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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of Hesperus or Forty-Five Dog-Post-Days Vol. I., by 
+Jean Paul Friedrich Richter
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: Hesperus or Forty-Five Dog-Post-Days Vol. I.
+       A Biography
+
+Author: Jean Paul Friedrich Richter
+
+Translator: Charles T. Brooks
+
+Release Date: May 9, 2011 [EBook #36071]
+[Most recently updated: November 13, 2021]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: UTF-8
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK HESPERUS OR FORTY-FIVE ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Charles Bowen, from page scans provided by the Web Archive
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+Transcriber's Notes:
+
+   1. Page scan source: Making of America
+      http://www.archive.org/details/hesperusorforty01paulgoog
+
+   2. Greek words are transliterated within brackets, e.g. [Greek:
+      naos].
+
+   3. The diphthong oe is represented by [oe].
+
+   4. [=a] represents a macron above the letter a.
+
+
+
+
+
+                         JEAN PAUL'S WRITINGS.
+
+                                _TITAN_.
+                             2 vols. 16mo.
+
+
+                   _FLOWER, FRUIT, AND THORN PIECES_.
+                             2 vols. 16mo.
+
+
+                _LEVANA, OR THE DOCTRINE OF EDUCATION_.
+                              1 vol. 16mo.
+
+
+                _THE CAMPANER THAL, AND OTHER WRITINGS_.
+                              1 vol. 16mo.
+
+
+                              _HESPERUS_.
+                             2 vols. 16mo.
+
+
+                          _LIFE OF JEAN PAUL_.
+           By Mrs. E. B. Lee. Preceded by his Autobiography.
+                              1 vol. 16mo.
+
+
+                           *   *   *   *   *
+The above are published in uniform volumes by
+                                       TICKNOR AND FIELDS, Boston.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+                                HESPERUS
+
+                                   OR
+
+                       _Forty-Five Dog-Post-Days_
+
+
+                              A BIOGRAPHY
+
+                           FROM THE GERMAN OF
+
+                     _JEAN PAUL FRIEDRICH RICHTER_
+
+
+                             TRANSLATED BY
+                           CHARLES T. BROOKS
+
+
+"The Earth is the _cul-de-sac_ in the great city of God,--the
+camera obscura full of inverted and contracted images from a fairer
+world,--the coast of God's creation,--a vaporous halo around a better
+sun,--the numerator to a still invisible denominator,--in fact, it is
+almost nothing at all."
+
+                        _Selections from the Papers of the Devil_.
+
+
+                            IN TWO VOLUMES.
+                                VOL. I.
+
+
+
+
+                                BOSTON:
+                          TICKNOR AND FIELDS.
+                                 1865.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+       Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 1864, by
+                          TICKNOR AND FIELDS,
+     In the Clerk's Office of the District Court of the District of
+                             Massachusetts.
+
+
+
+
+
+                           University Press:
+                      Welch, Bigelow, And Company,
+                               Cambridge.
+
+
+
+
+                         TRANSLATOR'S PREFACE.
+
+
+A work which has three prefaces by its author may be thought by some to
+need, and by others not to permit, a very long one from its translator.
+This is the first of Richter's romances which took hold of the German
+public. After he had long tried in vain, by a variety of literary
+devices, to entice or provoke the people's attention, and win or force
+a way to their hearts for his wit and his wisdom, his odd fancies and
+his noble sentiments, on the appearance of Hesperus, the siege, as
+Carlyle says, ("the ten-years'-siege of a poverty-stricken existence"
+Jean Paul himself calls it,) may be said to have terminated by storm.
+
+It was the Hesperus that brought Richter to Weimar. It was in Hesperus,
+and as Hesperus, that this singular genius rose on the horizon of
+Goethe and Schiller,--the latter of whom (as will be well remembered)
+tells his great friend that he has met "Hesperus," a strange being,
+like a man who has dropped from the moon. English readers may have
+different opinions on the question whether he "came down too soon" or
+too late. The Translator seems to see signs that Jean Paul is to be
+better and better understood and appreciated among us in this free and
+forming Western world, and he concludes his introduction of this second
+great labor to the public with the benediction upon the book which, in
+the closing paragraph of _his_ second Preface, the author so touchingly
+pronounces on this evening and morning star of his heart.
+
+The Translator is exceedingly indebted to his friend, Professor Knorr
+of Philadelphia, and to his former teacher, Dr. Beck of Cambridge, for
+their kind and patient assistance in correcting the proof-sheets of his
+work; and from the keen and practised eye of Mr. George Nichols he also
+received for some time valuable aid.
+
+Newport, R. I.
+
+
+
+
+                                PREFACE
+                         TO THE THIRD EDITION.
+
+
+Two long Prefaces follow on the heels of this third,--the first that of
+the second edition, and the next that of the first. Now, if I make this
+third again a long one,--and perhaps also, in fact, the many remaining
+ones of future editions,--I do not see how a reader of these latter can
+get through the lane of antechambers to the historical picture-gallery:
+he will die on his way to the book.
+
+I report, then, briefly. In this edition such amendments have been made
+as were most needed and easiest. In the first place, I have frequently
+translated myself into German out of the Greek, Latin, French, and
+Italian, and in fact in every instance where the speech-cleanser, with
+proper respect for the subject itself, demanded it. Once for all, we
+writers must all accommodate ourselves to the verbal-alien-bill, or
+decree for exiling foreigners, of Campe, Kolbe, and others; and even
+our beloved Goethe, however much he too "emergiert" and "eminiert,"
+will at last, in some future edition or other, have, for example, to
+throw both of these very words, which in the latest[1] he brings
+forward in the same line, out of the book. Is it not time, now that we
+have ejected the foreign peoples which had been long enough encamped in
+Germany, that we should send after them what has still longer remained
+behind,--their echo, or words?
+
+Only let Kolbe, or any other Purist, be a reasonable man, and not
+exhort us to change the technical words which are the common property
+of cultivated Europe--e. g. of music, of philosophy--into vernacular
+ones which will not be understood, especially in cases where the hand
+of the interpreter would snatch and pluck away the butterfly-dust of
+variegated allusions. For example, the name Purist itself may serve as
+an example. Supposing one should call Arndt a _political Purist_ of
+Germany, and Kolbe should substitute political _speech-purifier_, or
+pure of speech, this small conceit would give up in the translation the
+little bit of ghost that it haply possessed.
+
+Even if the author, however, has not turned out such things,--as some
+philological anchorites do, who, like the windpipe, eject all foreign
+matter with disagreeable coughing and spitting, and only retain their
+native air,--still he has at least sought to imitate the glaciers,
+which from year to year gradually shove down foreign bodies, such as
+stone and wood, from their sides. How diligently I have done this in
+the present edition of Hesperus, on every side, may be seen by the old
+printed copy interlined with the new emendations, and I could well wish
+Herr Kolbe would just travel to Berlin and inspect the copy. At least I
+will beseech the German Society there, which some years ago made me a
+member, to go to the bookstore and see for themselves what their
+colleague has done, what erasions and substitutions he has made.
+
+The ones who have properly sinned the most against the German language,
+and against those who understand no other, are the natural-historians,
+who--e. g. Alexander von Humboldt--import the whole Latin Linnæus into
+the midst of our language, without any other German signs of
+distinction than the final flourishes of German terminations, or
+tail-feathers, wherewith, however, they are as little intelligible to
+the mere speaker of German as a man would be to a stranger behind him
+through his mere queue. Has not our inexhaustible language already
+shown its capability of creating a German Linnæus when we read a
+Wilhelmi, and still more that true German in heart and speech, Oken?
+
+For the rest, the German language will, in general, never shrink up and
+grow impoverished, even by the greatest hospitality towards strangers.
+For it steadily produces (as all dictionaries show) out of its ever
+fresh stems a hundred times as many children and grandchildren and
+great-grandchildren as the foreign birth it adopts in the place of
+children; so that after centuries the thicket that has sprung from our
+prolific radical words must overshadow and choke up the strange words
+which have shot up only as flying seed, and finally rear itself into
+a true banian forest, whose twigs grow down to roots, and whose
+upward-planted roots strike out into summits. How entangled and wild
+with foreign growth will, on the contrary, after some centuries, the
+English language be, for instance, with its native but powerless stem
+full of engrafted word-shrubbery, capable only of inoculation, and
+fetching back from its duplicate, America, more new words than wares!
+
+The second, but easier thing which has been done for this third,
+improved edition of Hesperus, of course is, that I have gone slowly
+through the whole Evening Star with weeder in hand, and carefully
+eradicated all the fungous weeds of genitives, or _Es_'s, in compound
+words, wherever I found them, which on the very title-page of the
+_Dog's_-Post-days was unfortunately the case. I had, however, much to
+endure in this work. Of the old actions of our over-rich language
+against itself, too many are attachments upon its real estate, and I
+was compelled, therefore, to leave many a nested crew of Es's where it
+had too long been settled, and appealed to witnesses and ear-witnesses
+for right of possession.
+
+Even up to the hour of this Preface, the author of the "_Morgen-Blatt_
+letters on compound words" has been waiting, not so much for a
+thorough-going _examination_, (it were, perhaps, too soon for that,)
+but first of all for a comprehensive _reading_ of them, which, to be
+sure, the scattering archipelago of sheets, like islands lying apart
+from one another, will make difficult so long as the periodical has not
+yet run through its circle of numbers. But then I shall hope from the
+speech-investigator, when he has them complete in his house and hands
+before his judgment-seat, a thorough refutation or approbation.
+
+Finally, in the third place, after the double amendment of two
+editions, (for the first received great improvements, and in fact
+_before_ it was printed,) a third was undertaken which had for its
+object to let fly at harshnesses, obscurities, mistakes, and other
+over-lengthenings and overshortenings of dress.
+
+But, heavens! how often must not a writing-man have to improve upon
+himself, who is hardly over half a century old! Were he to live, in
+fact, into a Methusalem's millennium, and continue to write, the
+Methusalem would have to append so many volumes of emendations that the
+work itself would have to be annexed to them as mere preliminary
+matter, appendix, or supplementary sheet.
+
+For several years the author has found in his earlier works, in a high
+degree, a fault which he has met with in Ernst Wagner, Fouqué, and
+others, frequently repeated or imitated, namely, the passion for
+enacting, in his authorial person, the trumpeter, or usher, of the
+emotions, which the subject himself should have and show, but not the
+poet. E. g. "With sublime calmness Dahore replied." Why add _sublime_,
+when it is superfluous, presumptuous, and premature, provided the
+answer really exalts, or, if it does not so, the result is still more
+pitiful? The poet who, in this way, is the _fore-echo_ of his
+personages, takes for his model certain modern tragic poets, like
+Werner, Müllner, &c., who prefix to every speech for the actor the
+bookbinder's directions: "With touching emotion,"--"with a sigh of
+painful remembrance out of the depths of sorrow,"--mere sentences of
+intensity, or rather of impotence, which only a pantomimic dance needs
+or can follow, but which no piece of Shakespeare's, of Schiller's, or
+of Goethe's needs, because, indeed, the speech itself teaches how to
+speak it.
+
+For the rest, I have not the courage, now that I am a quarter of a
+century older and more aged, to give the first youthful outstreamings
+of the heart a different channel, and a weaker fall and course. Man in
+later life too easily regards every change in his junior as an
+improvement; but as no man can take the place of another, so, too,
+cannot the same man act as his own substitute in his different periods
+of life, least of all the poet.
+
+The best _wedded_ love is not what the _maidenly_ was; and so, too, is
+there in inspiration and delineation a maiden muse. Ah, all first
+things in poesy, as in life, whatever else may be wanting to them, are
+so innocent and good; and all _blossoms_ come so _pure-white_ into the
+world, in which by and by,--as Goethe says,[2] even of material colors,
+"The sun tolerates no white." Therefore shall all the ardent words of
+my inspiration for Emanuel's dying and Victor's loving and weeping, and
+for Clotilda's sorrow and silence, stand evermore in Hesperus uncooled
+and unchanged. Even the Now shall take nothing from the Once. For
+although during these twenty-five years I have been made, by some
+imitations and echoes of the book, actually sick of myself,
+nevertheless I overcome the disgust of this self-surfeit by the hope
+that the youth who wrote will again, by and by, find young men and
+young women to read him, and that hereafter, even for older readers,
+more will survive of the thing imitated than of the imitations.
+
+And so, then, may this Evening Star--which was once the morning star of
+my whole soul--run its _third_ circuit around the reading world in the
+fuller light of a better position toward the sun and the earth!
+
+                                            JEAN PAUL FR. RICHTER.
+
+Baireuth, January 1, 1819.
+
+
+
+
+                                PREFACE
+                         TO THE SECOND EDITION.
+
+
+I have as yet completed nothing of this Preface beyond a tolerable
+sketch, which shall here be given to the leader unadorned. I may
+perhaps, by the gift of this sketch, also raise the curtain which
+continues to hang down before my literary workshop, and which hides
+from posterity how I labor therein as my own serving brother and as
+master of the Scottish chair. A plan is with me, however, no outline of
+a sermon in Hamburg, which the head pastor gives out on Saturday and
+fills out on Sunday. It is no automaton, no lay figure, no canon, after
+which I work; it is no skeleton for future flesh, but a plan is a leaf
+or sheet on which I make myself more comfortable and move more at ease,
+while I shake out upon it my whole brain-tree, in order afterwards to
+pick over and plant the windfalls, and cover--the paper with organic
+globules and layers of ph[oe]nix ashes, that whole brilliant
+pheasantries may rise out of it. In such a sketch I keep the most
+unlike and antagonistic things apart by mere dashes. In such sketches I
+address myself, and _thou_ myself like a Quaker, and order myself about
+a great deal; nay, I frequently introduce therein conceits which I do
+not have printed at all, either because no connection can be contrived
+for them, or because they are of themselves good for nothing.
+
+And now it will be time that I should really present the reader such a
+sketch, which happens to be this time the plan of the present Preface.
+It is headed:--
+
+
+ARCHITECTURAL PLAN AND BUILDING MATERIAL FOR THE PREFACE TO THE SECOND
+EDITION OF HESPERUS.
+
+"But make it short, because, as it is, the world will find it a
+long way through two antechambers into the passengers'-room of the
+Book.--Joke in the beginning.--Seldom does a man bowl all the Nine
+Muses on the literary ninepin-alley.--The conclusion from the
+reflection.--Bring out many resemblances between the title Hesperus and
+the Evening Star, or Venus, of which the following must be specimens:
+That mine, like the latter, is full of high, sharp mountains, and that
+both owe their greater splendor to their unevenness; further, that the
+one as well as the other, in its transit across the sun (of Apollo),
+appears only as a black spot.--(In your copy-book of letters you must
+have made numbers of such allusions.)--The world expects that the
+Evening Star in the second edition will come up from below, as Lucifer,
+or Morning Star, and that the glorified body of the paper will
+tabernacle a glorified soul: let it pass, and bring the world to its
+right bearings.--Regard pedants, who sustain and fodder themselves on
+words, not on things, as like the after-moths, which devour and digest
+wax cakes, but no honeycomb.--No one so very much resembles as pedants
+do the magpies, which are at once thievish and _garrulous_: they dilute
+and filch.--Into the critical hell precisely those classes of persons
+are not cast, which the Talmud also exempts from the Jewish, namely,
+the poor, those who cannot count, and those who are carried off by the
+diarrh[oe]a.--Be a fox, and cajole the critical billiard-markers who
+announce loss and gain."----
+
+This last I do not understand myself, because this sketch was written
+as long ago as the winter. I can rather confess, without irony, that
+the critical quarter-judges, or country-judges, have spared my life,
+and have not thrown over me either a Spanish mantle, or a cloak of
+humility, or a bloody shirt and hair-shirt. This indulgence of the
+critics for a writer of books, who, like a Catholic, performs more good
+works than he needs for salvation, is certainly not their worst
+characteristic, as they thereby exert such a beneficial influence on
+our empty days. For one must now be very glad if only four or five new
+similes are sent to the Easter fair, and if at Michaelmas only a few
+flowers, which are novelties, are offered for sale. Our literary
+kitchen-servants know how to play off on the table-cloth and into our
+mouths the same _goutée_ over and over again, under the appearance of
+six different dishes, and entertain us twice a year with an imitation
+of the celebrated potato-banquet in Paris. At first came on merely a
+potato-soup; then potatoes again in another preparation; the third
+course, on the contrary, consisted of potatoes rehashed; so, too, the
+fourth. For the fifth, now, one could serve up potatoes again, when one
+had only announced for the sixth, potatoes cut into the novel form of
+brilliants,--and so it went on through fourteen dishes, of which,
+fortunately, one could still say, that at least bread, confectionery,
+and liquor comforted the stomach, and consisted of potatoes.----
+
+Censure is an agreeable lemon-juice in praise; hence both are always
+bestowed by the world together, as if in the form of an oxymel; just
+as, according to the Talmud, a few fingerfuls of assaf[oe]tida were
+thrown with the other things upon the altar of burnt-offerings. The
+only thing, accordingly, which I will expose about the reviewers after
+the foregoing praise, and with which they really offend, is this, that
+they seldom (their heart is good) understand much of the subject or
+writing on which they pass judgment; and even this blame applies only
+to the greater part of them.----
+
+"Weave it in (the sketch goes on) that you cannot make out what the
+unveiling and unshelling of women's arms,[3] bosoms, and backs at the
+present day can mean, just as, formerly, peacocks were served up on the
+game-dish with precisely the corresponding parts, necks, wings, and
+heads, unpicked.--It will be well, therefore, if you conjecture that
+the shell-less ladies are female Jesuits and Freemasons in disguise,
+because in both orders the mysteries and veilings begin with
+denudation; or lay these unfeathered limbs at the door of some
+starvation or other, as a chicken creeps forth from an egg, out of
+which one has only drawn off a few drops of the white, with featherless
+spots.--Threaten, at least, that ladies and crabs are best when caught
+and boiled in the moulting-season."----
+
+This is one of the cases of which I said above, that in them I was
+obliged to give up and throw away conceits of the sketch, for want of
+connection with the main subject: for really the whole matter of the
+moulting of the limbs has nothing in common with the Preface, except
+the year of birth.
+
+"You must deviate from other authors," the plan goes on, "and glide
+silently over the approbation you have reaped, so that the world may
+see just what you are.--One expects from the Preface to a second
+edition a little map of products, or a harvest register of all the
+after-bloom which exalts the second above the first: give them the
+register!--
+
+With pleasure!--First, I have corrected all typographical
+errors,--then all slips of the pen,--then many cacophonies of
+language,--moreover, verbal and real blunders enough; but the conceits
+and the poetical tulips I have seldom rooted out. I saw that if I did
+so there would be left in the world not much more of the book (because
+I should strike out the whole style) than the binding and the list of
+errata. The theologian hates juristic allusions,--the jurist,
+theological ones,--the physician, both,--the mathematician, all of
+them. I love them all. What shall one leave out or retain?--The woman
+is displeased with satire, the man with softening warmth, (for
+_coldness_ in _books_, as in _cakes of chocolate_, he holds to be proof
+of excellence,) and the public itself has forty-five opinions upon a
+chapter, as Cromwell dictated four contradictory letters to the same
+correspondent, merely for the sake of concealing from his scribes the
+purport of the one which he really despatched.----To which opinion
+shall an author adhere in such a disagreement?--Most properly to his
+own, as the world to its own.--
+
+For the rest, my little[4] work can hardly see so many _printed_
+editions as I have arranged of _written_ and improved ones in
+my study; and therefore great alterations in it are, if not less
+indispensable, at least more difficult. In the plan of the story
+itself, therefore,--even supposing I had forgotten that it is a
+true one,--there is little to change for the better, because the work
+is like my breeches, which were not made by a tailor, but by a
+stocking-loom, and in which the breaking of a single stitch of the
+right shank unravels the whole fabric of the left. For it is an
+essential, but undeniable, fault of the book,--which I easily explain
+by the want of episodes,--that the moment I take out from the first
+story (or volume) any defective stone whatever, immediately in the
+third all totters, and at last comes down. Of course I thereby fall far
+in the rear of the best new romances, where one can break out or build
+in considerable pieces without the least injury to the composition and
+fire-proof quality, simply because they resemble, not, like my book, a
+mere house, but a whole toy-city from Nuremberg, whose loose, unhitched
+houses the child piles away in his play-house, and whose mosaic of huts
+the dear little one easily puts together for his amusement, streetwise,
+just as he fancies. A true story always has the annoying thing about
+it, that in its case this cannot be done.
+
+However, I sufficiently excuse my work on the score of artistic
+_changes_ and _improvements_ by true _enlargements_ of it through
+historical additions. As I fortunately have for some years myself lived
+and been housed among the persons whom I have portrayed, accordingly I
+am perfectly in a position, as fly-wheel of this fair family circle, to
+supply, from the depositions of living witnesses, a thousand
+corrections and explanations which otherwise no man could learn, which
+however throw light on the somewhat dark history. Let the critic simply
+turn over the two nearest chapters of the book, or the remotest, or any
+others.
+
+My critics would complacently persuade me that I should have avoided in
+the additions what they call superfluous wit, and skilfully watered the
+gleaming naphtha-soil of my Evening Star, which was neither to be
+quenched nor sunk, with fresh history.----Heaven grant it! I have slim
+hope of it; but I should be glad if the reviewers would assure me that
+I had--although not sold at auction or covered up the crowded images in
+my Pantheon-Pandemonium--still, however, at least hung them farther
+apart.
+
+"On the whole," continues the sketch, "take in hand the historical
+_grafting-knife_ rather than the _weeder_!"
+
+I just said that I have done so.
+
+"But as touching those dried-up, withered men, in whose eyes nothing is
+great but their own image, and whose stomach at the sight of a fairer
+movement of the exalted heart is taken with a _reverse_ movement,--in
+short, whom everything nauseates (except what is nauseous),--make
+believe as if you did not perceive them; and so much more as they
+resemble patients who are gnawed by the tape-worm, and who, according
+to medical observations, sicken and vomit at all music, especially
+organs, think rather of the good souls whom thou knowest and lovest,
+and of the good ones whom thou only lovest,----and therefore at the end
+of the Preface be earnest and grateful and rejoice!"----
+
+Verily that I should have done, even without the sketch!--How could I
+remain insensible to the indulgence with which, on the whole, the world
+has appropriated the Aphrodito-graphic[5] fragments of my Evening Star,
+which runs around the sun with such remarkable aberrations, or
+deflections, and in so little of a planetary ellipse, that it may
+easily, as often happens to the Hesperus in the sky, be taken for a
+hairy, bearded, and tailed comet?--And how hard and cold must the soul
+be which could remain without emotion and without joy at the thought of
+the shortest happy day, nay, even happy second, or _third_, into which
+it had been able to introduce suffering men; and at the wide-spread
+relationship of lofty wishes and holy hopes, and friendly feelings,
+and at the gracious concordat wherein the brawlers and wranglers in
+this first world of the prosaic life give each other their hands
+in the _second_ world of poetry, in mutual recognitions, and become
+brothers?--
+
+Once more, good Asterisk and secondary planet of the soft evening-star
+above me, I follow thee on thy way with the wishes of three years ago
+for every soul which thou canst gladden. Only never rise upon any eye
+as a rainy star,--only never lead one astray, so that it shall take the
+_moonlight_ of poesy for the _morning_ of truth, and dismiss too early
+its morning dreams!--But into the torture-chambers and through the
+prison-gratings of forsaken souls throw a cheering radiance; and for
+him whose blessed island has sunk away from him to the bottom of the
+sea of eternity, transfigure thou the low, dark region; and whoever
+looks round and looks up in vain in a dismantled Paradise, to him may a
+little ray from thee show, down on the ground, under the yellow leaves,
+some hidden sweet fruit or other of a former time; and if there is any
+eye to which thou canst show nothing, draw it softly upward to thy
+brother, and to the heaven in which he shines.--Nay, and if I ever grow
+too old, then comfort me also!
+
+Hof, May 16, 1797.
+
+
+
+
+                PREFACE, SEVEN REQUESTS, AND CONCLUSION.
+
+
+                                PREFACE.
+
+I Was going to be indignant, in the beginning, at some hosts of readers
+with whom I know not what to do in this book, and I was about to
+station myself at the gate of Hesperus as porter, and with the greatest
+incivility send off particularly people who are good for nothing, for
+whom, as for a prosector, the heart is nothing but the thickest muscle,
+and who carry a brain and heart and interior parts generally as moulds
+of plaster statues do their stuffing of wood, hay, and clay, merely in
+order to turn out _hollow_ from the casting. I was on the point, even,
+of scolding at honest business-people who, like Antoninus the Great,
+thank the gods that they never did much at poetry; and at those to whom
+the chapel-leader, Apollo, must discourse on a rebeck, or straw fiddle,
+and his nine soprano girls with the ale-house fiddle and corn-stalk
+bass-viol. Nay, even at the reading sisterhood of the Romances of
+Chivalry, who read as they marry, and who among books, as among
+gentlemen's faces, pick out, not the fair, feminine ones, but the wild,
+masculine ones.----
+
+But an author should not be a child, and embitter for himself his
+Preface, when it is not every day that he has to make one. Why did I
+not rather in the first line address _those_ readers, and take them by
+the hand, to whom I joyfully give my Hesperus, and whom I would present
+with a free copy of it if I knew where they lived?--Come, dear, weary
+soul, thou that hast anything to forget, either a sad day or a clouded
+year, or a human being that afflicts thee, or one that loves thee, or a
+dismantled youth, or a whole life of heaviness; and thou, crushed
+spirit, for whom the present is a wound and the past a scar, come into
+my _Evening-Star_ and refresh thyself with its little glimmer; but, if
+the poetic illusion gives thee sweet, fugitive pains, be this thy
+conclusion from it: perhaps that, too, is an illusion which causes me
+the longer and deeper ones.--And as to thee, loftier man, who findest
+our life, which is passed only in a _glass_, darkly, less than thyself
+and death, and whose heart a veiled great spirit grinds brighter and
+purer in the dead dust of other mouldered human hearts, as one polishes
+the diamond with the dust of a diamond, I may call thee, too, down into
+my evening and night star to such eminence as I am able to throw up,
+that, when thou seest gliding around it at the foot, as around
+Vesuvius, _morganic fays_ and mist groupings and dreamy worlds and
+shadowy lands, thou shalt perhaps say to thyself, "And so is all dream
+and shadow around me; but dreams imply spirits, and clouds countries,
+and the shadow of the earth a sun and a universe?"--
+
+But to thee, noble spirit, who art weary of the age and of the
+after-winter of humanity, to whom sometimes, but not always, the human
+race, like the moon, seems to go backward, because thou mistakest the
+procession of clouds flying by below it for the course of the heavenly
+body, and who, full of exalted sighs, full of exalted wishes, and with
+silent resignation, hearest indeed beside thee a destroying hand and
+the falling of thy brothers, but yet castest not down thy eye, upraised
+to the ever serene, sunny face of Providence, and whom misfortune, as
+lightning does man, destroys, but not _disfigures_; to thee, noble
+spirit, I have, to be sure, not the courage to say, "Deign to look upon
+my play of shadows, that the Evening-Star which I usher before thee may
+make thee forget the earth on which thou standest, and which now with a
+thousand graves lays itself, like a vampyre, upon the human race, and
+sucks the blood of victims!"--And yet I have thought of thee all
+through the book, and the hope of bringing my little night and evening
+piece before wet, upraised, and steadfast eyes has been the sustaining
+maul-stick[6] of my weary hand.
+
+As I have now written too seriously, I must, out of the seven promised
+petitions, among which only four are such, omit three. I therefore
+present only the
+
+First Request. That the reader will pardon the title, "Dog-Post-Days,"
+until the first chapter has explained and excused it; and the
+
+Second. Always to read a whole chapter, and never half a one, because
+the great whole consists of little wholes, as, according to the
+Homoiomereia[7] of Anaxagoras, the human body consists of innumerable
+little human bodies; and the
+
+Seventh Request, which flows partly from the second, but concerns the
+critics only, not to anticipate me in their _fugitive leaves_,[8] which
+they call Reviews, by the publication of my leading incidents, but to
+leave the reader some few surprises, which, to be sure, he can have
+only once. And finally the
+
+Fifth Petition, which one knows already from the Lord's Prayer.[9]
+
+
+                              CONCLUSION.
+
+And now, then, become visible, little peaceful Hesperus--Thou needest a
+little cloud to veil thee, and a little year, in order to have
+completed thy orbit!—Mayest thou stand nearer to Truth and Virtue, as
+thy image in heaven does to the sun, than the earth into which thou
+shinest does to either of the three; and mayest thou, like that star,
+never withdraw thyself from the sight of men, except by hiding thyself
+in the sun! May thy influence be fairer, warmer, and surer than that of
+the Almanac-Hesperus, which superstition places on the misty throne of
+_this_ year!--Thou wouldst make me happy a second time if thou shouldst
+be an _Evening-Star_ to some withered mortal, and to some blooming one
+a _morning star_. Sink with the former and rise with the latter; glow
+in the evening sky of the first between his clouds, and overspread his
+past life-road up the mountain with a soft lustre, that he may
+recognize again the far-off flowers of youth; and rejuvenate his
+antiquated recollections into hopes!--Cool off the fresh youth in the
+early hours of life, as a tranquillizing morning star, ere the sun
+falls hot upon him and the whirl of day sets in!--But for me, Hesperus,
+thou art now well set; thou hast hitherto journeyed on beside the
+earth, as my companion-planet, as my second world, on which my soul
+disembarked as it left the body to the buffetings of earth; but to day
+my eye falls sadly and slowly off from thee and thy white flower-bed,
+which I planted around thy coasts, down upon the damp, cold ground
+where I stand, and I see how we are all encompassed with coolness and
+evening, torn far away from the stars, amused with glowworms,
+disquieted with _ignes fatui_, all veiled from each other, every one
+alone, and feeling his own life only through the warm, throbbing hand
+of a friend, which he holds in the dark.----
+
+Yes, there will indeed come another age, when it will be light, and
+when man will awake out of sublime dreams and find--the dreams again,
+because he has lost nothing but sleep.--
+
+The stones and rocks, which two veiled shapes, Necessity and Sin, like
+Deucalion and Pyrrha, throw behind them at the good, shall become new
+men.--
+
+And on the western gate of this century stands written: Here is the
+road to Virtue and Wisdom; just as on the western gate of Cherson[10]
+stood the sublime inscription: Here leads the way to Byzantium.----
+
+Infinite Providence, thou wilt make the day dawn.--
+
+But still struggles the twelfth hour of the night; nocturnal birds of
+prey shoot through the darkness; spectres rattle; the dead play their
+antics; the living dream.
+
+                                                        JEAN PAUL.
+In the _Vernal Equinox_, 1794.
+
+
+
+
+                           CONTENTS OF VOL. I.
+
+
+                            1. DOG-POST-DAY.
+
+   Difference between the 1st and 4th of May.--Rat-Battle-Pieces.--
+     Nocturne.--Three Regiments in future Breeches.--Couching-Needle.--Overture
+     and Secret Instructions of the Book.
+
+
+                            2. DOG-POST-DAY.
+
+   Antediluvian History.--Victor's Plan of Life.
+
+
+                            3. DOG-POST-DAY.
+
+   Sowing-Day of Joys.--Watch-Tower.--Fraternization of the Heart.
+
+
+                            4. DOG-POST-DAY.
+
+   Profile-Cutter.--Clotilda's Historic Figure.--Courtiers, and a Noble
+     Man.
+
+
+                            5. DOG-POST-DAY.
+
+   The Third of May.--The Nightingale.--The Abbate sitting on Music.
+
+
+                            6. DOG-POST-DAY.
+
+   The Threefold Deception of Love.--Lost Bible and Powder-Puff.--
+     Churching.--New Concordats with the Reader.
+
+
+                            7. DOG-POST-DAY.
+
+   The Great Parsonage-Park.--Orangery.--Flamin's Promotion.--Festal
+     Afternoon of Domestic Love.--Rain of Fire.--Letter to Emanuel.
+
+
+                            8. DOG-POST-DAY.
+
+   Examinatorium And Dehortatorium Of Conscience.--The Studious
+     Honeymoon of a Scholar.--The Cabinet of Natural History.--Answer
+     From Emanuel.--The Packed-up Chin.--Arrival of the Prince.--First
+     Intercalary Day.
+
+
+                            9. DOG-POST-DAY.
+
+   A heavenly Morning; a heavenly Afternoon.--A House without Walls; a
+     Bed without a House.
+
+
+                           10. DOG-POST-DAY.
+
+   The Bee-Master.--Zeusel's Oscillation.--Arrival of the Princess.
+
+
+                           11. DOG-POST-DAY.
+
+   Transfer of the Princess.--Smuggling of a Kiss.--Montre à
+     Regulateur.--Simultaneous Love.
+
+
+                           12. DOG-POST-DAY.
+
+   Polar Fantasies.--The Singular Isle of Union.--One more Bit from
+     previous History.--The Stettin-Apple as Coat-of-Arms.--Third
+     Intercalary Day.
+
+
+                           13. DOG-POST-DAY.
+
+   Concerning his Lordship's Character.--An Evening of Eden.--
+     Maienthal.--The Mountain and Emanuel.
+
+
+                           14. DOG-POST-DAY.
+
+   The Philosophical Arcadia.--Clotilda's Letter.--Victor's
+     Confessions.
+
+
+                           15. DOG-POST-DAY.
+
+   The Parting.
+
+
+                           16. DOG-POST-DAY.
+
+   The Potato-Form-Cutter.--Drag-chains in St. Luna.--Wax
+     Embossments.--Chess according to the _Regula Falsi_.--The
+     Thistle of Hope.--Escort to Flachsenfingen.--Fourth Intercalary
+     Day.
+
+
+                           17. DOG-POST-DAY.
+
+   The Cure.--The Prince's Palace.--Victor's Visits.--Joachime.--
+     Copperplate Engraving of the Court.--Cudgellings.
+
+
+                           18. DOG-POST-DAY.
+
+   Clotilda's Promotion.--Incognito-Journey.--Petition of the Majors
+     of the Chase.--Consistorial Messenger.--Caricature of the
+     Flachsenfingeners.
+
+
+                           19. DOG-POST-DAY.
+
+   The Hair-Dresser with a (musical) Disease of the Lungs.--Clotilda in
+     Victor's Dream.--Extra Lines on Church-Music.--Garden Concert by
+     Stamitz.--Quarrel between Victor and Flamin.--The Heart without
+     Solace.--Letter to Emanuel.
+
+
+                           20. DOG-POST-DAY.
+
+   Letter from Emanuel.--Flamin's Fruit-Pieces on Shoulders.--Walk to
+     St. Luna.--Fifth Intercalary Day.
+
+
+                           21. DOG-POST-DAY.
+
+   Victor's Professional Visits.--Concerning Houses full of
+     Daughters.--The Two Fools.--The Carrousel.
+
+
+                           22. DOG-POST-DAY.
+
+   Gun-Foundery of Love; e. g. Printed Gloves, Quarrels, Dwarf-Flasks,
+     and Stabs.-A Title from the Digests of Love.--Marie.--Court-Day.--
+     Giulia's dying Epistle.
+
+
+                           23. DOG-POST-DAY.
+
+   First Visit to Clotilda.--The Paleness.--The Redness.--The
+     Race-Weeks.
+
+
+                           24. DOG-POST-DAY.
+
+   Rouge.--Clotilda's Sickness.--The Play of Iphigenia.--Difference
+     between Plebeian and Patrician Love.--Sixth Intercalary Day.
+
+
+
+
+
+                               HESPERUS,
+
+                                   OR
+
+                           45 DOG-POST-DAYS.
+
+
+
+
+                            1. DOG-POST-DAY.
+
+   Difference between the 1st and 4th of May.--Rat-Battle-Pieces.--
+     Nocturne.--Three Regiments in future Breeches.--Couching-Needle.--
+     Overture and Secret Instructions of the Book.
+
+
+In the house of the Court-Chaplain Eymann, in the bathing-village of
+St. Luna, there were two parties: the one was glad on the 30th of April
+that our hero, the young Englishman, Horion, would return from
+Göttingen the 1st of May to stay at the parsonage,--the other disliked
+it; they did not want him to arrive till the 4th of May.
+
+The party of the 1st of May, or Tuesday, consisted of the Chaplain's
+son, Flamin, who had been educated with the Englishman till his twelfth
+year in London, and till his eighteenth in St. Luna, and whose heart
+with all its venous ramifications had grown into the Briton's, and in
+whose ardent breast during the long Göttingen separation there had been
+_one_ heart too few; next, of the Chaplain's wife, a native
+Englishwoman, who loved in my hero a countryman, because the magnetic
+vortex of nationality reached her soul over land and sea; and, finally,
+of their eldest daughter, Agatha, who all day long laughed out at
+everything and doted on everything without knowing why, and who, with
+her polypus-arms, drew every one to herself who did not live quite too
+many houses off from her, as food for her heart.
+
+The sect of the 4th of May could measure itself with its rival, for it
+also made out a college of three members. Its adherents were Appel
+(Apollonia, the youngest daughter), who acted as cook, and whose
+culinary reputation and certificate of good bakery would suffer by it,
+if the guest should come before the bread rose; she could well
+conceive what a soul must feel who should stand before a guest with
+her hands full of skewers and needles, beside the flat-iron of the
+window-curtains, and without having even the _frisure_ of her hat, or
+of the head which was to be under it, so much as half ready. The second
+adherent of this sect, who ought to have had most to say against
+Tuesday,--although he said least, because he could not talk and
+had only recently been baptized,--was to be carried to church on
+Friday for the first time; this adherent was the godchild of the
+guest. The Chaplain knew, to be sure, that the moon sent round her
+godfather-bidder, Father Riccioli,[11] among the _savans_ of earth, and
+got them into the church-book of heaven as godfathers to her spots; but
+he thought it was better for him to take a godfather within a
+circumference of not more than fifty miles. The Apostles'-day of the
+churching and the Festival-day of the arrival of the distinguished
+godfather would then have beautifully coincided; but now the plaguy
+fine weather was bringing godfather along four days too soon!
+
+The third disciple of Friday was, at bottom, the heresiarch of this
+party, the Court-Chaplain himself: the parsonage wherein Horion was to
+have his temporary court residence was all full of rats,--a regular
+ball-room and _plaza de armas_ of the same,--and of these the Chaplain
+wanted first of all to clear his house. Few court-chaplains, with
+hectic in their bodies and rats in their houses, ever made so much
+stench on that account as did this one in St. Luna against the beasts.
+It would have taken very few clouds of it to smoke all the court-dames
+out of Europe. Did not our hectic patient burn as much of the hoof of
+his nag as he had sawed off from it? Didn't he even take one of the
+sharp-toothed creatures themselves prisoner, and smear him with
+gudgeon-grease and train-oil, and then let the arrested subject go,
+that he might as a pariah trot up and down through the holes, and
+constrain by his ointment rats of higher caste to emigrate? Did he not
+go to work by the wholesale, and actually take a buck to board, of
+which he wanted nothing except that he should stink and displease the
+tailed monks? And were not all these remedies as good as useless?...
+For the deuse take rats and Jesuits! Meanwhile, I will at least offer
+people here on the very third page the moral, that against both of
+these pests, as against toothache, mental troubles, and fleas, there
+are a thousand excellent recipes which have no effect.
+
+We will now, in a body, make our way farther into the parsonage, and
+concern ourselves as minutely about the family history of the Eymanns
+as if we lived only three houses distant from them. Horion,--the accent
+must fall on the first syllable,--or Sebastian, by abbreviation
+_Bastian_, as the Eymanns called him,--or Victor, as Lord Horion, his
+father, called him, (for I give him now one name and now another, just
+as my prose-prosody requires,)--Horion had, through the Italian
+Tostato, who was a peripatetic Auerbach's court for that whole region,
+and was hurrying on to St. Luna, caused the little oral lie to be
+palmed upon his dear friends at the parsonage, that he was coming on
+Friday: he wanted, first, to give them a real surprise; and, secondly,
+he wanted modestly to tie the hands, which on his account _would_ be
+scouring, brushing up and serving up; and, thirdly, he regarded an oral
+lie as at least more trivial than a written one. To his father,
+however, he wrote the truth, and fixed his entrance into the parsonage
+for the 1st of May, or Tuesday. His Lordship had his abode in the
+residence city of Flachsenfingen, where he applied to the Prince at
+once moral blinders and _eye-glasses_, and _guided_ his vision while he
+_sharpened_ it; but he was himself blind, though only physically. For
+that reason his son had to bring an oculist with him from Göttingen,
+who should operate upon him in the Chaplain's house on Tuesday. When he
+caused his Victor to be made Doctor of Medicine, many Göttingen people,
+to my knowledge, wondered that so high-born a youth should put on the
+Doctor's head-piece,--that _Pluto's helmet_, which makes, not, like the
+mythological one, the wearer, but others indeed invisible,--and thrust
+on his finger the Doctor's ring,--that _ring-of--Gyges_, which only to
+others imparts invisibility: but was, then, the condition of his
+father's eyes unknown or an insufficient apology to the people of
+Göttingen?
+
+His Lordship wrote to the Court-Chaplain that he and his son would
+come to-morrow. The Chaplain read over the Job's-post silently three
+times in succession, and thrust it back with comic resignation into
+the envelope, saying: "We have now ample hope that to-morrow our
+Doctor will certainly arrive with the rest;--fine tournaments and
+watering-place amusements do I anticipate, wife! when to-morrow comes
+in, and my rats in a body dance like children before him;--besides, we
+have nothing to eat; and then, too, I have nothing to put on, for not
+before Thursday can I extort from that Flachsenfingen wind-bag[12] a
+hair-bag,--and you laugh at it? Is not one of us in the very middle of
+April made an April-fool of?" But the Chaplain's lady fell on his
+shoulder with redoubled exclamations of delight, and ran right off to
+gather to this rose festival of her good soul the little brethren and
+sisters of the church of the children. The whole family circle now
+resolved itself into three terrified and three delighted faces.
+
+We will seat ourselves only among the joyous ones, and listen
+while they, during the afternoon, work away as portrait-painters,
+drapery-painters, and gallery-inspectors, at the picture of the beloved
+Briton. All remembrances are made into hopes, and Victor is to bring
+nothing with him that is changed except his stature. Flamin, wild as an
+English garden, but more fruitful, refreshed himself and others with
+his delineation of Victor's gentle truthfulness and honesty, and of his
+head, and praised even his poetic fire, which he generally did not rate
+very high. Agatha called to mind his humorous knight's-leaps,--how he
+once took the drum of a passing dentist and drummed the village
+together for nothing before his theatre, because he had previously
+bought out the whole travelling apothecary's shop of this honest and
+true friend Hain,[13]--how he would often, after a child's baptism,
+post himself in the pulpit, and there be-preach two or three devout
+spectators in their work-day sward, till they laughed more than they
+wept,--and many another piece of waggery, whereby he would make no one
+ridiculous but himself, and set no one laughing but other people.
+
+But women will never approve of it (only men can) when one, like
+Victor, belongs to the British subdivision of humorists;--for with them
+and courtiers wit itself is caprice;--they cannot approve that Victor
+should love to _descend_ to carriers, clowns, and sailors, whereas a
+Frenchman would rather _creep upward_ to people of _ton_. For women,
+who always respect the citizen more than the man, do not see that the
+humorist makes believe that all which these plebeians say he prompts
+them to, and that he intentionally exalts the involuntarily comic to
+what is artistically so,--folly to wisdom, the earth's madhouse to a
+national theatre. Quite as little does an official comprehend, or a
+cit, or a metropolitan, why Horion should so often make such a wretched
+choice of reading from among old prefaces, programmes, advertisements
+of travelling artists, all which he would peruse with indescribable
+gusto,--merely because he made believe to himself that all this
+intellectual sack of fodder, which belonged properly only to the
+rag-picker, he had himself prepared and filled, with satirical design.
+In fact, as the Germans seldom appreciate irony and seldom write it,
+one is forced to foist fictitiously a malicious irony upon many serious
+books and reviews, in order to get any of it at all. And that, indeed,
+is no more nor less than what I myself aim at, when in court-session I
+elevate in thought the court-house to a play-house, the advocate to a
+juristic Le Cain and Casperl, and the whole assembly to an old Greek
+comedy; for I never rest till I have made myself believe that I have
+caused the good people just to study out the whole case as a star-part,
+and am therefore really theatre poet and manager. Thus, in fact, do I
+merrily carry my dumb head as a comic pocket-theatre of the Germans
+through their most august institutions (e. g. the university, the
+administration), and exalt, in perfect silence--behind the dropped
+curtain of my face-skin--the comic of Nature to the comic of Art.
+
+To return: the Chaplain's wife now related as much about Victor as all
+knew before. But this repetition of the old story is just the fairest
+charm of domestic discourse. If we can often repeat to _ourselves_
+sweet thoughts without _ennui_, why shall not another be suffered to
+awaken them within us still oftener? The good lady pictured to her
+children how gentle and tender, how delicate and womanly, her dear son
+was (for Victor always called her his mother),--how he relied upon her
+in all things,--how he was always sporting without ever teasing
+anybody, and always loved all human beings, even the greatest
+strangers,--and how she could open before him better than to any
+matron her oppressed heart, and how fondly he wept with her. A
+court-apothecary, with a heart of pumice-stone,--_Zeusel_ he writes
+himself,--once even regarded this melting of the warmest soul as a case
+of _lachrymal fistula_, because he thought that no eyes could weep but
+diseased ones.... Dear reader, do you not feel now just as the
+biographer does, who can hardly wait for the entrance of this good
+Victor into the parsonage and the biography? Will you not offer to him
+the friendly hand, and say: "Welcome, unknown one! Lo, thy soft heart
+opens ours here on the very threshold! O thou man with eyes full of
+tears, dost thou, then, feel with us, that in a life whose banks are
+lined with affrighted ones clinging to the _twigs_, and despairing ones
+clinging to the _leaves_, that, in such a life, where not only follies,
+but woes also hedge us round, man must keep a wet eye for red ones, an
+aching heart for every bleeding one, and a gentle hand that shall, in
+sad sympathy, hold the thick, heavy chalice of sorrow for the poor man
+who must drain it, and shall slowly raise it to his lips? And if thou
+art such a one, then speak and laugh as thou wilt, for no one should
+laugh at men but he who right heartily loves them."
+
+In the afternoon the Chief Chamberlain, Le Baut,--a fragrant
+leaf-skeleton,--sent his page, Seebass, to the Chaplain to beg that
+he would--for the palace lay near the parsonage across the way--remove
+the buck for a while, only until the wind should change, because
+his daughter was coming. "Esteemed Mr. Seebass!" answered the
+rat-controvertist, with emotion, "carry back my submissive compliments,
+and you see my distress. Tomorrow the Lord and his son and his oculist
+will gladden me with their presence, and the cataract is to be couched
+here. Now, at present, the whole house stinks, and the rats still carry
+on composedly their night-dance in the midst of the perfume; I assure
+you, Mr. Seebass, we can take assaf[oe]tida and stuff the parsonage
+with it up to the ridge-pole, not a tail shall we expel thereby; nay,
+it pleases them the more. I, for my part, am already preparing myself
+to see them to-morrow, during the operation, spring up on the very
+oculist and patient. Thus it fares with us all, please announce at the
+palace, but say that I was going to-day also to try an excellent
+rosewood-oil."
+
+He fetched, therefore, a great sack of hops and dragged it up under the
+roof, in order there, in a literal sense, to lead the rats by the nose
+into the bag. Rats are notoriously as dead-set upon rosewood-oil as men
+are on anointing-oil, which, so soon as only six drops fall on the
+skull, makes one a king or bishop on the spot, which I see by the fact,
+that in the first case a golden hoop shoots round the hair, and in the
+second it actually falls off. The militia, that is, the Chaplain,
+sprinkled the sack with some oil, and laid it with its mouth stretched
+and fastened wide open to receive the enemy;--he himself stood in the
+background, concealed behind a similarly oiled stove-screen. His plan
+was, to start out when the beasts were once in the sack, and carry off
+the whole crew like bees in a swarming-bag. The few chamber-hunters who
+read me must have frequently used this kind of trap. But they may not
+have stumbled over it as the Chaplain did, who was caught with the
+fragrant stove-screen between his legs, and who lay unable to stir,
+while the enemy ran off. In such a situation a man is refreshed by the
+trill of a curse. So after the Chaplain had struck a few such trills
+and thrills, had betaken himself to the family, and said to them, _en
+passant_: If there were in the temperate zone a fellow who from his
+swaddling-clothes rode a mourning-steed, who was lodged in a second
+mouse-tower of Hatto, and in an Amsterdam house of correction, and in
+limbo,--if there were any such correctioner, in regard to whom the only
+wonder was how he continued alive,--he alone was the one, and no devil
+beside him ... after he had relieved himself of this, he left the rats
+in peace,--and was himself very much so.
+
+In the night nothing memorable occurred, except that he kept awake and
+listened in every direction to hear if something with a tail might not
+be stirring, because he was minded to vex himself to his heart's
+content. As there was no sign of the beasts to be detected, not so
+much as a side-leap, he got out and sat on the floor, and pressed his
+spy's-ear to that. As good luck would have it, just then the movements
+of the enemy with their ballets and gallopades burst upon his ear. He
+started up, armed himself with a child's drum, and woke his wife up
+with the whisper: "Sweet! go to sleep again, and don't be frightened in
+your sleep; I'm only drumming a little against the rats; for the
+Zwickau Collection of Useful Observations for Housekeepers in Town and
+Country, 1785, recommends this course."
+
+His first thunder-stroke gave his hereditary foes the repose which it
+snatched from his blood relations.... But as I have now put everybody
+into a condition to imagine the Chaplain in his shirt and with the
+cymbal of the soldiery, let us rather go to the bed of his son Flamin,
+and see what _he_ is doing therein. Nothing,--but out of it he is at
+this moment taking a ride at this late hour, and that, too, without
+saddle or waistcoat. He, whose bosom was a cave of Æolus, full of
+pent-up storms--(any discreet prothonotary in Wetzlar would have
+scraped his fish-head or partridge's-wing cleaner or brushed his
+velvet-knee cleaner than he)--could not possibly lie longer on his
+pillow,--he to whom a drum came so near to-night, and to-morrow a
+friend. Anybody else, of course (at least the reader and myself), in
+the midst of the transparent night wherewith April was closing, the
+wide stillness on which the drum-sticks fell, the longing for a loved
+one with whom to-morrow would again make whole a desolate heart and a
+dismembered life, would have been filled by all this with tender
+emotions and dreams;--its only effect on the Chaplain's son was to
+fling him on his nag and out into the night: his inward earthquakes
+could only be allayed by a bodily gallop. He flew up and down the hill,
+on which he would to-morrow reunite himself to his Horion, ten times.
+He cursed and thundered at all his passions--to be sure _with_
+passion--which had hitherto laid the bone-saw to their hands linked in
+friendship. "Oh! when I once have thee again, Sebastian," he said, and
+twitched his nag round, "I will be so gentle, as gentle as thou, and
+never misconstrue thee; if I do, may the thunder--" Ashamed at his
+self-contradictory impetuosity, he rode merely at an ambling-pace home.
+
+His longing for his returning friend he expressed in the stable by
+plucking out some hairs from the top of the horse's head, drawing the
+cue-hair like the fourth string of a fiddle, and twisting off the bit
+of the key to the fodder-chest. Only a man who languishes for a friend
+_exactly_ as for a loved woman deserves either. But there are men who
+go out of the world without ever having been troubled or concerned at
+the fact that no one in it had loved them. He who knows nothing higher
+than the _commercial treaty_ of self-interest, the _social contract_
+of civility, or even than the _boundary_ and _barter agreement_ of
+love, such a one,--but I wish he had never ordered me from the
+publisher!--whose withered heart knows nothing of the _Unitas Fratrum_
+of men joined in friendship, of the intertwining of their nobler
+vascular system, and of their sworn confederacy in strife and
+sorrow--But I see not why I should talk so long of this ninny, as he
+knows not how to enter into the least feeling of Flamin's yearning, who
+desired a loving, appreciative eye, because his faults and his virtues
+stood out in equal relief; for with other men, either at least the
+spots balance the rays, or the rays the spots.
+
+Only in princely stables is there an earlier and louder din than there
+was in the parsonage on the blessed 1st of May. I ask any female reader
+at random, whether there can ever be more to polish and to boil than on
+a morning when a lord with a cataract is expected, and his son, too,
+and an eye-doctor? Men's resting-days always fall upon women's
+rasping-days; father and son went composedly to meet the doctor and the
+coucher.
+
+The 1st of May began, like man and human history, with a mist. Spring,
+the Raphael of the northern earth, stood already out of doors and
+covered all apartments of our Vatican with his pictures. I love a mist
+whenever it glides off like a veil from the face of a fair day, and
+whenever it is created, not by the "four _faculties_," but by greater
+ones. When (as this one did on the 1st of May) it webs-over summits and
+streams like a drag-net,--when the clouds, pressed down by their
+weight, crawl along on our lawns and through wet bushes,--when in one
+quarter it soils the heavens with a pitchy vapor and lines the wood
+with a heavy, unclean fog-bank, while in the other, wiped off from the
+moist sapphire of the sky, it gilds with minute drops the flowers, and
+when this blue splendor and that dirty night pass over close by each
+other and exchange places,--who does not feel, then, as if he saw lands
+and nations lying before him, on which poisonous and mephitic mists
+move round in groups, now coming and now going? And when, further, this
+white night encompasses my melancholy eye with flying streams of vapor,
+with floating, fluttering particles of perfume-dust, then do I sadly
+see in the vapor human life pictured, with its two great clouds on our
+rising and setting, with its seemingly light space around us, and its
+blue opening over our heads....
+
+The Doctor may have thought so too, but not father and son, who are
+going to meet him. Flamin is more powerfully affected by distant than
+by near nature, by the gross than by the detail, just as he has more
+feeling for the state than for the family room, and his inner man loves
+best to twine upward on pyramids, tempests, Alps. The Chaplain enjoys
+nothing about the whole thing except--May-butter, and from his mouth,
+amidst all this moral apparatus, issues nothing but--spittle, and both,
+because he is afraid of the damp's preying upon him and gnawing at his
+throat and stomach.
+
+As they strode down from the hill which was the scene of the nocturnal
+gallop into a valley confused with patches of mist; there marched out
+from it to meet them three garrison regiments on the double-quick. Each
+regiment was four men strong and as many deep, without powder or shoes,
+but provided with fine openwork high-ruffles,--that is to say, with
+porous pantaloons, and with superfluous officers, because there were no
+privates for them at all. When I now go on in my description to add,
+that both staffs, as well the regimental as the general staff, had over
+six hundred cannon in their pockets, and in fact a whole siege-train of
+artillery, and that the first platoon had wholly new _yellow_
+balls,[14] unusual in war, which germinated sooner than the gunpowder
+sowed by the savages, and which they thrust with the tongue into the
+muskets,--I should (I fear) make my readers, especially my lady
+readers, a little too distressed (and the more as I have not yet hinted
+whether these were soldier-parents or soldier-children) if I were to
+dip my pen again, and actually append the annoying circumstance that
+the troops began to fire at the befogged Court-Chaplain,--unless I
+leaped forward instanter with the information beforehand that a man's
+voice from behind the army cried, "Halt!"
+
+Forth came out of the rear ranks the general field-marshal, who was
+just as tall again as his lieutenant of artillery;--with a round hat,
+with flying arms and hair, he rushed impetuously upon Flamin, and
+attacked him with intent to destroy,--less from hatred than from love.
+It was the Doctor! The two friends hung trembling in each other's arms,
+face buried in face, breast pushed back from breast, with souls that
+had no words, but only tears of joy: the first embrace ended in a
+second,--the first utterances were their two names.
+
+The Chaplain had volunteered as a private along with the army, and
+stood with tried feelings on his insulating-stool, with a bare neck,
+around which nothing clung. "Just hug each other a moment longer," said
+he, and turned half-way round: "I must station myself only just a
+minute or two at the hazel-bush yonder, but I will be back again
+directly, and then I, in my turn, will embrace Mr. Doctor with a
+thousand pleasures." But Horion understood the natural recoil of love;
+he flew from the son's arms into those of the father, and lingered long
+therein, and made all good again.
+
+With appeased love, with dancing hearts, with overflowing eyes, under
+the full bloom of heaven and over the garniture of earth,--for Spring
+had opened her casket of brilliants, and flung blooming jewels into all
+the vales, and over all the hills, and even far up the mountains,--the
+two friends sauntered blissfully along, the British hand clasping the
+German. Sebastian Horion could not say anything to Flamin, but he
+talked with the father, and every indifferent sound made his bosom,
+laden with blood and love, breathe more freely.
+
+The three regiments had gone out of every one's head; but they had
+themselves marched obediently after the general field-marshal.
+Sebastian, too humane to forget any one, turned round toward the escort
+of little Sansculottes, who came, however, not from Paris, but from
+Flachsenfingen, and had attended him as begging soldier-children. "My
+children," said he, and looked at nothing but his standing army,
+"to-day is for your generalissimo and you, the memorable day on which
+he does three things. In the first place, I discharge you; but my
+retrenchment shall not hinder you any more than a prince's would from
+begging; secondly, I pay each of you arrearage for three years; namely,
+to each officer an allowance of three seventeen-kreutzer-pieces,
+because we have in these days raised the wages; thirdly, run back again
+to-morrow, and I will have all the regiments measured for breeches."
+
+He turned toward the Chaplain, and said: "It is much better to make
+presents in articles than in money, because gratitude for the latter is
+spent as soon as that is; but in a pair of presented pantaloons,
+gratitude lasts as long as the overhauls themselves."
+
+The only bad thing about it will be, that the Prince of Flachsenfingen
+and his war-ministry will at last interfere in the matter of the
+trousers, since neither can possibly allow regular troops to have more
+_on_ their bodies than _in_ them, namely, anything at all. In our
+days it should at last enter the heads of the stupidest commissary
+of equipment and provisioning,--but in fact there are discreet
+ones,--first, that, of two soldiers, the hungry is always to be
+preferred to the well-fed one, because it is already known, by the case
+of whole peoples, that the less they have, so much the braver they are;
+secondly, that just as, in Blotzheim,[15] of two equally virtuous
+youths, the poorer is crowned, even so the poor subject is preferred to
+the rich, though they may be equally courageous, and is alone enlisted,
+because the poor devil is better acquainted with hunger and frost; and,
+thirdly, that now, when on all the steps of the throne, as on walls,
+cannon are placed (as the sun receives its brilliancy from thousands of
+vomiting volcanoes), and, as in a well-conditioned state, the rod of
+up-shooting manhood is forced into ramrods,--the people advantageously
+fall into two classes of paupers,--the protected and their protectors;
+and, fourthly, the Devil take him who grumbles!
+
+When my three beloved _personæ_ at length arrived in front of the
+parsonage, the whole disbanded army had secretly marched after them and
+demanded the breeches. But something still greater had travelled after
+them from Flachsenfingen,--the blind lord. Hardly had the Britoness
+smiled-in her young guest, not politely, but delightedly, hardly had
+Agatha, for the first time, seriously, hid herself behind her mother,
+and old Appel behind the pots and kettles, when Eymann, who was in the
+midst of his cleaning, made a long leap from the window at which four
+Englanders--not foreigners, but horses--came trotting up. Now for the
+first time the question occurred to every one, where the oculist was;
+and Sebastian had hardly time to reply, that there was no one else to
+come, for he himself was to operate on his father. Into the short
+interval which the father occupied in passing from the carriage-door to
+the room-door the son had to squeeze in the fib, or rather the entreaty
+_for_ the fib, which the family was to put upon his Lordship, that his
+son had not yet arrived, but only the oculist, whom a recent apoplectic
+attack had deprived of his speech.
+
+I and the reader stand amidst such a throng of people, that I have not
+yet been able even to tell him that Dr. Culpepper had as good as
+punched out the lord's left eye with the blunt couching-needle; in
+order, therefore, to save the right eye of his beloved father,
+Sebastian had applied himself to the cure of those impoverished beings,
+who, as regards their sight, already grope round in Orcus, and only
+with four of their senses stand any longer outside the grave.
+
+When the son beheld the dear form veiled in such a long night, for whom
+there was no longer child or sunlight, he slid his hand, whose pulse
+trembled with pity, joy, and hope, under Eymann's, and hurriedly
+extended it, and pressed the father's under a strange name. But he had
+to go out of the house door again, till the trembling of his hand under
+the weight of the salvation it was bringing should subside, and he
+restrained out there his heart beating with hope by the thought that
+the operation might be unsuccessful; he looked with a smile up and down
+along the twelve-horse-team of the corps of cadets, that the emotion
+and yearning might pass from his excited breast. In-doors, meanwhile,
+the Chaplain's wife had made the blind man a still blinder one, and
+lied to him _quantum satis_; whenever a lie, a pious fraud, a _dolum
+bonum_, a poetic and legal fiction is to be gotten up, women offer
+themselves readily as business secretaries and court-printers, and help
+out their honest man. "I very much wish," said the father, as the son
+entered, "that the operation might at once proceed before my son
+arrives." The Chaplain's wife brought back the anxious son and
+disclosed to him the paternal wish. He stepped lightly forward amidst
+the embarrassed company. The room was shaded, the couching-lancet
+brought forth, and the diseased eye steadied. All stood with anxious
+attention around the composed patient. The Chaplain peered with a
+ludicrous anxiety and agony at the sleeping infant, prepared, at the
+least cry, to run with it immediately out of the couching-chamber.
+Agatha and Flamin kept themselves far from the patient, and both were
+equally serious. Flamin's noble mother drew near with her heart seized
+at once by joy and anxiety and love, and with her overflowing eyes,
+which obeyed her agitated heart. Victor wept for fear and for joy
+beside his dumb father, but he passionately smothered every drop that
+might disturb him. Thus does every operation, by the climax of
+preparation, communicate to the spectator heart-beating and trembling.
+Only the veiled Briton,--a man who lifted his head coldly and serenely,
+like a high mountain over a torrid zone,--he offered to the filial hand
+a face silent and motionless; he kept composed and mute before the fate
+which was now to decide whether his dreary night should reach even to
+the grave or no farther than this minute....
+
+Fate said, Let there be light, and there was. The invisible destiny
+took a son's anxious hand and opened therewith an eye, which was worthy
+of a finer night than this starless one. Victor pressed the mature lens
+of the cataract--that smoke-ball[16] and cloud cast over creation--down
+into the bottom of the pupil; and so, when an atom had been sunk three
+lines deep, a man possessed immensity again, and a father his son.
+Oppressed mortal! thou that art at once a _son_ and a _slave_ of the
+dust, how slight is the thought, the moment, the drop of blood or
+tear-drop, that is required to overflow thy wide brain, thy wide heart!
+And if a couple of blood-globules can become, now thy Montgolfier's
+globes and now thy Belidor's percussion-balls,[17] ah, how little earth
+it takes to exalt or to crush thee!
+
+"Victor! thou? Is it thou who hast cured me, my son?" said the
+delivered man, taking the hand that was still armed with the surgical
+instrument. "Lay it aside and bandage me again! I rejoice that I saw
+thee first of all." The son could not stir for emotion. "Bandage me,
+the light is painful! _Was_ it thou? speak!" He bandaged in silence the
+open eye amidst the glad tears of his own. But when the bandage hid
+from that noble stoical soul everything, his blushing and his weeping,
+then was it impossible for the happy son to contain himself any
+longer;--he gave himself up to his heart, and clung with his tears upon
+the veiled countenance to which he had given back brighter days; and
+when he felt on his trembling breast the _quicker_ beatings of his
+father's heart, and the _tighter_ embrace of his gratitude,--then was
+the best child the happiest,--and all rejoiced at his joy, and
+congratulated the son more than the father....
+
+Twelve cannon went off from that number of door-keys. They shot this
+History dead.
+
+For now it is actually gone,--not a word, not a syllable of it do I
+know any longer. In fact I have never in my life seen or heard or
+dreamed of, or romantically invented, any Horion or any St. Luna;--the
+Devil and I know how it is; and I, on my part, have, besides, better
+things to do and to lay open now, namely,
+
+
+                 THE OVERTURE AND SECRET INSTRUCTIONS.
+
+Another would have been stupid enough to begin at the very beginning;
+but I thought to myself, I can at any time tell where I live,--in fact,
+at the Equator, for I reside on the island of _St. John's_, which lies,
+as is well known, in the East Indian waters, which are entirely
+surrounded by the principality of _Scheerau_. For nothing can be less
+unknown to good houses, which keep their regular literary waste-book
+(the Fair-Catalogue) and their regular stock-book (the Literary Times),
+than my latest home product, the _Invisible Lodge_,--a work, the
+reading of which my sovereign should make still more obligatory on his
+children, and even on his vassals, (it would not expressly contradict
+the Recesses,) than the attending the national university. In this
+Lodge, now, I have placed the extraordinary pond better known by the
+name of the East Indian Ocean, and into which we, of Scheerau, have
+steered and moored the few Moluccas and other islands on which our
+productive business lies. While the invisible lodge was being
+transformed by the press into a visible one, we again prepared an
+island,--namely, the isle of _St. John's_, on which I now live and
+write.
+
+The following digression ought to be attractive, because it discloses
+to the reader why I prefixed to this book the crazy title,
+Dog-post-days.
+
+It was day before yesterday, on the 29th of April, that I was walking
+in the evening up and down my island. The evening had already spun
+itself into haze and shadow. I could hardly see over to Tidore
+Island,[18] that monument of fair, sunken spring-times, and my eye
+glanced round only on the near buddings of twig and blossom, those
+wing-casings of growing Spring,--the plain and coast around me looked
+like a tiring-room of the flower-goddess, and her finery lay scattered
+and hid in vales and bushes round about,--the moon lay as yet behind
+the earth, but the well-spring of her rays shot up already along the
+whole rim of heaven,--the blue sky was at length pierced with silver
+spangles, but the earth was still painted black by the night. I was
+looking only at the heavens,--when something plashed on the earth....
+
+It was a little Pomeranian dog, who had leaped into the Indian Ocean,
+and was now heading full for St. John's. He crawled up on my coast and
+rained a shower of drops as he waggled near me. With a dog who is an
+utter stranger, it is still more disagreeable undertaking to spin a
+conversation than with an Englishman, because one knows neither the
+character nor the name of the animal. The dog had some business with
+me, and seemed to be a plenipotentiary. At last the moon opened her
+sluices of radiance, and brought me and the dog into full light.
+
+
+                          "_To his Well-Born_,
+            _Superintendent of Mines_,[19] _Mr. Jean Paul_,
+                                  _on_
+_Free_.                                              _St. John's_."
+
+
+This address to me hung down from the neck of the animal, and was
+pasted to a gourd-bottle which was tied to his collar. The dog
+consented to my taking off his iron collar, as the Alpine dogs do their
+portable refectory-table. I extracted from the bottle, which in
+sutlers' tents had often been filled with spirit, something which
+intoxicated me still better,--a package of letters. _Savans_, lovers,
+people of leisure, and maidens are passionately sharp-set upon letters;
+business-people, not at all.
+
+The whole package (name and hand were strange to me) turned upon the
+one point, to wit, that I was a famous man, and had intercourse with
+kings and emperors;[20] and that there were few mining intendants of my
+stamp, etc. But enough! For I must needs not have an ounce of modesty
+left in me if, with the impudence which some really possess, I should
+go on excerpting and extracting from the letters, that I was the Gibbon
+and the Möser[21] of Scheerau, (to be sure only in the biographical
+department, but then what flattery!)--that every one who possessed a
+life, and would see it biographically delineated by me, should set
+about the matter at once, before I was pressed away by some royal house
+as its historiographer, and could absolutely no longer be had,--that
+it might occur in my case as in that of other mine-intendants, before
+whom often the deluded public never took off its hat, until they had
+already passed into another lane,[22] i. e. world, etc. Who apprehends
+this last more than myself? But even this apprehension does not
+bring a modest man to the point of lowering himself down to be the
+bellows-blower to the man that shall sound his eulogy; as I to be sure
+should have done, if I had gone on to lay myself entirely bare. To my
+feeling even those authors are odious, who, in their shamelessness,
+only _then_ bring up the rear with the final flourish, that _modesty
+forbids them to say more_, when they have already said everything that
+modesty _can_ forbid.
+
+At length my correspondent ventures out with his design, namely, to
+make me the compiler of an unnamed family history. He begs, he
+intrigues, he defies. "He is able,"--he writes more copiously, but I
+abridge all, and in fact I deliver this epistolary extract with
+uncommonly little understanding; for I have been this half-hour
+scratched and gnawed in an unusually exasperating manner by a cursed
+beast of a rat,--"to establish everything for me by documentary
+evidence, but is not allowed to communicate to me any other names of
+the personages in this history than fictitious ones, because I am not
+wholly to be trusted,--in time he will explain everything to me,--for
+this is a history upon which and its development destiny itself is
+still working, and what he hands over to me is only the snout thereof,
+but he will duly make over to me one member after another, just as it
+falls off from the lathe of time, until we get the tail;--accordingly
+the epistolary _Spitz_ will regularly swim back and forth as a _poste
+aux ânes_,[23] but I must not on any account sail after the postman;
+and thus," concludes the correspondent, who signs himself _Knef_,
+"shall the dog, as a Pegasus, bring me so much nutritious sap, that,
+instead of the thin Forget-me-not of an annual, I may rear a thick
+cabbage-head or cauliflower of folios."
+
+How successfully he has accomplished his purpose the reader knows, who
+is fresh from the first chapter of this story, which, from Eymann's
+rats to the cannonade complete, was all in Spitz's bottle.
+
+I wrote back to Mr. Knef in the gourd only so much as this: "Anything
+nonsensical I seldom decline. Your flatteries would make me proud if I
+were not so already; hence, flatteries harm me little. I find the best
+world to be contained in the mere microcosm, and my Arcadia stretches
+not beyond the four chambers of my brain; the Present is made for
+nothing but the maw of man; the Past consists of history, which,
+again, is an aggregate present peopled by the dead, and a mere
+_Declinatorium_[24] of our perpetual _horizontal_ deviations from the
+cold pole of truth, and an _Inclinatorium_[25] of our _vertical_ ones
+from the sun of virtue. There is left, therefore, to man, who wants to
+be happier in than out of himself, nothing but the Future, or fancy,
+that is, romance. Now, as a biography is easily exalted into a romance
+by skilful hands, as we see by Voltaire's 'Charles' and his 'Peter,'
+and by autobiographies, I undertake the biographical work, on condition
+that in it the truth shall be only my maid of honor, but not my guide.
+
+"In visiting-parlors one makes one's self odious by general satires,
+because every one can take them to himself; personal ones they set down
+as among the duties of _medisance_, and so pardon them, because they
+hope the satirist is attacking the person rather than the vice. In
+books, however, it is exactly the reverse, and to me, in case several
+or more knaves, as I hope, play parts in our biography, their
+_incognito_ is a quite pleasing feature. A satirist is not so
+unfortunate herein as a physician. A lively medical author can describe
+few maladies which some lively reader shall not think he himself has;
+he inoculates the hypochondriac by his historical patients with their
+pains as thoroughly as if he put him to bed with a real attack of them;
+and I am firmly convinced that few people of rank can read living
+descriptions of the unclean disease without imagining they have it, so
+weak are their nerves and so strong their fancies, whereas a satirist
+can cherish the hope that a reader will seldom apply to himself his
+pictures of moral maladies, his anatomical tables of spiritual
+abortions; he can freely and cheerily depict despotism, imbecility,
+pride, and folly, without the least apprehension that any one will
+fancy himself to have anything of the kind; nay, I can charge the whole
+public, or all Germans, with an æsthetic lethargy, a political
+enervation, a politico-economical phlegma towards everything which does
+not go into the stomach or the purse; but I rely upon every one who
+reads me, that he at least will not reckon himself in the number, and
+if this letter were printed, I would appeal to every one's inner
+witness. The only performer whose true name I must have in this
+historical drama--especially as he plays only the prompter--is
+the--Dog.                     JEAN PAUL."
+
+
+I have, as yet, got no answer, nor any second chapter; so now it
+depends wholly on the Dog whether he will present the sequel of this
+History to the learned world or not.
+
+But is it possible that a biographical mining intendant, merely for the
+sake of a cursed rat, who, besides, is not working at any journal, but
+only in my house, must just run away from the public and thunder
+through all rooms, to worry the carrion to death?...
+
+... _Spitzius Hofmann_ is the name of the dog; _he_ was the rat, and
+was scratching at the door with the second chapter in the flask. A
+whole crammed provisionship, which the learned world may nibble at
+have I taken off from Hofmann's neck; and now the reader, who loves to
+read wise things as well as stupid ones, shall have opened to him
+to-day--for henceforth it is certain that I shall go on with my
+writing--glad prospects which, from a certain feeling of modesty,
+I do not designate.... The reader sits now on his sofa, the
+fairest reading-Hours dance round him and hide from him his
+repeating-watch,--the Graces hold my book for him and hand to him the
+sheets,--the Muses turn over the leaves for him, or in fact read it all
+to him;--he has nothing to disturb him, but the Swiss or the children
+must say, "Papa is out." As life has on one foot a sock and on the
+other a buskin, he loves to have a biography laugh and weep in one
+breath; and as the fine writers always understand how to combine with
+the useful moral of their writings a something immoral which poisons,
+but charms,--like the apothecaries, who draw at once _medicines_ and
+_aqua vitæ_,--so does he willingly forgive me, in consideration of the
+immoral which is prominent, the religious quality which I sometimes
+have, and _vice versâ_; and as this biography is set to music, because
+Ramler sets it beforehand into hexameter (which it certainly needs far
+more than Gessner's harmonious prose[26]), he can, when he has done
+reading, stand up and play or sing it.... I, too, am almost as happy as
+if I read the work;--the Indian Ocean flings up the peacock-wheels of
+its illuminated circle of waves before my island,--I stand on the best
+footing with all, the Reader, the Reviewer, and the Dog;--everything is
+ready to hand with each Dog-post-day: a recipe for ink from an
+alchemist; the gooseherd with quills was here day before yesterday; the
+bookbinder with gay writing-books only to-day: nature buds, my body
+blooms, my mind produces,--and so I hang my blossoms over the tan-bed
+and forcing-bed (i. e. over the island), send my root-fibres through
+the soil, unable (Hamadryad that I am) to guess from my foliage how
+much moss years may collect on my bark, how many woodchafers the future
+may gather upon the pith of my heart, and how many tree-lifters Death
+may lay under my roots,--nothing of all this do I surmise, but swing
+joyfully--thou good destiny!--my boughs in the wind, lay my suckling
+leaves to the bosom of a Nature filled with light and dew, and, with
+the breath of universal life fluttering through me, stir up as much
+articulate noise as is necessary, that one or another sad human heart,
+while contemplating these _leaves_, may forget, in short, gentle
+dreams, its stings, its throbbings, its stiflings----O, why is a man
+sometimes so happy?
+
+For this reason: because he is sometimes a _littérateur_. As often as
+Fate, under its veil, dots off from the great world atlas to a special
+map the little life-stream of a _literatus_, which runs over some
+lecture-halls and bookshelves, it may possibly think and say thus:
+"Surely there is no cheaper or rarer way of making a creature
+happy than by making him a literary one: his goblet of joy is an
+inkhorn,--his feast of trumpets and carnival is (if he is a reviewer)
+the Easter-fair,--his whole Paphian grove is compressed into a
+bookcase,--and what else do his blue Mondays consist of than (written
+or read) Dog-post-days?" And so Fate itself leads me over to the
+
+
+
+
+                            2. DOG-POST-DAY.
+
+             Antediluvian History.--Victor's Plan of Life.
+
+
+At the gate of the First Chapter, the readers ask the incomers: "What
+is your name?--your character?--your business?"
+
+The Dog answers for all: H. Januarius--i. e. Herr Januarius, not Holy
+Januarius; but the Prince of Flachsenfingen bore that name--had, in his
+younger years, made the grand tour or journey round the beautiful and
+the great world. He everywhere distributed gifts to strangers, which
+cost him but a single _don gratuit_ from his subjects, and he succored
+and pitied many oppressed peasants in France, who fared as badly as his
+own did in Flachsenfingen. For the defenceless female sex, like all
+travelling princes, he did, if possible, still more; one may say of the
+greater number of them, that, like Titus, or like one sailing westward
+round the world, they, to be sure, sometimes lose a _day_, but seldom a
+_night_, without making others, and consequently being themselves,
+happy. In fact, the Regent must have foreseen the present depopulation
+of France; for he took measures betimes against it, and left behind him
+in three Gallic seaboard cities three sons, and on the so-called Seven
+Islands only one. The first was called the Welshman, the second the
+Brazilian, the third the Calabrian; the one on the Seven Islands, the
+Monsieur, or _Mosye_: these names were probably meant to allude to
+Princes of Wales, Brazil, and Asturias. He let his children grow up in
+no worse ignorance than ignorance of their rank: they were to be formed
+for future co-workers in his administration. Januarius was, to be sure,
+sensual and somewhat feeble, but--except where he _feared_--extremely
+philanthropic.
+
+Lord Horion met Prince January twice on his journeys: the first time he
+cut across the princely planetary orbit as a comet, in the sense of a
+hairy star; the second, as a comet with a tail when in its perihelion.
+What I mean is this: it was just when Horion was in love with a scion
+of January's house, who lived in London, that he saw the Prince for the
+second time, and at his house in London entertained him and his court.
+Upon this very distant relative of the Prince my papers--from an
+excessive deference to political and domestic relations--throw an
+unseasonable veil. She was, at the time of marrying his Lordship,
+twenty-two years old, and her whole person was (if I may venture to
+adopt the bold expression of a London eulogist) nothing but a single,
+tender, still blue eye. That is all which is vouchsafed to the public.
+
+The Prince willingly let himself be mastered and managed--by the lord,
+whom a singular mixture of coldness and genius constituted an unlimited
+monarch and commander of souls. The lord had, moreover, a beautiful
+niece in his house, whose charms in princes' eyes made such a spiritual
+Old Man of the Mountain as he at once _younger_ and more _smooth_.
+
+But the death-bell threw its discords into these harmonies of life. The
+beloved of his Lordship fled from the rough earth, and left behind her
+his first-born son as a memorial, and pledge of love; she died in her
+twenty-third year, as it were of the life of her child, some days after
+its birth, and the thin, tender twig broke down under the ripe fruit.
+Lord Horion bowed silently to fate. He had loved her terribly, without
+showing it: he mourned her in the same manner, without moistening his
+deep black eye.
+
+The Prince found in the niece, i. e. in a true Englishwoman, something
+to his taste, for the reason that he _had_ found what was still more so
+in the Frenchwomen; and on this ground he would, inversely, have loved
+them, had he previously known her. The subsequent Chief Chamberlain, Le
+Baut, had the same sentiments, and, what is still more, toward the same
+person; and as Indian courtiers imitate all wounds of their sovereign,
+so did Le Baut with an arrow of Cupid copy those of his master, and
+transferred to himself therewith one of the severest.
+
+These London histories cannot last much longer, and then we shall
+happily get back again to our St. Luna.
+
+A burning fever seized the Regent, which his physician, Dr. Culpepper,
+held to be merely zigzag dartings of fitful, gouty matter. I have been
+unable, hitherto, to ascertain whether this Culpepper has any tolerably
+near relationship to his well-known namesake and professional co-master
+in London. The fever hunted January so hard, and the Father Confessor
+instituted with his conscience, instead of extinguishing processes, so
+many incendiary ones, that in the agony of death he took a solemn oath
+never again at the sight of a maiden to think of Depopulation and
+Revolution. The same weakness which strengthened his superstition and
+childlike credulity ministered to his sensuality; when he was up again,
+he absolutely knew not what to do. The niece and his oath were
+next-door neighbors in the chambers of his brain. A clever ex-Jesuit
+from Ireland, who lived only for doubts of conscience, and had himself
+a _conscientia dubia_, flew to the help of the doubter, and gave him to
+understand that "his vow, especially before getting absolution from it,
+he must conscientiously keep, excepting the sinful and impossible point
+therein, that, namely, which, without the consent of his spouse, he had
+neither the right to promise nor the power to fulfil." In other words,
+the Jesuit failed not to show him, that he had in his fever sworn off
+only from the _unmarried_ sex, and limited his celibacy merely to nuns,
+that accordingly his vow did not, to be sire, forbid him compound
+adultery, (which confession would do away) but it did with extreme
+strictness the simple kind. January was too religious not to refrain
+wholly from the simple form.
+
+It is hard to investigate the relation in which his now _increased_
+love for his four grand dukes or _little_ dukes in Gaul stood to the
+fulfilment of his vow; in short, he gave his Lordship the commission
+and full power to fetch the four little persons from Gaul to London,
+because he wanted to take his beloved anonymous little posterity with
+him to Germany. It was uncertain whether he loved the mothers so
+heartily for the children's sake, or the children for the sake of the
+mothers. His Lordship went gladly, like Kotzebue (but differently),
+after the death of his beloved, to France. At last there came, not from
+him, but from the tutors of the Welshman, the Brazilian, the Calabrian,
+the sad intelligence, that in one night, probably according to a
+concerted plan of conspired prince-stealers, the three children had
+been abducted; and not long after that the sorrowful post was not only
+confirmed by his Lordship, but aggravated by the new one, that the
+Monsieur or Mosye on the Seven Islands was no more--to be found there.
+
+Fate often gives man the balsam before the wound: January received his
+fifth son, whom I shall never call anything but the Infante, still
+earlier than the tidings of his forfeited blessing of children. The
+chief Chamberlain, Von Le Baut, had wedded the mother of the Infante
+(his Lordship's niece); but he dated his marriage three quarter-days
+back, instead of announcing it one later. I have never been able to see
+the connection of this anachronism or misreckoning of time with the
+Prince's vow. For the rest, dangerous as January's _votum_ made him to
+the _husbands_ of his court, and harmless to the _fathers_,
+nevertheless, the virtuous confidence which the husbands reposed in the
+female virtue which they had appropriated to themselves by marriage was
+so unlimited, that they, without hesitation, led that virtue into the
+midst of his unbridled flames. Nay, they even disdained the fear of
+being suspected of doing so in order that, when he laid down his crown
+on the toilet-table of their spouses, they might play with the shining
+wall-crown (_corona muralis_) as with a _joujou_, and with its
+brilliancy throw a dazzling light into people's windows: for a courtier
+cares more to own his wife than to watch over her.[27]
+
+It will come on presently, cry the puppet-players; it will be over
+presently, say I.
+
+When, at length, his Lordship returned empty-handed, he was
+greatly surprised, not at the presence of the Infante, but at his
+adoption,--namely, at the marriage of Le Baut. But this High
+Chamberlain was--and no one minded it less than Horion--an ardent
+friend of the Prince; this rendered him capable of doing for him
+(as Cicero requires) even that which he would never have done for
+himself,--namely, a dishonorable action. In fact, it is an uncommon
+piece of good fortune for a courtier or a world's man, whose honor his
+high position exposes often to the worst of weather, that this honor,
+however sensitive to slight contusions,[28] easily gets over great
+ones, and can, if not by words, yet by deeds, be assailed without
+injury. Something similar is remarked by physicians in regard to
+madmen, or rather their skin, which to be sure feels the lightest
+touch, but on which no blister will draw. The Prince was knit to Le
+Baut by a threefold ligament,--by gratitude, son, and wife; his
+Lordship plucked the ligament asunder; that is to say, he laid bare
+to his niece the Chamberlain's heart, and discovered to her the
+poison-bag therein, and a dramatically carried out _plan_, which she
+had hitherto regarded as an _indulgent confidence_. All the nobility
+and pride of her nature flamed up in her with shame and wrath, and,
+pursued by crashing recollections, she flew with her child, and with
+the prospect of a second, out of the city to a country-seat of his
+Lordship's.
+
+Now the Prince with his Lordship and his court (including even Dr.
+Culpepper) returned to Germany. Le Baut tarried awhile longer to
+appease the niece and persuade her to take the journey. But it was not
+only impossible to draw all her deeply sunk roots out of the land of
+freedom and go with the party to Germany, but she even separated
+herself, not only by seas, but by a bill of divorce, from the filthy
+favorite. She was obliged to leave with the Chamberlain her second
+child, his real daughter; but the first, the Infante, she clasped to
+her maternal breast. Le Baut was glad enough to let it be so, and
+thought that after the building-oration the scaffolding of the building
+should also go into the house-stove. But when he appeared under the
+German throne-canopy, his sun (January) stood at the summer solstice,
+which from decreasing warmth gradually passed over to cold storms.
+January's love could more easily rise and fall than stay still, and the
+greatest crime with him was absence. Le Baut, stripped of both wife and
+child, must needs lose now in comparison with his Lordship, because the
+latter came upon the stage, and under January's throne-canopy as
+treasurer and coast-warden of two treasures left behind in London. But
+there were deeper reasons. His Lordship easily governed the Regent,
+because he held him in neither by his own nor other people's vices, but
+by his own virtues. In the first place, he required nothing of him, not
+so much as diet and chastity. Secondly, he lifted no cousins into the
+saddle, but tipped bad men out of it; he bore him like a hawk on his
+gloved fist, but the falconer did it not for the purpose of darting the
+Prince upon doves and hares, but in order to make him at once
+_watchful_ and _tame_. Thirdly, his firmness and his fineness mutually
+compensated each other: the best one to rule over changeable men is the
+unchangeable. Fourthly, he was not the favorite, but the associate,
+remained always a Briton and a lord and the country's beneficent
+bee-father (apiary), whereas January was the queen-bee and in the
+queen-bee's prison. Fifthly, he was one of the few men to whom one must
+be _equal_ in order to resist their will; and any one who would play
+the juggler's trick of throwing a padlock on his mouth slyly, soon had
+one to fetters and manacles on his own soul. Sixthly, he had a good
+cheese. This last point needs no copious explanation. In Chester he had
+a farmer, who produced a cheese, the like of which was not to be found
+in Europe; but to princes generally an extraordinary cheese is more
+gratifying than an extraordinary address of thanks from the provincial
+syndic.
+
+With such a conjunction of ill stars, of course our Chamberlain found
+the bill of divorce, which at first was written with sympathetic ink in
+January's face, gradually more and more legible. Still he read it
+through several times every week, in order to read it correctly; he
+could now no longer procure any lapdog a place, that is, a lap,--his
+letters of recommendation were Uriah's-letters,[29]--and now, when he
+actually succeeded in getting, through his Lordship, the charge of
+chief Chamberlain, he thought it high time to try, against the gout in
+his knee, bathing at his knightly seat of St. Luna year in and year
+out, and so he set off, having first been obliged to solemnly promise
+the whole court that he should come back well.
+
+Properly, now, the preliminary history would be, according to promise,
+ended, so that I might get well on in the later history this work
+contains, were I not absolutely obliged on the Court-Chaplain's account
+to add this much more:--
+
+The only place of which Le Baut had the presentation at court was
+the parish of St. Luna. He invested therewith, as its patron, the
+Rat-contradictor Eymann, who had begged from him in London the oral
+vocation to the Court-Chaplaincy, and who could no longer obtain it.
+Hence the Dog-post-days always call him the Court-Chaplain, although in
+fact he is only a country pastor.
+
+From the slight circumstance that Eymann, as travelling preacher,
+accompanied January's retinue, a great deal grew out. Eymann, at his
+Lordship's country-seat, offered to his present wife the neck- and
+breast-pendant of a heart hollowed with consumption, as a slight gift,
+which was accepted. To the couple while still in England their Flamin
+was born. Her Ladyship loved in the person of the Court-Chaplain's wife
+a worthy sister of her sex, and a worthy fellow-citizen of her native
+land; she urged her with fervent prayers to stay in England, and when
+all were refused, she begged and prevailed upon her at least to let her
+Flamin--in order to be at all events half a Briton--stay behind in the
+society of Victor and the Infante, till the friendly trio[30] should be
+transplanted simultaneously into German soil.
+
+The Parson's wife was strong enough to sacrifice for the sake of her
+Flamin's finer education the enjoyment of his presence, and left him
+behind under the eyes of love and in the little arms of childish
+friendship. The same training hand--_Dahore_ was the name of the
+teacher--reared and watered the three noble flowers, which sucked from
+one kind of bed and ether three kinds of color, and developed unlike
+stamens and honeycups. Dahore had the hearts of all children in his
+tender hand, simply because his own never boiled and blustered, and
+because an ideal beauty sat upon his youthful form and an ideal love
+dwelt in his pure breast. The three children loved and embraced each
+more warmly in his presence, as the Graces enfold each other before
+Venus Urania: they even bore all the same name, as the Otaheitans
+exchange names with those they love. When they had attained some
+ripeness of years, his Lordship came to put them all with Dahore on
+board ship for Germany. But before the embarkation the Infante caught
+the small-pox and was made blind, and Dahore was obliged to return with
+him to the distressed and weeping lady. Victor had long and
+speechlessly hung on the neck of his sick friend and clung around
+Dahore's knee, refusing to part from his two loved ones; but his
+Lordship parted them: Flamin and Victor were, from that time, educated
+in Flachsenfingen, the former for a jurist, the latter for a physician.
+
+There are some improbabilities in Spitzius Hofmann's gourd-flask; but
+the Dog must be held responsible for what he delivers. Now the story
+goes straight forward again.
+
+His Lordship, during the cannonading of the tattered or riddled
+garrison, withdrew with Victor into another apartment; and his first
+word was, "Unbandage me a moment, and leave thy hand in mine, that I
+may be sure of thy attention, for I have much to say to thee." Good
+man! we all remark that thou art more tender than thou art willing to
+appear, and we all praise it. Not _coldness_, but _cooling-off_, is the
+greater wisdom; and our inner man should, like a hot metal-casting in
+its mould, cool but slowly, in order that it may round itself out to a
+smoother form: for that very reason has Nature--just as they _warm_ the
+mould for statuary metal--poured his soul into an _ardent_ body.
+
+He continued: "I have, my dear boy, in my blindness been able to
+dictate to thee only empty letters; I meant to save my secrets for thy
+arrival. I am watched by a small gunpowder-conspiracy." Victor
+interrupted him with the question, how he had so suddenly become blind.
+His Lordship answered, reluctantly, "One eye was probably so already
+before thy departure for Göttingen, but I did not know it."
+
+"But the other?" said Victor.
+
+Over his Lordship's face glanced the cold shadow of a buried pang; he
+looked on his son a long time, and answered, as if abstractedly and
+hurriedly, "Also! as I look on thee, thou seemest to me much taller and
+larger."
+
+"That is, perhaps," replied he, for he guessed his thought, "an ocular
+illusion of the sensitive retina.[31] You spoke of a gunpowder-plot."
+
+"They have found out," his Lordship continued, "that the Prince's son
+is not in London: they even assume that the disease was given to him at
+that time designedly; and the Prince daily speaks of the moment when I
+shall bring his son back to him. Perhaps he knows these suspicions. I
+was obliged to postpone my departure for London till my cure. Now I
+shall shortly start for England, where the son is not, to bring his
+mother; him I shall bring from otherwheres, and with just as good eyes
+as thou hast given me."
+
+"Then," Victor broke out, "not the best of men, but his enemies, will
+be hurled down."
+
+"No, I am to be _hurled down_ first (to express myself in thy
+fashion),--but thou hast interrupted me: I have never had the courage
+to interrupt other people like fools,--for my absence is just what they
+want."
+
+I, as installed historiographer, ask no leave of any one, and interrupt
+whom I will. One who is interrupted may jest, indeed, but he can no
+longer argue. The Socrates grafted upon Plato, who never let a sophist
+have his talk out, was therefore one himself. In England, where they
+tolerate systems even among the wine-cups, a man can spread himself
+out like a royal folio: in France, where the spectacles of wisdom
+are splintered into sharp, shiny bits, one must be as curt as a
+visiting-card. A hundred times is the wise man silent before the
+coxcomb, because he needs twenty-three sheets to express his opinion.
+Coxcombs need only lines; their opinions are upstarting islands, held
+together by nothing but emptiness.... I add the remark, that between
+the lord and his son a fine, courteous wariness reigned, which in the
+case of so near a relationship is to be justified only by their rank,
+their mental structure, and their frequent separation.--
+
+"But my presence is, perhaps, still worse. The Princess--"
+
+(The Prince's bride, since his first wife died early and without
+children, as Spitz says.)
+
+"The Princess brings along with her a stream of diversions, in which he
+will no longer hear any voice but that which lures to pleasure. An
+interrupted influence is as good as lost. And then, too, I am, up to a
+certain point, so tired of this game, that I gladly flee from the new
+engagements in which this new arrival would involve me. Should she, as
+they say, not love him, she might so much the more easily govern him;
+and then my absence would be, again, not good. But, setting me aside,
+what dost thou propose to do during my absence?"
+
+After a crotchet-rest, he answered himself, "Thou wilt be his
+Physician-in-ordinary, Victor." Victor's hand twitched in his father's.
+"Thou hast already been promised to him; and he longs for thee, simply
+because I have often named thee. He is impatient to see for himself how
+any one looks whose father he knows so well. As Physician-in-ordinary,
+thou canst, with thy art and thy fancy, keep him clear of strange
+fetters until I come again; then will I impose still softer ones on
+him, and go back forever. My engagement has had hitherto the design
+merely of averting strange ones, particularly a certain--" Then, with
+full heart and changed voice, "My beloved! it is hard in this world to
+win Virtue, Freedom, and Happiness, but still harder to diffuse them.
+The wise man gets everything from himself; the fool, from others. The
+freeman must release the slave, the philosopher think for the fool, the
+happy man labor for the unhappy."
+
+He rose, and presupposed Victor's Yes. The latter had therefore to
+dribble out his rhetorical flood during the leave-taking. He began
+with compressed breath: "I detest most cordially the simoom of the
+court-atmosphere ..." (his Lordship has to answer for it with me, that
+the son leaves out here the concessive conjunction, "to be sure":
+whoever lets it be seen that he expects obedience, gets it at least in
+a prouder shape) "which sweeps over nothing but prostrate men, and
+turns him to powder who remains upright! I wish I could be in an
+antechamber on a court-day; I would say to all in my thoughts: 'How I
+hate you and your sour honey of pleasure- and plague-parties; the
+cursed watchman's- and rower's-bench of your card-tables; the gifts of
+full dishes of slaughtered provinces (I mean your gaming-plates and
+your meat-plates)!' But I know very well I can never express myself
+strongly enough upon the servile, tide-waiting court-oysters, who know
+not how to stir or open anything--not excepting their hearts--but only
+their shell, to draw something in ..."
+
+"I have not _interrupted_ thee yet," said his Lordship, and stood still
+for a moment.
+
+"Meanwhile," the son continued, "I wade with the greatest pleasure down
+to the oyster-bank ... O, my dear father! how could I help going? Why
+have I not hitherto left your diseased eye unbandaged, that you might
+see in my face the absence of a single objection to your wishes? Ah!
+around every throne hang a thousand wet eyes, upturned by maimed men
+without hands; above sits iron Fate in the form of a prince, and
+stretches out no hand. Why shall not some tender-hearted man go up, and
+guide Fate's rigid hand, and with one hand dry, down below, a thousand
+eyes?"
+
+Horion smiled, as one who should say, Young man!
+
+"But I beg only for some legal postponements and delays, in order that
+I may get time to be more stoical and foolish,--foolish,--that is, I
+mean--contented. I should be glad to laugh and go on foot for two
+months longer among the good people around us, and by the side of my
+Flamin, particularly just now in the almanac spring and in that of my
+years, and before the ship of life freezes into the harbor of old age.
+Stoical I must be at any rate. Verily, did I not lay Epictetus's manual
+as a serpent-stone[32] to myself and my wounds, in order that the stone
+might suck out the moral poison; were I to go out of the house with a
+breast full of cancer-sores; what would the court think of me?... Ah!
+but I mean it seriously. The poor inner man--dried up by the
+intermittent fever of the passions, exhausted by the heart-palpitation
+of pleasure, burning with the wound-fever of love needs, like any other
+sick man, solitude and stillness and tranquillity, in order to get
+well."
+
+Though he named the word "tranquillity," his inner being was agitated
+even to the dissolving-point, so much had the passions already stirred
+his blood and shaken his heart.
+
+And now the two went back in a deepening silence of harmony to Eymann.
+
+"I have a request for my Flamin."
+
+"What is it?" said his Lordship.
+
+"I do not yet know, but he wrote me he would soon name it."
+
+"Mine to him is," said his Lordship, "that, if he will get a place, he
+must love the Pandects better than tactics, and, instead of the rapier,
+take the pen."
+
+The son had been treated too politely by the father to have courage
+enough to ask for his secrets, especially that relating to the
+whereabouts of January's son. I treat the reader with the same
+delicacy, and hope he will have just as little courage; for, when any
+one explains himself guardedly, nothing is more uncivil than to put a
+new question.
+
+His Lordship now travelled back, a cured man, to the Prince.
+
+
+
+
+                            3. DOG-POST-DAY.
+
+   Sowing-Day of Joys.--Watch-Tower.--Fraternization of the Heart!
+
+
+The departure of his Lordship was the removal of the dam which had
+hitherto stood in the way of the flood of narrations, questions, and
+pleasures. The first investigation upon which the Parsonage entered
+was, to see whether it was really the old Bastian. And he it was, hide
+and hair; even the left side-lock he had still, as of old, shorter than
+the right. When the butcher's boy comes home from Hungary, he wonders
+that his kin are the same old pennies; they, however, wonder that he is
+no longer so. But in the present case there was mutual delight at the
+unchangedness on both sides. On every face lay the halo of joy, but
+on each composed of different rays. On a soft face, like Victor's,
+rapture looks like virtue. Old Appel, who had never, in all her life,
+turned over any leaves but those of David's Psalter and that in an
+ox's stomach,[33] expressed her pleasure all day long to the brass
+kettles by scouring them with unusual zest. The Vienna hospital for
+animals--consisting of an old pug and puss, who no longer hated
+each other, just as in the old man the good and bad souls are
+reconciled--and the bird-collection under the stove, which was one
+rusty-black bulfinch strong, took their full share of interest in the
+general uproar, and introduced themselves, and--which no ambassador
+would have done--waived the right of the first visit. Agatha expressed
+her joy only with her lips, by keeping silence with them, and pressing
+them to her brother's. To the Court-Chaplain's credit, it is reported
+that he took the invalid pug, who had the podagra in his hind-feet and
+the chiragra in his fore-paws, and shoved him quietly in his basket
+keeping-room and chamber under the stove again; restored the
+architectural order of the chairs without scolding; and rocked the
+little Bastian amidst the joyful confusion of tongues, that he might
+not wake up and aggravate it. But in the highly refined heart of
+Victor's countrywoman, the Chaplain's wife, the rays of joy from the
+whole family came to a focus, and diffused through her whole bosom the
+living glow of love. She smiled right into Victor's face to such a
+degree that she knew no way of escape but by bethinking herself of his
+destined chamber, which she directed to be opened and shown to him.
+Agatha flew forward with the jingling bunch of keys; and the guest, as
+he entered, was followed by only so many people as there were in the
+house, all eager to see what he would say to it.
+
+He surrendered himself to all this friendly handling, not with the vain
+egotism of a cultivated stranger, but with a delighted, docile, almost
+child-like confusion; it gave him not the least concern that he looked
+like a child, so gentle, so glad, and so unpretending. In such hours it
+is hard to sit down, or to listen to a story, or to tell one....
+Everybody began one, but the Chaplain interposed: "We have quite other
+things to talk about." But no _quite other things_ came. Everybody
+wanted to enjoy the stranger where there were only four ears, but the
+six remaining ears could not be kept away. My description of his
+confusion is itself confused, but so it is with me always; for
+instance, when I describe haste, I do it, unconsciously, with the
+greatest. To a heart like his, that hung rocking in the feathers[34]
+of love, was there any need that it should see in every notched
+window-sill, in every smooth pavement-pebble, in every round hole
+drilled by the rain in the door-step, his boyhood's years mosaically
+pictured, and that he should enjoy in the same objects age and novelty?
+Those boyish years, which appeared to him out of a shadow, abiding on
+the lawns of St. Luna, between happy Sundays and among beloved
+faces,--those _boyish years_ held a dark mirror in their hands, in
+which the glimmering perspective of his _childish years_ ran backward;
+and in that remote magic-night stood, dimly gleaming, the form of
+_Dahore_, his never-to-be-forgotten teacher in London, who had so
+loved, so indulged, so improved him. "Ah!" thought he, "thou unrequited
+heart, too warm for this earth, where beatest thou now? why can I not
+unite my sighs with thine, and say to thee, Teacher, Beloved? O, man
+often perceives but late how much he was loved, how forgetful and
+ungrateful he was, and how great the heart he misunderstood." What
+nourished his still pleasure the most was the thought that he had
+earned it by his filial obedience to his father, and by his resolve to
+undertake the future labors-of-Hercules at court; for into every great
+joy of his the doubt would fall, like a bitter stomach-drop, whether he
+deserved it,--a doubt which reigning houses, palatines, patriarchs, and
+grand-masters have skilfully taken from them in childhood. The better
+sort of men find pleasure sweetest only after a good action,--the
+Easter-Festival after a Passion-Week.
+
+My lady-readers will now want to hear what was cooked for dinner;
+but the documents of this Post-day, which reach me half by wheel and
+half by water, state, in the first place, that no one had any
+appetite,--which joy takes away more than grief,--except the three
+regiments, which slashed like veterans into the enemy,--that is, into
+the leavings of the table; secondly, that the meal was still leaner
+than the guest himself. We will, however, hereby invite all the
+reading-societies in a body to the _immovable_ feast of the 4th of May,
+the Friday when, for the first time, Victor's arrival and his godson's
+churchgoing are suitably celebrated.
+
+The Parson's wife extricated the beset darling in the afternoon from
+the musical circle of so many tones, and smuggled him away from under
+the eyes of her husband, whose Directress and Lady Mayoress she was,
+and led him to his chamber, that she might there, before him alone,
+distress and delight herself, and speak out her heart, like a mother.
+Long-suppressed sighs and antiquated tears now forced their way out of
+the opened motherly heart into another and tender one, which was,
+indeed, her son's best friend. She complained to him of Flamin's
+excitability, which Victor used always to allay; of his love for
+military life, while, after all, he was a scholar; and, finally, of the
+company he kept,--namely, he went roving round with a young page, one
+_Matthieu_, son of the Minister _Von Schleunes_, a dissolute,
+universally-beloved, universally-spoiled, bold, artful young scoffer,
+who, when his service allowed it, would spend his time either over
+yonder with the Chamberlain's people, or here with her son: "Heaven
+only knew what designs he had in his visits at a citizen's house." She
+rejoiced that Victor would bear off his old friend out of the traps and
+fangs of this rake. Victor pressed her hand with emotion, and said: "I
+could hardly think of sharing his heart with the best bond-fellow.
+Not so much as fall in love should he dare to, if it depended on me.
+Only me must he love, and one other person, who depicts him quite
+wrongly,--namely, yourself." He greatly mistrusted, also, her drawing
+of the sun-spots of Matthieu, because women seldom comprehend eccentric
+men, and because maidens, indeed, often love wild youths, but matrons
+(enlightened by marriage) always prefer gentle ones.
+
+He easily drew the hearts of married women into his drag-net by a
+certain kindly gallantry towards them which a German saves for
+unmarried ones. Old ladies and old tobacco-pipes, however, easily
+cleave to men's lips. The younger pigeons he enticed to himself by his
+_comic salt_, as they catch turtle-doves by another kind. A _bon-mot_
+is to them a _dictum probans_; a _pasquin_, a _magister sententiarum_;
+and the critical calendar of scandal is to them a Kant's Critique of
+the Pure Reason, in an improved edition. With his medical doctor's
+ring, also, he fastened to himself female souls; as physician, he laid
+claim to corporeal mysteries, and then the spiritual easily follow
+these.
+
+In the evening, when the woodland stream of the first jubilation had
+run out, three sober words were at length possible. The Parson, too, by
+this time, scolded less; for joy had made him rabid in the forenoon.
+Anger and the body are strengthened together, and therefore by
+pleasure. Hence in January and February, when dogs get the longer
+madness, men have the short one of wrath; hence convalescents grumble
+more at all about them, just as people do under strong mental
+excitements,--e. g. Dog-post scribes; hence, too, in the exhaustion
+following sick-headache, or a fit of intoxication, one is gentler than
+a lamb.
+
+Towards evening, there already transpired something of consequence.
+Apollonia swept and dusted her blood-relationship and her guest with
+her whisks even sooner than the spiders and the dust. On the 4th of May
+was this day's arrival of the long-absent fugitive to be right properly
+celebrated. Flamin and Victor led the way through the Parsonage garden,
+whose _memorabilia_ and _curiosa_ are so edifying that the
+correferent[35]  of these acts wishes he could, by the Dog-express,
+portray the garden to me more clearly. The Chaplain had stamped off
+many beds, not into rectangles, but had curved and twisted them into
+the shape of Latin characters, in double black-letter, to represent the
+initials of his family. His own (E) he had sowed with radishes;
+Apollonia's (A), with capuchin-lettuce;[36] Flamin's (F), with
+rape-cole; Sebastian's (S), with sweet-root, or _Glycyrrhiza vulgaris_
+(liquorice). Whoever was not present had left for him, at all events, a
+vacant place and _almanac royal_ among squashes and Stettin-apples,
+round which was wrapped a perforated paper with the name cut out,
+which, after the peeling off of this wrappage, would appear green or
+red on the pale fruit. Victor, as he passed along by a C made of
+tulips, asked his Flamin the meaning of it. "Why dost thou ask?" he
+inquired; and the loquacious Parsonage-people, following after, drove
+away the answer.
+
+Beyond the Parsonage-meadow stood--one had only to leap the brook--a
+hill, and thereon an old watchtower, in which there was nothing but a
+wooden staircase, and overhead nothing but a board covering instead of
+the Italian roof, both of which the Chamberlain had had made, that the
+people--not himself, for the unfeelingness of magnates labors for the
+feeling of minorites--might up there look round them a little. One
+could see from there the columnar architecture of the Creator, the
+Swiss mountains, standing, and the Rhine moving along with his ships.
+On the tower two linden-trees had grown aloft, twined together by
+nature, so as, sometimes, with their foliage, which had been hollowed
+out into a green niche and underlaid with a grassy bench, to fan, up
+there, a fevered islander. The loving party climbed the battlement, and
+carried up with them in their rural breasts a tranquillity which softly
+copied therein the still outer heaven that encircled these good hearts
+with its veiled suns. One lingering cloud gave a farewell glow, but it
+melted away before it burned out.
+
+Now could the supplementary volumes of the Universal History of St.
+Luna be conveniently issued. Eymann could deliver his folio volumes of
+_gravamina_ (grievances) upon the consistorial councils and the rats.
+All at once, Agatha, like her saintly namesake, was invoked down below
+by the organ-blower _loci_, who was _valet-de-place_ of the village,
+and Parsonage-coachman. When certain authors say, "The coachman was
+blind, and the horse was deaf," they exactly reverse the case. The
+churl was deaf. He had in his _mouchoir de Vénus_--the handkerchief is,
+with the common people, at once letter-bag and envelope, because a
+letter is as important and rare a thing to them as a good one is to a
+reviewer--to-day discovered and unwrapped an epistle to Agatha, which
+he should have delivered yesterday with his Lordship's: but coachmen
+consider a master only as the mock-sun and second party to the horse,
+and the lady absolutely as no more than a parasite-growth of the
+stable; hence "immediately" means with them one or two or three days;
+and "to-morrow forenoon" meant, on the Ratisbon notification-programme
+of matters to be voted on, one or two or three years. Agatha, with more
+eagerness, hurried down, held the letter towards the lighter quarter of
+the west, and deciphered something, which, with sparkling eyes, she
+carried in a gallop up the stairs. "She is coming to-morrow!" she cried
+out to Flamin; for she seemed almost, in the person of every one of her
+friends, to love only the companion and friend of her other friends.
+The case was this: _Clotilda_, Le Baut's only daughter by his first
+wife (his Lordship's niece), was coming from the Girls' Institute in
+Maienthal, where she had been educated, back to her father.
+
+"Do _you_ take good care!" said the Chaplain's wife; "she is very
+beautiful."
+
+"Then," said he, "I shall much rather take care _not_ to take care."
+
+"In fact," she continued, "all that is beautiful is now gathering
+around you" (here he tried to confuse and chastise her by a flattering
+look, but in vain). "The Italian Princess comes, too, on St. John's
+Day; and she is said to be as charming as if she were no princess at
+all, but only an Italian woman." There she did most princesses wrong;
+but a certain irony upon her own sex was the only fault of the
+Chaplain's wife, to whom, as to many other mothers, there were almost
+no step-sons and hardly anything but step-daughters.
+
+He hoped, he replied, that very few princesses, even in America, had
+yet been married, in whose affections he could not have become
+completely entangled, and that merely from pity for such a poor, tender
+creature or heraldic beast, pressed under the seal-stamp and then on
+the contracts, which were often the only children of these marriages.
+"The young Mothers of the Country are really, like bee-mothers, set up
+for sale in their queen's prison, and wait to see into what hive the
+bee-father, or Father of the Country, will this year trade them off
+again."
+
+A woman cannot possibly comprehend how a man whom she esteems can
+fall in love, except with her; and she can hardly wait to get sight of
+his beloved. Quite as curious is she about this man's style in his
+love,--that is, whether it is of the Flemish or French or Italian
+school. The Chaplain's wife questioned her confidential guest on this
+point also.
+
+"My harem," he began, "reaches from this watchtower to the Cape, and
+away round the globe: Solomon is but a yellow straw-widower compared
+with me. I have in it even his wives; and, from Eve with her Sodom's
+Borsdorf-apple down to the latest Eve with an Imperial apple, and even
+to a marchioness with a mere fruit-piece, they are all in my hold and
+breast."
+
+A lady excuses esteem for her sex on the ground that she is included
+therein. Women themselves have not so much as an idea of the
+peculiarities of their sex.
+
+"But what says the favorite Sultana to this?" asked the Grand
+Inquisitress.
+
+"She--" He paused, less from embarrassment than as one sunk in the
+fulness of glowing dreams. "_She_, of course--" he continued. "I pledge
+my head, meanwhile, that every youth has two periods, or, at least,
+moments. In the first, he stakes his head that he would sooner let his
+heart mould in his thorax or chest, and his _poples_ or knee-joint grow
+lame, than that either should stir for any other woman than the very
+best of her sex,--for a real angel, a decided Quinterne.[37] He
+absolutely insists on the highest prize in the marriage Loto,--that is,
+in the first period; for the second comes, and cheats him out of so
+much. The female Quinterne would naturally require a _male_ one; and,
+in case he were _that_,...
+
+"I am a stupid drawing, an _ambe_, a double number, I say, and
+absolutely refuse to let the period have its talk out; but I shall
+still be on the look-out for the _Quinterne_.... And here let me ask,
+What would be the use of being a man if one were not a fool? Well, now,
+if I should draw the above-mentioned Quinterne,--which, to be sure,
+without any extravagant hope, I may well presuppose,--I should not be
+indifferent on the subject, but in raptures. Good heavens! I must
+instanter be frizzled, and have my profile taken. I should make verses
+and _pas_, and both with their traditional _pedes_ (or feet); I should
+bend myself oftener than a devout monk, to make bows and (where there
+was anything to gather) bouquets; body, soul, and spirit I should have
+consist with me of so many finger-tips and feelers, that I should
+perceive at once (the Quinterne would perceive it still quicker) if our
+two shadows should come in collision. The touch of the smallest little
+end of a ribbon would be a good conductor to the electrical ether,
+which would shoot out from me in lightnings, as she would be charged
+negatively and I positively; and as to touching her hair, that could
+not create any less explosion than if a world should fall into the
+dishevelled[38] hair of a bearded comet....
+
+"And yet what does it all amount to, if I have sense, and consider what
+she deserves, this good creature, this faithful, this undeserved one?
+What, in fact, were dull verses, sighs, shoes (boots I should put
+away), one or two hands pressed, a sacrificing heart, but a slight
+_gratial_ and _don gratuit_, if thereby a creature was to be obtained
+who, as I see more and more, has everything belonging to the fairest
+angel that conducts man through life (invisibleness perhaps excepted);
+who has all virtues, and arrays them all in beauties; who gleams and
+gladdens like this spring evening, and yet, like it, conceals her
+flowers and all her stars, except the star of love; into whose
+all-powerful and yet gentle harmonica of the heart I would fain be so
+absorbed in listening; in whose eyes I would behold with such
+extraordinary delight the tear-drops of the tenderer soul, and the
+beamings of the loftier one; by whose side I could so fondly remain
+standing through the whole flying _opera buffa_ and _seria_[39] of
+life,--so fondly, I say, that so the poor Sebastian might at least,
+when, in life's holy evening, his shadow grew longer and longer, and
+the landscape around--him melted away to a broad shadow, and he
+himself, too, that I might at least behold _both_ shadowy hands," (one
+of them Flamin was just then holding,) "and exclaim--" (Checking
+himself:) "Here comes the-old bellows-blower, too, with something in
+one of his!"
+
+As he could no longer either hide his emotion behind jest, nor the
+signs of it in his eyes behind some low-hanging linden-leaves, it was a
+real piece of good luck, that, just at the second when his voice was
+about to give way to it, he looked over the watch-tower, and saw the
+coachman come racing over again. The man cried from below, "he had got
+it from Seebass, but not till this moment." Agatha flew down
+passionately, and, after reading a billet below, darted off across the
+meadow. The bellows-blower ascended slowly, like a barometer before
+settled weather, and lifted himself and the billet he had brought back
+with him,--not a minute the sooner for all the beckoning overhead
+there,--with his levers, to the top of the tower. In the billet was
+written, in Clotilda's hand, "Come to thy bower, beloved friend!"
+
+All eyes now ran after the runner, and fluttered with her through the
+clear-obscure of evening into the Parsonage, around whose arbor,
+however, no one could yet be seen. Hardly had Agatha caught sight of
+the opening of the latter, when her hurrying became flying; and when
+she was almost up to it, a white form flew out with widespread arms and
+into hers, but the arbor concealed the end of the embrace, and the eyes
+of all lingered long in vain expectation up in the cloister of love.
+
+The Chaplain's wife, who generally would allow maidens only
+degradations and not elevations of rank, now imparted to Clotilda all
+the seven consecrations, and praised her so much--perhaps also because
+she was a countrywoman of hers on the mother's side--that Victor could
+have embraced the eulogist and her subject at once. The Chaplain added,
+as his mite to her praise, that he had printed the initial of her name
+(C) with tulips in red, like a title, and that the letter would shine
+out, when the bed bloomed, far and wide.
+
+The husband and husbandman began now to break in more and more upon the
+sphere-music of night with the reed-stops of his cough; at last, he
+made off with Victor's enthusiastic female friend, and left the two
+friends alone, in the lovely night, with the two full hearts that
+panted to pour themselves out into each other.
+
+Flamin had, during this whole day, shown a deepening silence of
+touching tenderness, which seldom found its way into his being,
+and which seemed to say, "I have something on my heart." When the
+watch-tower was comparatively deserted, Victor, who had become full of
+loving and softening dreams, could no longer conceal his tear-swimming
+eyes: he opened them freely before the oldest darling of his days, and
+showed him that open eye which says, "Look right through, if thou wilt,
+down to my very heart; there is nothing therein but clear love." ...
+Silently the vortices of love swept round the two, and drew them nearer
+together; they opened their arms for each other, and sank into each
+other's without a sound, and between the brother-hearts lay only two
+mortal bodies. Covered deep by the stream of love and ecstasy, they
+closed for a moment their enraptured eyes; and when they opened again,
+there stood the night sublimely before them, with its suns withdrawn
+into eternal depths; the milky-way ran, like the ring of eternity,
+around the immensity of space; the sharp sickle of the earthly moon
+glided, cutting, across the short days and joys of men.
+
+But in that which stood under the suns, which the ring encircled, which
+the sickle smote, there was something higher, clearer, and more lasting
+than they: it was the imperishable friendship lodged in these
+perishable integuments.
+
+Flamin, instead of being satisfied by this exhausting expression of our
+speechless love, became now a living, flying flame. "Victor! in this
+night give me thy friendship forever, and swear to me that thou wilt
+never disturb me in my love to thee."
+
+"O thou good soul! I have given thee my heart long since, but I will
+gladly swear to thee again to-day."
+
+"And swear to me that thou wilt never plunge me into misfortune and
+despair."
+
+"Flamin! that distresses me too much."
+
+"O, I beseech thee, swear it! and lift thy hand and promise me, even if
+thou hast made me unhappy, nevertheless that thou wilt not forsake me
+nor hate me." ... Victor pressed him to his bosom. "But we will come up
+hither when we can no longer be reconciled,--O, it pains me, too,
+Victor!--up hither, and embrace each other, and throw ourselves down
+and die!"
+
+"Ay!" said Victor, in a low and exhausted voice. "O God! has anything
+happened, then?"
+
+"I will tell thee all. Now let us live and die together."
+
+"O Flamin! how inexpressibly I love thee to-day!"
+
+"Now will I let thee see into my whole heart, Victor, and reveal to
+thee all."
+
+But, before he could do it, he had to man himself by holding his peace;
+and they remained a long time silent, lost in the depths of the inner
+and outer heavens.
+
+At last he was able to begin, and to tell him that that Clotilda, about
+whom he had jested to-day, had written herself in ineffaceable
+characters on his heart; that he could neither forget nor possess her;
+that the creeping fever of a frightful, frenzied jealousy burned,
+galling, within him; that he could not, to be sure, say a word to her
+about his love, according to her prohibition, until her brother (the
+Infante) should come back and be present; but that she, to judge by her
+demeanor, and according to Matthieu's assurances, had perhaps some
+regard for him; that her position must be an eternal wall of separation
+between them, so long as he took the _juristic_ instead of the
+_military_ road to promotion; and that on this last, if his Lordship
+would lend him a hand in the matter, he would attain to Clotilda more
+swiftly on similar steps; and that the request of which he had spoken
+in his letters to Victor was just this,--that he would repeat all to
+his Lordship, and beg his assistance. In fact, his wild arm could hold
+the sword better than the balance of justice. A frightful
+predisposition to jealousy, which even from future possibilities
+catches palpitations, was the chief reason.--Victor rejoiced that he
+could give his feelings the best language,--namely, action, and
+assented to all he required, with delight at his confidence, and at the
+absence from his communication of dreaded news; and so, newly attached
+to each other, they went to rest. And the Twins--that ever-burning,
+intertwined name of friendship--glimmered in the west, beckoning upward
+out of an _earthly_ eternity; and the heart of the Lion blazed on their
+right....
+
+There are men laid upon this earth, and bound to the soil, who never
+erect themselves to the contemplation of a friendship which winds
+around two souls, not earthy, metallic, and unclean bonds, but the
+spiritual ones that interweave this world itself with another and man
+with God. Such ones, degraded to the dust, it is, that, like
+travellers, regard from below the temple that hangs round the Alpine
+peaks as baseless and airy, because they do not themselves stand on
+the heights, and on the great floor of the temple,--because they know
+not that in friendship we revere and love something higher than self
+(which latter cannot at once be the _source_ and the _object_ of
+love),--something higher, namely, the embodiment and reflection of the
+virtue which in ourselves we only _approve_, and not till we see it in
+others can _love_.
+
+Ah! can, then, higher beings judge severely the weaknesses of the
+shadowy groups that seek to hold fast to one another, driven apart as
+they are by north winds,--who would fain press to their bosoms the
+noble, invisible form of each other over which the thick and heavy
+earthly mask hangs,--and who fall, one after another, into graves into
+which the mourned draw their mourners?
+
+
+
+
+                            4. DOG-POST-DAY.
+
+      Profile-Cutter.--Clotilda's Historic Figure.[40]--Courtiers,
+                            and a Noble Man.
+
+
+Clotilda, as Sebastian learned the next morning, had originally meant
+to stay at the seminary till after St. John's; but, as her best friend
+and schoolmate _Giulia_ had gone beforehand, not to her parents, but to
+the long home, her distressed eyes must needs draw themselves away by a
+speedier departure from the grave-mound which lay like a ruin over her
+forlorn heart. Without packing up, she had fled from the flowerless
+Golgotha of her wounded soul; and a second contemplation of it, and a
+second departure, and a renewal of the old tears, still awaited her.
+
+Never was a great beauty praised in a more unembarrassed manner by a
+little one than Clotilda was by Agatha. Generally, the only thing
+maidens appreciate about maidens is the heart; the evanescent charms of
+another's face have so little worth in their eyes, that they hardly
+care to mention them. Young men are justly reproached with selecting by
+preference beautiful youths for their friends. In the case of girls, on
+the contrary, their eulogists make much of the fact that they entirely
+despise female beauty, as a too loose and base cement-and-mortar of
+friendship, and that, therefore, to a beautiful woman, the _heart_ of
+the very ugliest is more precious than the face of the handsomest on
+the five zones and scarfs of the earth. Agatha was otherwise: she ran
+over, the first thing in the morning, to the palace, to dress her
+friend.
+
+Flamin behaved still worse. He could not wait for the reality itself to
+hang up Clotilda's Madonna-image in the chambers of Victor's brain: he
+anticipated it with the pen-and-ink sketch of a painter, which is, at
+least, not cold; for painters, in the _æsthetic_ and in the
+_calligraphic sense_, seldom write well. The painter had, merely for
+the sake of seeing and sketching Clotilda, stretched himself, almost
+every Sunday morning, on a hill of Maienthal, where he transferred to
+his note-book the glittering landscape round the seminary; and the
+beautiful head which looked out of the eighth window he transferred
+into his heart. Even Flamin, who generally set even the vignettes of
+prose above the living oil-paintings of poetry, found, in the following
+Madonna or Clotilda of the artist, something to his taste:--
+
+"When my conscious being is a single thought, and burns; and when, with
+the flames waving around me, I dip my hand into colors, to cool myself
+therein;--then, when the lofty beauty[41] that forever beams within me
+lets fall its image on the waves which tremulously picture heaven and
+earth, and sets on fire the clear stream; and then, when an image of
+Pallas, descending from heaven, rests upon the stream, a lily-casing
+and cast-off wing-wrappage of an up-flown angel,--a form whose
+unstained soul no body, but only the snow which lies around the throne
+of God, and out of which the angels weave their fleeting vehicular
+bodies,[42] encloses; and when the most delicate drapery is too coarse
+and hard, and becomes a wooden frame around that divine breath on the
+countenance, around that trembling flowered-velvet of flesh, around
+that skin of white roses transfused with a glow of red ones; when this
+reflection of my shining soul falls upon the colored surface,--then
+every one will turn round, and think Clotilda is lying asleep on the
+bank.... And here my art is over; for, ah! when she awakes, and when,
+for the first time, the soul shall move these charms like wings; when
+the fast-closed bud of the lips shall break into a smile, and the bosom
+breathes in half a sigh, and, from modesty, breathes it not out again;
+when the sighs, veiled in songs, steal from those lips,--which, like
+two souls, hover over without touching each other--as bees steal out of
+roses; when the eye stirs between gleams and tears;--then, when at
+length the goddess of heavenly love approaches her daughter, and
+electrically touches her still heart, and says, 'Do thou, too, love';
+and now, when all charms tremble and bloom out, shrink and languish,
+hope and shudder, and the dreaming heart shuts itself up more deeply
+into its blossoms, and hides itself, trembling, behind a tear, from the
+happy one who has divined and deserves it;--then the happy one is mute,
+the happy one and the artist."
+
+Victor saw beside him the happy one, who was his friend, looked upon
+him with moist eyes, and said, "Of that thou wast worthy!" But now
+twenty rowels spurred him to follow Agatha to the palace;--the
+pen-and-ink drawing of the artist; the arrangement of dresses; the
+relationship; the desire which every man has to see the Grace and
+Infanta of his friend; the desire which _not_ every one has, but he
+had, to speak with any one for the first time (rather than for the
+eighth time); and, most of all, the evening of yesterday. Flamin's fire
+had yesterday burned Victor's bosom to a heap of tinder, through which
+nothing but sparks were running. He should have set all before him
+indifferently, because the contest _against_ love differs in nothing
+from the contest _for_ it, except in order of precedence. But let not
+the reader by any means imagine that now (as in one of your emasculated
+and emasculating romances) the Devil is to break loose in our
+biography, and the hero is to march into the palace and there fall down
+before Clotilda, and beg, on bended knee, "Be the heroine!" and go
+about to wrangle with her, out of love, and with the former _pastor
+fido_ out of hatred, and actually play nothing else than the æsthetic,
+self-seeking, sensitive--scamp. If I should wish this last, I could
+excuse myself only on the ground that then I might perhaps come to some
+biographical murders and duels. I hope, however, I may still, without
+injury to morals or honesty, in the course of these pages make out a
+murder or homicide or two, at least in the last volume, where every
+æsthetic reaper thins out his characters, and throws half of them into
+the _oubliette_ or family-vault of the inkstand.
+
+Victor had too many years and acquaintances to allow himself, with so
+little regard to days of grace and double usance,[43] on the spot,
+before supper,--_cito citissime_,--what hast thou, what canst thou?--to
+fall in love. His optic nerve daily unravelled itself into finer and
+more delicate fibres, and touched all points of a new form, but the
+sore feelers curled back again more readily; every month the sight of a
+new face, like new music, made a _stronger_ and _shorter_ impression.
+He could only talk his way into love, not see it. Only words winged by
+virtue and sensibility are the bees which, in such cases, carry the
+pollen of love from one soul into another. But such a love, of the
+better kind, is annihilated by the least immoral alloy. How could it
+form and filter up in a defiled heart, filled with high-treason against
+a friend?
+
+Victor would have gone to the palace as early as half past nine, but
+the Lady Chamberlain had not yet combed out her eyebrows and the King
+Charles's spaniel.
+
+Seebass brought a billet to Flamin:--
+
+
+"I cannot see you, my dearest, to-day. Three Graces hold me fast, and
+the third you yourself have sent. Tell your British friend he must love
+me because I love you. Surgery may do without sympathy, but friendship
+cannot.
+
+                             "Your        Matthieu."
+
+
+An absurd billet! When Victor heard that Agatha was the third Grace,
+there was a great hole torn in the curtain of the theatre in which
+Matthieu played Flamin's friend and Agatha's--first lover. Nothing is
+more annoying than a nest in which there sit none but brothers or none
+but sisters: the nest must be shaken up into a mixed and motley
+gradation,--that is to say, of brothers and sisters, packed in layers,
+so that an honest _pastor fido_ can come and ask after the brother when
+he is only on the look-out for the sister; and so, too, must the girl
+who loves a brother absolutely and by stronger necessity have a sister
+whose friend she is, and who may be hook and handle to the brother. Our
+_Turkish_ decorum required, therefore, that Matthieu should point his
+opera-glass at Flamin to see Agatha; and that Clotilda should visit the
+latter, since Flamin, as a man without ancestors, but of honor, could
+not possibly force his citizen's-visits upon the house of a
+chamberlain. Clotilda came often, and thereby involved herself in a
+contradiction, which I have till now been unable to solve, with the
+womanly refinement of her character.
+
+Flamin dipped Matthieu's likeness into a quite different dyeing-copper
+from that the mother used: he was a jolly genius, and nothing worse. He
+personated everything in the world, and no one could personate him. He
+could imitate and travesty all the players of the Flachsenfingen
+troupe, and the boxes too. He understood more sciences than the whole
+court; yes, and more languages, even to the voices of the nightingale
+and the cockerel, which he mimicked so perfectly that Petrarch[44] and
+Peter would have run away. He could do with women what he chose, and
+every court dame excused herself by the example of her neighbor; for it
+used to be part of the _ton_ in Flachsenfingen to have one's fidelity
+once put to the proof. They say love for him began to be knit, like a
+stocking, at the calf, but it is utterly false. It is therefore no
+wonder that, with such uninterrupted moderation in courtly pleasures,
+he grew stronger and _healthier_ than the whole burnt-out, evaporated
+court, only he was too caustic, and too philosophic, and almost too
+roguish.
+
+Victor and the reader and I have still, after all, only an indistinct,
+blurred crayon-drawing of Matthieu in our heads. My hero was somewhat
+pleased with him, as every eccentric man is with an eccentric one; it
+was a fault of his, that he pardoned too easily those of energy, even
+moral ones. With redoubled curiosity did he now take his way to the
+palace, or rather to its great garden, which joined thereto its
+semicircle of green beauties. He put in at the harbor of an embowered
+alley, and was delighted at the way in which the pierced shadow of the
+arbor, around whose iron skeleton tender twigs wound-like soft hair
+around hair-needles, glided dazzlingly over his body. Side by side with
+his arbor another parallel one passed along. He followed some scattered
+black paper snippings as way-marks. The fluttering of the morning wind
+tossed down from a twig a little leaf of fine paper, which he picked up
+to read. He was still on the first line, "Man has two minutes and a
+half, one in which to smile once, ..." when he ran against an almost
+horizontal queue, which was a black club of Hercules, compared with
+mine or the reader's plaited capillary tube. The queue was projected by
+a head crooked downward, which, peering in a listening attitude out of
+a niche in the arbor, was cutting a female profile, the original of
+which in a by-avenue was talking with Agatha. At the rustle of Victor's
+approach, the person, whose half-face was being stolen through the
+niche, turned round with surprise, and saw the proprietor of the
+Cyclops-queue with the profile-scissors, and also the hero of the
+Dog-post-days. The proprietor, without saying a word, thrust his
+artistic hand through the bush-work, and reached out to her her shadow
+or shadow-cutting.[45] Agatha took it, smiling; but the nameless one
+seemed to assume toward the cutter of forms and faces that seriousness
+which, on female faces, is nowise distinguished from contempt but in
+its ambiguousness, because his scissors awoke too strong a suspicion of
+his having been listening. Victor could perceive nothing of the
+nameless one yet except her stature, which, although bent forward a
+little, still surpassed the ordinary height. The face-cutter turned
+about with two flashing black eyes toward Victor, received him very
+politely, knew his name, told his own,--Matthieu,--and had, at his
+eighth pace, already had four good ideas. The fifth was, that he,
+unsolicited, introduced my hero to the couple in the side-arbor. The
+leafy nunnery-grating came to an end; a female form stepped forth, and
+Victor was so struck by it, that he, who knew little about
+embarrassments, or was made only more quick-witted by them, began his
+introductory sermon without the exordium, and that was--Clotilda. When
+she had said three words, he listened so to the melody instead of the
+text, that he understood not a word of what she was saying....
+
+I have here, lying beside me, on the snow-white ground of vellum, the
+very _silhouette_ which Matthieu had taken of her with the scissors. My
+correspondent will have me depict Clotilda as uncommonly beautiful.
+Otherwise, he says, a hundred things in this history are
+incomprehensible; and therefore he sends me (because he cannot trust my
+fancy) at least her profile. And that is to be, even during my writing,
+steadily looked at all the time,--so much the more, as it might seem
+actually to have been cut from the very face[46] of another loveliest
+female angel that ever flew out of an unknown paradise down to this
+earth: I mean the Fräulein von * * *, at present maid-of-honor in
+Scheerau; I am not sure whether all my readers know her.
+
+Victor felt as if his blood had been driven outward, and with warm
+touches described its circles on the external skin. At last Clotilda's
+cold eye, of which not the intoxicated pride of beauty, but the sober,
+retiring pride of innocence belonging only to the female sex, was
+mistress, and her nose, which betrayed too much reflectiveness, brought
+his new Adam to his legs again, upon which the old Adam had already set
+himself up. He congratulated himself that he was Flamin's friend, and
+consequently had some claims upon her attention and her society.
+Nevertheless he continued to feel all the time as if everything she did
+occurred now for the first time in the world; and he watched her as one
+does a man who has been operated on for blindness from his birth, or an
+Omai,[47] or a Li-Bu. He kept thinking, "How could sitting down ever
+become her,--or the handing of a fruit-dish, or the eating of a cherry,
+or stooping down to read a note?" I am a still worse ninny beside the
+above-mentioned court dame.
+
+At last came Le Baut into the garden, after the first toilet, and his
+wife after the second. The Chamberlain--a short, supple, bedizened
+thing, that will pull off its hat before the Devil in hell when it
+enters there--received the son of his hereditary enemy in an uncommonly
+complimentary manner, and yet with a dignity, for which, however, not
+his heart, but his rank, gave him strength. Victor, for the mere reason
+that he imagined him an injured person, cherished a predisposition of
+good-will towards him. Although Le Baut's tongue was almost, like his
+teeth, false and inserted, and consequently the words were so, too,
+which were made up of dentals and linguals, still his neither coarse
+nor uncourteous flatteries--among which his attitudes and intentions
+also are to be counted--pleased our honest Victor, who could not hate
+fine flatterers, as being weak persons. The Chamberlain's lady--who was
+already in the years which a coquette seeks to conceal, although she
+had still more reason to conceal the preceding ones--received our
+well-disposed hero with the sincerest voice that ever yet issued from a
+false Judas's bosom, and with the most artful face, on which it seemed
+impossible that the deceptions of love could ever have found room for a
+glance.
+
+The new company took away Victor's embarrassment at once. He soon
+remarked, indeed, the peculiar fighting- and dancing-positions of the
+circle towards each other. Clotilda seemed reserved and indifferent
+towards all, except her father. The step-mother was refined towards the
+Chamberlain, haughty towards her step-daughter, obliging towards
+Victor, and bore herself with an easy and subservient coquetry towards
+Matthieu, who, on his part, was, toward the wedded pair, alternately
+complimentary and ironical; towards Clotilda, cold as ice; and towards
+my hero, as courteous as Le Baut was to all. Nevertheless Victor was
+more joyous and free than any of them, not merely because he was under
+the free heavens,--for a room always lay upon him like a blockhouse,
+and a chair was like the stocks,--but because he was among _fine_
+people, who, despite the most angular relations, give to conversation
+four butterflies'-wings, that it may--in contrast to the clinging
+caterpillar, who impales himself on every thorn--fly without noise and
+in little curves over all prickles, and alight only on blossoms. He was
+the greatest friend of fine people and fine turns of expression; hence
+it was that he took so much pleasure in the society of a Fontenelle, a
+Crébillon, a Marivaux,--of the entire female sex, and particularly of
+the decently coquettish portion of it. Do not mistake me. Ah! upon his
+Flamin, upon his Dahore, on all great men who were exalted above the
+refined, cowardly, vacant microcosmologists of the great world, his
+whole soul hung glowing; but for that very reason did he seek out,
+with a view to greater completeness, the smaller men, as fringe and
+corner-trimmings, with so much zeal.
+
+Four persons had at this moment four telescopes pointed at once at his
+soul: for himself, he took nothing of the kind into his hand, because
+he was too good-natured and too happy to be the spy of a heart; and
+only after the lapse of some days did he observe the image which any
+one with whom he had been in company left behind in his brain. He did
+not conceal himself, and yet he was seen in a false light: good men can
+more easily see into bad ones than the latter can into the former. He
+guessed others better than they guessed him. Only Clotilda deserves a
+word of defence for having, even until after dinner,--during which Le
+Baut, the greatest story-teller of this story-telling century, carried
+through his part,--regarded him as too malicious and satirical. But she
+could hardly do otherwise: a woman easily discerns the human, but
+hardly the divine (or devilish), nature in a man, with difficulty his
+worth, but easily his intentions, and his inner complexion more so than
+his contour. Matthieu gave occasion for her error, but also (as I shall
+presently report) for its retraction. This Evangelist,[48] who was a
+much greater satirist than his namesake in the New Testament, placed
+almost all Flachsenfingen on his private pillory, from Prince and Court
+down to Zeusel;[49] only the Minister (his father) and his many sisters
+he was compelled, unfortunately, to leave out, and likewise those
+persons with whom he happened at the moment to be talking. What was
+called calumny in him was at bottom an exaggerated Moravianism. For, as
+St. Macarius commands that one shall, out of humility, add twenty
+ounces of evil when one has five, but with regard to good, the
+reverse,--accordingly ingenuous, courtly souls, seeing that no one will
+use this modest language, endeavor to speak it in every one's name, and
+always ascribe to him whose humility they wish to represent fifteen
+ounces more of evil and less of good than he really has. On the
+contrary, in the case of present company, they find this mediatorial
+system of satisfaction unnecessary: hence the life of such court-nobles
+is wholly dramatic; for as, according to Aristotle, comedy paints men
+as worse, and tragedy as better, than they are, so do the nobles
+referred to bring forward in the former only _absent_, in the latter
+only _present_ persons. I do not know whether this perfection will go
+to the length of atoning for a real fault of the Evangelist,--namely,
+that, like the Romans on the Lupercalia, he--too often made thrusts at
+the female sex. Thus, for instance, he said to-day, maidens and
+raspberries were wormy before they were ripe; female virtue was the
+red-hot iron which a woman (as was also the case in the old ordeals)
+had to carry from the font (the baptismal-day) to the altar (the
+wedding-day), in order to maintain her innocence, &c. Nothing fell upon
+Clotilda--and the same I have always found the case with the best of
+her sex--more keenly than satire upon her whole sex; but Victor was
+astonished at her art--very peculiar to her sex and to worldly
+experience at once--of concealing the fact, that she both--endured and
+despised.
+
+The Evangelist's example brought it about that Victor, too, began to
+phosphoresce at all points of his soul; the spark of wit ran round the
+whole circle of his ideas, which, like Graces, clasped each other by
+the hand, and his electrical chime of bells outdid the Page's
+discharges, which were lightnings, and stank of brimstone. Clotilda,
+who was very observing, mistrusted Sebastian's lips and heart.
+
+The young nobleman held him to be one of his feather, and in love
+with Clotilda; and that, on the ground that "the gayer or more earnest
+tone into which a man fell in company was a sign that a female
+electrical-eel had struck at his bosom." I must confess it,--Victor's
+effervescent soul never allowed him to hit that expression of respect
+for women which does not run into untimely tenderness, and for which he
+often envied cultivated people of the world; his regard unfortunately
+always looked like a declaration of love. The Chamberlain's lady
+accounted him as false as her Cicisbeo.[50] People like her cannot
+comprehend any other kind attentions than polite or artful ones.
+
+They kept our hero over there all day and half the evening.
+
+Not once in the whole day was he able,--although the invisible eyes of
+his inner man stood full of tears at Clotilda's noble figure, at her
+secret grief for her cold, buried friend, at her thrilling voice when
+she merely spoke to Agatha,--for all that, he never found himself able
+to say so much as an earnest word: toward strangers his nature always
+impelled him in the beginning to make sundry satirical leaps and other
+caprioles. But in the evening, when they were in the festal garden,
+where his usual shudder at the emptiness of life was made more intense
+by merriment, as it always was,--whereas serious, sad, passionate
+conversations diminished it,--and when Clotilda granted him only a very
+cold civility, as if shown to him at a father's dictation, and did not
+divine in its full extent the difference between him and Matthieu, who
+assumed no second world, nor any inner man organically adapted to it:
+then was there a stifled feeling about his yearning heart; too many
+tears seemed to fill his whole breast and press for a passage; and as
+often as he looked up to the great, deep heavens, something whispered
+in his soul: Take not the least thought for the fine circle, but speak
+out!
+
+But there was only _one_ soul for him, to which Nature had attached
+those treadles, as to pedal-harps, which impart to every thought a
+higher tone of the spheres, to life a holy worth, and to the heart an
+echo from Eden: that soul was not his once so-loved Flamin, but his
+teacher, Dahore, in England, whom he had long ago lost from sight, but
+never from his dreams. The shadow of this great man stood, as it were,
+projected upon the night, hovering and erect before him, and saying,
+"Dear one, I see thy inward weeping, thy sacred longing, thy desolate
+heart, and thy outstretched, trembling arms; but all is in vain; thou
+wilt never find me, nor I thee." He gazed at the stars, whose exalting
+science his teacher had even then instilled into his youthful soul; he
+said to Clotilda: "The topography of the heavens should be a piece of
+our religion; a woman ought to learn the catechism and Fontenelle by
+heart." And then he described the astronomical lessons of his Dahore
+and the teacher himself.
+
+From Clotilda's face there broke forth a great transfiguration, and she
+depicted with words and looks her own astronomical teacher at the
+Seminary,--how he was just as noble and just as quiet,--that he called
+himself _Emanuel_, and bore no surname, because he said, "With
+transitory man, with one whose genealogical tree so speedily sank into
+nothingness, the difference between family names and baptismal names
+was too slight";--that, unhappily, his noble soul inhabited a shattered
+body, which already bent low toward the grave,--that he was, according
+to the assurance of her Abbess, the gentlest and greatest man who had
+yet come from the East Indies (his native country), although there were
+some singularities of his way of life in Maienthal, which one had to
+overlook....
+
+Matthieu, whose wit borrowed from the snake his line of beauty, his
+poisonous tooth, his leap, and his coldness, said, softly and
+composedly: "It is well for his withered body that he was not made
+astronomer and night-watchman here at once; he applied, several years
+ago, for a telescope and a horn."
+
+Clotilda was, for the first time, suffused with a flush of angry
+redness, like the morning before the rain: "If," said she, quickly,
+"you know him merely from my portraiture, you cannot possibly seek this
+characteristic among his." But the Chamberlain came to the Page's
+assistance, and said that Emanuel had actually, five years before, been
+refused that application. Clotilda looked, as if for help, to the only
+one whose attentiveness was not ironical,--our Victor, on whom the
+reflection of her transfiguration threw its beauty,--and asked, more in
+the tone of hope than of assertion, "Should one expect anything like
+that of such a mind?" "Of mine sooner," he replied, by way of evasion;
+for he, who could have contradicted the Pope to his face, found it
+often impossible to gainsay fair lips, especially when they propounded
+a question with so much reliance on his negative. "As often as I walk
+through towns by night, I listen to the bodily night-watch with more
+pleasure than to the spiritual. In the silent, listening night, under
+the outspread starry heaven, there is something so sublime in the
+homiletic owl's-song or hoot of the night-watch, that I have a hundred
+times wished me a horn and six verses."
+
+The Chamberlain and his _associé_ took this for clumsy persiflage; the
+latter--perhaps for the sake of displeasing Clotilda, to the advantage
+of his heart's czarina, armed with false bosom and false rump--went on
+unshamed with his, and asserted that the best method of making the
+aforenamed anonymous person sad was a very merry one, a comedy;--to be
+sure, a farce moved him still more strongly, as he himself witnessed in
+him at Goethe's moral puppet-play or fair.
+
+Then flashed upon the surprised Victor a new face and a new relation;
+for he was exactly like Emanuel. A fair, with its human streams running
+up and down,--with its flitting of figures to and fro, as in a clock
+with images,--with its perpetually buzzing air, in which fiddle-squeak
+and human janglings and lowing of cattle conspire in one deafening
+roar,--and with the booths, crammed with commodities, offering a mosaic
+picture of our little life, patched up of varied necessities.... a
+village-fair, by all these reminiscences of the great, frosty
+_New-Year's fair_ of Life, made Victor's noble bosom at once heavy and
+full; he sank away, sweetly overpowered, into the din, and the human
+ranks around him absorbed his soul into its stiller fantasies. That was
+the reason why Goethe's Hogarthian _tail-piece_ of a village-fair (like
+Shakespeare) always left him melancholy; just as he was most fond,
+indeed, of finding in the low-comic the highest earnest (women are
+capable only of a reverse discovery), and a comic book, without any
+nobler trait or hint (e. g. Blumauer's Æneid), he could endure as
+little as La Mettrie's[51] disgustingly laughing face, or the faces on
+the frontispieces of the Vade Mecum.
+
+Like a true youth, he forgot himself and all around him, half-stretched
+out his arms, and said, with an eye in which one saw a soul longingly
+laboring at a portrait of Emanuel: "Now I know thee, thou nameless one!
+thou art the lofty man, who is so rare.... I assure you, Herr Von
+Schleunes, this Mr. Emanuel has something in him ... No, amidst this
+life on the wing, a thing which darts so _prestissimo_ out of one
+rain-shower into another,[52] and from cloud to cloud, should not keep
+its bill open on the stretch for one continued peal of laughter.... I
+have read today somewhere: Man has only two and a half minutes, and
+only one for a smile...." He had quite lost himself in the thicket of
+his feelings, else he would have kept back more than he did, especially
+the last line of the leaf found in the garden. Clotilda was startled at
+something or other. He would now gladly have read the leaf through. She
+related to him now those characteristics of her teacher into which she
+knew better how to enter; that he was a Pythagorean, went only in white
+robes, had himself put to sleep and waked with flute-music, ate no
+leguminous fruits or animal food, and often walked half the night under
+the stars.
+
+Lost in mute rapture over the teacher, he hung with enthusiastic eyes
+upon the friendly lips of the pupil, who was ennobled by her interest
+in a sublime and singular genius. She found here the first man whom she
+had ever put into an unfeigned enthusiasm for her Pythagorean favorite;
+and all her chasms turned themselves, blooming, towards Emanuel's
+image, like flowers toward the sun. Two fair souls discover their
+affinity first of all by the like love which binds them to a third. The
+full, inspired heart loves to hush and hide itself in a finery-room,
+which holds only heterogeneous persons, but when it finds therein
+its second, then in its joy at that its silence and secrecy and the
+finery-room are all forgotten.
+
+The quicksilver of Victor's morning gayety had fallen ten degrees. In
+the twilight of his soul nothing peered forth but the paper which he
+wanted to read, and in fact presently read out in the avenue; and so he
+took an early leave.
+
+The leaf had blown out of Clotilda's loose Album, and was written
+by--Emanuel.
+
+"Man has here two and a half minutes,--one to smile, one to sigh, and
+half a one to love; for in the midst of this minute he dies.
+
+"But the grave is not deep, it is the gleaming footmark of an angel who
+seeks us. When the unknown hand sends the last arrow at the head of
+man, he bends his head in anticipation, and the arrow merely takes off
+the crown of thorns from his wounds.[53]
+
+"And with this hope, go forth from Maienthal, noble soul! but neither
+continents nor graves nor the second world can sunder or bind together
+two human beings: but only thoughts part or marry hearts.
+
+"O, may thy life hang full of blossoms! From thy first Paradise may a
+second, as from the midst of one rose a second, be destined to bloom!
+May the Earth glow in thy sight, as if thou stoodest above it, and
+followedst with thine eye its path in heaven! And as Moses died because
+God kissed him, so be thy life a long kiss of the Eternal! And may thy
+death be mine!... EMANUEL."
+
+"O thou good, good soul!" cried Victor, "I can now no more forget thee.
+Thou must--thou wilt--take an interest in my weak heart!" From his
+inner strings the drops of vapor that choked their music had now fallen
+off. His brain became a radiant landscape, in which there stood nothing
+but Emanuel's shining form. He arrived late at the parsonage, with a
+face expressive of blissful emotion; and in this glow he arrayed before
+his spectators the image of Clotilda, to whom he gave everything an
+angel has, even the wings that threatened a short stay. His friendship
+raised him so far above the suspicion of a suspicion, that he thought
+he could give his friend no warmer or tenderer proof of the same, than
+by the strongest sympathetic praise of Clotilda; Flamin's love for her
+passed over through this friendship into his soul. The feeling for the
+beloved of a friend carries with it an unspeakable sweetness and moral
+tenderness. For Victor I answer, in this matter, that he understood,
+indeed, how a friend can sacrifice his love to another, but not how the
+other can accept the offering; but for Flamin I cannot stand security
+that he is cool enough, and a sufficient connoisseur of men, to regard
+the prize-medals which Victor stamps upon Clotilda, and upon which he
+sets her beautiful face and his coat of arms, as only just so many
+coins _de confiance_, and as pledges of brotherly fidelity. He was too
+impetuous and too ambitious to see, or even to listen to, the truth;
+for his open-hearted friend had to suppress many a tender reproach,
+which would have tried him too much, because he had too much love of
+praise and fieriness of spirit, and too little self-confidence. Hence a
+flatterer like Matthieu fastened himself so much the more firmly with
+his ivy-hooks into the fissures of this rock. When he a little harshly
+called the nameless Emanuel an enthusiast, Victor said little more
+about him that day. Flamin--either because he was a Jurist, or because
+he was a Hotspur, or both--could endure anything better than poets,
+philosophers, courtiers, and enthusiasts,--one excepted, who was all
+these at once, namely, his Sebastian Victor.
+
+
+
+
+                            5. DOG-POST-DAY.
+
+   The Third of May.--The Nightingale.--The Abbate Sitting on Music.
+
+
+I must here--premise, once for all, that I should be very stupid if I
+did not notice the multitude of improbabilities in this history: I am
+well aware of them all; nay, I have observed some of them--e. g. in
+Clotilda's behavior, or those in my hero's medical doctorship--even
+sooner than the reader, because I have--read everything before he has.
+I therefore delayed no longer, but entreated my correspondent by
+to-day's Hofmann-mail to write me by the dog the next time, in his
+portrait-box, what we were all about. I told him flatly, that the devil
+a bit did he know, though I did, however, of the readers and their
+tyranny. I must tell him (I said) that they were people of sense, whom
+a Biographer, nay, even a Romance-architect, dared not approach with
+poetic deception, but they would say, like the Areopagus, "Give us the
+naked historical fact here, without any superfluous poetic dressing
+up." And in fact it was a marvel to me, I went on to say, that he
+should not yet know that they had so much, partly understanding and
+partly four-leaved clover[54] in them, that, if the greatest authors
+and tragic poets should undertake to be fine, and by æsthetic
+juggleries to excite in them fear, like cuppers, or pity, like beggars,
+they would cold-bloodedly let these men work till they were tired, and
+say, "We are not to be caught." That the Reviewers, however, were still
+more crazy and clever, and were perhaps the best _Skotometers_
+(measurers of darkness), at the same time that they were the
+wretchedest _Photometers_ (light measurers) going. And finally, I said
+right out to my historical adjutant, that it was no injury to him, but
+very much to me, that I should be translated into several languages,
+and therein, for every improbability in the text, be dragged down into
+the scourging-cellar of a note, and there sorely lashed, without daring
+to open my mouth, if the interpreting scoundrel who translated (or
+transported) my gourd-bottle-case like a cask of wine, from one country
+to another, should, on the way, as all carriers do, outwardly
+besprinkle and inwardly fill up the wine with water.--He must, at
+least, (I entreated him) give me an answer, that I might show it to the
+readers, as an evidence that I had written to him.
+
+By the next Dog-post-day, therefore, at all events, great things may be
+expected.--
+
+Besides, the 4th of May comes into that also, with what should
+seem its two important Thanksgiving festivals for the arrival of the
+two Sebastians,--the little one into the world, the elder at the
+bathing-town.--Even Clotilda is to be there to-morrow, and Victor is
+very eager (and so am I) to see her in the sunshine of love beside
+Flamin; for over yonder all her charms seemed to bloom round a heart
+not yet smitten and ripened by love's ray, as flower-leaves hide the
+_white heart-leaves_ from the sun.... Matthieu came to-day to take
+leave, because he was going back to-morrow to the city. Our hero was
+less and less pleased with him, and a Page's history, which he related
+of himself, renewed Victor's resolve to fulfil soon the entreaty of the
+Parson's wife by ridding himself of such a fellow.
+
+Matthieu, as Page, rendered service to the chief Tutor's lady, I
+believe both the greater and the lesser service. Nevertheless, he had
+once to smuggle an Abbate and conscience-keeper into one of her
+cabinets, which was destined to be the confessional and holy place to a
+degree of which, to be sure, her stupid, jealous husband had no notion.
+Now there was in the next room a musical armchair, upon which, in fact,
+one played with no other instrument than the rump; so soon as one sat
+down in it, it began its overtures, and I myself once sat in such
+a one at Prince Esterhazy's. Our Mat,[55] as all the citizens of
+Flachsenfingen called him,--some government people called him even the
+Evangelist,--appointed the Abbate two hours too soon; but, lest the man
+with the shorn peruke should be tired of waiting, he first carried in
+the music-making chair as resting-bench and anchoring-ground for weary
+expectants. Toward three of the night, when the company was gone,
+except the chief Tutor, the counsellor of conscience, weary of
+standing, let his rump sink at last into the easy-chair stuffed out
+with favorite arias, and woke up with his breeches the whole wailing
+music therein with its thrilling passages, without the least
+possibility of stilling the cabinet-serenade of this alarmer. At last
+the husband darted like a herring at the final cadences (or falls), and
+dragged from his organ-stool the sedentary conscience-man in the midst
+of counterpoint and shakes, and spoiled his quail-call for him, I
+believe, by an administered cudgelling. The chief Tutor's lady easily
+guessed the master of the chair, Mat; but so very much a matter of
+course is pardon at court,--not merely _past_ offences, but _future_
+ones being forgiven there by good, easy female souls,--that the chief
+Tutor's lady did not avenge herself upon Mat, although he _served_ her
+two weeks and a half longer, till after just two weeks and a half....
+
+Victor was indignant at Flamin's laughter; he loved drollery, but not
+bantering. His sweetened blood began gradually with this _mother of
+vinegar_ to grow sour towards this Mat, whose cold, ironical gallantry
+toward the honest Agatha of itself exasperated him, though her
+phlegmatic, and, as it were, married pulse, beat in his absence and in
+his presence at the same rate. Still more heart-burning matter and acid
+collected in Victor's bosom, from the fact that he, who tolerated
+everything,--vain men, proud ones, atheists, enthusiasts,--could
+nevertheless not endure men who regard virtue as a kind of refined
+provision-bakery, wantonness as allowed, the spirit as an almsgatherer
+for the flesh, the heart as a blood-syringe, and our soul as a new
+shoot of the body. But this was what Matthieu did, who besides had a
+passion for philosophizing, and threatened to infect Victor's friend,
+who, in fact, was as cold toward the whole world of poets and spirits
+as a statesman, with his philosophical cancer-poison.
+
+In the evening he endeavored to sound, a little nearer to Flamin's
+ear, a blast upon a second Trumpet of Fame against the departed
+pseudo-Evangelist. It was in the garden that he blew it. He took the
+hand of which Matthieu's was not worthy into his better one, and began,
+with the finest and heartiest forbearance,--which one must grant even
+to true friendship for a hollow friend,--his iconoclastic attack. For
+while he charged it upon the lady of the Chamberlain, that she threw
+down at Agatha from her high post looks nowise cleaner than what
+monkeys used to throw down from their high roosts at passers-by; and
+while he blamed the young Page, that, like many of the nobility, only
+among the nobility could he scent best (perhaps by the help of
+contrast) the heretical odor of one belonging to the burgher-class, and
+that his words and looks at the palace flew like icicles at the good,
+warm heart of Agatha; at the same time the reproach of this May-frost
+toward the sister was only a pretext behind which he veiled the
+observation, that the Page would not be Flamin's friend, if he were not
+Agatha's lover.
+
+Flamin's silence (the sign of his indignation) gave the stream of his
+eloquence a new and swifter descent; in addition to this a nightingale,
+poetizing in Le Baut's garden, woke up all the echoes of love in his
+soul.--He therefore grasped, of course, both of Flamin's hands in that
+effervescence which always transformed his steps toward an object into
+springs, and thereby overshot the mark. Many plans miscarry, because
+the heart toils after the head, and because at the end of the execution
+one applies less caution than at its beginning. He looked upon his
+beloved, the fluting throat of the nightingale set the text of his love
+to music, and with indescribable emotion he said: "Best one, thy heart
+is too good not to be outwitted by those who cannot reach thee. O if,
+some day, the sharp edge of court _ton_ should pass bloodily across the
+veins of thy breast (Flamin's looks seemed to ask, Art thou not then
+even satirical?)--O if he, who has no faith in virtue and
+disinterestedness, should one day himself cease to show any; if he
+should sorely betray thee; should the hand, which court-life had
+hardened, like a lemon-squeezer, wring blood and tears from thy heart,
+then, I beseech thee, despair not, only not of friendship,--for thy
+mother and I love thee far otherwise. O verily, at the time when thou
+art forced to say, Why did I not hearken to my friend who so warned me,
+and to my mother who so loved me?--then mayest thou come to me, to one
+who never changes, and who prizes thy error higher than self-interested
+vigilance; then would I lead thee weeping to thy mother, and say to
+her, take him wholly, thou only art worthy to love him." To all this
+Flamin said not a word. "Art thou sad, my Flamin?" "Tired!" "I am sad;
+the plaints of the nightingale strike upon my soul like echoes of
+_future_ ones," said Victor. "Are you pleased with this nightingale,
+Victor?" "Indescribably, as if she were a friend of my innermost soul."
+"Thus are people imposed on; it is _Matthieu singing_," Flamin quickly
+answered. For the Evangelist differed from a nightingale in nothing
+except size. And then Flamin, somewhat irritated, and yet with a
+pressure of his friend's hand, took his departure.
+
+
+
+
+                            6. DOG-POST-DAY.
+
+   The Threefold Deception of Love.--Lost Bible and Powder-puff.--
+     Churching.--New Concordats with the Reader.
+
+
+Knef's answer is wretched: "By your well-born's favor, dated the 6th
+instant, I see that the public has taste and some refinement, which
+does not surprise me, since the same is treated like gold-leaves, which
+are beaten out thin and fine, first within a book of parchment, and
+then between two of sheep-skin leaves, and thus, in like manner, by
+being passed from one book to another, and therein through the force of
+the press-bar, is made as fine as cavalier-paper.[56] If the public
+keeps on reading in this way a year or two, it may at last be more
+clever than Germany itself. Touching the improbabilities in our
+work, several such are of course desirable, because without them a
+biography or a romance gives miserable satisfaction, since it wants the
+charm by which the German hospital-ship and ship of fools, full of
+original romances, proves so attractive to us, ... which ship, as
+secretive-gland of disagreeable works, may justly be called the liver
+of the Republic of Letters, and the bookstore the gall-duct. But in
+reference to improbabilities, I am myself only too apprehensive that
+even the few on which we rely may in the end disappear. I am, &c."
+
+The wag, as one may easily see, would fain pull the wool[57] over my
+eyes and those of the reader. For me, however, it is a magnificent
+document in evidence that I have done my part by writing to the rogue.
+
+There are certain persons who, if in the evening they were very warm
+and friendly, the next morning are very gloomy and cold,--like
+Maupertuis's half-suns, which burn only on one side and disappear
+from us when they turn towards us the earthly half,--and if they were
+cold, the next time they are warm. Flamin forgot the next morning both
+the warm evening and the night-chill. Today is the festival of
+churching! Over there with Sebastian he launched out like a German
+police-puritan and purist, with fire-devils[58] and musketry against
+churching,--against infant-baptismal festivals,--against felling trees
+for Christmases and Whitsuntides,--against holidays, and against all
+the merry-makings of mankind.
+
+Nothing in our century so enraged Victor as its haughty
+crusade-preachings against unfashionable follies, whereas with
+unfashionable vices it makes contracts of subsidy. He took a long
+breath to start with, and then showed that the good of a state, as of a
+man, consisted not in riches, but in the use of riches, not in its
+commercial, but in its moral worth, that the sweeping out of the
+ancient leaven and most of our institutions and pandects and edicts had
+for their object only to enhance princely incomes, not morality, and
+that one wanted to have vices and subjects, like the old Jews, bring
+their offerings only in one city, namely, the residence city,--that
+humanity, from time immemorial, had cut its nails only on its bare
+_hands_, not on its covered _feet_, which often themselves decayed on
+that account,--that economical and sumptuary laws were still more
+needful to princes themselves, at least to the highest classes, than to
+the lowest,--that Rome owed to her many holidays much of her
+patriotism.... Flamin had no eye for the little pearl-print of domestic
+joy, for infusory-flowerets of pleasure; on the contrary, his soul kept
+step with a Brutus when he strode majestically up to Pompey's statue,
+and with a sigh over fate drove the scissors of the Parcæ into the
+greatest heart of earth, which confounded its worth with its right.
+Victor had room in his heart for the most unlike feelings.
+
+I cannot repeat often enough, that to-day is the churching. I will
+sketch it for posterity; not, however, with that curtness with which a
+newspaper-writer condenses the funeral of a king into three sheets, but
+a little more circumstantially. For the stately initial letters of this
+day the Parsonage had quite other reasons _in petto_ than one has ever
+yet, to my knowledge, been pleased to disclose to our age: three
+interested parties wished to deceive each other,--at least, two did a
+third.
+
+In the first place, the Lady of the Parsonage wished to deceive our
+hero, who did not know that to-day was the birthday of his father, and
+that that personage--whom she had taken the liberty of inviting--was
+coming today for the space of five minutes. In the morning, she set her
+two daughters to boiling yarn, in order that they might confess nothing
+to Victor,--at least, not the truth; for it is a well-known
+superstition that yarn boils whitest when one lies soundly over the
+operation. Hence we should be the more watchful when women lie, and
+inquire whether they mean, by their poetical deceptions, to _burn
+anything else white_ except yarn. Her beloved Victor--that was her
+plan--should to-day present to her husband, whose cradle-festival[59]
+also fell on to-day, the usual congratulation, and afterward halve it,
+and carry it on to his Lordship, who was to arrive with his own
+birthday.
+
+Secondly, Sebastian and she wished to deceive the old Chaplain, who had
+forgotten that he had been born, which absence of mind had already
+occurred to him at his first birthday. Mankind keep the run of
+another's life better than of their own; truly we make altogether too
+little account of a history which once was ours, and which is the shell
+of hours that have flown away, and yet the drops of time through which
+we swim do only in the distance of memory form the rainbow of
+enjoyment. Men know when all emperors were born and all philosophers
+died; women know, by reckoning time, only this, when their husbands,
+who are _their_ regents and classic authors, underwent both. Victor,
+whose delicate feeling was seared by too great attentions to himself,
+was glad that Eymann's shoulders must bear half of to-day's honor.
+
+Thirdly, the Lord of the Parsonage wanted to play his deception as well
+as any one else, and in fact upon everybody. As this Festival-day was
+to him--like the three High Festivals of the Cloisters--at the same
+time shaving-day, on which the wisest heads make the foolishest faces,
+the barber must needs cut with the razor-lancet upon the skin of the
+soul-keeper, as upon the bark of a birch-tree, a memorial of himself;
+but the little blood that flowed out suggested to the Parson a cleverer
+thought than what the cupper left therein, which, however, secreted the
+nervous sap, that, according to the merest sciolists, is the grease of
+our mental motions, the gold solution of our most significant ideas,
+and the spirit of our spirit. This cleverer thought which I so much
+praise was, to have a vein opened in his left arm, to conceal it from
+the whole household, in the evening to congratulate his Lordship and
+everybody, and, at last, to strip up his sleeve and show the wound,
+like a Roman, and say, "Congratulate me, I pray, on the bleeding!" He
+executed his idea, and the shaver was obliged, to his amazement, to
+hack something else beside the chin. The wounded man escorted him even
+to the outer door, not so much from politeness, as in order that he
+might not hold forth to the whole domestic company on the subject, but
+keep the occurrence absolutely to himself, except in houses where
+there was a beard and an ear. For let an historian be ever so much the
+_month-hand_ of the age, and consequently the newspaper-compositor its
+_hour-hand_, and accordingly a woman its _second-hand_, still, after
+all, the beard-trimmer is both, woman and _second-hand_.
+
+As Flamin and Victor passed down into the sitting-prinking-summer and
+winter-room, from amidst none but glad faces protruded one sullen one,
+which belonged to the Parson, who was plunging about like one
+possessed: there were two things which he could not possibly nose
+out,--his Bible and his powder-puff. Three minutes before he had thus
+lamented: "Am not I and my wretched life then singled out for a true
+Passion-history? Let an urn of fortune be given me, from which anybody
+else would claw out, as if he were crabbing, whole kingdoms. So soon as
+the Archfiend sees it to be me, he drops his dung in; and I claw that
+out instead of crabs and kingdoms, and nothing more. It would have gone
+finely to-day, the Devil saw,--we should have had until four o'clock in
+the afternoon no fun, but dog's-work; but then we should have broken
+loose; then would have come the dinner in the summer-house, the
+congratulation and salutation and real jollity.... And for you all
+this is still waiting; but to me, if the puff and the Bible do not
+appear, just send some of the soot and ashes (the leavings of the
+evening-feast) that I may brush therewith Fox's [his horse's] bit, and
+in the evening I can weed radishes by the summer-house."
+
+At this moment, he had to salute, with the dipped flag of his poll, his
+tasselled cap, the Briton just entering,--when the gesture shook out of
+the cap a hair-tuft, which, to be sure, was not the long-sought Bible,
+but was the puff, which had been given up for lost. That is to say, the
+thinking and reading world, to which one does not often disclose the
+weightier facts, must at least come at this one,--that the Court
+Chaplain, just as men are snatched from among men to overtop and master
+the rest, precisely so bound up the hairs which his comb plucked out,
+into a skin-fascicle or hair-union, in order to powder therewith the
+others that were left standing,--which now could not, of course, by
+this most exalted spirit and pentameter,[60] be well christened
+anything else than a hair-puff. Nevertheless, Eymann's face was longer
+than his cap; he let this syringe of the coloring powder of his head
+lie and cool there, and said, "If I don't ferret out the Bible, then I
+don't see how this tuft alone is to get me out of the scrape."
+
+As the Bible was sought before Luther's time, so now was the Canstein
+Bible, with its black beetle's-wing-shells. If anything could make this
+hard blow still more bitter, it was this,--that Eymann's band, like his
+reason, lay between the lost canonical leaves[61] as in a napkin-press;
+for the clergy, especially the Pope, love to make the Bible commentary
+a smoothing-press and finery-box to their outer man. Although he had
+eight other Bibles, even the simple Biblical Chrestomathy of Seiler, in
+the house, and to-day, at week-day church, did not need any at
+all, still it was certainly better and more human--that is, more
+foolish--that he should whistle the head of his vestry-beadle, the
+schoolmaster, to the window, and postpone divine service, like a
+reformation, by a quarter of an hour's interim, than that, instead of
+simply the hour of tolling, he should change nothing less than Bible
+and bands. Good heavens! how like exegetists and Kennicottists[62] they
+searched and smiled! "This hunting for the Bible," said Sebastian,
+"redounds to a clergyman's honor, especially as he seeks the truths in
+the Bible only by _daylight_, not by _funeral-torches_."
+
+The monks, like the lighters of the street-lamps, have a _ladder_ and
+much oil, but with the oil they _extinguish_ the lamps and their own
+thirst, and with the ladder they conduct those who light them again up
+to the gallows.
+
+As the Chaplain passed along before the quiet head of the six-weeks'
+child, which to-day's lace-cap already oppressed, he went back, from
+vexation at its indifference, lifted its bedizened head with his right
+hand, and thrust the left through the stratum of the cradle-straw,
+thinking there to exhume the Bible, which is usually the pillow and the
+supporting amulet of children (particularly of _Dauphins_), saying,
+meanwhile: "The miserable little brat would lie there through all our
+misery, perfectly cool, seeming to say, 'What's that to me?' if I
+didn't stir him up." And just at this moment something fell, not like a
+shot, but like a book, although it can be heard through my quill, even
+to the thirtieth century. Eymann flew, thoughtfully, into the second
+story, and found at his feet a smashed--mouse under his long-sought
+Bible. The Protestant imperial circles can never have been ignorant of
+the students' or Dr. Luther's mousetraps,[63] for which one needs only
+a book, and which are to mice what symbolical books were to candidates.
+Sebastian drew forth the corpse by the tail from under the Biblical
+vellum-mould, and Seiler's Bible-arrangement, swung the cadaver toward
+the light, and delivered extempore this funeral sermon: "Poor
+schismatic! the Old and New Testaments were the death of thee, but
+neither thou nor the Testaments are to blame! Only be glad that the
+Bible did not absolutely singe thee to ashes, like a Portuguese
+Israelite; but thy lines fell in enlightened times, where it takes away
+nothing but livings. It is genuine wit, if I ask, As the Bible used to
+extinguish conflagrations into which it was thrown, why not, then,
+_auto-da-fés_ also?"
+
+I have long been watching for an opportunity here to force the world to
+ask why the case of a mouse's death should interest it more than the
+shooting down of an army in general history,--the loss of another's
+hair-puff more than Christina's abdicated crown.[64] ... This interest
+arises from the source whence it comes with those to whom the case
+really occurs: because I relate it copiously, i. e. because the
+readers, like the heroes concerned in it, painfully live over one
+moment of childish history after another. Many little blows riddle the
+firmest man as surely as one great one; and it is all one whether fate
+does it or an author. And thus it comes that the modern man is placed
+so near to the index-finger of time, that he can see it move; hence a
+trifle, when it takes up _many_ moments, becomes so great to us, and
+this short life, which, like the picture of our soul in the _Orbis
+Pictus_,[65] consists of points--of black and golden ones--seems so
+long. And hence, too, everywhere, as on this page, does our serious
+mood stand so near to our mirthful.
+
+Except Flamin, all moved to church, godfather and godchild. It was a
+so-called week-day prayer-hour, such as will be set apart in every
+rational duchy and margravedom, where one still sees to it that the
+parson shall freeze once or twice a week, and that, as novices do for
+the exercise of obedience, they may be obliged to sprinkle dry sticks,
+to scatter the seed of the Divine word into empty pews, as Melancthon
+did into empty pots.[66] In German countries, mine and a few others
+excepted, it takes two centuries thoroughly to do away a folly,--one to
+recognize it, and one more to do it away. The _views_ of a consistory
+always become rational a hundred years sooner than its orders
+(_circularia_) do.
+
+In the latticed pew of the Eymanns, whose door made nearly a right
+angle with that of the vestry, Sebastian found all the flowers again,
+or at least the flower-skeletons, which had bloomed around his fair
+childhood's days,--figurative and literal ones; and the literal ones,
+which had crept away all soiled under the footstool of the choir-pew,
+opened out again into flowers of memory. He thought of his childish
+sorrows here,--among them the length of the sermon,--and of his
+childish pleasures, among which were to be reckoned the length of the
+voluntary and Eymann's kneeling on the middle of the pulpit-stairs. He
+pushed back the wooden lattice-window, and found in its wooden groove
+his initials, V. S. H., notched by his own hands. So far is it from the
+child to the youth! And man wonders at the distance. "Ah! then," said
+Horion,--and we will say it with him,--"all was to thee as yet
+infinite, and nothing little but thy heart. Ah! in that warm,
+quickening time, when a father is still God the Father, and a mother
+the mother of God, not yet did the bosom, oppressed with spirits,
+graves, and storms, press itself for comfort to a human one. All the
+four quarters of the world were installed in this church; all rivers
+were named Rhine, and all princes January. Ah! this tranquil and lovely
+day was set in a golden horizon of infinite hope and a ring of
+morning-red. Now the day is gone, and the horizon sunk, and only the
+skeleton remains there,--the latticed pew."
+
+But if we now, even in the noonday hours of life, think and sigh thus,
+how much more at evening, when man folds up his flower-leaves, and
+becomes undistinguishable like other flowers,--at evening, when we
+stand low in the western horizon and go out,--then, when we turn round,
+and survey the short road strewed with trampled-out hopes,--oh! then,
+how much more sweetly will it not look upon us,--the garden of
+childhood, lying in the east, low down near the place of our rising,
+and still suffused with an old, pale redness,--how much more magically
+will it gleam on us, and yet how much more will it affect us to
+tenderness! And thereupon man lays himself down on the earth not far
+from the grave, and hopes here below no more.
+
+To Eymann it must be a touching thought, that he, as he had for years
+given the benediction in this church to newly-delivered mothers only
+parishionally related to him, could, for once, give his wishes to a
+nearer one. Victor crept back into all his boyish Sundays and their
+illusions by this simple act, that he to-day, as in his tenth year,
+went, while the whole congregation were singing, into the vestry, to
+the Parson, and asked him for the page of the hymn. He enjoyed it with
+a real childish gusto to think that there were four _moving_
+creatures[67] in the temple,--the Parson, the Schoolmaster, the
+Exchequer-master of the poor's-box,[68] and himself. Is there anything
+more sublime, thought he, than a jingling alms-bag-father with a long,
+horizontal balance-pole, walking to and fro alone, among nothing but
+stiffened statues?
+
+After church the festival began with mere preliminaries, as a treaty of
+peace does with articles about the neutral ground, about rank, &c. Only
+the world must not suppose that anything came on sooner than five
+o'clock in the afternoon, or that any one could earlier than that slip
+out of his prosaic week-day clothes into the poetic festal ones, or
+quietly settle down beside a neighbor; but, according to the order and
+programme of pleasure, all must now run up and down, obedient to
+Apollonia, that _majoress-domo_,--must carry away bean-poles and
+seed-cornucopias out of the summer-house,--fan out therefrom
+butterflies that had burst the cocoons and waked up bottle-flies,--tie
+back the twigs which had grown over the windows,--lug down the
+orangery, which consisted of a hundred blossoms of a pomegranate-tree,
+out of the parsonage into the garden alley, in like manner an invalid
+harpsichord, whose sounding-board had not sprung[69] so often as its
+strings.... The serious Flamin was compelled by the bustling Sebastian
+to take part in these puppet-plays,[70] and between them, in this
+preparatory chase of pleasure, the tormented visage of Eymann had to
+labor, to which Victor delivered the most essential exhortations:
+"Master Godfather, we cannot be earnest and busy enough,--this festival
+may yet be talked of in places where it will have influence; but a
+middle course between princely pomp and Belgian stinginess will, I
+think, throw upon us the most favorable light." All went well,--even
+the clouds dispersed,--Clotilda would come. The primate of the
+festival, in whose honor the church-going took place,--the little
+six-weeks'-man,--memorized his part aloud, which he had to perform
+after five o'clock, and which, as in the case of more than one hero of
+festivities, was to consist of nothing but going to sleep.
+
+The memorizing consisted of his waking and screaming in one steady
+scream for the bosom in which the Creator had stored up for him the
+first manna in life's wilderness. But not till five o'clock did the
+mother still him with the maternal sleep-potion, and enable the little
+speaker to close his throat-lid[71] and eyelids at once. At first I had
+come near suppressing--from respect for the Parson's lady--the fact
+that she suckled, and so, like a whale as it were, still reckoned among
+the mammalia, nourished at her bosom another child than Cupid; but I
+flattered myself, upon reflection, that a person who is neither a
+theatre-princess nor a crown-princess would not be so strictly judged
+as others, if she _had_ children or milk....
+
+Before I say that Clotilda came, I will, inasmuch as she has eight
+residences,--although many a magnate who owns sixteen noble residences
+still seeks a seventeenth with walls in which he may sleep,--offer a
+slight excuse for her going into the house of a common citizen; but she
+needs after all no other justification than the fact that she was in
+the country, where often the oldest blood can avail itself of no better
+intercourse than that of citizens, unless perhaps it is that of cattle,
+which even some not uncultured cavaliers really prefer....
+
+It strikes five o'clock,--the matchless beauty enters,--the moon hangs
+down towards her out of heaven like a white leaf newly budded,--the
+gay, innocent blood in St. Luna rises under her influence like the
+tide,--all is rehabilitated.
+
+But the sixth chapter is run out.... And as Spitz is not yet on hand
+with the seventh, the reader and I can exchange with each other a
+rational word. I confess, he has long appreciated me and my doings; he
+sees clearly that all goes on in the finest biographical train,--the
+dog, my littleness, and the heroes of these dog-days. Nor have I ever
+denied that he will continue to be more and more dazzled by the
+splendor and sparkle of this foot-birth,[72] since I am so very busy,
+waxing, rubbing, and polishing at it,--more so than if it were a man's
+boot or a military horse's-hoof in Berlin. Nay, I need not wait to have
+it foretold to me from any cup of coffee-grounds (for I see it already
+from my knowledge of human nature and from the coffee which I drink)
+that this is saying the very least, and that the proper reading-rage
+will then, and not till then, come over the poor dear fellow, when, in
+the course of this work, at which, as in the low-warp tapestry,[73] two
+workmen weave sitting in one chair, the historic figures of this
+tapestry, together with their grouping, shall come forth from the ball
+of the foot to the seam of the skull. At present there is hardly a
+heel, a shin-bone, a stocking finished....
+
+But when twenty or thirty ells of the work have been run off, then can
+I and my by-sitter expect what I will here portray: the reader will
+hurry as if the Devil were after him; to get through one Dog-post-day
+he will let six courses grow cold and the dessert warm. But what am I
+saying? An incarnate Romish king shall ride through the streets and a
+cannon-thunder bring up the rear,--he shall not hear it; his better
+half shall give in his library the best of suppers to a connubial
+excrescence,--he shall not see it; the excrescence itself shall hold
+assaf[oe]tida under his nose, shall give him in sport light blows with
+a woodman's axe,--he shall not feel it, so beside himself shall he be
+on my account, regularly out of his senses.
+
+Now that is a misfortune, the certainty of which I seek vainly to
+hide from myself. When it once comes on, and I have unhappily brought
+him into that historical clairvoyance where he no longer hears or
+sees anything except my characters, which are put in _rapport_ with
+him,--neither father nor cousin,--then I may be sure that he will hear
+a mining-superintendent still less,--for story is what he wants, and of
+_me_ he knows absolutely nothing more,--nay, I will suppose, I should
+let off the motliest fire-works of wit, yes, that chains of
+philosophical conclusions should hang down in skeins out of my mouth,
+like ribbons from a juggler's,--what would it avail me?
+
+Nevertheless, ribbons must hang down and fire-works play; but it shall
+be in this way: As from each year so many hours are left off that the
+remainder of four years makes out an intercalary day,--and as with me
+after four Dog-post-days there will always be so many Postscripts, so
+much wit and acuteness lying quite idle, as so much unsalable
+stuff,[74] that a regular _intercalary day_ could well be made,--it
+shall be made as often as four dog-dynasties have gone by; only this is
+still requisite, that I first conclude and ratify with the reader the
+following boundary agreement and domestic contract, in form and manner
+to wit:--
+
+I. On the part of the reader it is allowed and granted to the
+mining-superintendent on St. John's, him and his heirs and assigns,
+from this time forward, after every fourth Dog-post-day, to prepare and
+print a witty and learned intercalary day, in which there is no
+narrative.
+
+II. On the part of the mining-superintendent permission is given the
+reader to skip over every intercalary day and read only the historical
+days, in consideration whereof both powers waive all _beneficia
+juris_--_restitutionem in integrum_--_exceptionem læsionis enormis et
+enormissimæ_---_dispensationem_--_absolutionem_, _etc_. At the Congress
+of St. John's, May 4, 1793.
+
+Thus reads the genuine instrument of the so-called Dog-contract between
+the mining-superintendent and the reader, and this Act of Renunciation
+may and must, in future misunderstandings between the two powers, be
+laid before an umpire or a confederate court,[75] as the single ground
+of decision.
+
+
+
+
+                            7. DOG-POST-DAY.
+
+   The Great Parsonage-Park.--Orangery.--Flamin's Promotion.--Festal
+     Afternoon of Domestic Love.--Rain of Fire.--Letter to Emanuel.
+
+
+His Lordship excepted, all are now sitting and waiting for me in the
+parsonage-garden; but the garden itself not a mortal soul is yet
+acquainted with. It is a Chrestomathy[76] of all gardens, and yet no
+larger than the church. Many gardens resemble it in being at once
+kitchen-gardens, flower-gardens, and orchards; but it is also a _jardin
+des animaux_, as it contains in fact the whole Fauna of St. Luna, and a
+botanical garden, too; it is overgrown with the entire Flora of the
+village; and it is a garden of honey-bees and humble-bees also, as
+often as they happen to fly into it. Meanwhile such minor merits are
+really hardly worth naming, when a garden once has, like this, the
+merit of being the greatest English garden through which a man ever
+strode. It hides not only its end,--as every park, like every purse,
+must do,--but even its beginning, and seems to be merely the terrace
+from which one can see into that which one cannot see over, but, like
+Cook, may well circumnavigate. In the English parsonage-garden there
+are not single ruins, but whole broken-up cities, and the greatest
+princes have rivalled each other in their passion for furnishing it
+with romantic wildernesses and battle-fields and gallows-trees, to
+which (and that carries the illusion still higher) real rogues are
+tied, into the bargain, as fruit-pendants. The buildings and shrubs of
+different parts of the world are there, not huddled together into an
+absurd neighborhood, but neatly kept apart from each other by regular
+seas or water-scapes, which its size easily makes possible, since it
+contains over nine million square miles; and with what taste, in fact,
+these masses are brought together, the reader may estimate from the
+fact that all lords and all reviewers in the literary periodicals, and
+the readers themselves, are drawn into the garden and often stay
+therein sixty years.--
+
+The Parson thinks also to get some credit from it as a Dutch garden,
+particularly by a peruke made of water, which hangs not on a wig-stand,
+but on a tin pipe, and which leaps so in curls that already several
+city-parsons have wished they could wear it. Butterfly-show-glasses
+kept off the night-chills from precocious roses of silk and early
+cucumbers of wax. Cucumbers which consisted of real cucumbers, he was
+the first among all pastors to put in, in order to worry himself with
+the fear that they might freeze; for this fear he must have, in order
+to rejoice whenever a glass bottle was broken in his house: he could
+then carry this ice- or glass-mountain (which, in the case of wines,
+unfortunately heightens every year as our thirst does) into the garden,
+and with this manure-bell cover the heart-leaves. Round more important
+beds he ran a motley, mosaic border of crockery; his family was his
+verge-tool,--I mean, they had to break for him the few porcelain cups
+which he needed, in order with this motley powdered sugar to set off
+the more considerable patches, as a prince enchases and berings himself
+with the variegated order-ribbons drawn through the button-holes of his
+antechambers. As he could not set _whole_ cups round the beds, but must
+first analyze them by his chemists, a reviewer who eats with him must
+avail himself of my hint to understand how it happens, if such a
+consumptive patient is not beside himself for rage, when some very
+valuable vessel is broken; for only when it happens to worthless ones
+is he no longer master of himself. Every housewife should set off such
+a bed as an Arndt's garden of Paradise, as a Golgotha for porcelain
+whereof the _fashion is changed_, for the good of her soul, in order
+that she may not lose her senses when a cup falls. "Dearest!" I would
+say, "bear up under this misfortune like a Christian woman; it, will
+turn out for thy advantage either in eternity yonder, or here in the
+garden."
+
+Near a house, Dutch garden-ornaments, with their homely minuteness,
+make a better figure than thrilling Nature, with her eternal majesty.
+Eymann's clipped and carved parsonage-garden was in fact merely a
+continued family-room without roof or partition.
+
+As the Parson twitched our Victor round through the garden, the guest
+almost forgot to praise the garden as a magazine of ideas, simply
+because he was looking forward too curiously and warmly to the arrival
+of Clotilda, and her demeanor towards his friend. Fortunately it
+occurred to him that the Parson counted upon incense-offerings and
+censers; he was so unwilling to defraud a laurel-hoping heart, that he
+for that very reason loved to attach himself to people of some merit,
+that so he might indulge his humane disposition to praise, without
+expense to the truth. Victor rejoiced at the prospect of Flamin's and
+Clotilda's meeting: how beautifully, he thought, will the moonlight of
+soft love fall upon his and her proud faces! And he held in store a
+rich tolerance and love for their love. For he not only had so much
+insight into the fleeting nature of our pleasures, that he could hardly
+be angry over the maddest, but he could even be present at the
+journeyman's greeting (or methodology) of--two lovers with real
+pleasure. "It is very foolish,"--he said in Göttingen,--"every
+good-hearted man opens his arms in sympathy, when he sees friends,
+brothers and sisters, or parents embrace each other; but if a couple of
+monkeys in love dance round before us at the end of Cupid's string, and
+though it were on the stage, not a devil of us will take any interest
+in them, unless they dance in a romance. But why? Certainly not from
+selfishness, otherwise the wooden heart in the human block would also
+in the presence of friendship between others, or filial love, remain
+nailed fast; but, because the love of lovers is selfish, we are so too;
+and because in a romance it is not so, we are not so either. I, for my
+part, go on in my thinking, and make believe to myself in regard to
+every span of lovers I meet, that they were printed and bound, and I
+had them from the circulating library for paltry reading money. It
+belongs to the higher disinterestedness to sympathize even with its
+opposite. And by all means with you, poor women! Would you or I, then,
+oftentimes, with this life of yours so frittered away in sewing,
+cooking, washing, know that you had a soul, unless it fell in love?
+Many of you through long tearful years have never lifted your head
+except in the short, sunny day of love, and after it your bereft heart
+sank back again into the cool depths; so water-plants lie all the year
+drowned in water, only at the time of their bloom and love do their
+ascending leaves sit upon the water and sun themselves gloriously,
+and--then fall down again."
+
+At last Clotilda entered, in conversation with the Parson's wife. She
+had on a crape hat, with a black lace portcullis, which at once
+beautified, divided, and concealed with a pierced shadow her beautiful
+face. But her eye avoided Flamin's eye, and only at times stole
+thoughtfully after it. He proved that precisely people of the greatest
+courage have the least with regard to beauty; he advanced not towards
+her one step. She asked our Victor eagerly about the arrival and the
+health of his Lordship. She then proposed to him, with the usual
+medical uncertainty of her sex, whether such an operation often
+transpired so easily, and whether he had already restored to many so
+much as he had to his father: he answered both questions in the
+negative, and she sighed openly. His respectful distance towards her
+would have increased by that at which his friend kept himself from her,
+had he not had something to hand her,--Emanuel's note. He could not
+steal it, as he had already repeated to her the first line; secondly,
+he must present it _under four eyes_ (he could not through Agatha, for
+example), because he knew how she carried discretion to the extreme
+limits. Clotilda was one of those persons--troublesome to this
+biographer and his hero--who love to conceal all trifles: e. g. what
+they eat, where they are going to-morrow; who are furious with a friend
+if he blabs out how on St. Thomas's day last year they had a slight
+headache. With Clotilda it arose not from fear, but from a dark
+presentiment that he who babbled indifferent mysteries might at last
+tell weighty ones. He felt towards her, notwithstanding her pride, a
+mighty drawing to sincerity. He led her aside to the pomegranate-tree,
+and there--sparing her by his open-hearted lightness of manner the
+burdensome obligation she might feel with regard to a secret--handed
+her back the leaf. She was astonished, but said at once, her surprise
+related merely to her own negligence; i. e. she trusted him, but had
+some suspicion or other of her house-mates, and of the manner in which
+it got into the arbor. She took advantage of the orangery, and bent her
+inspired face close to the pomegranate blossoms. Victor could not
+possibly stand there alone so stupid; he, still a little struck with
+her astonishment, and at last with her almost too great pride, felt
+also a hankering after the pomegranate incense, and held his face down
+in it toward hers. He should have known, however, that any one who
+smells of anything does not look at the thing, but straight before him.
+Hardly, then, had he applied his olfactory nerves to the blossoms, when
+he opened his eyes, and Clotilda's large eyes stood opened full upon
+him; they were just at the highest and most effective elevation, of
+45°, whether you speak of eyes or bow-shots. He turned his pupils
+forcibly down toward the leaves; she, still more prudently, stepped
+back from the bewildering orangery.
+
+However, she was not embarrassed. He thought it unjust toward Flamin to
+observe her sentiments towards himself; but still he remarked this
+much,--that the observatory on which one would watch the occultations
+of her heart must be higher than is necessary in regard to other women.
+The custom of being admired had made her proof against that showing up,
+as in a glass, the impression of her charms with which men so often win
+to themselves the attention of woman's vanity. She was, as I have said,
+not embarrassed, but went on to tell her listener something further of
+Emanuel's character, which she lately, out of respect for her teacher,
+had not been willing to lay before such unholy ears,--namely, that he
+firmly believed he should die a year hence in the midnight of St.
+John's day.[77] Victor could easily guess that she herself believed it;
+but what he did not guess was, that this proud one, from pure
+tenderness of heart, had hastened her purpose of leaving Maienthal on
+St. John's day, in order not to meet the beloved man on the anniversary
+of the future day of his death. According to her account, this Emanuel
+had had a painfully exalted position among men; he was alone; he had
+had great friends on his bosom, but all had passed into the grave, and
+therefore he would also hide there his own head. Years give to stormy,
+over-vigorous men a finer harmony of the heart, but from refined, cold
+natures they take more than they give. Those strong hearts resemble
+English gardens, which age always makes greener, fuller, more leafy;
+whereas the man of the world, like a French one, is covered by years
+with dried-up and disfigured boughs.
+
+Victor grew more troubled; every word which he won from her he regarded
+as a sacrilege upon his friend, the more so as the latter did not
+understand so well as he the art of opening a conversation with a lady.
+He had not the heart to shine, because he feared thereby to be a rival
+of his friend for her good graces. His Flamin seemed to him to-day
+taller, more beautiful, and better than ever, and he himself shorter
+and more stupid. He wished a thousand times his father had already
+come, that he might deliver to him with the greatest ardor Flamin's
+prayer for his aid in obtaining Clotilda.
+
+At last he came, and Victor drew a full breath again. The good youth
+often seeks, by acts of sacrifice, to reconcile his conscience again
+with his _thoughts_. With heart-beatings of enthusiasm he awaited the
+moment of solitude. A garden detaches and draws together people in the
+easiest manner, and only in such a place should one impart secrets;
+Victor could soon, in an arbor which wove itself on four chestnut-trees
+with its blooming vein-work nest-wise over their heads, embrace his
+father with trembling emotion, and speak and glow for his friend with
+tongue and heart. His Lordship's surprise was greater than _his_
+emotion. "Here," said he, "is something which has long since fulfilled
+thy prayer in a different way; but I wished to reserve for thee the joy
+of bearing the message";--and therewith he gave him a most gracious
+autograph, wherein the Prince called the practising Advocate Flamin
+into the Administrative Council.
+
+A most gracious autograph is the _Tetragrammaton_[78] and means of
+grace, which works supernatural effects and state-miracles; and the
+illustrious writing-thumb is the magic thief's-thumb,[79] as it were,
+by which the different wheels of the state-repeating-watch--the
+lever-wheel, the face-wheel, often merely the hand--is shoved forward
+or backward, according as it desires an hour earlier or later.
+Hence ministers often climb up and cut off for themselves such a
+thief's-thumb to carry in their pockets.
+
+Sebastian is seized by joy, as by Habakkuk's angel, by the hair of the
+head, and carried through the garden, and driven with his news to the
+first he might meet, and that proved to be the Chaplain, who, with a
+comic face, swore it was all a fib of Victor's; but his restrained
+jubilation almost burst his compressed veins. Victor had no time for
+refutation, but hurried off with such a message to the heart to which
+it rightly belonged,--the mother's. The mother could not shape her
+mouth to anything but a blessed smile, into which the drops of joy
+overflowed from her eyes. No joy in nature is so sublimely affecting as
+the joy of a mother at the good fortune of a child. But the son, in
+whose soul, such as it was to-day, this sunbeam of fate was really
+needed, could not, in the surprise, be immediately found.
+
+His Lordship, meanwhile, talked with Clotilda as with a daughter, and
+gave her a letter from her mother and the intelligence of his
+approaching departure. His manly kindness, guided by respect and graced
+by refinement, ennobled her attentiveness to his looks; and as she came
+forth from the affectionate and low-toned conversation with sparkling
+eyes, her tall form, which usually stooped a little, was raised by a
+certain inspiration to a noble stature, and she stood in the temple of
+Nature, as a priestess of the temple, infinitely beautiful. His
+Lordship separated from her. She found Flamin near the tulip-formed
+letter C, and the Goddess of Fortune appeared to him in the sweetest
+human incarnation, to deliver to him her gift. We need not say that the
+news and the news-bearer threw him into equal ecstasy.
+
+Joy had shaken up the whole bee-garden in a swarming-bag and turned it
+into chaos. The foaming wine-fermentation could not work itself off
+till it ended in clear, tranquil rapture. His Lordship took himself out
+of the way of a gratitude swelled by so many ripieno[80] voices and off
+to his carriage, when the mother with her dumb heart-fulness overtook
+him; but nothing could she get from her blissfully burdened heart to
+her lips, save the modest words, that "to-day was his birthday, and his
+son did not know it, and ought _also_ to have been surprised with a
+rapture." He tried to escape from her with a grateful smile, and said
+that he must hasten back to the Prince, who perhaps had taken as kind
+an interest in this very day as she; but Sebastian, with his friend
+whom he had found, overtook him at the garden-gate, and the hurrying
+lord was delayed a little longer by a swift embrace of his son. Not
+until he was off did the mother, who longed to unburden her love, clasp
+tenderly Victor's hand, and, forgetting the agreement, asked: "O
+dearest, why, then, did you not congratulate him on his birthday? For,
+indeed, _I_ could not." Now for the first time he understood and felt
+the sudden embrace of his father, and stretched out his arms after him
+and would fain reciprocate it.
+
+Here the old Parson, also coming out of the garden, struck in and said,
+as if talking nonsense, "I wish he were Administrative Councillor"; but
+his wife, without making any reply to that, said to him with
+overflowing voice and love, "Such a cradle-festival thou hast never yet
+lived to see as to-day's, Peter!" Agatha looked at her inquiringly and
+admonishingly. "Just out with it," said she, and enfolded the children
+and drew them both into the paternal embrace, "and wish your good
+father length of days and three more blessed children."
+
+The father could not say anything, but stretched his hand toward the
+mother, to round the group of the loving Eden. Victor's sympathetic
+blood swelled up in his heart, to dissolve it in love, and he thought
+the silent prayer: "Never may any misfortune, All-gracious One, tear
+these entwined arms asunder!" But Flamin soon drew himself out of the
+concatenation, and said to Victor with a most grateful pressure of the
+hand, "Thou knowest not how I am always wronging thee." The Chaplain
+thought he should hide his emotion from all by saying: "I wish I had
+not deceived you. I have let myself be bled, but it was a stupid thing;
+if I had only known! only known! It is true; there, see for
+yourselves!" And finding that this mask was not adequate to cover the
+whole emotion of his soul, he called, in an overloud tone, to the poor
+forgotten Apollonia, who was rocking at the house door the awakened
+Bastian, to "come here!" But the poor girl, whose merely distant
+participation in the general mingling of hearts touched our Victor's
+tenderest feelings, shyly hesitated, till the mother came and
+indemnified her against any loss by all that for which mothers are
+never repaid. But not until the Parson's wife held her child in her
+arms and on her lips, did she feel that the imprisoned flames of her
+affections found vent, and her heart its alleviation.
+
+Ah, that man should receive the fairest love precisely at the time when
+he does not yet understand it!--alas that not until late in life's
+year, as he contemplates with a sigh the love of other parents and
+children, he should say hopefully to himself, "Ah, thus did mine
+certainly love me too!"--alas that then the bosom to which thou wouldst
+hasten with thy thanks for half of a life, for a thousand unappreciated
+anxieties, for an inexpressible, never returning love, is already lying
+crushed under an old grave, and has lost the warm heart which so long
+loved thee!...
+
+In domestic happiness the calm, cosey pleasures driven in between four
+narrow walls are only the most accidental constituent; its nervous and
+vital fluid is the blazing fire-fountains of love which spring out of
+kindred hearts into each other. The involuntary surprise had
+disconcerted the intentional ones. But the flood of joy had swept all
+parties together; and they still remained in the same confidential
+closeness to each other, when it had abated again. They sat down to the
+entertainment in the summer-house. Seldom are banquets spiced as this
+one was, by two extraordinary advantages,--want of food and want of
+room. Nothing whets the appetite so much as the fear of its not finding
+enough to satisfy it. It had been contrived by Sebastian, that for each
+guest only his favorite dish should be provided; for the Parson,
+stuffed crabs and potato cheese; for Flamin, ham; for the Hero, good
+Harry's beans. But in this case every one wanted another's favorite
+dish, and set his own up at auction.[81] Even the ladies, who generally
+eat and do not eat, like fishes, nibbled a little. The second
+intoxicating ingredient which they had, thrown into their cup of joy,
+was the table, together with the garden-house, of which the former
+would not hold the food nor the latter the feeders. Sebastian had
+betaken himself, with Agatha, to an affiliated table which had been
+adjoined outside to the window of the banquet-hall, merely for the
+purpose of screaming in from out there and whining, more than eating.
+This caprice was, at bottom, a covered modesty which feared being
+honored inside at the expense of the other guests, on his Lordship's
+account. His own solitude--perhaps in a painful sense--pictured to him
+the shy Appel, who, as vestal of the hearth, ate only the drawback toll
+of returning dishes, merely to try how they had tasted to others. He
+could not longer endure the thought of this separation, but took wine
+and the best of the dessert, and carried it in to her in her kitchen
+winter quarters. As, in doing so, he displayed upon his face, instead
+of his gayety towards girls, of which she might have made a too humble
+interpretation, the greatest seriousness of courtesy; he was so happy
+as to have given to a soul pinched up by nature itself--with no other
+flower-pot here to send its roots round in than a cooking-pot, and only
+the kitchen for its concert-hall and the spit for its music of the
+spheres--a golden evening and a long memory of pleasure. Let no one
+maliciously thrust his fist in the way of such a good snail-soul, and
+laugh to see how she wriggles over it; and let him who stands upright
+willingly stoop and gently lift her along over her little stone.
+
+As to Clotilda, before dinner things went very well, but after dinner
+very ill. I speak of Sebastian, who, after the handing in of the
+petition to his Lordship, was happier and more light-hearted, and
+actually talked as frankly with Clotilda as if she were--a bride. For
+he had already said in Hanover, that "there was not a more tedious and
+holy thing than a bride, particularly if it were a friend's; sooner
+would he fritter away his time about the musty Pandects in Florence, or
+a holy body in a glass shrine at Vienna, than about her." In fact, it
+was hard to fall in love with Clotilda; I know the reader would not
+have done it, but would have gone coldly away again. "Her Grecian nose
+under the almost manly breadth of forehead," he would have said, "this
+sister-nose to all Madonnas and this frontier wild-game[82] so rare on
+German faces, her still but bright eyes, which seek nothing beyond
+themselves, this British gravity, this harmonious thoughtful soul,
+raise her above the rights of love. And even if this majestic form
+should incline to love, who could ever be so selfish as to pocket the
+present of a whole heaven, or so proud as to shoot his heart into hers
+like a smoke-ball, and becloud thereby this still, pensive serenity?"
+The reader will be glad to read his own words.
+
+But after dinner things went differently. Under Victor's cerebral
+membrane, some hobgoblin had so thrown into pi all the letters of his
+ideas in the inner letter-case, that he was up to this time gay, but
+unsatisfied. He had tried to tie and untie Agatha's hair, to separate
+her double-bows into unequal, and for that very reason into equal
+halves again; but the operation had not pleased him as usual,--to-day's
+interludes of domestic love had put his mirthful spirit wholly out of
+joint,--and it seemed to him as if, withdrawn from the present joy, he
+should be happier, at least for a few minutes, in some quiet corner,
+and he particularly longed to see the sun set.
+
+Add to all this the sight of Clotilda's increased love towards
+Agatha,--the sight of his friend, who, by the deepening silence of his
+tenderness, his mildening voice, and by a devotedness so irresistible
+in impassioned natures, commanded every heart, "Love me,"--and,
+finally, the spectacle of night....
+
+He had already been long sad, when he seemed still gay. Now the mother
+took the little hero of the forenoon out under the bland evening heaven.
+They all stood outside of the garden-tabernacle-of-the-covenant, in the
+first temple of man's devotion. The evening-blood of the sinking sun
+flowed into the clouds, as into the sea sinks the blood of its giants
+dying in its depths. The porous cloud did not avail to hide the heavens;
+it swam round about the moon, and let her pale silver glisten from
+amidst the slags.
+
+The red clouds painted the infant. Every one took lightly his soft
+hands, which had already burst from the bud of pillows and the
+chrysalis of swaddling-bands. Clotilda--instead of lavishing on the
+little one carnally coquettish caresses, as many girls do _before_ or
+_for_ men--poured down a steadily streaming look full of hearty love on
+the new man, untied his too tight and cutting shirt-sleeve, screened
+from him the moon at which he was squinting, and said, playfully,
+"Smile this way and love me, _Sebastian_!" She could not possibly have
+meant to charge this line with metaphorical _ricochet_-shots; besides,
+the elder, unswaddled Sebastian knew full well that she could have
+anticipated no double sense; nay, he knew the rule, that the very
+anxiety wherewith some people banish certain subjects from their talk
+betrays the presence of the same in their thoughts. And yet, for all
+that, he had not the courage to smile like the rest, or to take the
+little hand which she had touched in his. She turned to him, and said,
+"But how does the child learn _our language, unless it has already a
+language it can master_?"
+
+... I have, out of mere regard to the philosophers, had this printed in
+italics.
+
+"Then it follows," he answered, "that the language of pantomime must
+signify just as much as articulate speech. As often as I see a deaf and
+dumb man go to sacrament, I think of this,--that all the instruction
+you can give imports nothing into man, but only indicates and arranges
+what is already there. The child's soul is its own drawing-master, the
+teacher is simply its colorist."
+
+"What if this lovely evening," she continued, "should one day come up
+again to the memory of this little one? Why does the sixth year look
+more beautiful in remembrance than the twelfth, and the third still
+more beautiful?" A beautiful woman one cannot interrupt so easily as an
+ex-Dean; and so she was permitted to recur to this reminiscence: "Herr
+Emanuel once said, one should relate to children every year the story
+of their past years, in order that they might one day look back through
+all their years, even into the haze of the second." It is as if I heard
+the above-mentioned maid of honor[83] personally speaking, under whose
+thin lace cap there lay more philosophy than under many a doctor's
+beaver, as quicksilver sticks in crape, and runs through leather.
+
+Victor answered, with the usual sympathy of his good heart: "Emanuel
+stands near to man, and knows him. Two scene-painters lead man, beset
+by magic, through the whole stage,--_Memory_ and _Hope_; in the present
+he is uncomfortable; enjoyment is poured out for him, as for Gulliver,
+only into a thousand Liliputian moments; how shall that intoxicate or
+satisfy? When we picture to ourselves a happy day, we compress it into
+a single happy thought; when we come upon it, this thought is diluted
+through: the twenty-four hours."
+
+"I think of that," she replied, "as often as I walk through meadows; in
+the distance are flowers upon flowers, but, near at hand, they are all
+scattered apart, and separated by the grass. But yet, after all,
+_memory is enjoyed only in the present_."
+
+Victor continued to think only of the flowers, and said, abstractedly,
+"And in the _night_ the flowers themselves look like grass,"--when it
+began suddenly to sprinkle.
+
+They all stepped, in solemn mood, into the summerhouse, on whose
+roof the rain pattered down, while through the open windows the
+alternately shutting and opening moon's eye threw in like a glacier its
+snow-glances,--the tepid blossom-breath of the whole glistening
+landscape stole with healing balm on every human sigh, every burdened
+bosom. In this confined circle, separated from nature by the
+alternation of night and moonshine, one must needs take refuge in
+something near and familiar, in the old harpsichord. Clotilda's voice
+might make a flute-accompaniment to the whispering rain without. The
+Parson's wife begged--her to favor them, and with her favorite _aria_
+from Benda's Romeo,--"Perchance, my lost repose! perchance one day in
+the grave I may find thee!" &c.,--a song whose tones like fine
+dissolving perfumes penetrate the heart through a thousand entrances,
+and tremble there, and tremble more and more intensely, till at last
+they shiver it to atoms, and leave nothing of it behind in the
+harmonious annihilation but tears.
+
+Clotilda without any hesitating vanity consented to sing. But for
+Sebastian, in whom all tones came in contact with naked, quivering
+feelers, and who could work himself into sadness at the very songs of
+the herdsmen in the fields--this, on such an evening, was too much for
+his heart; under cover of the general musical attentiveness, he had to
+steal out of the door....
+
+But here, under the great night-heaven, amidst higher drops, his own
+can fall unseen. What a night! Here a splendor overwhelms him, which
+links night and sky and earth all together; magic Nature rushes with
+streams into his heart, and forcibly enlarges it. Overhead, Luna
+fills the floating cloud-fleeces with liquid silver, and the soaked
+silver-wool quivers downward, and glittering pearls trickle over smooth
+foliage, and are caught in blossoms, and the heavenly field pearls
+and glimmers. Through this Eden, over which a double snow-shower of
+sparks and of drops played and whirled through a misty rain of
+blossom-fragrances, and wherein Clotilda's tones, like angels that had
+got lost, went flying about, now sinking and now soaring through this
+magic-maze, Victor staggered, dazzled, overwhelmed, trembling and
+weeping, and sank down exhausted into the arbor where he had to-day
+fallen on his father's heart. He thought over the wintry life of that
+good father amidst mere strangers to the heart, and his solitary, sad
+celebration of today's festival, and the cold, empty room in the
+paternal bosom, which once the lost form of the beloved one had
+inhabited, and he yearned painfully for the heart of his invisible
+mother. He lifted his leaning head into the rain, and from the large
+open eyes fell not strange drops alone. He glowed through his whole
+being, and night-clouds must cool it. His finger-tips hung down,
+lightly folded in one another. Clotilda's tones dropped now like molten
+silver-points on his bosom, now they flowed like stray echoes from
+distant groves into this still garden. He spoke no name, he thought no
+thought, he neither acquitted himself nor accused himself; he saw it
+all as in a dream, when now a thick night glided across the garden, and
+now a sea of light swept after it.
+
+But it seemed to him as if his bosom would burst, as if he should be
+blest could he at this moment embrace beloved persons, and crush in the
+closeness of that embrace in a blissful frenzy his bosom and his heart.
+It was to him as if he should be over-blessed, could he now before some
+being, before a mere shadow of the mind, pour out all his blood, his
+life, his being. It was to him as if he must scream into the midst of
+Clotilda's tones, and fold his arms around a rock, only to stifle the
+painful yearning.
+
+He heard the leaves drip, and took it for a continuing rain. But the
+_Staub-bach_ of the heavens had scattered itself in spray, and only
+Luna's fall of light any longer besprinkled the landscape. The sky was
+deep-blue. Agatha had been seeking him during the rain, and had only
+just found him. He woke up, obediently and silently went out with her,
+and met only cleared-up heavenly faces,--then all his nerves quivered,
+and he was compelled with a mute obeisance to take his painful and
+friendly leave. Each one had his own thoughts on the subject. But the
+Parson's wife told the company, he loved to hear music at a distance,
+only it always made him too melancholy.
+
+Ah, when he reached his chamber, a happy and consoling thought embraced
+his soul. Clotilda's dirge, and all, fixed before his sight the form of
+the exalted Emanuel,--and it seemed to say: "In a year I shall be
+already under the ground, only come to me, poor child, I will love thee
+till I die!" Without desiring a light, he wrote with streaming eyes,
+which no light could have helped, this letter to Emanuel:--
+
+
+"EMANUEL!
+
+"Say not to me, I know thee not! How can man, on this little grain of
+sun-dust called the earth, on which he warms himself, and during the
+swift moments which he counts off on his pulse between the flash of
+life and the stroke of death, still make a distinction between
+acquaintances and non-acquaintances? Why do not these little creatures,
+who have wounds of the same kind, and for whose coffins Time takes the
+same measure, fall without hesitation into each other's arms, and sigh,
+'Ah, we are doubtless like each other and acquainted!' Why must first
+these fleshly statues into which our spirits are chained move towards
+and touch each other, before the beings disguised therein can imagine
+and love each other? And yet it is so human and so true a thought: what
+then does Death take from us except fleshly statues, what from our eyes
+but the loved countenance, what from our ears but the dear voice, and
+the warm bosom from our own? Ah, Emanuel! be to me no dead man! Accept
+me! Give me thy heart! I will love it!
+
+"I am not very happy, my Emanuel! When my great teacher, Dahore,--that
+shining Swan of heaven, who, fastened to life by his broken wing-joint,
+looked up wistfully at other Swans, as they winged their way toward the
+warmer latitudes of the second life,--ceased to write to me, he did it
+in these words: 'Seek my duplicate! Thy breast will continue to bleed,
+until thou coverest its scar with another, and the earth will agitate
+thee more and more violently, if thou standest alone,--and only around
+the solitary do ghosts creep.'
+
+"Emanuel, art thou not tranquil and gentle and indulgent? Does not thy
+soul yearn to love all men, and is not a single heart too narrow for it
+to shut itself up therein with its love, as a bee is shut up in a tulip
+when it folds itself to sleep? Hast thou not had enough of the
+repeating-work of our merry bells and mourning-bells, and art thou not
+weary of the family likeness of all evenings and times? Dost thou not
+look, out from this fleeting earth over the long way above thee, that
+thou mayst not grow nauseous and giddy, as one for the same reason
+looks out of a carriage into the road? Believest thou not in men around
+whom floats the mountain air of a higher position, and who up on their
+height stand in the midst of a still heaven, and look down into the
+thunders and rainbows near the earth? Believest thou not in a God, and
+seekest thou not his thoughts in the lineaments of nature, and his
+eternal love in thy breast? If thou art and thinkest all this, then
+thou art mine; for thou art better than I, and my soul would fain lift
+itself to a higher friend. Tree of the higher life, I embrace thee, I
+twine around thee with a thousand faculties and tendrils, that I may
+mount up out of the trampled mire around me! Ah, a great man might
+heal, tranquillize, quicken, exalt me,--me, poor creature, only rich in
+wishes, distracted by the war between my dreams and my senses,--flung
+sorely to and fro between systems, tears, and follies,--disgusted at
+the earth, which I cannot replace for myself, laughing merely from
+anguish at the tearful comedy, the most contradictory, saddest, and
+merriest shadow among all the shadows in the wide night.... O fair,
+good soul, love me!
+
+                                               "HORION."
+
+
+Leaning his head on his hand, he let his tears flow, without thinking
+or looking, till nature was spent. Then he went to the harpsichord, and
+sang over to its accompaniment the most passionate passages of his
+letter; what strongly moved him always impelled him to singing,
+especially the emotion of longing. What can it matter to us that it was
+prose?
+
+At the last line of his epistolary song the door slowly opened.
+
+"Is it thou?" said a voice.
+
+"Ah, come in, Flamin!" he answered.
+
+"I only wanted to see whether you had come back," said Flamin, and went
+away.
+
+I think it is necessary that I should here insert at least the
+following, namely, that Victor possessed too much fancy, humor, and
+thoughtfulness not to give out, when these three strings were violently
+struck at once, pure dissonances, which, with more harmonious intervals
+between these faculties,[84] would not have appeared; that he had,
+therefore, more _leaning_ to enthusiasms and enthusiasts than
+_disposition_ that way; that his negative-electrical philosophy had
+always to contend with his positive-electrical enthusiasm for the
+balance of power, and that from the effervescing of these two spirits
+came nothing but humor; that he wanted to have all his carnations of
+joy on the same bed, although one adulterated the colors of the rest
+(e. g. refinement and enthusiasm, exaltation above the world and
+familiarity with the tone of the world); that from all this, beside
+irony and the highest tolerance, must also result a heavy, immovable
+feeling of the nothingness of our inner moods, so fleeting and sketched
+with such a contrariety of colors; and that he, whom the bad man
+regards as two-sided and the well-disposed one as changeable, needs
+nothing, for the gracing and rounding off of his Adam or Palladium
+buried up in so much wood, but the scythe of Time. Time then be it.
+
+
+
+
+                            8. DOG-POST-DAY.
+
+   Examinatorium and Dehortatorium of Conscience.--The Studious
+     Honeymoon of a Scholar.--The Cabinet of Natural History.--Answer
+     from Emanuel.--The Packed-up Chin.--Arrival of the Prince.--First
+     Intercalary Day.
+
+
+I wish the story were done, so that I might get it printed; for I have
+already too many subscribers to it among the common folk. An author
+in our days accepts advance payment for his book from the lowest
+fellow,--the tailor makes his pre-payment in clothes, the hair-dresser
+in powder, the landlord in rooms.
+
+Every morning Victor gave himself a curtain lecture under the bed-quilt
+for the evening previous; the bed is a good confessional and
+audience-hall of conscience. He wished that yesterday's garden-club
+would take him for a veritable fool instead of a lover. "Ah, if Flamin
+himself should torment himself with jealousy, and if our hearts, once
+so long parted, should already come to be so again!" Here the bed-box,
+from a confessional, grew to be a fiery oven. But an angel laid himself
+in beside him, and blew away the blaze. "But what, then, have I done?
+Have I not with a thousand-fold pleasure spoken, acted, kept silence
+for his sake? Not a look, not a word, can be charged against me,--what
+else then?" The angel of light or fire had now to blow terribly against
+the shooting flame. "What else? Thoughts, perhaps, which however, like
+field-mice of the soul, leap under the feet, and stick like adders. But
+could the disciples of Kant impute to me then, that I took the little
+image of the loveliest and best form, which I hitherto vainly summoned
+up in the lands of three lords, and threw such a Raphael's head, such
+an antique of Paradise, out of the window of the _villa_ of my brain,
+like apple-parings and plum-stones? I should wonder at the Kantians, if
+they did. And if it must stay there, am I to be an ox, ye Catechists,
+and coldly glower[85] at it? Not I. Nay, I will trust myself, and
+demand of the fairest heart even friendship, and yet leave to it its
+love!" Dear reader, during this whole summary process before the
+judicial commission of conscience, I have said to myself, over thirty
+times, "Neither of you, you nor the reader, is a hair more honest with
+your conscience!"
+
+He drew himself slowly by the bed-cord out of the bed, which he used to
+quit with a spring; some wheel of his ideas stuck within him. He read
+his yesterday's letter, and found it too stormy. "That is just our
+insignificance," said he, "that everything which man holds to be
+eternal freezes over night; not across our face do the most vehement
+gales pass more swift and traceless than across our heart. Why then am
+I not to-day what I was yesterday, and perhaps shall be to-morrow? What
+does man gain by this boiling up and down? And what has he then within
+himself to build upon?"
+
+Meanwhile, the fire-wheel of our earthly time, the sun, had whirled up
+its revolving streams, and burned on the shore of the earth. He flung
+up the window, and was fain to bathe his naked breast in the fresh
+morning wind, and his hot eye in the Red Sea of Aurora; but something
+within him interposed itself like an after-taste between him and the
+enjoyment of the morning-land. The remorse of conscience for _future_
+actions spoils a good man utterly for enjoyment.
+
+There rose slowly within him an overmastering emotion,--the former
+night passed by again before him with its flashing rain, and brought
+back to him his passionate heart and Emanuel's shadow,--he ran more and
+more vehemently, and in fact transversely, through the chamber,--tied
+his night-gown tighter, shook something from his eye, gave a
+perpendicular jump, jerked out a "No!" and said, with an inexpressibly
+serene smile, "No! I will not cheat my Flamin! I will neither seek nor
+shun her, nor will I desire her friendship till the time of his highest
+happiness. As I look upon thee[86] yonder, so will I upon her glorious,
+heavenly bust, without desiring that it take on warmth, and turn on me
+its cold plaster eye. But thou, my friend, be happy and all blessed,
+and never mayst thou once remark my conflict!"
+
+Now, for the first time, did the church-attire of morning gladden him,
+and the morning air flowed like a cool necklace over his hot bosom, and
+threw back the playing hair and shirt-frill. He felt that now he was
+worthy to have written to Emanuel, and to have looked up at the
+heavens....
+
+Flamin entered with some coldness, which was increased by the sight of
+the letter. Victor was not to be made cold; only when, down below, no
+one reminded him by a word of his yesterday's Dithyrambics, then did
+he, from fear of being betrayed, make an angry, covert oath, if _she_
+came, not to come,--which could be kept, too, for she did not come. She
+had still to bring away luggage from Maienthal, to besprinkle her
+friendships, and once more to set foot in the magic circle of her
+beloved teacher; and had, therefore, gone off.
+
+The following weeks danced now like just so many hours in Anglaises and
+Cotillons before Sebastian. His forenoons hung full of fruits, his
+afternoons full of flowers; for in the morning his soul with its
+exertions lived in his head, towards evening in his heart. In the
+evening one loves cards, poems, confidential talk, woman, music, very
+much; in the morning, very little; in the spirit-hour is that love at
+its highest strength.
+
+Except two other doubts that troubled him,--the first was, whether
+his Emanuel would write to him soon enough to enable him to visit
+him before he should be harnessed to the pole of the court and
+state-carriage; the second was the fear of being so too soon,--now he
+had hardly anything to do except to be happy or to make others so; for
+precisely in these weeks fell his holy or Sabbatical weeks...
+
+I know not whether the reader is yet acquainted with them; they are not
+found in the improved almanac; but they occur regularly (with some men)
+either immediately after the vernal equinox or in the after-summer.
+
+With Victor the first alternative was the one,--exactly in the middle
+of spring. I need not inquire whether it is the body, the weather, or
+who or what, that rings in this truce of God in our breast; but I must
+describe how they look, the Sabbatical weeks. Their form is precisely
+this: in a holy or Sabbatical week, many--e. g. I--are put off with
+mere Sabbatical days or hours. At first, one slumbers lightly, as on
+balanced clouds,--one awakes like a serene day. At evening one had made
+a firm resolve beforehand, and had therefore written it down in ciphers
+on the door, to grow better, and to apply the weeding-knife every day
+to one bed of weeds at least,--on awaking one is still so minded, and
+in fact carries it out. The gall, that excitable spirit, which usually,
+when it is poured, instead of into the duodenum, into the heart or
+heart's blood, sends up boiling and hissing clouds, is now in a few
+seconds absorbed or precipitated, and the exalted mind _feels calmly
+the bodily effervescence_ without any of its own. In this lull of the
+wings of our lungs, one utters only soft, low words, one clasps
+lovingly the hand of every one with whom he speaks, and one thinks,
+with melting heart, "Ah! I could not begrudge it to one of you, if you
+were still happier than I." On the clean, healthy, tranquil heart, as
+on the Homeric gods, light wounds immediately close. "No!" thou keepest
+saying in the Sabbatical week, "I must for some days to come maintain
+this tranquillity." Thou requirest, as material for joy, hardly
+anything but existence; nay, the sun-sting of a rapture would condense
+this cool, magical, transparent morning haze into a tempest. Thou
+lookest up steadily into the blue, as if thou wouldst fain give thanks
+and weep, and around upon the earth as if thou wouldst say, "Wherever I
+might be to-day, there I should be happy!" and a heart full of sleeping
+storms thou carriest, as a mother does her child sunk into slumber,
+shyly and watchfully over the soft flowers of joy.... But the storms
+start up, nevertheless, and assail the heart!...
+
+Ah, what must we not all already have lost, if the pictures of blissful
+days win from us nothing but sighs! O tranquillity, tranquillity, thou
+evening of the soul, thou still Hesper of the weary heart, which always
+abides beside the sun of virtue, if at thy very name our inner being is
+dissolved into tears, ah, is not that a sign that we seek thee, but
+have thee not?
+
+Victor owed the _siesta_ of his heart to the sciences,[87] particularly
+_Poetry_ and _Philosophy_, which two move, as do _comets_ and
+_planets_, around the _same sun_ (that of Truth), and differ only in
+the _shape_ of their orbits, as comets and poets have the _greater
+ellipse_. His training and talents had accustomed him to the vital air
+and oxygen of the study, which is also the only dormitory of our
+passions, and that only cloister and haven of bliss for men who would
+escape the broad whirlpool of the senses and fashions. The sciences
+are, more than virtue, their own reward, and they make one a partaker
+of happiness,--she only makes him worthy of it; and the prize-medals,
+pensions, and positive rewards, and the _patent_ which many scholars
+would fain get for their studying, belong at most to the literary
+apprentice-brethren, who make it a penance and a torture, but not to
+the masters of the chair, who make it a pleasure and a delight. A
+scholar has no _ennui_; only a throne-incumbent has to prescribe for
+himself, against this nervous consumption, a hundred court-festivals,
+cavaliers of honor, whole countries, and human blood!
+
+Good heavens! a reader who, in Victor's Sabbatical weeks, should have
+taken a ladder and climbed up to his window,--would he have espied
+anything there but a jubilant thing, that went gliding about over the
+fields of learning as among islands of the blest?--a thing which, in
+its ecstasy, knew not whether it should think or compose or read, and
+particularly _what_ or _whom_, out of the whole _high_ nobility of
+books ranged before it. In this bridal chamber of the mind (such are
+our study-chambers), in this concert-hall of the finest voices gathered
+from all times and places, the æsthetic and philosophical enjoyments
+almost overpowered his faculty of choice. Reading hurried him into
+writing, writing to reading, thinking to sentiment, and the latter to
+the former.
+
+I could go on with more satisfaction in this description, if I had
+previously written how he studied; namely, that he never wrote without
+having read himself full[88] on the subject, and the reverse, that he
+never read without having first _thought_ himself _hungry_. One should,
+he said, without an intense occasion and impulse from without, i. e.
+from within, not only not make verses, but even a philosophical
+paragraph; nor should any one set himself down and say: "Now, at three
+o'clock on this Bartholomew's day, I will go at it, and cleverly prove
+the following proposition." I can now proceed.
+
+Now when, in this mental laboratory, which served less for analytic
+chemistry than for synthetic science, he ascended from the turmaline
+which attracts grains of ashes to the sun which attracts worlds, and
+even to the unknown sun toward which solar systems fly; or when the
+anatomical charts were to him the perspective sketch of a divine
+architecture, and the dissecting-knife became the gnomon of his
+favorite truth: that, in order to believe in a God, there was need of
+nothing more than two men, of whom the one might be dead, too, that the
+living one could study him, and turn over his leaves[89]; or when
+Poetry, as a second nature, as a second music, wafted him upward softly
+on her invisible ether, and he chose undecidedly between the pen and
+the keys, when he wanted to communicate aloft; ... when, in short, in
+his heavenly sphere, supported on a human cervical-vertebra, the nebula
+of ideas gradually resolved itself into bright and dark parts, and
+beneath an unseen sun filled itself more and more with ether,--when one
+cloud became conductor to another,--when at last the gleaming mass of
+cloud came together,--then did the inner heaven (as the outer one often
+does), by eleven o'clock in the forenoon, grow from all the flashes
+into one sun, from all the drops into one flood, and the whole heaven
+of the upper faculties came down to the earth of the lower ones, and
+... some blue patches of the second world were for a flying moment
+open.
+
+We cannot delineate our inner states more philosophically and clearly
+than by metaphors, i. e. by the colors of related states. The narrow
+defamers of metaphors, who, instead of the brush, would rather give us
+the black-lead, ascribe to the _coloring_ the unrecognizableness
+of the _drawing_; but they ought to charge it merely on their
+non-acquaintance with the original subject. Verily, nonsense plays
+hide-and-seek more easily in the roomy, abstract, artificial words of
+the philosophers--since words, like Chinese shadows, increase with
+their circumference at once the obscurity and the emptiness of their
+contents--than in the narrow green hulls of the poets. From the Stoa
+and the Portico of thought one must have an outlook into the Epicurean
+gardens of poetry.
+
+In three minutes I shall come back to my story. Victor said, he must
+have mountain-, garden-, and swamp-meadows, because he possessed
+_three_ different whimsical souls, which he must drive to pasture on
+three sorts of grounds. He meant by that, not, as the scholastics do,
+the vegetative, animal, and intellectual souls, nor, as the fanatics
+do, the three parts of man, but something very like,--his _humorous_,
+_sentimental_, and _philosophical_ souls. Whoever should take away from
+him one of these, he said, might as well strip him of the remaining
+ones. Nay, sometimes, when the humorous soul happened at the moment to
+be sitting uppermost on the revolving cross-bench, he carried his
+levity so far as to express the wish that a joke might be made even in
+Abraham's bosom, and that he might with his three souls sit down at
+once on the twelve thrones.
+
+His afternoons he gave up now to a streaming humor which did not even
+find its proper hearers,--now to the people of the parsonage,--now to
+all the school-going youth of St. Luna, whose stomachs (to the vexation
+of every good schoolmaster) he provisioned more than their heads,
+because he thought that, in the short years when the bib expands to a
+napkin, enjoyment must find its way over the children's _serviette_,
+and had no other entrance than the mouth. He never went out without a
+whole military-chest full of small change in his waistcoat pocket. "I
+scatter it without thinking," said he; "but if from this metallic seed
+sowed broadcast whole evenings of joy spring up for the poor devils,
+and if just the innocent ones so seldom have them, why shall not one do
+something for the saved virtue and for pleasure at once?"
+
+He said he had heard moral lectures, and desired for his extra-judicial
+donations and merciful endowments nothing but forgiveness. His Flamin,
+who pronounced him a careless sowing-machine on rocks, spent his little
+holidays before approaching the session-table in ardent hopes of being
+serviceable there, and in preparations for being able to be so; often,
+when the higher patriotism, with saintly halo and Moses'-glory, broke
+out on the beloved Flamin's face, tears of friendly gladness stood in
+Victor's eyes, and in the moment of a lyric philanthropy both swore on
+their hearts for the future a mutual support in well-doing and joint
+sacrifices for mankind. The difference between them was merely
+reciprocal exaggeration,--Flamin treated vice too intolerantly, Victor
+too tolerantly; the former, as administrative counsellor, rejected,
+like the Anabaptists, all festivals, and, like the first Christians,
+all flowers (in every sense); the latter, like the Greeks, loved both
+too much;--the former would have sacrificed to honor human victims; the
+latter knew no robber of honor but his own heart: he overleaped at the
+tea-table the paper half-nobility of our miserable points of honor,
+and, mocking at mockery, submitted himself only to the high nobility of
+virtue....
+
+Victor sucked, with the feet of a green-frog, on every flower-leaf of
+joy,--at children, animals, village-Lupercalia, lessons; but dearest of
+all to him was Saturday. Then he made excursions through the glad
+unrest of the village, along by servant-men, hammering at their
+scythes, not to magnetize, but to sharpen them, and before the
+shop-door of the schoolmaster, at which his eye, like a Swiss, often
+stood for half an hour. For he could very well study the state of St.
+Luna's commerce in the little great-adventure-trade of the
+schoolmaster, who knew no smaller merchants' exchange than the one in
+his breeches' pocket. From this East India House he saw at a late hour
+people procuring the cheap pleasures of Sunday,--the wholesale dealer
+(the schoolmaster is meant), supported by his negro slaves, made the
+Sunday morning of St. Luna sweet with his syrup and hot with his
+coffee; and as well by the tobacco-culture of Germany was this
+tradesman enabled with spiral cables of pigtail to furnish the heads of
+the pipes, as through the silk culture the daughter's heads with
+Sabbath-streamers out of his Auerbach's court.... Our hero all knew.
+From every kennel a dog came wagging his tail to meet him to whom he
+had thrown in bread; from every window children screamed after him,
+whom he had bantered; and many boys, whom he passed, counted themselves
+happy if they had a cap on,--for then they could take it off before
+their master. For his first growing up in St. Luna was the history of
+St. Luna, which must have been drawn from the oral blue-books of the
+historic persons, and from the Imperial Postilion, the Parson's wife.
+This last, as a Mrs. Plutarch, always held up two characters, like
+pieces of cloth, side by side; and her husband read to him according to
+the best of his science and conscience upon the Church- and
+Reformation-history of his diocese. Victor devoted himself to this
+microcosmic world-history from two motives: first, in order--which is
+the object of professional students with the larger history--to dismiss
+it again clean from memory; secondly, in order to be as much at home in
+the village as the constable or the midwife, whence he hoped to derive
+the advantage of being grieved if a St. Lunite should die, and glad if
+he had previously married.
+
+Now the story strides forward again, from one day to another, as if on
+the stones of the stream of time.
+
+So sweetly then had the spring passed along before him with Sabbatical
+weeks, with Whitsuntides, with white blossoms, which fell gradually,
+like butterflies' wings, from the flying season. Victor had postponed
+the visit to Le Baut, thinking, "I shall have, at all events, to budge
+soon enough down out of the soft lap of Nature, and up to the court
+wire-bench and the object-holder (the throne) of the court-microscope";--he
+had, to be sure, daily exhorted himself, now, soon, before Clotilda's
+arrival, to start so as not to draw any suspicion upon his intentions,
+but always in vain, ... when suddenly (for the day before it was the
+13th of July) the 14th appeared, and with it Clotilda's luggage without
+her. Now he actually (according to the official dog-reports) crossed on
+the 15th the Brook of St. Luna,[90] passed the Alps of the Chamberlain's
+steps, and pitched his Cæsar's tent on Le Baut's sofa. He knew that
+to-day no one was there, not even Mat.
+
+"Heaven keep our politeness safe and sound," said he; "without it there
+were not only no holding out among a set of knaves, but it pays also
+minute-tributes of pleasure, whereas benevolence pays only quarterly
+assessments and exchequer-instalments, and charitable contributions."
+Mr. and Mrs. Le Baut were as courteous as never before (I could swear,
+they had nosed out something of Victor's court-doctor's hat and
+Doctor's crown); only they knew not what sort of a mouth-piece they
+should screw on to such a whimsically twisted instrument as Victor was.
+Like all study-inhabiting crustacea, he would rather talk of things
+than of persons; Flamin, however, the reverse. For the married pair,
+there was nothing in any Messiad more sublime than that now, on St.
+John's day, the Italian Princess would be coming: of that no mortal
+could talk enough, especially in the village. I know not to what slip
+of Victor's it was owing, that he led most women into the notion that
+he loved them. Suffice it, the Chamberlain's wife, who at her years
+demanded no longer _love_, but the _show_ of love, thought, "Perhaps!"
+Let no one mistake her, she, to be sure, always spent the first hour
+with a man on the _watch-tower_ of observation; but the second, then,
+only on the _hunting-screen_, if the first had been fortunate, and she
+was cool enough not to hope more than she saw: she even made a jest of
+every one who, in view of her vanity--a womanly vanity, however--of too
+easily presuming upon conquests, should think to flatter her otherwise
+than openly. Suffice it, she judged our Victor to-day too favorably, in
+her sense, or too unfavorably in ours; as, in general, mere courtiers
+can see through only mere courtiers. Of Clotilda not a word was said,
+not even of the time of her return.
+
+In fact, the Le Baut had a monstrous pride in herself to contend with
+towards her step-daughter,--of which my correspondent should have
+informed me what it rested upon, whether on relations or on merits; for
+of both there was an ample supply, inasmuch as the Chamberlain's wife
+had been the w----, that is, the mistress, of the present Prince's
+deceased father. I and a clever man have considered the question _pro_
+and _con_, whether she resembled Cæsar in love or in ambition. The
+clever man says, "In love," because a woman never forgets love, when a
+prince has been her teacher therein. The illustrious deceased father's
+heart had adored two beauties in her particularly, which aforetime the
+Scots[91] used to be so fond of eating, namely, the bosom and the rump.
+The great have their peculiar _grossièretés_, which the little dream
+not of. I would not print it, but it was known to the whole court, and
+therefore to many of my readers also. Well, the Devil brought along
+Time, who whetted his scythe and mowed away all of each of these charms
+which _hung over_ in his territory. Now with women at courts--or in the
+courtyard[92] of a school, or a warehouse, or in a cow-yard--vanity, so
+soon as old Saturn (i. e. Time) attacks it with his scythe-chariot and
+with the small shot from his hour-glass, makes one of the most skilful
+retreats that I know of. Vanity lets itself be driven from one work or
+member after another; but at last it throws itself out of the weak
+parts into _strongholds_, e. g. into finger-nails, foreheads, feet,
+&c., and from there the Devil himself cannot dislodge it. The
+Chamberlain's wife had first to make herself such a part, namely, a
+_gorge de Paris_ and a _cul de Paris_; these four _boundary hills_ of
+her kingdom had daily to be restored, and raised, out of respect for
+property, against the shifting of boundaries produced by years. From
+this, now, my clever man concludes that her soul is always writing
+letters of marque to her body.
+
+I am precisely the antipode of the clever man, and contend that Cupid
+is only her serving-brother, not the master of the lodge,--her
+adjutant, not her generalissimo; and this for the reason that she is
+still always applying either her own or Le Baut's hand to the
+restoration of the Solomon's Temple wherein she used to be adored as a
+goddess, side by side with the god,--because in marrying him she
+married nothing but the Chamberlain's key and his _assemblées_ and his
+hopes of future influence,--because her hostility to Clotilda relates
+not to the face, but to the brain,--because her love is now without
+jealousy. That is to say, she stood in a certain amatory relation with
+the Evangelist Matthieu, which (according to our feeling as common
+citizens) differs from hatred in nothing but--duration. Persiflages of
+love were their declarations of love; their glances were epigrams; his
+hours of assignation he seasoned with comic accounts of his
+corresponding hours in other places; and at the time of day when a holy
+man usually prays off his psalm,[93] both were ironical. Such an
+_erotic_ connection is nothing but the subdivision of a _political_....
+But to return to the story.
+
+The Chamberlain proposed now to show his guest something of more
+interest to a doctor and a scholar. To the chamber wherein the
+something was, they passed through the Chamberlain's wife's, and
+through Clotilda's. As they made a day of rest[94] in the former,
+Victor's eyes were fixed dreamily on Clotilda's profile, which Matthieu
+had lately cut out of nothing, and which the Chamberlain's wife, out of
+flattery to the profile-cutter, had hung up here under glass.
+Singularly--i. e. accidentally--the glass at this moment flew to pieces
+over the fair face, and Victor and the father were startled; for the
+latter was, like most great folk, for want of time, at once
+superstitious and sceptical; and it is well known that superstition
+regards the flying to pieces of a portrait-glass as a forerunner of the
+death of the original. The distressed father reproached himself with
+the permission he had given Clotilda to stay so long in Maienthal,
+since she would certainly injure her health there by unprofitable,
+youthful enthusiasms. He meant her mourning for her buried Giulia; for
+it was merely from sorrow for her, that, on the first of May, she had
+hurried hither without any baggage; and even the clothes of the beloved
+friend she had to-day sent among her own. He broke off in a cheerful
+tone, for Matthieu came, the brother of this Giulia, who only wanted to
+show and excuse himself, because, like several of the court church of
+half-brothers, he was going to meet the Princess.
+
+Victor grew stiller and sadder; his bosom became at once a swelling
+flood of invisible tears, whose source he could not trace to his heart.
+And when next they had to pass through Clotilda's still and vacant
+chamber, where order and simplicity too intensely reminded him of the
+fair soul of the proprietor, his sudden and touching dumbness struck
+others also. He tore his eyes hurriedly away from some flower-drawings
+by her own hand, from her white inkstand, and from the beautiful
+landscape of the oil-tapestry, and stepped up hastily to that which Le
+Baut was unlocking. It was not any noble heart which the latter, with
+his golden key, although bored like a cannon, could fasten,[95]--the
+Titular Chamberlains in Vienna apply only an hermetically sealed
+one,--but what he opened was his _Cabinet d'histoire naturelle_. The
+cabinet contained rare copies and some _curiosa_;--a calculus taken
+from the bladder of a child, two seventeenths of an inch long and two
+seventeenths of an inch broad, or the reverse; the hardened _vena cava_
+of an old Minister; a pair of American feather-trousers; tolerable
+Fungites, and better specimens of _Strombi_ (e. g. a staircase-shell,
+_not genuine_); the model of a midwife's chair and of a sowing-machine;
+species of gray marble from Hof in Voigtland; and a petrified
+bird's-nest,--duplicates not included.... Meanwhile I and the reader
+prefer to all this dead trumpery the living ape who was the cabinet's
+sole ornament and--owner. Camper should cut off from this living
+specimen the Chamberlain's head, and dissect it, if only to see how
+near the monkey borders upon man.
+
+A great person has always some branch or other of science which he
+cares nothing about, and to which, therefore, he particularly devotes
+himself. To Le Baut's soul, hungering for knowledge, it was all one
+whether it were set in a cabinet of seals or of gems or of pistoles.
+Were I a great person, I would with the greatest zeal make buttons--or
+deliveries--or books--or Nuremberg wares--or wars--or right good
+institutions, merely from cursed ennui, that _mother of vinegar_ to all
+vices and virtues which peep forth under ermine and stars of orders.
+Nothing is a greater proof of the general growth of refinement than the
+general growth of ennui. Even the ladies, out of mere flat ennui, a
+hundred times contrive pastimes for themselves; and the cleverest man
+utters his greatest number of platitudes, and the best his greatest
+number of slanders, merely to a circle that knows how to adequately
+bore him.
+
+The court-page was the cicerone of the cabinet, perhaps for the sake of
+going about. Victor wronged him by the medical supposition that he
+affected a certain loose, unsteady, slouchy gait common to debauchees
+in high life; for he really had it, and for the reason that he, on
+quite other grounds than Victor's fine ones, never loved to--sit. But
+to proceed: Unless the Chamberlain's wife meant to tear aside the
+curtain from before Victor's soul, and spy out therein his sentiments
+toward herself and Clotilda by the fright which I am about to relate,
+then it can have been nothing but a very bad spirit which led the hand
+of the said Chamberlain's wife to a silver ingot. Behind the ingot lay,
+perhaps killed by crumbs of arsenic, a mouse. A female reader, who in
+similar dangers has suffered as a patient, can imagine how the
+Chamberlain's wife felt when she grasped, with the hard substance,
+something soft, and drew it forth, and then saw what it was. A _real_
+fainting-fit was inevitable. I confess I should myself hold her swoon
+merely as a feint, were the occasion less; e. g. had it been, not her
+senses, but her honor, that was assailed: but a mouse is a very
+different matter. In fact, before such malicious spectators as her
+husband and her Cicisbeo, she must long since have banished from her
+stage, as the French from theirs, this Fifth Act Murder; nay, I do not
+believe she could in any way have rendered herself so ridiculous in the
+eyes of a triumphant enemy of her virtue (except by a real swoon) as by
+a fictitious one. Terror at the trance[96] deprived the Evangelist of
+the use of his reason, and left him only the use of his wickedness and
+his hands, with which he instantly tore open the whole blind- and
+fence-work of her bosom, in short, the whole optical breast, to get air
+enough for the true one, on whose board he had a piece,[97] namely, her
+heart. But Victor pushed him away, and, sprinkling her with a few drops
+of ice-water, out of tender respect for her charms and her life, soon
+raised her up again. However, she forgave the page all that she
+guessed, and thanked the court-physician for all in which she was
+mistaken....
+
+... Let me look away a moment from this black cobweb, and refresh
+myself with surveying the fairer world around me on my island, where
+there is no enemy,--and the flashing play of fishes and children on the
+shore,--and the playing mother who flings to them flowers and watchful
+glances,--and the great maple-trees which, softly murmuring with a
+thousand leaves and flies, bend downward to meet the foliage that
+glimmers in mimic dance under the waves,--and how the warm earth and
+the warm sky rest on each other in slumbering love, and bear one
+century after another....
+
+Victor, before the end of his rural day, went sadly home. Saturday (the
+16th of June[98]) sped softly by, and in its flight shook out a whole
+flower-head of winged seed for new flowers of joy.
+
+The stars glided lightly over its night. A friendly, blue Sunday
+morning hung floating over the village in its finery, and held its
+breath lest it should snatch off a ripe, linden-blossom, or the down of
+a marsh-marigold. Victor could hear the forte-pianissimo sounding down
+from the palace over the reposing village, and must needs sigh with the
+asthma of blissful longing, "Ah, when shall I have to cease swimming
+upon this still, shining sea, over this fair anchorage of life?" ...
+When Fate answered, "To-day!" For this very day, on Sunday, there came
+from the residence-city of Flachsenfingen a light-headed fool (in fact,
+two) in a no less light-bodied Berlin, and took out of his package a
+letter to him from his Lordship.
+
+
+"On the 21st of June (Thursday), the Italian Princess makes her entry
+into Kussewitz. On Wednesday, I leave here, and present thee in St.
+Luna to the Prince, who accompanies me to that place. I pray thee,
+however, to repair on the Saturday following to the _Island of
+Union_,[99] because the little which, for want of opportunity, I cannot
+say to thee in St. Luna, I shall reserve for the island. Thou wilt find
+me there. The bearer of this is our respected court-apothecary
+_Zeusel_, in whose house thou wilt, as court-physician, have thy future
+residence. Farewell!"                     H.
+
+
+"Zeusel?" asks the reader, and ponders the matter. "I know not the
+Zeusels." No more do I; but I say to myself, Is not this carrying
+things too far? And is it not a regular imposition, that the
+correspondent of this work cannot, by all the representations made to
+him by me through the dog, be induced even to arrange things in this
+history in as orderly a manner as they are, indeed, in every wretched
+romance, and even in--a house of correction, where every new
+correctioner rehearses neatly to the old ones, in the very first hour,
+his total _Fata_, even to the introductory cudgelling on entering, from
+which the historian has freshly arrived. By Heaven! people actually
+rush and leap into my work, as into a passengers' room, and neither
+reader nor Devil knows who their dogs and cats are.
+
+"I wish..." said Victor, and made six circumflexes upon it as
+apostrophes of the same number of omitted curses. For he was now to
+pass over from the Idyl of country life into the travestied Æneid of
+city life, and no road is surely more wretchedly paved than that from
+the study into the court smelting-houses and _chambres ardentes_,[100]
+from peace to turmoil. Besides, Emanuel had not yet written. Clotilda,
+the _Hesper_ of those two fair evenings, was like the Hesperus in the
+sky, not to be seen over St. Luna. As we said, it was a wretched state
+for him. And now, in addition to all this, that Zeusel, his future
+landlord, the Court Apothecary, was, so to speak, a fool, full as
+light as his Berlin, or as the court-fourier, with whom he came, but
+fifty-three years older than the carriage, that is to say, fifty-four
+years old, and, taken for all in all, a human diminutive and
+vinegar-eel in body and soul, _peaked_ in all respects, in chin, nose,
+wit, head, lips, and shoulder. This fine vinegar-eel--for the eel
+contends that he understands a certain refinement, which never could
+belong to any Roturier,[101] and he does not deny that his great
+ancestors wrote themselves, not Zeusels, but _Von Swobodas_--was
+travelling with the court-fourier, who administered the
+quartermastership in Kussewitz for the princely bride, toward that
+place, in order to remain there just so long as he was not wanted.
+Zeusel meant absolutely to have influence on the Flachsenfingen court
+by something beside his clyster-hydraulics, and to work upon the court
+household with something more than senna-leaves; therefore he bought up
+at a high price all private intelligence (he improved it forthwith into
+public) which he could collect of new meteorological phenomena in the
+court-atmosphere, and then, when certain people turned somersets down
+from the steps of the throne, he smiled finely enough, and remarked
+that he hoped such persons had regarded him as their friend, and not
+noticed the leg which he had thrust out of his shop-door by way of
+giving them a sly lift. He was, in spite of some good-heartedness, a
+liar from the beginning, not because he wanted to be malicious, but
+refined; and he evaporated his sound understanding, that it might drop
+in wit.
+
+Towards Victor, as future courtier and patron, he knew not, for all
+that, how to assume the upright court-dignity which respects at once
+itself and others; but towards the people of the parsonage he amply
+observed the regular courtly contempt, and showed them well enough how
+little, without designs upon the Lord's son, he should have thought of
+even _looking_ over their garden-wall or window-sill, to say nothing of
+_coming_ over. Victor never hated anything else in his neighbor but
+hatred of other neighbors; and his respect for all classes, his
+contempt for all _eminent_ fools, his disgust at ceremonies, and his
+inclination as a humorist for the little theatres of life, formed the
+greatest contrast to the pharmaceutic infusorium, and to its disgust
+with men and deference for grandees.
+
+Victor gave his landlord thirty greetings to carry with him to the
+Italian _Tostato_ in Kussewitz, who had travelled with him, laughing
+and dancing, a day and a half out of Göttingen. The Apothecary, at his
+departure, left behind in Victor an annoying, sour sediment; even at
+the organ-blower, who brought up the coffee every Sunday, he could not
+laugh as usual. I will explain why he used to laugh at him.
+
+On that day the coachman was shaved, and, in fact, at first
+hand,--namely, by his own. Now the chin of this lazy box-incumbent had
+thrown up more mole-hills--so I euphoniously name warts--than are
+necessary for shaving and mowing. Among these the old man hacked and
+planed on Sunday morning,--for then it is that the common people put
+off at once the old Adam and the old shirt, and leave sins and beard to
+grow only on working-days,--boldly slipping his knife up and down among
+the warty _chagrin_ and cutting away. Now the man would have looked
+pitifully, with his ploughed-up facial foreground,--so that one must
+needs have wept blood at that which ran in red lines down over the chin
+of this stone river-god,--if the Prosector, like a Roman, had, out of
+stupidity, exhibited his wounds. But he showed nothing,--he had more
+sense than that; he picked tobacco-spunk into small caps, and put the
+headpieces upon the sore warts, and so made his appearance.
+
+"Let a Spener, a Cato the younger," said Victor, "just come into my
+study, and not laugh when a bellows-blower follows with coffee-cups,
+and with sixteen scalped warts and his chin bound up in spunk, looking
+like a garden-rockery overgrown with beautifully distributed moss,--let
+a Spener, I say, help laughing, if he can."
+
+To-day he could help it himself. Weary of the day, he went out into the
+peaceful evening, and laid himself on his back on the summit of a steep
+hill; and when the sun, dissolved into a cloud of gold, tremulously
+flowed away over the liquid gloss of the flowers, and swam down on the
+grassy sea of the mountains, and as he lay nearer to the warm,
+throbbing heart of Nature, sunk down upon the soft earth as if in the
+repose of death, drawing down the clouds into him with sighs, fanned by
+winds coming from afar, lulled by bees and larks,--then did
+remembrance, that after-summer of human joy, steal into his soul, and a
+tear into his eye, and longing into his breast, and he wished that
+Emanuel might not reject him.--Suddenly slight steps drew nigh to his
+reclining ears; he started up, alarmed and causing alarm. A heavy
+travelling carriage came staggering lazily up the hill; behind, instead
+of servants, three pale foot-soldiers had thrust their hands into the
+footmen's straps, who had only a single leg among them which was of
+flesh, while they footed it on five wooden stilt-legs or boot-makers'
+signs, which, with something still longer, made of wood,--namely, three
+well-wrought beggar's staffs,--they had taken from the enemy; a
+coachman walked beside the carriage, and a gentlewoman, and close by
+Victor, as he sprang up, stood--Clotilda.
+
+She came from Maienthal. This sudden illumination eclipsed all the
+tables of the law hung up in his soul, and he could not at once read
+the tables. She looked upon him with softer rays than ever, and the sun
+lent some too. With a smile, as if she anticipated his first questions,
+she gave him a--letter from Emanuel. A shrinking "Ah!" was his answer;
+and before he could accommodate himself to two ecstasies,[102] the
+carriage was already at the top of the hill, and she in it, and all had
+gone off.
+
+He hesitated with trembling to gaze, absorbed, into the still, blue
+paradise of the fairest soul that ever overflowed. At last he looked
+upon the traces of a beloved human hand which he had not as yet
+touched, and read:--
+
+
+"Horion!
+
+"Man climbs a mountain, as the child does a chair, in order to stand
+nearer the face of the infinite Mother, and to reach her with his puny
+embrace. Around my height the earth lies sleeping, with all its eyes of
+flowers under the soft mist; but the heavens already lift themselves up
+with the sun under the eyelid; under the paled Arcturus mists begin to
+glow, and colors extricate themselves from colors; the globe of earth
+rolls, vast and full, to rapture, of blossoms and living creatures,
+into the burning lap of morning.
+
+"So soon as the sun comes, I look into it, and my heart lifts itself up
+and swears to thee that it loves thee, Horion!... Glow, Aurora, through
+the human heart as through thy field of cloud, illuminate the human eye
+like thy dew-drops, and send up into the dark breast, as into thy
+heaven, a sun!...
+
+"I have now sworn to thee, I give thee my whole soul and my little
+life, and the sun is the seal on the bond betwixt me and thee.
+
+"I know thee, beloved; but knowest thou whose hand thou hast taken into
+thine? Lo, this hand has closed in Asia eight noble eyes,--no friend
+survives me,--in Europe I veil myself,--my sad history lies near the
+ashes of my parents, in the waters of the Ganges, and on the 24th of
+June of the coming year I go out of the world.... O Eternal One, I go;
+on the longest day the happy spirit wings its way out of this temple of
+the sun, and the green earth opens and closes with its flowers over my
+sinking chrysalis, and covers the heart that is gone with roses....
+
+"Waft greater waves upon me, morning-air! Draw me into thy broad floods
+that stand over our lawns and woods, and bear me in clouds of blossoms
+over sparkling gardens and over glimmering streams; and dizzied between
+flying blossoms and butterflies, melting away under the sun with
+outspread arms, faintly floating over the earth, let me die, and let
+the bloody garment, dissolved into a red morning-vapor, like the ichor
+of the butterfly[103] just released, fall into the flowers, and let a
+hot sunbeam absorb the azure-bright spirit out of the rose-chalice of
+the heart up into the next world.... Ah, ye beloved, ye departed, are
+ye indeed departed? are ye, then, moving along as dark waves[104] in
+the quivering blue of heaven? even, now, in that abyss, full of veiled
+worlds, do your ethereal garments billow around the hidden suns? Ah,
+come back, sweep hitherward; in a year I melt and flow into your heart!
+
+"--And thou, my friend, seek me soon! No one on earth can love thee so
+truly as a man who must soon die. Thou good heart, which these mild
+days press into my hands, even at this last moment, for a farewell, I
+will love and warm thee inexpressibly. During this year in which I am
+not yet taken away, I will stay with thee entirely; and when Death
+comes and demands my heart, he shall find it only on thy breast.
+
+"I know my friend, his life and his future. In thy coming years stand
+open dark chambers of martyrdom; and when I die, and thou art with me,
+I shall sigh, Why can I not take him with me, before he sheds his
+tears?
+
+"Ah, Horion! there lies in man a black Dead Sea, out of which only when
+it is agitated the blessed island of the next world lifts itself up
+with its clouds. But my lips will already lie under the earthly clod
+when the cold hour comes to thee in which thou wilt no longer see any
+God,--in which Death shall lie on his throne, and mow around him, and
+fling even to the domain of nothingness his frosty shadows and the
+lightnings of his scythe. O beloved, my grave-mound will then be
+already standing when thy _inner_ midnight comes on; with anguish thou
+wilt mount upon it, and look sternly into the soft wreaths of the
+constellations, and cry:[105] 'Where is he whose heart crumbles beneath
+me? Where is eternity, the mask of time? Where is the Infinite One? The
+veiled self grasps after itself on all sides, and strikes against its
+cold form.... Gleam not upon me, broad starry field; thou art only the
+conglomerate _picture_, formed of colored earths, on an infinite
+_churchyard-gate_, that stands before the desert of a life buried under
+space.... Laugh me not to scorn, ye shapes on higher stars, for, if I
+melt away, ye melt away also. One, one thing, which man cannot name,
+glows forever in the immeasurable smoke, and a centre without limit
+calcines a circumference without limit.--Still I exist; the Vesuvius of
+death yet smokes above me, and its ashes envelop me; its flying rocks
+bore through suns, its lava-torrents move dissolved worlds, and in its
+crater the former world lies stretched out, and it sends up nothing but
+graves.... O Hope, where abidest thou?' ...
+
+"Float enraptured around me, animated gold-dust, with thy thin
+wings,--I will not crush thy short flower-life; swell upward, giddy
+zephyr, and waft me down into thy blossom-cups. O thou immeasurable
+flood of radiance, fall from the sun over this narrow earth, and bear
+up on thy waves of splendor the heavy heart before the highest throne,
+that the eternal and infinite Heart may take the little ones which are
+nigh to ashes, and heal and warm them!
+
+"Is, then, a poor son of this earth so unhappy that he can quail in the
+midst of the splendor of morning, so near to God on the hot steps of
+his throne?
+
+"Fly not from me, my dear one, because a shadow always encompasses me,
+which daily grows darker, until at last it shall wall me in as a little
+night. I see the heavens and thee through the shadow, in the midnight I
+smile, and in the night-wind my breath goes forth full and warm. For, O
+man, my soul has stood erect toward the stars; man is an asthmatic, who
+suffocates if he lies down and does not lift up his breast.--But darest
+thou despise the earth, that forecourt of heaven, which the Eternal has
+thought worthy to move along as one in the bright host of his worlds?
+The great, the godlike, which thou hast in thy soul and lovest in
+another's,--seek it not in any sun-crater, on any planet-floor; the
+whole next world, the whole of Elysium, God himself, appear to thee in
+no other place than in the midst of thee. Be great enough to despise
+the earth; be greater, so as to respect it. To the mouth which is bent
+down to it, it seems a rich, flowery plain; to man in his _perigee_, a
+dark world; to man in his _apogee_, a glimmering moon. Then, and not
+till then, will the holy element, which from unknown heights is sent
+down into man, flow from the soul, mix itself with the earthly life,
+and quicken all that surrounds thee. So must the water, shed from
+heaven and its clouds, first run under the earth, and well up from it
+again, before it is purified into a fresh, clear draught. The whole
+earth is trembling now for rapture, till all rings and sings and
+shouts, as bells sound of themselves during an earthquake. And the soul
+of man is made greater and greater by its nearness to the Invisible....
+
+"I love thee exceedingly!
+
+                                         "EMANUEL."
+
+
+Horion read through swimming eyes. "Ah," he wished, "were I only, this
+very day, near thee, with my disordered heart, thou glorified one!" and
+now, for the first time, occurred to him the nearness of St. John's
+day, and he proposed to himself on that day to see him. The sun had
+already vanished; the evening red fell like a ripe apple-blossom; he
+felt not the hot drops on his face, nor the icy dew of twilight on his
+hands; and with a bosom illuminated by dreams, and a heart
+tranquillized and reconciled to earth, he wandered back....
+
+--By the way! is it, then, necessary that I should elaborate an apology
+for Emanuel as stylist and as _stylite_ (in the higher sense)? And if
+such is necessary, need I therein bring forward anything more than
+this,--that his soul is still the echo of his Indian palms and the
+River Ganges; that the walk of the better sort of unfettered men, just
+as in dream, is always a flight; that he does not manure his life, like
+Europeans, with the blood of other animals, nor hatch it out of dead
+flesh, and this abstinence in eating (quite another effect than that of
+excess in drinking) makes the wings of fancy lighter and broader; that
+a few ideas, to which he guides with partial hand all the mental sap
+and nutriment (and this distinguishes not only madmen, but also
+extraordinary men; from ordinary ones), must in him obtain a
+disproportionate weight, because the fruits of a tree become so much
+thicker and sweeter when the rest have been plucked; and more of the
+same sort? For, to speak candidly, those readers who desire an apology,
+themselves need one, and Emanuel deserves something better than
+a--criminal defence.--
+
+At this moment the consolation leaped up within my hero like a
+fountain, that he was to begin on Thursday his metempsychosis through
+nature,--his journey. "Deuse take it!" said he, skipping up; "what
+needs a Christian to coin money for the present distress,[106] and put
+on mourning-cloaks, when he can journey on Thursday to Kussewitz to see
+the handing-over of the Italian Princess, and on Saturday to the _Isle
+of Union_, and, what is more, on the same day, which is _one_ day
+before St. John's, to Maienthal, to his dear one, his angel?"
+
+O Heavens! I would that he and I were already about the
+journey,--really it may perhaps, unless all hopes deceive me, be quite
+tolerable!--
+
+During the week-day prayer-hour of Wednesday, two carriages rolled
+along. Out of the full one stepped his Lordship and the Prince; out of
+the empty one, nobody. Old Appel had dressed herself up splendidly, and
+locked herself into the pantry. The Chaplain was happier,--he taught in
+the Temple. Seldom does one make a clever face when one is presented,
+or a stupid one when one presents. His Lordship led his son to the
+Prince's hand and heart, as a collateral security for his future
+loyalty, but with a dignity which won as much reverence as it showed.
+My good hero behaved himself like a--fool; he had far more wit than our
+deference for higher persons, or theirs towards us, allows. A talent
+which expresses itself outside the limits of feudal service may be
+regarded as high-treason.
+
+His wit was only a covered embarrassment, into which he was thrown by
+two faces and a third cause. First, the Prince's....
+
+--If the reading world complains that so gradually, as they observe,
+one new name and actor after another steals into this star Venus, and
+makes it so full, that, at last, the historical picture-gallery becomes
+a regular gallery of vocables, in which they must wander round with a
+directory in their hands, they have really only too much ground for the
+complaint, and I have myself already complained the most bitterly of
+the same thing; for, after all, the greatest load remains on my
+shoulders, inasmuch as every fresh ninny is a new organ-stop drawn out,
+which I have to take into my performance, and which makes the pressing
+down upon the keys more disagreeable to me; but my correspondent
+forwards to me in the gourd-flask, without leave asked, all these
+people to be quartered on me, and the rogue actually writes me I have
+only to tell the world, _There are still more people coming_.--
+
+The Prince's face threw our hero into embarrassment, not from anything
+imposing about it, but because everything of that kind was discharged
+from it. It was a week-day and _current_ face, that belonged on coins,
+but not on prize-medals,--with arabesque lines, which mean neither good
+nor evil,--tinged with a little dead gold of court-life,--anointed with
+a soft oil, which might stifle the strongest waves,--a sort of sweet
+wine, more drinkable for women than men. Of the finest turns, which
+Victor had intended to reciprocate, there was nothing to be heard or
+seen; but of apt and easy ones so much the more. Victor was embarrassed
+by the conflict and interchange of politeness and truth. Social
+embarrassments arise not from the uncertainty and impracticableness of
+the path, but from the crossways of choice and the perplexity of the
+scholastic ass between his two bundles of hay. Victor, whose politeness
+always sprang from philanthropy, must to-day let it spring from
+self-interest; but this was precisely what he could not get into him.
+Beside the paternal face, before which, with most children, the whole
+wheelwork of a free behavior grates and sticks, a third cause made him
+disconcerted and witty,--namely, that he was after something. I can
+tell by the look of every one,--except a courtier, whose life, like a
+Christian's, is a constant prayer for something,--the moment he enters
+the door, whether he calls as an alms-beggar and saint-by-works, or as
+merely a member of the joy-club.
+
+Long before the people left the church, Victor already conceived a
+hearty love for the Prince,--the reason was, he was determined to love
+him, though the Devil himself stood before him there incarnate. He
+often said, Give me two days, or _one_ night, and I will fall in love
+with whomsoever you propose. He was delighted to find on January's face
+no second-hands, no minute-hands, of those assignation-hours with which
+a good Cæsar generally seeks gladly to interleave, as with honeymoons,
+the tedious years of wedlock; but on his face nothing was displayed but
+continence, and Victor would rather swear by the face than by the
+reputation. He misses the mark; for on the male face--although it is
+made of mere printed characters of physiognomy, as certain pictures are
+of written letters--Nature has, nevertheless, written the _matres
+lectionis_[107] and signs of sensuality very small, but upon the female
+larger, which is really lucky for the former and stronger and less
+chaste sex. In fact, adultery is, with princes of the January stamp,
+nothing but a milder sort of ruling and conquering. And yet honest
+regents always return--with pleasure the wives, so soon as they have
+conquered them, to their former lords. This, however, is only the same
+greatness which led the Romans to deprive the greatest kings of their
+realms, in order afterward to present them with them again.
+
+As princes are not, like jurists, bad Christians, but prefer to be none
+at all, January prepossessed our Victor by sundry sparks of religion,
+and by some hatred of the French Encyclopedists; although he saw that
+for a prince religion has indeed its good, but also its bad side, since
+only a crowned Atheist, but no Theist, possesses the invaluable
+_privilegium de non appellando_, which consists in this, that the
+accused party is not permitted (_per saltus_ or by a _salto mortale_)
+to appeal to the highest jurisdiction beyond the pale of earth.
+
+The conversation was indifferent and empty, as in such cases it always
+is. In fact, men deserve, for their conversation, to be dumb; their
+thoughts are always better than their talk; and it is a pity that one
+could not apply to good heads some barometrograph, or compositor's
+harpsichord, which should write off outwardly what is thought within. I
+would bet that every great head goes to the grave with a whole library
+of unprinted thoughts, and lets only some few book-shelves of printed
+ones go out to the world.
+
+Victor submitted to the Prince the usual medical interrogatories, not
+merely as physician-in-ordinary, but also as a man, for the sake of
+loving him. Although people from the great world and the greatest have,
+like the sub-man, the orang-outang, lived out and died out in
+their twenty-fifth year,--for which reason, perhaps, in many
+countries kings are placed under guardianship as early as their
+fourteenth,--nevertheless January had not ante-dated his life so far,
+and was really older than many a youth. The Prince won the good, warm
+heart of Sebastian most by the unpretending simplicity which served
+neither vanity nor pride, and whose ingenuousness differed from the
+usual sort only in refinement. Victor had seen vassals stand in such a
+manner beside the mouth[108] of their liege-lord; that the latter
+looked like a shark carrying a man crosswise in his jaws; but January
+resembled a Peter-fish, which holds forth in _its_ jaws a fine
+_stater_.
+
+The Court-Chaplain, when he arrived, in his astonishment at a crowned
+guest, found it impossible to stir lip or foot; he remained immovable
+in the broad water-spout of the priestly frock, which was thrown around
+him like a sheet of royal paper round marchpane. The only thing in
+which he indulged, and on which he ventured, was--not to put away the
+Bible (the mouse-trap), but--to send his eyes secretly round the room,
+to spy out whether _it_ had been properly stitched, folded, and
+superscribed by the registresses of rooms.
+
+The Prince proceeded at once on his journey with his Lordship, who had
+to reserve his leave-taking of his son and his farewell sermons till
+the solitary day they were to spend on the Isle of Union. The son
+contracted a liking for the company of the Prince, when he thought over
+his demeanor towards his father; he had a double joy, a filial and a
+human, as that father transformed his own happiness into the happiness
+of the poor country, and only for the sake of doing good made
+foot-tracks for himself in the rock of the throne, as in Italy the
+footsteps of angels who have appeared and left a blessing are shown
+in the rocks. Other favorites resemble the executioner who hollows
+out for himself foot-holes in the sand, so as to stand steadier when
+he--beheads.
+
+When the room was emptied, the first of Eymann's members to wake
+up--he still stood in the sentry-box of the priest's frock--was the
+index-finger, which stretched itself out, and pointed out to the
+family-circle the bed. "It would have been more satisfactory and
+serviceable to me," said he, "to have been strangled to death with that
+rag, than to have had his _Serenissimus_ spy it out." He meant,
+however, his own soiled cravat, which he himself had thrown upon the
+nuptial bed,--that art-chamber and wareroom of his linen. Whenever one
+contradicted any tormenting notion of his, he argued it so long that at
+last he believed it himself; but if one admitted it, then he conjured
+up certain scruples, and adopted a different opinion. "His Highness
+must inevitably have seen the tattered thing through the bed-curtains,"
+he replied. Finally he travelled over all the places where January had
+stood, and took observations at the torn neck-tie, and investigated its
+parallax. "We must adhere to the _blinding_ of the windows, if we want
+to have any _peace_," he concluded, and--
+
+So do I.
+
+P. S. I shall always remark after an eighth chapter (because I get
+ready exactly two Dog-post-days in a week), that I have again worked
+for the space of a month. I therefore report that to-morrow June comes
+on.
+
+
+
+
+                         FIRST INTERCALARY DAY.
+
+       Must Treaties be kept, or is it enough that they are made?
+
+
+The latter.--To-day the mining-superintendent exercises, for the first
+time, on the reader's ground and soil the right (_servitus oneris
+ferendi_, or I may say _servitus projiciendi_) which, according to the
+contract of May 4, he actually possesses. The main question now is,
+whether a dog-contract between two such great powers--inasmuch as the
+reader has all the quarters of the world, and I, in turn, have the
+reader--must, after being concluded, also be kept.
+
+Frederick, the Antimachiavellist, answers us, and backs himself by
+Machiavelli: Certainly every one of us must keep his word so long as
+it--is for his advantage. So true is this, that such treaties would
+never be broken, if they were not once--concluded; and the Swiss, who,
+as late as 1715, swore one with France, might quite as well in all the
+Cantons have lifted their fingers and taken an oath they would every
+day regularly--make water.
+
+But so soon as the advantage of contracts ceases, then is a regent
+entitled to break them in two cases,--those which he makes with
+other regents, and those he makes with his own step-children of the
+country,--his subjects.
+
+While I was already at work in the cabinet, (not later than six
+o'clock, with the goose-wing, dusting the session-table, not with the
+pen,) I had under the latter a clever fugitive paper, wherein I
+proposed to show that the _ouverture_ of treaties (_au nom de la Sainte
+Trinité_ or _in nomine Sanctissimæ et individuæ Trinitatis_) was the
+cipher which ambassadors sometimes place over their reports, meaning
+that the opposite is to be understood. Nothing, however, came of the
+fugitive paper but a--manuscript. In this I was simple enough, and
+proposed first to advise princes, that, in regard to lies of necessity
+and truths of necessity, they must have, for every latitude and
+hour, _declinations_ and _inclinations_. I proposed to whistle the
+state-chanceries to myself into a corner, and whisper in their ears, I
+would never suffer it, and, though I had only nine regiments in pay and
+starvation, that my hands and feet should be glued together with the
+sealing-wax of contracts, and my wings clogged with ink. That
+would I for the first time introduce into state-praxis; but the
+state-chanceries laughed at me, afar off in my foolish corner, and
+said, The whistler may believe, himself,--we do the thing otherwise.
+
+In the works of Herr _Herkommen_[109]--the best German publicist, who,
+however, writes no _acta sanctorum_ it is proved that a reigning prince
+need not observe at all any treaties, privileges, and concessions
+granted by his predecessor to his subjects; hence it follows that he is
+far less bound to keep his _own_ covenants with them, since the
+enjoyment of the benefit of these covenants, which consists in nothing
+but the keeping or breaking, manifestly vests in him as proprietor. Mr.
+Herkommen says the same on every page, and absolutely swears to it.
+Nay, can there be a dean or rector magnificus who exercises so little
+reason--considering that, according to a general assumption, a king
+never dies, and consequently predecessors and successors grow together
+into one man--as not to draw from this the conclusion that the
+successor may regard his own covenants as those of his predecessor, and
+accordingly, since the two make only one man, may break them just as
+much as if they were transmitted ones?
+
+Whoso chose to discourse philosophically about this might prove that,
+in fact, _no man whatever_ needs keep his word, not merely no prince.
+According to physiology, the old body of a king (a reader, a
+superintendent of mines) in _three_ years makes way for a new one. Hume
+carries it still farther with the soul, inasmuch as he considers that
+as a fleeting (not frozen) stream of phenomena. How much soever, then,
+the king (reader, author) may, at the moment of making a promise, be
+bound to keep it, still he cannot possibly be held thereto the next
+minute after, when he has already become his own successor and heir; so
+that, in fact, of us two contracting parties of the 4th of May, nothing
+more is extant than our mere _posthumi_ and successors,--namely,
+ourselves. As now, fortunately, promising and fulfilling never enter
+into one and the same moment, herefrom may follow the conclusion,
+pleasant to all of us, that, in fact, no one at all is bound to keep
+his word, whether he is the top of a throne or only a chip thereof. Nor
+will courtiers (the corner-clips of the throne) oppose this
+proposition.
+
+The public is requested to consider the Preface as the Second
+Intercalary Day, for the sake of symmetry.
+
+
+
+
+                            9. DOG-POST-DAY.
+
+           A Heavenly Morning; a Heavenly Afternoon.--A House
+                 without Walls; a Bed without a House.
+
+
+Ah, the poor miner, the delver in rock-salt pits, and the island-negro
+have in their calendar no such day as is here described or repeated!
+Sebastian stood on Thursday, as early as three o'clock, on the
+flying-board of his bee-hive, in order in one day to land in _Great
+Kussewitz_ and be off again before people were up. A reader who
+has an atlas on the floor at his feet cannot possibly confound this
+market-town, where the presentation of the Princess takes place, with a
+namesake of a town, which the city of Rostock has annexed to its
+immovable property. Unfortunately, the whole house loved him so that it
+had already, for half an hour earlier, been out of the morning feathers
+of which the greatest wings of dream are made. Amidst the din of
+carriage-chains, dogs, and cockerels, he tore his tender heart away
+from eyes that were all love, and, as the beating of the former and the
+melting of the latter annoyed him, all grew still worse; for external
+noise stills the inner tumult of the soul.
+
+Out of doors all the grass-pastures and grain-fields were bathing
+in the _shower-bath_ of the dew and in the cold _air-bath_ of the
+morning-wind. He hardened in it, like hot iron; a morning-land full of
+immeasurable hopes encircled him; he stripped his breast, threw himself
+all aglow into the dripping grass, washed (but not with any higher
+purpose than girls have) his firm face with liquid June-snow, and;
+strung with tenser fibres, stepped back from the shower-bath to his
+toilet,--only hair and breast he confined in no imprisonment.
+
+He would certainly have started earlier, but he wanted to avoid the
+moon, whom he could no more marry to the sun than he could their
+respective children to each other,--namely, night-thoughts and
+morning-thoughts. For when the morning-clouds envelop man in their dew,
+when the loving birds dart noisily through the gleaming mist, when the
+sun looms forth out of the hazy glow, then does man, quickened in
+spirit, press his foot more deeply into the earth, and cling with new
+ivy-twigs of life more firmly to his planet.
+
+Slowly he waded through a low avenue of hazel-bushes, and reluctantly
+swept off their chilled chafers; he held himself in, and stopped at
+last, in order to make himself late, that he might not reach the
+neighboring thicket just when the sun was entering his theatre. Already
+he heard the musical _mêlée_ in the thicket; rosy clouds were spread
+like flowers in the sun's pathway; the watch-tower of the parsonage and
+village, that high altar whereon his first lovely evening had glowed,
+kindled again; the singing world of the air hung exulting in the hues
+of morning and the heavenly blue; sparks of clouds darted up from gold
+bars along the horizon; at last the flames of the sun streamed in over
+the earth....
+
+Truly, were I every evening to depict sunrise, and every morning to see
+it, still I should cry, like the children, Once more, once more!
+
+With benumbed nerves of vision, and with flakes of color swimming
+before him, he passed on slowly into the wood, as into a dark minster,
+and his heart swelled even to devotion....
+
+--I will not assume that my reader has such a prosaic feeling in regard
+to morning as to deem this poetic one irreconcilable with Victor's
+character; nay, I venture to presume that his knowledge of human nature
+will find little trouble in discovering the _key-note_ between two such
+distant tones in Victor as humor and sensibility. I will therefore
+commit myself unconcernedly to the happy contemplations of his feeling
+soul, and to my assurance of having all hearts in unison with mine.
+
+The planet Venus and a grove show most beautifully in the morning and
+the evening; on both, at these hours, more rays of the sun fall than at
+any other. Hence our Victor felt, in the thicket, as if he went through
+the gate of a new life, as on this fiery morning he sauntered onward
+with the sun, which darted beside him from twig to twig, through the
+murmuring wood, away along under symphonious branches, which were so
+many music-barrels set in motion, over moss that lay in green sun-fire,
+and under evergreen bathed in heavenly blue. And this morning renewed
+in his heart the painful likeness of _four_ things,--life, a day, a
+year, a journey, which resemble each other in their fresh, exultant
+beginning, in the oppressive interlude, in the weary, sated close.--
+
+Outside in the copse, in the background of the woodland, Nature
+unrolled before him her altar-piece, miles long, with its chains of
+hills, with its dazzling country-houses, which had decked themselves
+with gardens as with festoons, and with the miniature-colors of the
+flowerets which played on the silver line of beauty traced by the
+brooks. And a cloud of enraptured, sporting, buzzing little creatures
+of silk-dust swept or hovered over the undulating picture.--What way
+should Victor take in the labyrinth of beauty?--All the sixty-four
+radii of the compass stretched themselves out as so many fingerposts,
+and he had sense enough not to propose to himself any particular hour
+of arriving. He therefore slipped off everywhere, to the right and to
+the left; he climbed over into every vale that hid itself behind a
+hill; he visited the pierced shadow-projection of every row of trees;
+he laid himself down at the feet of a more than commonly beautiful
+flower, and refreshed himself with pure love by its spirit, without
+breaking its body; he was the travelling-companion of the powdered
+butterfly, and observed his burying himself in his flower, and the
+hedge-sparrow he followed through the bushes to her brooding-cell and
+nursery; he let himself be spell-bound in the circle which a bee drew
+around him, and quietly suffered himself to be immured in the shaft of
+his own nosegay; he exercised upon every village which the motley
+landscape held up to him the right of way, and loved best to meet the
+children, whose days played even like his hours--
+
+But men he avoided....
+
+And yet there leaped from his heart a high fountain of love, which
+penetrated even to the remotest brother; and yet was he so entirely
+free from egotism, from that _sensitive_ intolerance, which has its
+degree and source in common with the _Moravian_.---The reason, however,
+was this: the first day of a journey was wholly different from the
+second, third, eightieth; for on the second, third, eightieth, he was
+prosaic, humoristic, social,--i. e. his heart adhered everywhere like
+hooked seed, and sent the roots of its happiness into every other
+being's lot. But on the first day came veiled spirits from all hours
+into his soul, who vanished if a third spoke,--a soft intoxication,
+which the atmosphere of nature, like that of a wine-store, communicated
+to him, spread itself, like an enchanted solitude, around his soul....
+But why shall I depict the first day before I depict him?
+
+In the first hours of the journey, he was to-day fresh, glad, happy,
+but not blissful; he drank as yet, only he was not drunken. But when he
+had thus for some hours wandered on, with drinking eye and absorbing
+heart, through pearl-strings of bedewed web-work, through humming
+vales, over singing hills, and when the violet-blue sky peacefully
+joined itself to the smoking heights and to the dark woods, rising like
+garden-walls behind each other,--when Nature opened all the pipes of
+the stream of life, and when all her fountains leaped up, and,
+flashing, played into each other, painted over by the sun,--then was
+Victor, who went through these flying streams with a rising and thirsty
+heart, lifted and softened by them; then did his heart swim, trembling
+like the sun's image in the infinite ocean, as the salient point of the
+wheel-animal[110] swims in the fluttering water-globule of the mountain
+stream.--
+
+Then did flower, meadow, and grove dissolve into a dim immensity, and
+the color-grains of Nature melted away into a single broad flood, and
+_over_ the glimmering flood stood the Infinite One as a sun, and _in_
+it, as a reflected sun, the human heart.--
+
+All was one; all hearts grew to one greatest heart; a single life
+throbbed; the blooming pictures, the growing statues, the dusty clod of
+earth, and the infinite blue vault became the beholding face of an
+immeasurable soul.--
+
+He might shut his eyes as much as he pleased, still there lingered in
+his dark breast this blooming immensity.
+
+Ah, if he could have plunged up into the clouds, so as to sweep thereon
+through the undulating heavens over the boundless earth!--ah, if he
+could have floated with the flower-fragrance over the flowers,--could
+have streamed with the wind over the summits, through the woods!--O now
+would he rather have fallen on the heart of a great man, and sunk,
+enraptured and weeping, into his bosom, to stammer out, "How happy is
+man!"
+
+He must needs weep, without knowing why; he sang words without sense,
+but their tone went to his heart--he ran, he stopped--he dipped his
+glowing face into the cloud of blossoming bushes, and would fain lose
+himself in the humming world between the leaves; he pressed the
+scratched face into the deep, cooling grass, and hung delirious on the
+breast of the immortal mother of Spring.
+
+Whoever saw him from a distance took him for a madman; perhaps many a
+one does so still, who has never himself experienced how, through the
+cleared-up, blissful breast, as through the serenest sky, storm-winds
+may sweep, which in both dissolve in rain.
+
+In this hour of his regeneration-day, his genius gave his heart the
+fiery baptism of a love, which clasped all men and all creatures into
+its flames. There are certain precious minutes of rapture--ah, why not
+years?--when an inexpressible love towards all human creatures flows
+through thy whole life, and opens thy arms softly to every brother. The
+least that Victor could do, whose heart was on the sunny side of love,
+was, if any one met him near a mountain, to turn out for him toward the
+steep side,--not to pass by any one who was fishing, for fear of
+throwing a frightening shadow on the water,--to wander slowly through a
+flock of sheep, and, if a child was shy of him, to make a long circuit
+aside. Nothing could surpass the soft voice with which he wished every
+pilgrim more than _this_ good morning; nothing the look of anticipating
+emotion with which in every village he sought to spy out any poor body
+whose calluses and scars and gashes required a sponge or pain-killing
+drops. "Ah, I know as well as an amanuensis[111] to a Professor of
+Morals," he said to himself, "that it is no virtue, but only a luxury,
+to take away the crown of thorns from a lacerated brow, the prickly
+girdle from sore nerves; but this innocent pleasure will still be
+begrudged me, and when on so many roads mangled men are lying, why on
+mine does no one stretch out his hand that I might place in it some
+compensation for this undeserved heaven in my breast?"
+
+He would fain carry his joy to another's heart to be tasted, as the bee
+delivers its mouthful of honey to the lips of another bee. At length
+two children came puffing along, one of whom was tackled as pulling
+beast of burden to a wheelbarrow, and the other harnessed on in front
+as pushing driver. The barrow was freighted with six porous bags full
+of pine-cones which the poor span were hauling to feed a consumptive
+fire. The two frequently exchanged places, so as to hold out; and the
+driver always wanted presently to be the horse again. "My good
+children! can't your father push, then?"--"The tree has broken
+both his legs short off."--"Then certainly your big brother could go to
+the wood?"--"He has to plough over yonder."--Victor stood on the
+fallow-field beside a waistcoat with full as many colors as holes, and
+near a dirty bread-sack, both which belonged to the brother, who at a
+distance was ploughing on the stage of this scene with half a post-team
+of lean cows. The emptying of a full hand into the lap of misery
+lightened Victor's heavy soul, as did the outgushing, which followed,
+of the full eye; his conscience, not his selfishness, was his objector
+to the _greatness_ of his gift--he gave it, however, but in coins of
+small denominations--the children left their merchandise, and while one
+of them ran across the field to the plough, the other ran down to the
+village to his mother. The ploughman in the distance pulled off his
+hat--would fain have uttered loud thanks, but could only blow his
+nose--went on ploughing without his hat; but when at length he called
+out his thanks after the youth, the latter had already escaped far
+beyond earshot....
+
+Do not, dear reader, wish this or the succeeding interlude of human
+sorrow left out of the great scenes of happy nature; and may thy heart,
+like Victor, by giving deserve to receive!
+
+In his good-hearted haste he soon overtook a journeyman blacksmith sick
+with fever, whose travelling-trunk or portmanteau was a filled
+handkerchief; he also carried on a stick a wretched, faded pair of
+boots, which he had to spare, because the other which he dragged along
+on other sticks, namely, on his legs, was still wretcheder and less
+without color than without soles. When he had tenderly greeted the
+feverish man and made him a present, he looked into his pale, livid
+face, and he could not deny him some smart-money.... Ah, the whole
+smart-money for this life is not paid out till we reach a higher! When
+he had civilly questioned him and informed himself about his hungry
+journeyings, about his correction-house fare, about his flights from
+one country to another, and about his thin viaticum which the mistress
+denied him when the master was out,--then was he ashamed, before the
+All-gracious One, of his flower-field of rapture, which he no more
+deserved "than that poor devil there," and he made him an additional
+present; and when he again waited for him to speak, and learned that he
+was fifty years old without any prospects, and when the distress
+overmastered him which he always felt at the sight of _old_ but
+_undeveloped_ men, gray apprentices, old clerks, old dispensers, old
+amanuenses, then was he somewhat excusable for running back again and
+silently giving the astonished old man the new signs of his
+overflowing, benignant soul; and when, at this renewed parting, he felt
+his heart, which was dissolved into love, and only floated, as it were,
+round his soul, thirst more and more for doing good, and felt an
+incomprehensible inclination for fresh giving, and a longing to pour
+out upon somebody to-day everything, everything, then for the first
+time did he perceive that he was now too tender and too happy and too
+giddy and too weak.
+
+So soon as the people in the village had in hand the certain
+intelligence of this transit-toll of generosity, in the afternoon about
+fifteen children stationed themselves on different posts along the way,
+manned the narrow passes, and distributed sentries and _enfans perdus_
+to prevent evasion of the revenue-laws....
+
+A man who, like Victor, construed three straight leagues into seven
+crooked ones, is often hungry, but certainly more so than he;--he took
+merely a Leibnitz's monad-meal out of his pocket, biscuit and wine, and
+appeased therewith the stomach which hung and drew upon his spirit, in
+order not to darken and foul, by throwing in any pieces of flesh, the
+clear lake of his inner being, with its reflected arch of heavenly blue
+and heavenly red. In fact, he hated gormandizers as men of too gross
+selfishness, as well as all living larders, where layers of fat crush
+in the spirit, as masses of snow do a house. The soul, he said, takes
+an odor from the contents of the body, just as wine does from the fruit
+which is near it in the cellar, and in the mephitic vapor in which the
+souls of the Flachsenfingenites bob up and down over the brew-kettles
+which seethe their potatoes and beer, the poor birds must surely fall
+down tipsy and stifled into this dead sea.
+
+He broke his biscuit not in any house, but in the skeleton, i. e.
+framework of a house, which had just come from the hands and axes of
+the carpenters into the sight of the village. As he looked through all
+the divisions and subdivisions of this architectural skeleton, and saw
+at once through sitting-room, kitchen, stable, and loft, he thought to
+himself: "Another play-house for a poor, little human troupe, who are
+here to play out their benefit comedy, their Gay's Beggars'-opera, with
+no voice to cry from the stage-box, _Encore!_ Ah! before these beams
+have blackened to ebony by the winter smoke, many an eye-socket will
+have grown red with grief; many a northwester of life will blow through
+the window upon trembling hearts, and into these nooks, which are yet
+to be darkly walled up, will many a back, sore with bruises from the
+warfare of common life, creep away to wipe off sweat or blood. But joy
+(he went on soliloquizing as he looked at the place for stove and
+table) will also set a gilliflower-tree or two before the window for
+your inmates, and drive up before your house-door, which is yet to be
+hung, and unload its freight of the three holy feasts, and the church
+fair, and the child's baptism.--Heavens! how foolish that I should
+prefer thinking all this in the mere ribs of a house to seeing it
+yonder in the walled-up houses of the village!"
+
+During this table-talk and house-warming-oration, whereat, however, no
+drinking-glass was shivered, the white breast of a swallow swooped low
+across the road, and her bill took up a load of slacked lime for her
+little garret. The wasp shaved off from the joist-work paper-shavings
+for the layers of her bulbous sphere. The spider had already knit her
+spider's house into the larger one. All creatures played the carpenter
+and mason in building up for themselves their little islands in the
+infinite sea; but grovelling man looks not over his shoulder, and sees
+not that all is like him.
+
+Sebastian quitted his wooden inn, his skeleton of a Frankfort Red
+House, more intoxicated with happiness than he could have gone from a
+fully-built one. In certain men a dark melancholy diffuses itself,--a
+shadow of the soul all the greater when the shadows around them are the
+smallest: I mean about one o'clock of a summer afternoon. When in the
+afternoon the lawns lie more intensely perfumed, and the woods with
+drooping leaves stand, more softly sighing and sleeping beneath the
+brooding sun, and the birds sit on the trees as dumb figurants or
+supernumeraries,--then in the Eden that lay sweltering under the cloud
+of blossoms an oppressive yearning seized upon his heart,--then was he
+wafted by his fancies under the eternally blue sky of the East, and
+under the wine-palms of Hindustan,--then did he rest himself in those
+still lands, where, without stinging necessities or scorching passions,
+he sank dissolved into the dreamy tranquillity of the Brahmin, and
+where the soul in its elevation holds itself steady and no longer
+trembles with the trembling earth, like the fixed stars whose gleam
+trembles not, seen on mountains,--then was he too happy for a German
+colonist, too poetic for a European, too luxurious for a neighbor of
+the North Pole.... Every summer morning he feared that in the summer
+afternoon he should fantasy too effeminately.
+
+Fasting, wine, heaven, and earth had to-day so lavishly filled the
+chambers of his heart with the sleep-potion of rapture, that they must
+needs, when anything more was poured in, overflow through the eyes.
+These now gushed forth; and behind his dimmed eyes, in the overshadowed
+inner chamber, lined with the green of nature, and darkened, as it
+were, with curtains of evening redness, a colored night came on,
+wherein all the little shapes of his childhood rose cloudily before
+him,--the earliest playthings of life were laid out,--his first May
+months played like little angels on an evening cloud, and they could
+not in their wing-clothes fly round the great cloud, and the sun did
+not scorch them.
+
+Ah! what he had long forgotten,--long lost,--long loved,--songs without
+sense and tones without words, nameless plays,--buried nurses,--dead
+servants,--all these came to life again; but before all, and greatest
+of all, moved the form of his first, his dearest teacher, Dahore, in
+England, who said to his melted soul, "We were once side by side."--O
+this eternally loved spirit, who even then saw in our Victor the wings
+that lift themselves toward the next world,--who even then was more the
+friend than the master of his so tender, tempestuous, loving, aspiring
+heart,--this never-to-be-forgotten spirit would not leave him; his form
+pushed aside the shroud, began to shine and to say, "Horion, my Horion,
+did I not hold thee by the hand, wast thou not in my heart? But it is
+long since we loved each other, and my voice is no longer recognizable
+to thee, scarcely my face; ah, the seasons of life roll not back, but
+onward, downward, forever." He leaned against a tree and kept drying
+his eye, which could no longer find the road, and his sight was fixed
+calmly on the woods which stretch toward St. Luna, and on the hazy
+hills that separate him from Maienthal and from his second teacher....
+
+Kussewitz burst upon him. But too soon; his soul in its emotion was not
+ready to go among strangers. He was glad to come upon an overturned
+trough, out of which sheep were licking salt, and a hedge-pen, which
+folded them at night, and the hut on two wheels wherein their keeper
+slept. He had a peculiar curiosity and predilection for little copies
+of houses; he always walked into or up to every collier's hut, every
+hunter's and fowler's house, for the sake of saddening and comforting
+himself with his own confinement, and with the parodies of our little
+life and with the ground-floor of poverty. He never went blindly by
+anything small, over which the world's man and business man stalk so
+scornfully; just as, on the other hand, he never stopped before any
+pomp of citizenly life. He opened, therefore, a little door to the
+travelling bed of the shepherd: it looked so poverty-stricken in
+there, and the straw, which took the place of eider-down and silk
+pillow-cases, was so lowly and rumpled, that he felt an indescribable
+longing to enter; he needed now a diving-bell that should separate him
+from the rushing, crushing, sublime sea around him. I wish one could
+conceal the fact from the European cabinets, the Imperial Diet, and the
+Chief Commissary, that he actually laid himself down therein. But now
+the excitement of his senses, into which the door of his bedchamber
+admitted only a small section of the blue sky, soon passed over into
+the exhaustion of slumber, and over the hot eye the lid closed.
+
+
+
+
+                           10. DOG-POST-DAY.
+
+    The Bee-Master.--Zeusel's Oscillation.--Arrival of the Princess.
+
+
+Since the last Post-day our hero has been sleeping. The German
+_Reviewers_ should do me the favor to start him up.
+
+But they are knaves, these headsmen and partners of the censors; they
+wake up neither readers nor princes, but only Homeric sleepers. The sun
+already hangs low, and peers horizontally into his Dr. Graham's-bed,
+and he still lies there glowing in the face of it....
+
+The sheep had to do it with their bleating and bells. When the
+belfry-bell of Great Kussewitz, with the accompaniment of sheep-bells,
+wafted into his opening ears an evening prayer set to music,--when into
+his opening eyes the red outline of the departed sun which had
+illuminated his to-day's paradises entered, and the evening glow, whose
+gold leaves the evening wind breathed upon the clouds,--when the air,
+bedewed like his nosegay, refreshed his bosom,--then was to-day's
+sultry afternoon rolled back a whole week; Victor had dropped upon a
+new island of the blest; new-born and rejoicing, he crept back out of
+his piece of travelling property. "O mad me!" he said; "but I do not
+rejoice extraordinarily in the fact that half an ounce of grains of
+sleep can eat away clean out of man a whole glowing world, and that the
+turning over of the body is the sinking of his paradise and his hell."
+
+On the high road two sedan-bearers went jogging off at a short gallop
+between the supporting poles of their leather die.[112] He made after
+them,--their load, he thought, must be far lighter to them than a whole
+country and its sceptre, both which, however, a regent knows how to
+balance, as a juggler does a sword, dancing, on the nose, on the teeth,
+everywhere. They bore, however, the heaviest thing in the world,
+beneath which cities, thrones, and continents have often broken down.
+
+"What are you moving round with at such a rate?" he asked. "With our
+most gracious Lord!" It was January,--it is, however, quite in
+accordance with the æsthetic and artistic tricks wherewith an author so
+extraordinarily excites the expectation of his readers, that I do not
+divulge what it was of January that sat in the bounding litter, until I
+utter the next word.
+
+It was his image. The bust always travelled ahead before the bride, in
+order to arrive in season at her bedchamber, and hang itself up by a
+nail to the wall. On the whole _sentimental journey_ the _cubic
+contents_ of the bride had slept only in chambers, on which the
+_superficial area_ of the bridegroom hung down like a garden-spider all
+night long....
+
+As I do not mean in any manner to cut myself of, by the barrier-treaty
+which I have concluded with my cousin the reader, from the right of
+making, beside the Intercalary Days, extra-leaves, extra-leaflets, and
+pseudo-extra-leaves, inasmuch as I have, the rather, by certain secret
+and separate articles, which I have made merely in my own head, as the
+Pope does certain cardinals, reserved to myself the privilege, I will
+now exercise the right which my self-made By-Recess offers me on the
+spot.
+
+
+               EXTRA LEAFLET UPON THE ABOVE BUST-PIECES.
+
+"I maintain," said I, in the billiard-room at Scheerau, at a moment
+when I was not striking, "that dukes, margraves, and other graves, and
+many of high nobility, would be stupid, if in our day,--or, in fact,
+in future days,--when the crown grows bald before the chin gets a
+beard,--when many a face wants no requisite for spectacles except the
+bridge,--when particularly the man of rank is glad to be, instead of a
+_cast_, at least an _outline_, of a man,--they would not be wise, I
+recapitulate, if they celebrated no better marriage than a true
+one,--that is, no pictured--one; if their busts were stamped on
+nothing better--that is, on no breast--than on the pewter covers of
+beer-pitchers, so that they could _intoxicate_ people in no other way
+than this latter; and if they, who uniformly act by plenipotentiaries,
+on imperial benches, in session-chairs, in bridal beds (marrying by
+ambassadors), should conceive that in the last-mentioned case there
+were any truer and more innocent chief commissary than their own
+picture on an ell of canvas." ... As we just then played in mass, and I
+happened to be king, and in my fiery state went on to say, "What the
+Devil! we kings understand how to substitute skilfully enough, for the
+_plastic_ arts in virtue and in marriage, the _delineative_ arts; and
+_not merely_ in billiards does a king stand quite idle with his
+sceptre-cue!"--then the fire of my speech might well seem far from
+strange.
+
+          _End of the Extra Leaflet on the above Bust-pieces_.
+
+
+At the house of the Count of O---- (so was called also a famous officer
+in the Seven Years' War, and by Shakespeare the world, and the whole
+territory of an old lady; and, according to Bruce, with the Hebrews
+this vowel was a particular favorite; but this is, after all,
+unprofitable learning here) the Princess and the painted bridegroom
+alighted. Victor would not, with his to-day's dress and his to-day's
+heart, mingle in the tumult of the world; and yet he would gladly have
+seen all.
+
+As he approached Kussewitz, a little red and white house peered forth
+to meet him,--red as a squirrel-cage, and smiling as a summer-house. He
+stepped up to it and to its gleaming windows, but immediately stepped
+back again; he would not hinder an old human couple, for whom the bell
+had been the organ, from finishing their prayer. When he entered, with
+his face exalted by the reflection of to-day's transfiguration, an old
+man turned a silver head, which stood like a mild moon over the evening
+of his life, and a face of smiling wrinkles, toward the guest. Only a
+hypocrite--that stockjobber of virtue--is not, after praying, more
+gentle and complacent. The old woman was the first to lay aside the
+look of devotion. Victor, with his victorious simplicity, asked a
+night's lodging. To grant it to him was what only such contented people
+as these could do; to request it was what none could do, except one
+who, like him, shunned landlords, because their cold, selfish sympathy
+and love, coming and going with every guest, was too repulsive to his
+warm soul. Secondly, he was attracted by the cleanliness which even the
+slut loves in _strangers'_ houses, and which, in them, is a proof of
+contentment and of--childlessness. Thirdly, he wanted to remain to-day
+incognito, and out of the thronged streets, with his soul so
+consecrated by Nature.
+
+He soon felt himself at home; even before the supper was washed and
+picked and ready, he found out, or, rather, took it in, that the gentle
+old man, named _Lind_, was a bee-keeper. The latter I believe; for
+otherwise he would not have been so mild, as, in fact, in most cases,
+animal society is less corrupting than human. Hence Plato assigns the
+Lange's colloquies of man with the animals as the best thing left of
+Saturn's golden reign. It is not all one whether one is a dog-keeper, a
+lion-keeper, or a bee-keeper; for our menagerie in the lower viscera,
+according to the Platonic allegory, barks and bleats in unison with the
+external one.--When Victor actually went with the old man round the
+house and among the bee-hives, then he came back into the supper-room
+with the face of a man who claimed already a seat in the Kussewitz
+Church and a page in the church-book. Did he not already know that the
+bee-father had followed three parsons and five squires in Kussewitz to
+the grave; that he had celebrated his first marriage with his "mother"
+(so he called his wife) at the age in which the silver wedding usually
+falls; that his head had still memory and hair; that he expected to
+carry black eyebrows under the coffin-lid; that he, Lind, had not the
+least need, like old _Gobel_ and even the beadle _Stenz_, for the
+sake of his eyes, to take his place near the church-window, but
+could read his verse anywhere; and that he once every year went to
+Maienthal to church, and thrust a sovereign[113] into the church
+billiard-pocket,[114] because the churchyard there covered all his
+relations on the father's side?
+
+
+O, this contentment with the evening-clouds of life refreshes the
+hypochondriacal hearer and spectator, whose melancholy strings in an
+old man's presence begin so easily to tremble like a death-watch; and
+an ardent old man seems to us an immortal being, hardened against the
+scythe of death, and a finger-post pointing to the next world! Victor
+especially saw, with heavy thoughts, in an old man, an organized past,
+a bent incarnation of years, the plaster cast of his own mummy standing
+before him. Every childish, forgetful, petrified old man reminded him
+of the masters of forges, who in their old age, like the human soul,
+have to undergo a crab-like promotion, and on account of their usual
+loss of sight become casters again,--then head smiths,--then foundery
+apprentices. The good Newton,[115] Linnæus, Swift, went back to be
+foundery-apprentices of learning. But so singularly timid is man, that,
+while he regards his soul, in its greatest _advantageous_ dependence
+upon his organs, still as a _vowel_,--and justly,--nevertheless, in the
+case of an _injurious_ dependence upon the same, fears it may be merely
+a _consonant_ of the body,--and _that_ unjustly.
+
+As a walk about a strange place gives a traveller the best
+naturalization act, and as Victor was incapable of being anywhere a
+stranger, he went--out a little way. There are many nights when it is
+not night. He saw outside, not far from the garden-fence of the senior
+(not the seignior of nobility, but the senior parson), a very beautiful
+girl sitting, buried in a Latin Whitsuntide programme, and praying from
+it with folded hands. A case of beauty and craziness united he never
+could resist; he greeted her, and would not let her roll up and put up
+her Latin prayer-book. The good soul, having lost her prayer-book and
+paternoster, had easily despatched her devotions out of the Whitsuntide
+programme _De Chalifis literarum studiosis_, as she neither understood
+Latin nor how to read, and looked upon the folding of the hands as a
+Masonic finger-speech, which would be readily understood in the _higher
+places_. She unrolled from a paper a sixth finger which had been cut
+off, and said the cloister of Mary in Flachsenfingen, on whose mother
+of God her father had wished to hang it as a thank-offering, would not
+accept it, because it was not made of silver. As Buffon ascribes to
+man's fingers the clearness of his ideas, so that the thoughts may be
+dissected at the same time with the hand, it follows that one who has a
+_sext_[116] of fingers, must think 1/6 or 1/11 the more clearly; and
+such a one, with such a supernumerary writing-finger, could do more in
+the sciences than we with the whole hand.
+
+She related that her father would not marry her till after two years,
+and that his son could get her sister, if she were not only just
+six years old,--and they two had been adopted as children by the
+six-finger,--and that he had his bijouterie shop wherewith he wandered
+from one ducal palace to another; just now in that of the Count of
+O----, together with board and lodging, and that he was an Italian,
+named _Tostato_. Heavens! Victor knew him full well. Without further
+question--for he loved besides to go a Sabbath-day's journey or two
+with any girl or any Pomeranian dog, and used to say he never would
+make the least distinction between a new face and a pretty one, even if
+he were obliged to--he marched off with her straight toward the Count's
+to see her father. He peeled off more and more of the hull of his
+little maid of honor: she was not only uncommonly beautiful, but
+equally--stupid.
+
+But now she ran away from him; the Flachsenfingen Court came travelling
+along, and she must needs see the ladies alight. He kept close to the
+tail of the whole corps, which was still trailing along the street,
+while half the rump was already in the palace. The draggling tail was
+somewhat short and thin, consisting of the Court-apothecary Zeusel, who
+from vanity was on hand with his fifty-four years and his youthful
+clothes and his bumping coach to take part in the affair. The smallest
+man in the world, in the biggest carriage in the world, could so little
+be looked upon as an _entity_, that I count his coach as an empty
+ceremonial coach, in which the coachman shook him about like a dry
+kernel in a walnut.
+
+I will describe more copiously how the coachman winnowed and bolted
+him, and will make it up by being shorter in matters of less
+consequence.
+
+Of course, if I should lay such an imputation upon the coachman as to
+say that he knew how by speed and stones to give the coach-body that
+hard pulsation, which made Zeusel sit more on the air than on the
+coach-cushion,--then would Kästner in Göttingen reply to me, and prove
+that the apothecary himself, by the counteraction which he produced
+upon the cushion by his posteriors, was to blame for the repulsion of
+the homologous pole; but we have, I trust, less to do here with the
+truth than with the apothecary. Victor, as Court-doctor, took a
+_distant_ interest in the apothecary; nay, he would gladly have begged
+the favor of being allowed to get in and sit by his side, that he might
+see more distinctly how the skilful Vetturino sent the ball, Zeusel,
+into the air. But to the weak nerves of Victor comic scenes, by the
+physical suffering which they in reality brought with them, were too
+hard and sharp,--and he contented himself with following behind the
+bouncing box, and merely conceiving how the thing inside rose like a
+barometer to indicate the pleasant weather of the drunken coachman,--he
+merely pictured it out to himself (therefore I need not) how the good
+little courtier at a climax, to which the fellow brought him (who ended
+every lift with a higher one), would thrust his left hand, not into his
+waistcoat pocket, but merely into the coach-strap, while in his right
+he would be obliged to warm and squeeze for an hour a pinch of snuff,
+which for want of a quiet moment he could not raise to his empty nose
+till the rascal of a coachman cried, Brrr!
+
+Come along! said the stupid girl to Victor, and drew him to her
+father's. The Italian made his windmill gesture, and placed himself
+against Victor's ear and whispered into it, _Dio vi salvi!_[117] and
+the latter thanked him in a still lower voice in Italian, _Gran
+mercè!_[118] Thereupon Tostato breathed three or four uncommonly
+soft-voiced curses into Victor's ear-cell. He had not lost his wits,
+but only his voice, and that only by a cold. He cursed and condoled
+about it, that to-morrow, of all days, he should have to be dumb as a
+haddock, precisely when so much was to be cut. Victor congratulated
+him sincerely on that very account, and begged him to accept him till
+to-morrow, not only as Doctor, but also as partner and spokesman; he
+would talk for him in the shop to-morrow, in order the better and
+incognito to see all that went on. "If you will tell me to-day,"
+replied Tostato, "one more funny story." And now when he actually
+produced the adventure of Zeusel with an Italian systole and diastole
+of the hands, and when Tostato grew foolish with laughing at the
+joke,--(the Italian and Frenchman laugh with the whole body, the
+Englishman only in the brain,)--then was it no wonder that he took him
+into partnership at once. His doctorship he began by pulling off the
+patient's stocking and binding it round the untuned throat, for a warm
+stocking is worn with equal medicinal benefit on foot and neck; with a
+garter it would be different.
+
+Now the beauty and stupidity of the programme-pray-er appeared greater
+than ever in his eyes; he would gladly have kissed her, but it was
+impracticable: the Bijoutier followed him about everywhere, eager for
+his witty overflowings, and held both ears under to catch the drops.
+
+He took this occasion, as he thought of the German indifference
+to wit and the fine arts, to lay down the fundamentally false
+proposition,--The Englishman, the Frenchman, and the Italian are _men_;
+the Germans are _citizens_. The latter _earn_ life; the former _enjoy_
+it. And the Dutch are a cheaper edition of the Germans on mere printing
+paper and without engravings.
+
+He was on the point of going back to bee-keeper Lind's: when at this
+late hour of the night--so late that the Court-courier had set down the
+appearance of this comet a whole hour too soon in his astronomical
+tables--the Princess with her attendant atmosphere arrived. As he had
+talked of her so long, he needed nothing more to make him love her,
+than to hear the rolling of her chariot and the silk-rustle of her
+walk. "A princely bride," he said, "can be much better endured than
+another; show me any other difference between a Crown-princess, a
+crowned bride, and a crowned wife, than that which the state-almanac
+assigns." Whoever shall further consider, that he knew her personal
+disinclination towards the Prince, who at his first marriage had
+postponed her for her sister,--and whoever reads now what I here
+mention that Tostato told him she had a handkerchief in her hand on
+alighting from her carriage,--such a one will already be wise enough
+not to be angry at his saying: "I would that these crown-beasts, who
+are suffered to snap off the fair white hands of such a beautiful
+child, as swine eat off the tender ones of children--I would... but my
+wares, of course, will be near enough to her to-morrow to admit my
+seeing the handkerchief, Mr. Partner."
+
+At the Bee-father's, to whom he went home again, there was a more
+tranquil world, and his house stood in the green, silent as a cloister
+of sleep around a holy place of dreams. Victor pushed his little bed on
+the attic floor towards an opening through which the moon streamed in,
+and thus, overhung with hushed swallows' and wasps' nests, he saw peace
+in the form of Luna float down to his own nest; but she smiled upon him
+so potently that at length he sank away dissolved into guileless
+dreams. Good man! thou deservest the bright flower-pieces of dreams,
+and a fresh nosegay of head and breast on waking; thou hast never yet
+tormented any man, never yet supplanted any one, overcome no female
+honor, nor ever bartered away thy own; and thou art merely a little too
+volatile, too effeminate, too gay, too human.
+
+
+
+
+                           11. DOG-POST-DAY.
+
+        Transfer of the Princess.--Smuggling of a Kiss.--Montre
+                   à Regulateur.--Simultaneous Love.
+
+
+Voltaire, who never could write a good comedy, would not have been
+competent to create this Eleventh Dog-post-day.
+
+In regard to the Eleventh Dog-post-day I remark, to be sure, that
+Nature has created plants with all variety of numbers of stamens, only
+none with eleven, and seldom also men with eleven fingers.
+
+Meanwhile life, like shell-fish, tastes best in the months without R.
+
+In reply to this, some say that the pen of an author goes, like a
+watch, the faster, the longer it has been going; but I reverse it, and
+say rather, men who write much make fast writers.
+
+And yet people cannot well bear men who are the fifth wheel of a coach;
+but every baggage-wagon has a fifth wheel strapped on behind it, and in
+case of accident this is a true _wheel of fortune_. Reinhold read
+Kant's Critique through _five times_ before he understood it. I pledge
+myself to be more intelligible to him, and require to be read only half
+as often.
+
+To speak out freely, I cherish some contempt for a head full of elastic
+ideas, which jump with their spring-feet from one cerebral chamber to
+another; for I find no difference between them and the elastic worms in
+the intestines, which Götze saw, before a light, leap to the height of
+three inches.
+
+Of course the following thought does not rightly hang together with the
+foregoing chain of conclusions and flowers; namely, that I am afraid of
+finding imitators, and so much the more as I am, here, myself, one of a
+certain class of witty authors. In Germany no great author can light a
+new torch, and hold it out into the world till he is tired and throws
+away the fag-end of it, without the little ones immediately pouncing
+upon it, and running round and shining round for half-years longer with
+the little end of a light. Thus have I (and others) in Ratisbon been
+run after a thousand times by the boys, who held in their hands
+remnants of wax-torches which the ambassadorial retinue had thrown
+away, and offered to light me to my landlord's for a few kreutzers ...
+_Stultis sat!_[119]
+
+In the morning Victor hastened to the palace. He got a tradesman's
+dress and the shop. At ten o'clock came on the "transfer" of the
+Princess. The three apartments in which it was to take place stood,
+with their folding doors, opposite to his shop. He had never yet seen
+the Princess--except all night in his dreams, and he can hardly wait
+for it all....
+
+Nor the reader either: does he not even now snuff his candle and his
+nose,--fill up pipe and glass,--change his position, if he rides
+upon a so-called _reading-ass_,[120]--press the book smoothly open, and
+say with uncommon delight, "I am somewhat sharp-set for that
+description!"--I verily, am not at all; I feel as if I were to be shot
+with arquebuses. Positively! an infantry-soldier who in midwinter
+storms a hostile wall of the thickest paper, in the opera, has his
+heaven on earth, compared with a mining-superintendent of my stamp.
+
+For one who drinks coffee and sets out to make a description of any
+school-act of the Court,--e. g. of a Court-day, of a marriage, (in
+fact, of the preliminaries thereof,) of a Transfer,--such a drinker
+pledges himself to reproduce scenes, whose dignity is so extremely fine
+and fugitive that the smallest false by-stroke and half-shadow makes
+them perfectly ridiculous,--hence even spectators, on account of such
+accidental touches, laugh at them _in naturâ_;[121]--he pledges
+himself, I say, so to reproduce such scenes, bordering on the comic,
+that the reader shall remark the dignity, and be as little able to
+laugh at them as if he himself were one of the performers. It is true I
+may presume to count upon myself somewhat, or rather upon the fact,
+that I myself have been at Courts and acted the part of master of the
+Harpsichord (whether this was a mask of higher honors or not, I leave
+here undecided); from a privilege, then, which has fallen to me alone
+of almost the whole scribbling Hansa, and to which I actually and
+gladly own my indebtedness for that preponderance which has (by some)
+been detected in me over the so inferior crew of authors in the
+_Scientiâ media_[122] of courts,--therefrom, I say, one should promise
+one's self almost extraordinary things. I fear, however, we shall come
+off slimly; for I was not even able to rehearse to my pupil Gustav the
+crown-suit in Frankfort seriously enough to make him leave off
+laughing. So, too, Yorick never could scold in such a way as to drive
+his people off, but they always took it as a joke.
+
+It would have been my misfortune if I had depicted the transfer of the
+Princess (I thought at first, to be sure, there would then be more
+dignity in it) under the figure of the transfer of a house to creditors
+sealed with a chip of the door, or as a transfer of a fief by
+_investitura per zonam_, or _per annulum_, or _per baculum
+secularem_.[123] But I have luckily hit upon the thought of portraying
+the transfer, under the poetic garb of a historical benefit-comedy,
+with that dignity which theatres give. I have, for that purpose,
+as much and more unity of place--(three chambers)--of time--(a
+forenoon)--and of interest--(the whole joke)--in my hands, as I need.
+And if an author reads through beforehand, into the bargain, as I do,
+the saddest serious works, Young's Night Thoughts, the uncatholic
+_gravamina_ of the Lutherans, the third volume of Siegwart, and his own
+love-letters; if, further, he has never yet trusted himself, without
+first laying before him and running through Home's and Beattie's
+excellent observations on the source of the comic, in order to know at
+once what comic sources he was to avoid;--such an author can safely,
+without fear of vainglory, make and fulfil the promise to his readers,
+that, thus comically guarding himself against the comic, he may perhaps
+be able, not wholly without touches of sublimity, to deliver and depict
+the following
+
+
+       HISTORICAL BENEFIT-COMEDY OF THE TRANSFER OF THE PRINCESS.
+
+                             IN FIVE ACTS.
+
+The half-word Benefit signifies merely the profit which I myself gain
+from it.
+
+Act First.--Of three chambers, the middle one is the scene of the play,
+the trading-mart where they exhibit, the hall of _correlation_
+(Ratisbonically speaking) where all matters of importance are referred
+and matured. On the other hand, in the first adjoining chamber is
+stowed the Italian, and in the second the Flachsenfingen court, each
+calmly awaiting the beginning of a part for which Nature has formed it.
+These two apartments I regard only as the sacristies of the central
+one.
+
+The middle chamber, i. e. its curtain, which consists of two
+folding-doors, at last rises and shows to partner Sebastian, who is
+peeping out from his shop beside the catarrhal half of the firm, a
+great deal. There appears at the door of coulisse No. 1 a red-velvet
+chair; again, at the door of coulisse No. 2, another, a brother and
+relative of the first; these duplicates are the seats whereon the
+Princess sits in the course of the action, not because weariness, but
+because her rank, expressly desires it. One discovers now (caught in
+the Act it may be said to be) a long fringed table, dividing the middle
+chamber (which is itself a hyphen to the two coulisses) into two
+halves. One would not expect that this session-table, in its turn,
+would be again halved by something which a stupid person hardly sees.
+But let a man step into Victor's shop; then will he have a view of a
+strip of silk-cord, which, beginning under the pier-table, streaming
+across the agate floor and under the partition-table, ends in front
+on the threshold; and thus a mere silk-band easily divides the
+dividing-table and thereby the dividing-chamber, and finally
+the divided company of performers, into two of the most equal
+halves,--whence let us learn that at court everything is cut up, and
+even the prorector, in his time and turn, is stretched out on the
+dissecting-table. Of this silk-lace, wherewith the grand seignior
+divides his favorites from above downwards, but into fractions, we
+cannot and must not say any more in the First Act, because--it is
+over....
+
+I found it uncommonly easy to draw up this scene in a serious manner;
+for as, according to Plattner, the ridiculous attaches only to man, the
+sublime, which in my performance assumes the place of the comic, was
+easy to be had in an act where nothing living played, not even cattle.
+
+Act Second.--The stage grows now more alive, and upon it enters now the
+Princess, handed in by the Italian Minister from coulisse No. 1; both
+act at first, like nature, silently on this parade-ground, which on
+paper is already two pages long....
+
+Just one look from the stage into the stage-box! Victor is playing also
+on his own account, in the fact that he picks out from the lorgnettes
+which he has to sell the most concave, and gets therewith a view
+of the heroine of my benefit-comedy.... He saw the confession- and
+praying-stool on which she had to-day already knelt. "I wish," he said
+to Tostato, "I had been her father confessor to-day; I would have
+pardoned her her sins, but not her virtues." She had, in fact, that
+regular statuesque and Madonna's-face, which covers quite as often
+hollow as well-filled female heads; her courtly _début_ concealed, it
+is true, every wave and every gleam of wit and expression under the icy
+crust of decorum; but a soft, childlike eye, which makes us eager for
+her voice, a patience, which remembers rather her sex than her rank, a
+weary soul which yearned for a twofold repose, perhaps for her maternal
+fields, even an unnoticeable line around the eyes, drawn by pain in
+those organs, or perhaps by still deeper ones,--all these charms, which
+grew into sparks, cast into the dry tinder of the partner behind the
+eye-glass, made him in his box regularly half-crazy at the fate of such
+charms. And how could it do otherwise than make one's head hot,
+especially when the heart is already so, to think that these innocent
+victims, like the Moravian women, must see alps and oceans rise between
+their cradle and bridal-bed, and that cabinets export them like
+silkworm-seed in the cornucopia of despatches?... We turn again to our
+Second Act, wherein one proposes nothing more than to--arrive.
+
+Coulisses Nos. 1 and 2 are still choke-full of actors and actresses,
+who must now come out. This is the day on which two courts, like two
+armies, are halted over against each other in two rooms, composedly
+preparing themselves for the minute when they are to march out and
+stand face to face, until at last it actually comes to that point, to
+which after such preparations and in such nearness to each other it
+very naturally must come, that of going away. The cubic contents of No.
+1 stream after the Princess, consisting of Italians;--at the same
+moment, also, the court-retinue from coulisse No. 2 takes up its line
+of march towards head-quarters; it consists of Flachsenfingenites. At
+this moment two countries--properly only their abstracted and
+evaporated spirits--stand quite near each other, and now all depends
+upon the silken strings beginning to operate which I stretched
+across the room in the first Act; for the boundary shiftings and
+population-mixings of two so contiguous lands as Germany and
+Italy would be in one room almost as inevitable as in a _Papal
+brain-chamber_, had we not the string; but _that_ we have, and this
+keeps two populations, threatening to run into each other, so
+effectually apart, that it is only a pity and a shame--honesty feels
+the greatest--that the German Cabinets have not drawn some such cordon
+between themselves and the Italian; and did it not, then, depend upon
+them, where they would apply the cord,--to the floor, or to Italian
+hands or to Italian necks?
+
+When the English General History of the world and its German abridgment
+shall once have so nearly come up with the times as to take in hand and
+relate the year of this transfer, and among other things are able to
+remark that the Princess, after her entrance, seated herself in the
+velvet chair,--then should the Universal History quote the author from
+whom it borrows, namely, myself.... That was the second Act, and it was
+a very good one, and not so much comic as sublime.
+
+Third Act.--In this there is nothing but talking. A court is the
+parlor or talking-room of the country; the ministers and envoys are
+_listening-brethren_.[124] The Flachsenfingen Secretary read at a
+distance an Instrument, or the emption-bill of her marriage. Thereupon
+speeches were whispered,--two by the Italian minister,--two, also, by
+the Flachsenfingen minister (Schleunes),--none by the bride, which was
+a shorter way of saying nothing than that of the ministers was.
+
+Since, now, this sublime Act were verily ended, if _I_ should say
+nothing: it will, I trust, be allowed me for once, after many weeks, to
+obtain by begging and to append a little _extra-leaf_, and therein to
+say something.
+
+            AN EXTRA-LEAF (BY GRACIOUS PERMISSION) UPON THE
+                 GREATER FREEDOM ENJOYED IN DESPOTISMS.
+
+Not only in Gymnasia and republics, but even (as may be seen on the
+former page) in monarchies, speeches enough are made,--not to the
+people, but still to their _curatores absentes_.[125] Even so is there
+in monarchies freedom enough, although in despotisms there may be still
+more of it than in them or in republics. A true despotic state has,
+like a frozen cask of wine, not lost its _spirit_ (of freedom), but
+only compressed it from the watery circumference into a fiery point; in
+such a happy state freedom is distributed merely among the few who are
+_ripe_ for it, the Sultan and his Bashaws, and that goddess (who is
+pictured still oftener than the bird Ph[oe]nix) holds herself
+indemnified, and more and better than that, for the reduced _number_ of
+her worshippers, by their _worth_ and _ardor_, since her few
+_epopts_[126] or _initiates_--the Bashaws--enjoy her influence in a
+measure of which a whole people is never capable. Freedom, like an
+inheritance, is lessened by the multitude of heirs; and I am convinced
+that he would be most free who should be free alone. A democracy and an
+oil-painting are to be put only on a canvas without _knots_
+(inequalities), but a despotism is a piece of _relieved_ work,--or
+something still more rare: despotic freedom lives, like canary-birds,
+only in _high_ cages; republican liberty, like yellow-hammers, only in
+_long_ ones.
+
+A despot is the _practical reason_ of a whole country; the subjects are
+just so many impulses contending therewith, which must be overcome. The
+legislative power, therefore, belongs to him alone (the executive to
+his favorites);--even mere talented men (like Solon and Lycurgus) held
+the law-giving power in themselves alone, and were the _magnetic
+needle_ which _guided_ the ship of state; a despot consists, as their
+throne-successor, of almost nothing but laws, his own and others at
+once, and is the magnetic mountain, which draws the ship of state to
+itself. "To be one's own slave is the hardest slavery," said an old
+man, at least an ancient and a Latin; but the despot demands of others
+only the easier kind, and takes upon himself the harder. Another says
+_Parere scire, par imperio gloria est_;[127] a negro slave, therefore,
+wins glory and honor as much as a negro king. _Servi pro nullis
+habentur_;[128] hence it is that political nullities feel so little the
+pressure of the court atmosphere; whereas despotic realities earn their
+freedom by the very fact that they know so well how to feel and prize
+its worth. A republican in the nobler sense, e. g. the Emperor of
+Persia, whose liberty-cap is a turban and his liberty-tree a throne,
+fights for freedom behind his military Propaganda and behind his
+Sans-culottes with an ardor such as the ancient authors demand and
+depict in the Gymnasia. Nay, we are never justified in denying such
+enthroned republicans a Brutus's greatness of soul, before we have put
+them to the proof; and if in history good were delineated more than
+evil, one would have even now the means of showing, among so many
+Shahs, Khans, Rajahs, and Califs, many a Harmodius, Aristogeiton,
+Brutus, &c. who was able to pay for _his_ freedom (slaves contend for
+another's) even with the death of otherwise _good_ men and friends.
+
+   _End of the graciously allowed Extra-leaf upon the greater Freedom
+                        enjoyed in Despotisms_.
+
+
+The extra-leaf and the Third Act are ended, but the latter was shorter
+and more serious than the former has been.
+
+Fourth Act.--By the act of dropping the curtain and raising it again, I
+have carried the world over from the shortest Act into the longest. To
+the Princess who now, as the German Imperial History announces, is
+sitting--came her compatriots in a body, who neither looked very
+honest nor very stupid, the chief-governess, the Court-confessor, the
+Court-Æsculapius, ladies and servants and all. This court-train does
+not say its farewell,--that has already been said privately,--but
+merely recapitulates it by a silent bow. The next step of the united
+Italians was from the middle chamber to--Italy.
+
+The Italians passed along before Sebastian's warehouse, and wiped off
+from their faces, whose hard parts were _en haut-relief_,--the German
+were _en bas-relief_, a nobler glimmer than that which courts
+communicate: Victor saw among so many accentuated eye-sockets the
+multiplied signs of the melancholy with which he himself was oppressed
+as he thought of the willing stranger-heart which remained behind alone
+under the frosty canopy of the German throne and clouds, torn away from
+her loved ways and scenes, brought before microscopic eyes, whose focal
+point scorches into tender feelings, and bound to a breast of ice....
+
+When he thought of all this, and saw the compatriots, how they pocketed
+their feelings and packed themselves off, because they were not
+permitted to exchange another word with the Princess; and when he
+looked upon the mute, submissive form within there, who was not allowed
+to show any other _pearls_ than Oriental ones, (although the dream and
+the possession of the latter signifies Western ones, or of the evening
+land,--tears, I mean,) then did he wish, "Ah, that I could only, thou
+good creature, draw a treble veil over thy eye long enough for it to
+shed a tear!--might I only kiss that hand, so rudely set up at auction,
+as thy court-ladies are now doing, so as to inscribe with my tears upon
+the sold hand the nearness of a sympathizing heart." ...
+
+Be tender and expand not your hatred of princes into hatred of
+princesses! Shall a bowed-down female head not touch our hearts with
+pity, because it leans on a mahogany table? and shall great tears not
+move us, because they fall upon silk? "It is too hard," Victor said,
+when in Hanover, "that poets and _magistri legentes_, when they pass by
+a chateau, make, with an envious, malicious pleasure, the remark, In
+there as much bread of sorrow is baked, perhaps, as in fishermen's
+huts. O yes, doubtless greater and harder loaves! But is the eye, out
+of which in the badger's kennel of a Scotchman nothing extorts a tear
+but the smoke of the room, worthy of a greater compassion than the
+tender one which, like that of an Albino, smarts at the very rays of
+joy, and which the spirit fills with spiritual tears? Ah, down in the
+valleys only the skin is punctured, but up on the high places of rank,
+the heart; and the index-hand of the village clock moves merely around
+the hours of hunger and sweat, but the second-hand, set with
+brilliants, flies round dreary, despairing, bloody minutes."
+
+But fortunately never is rehearsed to us the passion-history of those
+womanly victims, whose hearts are tossed to the mint, and, like other
+jewels, cast among the throne-insignia,--who, as flowers with souls,
+hung upon an ermine-clad dead man's heart, fall to pieces, unenjoyed,
+on the bed of state, mourned by no one, save by a distant, tender soul,
+which finds no place in the Court-almanac....
+
+This Act consists of nothing but _goings_: in fact, this whole comedy
+resembles the life of a child. In the first Act, there was _providing
+of household furniture_ for the coming existence; in the second, the
+_arrival_; in the third, _talking_; in the fourth, _learning to walk_,
+&c.
+
+When Germany had delivered discourses enough to Italy, and Italy to
+Germany, then Germany, or rather Flachsenfingen, or properly a piece of
+it, the Minister Schleunes, took the Princess by the hand and led her
+out of the torrid zone into the frigid; I mean, not from the bridal bed
+to the wedded bed, but--from the Italian territory of the apartment
+into the Flachsenfingenite, away over the silken Rubicon. The
+Flachsenfingen court stands over yonder as right wing, and has not yet
+gone into the fight. So soon as she had passed the silken line, then it
+was well that the first thing she did in her new land should be
+something memorable; and in fact she did, before the eyes of her new
+court, take 4½ paces and--sit down in the Flachsenfingen chair, which I
+set out vacant for that purpose in the very first Act. Now, at last,
+the right wing marched into fire, for the kissing of hands and sleeves.
+Each one in the right wing--the left not at all--felt the dignity of
+what he entered upon, and this feeling which melted into one with
+personal pride came--as according to Plattner pride is akin to the
+sublime--quite _apropos_ to my Benefit-farce, in which I cannot succeed
+in being sublime enough. Great and silent, embarked in silken bow-nets,
+buried in a gulf of robes, the court-dames sail up with their lips to
+the still hand which is fastened with conjugal manacles to a
+stranger's. Less stately, but still stately, is urged on, also, the
+Adamitish portion of the _Dramatis Personæ_, among whom, unfortunately,
+I see the apothecary Zeusel.
+
+We know no one among them but the minister, his son Mat, who does not
+observe anything whatever of our hero, the Physician in ordinary to the
+Princess, Culpepper, who, transformed by fat and his doctor's beaver
+into a heavy Lot's-pillar-of-salt, pushes himself like a turtle into
+the presence of the Regent and Patient.
+
+No mortal knows how Zeusel torments me. Contrary to all order of
+precedence, I prefer to present, sooner than I do him, the fat
+livery-servants, swollen into knavish stupidity, whose coats consist
+less of threads than of laces, and who bend themselves like yellow
+ribbon-preparations before weary eyes, wont to look on fairer forms.
+Victor regarded, through his English opera-glass, the Italian glazed
+court-faces as at least picturesquely beautiful; on the contrary, he
+found the German parade-masks so worn out and yet so starched, so
+languid and yet so on the stretch, their looks so evaporated and
+yet so brimstone-smoked!... I still keep Zeusel back by means of some
+Easter-lambs or _agnus Dei's_ of pages' faces, soft and white as mites;
+a nurse would like to lay them with their nipple-glass-mouths to her
+breast.
+
+Zeusel was no longer to be restrained; he has broken through and has
+the Princess by the wing--the whole joke of this play, I mean the whole
+serious meaning of it, is now once for all spoiled. This gray fool has
+in his old days--his nights are still older--buttoned himself into a
+complete historical copper-plate, that is to say, into a zoölogical
+fashionable waistcoat, wherein, with his four variegated rings, too, he
+looks for all the world like a green game-wagon, on which the animal
+pieces of the whole chase are painted, and four rings for the ringing
+of the swine's snouts are there _in naturâ_.[129] I must now see and
+suffer it,--as he does everything in the past,--while he, fuddled with
+vanity and hardly able to distinguish watch-chains from gala-coats,
+runs up and catches at some silken stuff to kiss it. It was easy to
+foresee that the man would spoil my whole altar-piece with his
+historical figure; I would absolutely have suppressed the ninny and
+covered him up behind the frame of the picture, had he not with his
+flappers and skippers stood out too prominently and made too much of a
+chattering; and then, too, my correspondent has expressly introduced
+and designated him among the benefit-confederates. It hardly pays for
+the trouble to write--
+
+Act Fifth; since all is now thrown into pickle and the reading world is
+in a grin. In the Fifth Act, which I make without any gusto, there
+still continued to be nothing done,--whereas Tragedy-makers and
+Christians turn over the conversion and all important matter into the
+last Act, as, according to Bacon, a courtier thrust his petitions into
+the Postscript,--nothing, I say, except that the Princess let her new
+maids of honor do their first example in arithmetic and subtraction;
+namely, the problem of disrobing.... And as undressing concludes the
+fifth Acts of Tragedies, where Death does it,--and of Comedies, where
+Love does it,--so, too, would this Benefit-Comedy, which, like our
+life, wavers between Comedy and Tragedy, wearily end with an
+undressing.
+
+                      _End of the Benefit-Comedy_.
+
+
+I was too much excited yesterday. To be sure the Apothecary is the Dog
+and Cat, in my picture, biting each other under the table of the Holy
+Supper; but, upon the whole, the very farce is sublime. Let one just
+consider that all is carried on in a monarchical form of government,
+which, according to Beattie, more than the republican form, helps out
+the comic,--that, according to Addison and Sulzer, precisely the most
+waggish men are the gravest, and that, consequently, the same thing
+must hold in regard to the stuff they work;--one must then see at once,
+from the comic element which my Acts contain, that they are serious....
+
+My hero delivered in the shop a vehement Father Merz's controversial
+sermon _against_ something which imperial cities and towns preach in
+favor of: "That men can act so without brains, the white or the gray,
+and without a particle of taste, as not to be ashamed sinfully and like
+dogs to fritter away the two or three years in which Pain has them not
+yet in his game-ticket, nor Death on his night-list,--not in doing
+absolutely nothing, or in the half bar-rests of chancery-holidays or
+the whole bar-rests of comitial holidays, or with the whimsicalities of
+joy,--what were more laudable?--but with the whimsicalities of torture,
+with twelve Herculean labors to do nothing, in the correction-houses of
+antechambers, on the _tratto di corda_ of tight-strung ceremonials....
+My dear seneschal, my fairest chief-governess, I approve all; but
+life is so _short_ that it does not repay the trouble to make one's
+self a _long_ queue[130] therein.--Could we not shake out our hair,
+and leap over all entrance-halls (or -hells), over all ushers and
+dancing-masters, away into the very midst of the May-flowers of our
+days, and into their flower-cups?... I will not express myself
+abstractly and scholastically; if I did, I should have to say, Like
+dogs, ceremonies grow mad with age; like dancing-gloves, each serves
+only for once, and must then be thrown away; but man is such a curséd
+ceremonious creature, that one must swear he knows no greater or longer
+day than the diet[131] of Ratisbon."
+
+While Victor was at his meal, Tostato was not present, but in the shop.
+Now he had already, the evening before, been unable to get out of his
+head a design of kissing the pretty dunce. "If I can kiss a saint who
+is stupid as a cow but _once_, then I have peace for the rest of my
+life." But, unluckily, the so-called _smallest_ (the sister), whose
+understanding and nose were too great, had to float round the dunce, as
+bob to the angle; and the bob would instantly have twitched, had he so
+much as put a lip to the bait. However, he was cunning, at least: he
+took our _smallest_ on his knee, and danced her up as Zeusel's coachman
+did him, and called this _clever_ one sweet names over her head, all of
+which he dedicated with his eyes to the _stupid_ one (at court he will
+dedicate with reversed dissimulation). He covered up twice in joke the
+spying eyes of the _smallest_, merely in order to do it a third time in
+earnest, when he drew the dunce to himself, and with his right hand
+brought her into a position, where he could,--especially as she allowed
+it, because girls do not like to refuse a trick, often from the mere
+pleasure of guessing it,--amidst his court-services to the blind one,
+offer the other the hasty kiss, for which he had already contrived so
+many _avant-propos_ and lines of march. Now was he satisfied and well;
+if he had been compelled to lie in wait two evenings longer for the
+kiss, he would have fallen deeply in love.
+
+He was again sitting at his masthead when the Princess dined. It took
+place with open doors. She stirred up his wild-fire of love with the
+gold spoon as often as she pressed it to her small lips; she scattered
+the fire apart again with the two toothpicks (sweet and sour) as often
+as she resorted to them. Tostato & Co. disposed to-day of the most
+costly articles. No man knew the _& Co_.,--only Zeusel looked more
+sharply into Victor's face, and thought, "I must have seen you before."
+Towards half past two in the afternoon, good luck would have it that
+the Princess herself came to the shop, to look up Italian flowers for a
+little girl with whom she had fallen in love. In all masquerades, as
+every one knows, one takes masquerade liberties, and in every journey
+the freedom of a fair. Victor, who in disguises and on journeys was
+almost too bold, undertook to speak in the mother-tongue of the
+Princess, and, in fact, with wit. "The Devil," thought he, "cannot
+surely catch me for that." He remarked, therefore, with the tenderest
+complacency toward this fair child in Moloch's arms, simply this in
+regard to the silk-flowers: "The flowers of joy, too, are unhappily,
+for the most part, made of velvet and iron wire, and with the
+_shaping-iron_." It was only a miracle that he was polite enough to
+leave out the circumstance that it was just the Italian nobility who
+elaborated the Italian Flora. She looked, however, at his goods, and
+bought, instead of flowers, a _montre à régulateur_,[132] which she
+requested to have brought over to her.
+
+He delivered the watch to her with his own hand; but, unfortunately, no
+less with his own hand--the reader will be frightened, but at first he
+himself was frightened, and yet thought over the conceit till at last
+he approved it--had he previously stuck on, above the _Imperator_ of
+the watch, a delicate strip of paper, wherein, with his own hand, he
+had written, in pearl type: "_Rome cacha le nom de son dieu et elle eut
+tort; moi je cache celui de ma déesse et j'ai raison_."[133]
+
+"I know this people well enough," thought he; "they never open or wind
+up a watch in their life!" Ha, Sebastian! what will my reader or _thy_
+lady reader think?
+
+She started this very evening for the country she had obtained by
+marriage, the future string-floor of her sceptre. Our Victor felt
+almost as if he had transferred another heart than the metal one with
+the billet, and thought with pleasure of the Flachsenfingen court.
+Before her ran her copied bridegroom or his litter, from which he
+alighted on the wall of the bedchamber. As he was her god, I can
+compare him or his image with the images of the ancient gods, who were
+carried round on a peculiar _vis-à-vis_, called a _thensa_,[134]--or in
+a portrait-box, called [Greek: naos],[135]--or in a cage, called
+[Greek: kadiskon].[136]
+
+Thereupon Victor went with his commercial consul round behind the
+coulisses of the benefit theatre. He untied the silken demarcation-line
+and barring-chain,--drew it up like a disgusting hair,--felt of
+it,--held it first far from his eye, then near to it,--and pulled it
+apart, before he said: "The power may lie where it will,--a silk ribbon
+may insulate bodies politic as well as electrical, or it may be with
+princes as with cocks, who never can get a step farther, if one takes
+chalk and draws therewith a straight line from their bill to the
+ground,--nevertheless this much you see, partner,--if an Alexander
+should displace the boundary-stones, such a string would be, in
+opposition thereto, the best epitome of the natural law and a
+_barrière-alliance_ of the same nature." He went into her bedroom, to
+the empty sepulchre,--that is, to the bed of the risen bride,--into
+which the _sponsus_ could look down as he lay at anchor on the wall.
+Whole divisions of conceits marched mutely through his head, which,
+thus full, he pressed sidewise with his cheek against a silken pillow,
+as large as a lap-dog's, or the side-cushion of a carriage. Thus
+reclining and kneeling, he said, speaking half into the feathers:[137]
+"Would that on the other pillow also there lay a face looking into
+mine! Dear Heaven! two human faces opposite each other,--each drawing
+the other into its eyes,--listening to each other's sighs,--breathing
+away from each other the soft, transparent words,--that were what you
+and I absolutely could not stand, partner!"--He sprang up, gently
+patted down his hare's form smooth again, and said, "Lay thyself softly
+around the heavy head which sinks upon thee; smother not its dreams;
+betray not its tears." Had even the Count of O----, with his fine,
+ironical look, come in at this moment, he would not have minded this.
+It is unfortunate for us Germans that we alone--while to the Englishman
+even a world's-man sets down his hare's leaps, caprioles, and gambols
+as so many elegant _pas_, _forward capers_ and _backward capers_ and
+_side-capers_--cannot possibly march along with sufficient gravity and
+composure.
+
+At evening he ran in again to the harbor of his beekeeper; and his
+tossing heart threw out its anchor into the tranquil, blooming nature
+around him. The old man had meanwhile mustered up all his old papers,
+baptismal and marriage-certificates, and private documents of reference
+for the Nuremberg Bee-father's case, and said, "Let the gentleman read
+them!" He wanted himself to hear it all over again. He showed also his
+"Trinity-ring" from Nuremberg, in which was inscribed:
+
+
+                 "Here, by this ring, you see,
+                  Father, Son, Spirit, three,
+                  Make one sole Deity."
+
+
+The Bee-father went on to make no secret of it, that he formerly,
+before he procured this ring in Nuremberg on a court-day, had not been
+able to believe in the Trinity; "but now one must be a beast, if he
+could not comprehend it."--The morning before his departure, Victor
+was in a double embarrassment,--he was very desirous of having a
+present; secondly, of making one. What he wanted to have was a plump
+hour-watch,[138] won at a raffle where the ticket was twenty kreutzers.
+This piece of work, whose thick hand had measured off the thread of the
+old man's life on the dirty dial-plate in nothing but gay, joyous
+bee-hours, he wanted as a Laurence's-box,[139] an amulet, an
+Ignatius's-plate,[140] against hours of Saul. "A manual laborer," said
+he, "needs really only a little sun, to go warmly and contentedly
+through life; but we, with our fantasy, are often as badly off on the
+sunny side as on the stormy side,--man stands more firmly in mud than
+on ether and morning-redness." He wanted to press upon the acceptance
+of the happy veteran of life, as purchase-money for the hour-watch and
+prize-medal for his lodgings, his own watch that told the seconds.
+Lind had not the heart for it, but grew red. At last Victor represented
+to him that the second-watch was a good fire-ball[141] for the
+Trinity-ring, a thesis-image of that article of faith, for the
+_threefold_ hands made, after all, only _one_ hour.--Lind _swapped_.
+
+Victor could neither be the mocker nor the Bunclish[142] reformer of
+such an erring soul, and his sympathetic whimsicality is nothing but a
+doubting sigh over the human brain, which has its seventy _normal
+years_, and over life, which is an interim of faith, and over the
+theological doctors'-rings, which are just such Trinity-rings, and over
+the theological lecture-rooms and recitation-rooms, wherein just such
+second-telling watches indicate and strike.
+
+--At last he leaves Kussewitz at six o'clock in the morning. A very
+beautiful daughter of the Count of O---- did not come back until seven
+o'clock; that is fortunate for us all, for otherwise he would be still
+sitting there.
+
+The Dog-post-day is run out. I know not whether I should make an
+extra-leaf or not. The Intercalary Day is at the door; I will therefore
+let it be, and only insert a Pseudo-extra-leaf, which, as is well
+known, differs from a canonical merely in this,--that in the apocryphal
+I do not give notice by any superscription, but only slip off from the
+history in an underhand way to mere irrelevant things.
+
+I take up my historical thread again, and ask the reader what he
+thinks of Sebastian's flirtations. And how does he explain them to
+himself?--He replies, and philosophically indeed: "Through Clotilda;
+she, by her magnetizing, has put him _en rapport_ with the whole female
+world; she has knocked at this swarm of bees, and now there is no more
+peace.--A man may sit for twenty-six years cold and sighless in his
+book-dust; but when he has once breathed the ether of love, then is the
+oval hole of the heart forever shut, and he must go forth into the air
+of heaven and be continually gasping at it, as I see by the coming
+dog-post-days plainly enough." The reader has accustomed himself to a
+quaint philosophical style, but what he says is true; hence a maiden
+never sues so eagerly for a second lover for her stage as after
+the decease of the first, and after her vows to throw away her
+recruiting-license.
+
+But how could the reader fail to hit upon still weightier
+reasons,[143]--1. General love, and 2. Victor's maternal marks?
+
+1. General love is too little understood. There is as yet no
+description of it extant but mine,--namely, in our days,
+reading-cabinets, dancing-halls, concert-halls, vineyards,
+coffee-tables, and tea-tables are the forcing-houses of our hearts and
+the wire-mills of our nerves; the former are too big, the latter too
+fine. Now when, in these marriage-seeking and marriageless times, a
+young man, who still watches like a Jew for his female Messiah, and
+still is without the highest object of the heart, accidentally reads
+with a dancing-partner, with a lady member of his club, or an
+_associée_, or sister in office, or other collaboratress, a hundred
+pages in the "Elective Affinities" or in the Dog-post-days,--or
+exchanges from three to four letters with her upon the culture of silk
+or clover, or on Kant's _Prolegomena_,--or scrapes the powder from her
+forehead some five times with the powder-knife,--or with her, and by
+her side, ties up the intensely fragrant kidney-beans,--or actually at
+the ghostly hour (which becomes full as often the sentimental hour)
+quarrels with her on the first principle of morals;--then is this much
+certain,--that the aforesaid youth (provided _refinement_, _feeling_,
+and _reflection_ hold a mutual balance within him) must needs behave a
+little madly, and feel towards the aforesaid collaboratress (that is,
+if she does not by some higglings of head or heart offend against his
+feelers) something which is too warm for friendship and too _unripe_
+for love,--which borders on the former, because it includes several
+objects, and on the latter, because of this it dies. And this is, in
+fact, neither more nor less than my general love, which I have
+otherwise called simultaneous and Tutti-[144]love. Examples are odious;
+else I would adduce mine. This universal love is a glove without
+fingers (or mitten), into which, because no partitions separate the
+four fingers, any hand easily slips; into the partial love, or the
+glove proper, only a single and particular hand can squeeze itself. As
+I was the first to discover this fact and island, I can give it the
+name wherewith others will have to name and call it. It shall be
+christened henceforward collective or simultaneous love, though
+I might also, if I and Kolbe chose, let it be named preluding
+love,--confederate-tenderness,--general warmth,--the fidelity of
+adopted childhood.
+
+To please the theologians and humor their fiddle-faddle about final
+causes, I throw in here the following fixed principle: I should like to
+see the man who, without this general love, could in our times, when
+paired love is, by the demands of a greater _metallic_ and _moral_
+capital, made more rare, hold out three years.
+
+2. The second cause of Victor's so easily falling in love with women
+was his maternal mark,--i. e. a resemblance to his own and every
+mother. Besides, he asserted that his ideas had exactly the pace--that
+is, the leap--of woman's, and that he had, in fact, a great deal of
+woman in him; at least, women resemble him in this,--that their love
+springs up through talking and intercourse. Their love, it may safely
+be said, has not much oftener begun than ended in hatred and coldness.
+An imposed and hated bridegroom makes often a loved husband. "I will,"
+he used to say in Hanover, "get into her heart's ears, if not into her
+heart. Could Nature, then, have built into the female bosom two such
+spacious heart-chambers--one can turn round therein--and two such neat
+heart's-alcoves--the heart's treasure-bag I have not yet touched
+upon--merely for this purpose, that a man's soul should hire these four
+apartments all alone without a mother's son beside, as a female soul
+inhabits the four cerebral chambers of the head's female suite? Quite
+impossible! and in fact they do no such thing: but (but whoever is
+afraid of immoderate wit, let him now step out of my track) in the two
+wings of this rotunda and in the side-buildings everything takes up its
+quarters that goes in, i. e. more than comes out--as in a toll-house or
+pigeon-house there is a constant coming and going--one cannot count, if
+one is there to see--it is a beautiful _temple_ in which there is
+_right of thoroughfare_.--Such regard not the few who so shut
+themselves up as to give the chief box of the heart to only a single
+lover, and merely the two side boxes to a thousand friends."
+
+Nevertheless Jean Paul never could succeed--though there might be ever
+so much surplus room--even so far as to get into the heart's ears,
+which, to be sure, is the very least thing. Because his face looks too
+meagre, his complexion too sallow, his head is much fuller than his
+pocket, and his income that of a titular-mining-superintendency: so
+they quarter the good rogue merely in the _coldest_ place away up under
+the eaves of the _head_ not far from the hair-pins,[145]--and there he
+is still sitting now and laughing out (in writing) his Eleventh
+Chapter....
+
+
+
+
+                           12. DOG-POST-DAY.
+
+   Polar Fantasies.--The singular Isle of Union.--One more Bit from
+     previous History.--The Stettin-Apple as Coat-of-Arms.
+
+
+We are living now in the dark middle-ages of this Biography, and
+reading on toward the enlightened eighteenth century or Dog's-day.
+Still, even in this twelfth, as in the night before a fair day, great
+sparks fly. "Spitz," said I, "eat me out of what thou wilt, only
+enlighten the world."
+
+Sebastian hastened on Saturday with joyful soul under an overclouded
+heaven to the island of Union. He could arrive there, if he did not
+delay, before the cloudiness was absorbed. Under a blue heaven, like
+Schickaneder[146] he brought out the Tragedies, but under an ashen-gray
+one the comedies, of his inner man. When it rained, he absolutely
+laughed out. Rousseau built up in his brain an _emotional_ stage,
+because he cared neither to go out of the coulisse nor into a box of
+actual life; but Victor had in his pay between the bony walls of his
+head a _comic_ theatre of the Germans, merely for the sake of not
+ridiculing _actual_ men; his humor was as ideal as the virtue and
+sensibility of other people. In this mood he delivered (like a
+ventriloquist) purely internal discourses to all Potentates;--he posted
+himself on the bench of Knights with church-visitation-discourses,--on
+the bench of the cities with funeral-discourses,--in the Papal chair he
+held forth in straw-wreath[147]-discourses to the _virgin_ Europe and
+the Ecclesiastical _bride_. The potentates had all, to answer him
+again, but one may imagine _how_--when he, like a minister from his
+prompter's hole put everything into their mouths;--and then, to be
+sure, he went his way and made fun of every one of them.
+
+Mandeville says in his Travels, that at the North Pole in the
+winter-half of the year every word freezes, but in the summer-half
+thaws out again and is audible. This intelligence Victor pictured out
+to himself on the way to the island; we will lay our ears to his head
+and listen to the inner buzzing.
+
+"Mandeville and I are not at all obliged to explain why at the North
+Pole words, as well as spittle, turn to ice as they fall, just as
+quicksilver does there; but we are obliged to reason from the
+phenomenon. If a laughing heir wishes there long years to his testator:
+the good man does not hear the wish sooner than the following spring,
+which may already have laid him dead. The best Christmas sermons do not
+edify good souls before haying-time. Vainly does the Polar court lay
+its New-Year's wishes before _Serenissimo_; he hears them not, till
+warm weather, and by that time half of them have already miscarried.
+They ought, however, to place a _circular stove_ as speaking-trumpet in
+the antechamber, so that one might hear in the _warmth_ the court
+speaker. An oratorical brother, without a stove-heater, would there be
+a defeated man. The faro-player, to be sure, vents his curses on St.
+Thomas's day; but not until St. John's day, when he has already won
+again, do they begin to travel;[148] and one might make summer-concerts
+out of the winter ones without any instruments: all one has to do is to
+seat one's self in the hall. From what other cause can it arise that
+the Polar wars are often carried on half-years before the declaration
+of war, except from this, that the declaration issued in winter does
+not make itself heard till _good weather_?--And so, too, one cannot
+hear anything of the winter-campaigns of the Polar armies till during
+the summer-campaigns. I, for my part, should prefer to travel to the
+Pole so as to be there only in winter, merely for the sake of uttering
+real insults to the people's, particularly the court-retinue's, face;
+by the time they came at last to hear them, the defamer would be snugly
+ensconced again at Flachsenfingen.--Their winter-amusements are not to
+blame for it, if the Northern administration fails to propose and
+decide a multitude of the weightiest things: but only during the
+canicular holidays is the voting to be heard; and then, too, can the
+decisions of the chamber upon matters of grace and _forest-law_ take
+shape in speech. But, O ye saints, if I at the Pole--while the sun was
+in Capricorn and my heart in the sign of the Crab--should fall down
+before the fairest woman, and in the longest night make to her
+declarations of love all night long, which, however, in a third of
+a third[149] assumed the form of ice and reached her in a frozen
+state,--i. e. did not reach her ears at all,--what should I do in
+summer, when I had already grown cold and already possessed her, if at
+the very hour in which I was hoping to have a good quarrel with her,
+now, in the midst of the scolding, my Capricorn-love-declarations
+should begin to thaw out and to utter themselves? I could do nothing
+with any composure, but to make the rule, Let any one be tender at the
+Pole, but only in Aries or Cancer. And if, finally, the transfer of a
+Princess should take place at the Pole, and, in fact, at that point
+where the earth does not move, which is best suited to the twofold
+inactivity of a Princess and a lady, and if the transfer should
+actually occur in a hall, where every one, particularly Zeusel, had in
+the long winter evenings slandered her; then, when the air in the hall
+began to repeat the slanders, and Zeusel in his distress sought to
+escape,--then would I pat his shoulder in a friendly manner and say,
+Whither away, my friend?"--
+
+"To Grosskussewitz, I help in the catching department," replied the
+veritable beadle of St. Luna, who behind some masonry had with one hand
+unclasped a book and with the other buttoned up a wallet. Victor felt a
+happy pressure upon his heart at an antique from St. Luna. He asked him
+about everything with an eagerness that seemed as if he had been away
+for an eternity _a parte ante_.[150] The reader who buttoned up his
+wallet became an author, and drew up at sight for the gentleman the
+year-books, i. e. hour-books of what had since occurred in the village.
+Into twenty questions Victor involved the one he had to put about
+Clotilda, and learned that she had been hitherto every day at the
+Parson's. This vexed him. "As if," thought he, "I had not strength of
+soul enough to look upon a friend's love,--and then too, as if----." In
+fact, he thought, at such a distance, he was the more at liberty to
+think of her.
+
+The reading constable was a reader under my jurisdiction: the book
+which he carried about on his poaching-expeditions after thieves was
+the _Invisible Lodge_.[151] Victor requested the First Part to be
+handed to him: the Beadle was in the Second, just at the Pyramid, at
+the moment of the first kiss. Our hero made more and more rapid strides
+in reading and in walking, and ended book and walk together.
+
+The island stood before him!--Here, on this island, my reader, open
+both eyes and ears!... Not that any memorable things presented
+themselves,--for these would of themselves make their way into
+half-open ears and pupils,--but for the very reason that only everyday
+matters are to be recorded.
+
+His Lordship stood alone on the shore of the sea which flowed round the
+island, and awaited and received him with a seriousness which veiled
+his friendliness, and with an emotion which still wrestled with his
+wonted coldness. He was going now to cross over to the island, and yet
+Victor saw no means of transportation. There was no boat there; nor
+would it have been practicable to get one off, because iron spikes
+stood under the water in such numbers and direction that no boat could
+move. The guard that had hitherto been stationed on the shore to
+protect the island against the destructive curiosity of the populace
+was to-day removed. The father went with his son slowly around the
+shore, and dislodged out of their beds, one after another, twenty-seven
+stones which lay at equal distances from each other. The island had
+been constructed _before_ his Lordship's blindness, and _then_ was
+not yet prohibited to strangers; but during that affliction he
+had caused its interior to be completed and concealed by unknown
+nocturnal workmen. During the tour round the island Victor saw its
+fruit-espaliers of high tree-stems, which seemed to direct their
+shadows and voices toward the interior of the island, and whose
+foliage-work the tossing waves sprinkled with their broken suns and
+stars; bean-trefoils clasped the pine-trees, and round the cones
+ringlets of purple blossoms played their antics; the silver-poplar
+bowed down under the enthroned oak; fiery bushes of Arabian beans
+blazed from farther in out of leafy curtains; trees, grafted by
+approach, on double stems latticed up the avenues from the eye; and by
+the side of a fir, which overtopped all the summits, was a taller one,
+which had been bent down by storms half over the water, and which
+rocked itself above its grave. White columns lifted up in the middle of
+the island a Grecian temple, immovable above all the wavering
+treetops.--Sometimes a stray tone seemed to run through the green Holy
+of Holies. A tall, black gate reached to the tops of the pines, and,
+painted with a white sun-disk, looked toward the east, and seemed to
+say to man, Pass through me; not only thy Creator, but thy brother, has
+worked, here!--
+
+Opposite to this gate lay the twenty-seventh stone. Victor's father
+displaced it, took out a magnet, bent down, and held its _south_ pole
+to the gap. Suddenly machines began to gnar, and the waves to whirl,
+and an iron bridge rose out of the water. Victor's soul was overfilled
+with dreams and expectations. Shuddering, he followed his father, and
+set foot upon the magic island. Here his father touched a thin stone
+with the _north_ end of the magnet, and the iron bridge sank down
+again. Before they stepped up to the elevated gate a key turned itself
+from within, and unlocked, and the gate flew open. His Lordship was
+silent. On his face a higher soul had risen like a sun: one no longer
+knew him; he seemed to be transformed into the genius of this magic
+island.
+
+What a scene! So soon as the gate was opened there ran to and fro
+through all twigs an harmonious murmur; breezes flew in through the
+gate, and absorbed the sounds into themselves, and floated on with
+them, trembling, and reposed only on bended blossoms.--Every step
+opened farther a great, sombre stage.--Round about the scene lay marble
+fragments, on which the blacksmiths' coals had drawn forms of
+Raphael's, sunken Sphinxes, map-stones, whereon dim Nature had etched
+little ruins and effaced cities, and deep openings in the earth, which
+were not so much graves as moulds for bells that had been cast therein.
+Thirty poisonous trees stood twined round with roses, as if they were
+signs of the thirty years of man's passionate madness. Three-and-twenty
+weeping birches had bent themselves down to form a low bush-work, and
+were crowded into each other; into this bush ran all the paths of the
+island. Behind the bushes ninefold crape-veils, in waves that mutually
+swallowed each other, obscured the sight of the high temple; through
+the veils five lightning-rods rose into the heavens, and a rainbow,
+formed of two shoots of water that leaped up and arched over into each
+other, hovered glittering over the twigs, and evermore the two streams
+arched themselves aloft, and evermore they shivered each other to
+pieces overhead by their contact.
+
+As Horion led his son, whose heart was grasped, affrighted, oppressed,
+kindled, chilled, by invisible hands, into the low birch thicket, the
+stammering dead-man's-tongue of an organ-trill began to speak, through
+the lone silence, to the sigh of man, and the tremulous tone sank too
+deeply into a soft heart.--There stood the two on a grave darkly built
+over with bush-work; on the grave lay a black marble, on which were
+chiselled a bloodless white heart, with a veil over it, and the pale
+words, "_It is at rest_." "Here," said his Lordship, "my second eye
+became blind; _Mary's_[152] coffin lies in this grave; when that
+arrived at the island from England, the diseased eye was too severely
+inflamed, and never saw again."--Never did Victor shudder so; never did
+he see on a face such a chaotic, shifting world of flying, coming,
+conflicting, vanishing emotions; never did such an ice of brow and
+eyes congeal upon convulsive lips;--and so a father looked, and a son
+felt every sensation repeated in himself.
+
+"I am unhappy," said his father, slowly; a more bitter, biting tear
+burned on the pupil of his eye; he hesitated a little, and placed his
+five open fingers upon his heart, as if he would grasp and pluck it
+out, and looked upon the pale stone one as if he would say, Why is not
+mine resting too? The good, dying Victor, crushed with the anguish of
+affection, melting into pity, longed to--fall upon the dear, desolated
+bosom, and to say more than the sigh, "O God, my good father!" But his
+Lordship gently repelled him, and the tear of gall, unshed, was stifled
+by the eyelids. His Lordship resumed, but more coldly: "Think not that
+I am specially affected; think not that I desire a joy or deprecate a
+sorrow: I live now without hope, and without hope I die."
+
+His voice came cutting over ice-fields; his glance was made sharp by
+frost.
+
+He continued: "When I have, perhaps, made _seven_ human beings happy,
+then must it be inscribed on _my_ black marble, _It rests_.... Why dost
+thou wonder so? Art thou even _now_ at peace?"--The father stared at
+the white heart, and then stared more fixedly straight before him, as
+if a shape had risen out of the grave,--the freezing eye laid and
+turned itself about on a rising tear, as if to smother it. Suddenly he
+drew back a veil from a mirror, and said, "Look in, but embrace me
+immediately after!" ... Victor gazed into the mirror, and saw, with a
+shudder, an eternally loved face appear therein,--the face of his
+teacher _Dahore_; his knees smote together, but still he did not look
+over, his shoulder, and embraced that father who was without hope.
+
+"Thou tremblest far too violently," said his Lordship; "but ask me not,
+my dear boy, why all is so. At a certain stage of years one opens no
+more the old breast, full as it may be."
+
+Ah, I pity thee! For _those_ wounds which can be disclosed are not
+deep; _that_ grief which a humane eye can discover, a soft hand
+alleviate, is but small; but the woe which a friend must not see,
+because he cannot take it away,--that woe which sometimes rises into
+the eye in the midst of blessedness in the form of a sudden trickle
+which the averted face smothers,--_this_ hangs in secret more and more
+heavily on the heart, and at last breaks it, and goes down with it
+under the healing sod. So are iron balls tied to man when he dies on
+the sea, and they sink with him more quickly into his vast grave.--
+
+He continued: "I am going to tell thee something; but swear, here upon
+these precious ashes, never to divulge it. It concerns thy Flamin, and
+from him thou must conceal it."
+
+Victor, so hurled from one wave to another, started at this. He
+remembered that Flamin had wrung from him on the watch-tower the
+promise, that, if ever they should have offended each other too sorely,
+they would die together. He hesitated to take the oath; at last he
+said, "But shortly before my death may I tell it to him?"
+
+"Canst thou know when that will be?" said his father.
+
+"But in case--?"
+
+"Then!" said his father, coldly and curtly.--
+
+Victor swore, and trembled at the future import of the oath.
+
+He also had to promise not to visit this dark island before his
+Lordship's return.
+
+They passed out of the leafy mausoleum, and sat down on an overturned
+stalactite. At times, during the conversation, a strange harmonica-tone
+fell from leaf to leaf, and, at a great distance, the four rivers of
+Paradise seemed to go sounding away under a zephyr that trembled with
+it.
+
+The father began: "Flamin is Clotilda's brother, and the Prince's
+son."--
+
+Only such a lightning-flash of thought could now have penetrated into
+Victor's already dazzled soul; a new world now started up within him,
+and snatched him away from the great one before his senses.--
+
+"Furthermore," continued Horion, "January's three other children still
+live in England,--only the fourth, on the Seven Islands, is invisible."
+Victor comprehended nothing; his Lordship rent away all veils from the
+past, and introduced him to a new outlook into the life immediately
+before him, and into that which had flown away. I shall, in the sequel,
+communicate all his Lordship's disclosures and secrets to the reader;
+at present I will first relate the leave-taking of father and son.
+
+While his Lordship accompanied his son into the dusky, subterranean
+passages of former times, and told him all that he concealed from the
+world, tears started from Victor's eyes at many a trifle which could
+not deserve any; but the stream of these soft eyes,--it was not the
+narrative, but the returning contemplation of his unhappy father
+and the neighborhood of the buried and mouldering fair form and of
+the funereal marble, that wrung it out of the incessantly weeping
+heart.--At last all tones on the island ceased,--the black gate seemed
+to shut to,--all was still,--his Lordship came to an end with his
+revelations, and said, "Fulfil thy purpose of going to-day to
+Maienthal, and be cautious and happy!"--But although he took his leave
+with that refined reserve which in his rank guides and governs the
+hands and arms of even parents and children, still Victor pressed his
+childish bosom, so big with sighs and emotions, to his father's, with
+such an intensity as if he would fain crush in two his impoverished
+heart for the sake of the tears which he was compelled to let rise to
+sight ever hotter and larger. Ah, the forsaken one! When the bridge
+which clove asunder the father's and the son's days had risen up,
+Victor went over it alone, staggering and speechless; and when it had
+sunk into the water again, and the father had disappeared into the
+island, pity weighed him down to the ground; and when he had drawn all
+his tears, like arrows, out of his suffering heart, slowly and dreamily
+he quitted the still region of riddles and sorrows, and the dark
+funeral garden of a dead mother and a gloomy father, and his whole
+agitated soul cried incessantly, "Ah, good father! hope at least, and
+come back again, and forsake me not!"--
+
+And now all that in the foregoing part of the story has created
+obscurities, all that his Lordship exposed to his son, we will explain
+to ourselves also. It will still be remembered that, at the time when
+he set out for France to fetch away the Prince's children,--the
+so-called Welshman, Brazilian, and Asturian, and the _Monsieur_,--the
+dark intelligence of their abduction came to hand. This abduction,
+however, he had (as he now confessed) himself arranged,--only the
+disappearance of the _Monsieur_ on the Seven Islands had occurred
+without his knowledge, and he could therefore with his untruth mix some
+truth, as mouth-glue. These three children he caused secretly to be
+taken to England, and educated at Eton for scholars, and in London
+for civilians,[153] in order to give them back to their father as
+blood-related assistants of his tottering administration. Hence he had
+helped the so-called Infante (Flamin) become an administrative
+councillor. So soon as he once gets the whole infant colony together,
+he means to surprise and bless the father with the delightful
+apparition. The (at present) invisible son of the Chaplain, who before
+the embarkation took the small-pox and blindness, he therefore keeps in
+the dark, because otherwise it would be too easily guessed to whom
+Flamin properly belonged.
+
+Victor asked him how he would convince the Prince of a relationship to
+four or five strangers. "By my word," was Horion's first reply; then he
+subjoined the remaining evidences,--in Flamin's case, the testimony of
+his mother (the niece), who would come with him; in the case of the
+others; their resemblance to their pictures, which he still possessed,
+and finally the maternal mark of a Stettin apple.
+
+Victor had already often heard from the Parson's wife that all
+January's sons had a certain mother's or father's mark on the left
+shoulder-blade, which looked like nothing, except in autumn, when the
+Stettins ripen; then it also grew red, and resembled the original. The
+reader himself must remember, in the annals of the curious and learned
+societies, whole fruit-basketfuls of cherries, whose red pencilling was
+only faint on children, and heightened in redness not until the
+ripening of the prototypes on the twigs. If I could believe a
+fellow-bather of mine, I myself should have such a Stettin fruit-piece
+hanging on my shoulder; the thing is not probable nor important;
+meanwhile next autumn,--for I have proposed it to myself several
+autumns, but now Knef, through his dog, reminds me of it,--so soon as
+the Stettins mature, I might, to be sure, take a looking-glass and
+examine myself behind.--And on the same ground this Stettin festoon
+puts off the return of his Lordship, at least the transfer and
+recognition of the children, till the autumnal season of its
+reddening.--
+
+I make no scruple of communicating here a satirical note from my
+correspondent. "Make believe," he writes, "in regard to this
+intelligence, as if you did it at my behest, and, when you have once
+related his Lordship's _exposé_ and revelation, very quietly relate it
+over to your reader a second time; so that he may not forget, or get it
+confused. One cannot cheat readers enough, and a clever author will be
+fond of leading them into marten-traps, wolf-pits, and deer-nets." I
+confess, for such tricks I always had a poor talent; and, in fact, will
+it not be more creditable, both to me and to the reader, if he fixes it
+at once in his mind, at first hearing, that Flamin is January's natural
+and Le Baut's assumed son,--that the Parson's is blind, and not yet
+apparent,--that three or four other children of January's, from the
+Gallic seaboard towns, are still to follow;--more creditable, I say,
+than if I should now have to chew it over for him a second time, (in
+fact, it would be a third time,) that Flamin is January's natural and
+Le Baut's assumed son,--that the Parson's is blind, and not yet
+apparent,--and that three or four other children of January's, from the
+Gallic seaboard towns, are still to follow?
+
+The reason why his Lordship required of his son the oath of silence
+towards Flamin was, that the latter, by his native honesty, kept all
+secrets, but in a heat of passion betrayed all; because in such a case
+he would make his birth tell, merely for the sake of backing himself in
+a quarrel with an adversary; because he might the very next day, on
+account of this revelation, become, instead of a fencing-master with
+the sword of Themis, a fencing-scholar with the war-blade; and because,
+in fact, a secret, like love, fares still better between two partners
+than among three. His Lordship thought, too, that out of a man to whom
+you gave money in order that he might become something, more would be
+made than out of one who should be something because he had money, and
+who looked upon the coins as his hereditary arms, and not as the
+prize-medals laid out for his future redemption of them.
+
+After all these developments, his Lordship made to our Victor still one
+more, and a weighty one, upon which he was always to look back on the
+icy career of his future court-life as to a warning-tablet.
+
+When his Lordship was struck blind before the house that held the ashes
+of his beloved, his whole correspondence with England, with the niece
+and with the tutors of the princely children, was embarrassed, or at
+least changed. He was obliged to have the letters received by him read
+to him by a friend whom he could trust: but he could trust no one. Only
+one female friend he found out who deserved the distinguished
+preference of his confidence, and that was none else than Clotilda. He
+who did not, like a youth, squander his secrets, could nevertheless
+venture to put Clotilda in possession of his greatest, and to make
+her book-keeper and reader to him of the letters of her mother, the
+so-called niece. In fact, he held women's power of keeping a secret to
+be greater than ours,--at least in weighty matters and in the concerns
+of men whom they love.--But just hear what the Devil did last winter:
+to me it is memorable.
+
+His Lordship received a letter from Flamin's mother, in which she
+renewed her old entreaties for a speedier promotion of the beloved
+child, and her inquiries after his fortunes at the Parsonage. Luckily
+just then Clotilda was making a visit at St. Luna, and saved him the
+journey to Maienthal. He visited the Chamberlain, to hear the letter
+from the mouth of his reader. He had great difficulty in securing in
+Clotilda's chamber an hour free from eavesdroppers. When he at last got
+it, and Clotilda began to read to him the letter, the latter was called
+away from the reading by her step-mother. He hears her immediately come
+back again, read the letter over in a sort of darkly murmuring tone,
+and say softly that she was going away again, but would come back in a
+moment. After some minutes Clotilda appears, and when his Lordship asks
+why she went out the second time, she denies a second leaving,--his
+Lordship insists,--she likewise persists,--finally Clotilda falls upon
+the bitter conjecture whether Matthieu may not have been there, and
+with his theatrical art and throat, which contained all human voices,
+himself have mocked and travestied her, in order under her credentials
+to read the important letter. Ah, there was too much in favor of the
+conjecture and too little against it! To be sure Matthieu could not now
+undertake upon Flamin, whose academic career had just expired, the
+October-test of the shoulder-device; but he stuck (so it afterward
+seemed to Clotilda and his Lordship) with his green-frog-feet to that
+good soul, and, under the cloak of love for Agatha and for his friend,
+hung out his threads, let the wind swing and stretch them across
+between the princely palace and the Parsonage-house,--kept on spinning
+one after another, until at last his father, the minister Schleunes,
+should have woven the right web for the entangling of the prey.... I
+confess, this conjecture throws light for me on a thousand things.--
+
+Victor was even more astounded than we are, and proposed to his
+Lordship whether he might not, without injury to his oath, reveal to
+Clotilda his induction into these mysteries, as he had two reasons for
+it: first, her delicacy would be spared embarrassment at the appearance
+which her sisterly love must otherwise, in her opinion, have in his
+eyes;[154] secondly, one keeps a secret better, if only _one_ more
+person helps him hold his tongue about it, as is well known from the
+case of Midas's barber and the reeds; the third reason was, that he had
+several reasons. His Lordship naturally did not refuse.
+
+For the rest, he introduced his Victor with no pedantic rules of march
+to the ice-course and tilt-yard of the court. He merely advised him
+neither intentionally to seek nor to shun any one, particularly the
+house of Schleunes,--to unbridle his friend Flamin, who was in
+Matthieu's leading-strings, and to guide him, instead of by the bit,
+rather with a friendly hand,--and himself to covet the rank of a
+doctor, and nothing more. He said, rules before experience were like
+geometry before the operation for the cataract. Even after the harvest
+of experience Gratian's _homme de cour_ and Rochefoucauld's Maxims were
+not so good as the memoirs and history of courts, i. e. the experiences
+of others. Finally he appealed to his own example, and said, it was
+only within a few years that he had understood the following rules of
+_his_ father's.
+
+The greatest hatred, like the greatest virtue and the worst dogs, is
+quiet.--Women have more _flow_, and fewer _overflows_, of emotion than
+we.--There is nothing one hates so much in another as a _new_ fault,
+which he does not show till after some years.--One commits the most
+follies among people who are of no account.--It is the most common and
+pernicious delusion, that one always takes one's self to be the only
+one who remarks certain things.--Women and soft-hearted people are
+timid only in their own dangers, and courageous in those of others,
+where they have to save them.--Trust no one (and though it were a
+saint) who in the smallest trifle leaves his honor in the lurch; and a
+woman of that kind still less.--Most persons confound their vanity with
+their sense of honor, and allege wounds inflicted on the one as wounds
+inflicted on the other, and the reverse.--What we undertake from
+humanity, we should always accomplish, if we mixed in no selfishness
+with our motive.--The warmth of a man is by nothing more easily
+misunderstood than by the warmth of a young man.
+
+The last observation, which perhaps had a nearer reference, he had made
+while he was already on the shore of the island in the attitude of
+leave-taking, which he did with that considerate courtesy which in his
+rank guides the hands and arms of even parents and children.[155]
+
+
+                         THIRD INTERCALARY DAY.
+
+                 Meteorological Observations upon Man.
+
+When, in the former chapter, I wrote down his Lordship's pithy sayings,
+I found that some came into my own head, which might be serviceable for
+the Intercalary Day. I have never made one observation alone, but
+always twenty, thirty, in succession, and this very first one is a
+proof of it!
+
+                                   *
+
+When any one remains modest, not after praise, but after censure, then
+he is really so.
+
+                                   *
+
+The talk of the people, and still more the letters of maidens, have a
+peculiar euphony, arising from a constant interchange of long and short
+syllables (Trochees or Iambuses).
+
+                                   *
+
+The two things which a maiden most easily forgets are, first, how she
+looks (hence mirrors were invented); and, secondly, wherein the pronoun
+_that_ differs from the conjunction _that_. I fear, however, that they
+will from to-day forward observe the distinction, merely for the sake
+of upsetting my assertion. And _then_ one of my two touchstones is
+lost[156] with which I have hitherto tested learned ladies; the second,
+which I retain, is the left thumb-nail, which the penknife has
+sometimes notched full of red marks, but seldom, however, because they
+drive the quill more easily than they make the pen.
+
+                                   *
+
+One who has received many benefits ceases to _count_, and begins to
+_weigh_ them, as if they were votes.
+
+                                   *
+
+The transporting one's self into good characters does more harm to a
+poet or player, who retains his own, than entering into bad ones. A
+clergyman who, besides, is free to take only the first of these steps,
+is more exposed to moral _atony_[157] than the maker of verses and
+parts, who is able to make up again for a holy part by an unholy one.
+
+                                   *
+
+Passion makes the best observations and the wretchedest conclusions. It
+is a telescope whose field is so much the brighter, as it is narrower.
+
+                                   *
+
+Men require of a new Prince, Bishop, Domestic Tutor, Nursery Tutor,
+Capon-Stuffer, Town-Musician, or Town-Recorder _only in the first week_
+very special merits which were wanting in his predecessor; for in the
+second they have forgotten what they required and what they missed.
+
+                                   *
+
+Such sentences please women most and stay by them longest.
+
+                                   *
+
+Therefore, by way of reward, I will manufacture more than one upon
+themselves.--They regard others only as younger, not as fairer, than
+themselves.
+
+                                   *
+
+They are even ten times more artful and false towards each other than
+towards us; but we are almost more honest to each other than to them.
+
+                                   *
+
+They look to it only that one _does_ justify himself with them, no
+matter _how_.
+
+                                   *
+
+They forgive a loved man more stains than we do a loved woman. Hence
+the romance-writers let the heroes of their quill guzzle, storm, duel,
+and stay overnight anywhere and everywhere, without the least prejudice
+to the hero.--The heroine, on the contrary, must sit at home by her
+mother and be a little angel.
+
+                                   *
+
+On the whole, they are so delicate, so mild, so sympathetic, so
+refined, so loving and love-thirsty, that I cannot get it into my head
+why it is that they cannot really like each other, unless it is for
+some such reason as this, that they are too courteous to each other to
+be formally reconciled or formally at variance with each other. You
+dear ones! you sometimes love a man because he has a friend and is one.
+O how beautifully would a friend of your own sex _fit_[158] you!
+
+                                   *
+
+One learns taciturnity best among people who have none, and loquacity
+among the taciturn.
+
+                                   *
+
+If self-knowledge is the road to virtue, so is virtue still more the
+road to self-knowledge. An amended and purified soul is darkened by the
+least moral poison, as certain precious stones are by every other, and
+now after the amendment one observes for the first time how many
+impurities still lurk in all corners.
+
+                                   *
+
+I will close with some rules for improvement. Never, when the bosom has
+to fear that thorn in the side, anger, eloquently represent to any one
+his faults; for in the very act of convincing him of his guilt thou
+persuadest thyself of it, and so becomest exasperated. Picture to
+thyself every morning the possible situations and passions into which
+during the day thou mayst fall; then thou wilt deport thyself better,
+for one seldom behaves badly, in a repeated case, the second time.--Is
+thy friend angry with thee, then provide him an opportunity of showing
+thee a great favor. Over that his heart must needs melt, and he will
+love thee again.--No resolves are great save those which one has more
+than once to execute. Hence _forbearing_ is harder than _undertaking_;
+for the former has to be kept up longer, and the latter is also linked
+with the sense of a double expression of power, a psychological and a
+moral.--Only despair not at a single failing; and let thy whole
+repentance be--a nobler action.--Only make thyself (by stoicism, or in
+ally way thou canst) _tranquil_, then wilt thou have little trouble in
+making thyself _virtuous_ also.--Begin the culture of thy heart, not
+with the rearing of noble motives, but with the extirpation of bad
+ones. When the weeds are once withered or uprooted, then will the
+nobler flowerage spontaneously and vigorously spring up.--The virtuous
+heart, like the body, grows sound and strong more by _work_ than by
+good _food_.
+
+Therefore I can stop.
+
+
+
+
+                           13. DOG-POST-DAY.
+
+          Concerning his Lordship's Character.--An Evening of
+              Eden.--Maienthal.--The Mountain and Emanuel.
+
+
+In regard to his Lordship I have three words to say, that is, three
+opinions to state.
+
+The first is wholly improbable; it is, that, like all men of the
+world and of business, he regards mankind as an apparatus for
+experiments, as so much hunting-gear, war-material, knitting-work:
+such men look upon heaven only as the key-board to earth, and the soul
+as orderly-sergeant of the body; they carry on wars, not for the sake
+of winning crowns of oak-leaves, but to secure the oak soil and acorns;
+they prefer the successful man to the deserving one; they break oaths
+and hearts to serve the state; they respect poetry, philosophy, and
+religion, but as means; they respect riches, statistics of national
+prosperity, and health, as objects; all they honor about pure
+Mathesis[159] and pure female virtue is the transmutation of each into
+impure for manufactures and armies; in the higher astronomy all they
+care for is the transformation of suns into odometers[160] and
+way-marks for pepper-fleets, and in the most exalted _magister
+legens_[161] they seek only an alluring tavern-sign for poor
+universities.
+
+The second opinion is at least the opposite of the first, and an
+improvement upon it: it is, that to his Lordship, as to other
+great men, the race-course is the goal and the steps taken the
+garlands.--Fortune and misfortune differ, with him, not in _worth_, but
+in _manner_; both are, in his view, two converging race-tracks toward
+the eternity's ring of inner promotion; all accidents of this life are
+to him mere arithmetical examples in _unknown_ terms, which he solves,
+not however as a merchant, but as an indifferentialist[162] and
+algebraist, to whom products and multiplicands are of equal interest,
+and to whom it is all one whether he reckons by letters or by
+hundredweights.
+
+Verily, a man has almost as much to reproach himself with, if he is
+discontented, as if he had committed a crime; and inasmuch as it
+depends upon his ocean of thoughts, whether he will raise out of it as
+an island an Otaheite-Arcadia or the lowest hell, he deserves all that
+he creates....
+
+Nevertheless, the third opinion is the true one, and at the same time
+it is mine: his Lordship, how much soever he may seem to be an
+indeclinable man, who has no object, but is a verb in _mi_, has
+nevertheless the following paradigm (and so inversely we find in the
+most ordinary man a short plan for the most singular one): he is one of
+the unhappy great ones who have too much genius, too much wealth, and
+too little repose and knowledge, to be habitually happy; they hunt
+pleasure instead of virtue, and miss both, and cry out at last
+over every bitter drop which is given them in a sugar-loaf; like
+silver-plate, precisely at the point of melting in the fire of pleasure
+are they the most inclined to overspread themselves with a dark skin;
+their ambition; which otherwise hides with plans the emptiness of high
+life, is not strong enough for their heart, which in this emptiness
+withers; they do good from pride, but without the love of doing it;
+they play with the empty shell of life as with a ringlet, and deem it
+not even worth the while to shorten it; and yet they do deem it worth
+the while, when they, who stand through this night-frost of the soul,
+outwardly smiling and cold, inwardly all in a fever, without hope,
+fear, or faith, renouncing all, making light of everything, and shut up
+in themselves,--when they feel a stroke of death, a great sorrow clutch
+at their unhappy hearts.----Ah the poor lord! can thy heart then find
+no rest till it finds it under the lid of black marble?
+
+"Ah the poor lord!" his son incessantly repeated, as with oppressed
+soul he went toward Maienthal. The outward heaven around him was still;
+a great cloud completely overspread it, but rested on a blue rim along
+the whole circle of the horizon. In Victor's breast, on the contrary,
+streams of air rushed against each other and whirled together into a
+hurricane, drinking up brooks and tearing up trees. His father's image
+hung pale in this tempest. Victor's future days were hurled to and
+fro.--His future life was compressed into a narrow, veiled image, and
+it distressed him just as much to think that he _must_ live it as _how_
+he must.
+
+What saddened him most was the mere external and trifling circumstance
+that his father had remained alone and concealed in the depths of the
+island. Once the conjecture came over him, whether the greater part of
+what he had witnessed had not been mere dramatic machinery which his
+father (who in his youth had been a tragic poet) had employed to give
+more firmness to his vow of silence; but he was immediately disgusted
+at his own heart. Why are the purest souls tormented with a multitude
+of disgusting, poisonous thoughts, which like spiders crawl up on the
+shining walls, and which they only have the trouble of crushing to
+death? Ah, our _victories_ are not wholly distinguishable from our
+_defeats_!
+
+It is singular that the _perspective_ thought of Clotilda's
+blood-relationship to Flamin was the one which he followed out least of
+all.
+
+When man can obtain from reason no balsamic relief, he begs it at the
+hands of Hope and Illusion; and they two then willingly share his
+sorrow. Just as the blue sky of to-day by little and little peered
+through light seams in the clouds, and the sea of mist collected into
+hanging lakes, so also did the dark thoughts break asunder in Victor's
+soul.--And when the swollen masses of cloud in the broad blue passed
+into fleece, till at last the blue sea swallowed up all banks of vapor,
+and bore nothing on its infinite expanse but the blazing sun, then did
+Victor's soul also cleanse itself from vapors, and the sun-image of
+Emanuel, whom he was to-day to reach, shone soft and warm and cloudless
+into all his wounds.... The form of his loved Dahore, the form of his
+loved father, the form of his hidden mother, and all beloved images,
+reposed like moons in a mournful group over his head; and this sadness,
+and the sacred oath to keep himself virtuous and obey all his father's
+wishes, breathed upon his inflamed bosom some solace in regard to his
+father's fate.
+
+He could even to-day see the sun go down behind the church-tower of
+Maienthal.
+
+The broad cleared-up sky made him more tender, the thought of falling
+to-day upon the heart of a noble man, whose soul dwelt above this blue
+atmosphere, made him more exalted, the hope of being consoled by this
+man for his whole life made him more tranquil.--
+
+He hastened, and, his haste drew out the saddest lute-stop of his soul.
+For he seemed not to be going over the summer fields, but they seemed
+rather to be hurrying along before him; landscape after landscape,
+theatres of woods, theatres of grain-fields, flew by; new hills rose
+with other lights, and lifted up their woods, and others with theirs
+dropped down; long, shadowy steppes ran backward before the flood of
+yellow sunlight; now valleys full of flowers billowed around him, now
+bare, hot hill-shores carried him upward; the stream murmured close to
+his ear, and suddenly its windings glistened from far away across
+poppy-fields; white roads and green paths met him, and fled from him,
+and led round the broad earth; full villages, with gleaming windows,
+swept by, and gardens with undressed children; the declining sun was
+now lifted up, now lost again, and now withdrawn to the summits of the
+hills.--
+
+This fleeting of Nature's dissolving views bedimmed his moistened eye,
+and brightened the inner world; but the steady abiding of an incessant
+music, the constant choir of larks above him, whose contending cries
+melted to one in his soul, this distant hum from air and woods and
+bushes, this harmonica of Nature, moved him to say to himself: "Why do
+I in this solitude hold back every drop that would fall? No; besides, I
+am too sensitive to-day, and I will exhaust myself before I see the
+beloved man."
+
+At last he ascended the broad mountain that stations itself with its
+scattered columns of trees and gray cubes of rock before Maienthal,
+which lies in greenness at its foot.... Then the earth, tuned by the
+Creator, rang with a thousand strings; the same harmony stirred the
+stream, divided into gold and gloom, the humming flower-cup, the
+peopled air, and the waving bush; the reddened east and the reddened
+west stood stretched out like the two rose-taffeta wings of a
+harpsichord, and a tremulous sea gushed from the open heavens and the
+open earth....
+
+He burst into a mingling flood of tears at once of joy and sorrow, and
+the past and the future simultaneously stirred his heart. The sun with
+ever-increasing swiftness dropped down the heavens, and the more
+swiftly did he climb the mountain, the quicker to follow its flight
+with his eye. And there he looked down into the village of Maienthal,
+that glimmered among moist shadows....
+
+At his feet, and on this mountain, lay, stretched like a crowned giant,
+like a transplanted spring-island, an English park. This mountain
+toward the south and one toward the north met and formed a cradle in
+which the peaceful village rested, and over which the morning and the
+evening sun spun and spread out their golden veil. In five gleaming
+ponds trembled five duskier evening heavens, and every wave that leaped
+up painted itself to a ruby in the hovering fire of the sun. Two brooks
+waded, in shifting distances, darkened by roses and willows, over the
+long meadow-land, and a watering fire-wheel,[163] like a pulsating
+heart, forced the sunset-reddened water through all the green
+flower-vases. Everywhere nodded flowers, those butterflies of the
+vegetable world, on every moss-grown brook-stone, from every tender
+stalk, round every window, a flower rocked in its fragrance, and
+scarlet lupines traced their blue and red veins over a garden without a
+hedge. A transparent wood of gold-green birches climbed, in the high
+grass over there, the sides of the northern mountain, on whose summit
+five tall fir-trees, as ruins of a prostrated forest, held their eyrie.
+
+Emanuel's small house stood at the end of the village, in a tangled
+growth of honeysuckle, and in the embrace of a linden-tree which grew
+through it.--His heart gushed up within him: "Blessings on thee, quiet
+haven! hallowed by a soul which here looks up to heaven, and waits to
+launch into the sea of eternity!"--Suddenly the windows of the
+abbey where Clotilda had been educated flung upon him the flames
+of the evening-redness,--and the sun went, softly as a Penn, toward
+America,--and the thin night spread itself over nature,--and the green
+hermitage of Emanuel wrapped itself in obscurity.... Then he knelt
+there alone on the mountain, on that throne-step, and looked into the
+glowing west, and over the whole still earth, and into the heavens,
+and expanded his spirit to think on God.... As he knelt, all was so
+sublime and so mild,--worlds and suns came up from the east, and the
+little insect, with his play of colors, nestled down into his mealy
+flower-cup,--the evening-wind flapped its immeasurable wing, and the
+little naked lark rested warmly under the soft-feathered breast of the
+mother,--a man stood on the mountain-ridge, and a golden-chafer on the
+stamens; ... and the Eternal loved his whole world.
+
+His spirit was now made up to take in a great man, and he yearned for
+the voice of a brother.
+
+He staggered, without following any path, down into the village, with
+the pewit in its great circles, and the may-chafer in its little ones,
+sweeping around him. At the foot of the mountain the hybrid day grew
+darker,--in the starry heaven the curtain rose,--the vapor of evening,
+which had gone up hot, fell cold, as men do, back to the earth: one
+more loud lark went circling upward, as the last echo of day, over the
+mountain.
+
+At last he neared Emanuel's linden. He would rather have embraced him
+under the great heavens than under the close ceiling of a room. Through
+the window he saw an uncommonly beautiful youth standing and playing on
+a flute. The player drew out of its heavenly gates a fugitive and
+floating elysium. Victor listened to him for a long time, in order to
+still his beating heart; at last, with tearful eyes, he went round the
+house, and would fain have fallen speechlessly and blindly on the necks
+of the youth and of Emanuel. As he passed along before the window, the
+youth did not return his greeting; as he opened the house-door, a soft
+chime of bells began to make music. Then the youth came out
+immediately, and asked him, in a friendly tone, who was there; for he
+was blind. Victor stepped into a Holy of Holies when he entered the
+apartment lined with linden-leaves, which was the nest of the winged
+man, who at this moment was out of it, under the great night of God.
+Emanuel was to return toward midnight. The room was open and clean;
+some leaves of fruits which had been eaten lay on the table; flowers
+glowed around all the windows; a telescope leaned against the wall;
+remains of an Oriental wardrobe bespoke the East Indian....
+
+The voice of the beautiful youth had in his ear something inexpressibly
+touching, because it seemed like one he knew; it went deep into his
+heart, like the melody of a song that sounds up from childhood. He
+could rest freely with the steady gaze of love upon that face, that
+looked out into an eternal night; he wanted to kiss those childish lips
+full of melodies, and still he hesitated. But as he went out of the
+house again in quest of Emanuel, and when the bells began to chime
+again,--for they sounded whenever the door opened, to announce to the
+blind one every arrival,--then he could no longer restrain himself
+amidst the lovely music, but he touched the mouth of the blind one, as
+he leaned at the open window, with a kiss as soft as a breath. "Ah,
+angel! art thou, then, come down again from heaven?" said the blind
+one, confounding him with some well-known being or other.
+
+How good was it to be out of doors! The evening-bell of the village
+sounded its call over the slumbering fields, and a distant soul was
+inclining its ear, perhaps, to catch the dying echoes of its broken
+tones. The evening wind, rustling through twigs full of green fruits,
+joined in. The evening star--the moon of our twilight--rested kindly on
+the road of the sun and of the moon, and sent its solace in the
+interval during the absence of both.--"Where mayst thou be at this
+moment, my Emanuel? Art thou resting, perhaps, in the sight of the
+evening-red,--or gazing into the starry sea?--art thou in the ecstasy
+we call a prayer,--or ..."
+
+At this moment, all at once the thought flashed up in him, that, as
+to-night St. John's day began, his Emanuel might have expired in the
+enjoyment of the evening.... The more eagerly did he seek after him
+with his eyes under every tree, in every deeper shadow; he looked up to
+the hills, as if he might see him there, and to the stars, as if even
+there he might venture to seek him.--He went round the village, whose
+circular wall was a festoon of cherry-trees which silvered the green
+circumference with a milky-way of blossoms long since fallen, and
+hurried over the ruins of the houses which the children had built
+during the day, towards the fading windows of the abbey, which rose on
+the southern mountain down whose slope he had entered the village; for
+the blind one had told him that this mountain was Emanuel's
+observatory, and that he went thither every night. The green stairway,
+which made its successive landings of terraces and moss-banks, and on
+which a balustrade of bush-work ran upward, led him to a mountain which
+terminated sublimely in the ether with a tall weeping-birch. With every
+grass-plot, as from a bath, new limbs of dark Nature lifted themselves;
+he went on, as if from one planet to another. Across the ascending,
+darkling fields streamed the night-wind, and lonesomely swept on from
+wood to wood, and its ruffling fingers played with the plumage of the
+sleeping bird and the down of the whirring night-butterfly. Victor
+looked over toward the evening-red which Night had taken as a rose to
+wear on the bosom whereon suns repose. The sea of eternity lay in the
+form of night on the silver-sand of worlds and suns, and from the
+bottom of that sea the grains of sand glistened far up through the
+deep.
+
+Around the weeping-birch swelled an unaccountable melodious murmur,
+which he had this very day heard on the island. At length he stood up
+there under the birch, and the music, like that of an harmonica which
+has just stolen over paradises and through hedges of flowers, was loud
+around him; but he saw nothing further, save a high grassy altar (the
+birthplace of Emanuel's letter) and a low grassy bench. From what
+invisible hand, he thought with awe, can these tones issue, which seem
+to glide off from angels, as they fly over the next world, from
+mingling souls, when a too great bliss breathes itself out into a
+sigh, and the sigh dissipates itself into distant dying sound? It must
+be forgiven him, if on such a day, which threw his soul into growing
+agitations, in this awful hour of night, under this melodious
+mourning-tree, on this Holy of Holies of the invisible Emanuel, he at
+last came to believe that _he_ had this evening taken his flight from
+life, and that his soul, full of love, was still floating around him in
+these echoes and yearnings for the first and last embrace. He lost
+himself more and more in the tones and in the silence round about
+them,--his soul grew to a dream within him, and the whole nocturnal
+landscape grew to a cloud made of the sleep in which this light dream
+hung,--the fountain of endless life, flung up by the Eternal, flew far
+above the earth in the immeasurable arch with the spraying silver-sparks
+of suns over immensity; gleaming it encircled the whole vault of night,
+and the reflection of the Infinite overspread the dark eternity.
+
+O Eternal One, if we saw not thy starry heaven, how much would our
+heart, sunk into the mire of earth, know of thee and of immortality?--
+
+Suddenly in the east the night grew lighter, because the floating
+glimmer of the moon darted up on the Alpine ridges that hid the orb,
+and all at once the unaccountable tones and the leaves and the
+night-wind grew louder. Then Victor awoke as out of a dream and out of
+life, and clasped the harmonious, fleeting airs to his languishing bosom,
+and, amidst the gushing tears which, like a rain-cloud, veiled from him
+the whole landscape, he cried out, beside himself: "Ah, Emanuel,
+come!--Ah, I thirst for thee--Float no more in sound, thou blessed one;
+take thy deposed human face, and appear to me, and slay me by a
+shudder, and keep me in thy arms!" ...
+
+Lo! while the dim tear-drop still stood in his eye, and the moon still
+lingered behind the Alps, there came up the mountain a white form with
+closed eyes,--smiling, transfigured, blissful,--turning toward
+Sirius....
+
+"Emanuel, dost thou appear to me?" cried Horion, trembling, and melted
+into a new flood of tears. The form opened its eyes,--it spread out its
+arms. Victor saw not,--heard not; he glowed and trembled. The form flew
+to meet him, and he gave himself up, saying, "Take me!" They touched
+each other,--they embraced each other,--the night-wind swept through
+them,--the strange music sounded nearer,--a star shot down,--the moon
+flew up over the Alps....
+
+And when with its Eden-light it suffused the cheeks of the unknown
+apparition, Victor recognized that it was his dear teacher, _Dahore_,
+who had to-day cast his image into the mirror on the island. And Dahore
+said: "Beloved son, dost thou still know thy teacher? I am Emanuel and
+Dahore." Then the embrace grew closer. Horion would fain have
+compressed his gratitude for a whole childhood into one kiss, and lay
+dissolved in the arms of the teacher and in the arms of loving ecstasy.
+
+Twine around each other tightly, ye blessed ones; press your full
+hearts to each other even till you press tears out of them; forget
+heaven and earth, and prolong the sublime embrace!--Ah! so soon as it
+is dissolved, then has this frail life henceforward nothing firmer
+wherewith to knit you together than the beginning of the--second....
+
+At last Emanuel drew himself out of the attitude of love, and, bending
+aside, gazed like a sun, with large and open look, into Horion's face,
+and confronted with rapture the ennobled spirit and countenance of his
+blooming favorite. The latter sank before the look of love
+involuntarily on his knee, and said, with uplifted face: "O my teacher,
+my father! O thou angel! dost thou, then, still love me so
+exceedingly?"--But he wept too much for utterance, and his words were
+unintelligible, and died in his heart....
+
+Without answering, Emanuel laid his hand on the head of the kneeling
+pupil, and turned his glorified eye toward the glittering heavens, and
+said, with solemn voice: "This head, thou Eternal One, dedicates itself
+now to thee in this great night. Let only thy second world fill this
+head and this heart, and may the little, dark earth never satisfy
+them!--O my Horion! here on this mountain, on which, after a year, I go
+up from the earth, I conjure thee, by the great second world above us,
+by all the great thoughts wherewith the Eternal at this moment appears
+in thee,--I conjure thee to be still good, even when I shall have long
+been dead."
+
+Emanuel knelt down to him, held up the exhausted youth, and bent
+towards his paling face, and said, in a low and prayerful tone, "My
+beloved! my beloved! when we both are dead, in the second world may God
+never part us,--never part me and thee!"--He wept not, and yet could
+say no more; their two hearts, knit together, rested on each other, and
+night veiled silently their mute love and their great thoughts.
+
+
+
+
+                           14. DOG-POST-DAY.
+
+        The Philosophical Arcadia.--Clotilda's Letter.--Victor's
+                              Confessions.
+
+
+I have only two things to explain before going further,--the mysterious
+music and the shutting of the eyes. The former proceeded from an Æolian
+harp laid on the weeping-birch. As often as Emanuel came hither by
+night he let these breathed-out tones intermingle like blossoms with
+the whispering leaves, in order to exalt himself when he looked alone
+upon the exalted night. His eyes he often closed before the sun and the
+moon, whenever his inner man, winged like a cherub, had leave to bury
+itself in soft fantasies; into the streaming, many-colored waves of
+light which crowd through the eyelids he would then plunge, as into a
+zephyr, for a delicious swim, and in this light-bath the higher
+light-magnet within him drew heavenly light out of earthly light. As
+there are but few souls that know how far the harmony of outward nature
+with our own reaches, and in how very great a degree the whole creation
+is but an Æolian harp, with longer and shorter strings, with slower and
+swifter vibrations, passive before a divine breath,[164]--I demand not
+that every one should forgive this Emanuel.--
+
+After this finding of each other again, which threw a far gleam over a
+whole life, the two came home to the blind youth; and his flute carried
+the heart softly over in dream from the tossings of fevered blood into
+the tranquil ether of heaven.
+
+As I love so to be about Emanuel, the reader will not begrudge me the
+pleasure of turning over the leaves of all the hours which we are
+permitted to spend in his house, and to go along regularly, step by
+step.
+
+The morning for the first time disclosed to the pupil of Emanuel, as it
+does to children, what a Christmas present the night had provided for
+his heart. What a form came before him in the morning-radiance, when
+the still, childlike, composed face of the teacher, over which storms
+had once passed, as on the soft, white moon volcanoes have flamed,
+smiled upon him in such wise that his inner being melted into mute
+bliss! Especially when beheld in _profile_ did this lofty form appear
+to stand on the brink of earth, and to look down into the _second_
+hemisphere of the heavens, which is hid from us by the gravestone and
+the rich pasture-ground of this life. His countenance was transfigured
+when he lifted it to heaven, when he named God or Eternity, when he
+spoke of the longest day; in its light the leaf-gold of the present
+paled to the dead-gold of the past, and his spirit hung hovering over
+the body, as genii bloom out of flowers in arabesques. Never did Victor
+so easily attune himself, when coming out of a dream, to the new day,
+as he did this morning with Emanuel's voice, which was, so to speak,
+the music of the spheres to the blue heaven of his eyes, from which,
+as from that of Egypt, never a drop fell; from incapacity of the
+tear-glands, he could never weep; nor did this life any longer agitate
+his soul.
+
+The pure morning-apartment seemed to make the soul pure and still. He
+was the greatest bodily Purist; he washed his body quite as often as
+his clothes; and the uncleanness of medical language, even to the very
+words,--as, e. g. toothpicks, &c.,--was avoided by his stainless
+tongue. Even so did his heart remain unsoiled by so much as the images
+of great sins, and this unconscious innocence, as well as an
+unacquaintedness with our artful manners, made him, in the eyes of
+three different classes, either a child--or a maiden--or an angel.
+
+The breakfast of fruits and water, which, in fact, made up his whole
+bill of fare, called up reprovingly before our Victor the wine and
+coffee-grounds wherewith he had sometimes had to manure, like earthly
+ones, the flowers of his spirit. Flower-pots were Dahore's snuff-boxes,
+and glowed under the linden-green, which, with two tame, and yet
+free, ground-sparrows skipping through it, was the live, growing
+ceiling-piece of the apartment. His soul seemed also, like a Brahmin,
+to live on poetical flowers, and his speech was often, like his
+manners, Indian,--i. e. poetic. So was there throughout, as with divers
+magnates of men, a striking pre-established harmony between outward
+nature and his heart; he readily found in the corporeal the physiognomy
+of the spiritual, and _vice versâ_; he said matter, considered as
+thought, was just as noble and spiritual as any other thought, and that
+we represented to ourselves in it, after all, only the Divine
+conceptions of it. For example, during breakfast he lost himself in the
+glimmering dew-drop on a stock-gillyflower, and, by moving his eye to
+and fro, played through the gamut of its harpsichord of colors. "There
+must," said he, "be some harmony or other of accordant sounds between
+this minute particle of water and my spirit, as between virtue and me,
+because otherwise neither could so ravish me. And is, then, this accord
+which man makes with the whole creation (only in different octaves) a
+mere play of the Eternal, and no resonance of a nearer, greater
+harmony?" In the same way he would often gaze at a glimmering coal,
+till in his eyes it had expanded to a flaming meadow, on which,
+illumined by tender fancies, he roamed up and down....
+
+Have patience, reader, with this flowery soul; we will both think that
+men can more easily have one religion than one philosophy, and that
+every system presupposes its peculiar weaving in the heart, and that
+the heart is the bud of the head.
+
+The only circumstance that pained the blessed Victor this morning was,
+that he could not embrace the fair blind youth, and ask, "Have we not
+already once lived together, and is not my voice as familiar to thee as
+thine is to me?" For he looked upon him (as I do too), for several
+reasons, as the concealed son of Pastor Eymann. But as Dahore kept
+silent on the subject,--into whose clear, bright heaven one could
+otherwise look down even to the least nebulous star,--he feared before
+these holy ears he should be speaking too near to the verge of his oath
+of silence, though he should only disclose his inquiring conjectures
+about the blind one. This Julius seemed to have only two root-fibres in
+his nature, of which the one went to his flute, and the other to his
+teacher. On his white face, whereon the rapture of the musical genius
+and the abstractedness of the blind dreamer were blended with an almost
+womanly beauty, lay the reflection of his teacher, and its fibres had,
+like lute-strings, stirred only to harmonious movements. The poor blind
+one, who looked upon his Dahore as his father, was turned about, like
+down, by his lightest breath. Victor often drew the head of the dear
+blind one close to his face, in order to inspect the disordered eyes,
+and judge whether they might be restored. But though he saw with pain
+that the unhappy one must remain incurable on the full, radiant earth,
+nevertheless he kept on repeating his minute investigation, merely for
+the sake of having the dear, enchanting form nearer to his eye and his
+soul.
+
+In the morning Emanuel, as cicerone of Nature, led his guest through
+the ruins and antiques of the earth: for every tree is an eternal
+antique. How different is a walk with a religious[165] man from one
+with a vulgar, worldly soul! The earth appeared to him holy, just
+fallen from the hands of the Creator; it was to him as if he were
+walking in a planet hanging over us and clothed with flowers. Emanuel
+showed him God and love everywhere mirrored, but everywhere
+transformed,--in the light, in--colors, in the scale of living
+creatures, in the blossom and in human beauty, in the pleasures of
+animals, in the thoughts of men and in the circles of worlds; for
+either everything or nothing is his shadow. So the sun paints its image
+on all creatures,--great in the ocean, many-colored in the dew-drop,
+small on the human retina, as mock-sun on the cloud, red on the apple,
+silvery on the stream, seven-colored in the falling rain, and gleaming
+over the whole moon and over all its other worlds.
+
+Victor felt to-day, for the first time, the enlargement and
+transfiguration of his conscious being before a spirit which, _like_
+his, but _excelling_ his, like a spherical concave mirror reflected all
+the features of his nobler part in colossal size. The whole vulgar
+portion of his nature crept away when the higher, painted by Dahore on
+a large scale, erected itself above the low impulses. A man whom the
+perihelion of a great man does not set on fire and beside himself is
+nothing worth. He was hardly willing to speak, so that he might only
+hear _him_ all the time, although he had it in mind to stay here a good
+many days. As before a higher being and before the woman of his love,
+in whose presence one will neither show his head nor his tongue, so had
+he, renouncing self, sunk into pure truth and love. All the varnish of
+the little relations of place and citizenly respectability had cracked
+so clean off, and they all stood before him there so moss-grown, that
+he would not so much as name the names of Göttingen, of Flachsenfingen,
+or empty incidents of life, or strange personalities. In fact, Victor
+had a slight contempt for men who care more for the directions to the
+bookbinder than for the book, and more for the review of an author than
+for his system, and to whom the earth is no deciphering chancery of the
+book of nature, but a parlor (a talking-room), a news-office of
+wretched personalities, which they care neither to profit by, nor to
+retain, nor to estimate, but merely to tell; and he was disgusted with
+the German societies, in which there is so little philosophizing.--Oh,
+how blest he was, for once to think a whole day in company with
+another, and, what is still finer, to be permitted to poetize with him!
+
+His doubts upon the greatest matters which can weigh down our minds and
+lift up our hearts grew to-day to questions; the questions, to hopes;
+the hopes, to presentiments. There are truths of which one hopes that
+great men will be more strongly convinced than one can be one's self;
+and one will therefore by their conviction confirm and complete his
+own. Dahore held the two great truths (God and immortality) which, like
+two pillars, bear up the universe, firmly to his heart; but, like the
+rarer men to whom the truth is not merely the _shew-bread_ of vanity
+and the dessert of the head, but a _holy supper_ and _love-feast_ full
+of the _spirit of life_ for their weary heart, he cared little, if he
+could make no proselytes. Victor felt that _he_ understood handling the
+artillery-train and the electric pistols and batteries of the art of
+disputation better than Emanuel; he would have abhorred his own tongue
+if he had directed its readiness against this fair soul. He was silent
+for two reasons. "Undertake," said he, "to give a molten image, an
+altar-piece, of a great, shining truth that embraces thy whole
+being,--to do this on the flying second-hand whereon one stands in
+transient conversation, with the few dry paints wherewith human ideas
+are to be colored, and with the clumsy human tongue wherewith you must
+daub on these grains of color,--I tell you, a _silhouette_, a
+transparent asterism, will be all you can produce." The light heaven of
+certain simple-hearted men of deep feeling veils, like the outer one,
+all its suns, except the warmest, under the sheen of a void blue; but
+the unclean heaven of others full of wit and logic is bedizened with
+_mock-suns_, bows, northern lights, clouds, and redness.
+
+The second, better reason why he scorned the honor of opposition was
+his heart, which contained in itself more than the head could throw
+light upon. Certain views cannot be detached so easily as wall-pictures
+in Italy, and transferred from one head into another. The _light_
+which another can give thee _shows_, but _constructs_ not, the
+house-furniture of thy interior, and what the light really _creates_
+with some is meteorological appearance, optical illusion, but no
+substance.[166]--Hence all turns not upon the showing and seeing of a
+truth, i. e. of an object, but upon the effects which it works through
+thy whole inner being. For how is it that there are men who, as
+Socrates did Aristides, make us better merely by our being with
+them?--How do great authors bring it about, that their invisible
+spirit in their works seizes and holds us fast, without our being
+able to quote the words and passages whereby they do it, as a thickly
+leaved forest always murmurs, though not a single branch stirs?--Why
+did Emanuel overmaster his beloved Horion--more than by broad
+thesis-formulas, _rationes decidendi_ and _sententiæ magistrales_--merely
+by the transfiguration in his countenance, by the low echo-tone of his
+voice, by the radiance of his look, and by the devotion in his breast,
+when he spoke solemnly truths which were old to speech and new to the
+heart, like the following?--
+
+Man goes, like the earth, from _west_ to _east_; but it seems to him as
+if he went, with it, from east to west, from life to the grave.
+
+What is highest and noblest in man conceals itself, and is without use
+for the practical world, (as the highest mountains bear no herbage,)
+and out of the chain of fine _thoughts_ only some members can be
+detached as actions.[167]
+
+Our aimless activity, our clutchings at the air, must appear to higher
+beings like the clutching of dying men at the bed-clothes.
+
+The spirit awakes and will awake when the light of the senses goes out,
+just as sleepers awake when the night-light is extinguished.
+
+                           *   *   *   *   *
+
+Why did these thoughts linger like things of awe in the soul?--Because
+Horion felt something higher than language, which is invented only for
+every-day sensations, can ever represent; because, even in his
+childhood, he hated systems which thrust out of sight all that is
+inexplicable; and because the human spirit feels itself as much
+oppressed in the explicable and finite as it is in a mine, or in the
+thought of the heavenly space overhead being somewhere or other boarded
+up.
+
+How should he have had the heart or the occasion on such a day to ask
+Emanuel about his dying-day, or about Clotilda? Victor had that poetry
+of fellow-feeling which easily puts itself into the place of the most
+unlike persons, of women and philosophers. In the evening Dahore went
+to the abbey to teach astronomy, his most beloved science. During the
+astronomical school-hour the open face of Julius became an open heaven;
+he told his Victor everything, as if he were a second father. Now he
+related to him frankly that the year before an angel had again and
+again come to him, who grasped his hand, gave him flowers, spoke to him
+kindly, and at last vanished from him into heaven, but had left him a
+letter, which he was permitted to have read to him a year after, at
+Whitsuntide, by Clotilda,--yes, and that this good angel had yesterday
+flown by him with a kiss. Victor smiled with delight, but concealed his
+conjecture that _he_ looked upon the angel to be a shy, loving maiden
+from the boarding-school.--"But yesterday," said Victor, "I only was
+the angel that kissed thee _thus_!" and repeated it. Julius knew
+no fairer gift to make to those he loved than the picture of his
+father,--the portraiture of his exalted love, which forgot no human
+being, because it was based, not upon the superiorities, but upon the
+necessities, of men,--further, of his indulgence, of his
+disinterestedness, since a long virtue spared him the battle against
+his heart, and now he did nothing but what he wished to, and since the
+next world, hanging low down before him, preached a peculiar
+independence upon necessities. Five hundred thousand fixed stars of the
+first magnitude, according to Lambert, hardly give a light equal to
+that of the nearer full moon,--and so the present always outshines our
+inner world; but soar nearer to the fixed star of the next world, then
+does it grow to a sun, which transforms the moon of time and of the
+present into a petty nebula.--As to this Emanuel, all Maienthalers
+loved him (even the Parson, although he was a non-Catholic,
+non-Lutheran, and non-Calvinist); and he loved to be dependent on
+something, on others' love.[168]--During this description Victor
+yearned for him again with as much emotion as if they had been
+separated a year; accordingly, in the flush of evening he laid himself
+down under the birch-leaves opposite the school, in order immediately,
+with ardent arms, to take him prisoner.
+
+And as Victor lifted his soul on the tall, white columns of the park
+planned by his Lordship, on the sublime sculpture which wrote out a
+great thought that looked like a tempest, and just as he had carried a
+bee that had dropped down, his wings being glued up with honey, to the
+beehive sill,--just then Dahore, with a friendly manner, came up. The
+latter entered, himself,--for Victor would have held the covert
+starting of a subject as a sin,--on that of Clotilda, and said this
+used to be her favorite spot, and the resting-bench of her quiet soul.
+The place was not grand, but, what is more, it was opposite to
+something grand (even physical greatness, e. g. a mountain, needs
+distance as a pedestal); it lay in the deepest part of the dell,
+encircled with Emanuel's flower-chains, which he often laid out
+without enclosure, because all Maienthalers respected his little
+joys,--breathed upon by great clover-fields,--overspread by the moon,
+which in spring, only after reaching the mountain-top, beamed down this
+deep valley with a mournful medley of birch-shadows, water-glistenings,
+and bright spots,--and, finally, adorned with a grassy bench, which I
+should not have mentioned had it not been planted at both ends with
+great, drooping flowers, which, with a tender feeling, no one crushed
+who sat down between them. How was Victor surprised or enraptured when
+Emanuel asked about this Clotilda! Like jewels of dew, like tears of
+joy, all the words of his teacher fell into his languishing heart,
+because they were eulogies upon her tender soul, which leads its own
+tears only into those of _others_, and hides them before dry hearts;
+upon her fine ambition, which men's criticism misconstrues into
+_coldness_ and women's into _pride_; and on her warmth of love, which
+one would not have looked for in a heart like hers, fast closed as a
+bud, which now confounds inanimate with animated nature, in order by
+the former to learn to love the latter. It touched Victor even to tears
+when Emanuel so warmly praised his pupil, now withdrawn from this Eden;
+and when he actually went on to beg, in all simplicity, that he would
+be the friend of _his_ friend, and now especially because he was going
+to die, and because she would never come back again,--for she had been
+here the last time merely for the purpose--on Whitsuntide, where her
+parents could not smile at it--of publicly taking the sacrament with
+the boarding-school girls,--that he would now take _his_ place towards
+this starward-soaring eye, this heart aspiring to eternity,--then could
+he have fallen at the feet of his friend and _his_ maiden friend for
+emotion and love.... From such lips praise bestowed upon its object
+always gives to love an extraordinary growth, because that sentiment
+always seems a pretext,[169] and ripens at once, so soon as it has
+found it.
+
+If thy heart, my friend, does not beat quickly and intensely enough for
+another's,--although, in my opinion, it already pulsates at the
+fever-point, namely, a hundred and eleven times in a minute,--then just
+go, in order to transform thy cold fever into a warm one, thy quartan
+ague into a quotidian, to other particularly respected people, and
+let them praise her, the good soul, or only name her often before
+thee,--mortally sick, and provided with thy good hundred and forty
+pulsations to the minute, thou wilt go thy way, and have the desired
+fever.
+
+The innocent Emanuel, who did not guess Victor's warmth, thought he
+must do still more by way of giving him the sevenfold consecration as
+priest of friendship for Clotilda, and gave him a--letter from her.
+_Thou_ couldst do it, East Indian, since thou art here a child that has
+been made into an angel in the _limbus infantum_ (the children's
+heaven), since thou hast no mysteries, excepting the mystery of the
+three children (hence his Lordship did not make thee the reader of his
+letters), and since thou dost not at all dream that the giving away of
+another's letter is anything wrong. Still thy scholar should not have
+read it.
+
+But he did read it. He cannot defend himself by anything except by my
+reader, who here holds in his hand this very same letter of another who
+never wrote it for him, and nevertheless reads it through word for word
+in his chair. I, for my part, read nothing, but only copy off what the
+dog brings me.--It is a beautiful coincidence that this letter should
+have been written by her on that very same raining, melodious night of
+the garden-feast when he wrote his first to Emanuel.
+
+
+                                           "St. Luna, May 4, 179*.
+
+"You will not, perhaps, expect any excuse from me, revered teacher,
+that, when I have hardly left Maienthal, I come back in the form of a
+letter. In fact, I meant to write it even while on the road, then the
+second day, and finally yesterday. This Maienthal will spoil for me
+many other valleys; all music will sound to me like an Alpine horn,
+making me sad, and bringing to my heart the remembrance of the Alpine
+life under the weeping-birch tree.
+
+"In this mood I should not have been able to deny my heart the pleasure
+of opening itself and pouring itself out before yours in the warmest
+thanks for the most beautiful and instructive days of my life, had I
+not formed the resolve after some days to be in Maienthal again; after
+my second return home, my heart must have its will, and way.
+
+"In our house I found nothing changed,[170] nor anything in our
+neighbor's; and I found in all souls the same old love with which we
+had parted from each other,--only my Agatha, to be sure, is merry, but
+yet less so than she used to be. The only change in Herr Eymann's house
+is a guest whom every one calls by a different name,--Victor, Horion,
+Sebastian, young Lord, Doctor. This last name he fully deserves by his
+first action and first joy in St. Luna, which was the healing of the
+blind Lord Horion. What a piece of happiness for the saved and for his
+saviour!--May this youth one day only pass through your Eden, and meet
+with your good Julius, so as to repeat upon him the beautiful art--Oh!
+as often as I think upon it, that the male sex is blest with the means
+of the greatest, godlike benefactions,--that they, like a god, can
+distribute eyes, life, justice, science,--whereas my sex must confine
+its heart, so yearning to do good, to lesser services,--to the drying
+away of a tear for another, to the concealing of its own, to the
+exercise of a secret patience with happy and unhappy;--then the wish
+rises, O that that sex which has the highest benefits in its hands
+would vouchsafe to us the greatest,--that of imitating itself, and
+getting into our hands good things which should bless us by our
+distribution of them!---At present, a woman can have nothing in her
+soul to make her great, except only wishes.
+
+"I have just come in out of the open air from a little garden-feast at
+my Agatha's; and never is any fair bit of deep-blue sky exactly right
+to me, if it does not stand over your weeping-birch, where your eye
+counts up all its treasures and suns, and shows my heart all the tokens
+of Infinite Power and Love. To-day, in the garden, I thought with
+almost too sad a longing on your Maienthal; Herr Sebastian reminded me
+of it still oftener, because he seems to have had a teacher who
+resembled mine.[171] He talked very well to-day, and seemed to be made
+up of two halves,--a British and a French. Some of his fine
+observations have not gone from me,--e. g., 'Sorrows are like
+thunder-clouds: in the distance they look black, over our heads hardly
+gray.--As sad dreams betoken a glad future, so may it be with the
+so-often-tormenting dream of life when it is over.--All our strong
+feelings, like ghosts, hold sway only up to a certain hour; and if a
+man would always say to himself, This passion, this grief, this
+rapture, will in three days certainly be gone from this soul,--then
+would he become more and more tranquil and composed.' I report all this
+to you so exactly, in order, as it were, to punish myself for a too
+hasty judgment which I passed some days since (though within myself) on
+his propensity to satire.--Satire, also, seems to be merely for the
+stronger sex; I have never yet found one of my own who had found in the
+works of Swift or Cervantes or Tristram anything to her taste.--
+
+"_Two days later_.--I and my letter are still here; but to-day it
+starts four days in advance of me. I cannot help thinking, This last
+time every flower in Maienthal, and every word my best teacher says to
+me, will give me still greater and deeper joy than ever, because I
+journey thither right from the turmoil of visiting, and with such a
+melancholy heart. The morning after that lovely night of the
+church-going festival I sat alone in an arbor near the great pond, and
+made myself sadder with all that I saw and thought; for during that
+whole morning, by reason of a dream I had had, my faded friend[172]
+stood before my soul,--her grave lay transparent above her, and I looked
+down through it, and saw that lily of heaven lying within there pale and
+still,--I reflected, indeed, as the gardener buried flowers with their
+pots in the earth, that the body in which we are planted must, in like
+manner, go down into the earth for future blooming, but, nevertheless,
+I could no longer control my tears.--In vain did I look upon the
+sparkling spring, which draws every day new colors, new insects, new
+flowers out of the earth,--I only grew sadder, since it rejuvenates
+everything, but not man.[173]--And when I saw Herr von Schleunes with a
+frog-bow approaching the pond, I was obliged, as he could see my eyes
+at a great distance as he passed by, to make believe asleep, in order
+not to betray them.... But before my dearest teacher I would have
+opened them as now, because he forgives me my weaknesses.
+
+                                               "CLOTILDA v. L. B."
+
+Victor had kept his left hand, with which he held the letter, too near
+to his heart, and his arm and letter began to tremble with the thumping
+heart, and he could hardly read and comprehend it for emotion. "Such a
+teacher! such a pupil!"--beyond that his looks could say nothing more.
+
+There was a struggle within him whether he should tell his friend his
+love for Clotilda. In _favor_ of the confession was Emanuel's request
+to seek her society,--that eye of his beholding, as if out of fixed
+stars, all trifles of earth,--Victor's grateful desire to repay one
+secret with another, and, most of all, oh! this love for his teacher,
+this love of his teacher for him.... And this, too, conquered, however
+much there was otherwise to be said _per contra_. For if Victor's whole
+nature glowed in the fire of friendship, so did his heart mount higher
+and higher, and burn to lay itself open,--he still wrestled with it,
+and still it was silent,--it loved boundlessly,--it lifted itself up as
+if by an invisible power,--at last it burst asunder,--his bosom opened
+wide as before God,--and now, beloved, look in, but forgive him all!
+
+He was still in this inward conflict, when the moon, which had gone up
+behind their backs, projected their two shadowy knee-pieces before
+them.--He was reminded, by Emanuel's outstretched shadow, of a passage
+in his letter,[174] and of his sickly life and early passing away....
+This clove open his inner being; he gently turned his Emanuel round
+toward the moon, now pouring down its radiance, and told him and showed
+him everything,--not merely his love, however, but his whole history,
+his whole soul, all his faults, all his follies,--everything; he was,
+at this moment, as eloquent as an angel, and full as great; his heart
+undulated in the melting glow of love; and the more he said, the more
+he wanted to have to say.
+
+No sublimer and more blessed hour strikes on this earth than that in
+which a man erects himself, exalted by virtue, softened by love, and
+despises all dangers, and shows a friend how it is with his heart. This
+trembling, this dissolving, this exaltation, is more precious than the
+itching of vanity to disguise itself in idle refinings. But perfect
+sincerity comports only with virtue. Let the man in whom suspicion and
+darkness dwell by all means apply to his bosom night-screws and
+night-bolts,--let the bad man spare us his opening of coffins,--and
+whoso has no heaven's door about him to open, let him keep the
+hell-gate shut!
+
+Emanuel felt the divine or motherly joy which a friend experiences at
+the virtue and improvement of a friend, and forgot in his joy the
+different occasions of it.
+
+Reluctantly do I tear myself away for a night from this virtuous pair.
+May I get many more days of Maienthal to paint, and may Victor spend
+there many days more!
+
+
+
+
+                           15. DOG-POST-DAY.
+
+                              The Parting.
+
+
+Ah, he goes this very day! The emotions and conversations which we have
+described had shattered too severely the tender casing which enclosed,
+as a tulip does the bee, Emanuel's fair spirit; he rose pale and
+languid; and the blind one was the happiest, who saw neither this
+paleness nor the white handkerchief which he, during the night, instead
+of staining with tears, had stained with blood. He himself had still
+the pale evening red of yesterday's joy on his face; but this very
+indifference to the gradual extinguishing of his days, this growing
+feebleness and faintness of tone in his conversation, caused Victor to
+turn away his eyes from him whenever they had for some time rested upon
+him. Emanuel looked down calm as an eternal sun on the autumn of his
+bodily life; nay, the more the sand fell from his life's hourglass, so
+much the more clearly did he look through the empty glass. And yet the
+earth was to him a beloved place, a fair meadow for our earliest plays
+of childhood; and he still hung upon this mother of our first life with
+the love wherewith the bride spends the evening full of childish
+remembrances on the bosom of her beloved mother, before on the morrow
+she goes to meet the bridegroom of her heart.
+
+Victor reproached himself with every drop of blood shed by Emanuel, and
+resolved to go to-day, because this Psyche, with her great wings, could
+no longer stir herself in her web without tearing it. In Emanuel's eyes
+there shone an inexpressible love for his sympathizing scholar. He
+began of himself to speak of his dying-day, in order to comfort him,
+and represented to him that he could not go hence till after a year. He
+based his enthusiastic prediction on two grounds;--first, that most of
+his male relatives had died on the selfsame day and in the selfsame
+climacteric[175] of life; secondly, that several consumptive patients
+before him had read in their diseased breast, as in a magic mirror,
+their last day. Victor disputed him; he showed that the foretelling of
+one's last appearance, as if the hectic man could easily feel
+beforehand, from the regular and gradual failing of the vital energy,
+the last step or freezing-point, was false, because feelings of the
+future in the present were contradictions (_in adjecto_), and because
+in the midst of life we could as little have a presentiment of the
+arrival of death as in our waking hours we can (notwithstanding a
+parallel gradation of steps in this case also) that of sleep. Victor
+represented all this to him; and yet he did not fairly believe it
+himself; he was overmastered by the lofty man who could announce his
+entrance into the shadow of death as calmly and confidently as an
+entrance of the moon into the shadow of the earth.... We will forgive
+the sick man, and not hold ourselves wiser than he is, because he is
+more enthusiastic than we.--Victor was most consoled by Emanuel's
+notion that his deceased father would appear to him for the first time
+just before his death.
+
+Victor lingered, and tried not to linger; forbade, as physician,
+Emanuel's talking, in order to make the excuse to himself of a harmless
+postponement, and became more and more troubled, for the very reason
+that he cared little to speak himself.--How canst thou, good Victor,
+this very day hurry away from him, from this angel, who will perhaps
+disappear over the next grave?--It must be a sore thing for thee, since
+it is already so hard to quit a Maienthal full of blossoms, a blind one
+full of soft tones; painful is here the last pressure of hands, Victor,
+and sweet every delay!
+
+He resolved to take leave at night, because a parting in the morning
+begets too long a sadness, and the place in the heart from which the
+beloved object was torn away continues bleeding all day long. Emanuel
+would of course, at evening, have betaken himself to the seminary, as
+he did yesterday; then would Victor, before the blind one, whom he
+would beg for the saddest melody in the world, be able to let his full
+eyelids, with which he always had to go out in order to relieve the
+anguish, stream down to his heart's content.
+
+When at evening he had eaten his last meal, and the evening-bell began,
+his heart felt as if the breast had been lifted away from it, and
+needle-points of ice were blown upon it.[176] Full of love, he clasped
+the blind youth, whom he was not permitted to recognize as the playmate
+of his childhood, and who with his tones had given more raptures than
+he had in this night of his blindness received in return; and he let
+tears have their way, whose twofold, perhaps threefold, source Emanuel
+did not guess; for the sight of these eyes, which were nevermore to be
+opened, awoke in him now, since Clotilda's wish for their healing, much
+more sorrow. Emanuel he still begged, with a voice that hurried away
+over the incidental meaning, to accompany him a short distance, till
+Maienthal should be out of sight.
+
+Out in the darkling and still country, all his sorrows lingered in his
+breast beside their sighs. "When the moon glimmers in upon this valley
+of blossoms," thought he, "I shall have left it for a long time." Only
+the altar-lights, the stars, burned in the great temple. He proposed to
+himself to part with his teacher on the mountain where their union had
+taken place; but he went up by circuitous ways,--Emanuel gladly
+following whithersoever he led,--in order during the circuit to
+overmaster his taciturnity and his tears.
+
+But they arrived at the foot of the weeping-birch, and grief still held
+possession of his eye and his voice. "Ah!" thought he, "how great and
+glad was the first night here, and how painful is this!" They reclined
+on the earth beside each other on the grassy bank, solitary, silent,
+sad, before the darkly glimmering universe. Victor could hear the
+labored breathing of the diseased breast, and the future grave on this
+mountain seemed to open at his side. Oh! if it is bitter to stand by
+the bed wherein a loved and fading countenance lies with the hues of
+death, far more bitter is it, in the midst of the scenes of health,
+behind the erect form of the dear one, to hear the grave-digger Death
+softly at his work, and to think, as often as the loved face looks
+joyful, "Ah, be still more joyful! in a short time he will have gnawed
+round the roots of thy life, and thou wilt have passed away with thy
+joys and with mine!"--But ah! there is indeed no friend, man or woman,
+with whom we should not be obliged to think the same!--
+
+He knew not why Dahore was so long silent.--He foresaw not that the
+moon would illumine the mountain sooner than the valley. The moon, that
+Pharos on the coast of the second world, now encircled men with pale
+fields, taken from dreams, with wan, gleaming meadows born of a
+super-terrestrial perspective, and the Alps and woods it resolved into
+immovable mists; _above_ the hemisphere of earth stood deep the
+Lethe-flood of slumber, _below_ the green crust stood the dead sea, and
+two loving men lived between the wide domains of sleep and death.... At
+this moment Victor thought to himself, indeed, still more keenly,
+"Here, beside this birch-tree, under this cold sod, will _his_
+crumbling breast be forever hidden, and his heart will bleed no more;
+but ah! it will beat no more." He thought, indeed, upon gloomy
+resemblances, as the _immovable_ stars appeared to go _up_ and _down_,
+merely because the playing _earth_ turned itself about them, now
+_showing_ and now _hiding_ them; he turned, indeed, his melancholy
+glance away from the _ignes fatui_, that, gliding over valleys, danced
+only on the solemn darkness and on the graves, and which described
+round a solitary powder-house their deceptive circles.----
+
+But still he was silent, and thought, "Ah, well! we have each other
+yet."
+
+But then it was too much for his bleeding heart when the flute-wails of
+the blind one stole out from the solitary house into the night, and
+passed over the mountain and over the future grave.--Then were voices
+given to the sighs and death-bells to the future, and his sadness grew
+too oppressive, as he thought, amidst the flute-murmurs, how this
+unique, this irreplaceable man, who cherished so much love for him in
+his great heart, was going hence never to reappear.--Ah! and when,
+besides, just at this moment, Emanuel, who had been lying beside him
+silently lost in gazing on the heavens and like a departed one, changed
+his position on account of his painful and oppressed breathing, but
+with a countenance whose serenity was undisturbed by the pains in his
+breast, then a cold hand glided into Victor's swollen heart and turned
+itself about therein, and his blood curdled on it, and he said, without
+the power of looking upon him, in faint, supplicating, broken accents,
+"Do not die in a year, my dear Emanuel,--do not wish to die!"
+
+The genius of night had stood till now, invisibly, before Emanuel, and
+poured high raptures into his bosom, but no passions; and he said: "We
+are not alone,--my soul feels the passing by of its kindred, and lifts
+itself up,--_under_ the earth is sleep, _above_ the earth is dream, but
+between sleep and dream I see luminous eyes move along like stars,--a
+cool breath comes from the sea of eternity over the glowing earth,--my
+heart mounts up, and will break away from life,--all around me is
+as great as if God passed through the night.--Spirits! grasp my
+spirit,--it climbs to your embrace,--and bear it up yonder...."
+
+Victor turned round and looked imploringly into the beautiful, joyous,
+tearless countenance: "Thou _wilt_ die?"
+
+Emanuel's ecstasy soared above life: "The dark streak in the next
+world is only a meadow of flowers,[177]--suns shine to light us
+onward,--flying heavens come to meet us with spring-breezes. With only
+empty graves the earth flies round the sun; for her dead stand remote
+on brighter suns."--
+
+"Emanuel?" said Victor, in a questioning tone, weeping aloud, and with
+a voice of the most fervent yearning,--and the flute-notes sank
+sorrowfully into the broad night,--"Emanuel?"
+
+Emanuel, returning to himself, looked on him, and said, calmly: "Yes,
+my beloved!--I can no more accustom myself to the earth; the water-drop
+of life has become flat and shallow,--I can no longer move round
+therein,--and my heart yearns to be among the great men who have left
+this drop behind them.--O beloved, listen, I pray,"--and here he
+pressed to soreness the heart of his Victor,--"and hear this heavy
+breath going. See, I pray, this shattered body, this thick casing,--how
+it wraps round my spirit, and obstructs its passage.--
+
+"See, here my spirit and thine cleave frozen to the ice-cake, and
+yonder the night opens all her heavens, reposing one behind the other;
+yonder in the blue, glimmering abyss dwells all the greatness which has
+disrobed itself on the earth, all the truth that we guess, all the
+goodness that we love.--
+
+"See, how still is all up there in immensity,--how softly the worlds
+move, how silently the suns glow! The great Eternal reposes as a
+fountain, with his overflowing, infinite love, in the midst of them,
+refreshing and tranquillizing all; and around God lies no grave."
+
+Here Emanuel, as if raised by an infinite blessedness, stood up and
+looked lovingly toward Arcturus, who still hung under the zenith of
+heaven, and said, directing his words toward the broad deep of
+brilliancy: "Ah, how inexpressibly do I yearn to come up to you! Ah,
+break in pieces, old heart, and hold me not so long in these bonds!"
+
+"Die, then, great soul," said Victor, "and take thy way up yonder; but
+break with thy death my little heart also, and keep by thee the poor
+one who cannot forsake thee nor do without thee."
+
+The flute had ceased; the two friends had sunk into each other's arms
+to end their farewell. "Dear, beloved, never-to-be-forgotten one," said
+Emanuel, "thou movest me too deeply; but when, a year hence, I go up
+from this mountain, then shalt thou stand by me, and see how man is
+released from his bonds. Thy tears will be my last earthly pangs; but I
+shall say, what I say now, We part by night, but we meet again by day."
+And so he went.
+
+Victor had gently disengaged himself from the childlike lips,--he
+sought not to follow him on his night-track,--slowly he went along by
+one vast sleep.--Often he turned round and followed with eyes full of
+falling tears the falling stars over Maienthal; and at four of the
+morning he arrived with a heavenly soul at St. Luna, and entered the
+garden full of old scenes, and laid down in the familiar arbor his
+glowing head and his subdued heart in the dew of the morning for a
+cooling repose.
+
+O rest thou, rest thou!--ah! sleep only, either on the earth or under
+the earth, can still the ever-agitated bosom of man....[178]
+
+
+
+
+16. DOG-POST-DAY.
+
+The Potato-form-Cutter.--Drag-chains in St. Luna.--Wax
+   Embossments.--Chess according to the _Regula Falsi_.--The Thistle
+   of Hope.--Escort to Flachsenfingen.
+
+
+One would certainly want to sleep in one's clothes, like old Fritz, so
+soon as ever one came to understand that in his shirt he is beset and
+attacked, as Victor and I sometimes are, by the vampires of midnight
+melancholy. They stay away when one sits up and has all his clothes on;
+especially do boots and hat retain for us the feeling of day in the
+greatest degree.--
+
+A warm hand lifted up Victor's bedewed head from the
+sleeping-board,[179] and directed it towards the whole surging flood of
+morning-light. His eyes opened (as always) with indescribable mildness,
+and without night-clouds, before Agatha, and beamed on her with full
+radiance. But she hurried him away with his radiance out of the leafy
+bedchamber; for he must look himself up a dressing-comb and a
+morning-blessing, and, secondly, the table-couch was to be a tea-table
+for Clotilda, who liked to take _warm_ drinks in _cool_ places.
+
+--And so he stands out there between parsonage and palace in
+mid-morning. All seemed to him to have been just built and painted
+during his journey; for all that dwelt therein seemed to have changed
+and made him melancholy. "The parents in there," he said to himself,
+"have no son, my friend has no sweetheart, and I--no tranquil heart."
+And now, when at last he entered the house, and became once more a
+bright triumphal arch of the loving family-circle,--when he was
+compelled to contemplate with sympathetic and yet enlightened eyes the
+tender illusions of the parents, the groundless hopes of his friend,
+and the coming up of stormy days,--then stood one fixed tear for the
+future in his eye; and it grew not less when his adoptive mother would
+justify it by tender glances.... Partly, however, this veil was wafted
+over his soul merely from the preceding night, whose glimmering scenes
+were separated from him only by a short interval of sleep; for a night
+spent in the watches of emotion always ends with a melancholy forenoon.
+
+The Chaplain was just making butter-vignettes; I mean, he was cutting,
+with no other etching-tool than a penknife, and into no other
+copperplate except potatoes, printers' tail-pieces and quadrats, which
+were to be stamped on the July butter by way of ornament. One might
+have supposed that Victor would have helped himself out greatly by
+having wit enough to remark that the _old printed things_ were, to be
+sure, quite worthy of long books upon them, and long universal German
+literary reviews of the books, but of no human thought, and were ten
+times more unenjoyable than these _newest_ butter-_incunabula_;[180]
+for, if there could be anything wretcheder than the world's history
+(i. e. the history of rulers), whose contents consisted of wars, as the
+theatre-journal of _other_ puppets does of cudgellings, it could only
+be the history of _littérateurs_ and printers.[181] This, too, must
+have stood him in stead,--that he was, finally, philosophical, and
+demanded that man should be called neither a _laughing_ nor a
+_reasoning_, but a _prinking_ animal; to which remark the Chaplain's
+lady added nothing, except the application of it to her daughters.
+
+But in men of his sort, sadness, satire, and philosophy have place
+beside each other. To the potato-medal-coiner and the Chaplainess, who
+reckoned all women on earth among her daughters, and pronounced similar
+castigatory sermons against them all, he described his journey with as
+many satires and rasures as were needful for both parties; but when he
+heard the wishes of the family expressed that his Lordship might have a
+happy journey back with the beloved son of the Prince, and the
+intelligence that the Regency-Counsellor had already everything packed
+up to start for the city any hour that he might choose, then had Victor
+nothing to do but to take the secretive tear-ducts in his eye-sockets
+out of the way.
+
+But whither? Into the garden! That was not well-considered. Flamin
+followed, and they arrived together at the embowered closet in the
+presence of the tea-drinkers. Never did its branches overshadow a more
+embarrassed face, softer eyes, fuller looks, and livelier or lovelier
+dreams than Victor carried with him beneath them. He thought of
+Clotilda as now a wholly new being, and thought, therefore,--as he knew
+not whether she loved him,--very stupidly. Man, when he has climbed
+over the mountain, always regards the coming hill as nothing; Flamin
+had been his mountain, and Clotilda was his hill.--In all the shallows
+of conversation, where one is already half stranding or sinking, there
+is no grander ship's-pump than a story which one has to tell. Give me
+embarrassment, and the largest circle, and only _one_ disaster,--that
+is, the anecdote of it, which no one knows but myself,--and I will soon
+save myself. Victor therefore brought out his, life-preserver,--that
+is, his log-book,--from which he made for the bower a practical
+extract. I confess, a newspaper-writer might have falsified more, might
+have been guilty of more sins of _commission_, but hardly of more sins
+of _omission_.
+
+He gave himself, I fancy, a lift again with the Chaplainess, and
+injured himself unquestionably with Clotilda,--however much, out of
+good-will towards his hearers, and too strong a hatred of the court, he
+offended against Clotilda's satire-embargo in her letter,--when,
+without reflecting, too, that maidens love only the jest, not the
+jesters, he represented the benefit-drama of the Princess, not on the
+sublime side, as I did, but on the comic side. Clotilda smiled, and
+Agatha laughed.
+
+But when he named the name of Emanuel, and his house, and his mountain,
+then did friendship and memory diffuse over the fairest eye above which
+an eyebrow-arch, drawn by a line of beauty, ever yet flowed, a soft
+glimmer which wanted, every moment, to grow to a tear of joy. But it
+had to become one of another nature, when, in answer to the question
+about his health which Clotilda hopefully put to him as an adept in
+science, Victor was compelled to give the (faintly paraphrased) history
+of his nocturnal bleeding. He could not conceal the pang of sympathy,
+nor could Clotilda conquer it. O ye two good souls! what sore wounds
+will your hearts yet receive from your great friend!
+
+Whither could she now turn her loving and sorrowing eye, but to her
+good brother Flamin, towards whom her demeanor, in consequence of the
+double constraint which her silence and his interpretations imposed
+upon her, had been hitherto so indescribably mild?--As, now, Victor saw
+all this with such wholly different eyes,--as he stood before his poor
+friend, who with his present happiness was perhaps accumulating the
+poisonous nourishment of his future jealousy, and gazed openly and
+fixedly into the firm countenance which some time bitter days might
+rend with agony,--and as, generally, _past_ or _future_ sorrows of
+another took a stronger hold of him than _present_ ones, because fancy
+had him more in its power than the senses,--in this state of things, he
+could not for a moment assert the mastery over his eyes, but they bent
+their look, encircled with compassionate tears, tenderly on his friend.
+Clotilda was embarrassed about the resting-place of his look; so was he
+too, because man is less ashamed of the most vehement signs of hatred
+than of the smallest signs of love. Clotilda understood not the
+coquettish double art of throwing others into embarrassment or drawing
+them out of it; and the good Agatha always confounded the latter with
+the former.... "Ask him what ails him, brother!" said Agatha to
+Flamin....
+
+The latter led him out with like good intention behind the nearest
+gooseberry-bushes, and asked him in his firm way, which always held an
+assertion as a question,--
+
+"Something has happened to thee?"
+
+"Just come this way!" said Victor, and pulled him along behind some
+higher Spanish walls[182] of foliage.
+
+"Nothing has happened to me," he began, at last, with brimming
+eye-sockets and smiling features,--"nothing more than that I have been
+a fool for some twenty-six years" (that was his age). "I know thou art
+unfortunately a jurist, and perhaps a worse oculist than I myself am,
+and hast, perhaps, read very little in Herr Janin.[183]--Am I right?"
+
+Flamin's shaking of his head meant something more than No.
+
+"Very naturally; but if thou hadst, thou couldst have it from himself,
+or from the translation by Selle, very finely shown, that not merely
+the lachrymal gland secretes our tear-drops, but also the crystalline
+body,[184] the Meibomian[185] glands, the lachrymal caruncle,[186]
+and--our afflicted heart, I add to the rest.--Nevertheless, of these
+aqueous globules, which are made for the sorrows of poor, poor mortals,
+not more than (if things go rightly) four ounces are filtered in
+twenty-four hours.... But, my dear one, the fact is just this,--that
+things do not go rightly, especially with me; and it vexes me to-day,
+not that thou hast never peeped into Herr Janin, but that thou dost not
+observe my confounded, cursed, stupid way."
+
+"What one?"
+
+"Yes, indeed,--what one? but I mean this of to-day,--namely, that
+my eyes--thou mayst boldly ascribe it merely to a too feeble
+_tear-siphon_, under which head Petit comprehends all absorbing
+tear-ducts--run over, when, e. g., any one does me an injustice, or
+when I merely desire anything too strongly, or imagine to myself an
+approaching pleasure, or only, in fact, a strong sensation, or human
+life, or the mere weeping itself." ...
+
+His good-natured eye stood full of water as he said it, and justified
+all.
+
+"Dear Flamin, I wish I had been a lady, or a Moravian, or a
+player;--truly, if I wanted to make the spectators believe I was going
+about it (namely, weeping), it would be actually a fact, too, on the
+spot."--
+
+And here he fell softly and fondly, with tears which had an excuse for
+flowing, upon the beloved breast.... But for the viper-cure and
+iron-cure of his manliness he needed nothing but a "Hm!" and a shrug of
+the whole body; thereupon the youths went back as men to the arbor.
+
+There was nothing left there: the girls had stolen away to the meadows,
+where nothing was to be avoided, except high grass and bedewed shadows.
+The empty arbor was the best absorbing tear-siphon for his eyes; nay, I
+gather from reports of the epistolary Spitz that he was vexed. As the
+sister came back by-and-by alone, his companion was vexed too. In fact,
+if somehow or other my hero--which would be a misfortune for me and
+him--should in time fall in love with Clotilda, then will the heroine
+make us both warm enough,--him in acting, me in copying,--for the very
+reason that she herself will _not_ be warm, because she has neither
+superfluous warmth nor superfluous coldness, but always the alternating
+temperature which changes with the subject of conversation, but not
+with the speaker; because she takes away from a tenderly disposed
+fellow-man all pleasure in praising her, as she pays out no tithe
+thereof, or at least in offending her, as she issues no letters of
+indulgence; and because one really, in his agony, assumes at last that
+one can commit no other sins against her except such as are sins
+against the Holy Ghost. Jean Paul, who has been in such cases, and has
+often stood for whole years in one spot before such mountain-fortresses
+with his storming-ladders and labarums and trumpeters, and, instead of
+the garrisons, taken _himself_ off by an honorable retreat,--this Paul,
+I say, can form a conception of what an amount of parchment, time, and
+printer's ink may have to be used up in the case of Sebastian _contra_
+Clotilda, before we get things even to a _war-footing_. In fact, with a
+perfectly _rational_ woman a man never feels himself quite well; and
+only with a merely fine, fanciful, ardent, capricious one is he truly
+at home. One like Clotilda can make the best man, from mere distress
+and respect, frosty, stupid, and enraptured; and in most cases there
+comes in the additional misfortune, that the poor, worn-out, fond fool,
+by whom such an earthly angel absolutely will not let herself be
+worshipped, as the Apocalyptic one would not by the disciple John, can
+still seldom muster courage to say to the angel,--somewhat as one might
+to an angel of an opposite nature with the kingdoms of the world,
+demanding to be worshipped,--"Take thyself out of my sight!" Paul
+always in such cases takes himself away.----
+
+Victor did not do this; he absolutely now could not get away from the
+house, i. e. from the village. The summer days seemed to him to rest in
+St. Luna, softly breathing, fragrant, blissful; and he was going to be
+cast out of this softly straying gondola into the slave-ship of the
+Court,--out of the milk-house of the Parsonage into the princely
+arsenic-house,--out of the _kindergarten_ of household love into the
+ice-field of court love. That was a sore thing to him here in the
+arbor,--and so sweet a thing in Tostato's shop!--When man's wishes and
+situations exchange places, he accuses the situations, not the wishes.
+He could laugh at himself for it, he said, but he had a hundred reasons
+for lingering in St. Luna from one day to another: he was so much
+disgusted now with his intention of pleasing a man (the Prince) from
+any other motive than love; it was still more improbable that he should
+himself please than that he should be pleased; he would rather humor
+his own whims than those of crownéd heads, and he knew for certain that
+in the first month he should tell the Minister von Schleunes satirical
+things to his very face, and in the second even the Prince; and, in
+fact, now in midsummer he should just be fit to act the complete
+court-knave, whereas in winter, &c.
+
+Beside these hundred reasons, he had still weaker ones which he did not
+at all mention,--for instance, some such as these: He would gladly be
+about Clotilda, because he must necessarily, as it were, to justify his
+conduct,--but which, then, my dear, thy past or thy future?--disclose
+to her his knowledge about her consanguinity to his friend. To this
+disclosure there was wanting, what in Paris is dearest, _place_,--and
+then, too, the exordium. Clotilda was nowhere to be met alone.
+Connoisseurs say that every secret one tells to one of the fair sex is
+a sticking-plaster which attaches him to her, and often begets a second
+secret: was it for some such reason that Victor was so eager to
+contrive a way of showing to Clotilda his acquaintance with her
+sisterly relation?--
+
+He stayed day after day, as, besides, the butter-week[187] of the
+marriage must go by first. He had already marriage-medals in his
+pocket. But he never could see Clotilda except a second at a time;
+and, according to Bonnet, one needs half a second for a clear
+idea,--according to Hooke, a whole one, in fact. Therefore, before he
+could form a complete conception of this still goddess, she was always
+gone.
+
+At last more serious arrangements were made, not for departure, but for
+forming the purpose of it.... The sweetest minutes of a visit are those
+which once more postpone its close; the sweetest of all, those in which
+one already has cane or fan in hand, and yet does not go. Such minutes
+now encircled our Fabius of love; softer eyes said to him, "Hurry not!"
+warmer hands drew him back, and the mother's tear asked him, "Wilt thou
+rob me of my Flamin so soon as to-morrow?"
+
+"By no means," he answered, and kept his seat. Did not, I ask, the
+Chaplainess thrust for his sake her lingual executioner's sword into
+its sheath, because there was nothing he so hated as loud or silent
+defamations of a sex which, more unhappy than ours, sees itself
+maltreated by two sexes at once? For he often took maidens by the hand,
+and said: "Woman's faults, particularly _evil_ reports, moodiness, and
+sensitiveness, are _knot-holes_, which in the _green_ tree please us
+even into the honeymoon[188] as fine marble-veined _circles_, but
+which, in the _dry_, in the marriage-furniture, when the plug has
+shrunk and fallen out, gape open as ugly holes." Agatha now screwed her
+sewing-cushion to his writing-table and kissed him, whether he chose to
+look pleasant or sullen; Even the Chaplain sought to sweeten for him,
+if not the last days, which he dreamed away at his house, yet at least
+the last _nights_, for which purpose he needed nothing but a drum and a
+foot. The most fiery nocturnal witch-dances of the mice the Chaplain
+interdicted with his heel, that they might not wake up his guest; that
+is to say, he kept up against the foot-board of the bed from time to
+time a moderate cannonading, which knelled into the ear-trumpets of the
+dancers the more in proportion as it startled the ears of humanity.
+Against the Euler's knight's-moves of the rats he took the field with
+only a mallet, wherewith, breaking in like a day of judgment on their
+pleasure-parties and hunting-parties, he merely thumped once or twice
+on a drum, extemporized out of the bed-quilt.
+
+Matthieu was invisible, and, as courtiers mimic princes in everything,
+was parodying the nuptial days of his prince at least by little nuptial
+_hours_ of his own. The powder which issued out of cannons and the
+cornucopias of the firework-makers, the _vivat_ which was prayed from
+pulpits and shouted from taverns, and the expenses one incurred for all
+this, were, I think, so considerable, that the greatest prince need not
+have been ashamed to illustrate therewith his marriage and his--ennui.
+Coldness has forever a _speaking-trumpet_, and sensitiveness an
+_ear-trumpet_. The arrival of an unloved princely corpse or bride is
+heard of at the polar circles; on the contrary, when we inferiors fill
+our graves or our arms with loved beings, there fall only a few,
+unheard tears, disconsolate or blissful.
+
+Flamin pined for the session-table, whose labors were now soon to
+begin, and he could not comprehend this delay.... At last, for once,
+and with all seriousness, the day of departure was fixed, the 10th of
+August; and I am sure Victor would not have been on the 14th still in
+St. Luna, had not the Devil on the 8th brought along a Tyrolese.
+
+It is the same fellow who day before yesterday made his entry among us
+at Scheerau, with a wax retinue which he had got together, half from
+the imperial states and half from among the literati, and with the wax
+hands of these twin brothers of man took money from our purse. It is
+stupid, that Spitz did not bring me the present dog's-day the day
+before yesterday; I could myself have asked the churl, who embossed, in
+St. Luna, Victor and the Chaplain in wax, what was the real name of
+Victor, and of Eymann, and of St. Luna itself. The result is, that I am
+still, with an allowable and biographical curiosity about this
+carpenter of men, who surrounds us with awful reflections of our little
+being, following on his heels.
+
+Victor must, therefore, again tarry; for he had himself and the
+Chaplain baked in wax, in order to give, in the first place, to the
+latter, who had a childish fondness for all casts, dolls, and puppets,
+and, secondly, to the family, who longed to quarter the waxen
+mock-Victor in his vacated chamber, a greater pleasure than to himself.
+For he had a horror of these flesh-colored shadows of himself. Even in
+childhood, among all ghost-stories, those of people who had seen
+themselves crept with the coldest hand over his heart. Often at
+evening, before going to bed, he surveyed his trembling body so long,
+that at last he detached it from himself, and saw it standing thus
+alone beside his self and gesticulating as a strange form; then he
+would lay himself down, quaking, with this strange form, in the grave
+of sleep, and the darkling soul felt itself like a Hamadryad, grown
+over by the pliant fleshy bark. Hence he felt deeply the difference and
+the long interval between his self and its bark, when he looked for
+some time on another's body, and still more deeply when he contemplated
+his own.
+
+He sat opposite the embossing-stool and the embossing-tools, but fixed
+his eyes on a book again, so as not to see the corporeal form, in which
+he carried himself round, distant and duplicated. The reason why he
+nevertheless could endure the reduplication of his face in the glass
+can only be, that he regarded the supernumerary in the glass either
+merely as a superficial portrait without cubic contents, or as the only
+archetype with which we compare other duplicates of our person.... Upon
+these points I can never speak, myself, without a certain tremor....
+
+The wax-copy of Victor, to express his majority, was arrayed in a _toga
+virilis_, an overcoat which the original had cast off; likewise the
+chamber which the living one vacated was cleared out. The Chaplain
+proposed to himself to place this cheap edition of Horion in the window
+when the better one was gone, in such a manner that all the school
+youth, who learned from the chorister manners and _mores_, should doff
+their hats to it when they came tearing out of the school-house.
+
+Now at last!--For Mat came. The wrung-out cheeks of the latter, and his
+whole body, which had been under the lemon-squeezers of night-feasts,
+gave evidence that he did not lie when he said the princely bridegroom
+looked even eight times wretcheder, and was prostrate with the gout. He
+added in his bitter way, which Victor little liked, that these pale
+great people had in fact no blood except the little they cupped from
+their subjects or what stuck to their hands, as insects carry no red
+blood about with them, save what they have sucked from other creatures.
+This reminded Victor of his medical duties to this prince. Either Mat's
+wasted form,--for immoral night-life makes features and complexion
+still more repulsive than the longest confinement to the sick-bed,--or
+the recollection of his Lordship's warnings, or both, made him
+quite as odious to our court-physician as the latter through his
+court-doctorship had become to him: this secret poison of Matthieu's,
+however, manifested itself, not by an abated, but by an increased,
+almost ironical courteousness. On the contrary, Mat and Flamin seemed
+to be more familiar with one another than ever.
+
+In the forenoon, after shaving, Victor jumped up without washing
+himself again, and immediately packed up his boot-jack, and burst the
+suspenders of his pantaloons, and bespoke additional hands to discharge
+his life-ballast, (on account of his miserable packing,) and then stow
+it again. For he always gave over the whole trusteeship of the lumber
+of our petty life's furniture to strange hands, and that with such a
+contempt for the trumpery and such a recklessness of expenditure,--I
+never mean, indeed, to calumniate my hero, but, notwithstanding,
+it is proved by Spitz that he never collated the current money of a
+gold-piece when he changed it into silver, nor ever beat down in trade
+a Jew, Roman, or Moravian,--to such a degree, I say, did he carry this,
+that the whole female Hanse in St. Luna cried, "What a fool!" and that
+the Chaplainess always in the market-square slipped herself into his
+place. But he was incorrigible, because he made the journey of life,
+and therefore the luggage of the journey, look so diminutive through
+his philosophic eyes, and because nothing made him blush like the least
+appearance of self-interest: he ran off from all arrangements,
+outriders, and stage-rehearsals, when they appeared on his account; he
+was ashamed of every pleasure which was not to be divided, at least
+into two bites, one for a fellow-eater; he said, the forehead of a
+Hospodar[189] must have assumed the hardness of his crown, for
+otherwise such a man could not possibly endure what often, merely on
+his behalf, was done by a whole county,--the music, the triumphal
+arches, the odes, the cries of joy in prose, and the frightful
+cannonades.
+
+He had now nothing more to discharge in St. Luna than a mere flat
+civility; for thus much may I well assert without vanity, that
+a hero whom I have chosen for mine will have, I trust, sufficient
+good-breeding to go to the Chamberlain Le Baut and say, "_Au revoir!_"
+Besides, to such state visits he must now accustom himself.
+
+Mat, too, was over there, that image of a Cupid with bristly, plucked,
+drooping wings, tossed to the Chamberlain's lady: the latter joked with
+him about those vacant looks, which betrayed the intermittent pulse of
+his love. Le Baut was playing chess with Mat,--Clotilda sat at her
+little work-table full of silk-flowers, in the midst of this noble
+trio.... Ye poor daughters! what people have you not often to welcome
+and hear through! To Clotilda, however, this family friend was nothing
+but a stuffed-out mummy, and she knew not whether he came or went.
+
+Sebastian, as adoptive son of Fortune, as heir of the paternal post of
+favorite, was to-day received at the Chamberlain's with uncommon
+civility. Verily, if the courtier shuns unfortunates because sympathy
+for their sufferings comes over him too heavily, so does he gladly seek
+the society of the fortunate, because he loves to participate in their
+joy. The Chamberlain, who even continued to bow before one who, in his
+fall from a throne, hung midway in the air, naturally bent himself
+still lower before one who was in the act of making the opposite
+passage.
+
+Victor joined the women, but with an eye that strayed away to the
+chess-board, in order, if he should be embarrassed, immediately to have
+at hand a pretext for changing his attention or taking his leave. It
+was ingenious: for every word which he or the women said was a move at
+chess; he was obliged to conceal his coldness toward the Le Baut, that
+is, toward the stepmother,--how much did she know that nothing graces a
+mother more than a perfect daughter?--and his _warmth_ toward the
+stepdaughter. The reader must not ask: "What warmth, then, could the
+old stepmother desire?" For in the higher ranks claims are not altered
+by blood-relationship or age; merely in the lower is this the case;
+hence I always fear that what I address to the daughter may weary the
+mother, and I always cast about, and rightly, when she comes, for a
+better thread of discourse. Victor easily concealed his _coldness_ by
+virtue of humanity, which, with him, so often degenerated into a
+good-natured flattery of immoral hopes; and when a woman wanted to have
+him fall in love with her, he would say: "I cannot really tell the good
+little lamb, 'I would rather not.'" His _warmth_ toward Clotilda he
+concealed--badly, not because it was too strong, but precisely because
+it was not yet enough so. It is natural: a young man of education can,
+if he will, conceal and bury in silence his _reciprocated_ love,
+without making a pulpit announcement, but an _unreturned_ love, one
+which he himself calls nothing more than mere regard, he lets blaze out
+from him without cover. For the rest, I beg the world to sit down and
+consider, that my hero has not the Devil in his skin or sixteen years
+over his head, but that he cannot possibly feel a love for a person who
+hangs a Moses' veil over her sentiments and over her charms. Love
+begins and rises, throughout, only on reciprocal love, and with the
+lovers' mutual finding-out of each other. He has merely regard, but a
+very great, a growing and anxious regard; in short, his regard is that
+cold pulsating point in the yolk of the heart--the metaphor is drawn
+from an egg--to which the least outward warmth, often after years,
+imparts growing life and Cupid's wings.
+
+He now at the work-table investigated Clotilda's warmth with the
+pyrometer; but I cannot go beside myself for joy, that he found, on a
+scale subdivided into the minutest parts, her warmth to have risen
+1/111 of a line. For he is off the track: I would sooner rely on
+Lavater's forehead-measurer than on the heart- and warmth-measurer of a
+love-seeking man, who confounds his interpretations with his
+observations, and accidents with intentions. His pyrometer may,
+however, be right; for towards good men one is, when bad ones are by,
+(consider only Mat,) warmer than usual.
+
+Let no one blame Herr Le Baut and Frau Le Baut for congratulating my
+hero on the good fortune of going to such a court, to see such a
+prince,--the greatest in Germany, said _he_,--to such a princess,--the
+loveliest in Germany, said _she_. Mat smiled between Yes and No. The
+old man went on with his chess, the old woman with her praise. Victor
+saw with contempt how little possible it would be, in the case of two
+such souls, who held the steps of the throne for a scale of being, and
+the glacier of the throne for an Olympus and an Empyræum, and knew not
+where, except on this eminence, to find their happiness,--to give them
+better ideas of happiness, and worse ones of the eminence.
+Nevertheless, he was obliged to confess to Clotilda, who had on her
+face more than a No to the _eulogy_, that he negatived the whole of it
+as nobly as she. He therefore kneaded praise and blame together,
+according to an Horatian mixture, in order to make neither satirical
+nor flattering allusions to two dismissed court-people.
+
+"It is painful to me," said he, "that there are only pleasures there,
+and no occupations,--mere baskets of confectionery, and not a single
+work-bag, not to say no work-table like this one."
+
+"Do you think," asked Clotilda, with striking earnestness, "that all
+court-feasts pay for a single court-service?"
+
+"No," said he, "for one ought to be paid for the feasts themselves. I
+maintain there is nothing but drudgery there, and no enjoyment: all
+their amusements are only the illumination, the interlude, and the
+decorations, which please the player, who is thinking of his part, less
+than the spectator."
+
+"It is, at all events, good _to have been there_," said the old woman.
+
+"Certainly," said he; "for it is good not always to stay there."
+
+"But there are persons," said Clotilda, "who cannot make themselves
+happy there, simply because they do not love to be there."
+
+That was very fine and forbearing, but intelligible only to Victor's
+heart.
+
+"I would advise a fine enthusiast" (said he, and made no account, as
+usual, of the apparent contradiction between Victor's _life_ and
+Victor's _opinions_) "or a fiery poet to stay at home,--the _flights_
+of either, instead of _pas_, would be in court-life what an hexameter
+is in prose, which the critics cannot bear,--and to the soul with the
+softest sensibilities I would say, Be off with them! the _heart_ is
+there treated as a superfluous member, as in the six-fingered family in
+Anjou the sixth _finger_ is." ...
+
+The old woman shook her head quickly to the left.
+
+"And yet," he continued, "I would take all three for a month to court
+and make them unhappy, in order to make them wise."
+
+The Chamberlain's family could not accommodate themselves to Victor's
+style so well as my reader, who to my exceeding delight so cleverly
+distinguishes humor and the talent of looking at all sides of a thing
+from flattery and skepticism. Clotilda had slowly shaken her head at
+the last proposition. In fact, all battled to-day _for_ and _against_
+him, in that partial tone which women and relatives always assume
+towards a stranger, when an hour before they had carried on the same
+suit, but with a practical application, with their own kin.
+
+Victor, who had long been fearing: that he should become disconcerted,
+went off at last to where he had been so often looking,--to the
+chess-table, where they were playing with the greatest desire to--lose.
+The Chamberlain,--we all know how it was with him; he wrote nothing but
+commendatory letters for the whole world, and the sacramental cup would
+have been more to his taste, could he have drunk from it a _toast_ to
+some important man's health,--that personage only promoted as well as
+he could with the dry chess-statues another's success at the expense of
+his own; he was glad to lose, provided only Matthieu won. And then,
+too, he resembled those shamefaced souls who love to bestow their
+benefits secretly, and he could not find it in his heart to tell his
+adversary that he was securing him the victory; he took almost greater
+pains to conceal himself as a courtier than to _conquer himself_ as a
+Christian. Such a love ought, it would seem, to have been more warmly
+requited than by open malice; but Mat had the same object in view, and
+declined the victory which the other threw into his hands, like a real
+sharper. In vain did Le Baut devise the best moves for checkmating
+one's self. Mat matched him with still better ones, and threatened
+every minute to be checkmated too. And every one pities the poor
+Chamberlain, hunted about on the chess-board, and fearing, like a
+coquette, that he shall _not_ be conquered. It became at length, for a
+soft-souled eye, which certainly forgives the weak one sooner than the
+wicked one, no longer endurable; Victor, with a thousand excuses to the
+weak one and full of malice toward the malicious one, entered into the
+steeple-chase, and obliged the Page to accept his advice and his
+charitable subsidies, and to lay hold of military operations which he
+proposed of such worth, that the man with the office of Chamberlain's
+key, at last, in spite of his fears and in spite of the worst
+prospects,--lost the game. All present saw through all present, as
+princes do through each other in their public--playbills.
+
+He got at last his farewell audience, but very small solace. The fair
+form, beneath which all his ideals of beauty stood only as heraldic
+bearers and caryatides, was even colder than at the reception, and
+persisted in being only the echo of the parental courtesy. The only
+thing which still kept him up was a--thistle: namely, an optical one
+which had been sowed on the mosaic floor. That is to say, he took
+notice that Clotilda during the farewell avoided with her foot this
+flower-piece (which she certainly must have known) as if it were the
+original. In the evening he drew his chains of inferences, as they are
+taught in the universities; he engrafted upon this mock-thistle all the
+roses of his destiny. "She was certainly _distrait_, and why? I ask,"
+he said, speaking into his pillow; "for, besides, they have not yet
+detected my feelings over yonder," he asserted, as he laid himself on
+the second pillow. "O thou sweet eye that went down on the thistle,
+rise again in my sleep, and be the moon of my dreams!" said he, when he
+was already half-way into both. It was merely out of modesty that he
+thought he was not discovered, because he did not look on himself as
+remarkable enough to be observed.
+
+The 20th of August, 179-, was the great day when he took up his march
+to Flachsenfingen. Flamin had already trotted off at four o'clock in
+the afternoon, in order to avoid a leave-taking which he hated. But our
+Victor loved to bid farewell, and loved to tremble in the last silences
+of parting. "O ye poor, egoistic mortals!" he said,--"besides; this
+polar life is but so bald and cold; besides, we stand weeks and years
+near each other without stirring with the heart anything better than
+our blood,--only two or three glowing moments hiss and go out on the
+glaciers of life,--why do you still avoid everything that draws you out
+of your commonplace, and that reminds you how man loves? No! and if I
+went to the bottom, and if I could thenceforward no longer console
+myself, I would still, with bare heart and with all my wounds bleeding,
+dissolved and sinking, I would still press to my bosom the beloved
+being who must leave me, and would still say, It does me good!" Cold,
+self-seeking, comfortable persons avoid leave-taking, just as unpoetic
+ones of too intense sensibilities do; women, on the contrary, who
+alleviate all their sorrows by talking, and people of poetic
+temperament, who relieve all theirs by fantasying, court it.
+
+At six o'clock in the evening,--for it was only a skip to
+Flachsenfingen,--when the cattle came home, he sallied forth,
+accompanied by the whole family. On his more fortunate arm--mine has to
+bestir itself only for the good of science--hung the Britoness, and on
+his left Agatha; to the sister the poor house-poodle (Apollonia) had
+buckled herself, who thought, nevertheless, she might touch and enjoy,
+despite the sisterly interpolation and mediating spirit, the dear
+Doctor. So do the sparks of love, like the electric and magnetic
+element, dart through a medium of twenty interposed bodies. A
+philosopher, who sits down and considers that our fingers come not, in
+fact, a thumb nearer to the beloved soul, whether only the globe of the
+brain or that of the earth lie between them and it, will of course say,
+"All very natural!" Hence this sedentary philosopher explains why
+maidens half-love at the same time the male acquaintances of their
+beloved,--why the cane-chair of Shakspeare, the clothes-drawer
+of Frederick II., the bob-wig of Rousseau, content our yearning
+hearts.----
+
+But no one, except the queen-bee of this streaming swarm, wanted to go
+back again. "Only just as far as the six trees," said Agatha. When they
+had arrived at these frontier posts and boundary-trees of to-day's
+pleasure, there were seven of them, and there was a general agreement
+that _they_ were not meant, and they must go farther. The one who is
+escorted grows generally more and more nervous, and the escort more and
+more delighted, the longer it lasts. "Do let us go as far as that
+ploughman!" said the sharp-sighted Britoness. But at last our hero
+observed, that this Pillar of Hercules of their journey was itself a
+moving column, and that the ploughman was only a wayfarer. "The best
+thing is," said he, and turned about, "for me to go back, and not start
+till to-morrow." The Chaplain said: "As far as the old palace" (i. e.
+there was still _one_ wall of it remaining); "besides, I usually go
+there evenings!" But beyond this frontier fort of the loveliest of
+evenings the chattering column deceptively extended its march, and the
+eyes were forgotten for the ears. As, consequently, in these boundary
+disputes, one main article after another was broken by separate
+articles, there was really nothing further to be done, except to make
+the following attempt. "Only so far did I mean to have you go," said
+Victor;--"now you must keep on with me and spend the night at the
+apothecary's." "In fact," said the Chaplain's wife, coolly, "we'll go
+along together till sundown; we surely are not going to turn our backs
+upon this lovely sun." And certainly the evening had kindled nothing
+but _feux-de-joie_ in the sun, in the clouds, on the earth, and on the
+water.
+
+On the hill they saw already the spires of the city; the sun, that
+chosen turnstile of the escort, poured out of his deep hiding-place his
+gold-trailing purple streams over the beds of shadow. There, on the
+hill, as the sun vanished, Victor folded his arms round the married
+couple, and said, "O, make yourselves as happy as you do me, and return
+to your home in gladness!"--and then he took the sisters to his
+enraptured heart, and said, "Good, good night! I love you!"--and then
+he saw them all going back with their hidden sighs and tears; and then
+he called out, "Truly, I shall soon come back; it is really only a jump
+from one place to the other"; and then he cried after them, "I shall be
+a poor devil, if we are separated!"--and then his heavy eye followed
+them through all branches and hollows, and only when the loving company
+had sunk into the last valley, as into a grave, did he close his eyes
+and think on the ceaseless separations of man....
+
+At last he opened his eyes toward the outspread, obscured city, and
+thought: "Amidst that raised-work, in which men nestle with their
+little life, thy little days, too, are shut in,--this is the veiled
+birthplace of thy future tears, thy future raptures;--ah! with what
+eyes shall I look down again, years hence, over this misty
+environment,--and ... I am a fool! are, then, 2,300 houses standing
+only on my account?"
+
+_Postscript_. This sixteenth post-day the Mining-Superintendent has
+concluded in regular order at the end of June.
+
+
+                        FOURTH INTERCALARY DAY,
+                                  AND
+                      PREFACE TO THE SECOND PART.
+
+I am going to weld Intercalary Day and Preface together. Therefore,
+unless there is to be mere trifling with the matter of the Preface, the
+Second Part must be here, in some measure at least, touched upon. It
+deserves to be noticed by critics, that an author who in the beginning
+has before him for his domain eight pages of white paper--just as,
+according to Strabo, the territory of Rome was eight leagues
+broad--gets on by degrees so far, and peoples the scribbled paper
+with so many Greek colonists,--for such our German characters
+are,[190]--that at last he has often marched through and settled a
+whole alphabet. This puts him into a condition to begin the Second
+Part. My second is, as I know for certain, much better than the first,
+although it is, to be sure, ten times worse than the third. I shall be
+amply rewarded, if my work is the occasion of one review more being
+made in the world; nor can I conceive of anything, unless it be this
+very thought, that books must be written, so that the learned notices
+of them may go on, which could keep an author up to the unspeakable
+labor of standing all day at the inkstand, and dyeing whole pounds
+of paper-rags _Berlin-blue_.... And now let this cool, serious,
+_hocus-pocus_ of a Preface--an expression which Tillotson maintains to
+be an abridgment of the Catholic formula, _hoc est corpus_--suffice for
+good reviewers and universities.
+
+I return to that which I properly meant by this whole episode. I have
+conceived the idea, namely, of not only announcing my intention to give
+the extra leaflets and side-shoots wherewith the Intercalary Days are
+to be filled up, in alphabetical order,--for disorder is the death of
+me,--but also to make a beginning here on the spot, and continue as far
+as the letter I.
+
+
+         INTERCALARY--AND SIDE-SHOOTS, ALPHABETICALLY ARRANGED.
+
+                                   A.
+
+Age of Women.--Lombardus (L. 4. Sent. dist. 4) and Saint Augustin (l.
+22. de Civit. c. 15) prove that we all rise from the dead at that age
+at which Christ rose, namely, in the thirty-second year and third
+month. Accordingly, as in the whole of heaven there is no
+quadragenarian to be found, a child will be as old there as Nestor,
+namely, thirty-two years and three months. Knowing this, any one will
+highly esteem the fine modesty of women, who after the thirtieth year
+give themselves out (like relics) to be older than they are; for it
+would be enough, if a quadragenarian, or one of eight-and-forty years,
+should make herself out as old as good Rhine wine, or, at most, as old
+as Methuselah; but she thinks it is being more modest, if she ascribes
+to herself at once, however much her face contradicts it, the extreme
+old age which she can have only when her face has lain some thousands
+of years in the earth, namely, thirty-two years and three months. The
+merest dunce can see that she means only her future resurrection-age,
+and not any earthly age,--because she does not deviate from that
+standing year, which in eternity, indeed, when no human being can grow
+an hour older, is a matter of course. This unity of time they introduce
+into the _Intrigue drama_ of their life already in the thirtieth year,
+for the reason that after that time in Paris no woman can any longer
+dance in public, and (according to Helvetius) no genius can any longer
+write in a masterly style. This last fact they perhaps took into
+account in old times in Jerusalem, where any one after his thirtieth
+year, but no sooner, could get an office as teacher.
+
+                                   B.
+
+Basedow's School System.--Basedow proposes in his _Philalethia_ to
+hedge up thirty uneducated children in a garden, to leave them to their
+own development, and to assign them only mute attendants, who should
+not even wear human clothing, and then to publish in a protocol the
+results of the experiment. Philosophers are so preoccupied with
+possibility that they do not see reality; otherwise Basedow must have
+observed that our country-schools are just such gardens, in which
+Philosophy would try the experiment of what will at last come of human
+creatures, if they are absolutely deprived of all culture. I confess,
+however, that all these attempts must continue uncertain and imperfect
+so long as the schoolmasters cannot refrain from imparting to these
+little probationers some instruction, though it were the least
+possible; and the thing would work better with wholly dumb teachers, as
+there are deaf and dumb pupils.
+
+                             C (_vide_ K).
+
+                                   D.
+
+Divine Poet.--The Poet, although he paints the passions, nevertheless
+will hit them best at that period of life when his own, have
+slackened,--just as convex mirrors, precisely in those summers when the
+sun burned the faintest, have acted the most intensely, and in the hot
+ones the least so. The flowers of poesy are like other flowers, which
+(according to Ingenhouse) thrive best in a dim, hazy sunlight.
+
+                                   E.
+
+Emotion (Sentimental).--Sentimentality often imparts to the inner man,
+as apoplexy to the outer, greater sensibility and yet paralysis.
+
+                              F (_see_ Ph)
+
+                                   G.
+
+Goddess.-As the Romans would rather recognize their monarchs as gods
+than as masters, so do men like to call the directress of their heart
+_goddess_ rather than mistress,--because it is easier to adore than to
+obey.
+
+                                   H.
+
+H.--I have often seen people who had the wherewithal of living and knew
+how to live,--which are not two different things,--first, flutter about
+the best and most superior women and suck from the honey-cup of their
+hearts; and, secondly, I have seen them on the same day fold their
+wings and light on a miserable ninny, that the ninny might inherit
+their--heirs. But never have I compared these butterflies to anything
+but butterflies, which all day long visit and rifle flowers, and yet
+spawn their eggs on a dirty cabbage-stump.
+
+                                   H.
+
+Holbein's Leg.--I prefer repeating the H in the place of I, because
+under the Rubric of the I would come the _Invalides_, of whom I had
+meant to assert, that, as people who have had limbs taken off become
+full-blooded, so they have the less bread handed to them the more limbs
+they have had shot or cut off, and that this is called the Physiology
+and Dietetics of the military chest.--But I have pitied these (half)
+poor devils too much to do it.
+
+The famous legs of Holbein afford a better joke than legs that have
+been taken off. That is to say, this painter used his brush in Basle
+only upon Basle itself; and the self-same circumstance that drove his
+genius to this architectural dyeing-business compelled it often to hold
+recess-hours therein,--namely, he guzzled terribly. A house owner,
+whose name is wanting in history, often came to the house-door, and
+swore up at the scaffolding, when the house-stainer's legs--for that
+was all of the painter that could be seen--were standing or staggering
+in the neighboring wine-cellar. Then when Holbein by-and-by came
+stalking along with them across the street, a quarrel came to meet him
+and went with him up the scaffold. This irritated the painter, who made
+a study even of his cups, and he proposed to himself to reform the
+owner. That is to say, as he owed his misfortune wholly to his legs,
+whose festoons the man wanted to see under the scaffolding, he resolved
+to make a second edition of his legs, and paint them on the house in a
+hanging posture, so that the man, when he looked up from the house-door
+below, should get the idea that the two legs and their boots were
+painting away up there busily. And the owner took this idea, too; but,
+as he observed at last that the counterfeit foot-works hung all day in
+one spot and never moved along, he wanted to see what kept the master
+so long improving and retouching at one part, and so up he went. Up
+there in the vacuum he easily saw that the painter ceased where the
+knee-pieces began, at the knee, and that the trunk, which was wanting,
+was again guzzling in an _alibi_.
+
+I do not blame the owner for not at once on the scaffolding drawing a
+moral from the leg-works; he was too furious.
+
+I meant to have appended a further history of the princely portraits
+which hang there behind the President in the Session-Chambers instead
+of the originals, by way of casting-votes,--but I should disturb the
+connection; here, too, was formerly the end of the First Part.
+
+
+
+
+                           17. DOG-POST-DAY.
+
+   The Cure.--The Prince's Palace.--Victor's Visits.--Joachime.--
+      Copperplate Engraving of the Court.--Cudgellings.
+
+
+When I was in Breslau, I said, "I wish I were the Fetzpopel!"[191] just
+as I was devouring the portrait of that personage. The Fetzpopel is a
+silly woman whose face is stamped on the Breslau ginger-cookies. I say
+what follows not merely on my own account, for the sake of getting my
+own head on to such gingerbread paste, but also for the sake of other
+literati, whom Germany honors with monuments as little as it does
+me,--for instance, Lessing and Leibnitz. As one must always feel so
+disagreeably in the German circles, until half a rod of stones, at
+least, are got together for the monument of a Lessing or other magnate,
+(the most that we have as yet is what few stones good reviewers throw
+at a literary man, as the ancients did upon graves,)--accordingly, I
+expressed myself freely in the Breslau market-place before I had bitten
+into the Fetzpopel: "Either the temple of fame and the bed of honor for
+German authors are on this gingerbread here, or else there is no fame
+at all. When will it be the time, if it is not now, to expect of the
+Germans that they shall take the faces of their greatest men and emboss
+them upon eatables? because, certainly, the stomach is the most
+important German member. If the Greek lived only among statues of great
+men, and thereby became great himself, then surely would the Viennese,
+if he had the greatest heads always before his eyes and on his plate,
+fall into enthusiasm and an emulous desire to promote himself and his
+face also on to gingerbread, and other cakes, pies, and cracknels.
+Meusel's learned Germany might be copied in baker's-work,--one might
+emboss great heroes upon army-biscuit, in order to set on fire the
+common soldiery and make them hunger for glory,--great poets I would
+sketch on bridal-cakes in inlaid sculpture, and heraldic geniuses on
+oatmeal bread,--of authors for women sweet box-pictures might be
+designed for sugar-work. If this were done, then would heads like
+Hamann or Liskov meet more generally the German _taste_ in such dress;
+and many a scholar who had not a loaf of bread to eat would at least
+ornament one; and we should have, beside the paper nobility, a baked
+one also." As regards myself, who up to this time never saw my face
+anywhere except in the shaving-glass, they shall mould me (for I am
+least known in Westphalia) on Westphalia rye-bread.
+
+
+Now to the story again. A tall, curly-haired man stands in the night
+before the many-colored house of the apothecary Zeusel, peeps up at the
+lighted third story, which he is about to occupy, and at last opens,
+instead of the wooden door, the glass one of the apothecary's shop. O
+my good Sebastian! a blessing on thy entry! May a good angel give thee
+his hand, to lift thee over boggy roads and man-traps; and when thou
+hast fallen into a snare and been wounded, then may he fan the wound
+with his wing, and a kind man cover it with his heart!
+
+In the apothecary's shop, which blazed like a ballroom, one of the
+fattest court-lackeys was begging of one of the leanest dispensers a
+maniple more and a little pugillus[192] of moxa[193] for his Highness.
+But the lean man took behind his scales a half-open handful of moxa,
+and four finger-tipfuls more (for in fact a little pugillus amounts to
+only three finger-tips), and sent it all to the feet of the Prince.
+"When we have burnt all this," said he, pointing to the moxa, "his
+Highness will soon have a podagra as good as can be found in the
+country."
+
+The reason why the dispenser gave more than the recipe said was that he
+also wished to have his pew in the Temple of Fame; therefore he would
+first think over a recipe that was handed to him until he approved it,
+and then he always weighed out 1/11 or 1/17 of a scruple too much or
+too little, in order to take off from the doctor's head the civic crown
+of the recovery and put it on his own. "Only with such gifts can I work
+my cures," said he. Victor did not begrudge him the illusion. "A
+dispenser," said he, "who leads the whole column of convalescents, and
+turns over to the doctor merely the rearguard of corpses, has already
+laurels enough for this short life _under_ his brain-pan."
+
+The apothecary Zeusel has good breeding enough not to bore his tenant
+by forcing upon him a reception-dinner, and merely gave him _this_
+newspaper article from his oral _Morning Chronicle_ of the city, that
+the Prince had not so much got the gout as that he was trying to get it
+and settle it. He also gave him the Italian servant whom his Lordship
+had hired for him, and his chamber.
+
+--And therein Sebastian is now sitting alone on the window-seat, and
+seriously considering, without glancing at the beauties of the room or
+the prospect, what he properly shall have to do here to-morrow, and day
+after tomorrow, and longer. "To-morrow, I blaze away at once," said he,
+and twirled the tassel of the curtain-cord; "I and the gout must settle
+ourselves down with the Prince. It is hard when a man has to use the
+gouty matter of a Regent for water to turn his mill: a polypus in the
+_heart_ or dropsy on the _brain_ would annoy me less as a courtier;
+either would be respectable _means of grace_ and fins for swimming
+upward. No, I will stand straight and firm, entirely upright; from the
+very first I will not yield an inch, so that they shall always find me
+the same. Not so much as quartering and anchoring in antechambers is to
+be thought of." (Indeed, his Lordship had already stipulated to the
+soliloquist an exemption from the annoyance of court etiquette.) "Ah,
+ye fair spring-years! Ye are now flown away over my head, and with you
+peace and mirth and studies and sincerity, and none but good, genial
+hearts!" (He suddenly twirled the curtain-tassel up shorter.) "But,
+thou good father, thou hast not even had such good years,--thou roamest
+over the earth and givest up thy days to the welfare of men! No, thy
+son shall not spoil nor embitter for thee thy sacrifices,--he shall
+conduct himself here discreetly enough,--and then, when thou comest
+back again and findest here at court an obedient, favored, and yet
+uncorrupted son..." When the son actually thought to himself, that, if
+he should thus culminate in a right ascension at court, he might win
+the heart of the Chaplaincy, the heart of Le Baut, that of his father,
+those of his whole kindred, and (provided he thought of _that_)
+even the heart of Clotilda,--by that time he had twisted off the
+curtain-tassel and held it like a tuberose in his hand, ... and so he
+thought best to lay himself quietly down in his bed.
+
+--Get up, my hero! The morning sun already reddens thy balcony,--jump
+up amidst the ringing of the bells for the week-day sermon, and amidst
+the din of this market-day, and look round on thy bright chamber! Thy
+father, of whom thou hast been dreaming all night, has furnished it
+full of musical and artistic instruments and apparatus, and thou wilt
+think of him the whole morning; and yet the balcony offers thee still
+more,--the sight of a green strip of fields, and, toward the west, of
+the heights of Maienthal, the whole market-place, the private residence
+of the senior parson of the city opposite, into all the rooms of which,
+that he lets to thy Flamin, thou canst look!
+
+Flamin, however, is not in there just now: for it was he who had
+already laid hold of my hero, and accosted him in those words of mine,
+"Get up!" A new situation is a spring-cure for our hearts, and takes
+away from them the oppressive feeling of our transitoriness; and
+beneath such a cheerful sky of life my Victor to-day dances with
+everything and everybody,--with the forenoon hours,--with the
+Regency-Counsellor,--with the apothecary,--out through the apothecary's
+shop right before the dispenser, on his way up to the palace to make a
+few passages with the gouty Januarius.
+
+--He has hardly been at the Prince's half an hour, when Zeusel sees him
+running back again into his medicinal warehouse.... "Heigh! heigh!"
+thinks the apothecary.
+
+But it was quite different from what he thought. Through an abatis of
+uniforms--for the entrances to princes' apartments are almost like
+lanes of tents, and rulers cause themselves to be guarded as anxiously
+as if they feared they might be the _first_ or the _last_--Victor made
+his way into the sick-chamber. Before a patient who lies in a
+horizontal position one can keep a perpendicular one more easily. Great
+folk often confound the effect of their apartment and furniture with
+their own: if the _savant_ could come upon them on a common, in a wood,
+in a cabbage-field, he would know how to deport himself. Victor,
+however, had himself been brought up in apartments that were
+embroidered, and furnished with gold corner-clips. So when he found his
+father's friend in pain and with his legs packed up, he exchanged his
+English composure for the professional, and, instead of awaiting
+haughty princely questions, began to propose medical ones. When the
+doctor's medical confessional session was at an end, he laid his hand,
+instead of on the head of the penitent, on the Bible which lay by it,
+and was going to swear, but gave that up because a better idea had
+occurred to him, and he opened--this was what had come into his
+head--the gospel of the paralytic: "For the podagra in this case is not
+to be thought of," said he. He showed him that his whole complaint
+was--wind (figuratively and literally speaking),--that it lodged itself
+in the relaxed vessels of the system, and insinuated itself, like the
+Jesuits, under every different form, through all the members,--even his
+pain in the calf was nothing more than that displaced human or
+intestinal ether. The physician in ordinary, Culpepper, is to be
+excused for his error in regard to the Prince; for every physician must
+make his selection of some universal malady, into which he resolves all
+others, which he treats _con amore_, in which, as the theologue does in
+Adam's sin, or the philosopher in his first principle, he detects all
+the rest. It rested, therefore, with the free will of Culpepper,
+whether to pick out for himself as the radical malady, to be the
+nest-egg and mother-bulb of his pathology, the podagra in the case of
+men, with women the flux, or not. When he has once made his choice,
+then he is obliged to endeavor to fix it upon his Highness, like pastel
+or quicksilver. January had never, even from his chapel, heard anything
+more agreeable than Victor's assertion, which set him free from the
+prostration, dosing, and starving which he had had to go through.
+Victor, in his joy at the lightness of the malady, hurried away to give
+his recipe for it, after he had asserted, by way of consolation, that
+"an _ethereal_ body was still to be taken along with him, and would
+serve the soul, not indeed for a heavenly Graham's-bed,[194] but still
+for an air-bed, which made itself up. Only poor women's-souls--if one
+rightly regarded their bodies--might be said to lie on thorny straw
+sacks, smooth hussars'-saddles, and sharp sausage-sledges[195]; whereas
+shaven and tattooed spirits (monks and savages) wrapped themselves up
+with such fine bodies stuffed with whalebone shavings."[196]
+
+Away he flew; and I have already reported that the apothecary presently
+thought to himself: "Heigh! heigh!" In the apothecary's shop Victor
+said to the dispenser, at whom he flew like saltpetre: "Sir colleague,
+what think you about it, if we should have nothing to cure in the case
+of his Highness but wind? You must advise me. For my part, I should
+prescribe:--
+
+            _Pulv. Rhei Orient_.
+            _Sem. Anisi Stellati_
+            ----_F[oe]niculi_
+            _Cort. Aurant. immat_.
+            _Sal. Tart. [=a][=a] dr. I_.
+            _Fol. Senn. Alexandr. sine Stipit. dr. II_.
+            _Sacchar. alb. unc. sem_.--
+
+
+"If you agree with me, I have nothing more to say, except, _C. C. M. f.
+p. Subt. D. ad Scatulam, S_. Colic-powders, one teaspoonful as often as
+occasion requires."[197]
+
+As the dispenser looked at him seriously, he looked at him still more
+seriously; and the medicine was prepared without a change in the dose.
+When he had gone, the dispenser said to his two startled pages: "You
+couple of stupid epiglottises, don't you suppose he has sense enough to
+ask?"
+
+The biographer has no need whatever to justify the circumstance--since
+the powder and the hero justify it--that January got upon his legs the
+very same day.
+
+As princes feel no pressure of the atmosphere, except that of the air
+which is in their bodies, January's gratitude for his deliverance from
+this pressure, was so unbounded that for the whole day he would not let
+the Doctor go from his side. He must dine,--sup,--ride,--play with him.
+In the palace it was tolerable; it was not like Nero's, a city within a
+city, a Flachsenfingen in Flachsenfingen, but merely barracks and a
+kitchen full of soldiers and cooks. For before every mouldy archive,
+before every room where lay genuine diamonds, before every door-lock,
+and before every stairway a bayonet was planted, with the protector and
+patron who was attached to it. The numerous crew of kitchen-servants
+lived and fired up in the palace, because his Highness was continually
+eating. By this continual eating he would make his fasting easier for
+him; for at the three ritual mealtimes of men he touched--because
+Culpepper would so have it--desperately little, and could not wholly
+contradict the courtiers who praised his strict diet. A watchmaker from
+London had done the most to help him out in this moderation by
+contriving for him a servant's bell, and a spring-work whose index
+stood upon a great dial-plate in the servants' apartment; the margin of
+the dial-plate was encircled, instead of the hours and the days of the
+month, with the names of viands and wines. January had only to ring the
+bell and press the spring, and the household immediately knew whether
+the tongue and the victual-index pointed to pastry or to Burgundy. In
+this way, by tinkling like a mill when his inner man had nothing more
+to grind, he was most easily enabled to observe a stricter diet than
+physicians and moralists could well demand, and he shamed more than one
+grandee, whom, after eviscerating in death, they were obliged to lay
+out upon the bed of state with the hungry stomach under one arm and the
+thirsty liver under the other, as they give to capons also their two
+viscera as a body-guard between their two wings.
+
+Victor was as much at home in the palace as in the parsonage; for the
+court proper, the proper courtly worms'-nest and frog-spawn, was
+resident merely in the palace of the actual minister, Von Schleunes,
+because he had to do the _honneurs_ of the throne, to invite
+ambassadors, strangers, &c. The Princess resided in the large old
+palace, which was called the Paullinum. Thus, then, did January spend
+his days without pomp, but with comfort and convenience, in the true
+solitude of a philosopher, and passed them away in eating, drinking,
+and sleeping; hence could the Flachsenfingen Prorector compare him,
+without flattery, to the greatest of the old Romans, in whom we admire
+a similar hatred of show and state. January had, in fact, no court, but
+went himself to the court of his actual minister; with extreme
+reluctance, however: he could not love anything there,--neither the
+Princess, who was always there, nor Schleunes's unmarried daughters,
+which would have been against his London vow.
+
+About twelve o'clock at night Zeusel would have been glad to find out
+how all was going on, and brought to the physician in ordinary his
+niece _Marie_, whom he offered to him as a female lackey. The
+physician, who could not play the fool with any fool in the world,
+especially under four eyes, thrust before the slender pike a crateful
+of the food of truth, which the latter greedily devoured as if it were
+pine-apple. Marie was a relative and a Catholic, impoverished by a
+lawsuit, and disappointed in love, who, in the cold, hollow family of
+the apothecary, received and expected nothing but thrust-wounds of
+words and shot-wounds of looks; her broken and crushed soul resembled
+the marsh-willow, of which one can strip down backward all the twigs
+with the mere hand. She felt no longer pained at any humiliation; she
+seemed before others to crawl, but in truth she lay continually
+prostrate on the ground. When the gentle Victor saw this meek, averted
+form, over which so many tears had flowed, and this once beautiful
+face, on which, not the sorrows of fancy had laid their charming
+painter's-touches, but physical pangs had emptied their poison-bags,
+then did the fate of mortals bring sadness to his heart, and, with the
+softest of courtesy towards Marie's station, sex, and sorrow, he
+declined her services. The apothecary would have despised himself if he
+had taken this politeness for anything else than fine raillery and good
+breeding. But Victor threw her off once more; and the poor girl
+withdrew in silence, and, like a maidservant, without spirit enough for
+courtesy.
+
+Nevertheless, in the morning the rejected one brought him his breakfast
+with downcast eyes and painfully smiling lips; he had heard in his bed
+how the apothecary and his hard sprouts of daughters had twitted Marie
+with her "doleful whining air," and therefrom inferred a "_refusal_
+from the jesting gentleman" overhead. His soul bled within him, and at
+last he accepted Marie;--he made his eye and his voice so soft and
+sympathetic that he could have lent either to the most tender maiden;
+but Marie took nothing of it to herself.
+
+January could hardly wait for him to come again.
+
+The third day also it was just so.
+
+And so, too, the next week.
+
+--But I could wish my readers had all ridden in a body, at this time,
+through the Flachsenfingen gate, and that this learned company had
+scattered itself through the city in order to institute inquiries
+about our hero. The reading scouts sent by me to the coffee-houses
+would learn that the new English doctor had already unseated the
+old one,--helped the parson's son at St. Luna to the post of
+Regency-Counsellor,--and that great changes in all departments were at
+hand. The division which I distributed among the butlers, butchers,
+fishery-masters, castellans, and valets of the court, would bring me
+word that the Prince had patted the Doctor, not on the fingers, but on
+the shoulder,--that he had day before yesterday showed him with his own
+hand his picture-cabinet, and sent him the best piece out of it,--that
+in the theatre he had looked out with him from the stage-box,--that he
+had presented to him a snuff-box rich with jewels (the usual civic
+crown of rulers, and their calumet, as if we were Greenlanders, who
+never love to receive any other present so much as snuff),--and that
+they would travel together. Two of the very finest and most dignified
+readers whom I had detached from these columns, and of whom I had
+despatched the one to the Paullinum to the Princess, the other to the
+actual Minister, would at least report to me the news that Prince and
+Doctor had called together upon both, and that both had looked upon my
+hero as a singular, shy, taciturn Englishman, who owed everything to
+his father.
+
+But the last piece of news which the readers have related to me they
+cannot, I am sure, possibly know; and I will myself tell it to them.
+
+--Before I deliver this, let me first simply explain in three words how
+it was that Victor rose so rapidly. There may be Evangelist-Matthieus
+among my readers who take this sudden rise, like that of the barometer,
+as the sign of a speedy fall,--who will say that laurels and salad,
+which have been forced to ripen in twenty-four hours by spirit on a
+cloth, wither again just as soon,--nay, who will even joke about the
+matter, and give out that the Prince's intestines, with their ether,
+are a fish's swimming-bladder to my hero, who only by its inflation
+mounts upward. Mining-superintendents laugh at such readers, and inform
+them that men, particularly the occupants of thrones, look upon a new
+physician as a new specific,--that they are always most ready to obey a
+new one,--that Sebastian always deported himself towards every one the
+first time in the finest manner, whereas with old acquaintances he
+never said unnecessarily anything witty,--that January loved every one
+whom he could see through, and that he fortunately recognized in my
+hero merely a gay fellow fond of life, and did not remark around his
+head any of Bose's Beatifications,[198] which smell of phosphorus and
+emit painful sparks,--that Victor was not, like Le Baut, a _pot-plant_
+in a crown, but a hyacinth hanging in the open air high above it,--that
+he was cheery, and made every one else so,--and that another
+mining-superintendent would not have made so much ceremony with his
+readers as I: _he_ would merely have told them the main circumstance,
+that in Victor, in his waggery and behavior generally, the Prince had
+found and fallen in love with an enchanting resemblance to his fifth
+son, the _Monsieur_ (lost on the Seven Islands), and that he had made
+this observation even in London, although Victor was five years younger
+than the latter.
+
+January chose, himself, to present his favorite to everybody, and
+so to the Princess too. The philosophers have it to explain why
+Sebastian never once remembered, until he sat beside the princely
+bridegroom on the coach-cushion, the mad, enamored little strip of
+paper which, in Kussewitz, he had pasted above the Imperator of the
+_montre-à-regulateur_, and thrown into the Princess's bargain. He
+started, and held it to be impossible that he should have been such a
+fool. But such a thing is easy for a man. His fancy flung back upon
+every scene, upon every idea, so many focus-lights from a thousand
+mirrors, and spread around the future, which stretched out beyond, so
+many colored shadows and so much blue mist, that he was really
+frightened when a foolish action came into his head; for he knew, that,
+when he should have rejected it ten times and then thought it over
+thirty times more, then, after all, he should go and do it.--When the
+two appeared before the Princess, Victor was in that agreeable frame,
+which is nothing new to tutors and young scholars, which stiffens the
+limbs to bone, and sends the heart up into the mouth, and petrifies the
+tongue;--it was not the certainty that _Agnola_ (that was the name of
+the Princess) had read the aforesaid advertisement on the watch, which
+so disconcerted him, but the uncertainty whether she had or not. In his
+agony he never thought of _this_,--that she, of course, did not even
+know his handwriting or the authorship of the little slip; and even if
+one does think of that in his agony, still it does not leave him.
+
+--But all was, at once, above, below, and contrary to his expectation.
+The Princess had laid aside the face of sensibility with her
+travelling-dress, and had put on instead a fine, firm gala-face. The
+crowned bridegroom January was received by her with as much warm
+decorum as if he were his own ambassador of the first rank. For
+January, the disk of whose heart charged itself full of sparks on the
+electrizing-cushion of a fair cheek or a bosom-handkerchief, had for
+that very reason towards Agnola, with whom merely from policy he had
+concluded the concordats of marriage, all the warmth of the month after
+which he was named. Towards Victor, the son of her hereditary foe, the
+successor to the house-thief of princely favor, she cherished, as is
+easy to guess, true tenderness. Our poor hero, surprised at January's
+coldness, which seemed to promise on the part of the wife no special
+warmth toward himself, demeaned himself as gravely as the elder and
+younger Cato at once. He thanked God (and so do I) that he came away.
+
+But all the way back he kept thinking: "If I could only have got my
+missive out of the watch-case! Ah, then I would have done everything,
+poor Agnola, to reconcile thee to thy fate and thy husband!--Ah, St.
+Luna," he added, as they passed along before the city parson's house,
+"thou peaceful spot, full of flowers and of love! The masters of the
+hunt send thy Bastian from one baiting-house to another!"
+
+For he must also, for politeness' sake, go at least to the actual
+Minister's, and January took him along with him. Thither he went with
+gusto, as if into a sea-fight, or into a quarantine hospital, or into
+the Russian ice-palace.
+
+Furniture and persons in the house of Schleunes were in the finest
+taste. Victor found there, from the wabble-headed figures[199] and
+court-people, even to the basaltic busts of old philosophers, and to
+the dolls in the shape of Schleunes's daughters, from the polished
+floor to the polished faces, from the powdering cabinet to the reading
+cabinet,--both of which painted the head in the mere passage through
+them,--in short, everywhere he found all that the sumptuary laws have
+ever forbidden. His first embarrassment with the Princess gave him the
+pitch for a second. It was no longer the old Victor at all. I see
+beforehand that the worthy schoolmasters at the Marianum in Scheerau
+will be hard upon him for it,--especially the rector,--that he should
+have so little knowledge of the world as to be, while in this company,
+witty without vivacity, constrainedly free without complaisance, too
+constantly in motion with his eyes, too immovable in his other members.
+But one must suggest to these courtly and scholarly people, that he
+could not help it. The rector himself would have been embarrassed as
+well as Victor before the _bel-esprit_ of a minister's lady, whom,
+though, to be sure, Meusel has not introduced her into his, the court
+has into _its_ Learned Germany,--before her quizzing daughters,
+especially the handsomest, who was named Joachime,--before a number of
+strangers,--before so many people who hated him on his father's
+account, and who watched him in order to explain and verify his
+relations with the Prince,--before the Princess herself, whom the Devil
+had also brought hither,--before Matthieu, who here was in his element,
+and in his leading character and bravura air,--and before the
+Minister,--especially before this last. Victor found in him a man full
+of dignity, from whom business did not take away politeness, nor
+thinking wit; and whom a little irony and coldness only the more
+exalted, but who seemed to despise feeling, scholars, and mankind.
+Victor generally imagined to himself a minister--e. g. Pitt--as a Swiss
+glacier, on which the clouds and dew that nourish it freeze overhead,
+which oppresses the low places, and, in its alternation between melting
+and congealing, sends out great torrents down below, and out of whose
+clefts corpses are drifted.
+
+January himself was not quite comfortable among them: what availed him
+the finest dishes, if they were embittered by the finest conceits? The
+card-table was, therefore, especially upon the peaceful arrival of his
+spouse, his quiet place of anchorage; and his Victor was for this once
+also glad to anchor beside him. My correspondent thinks that the
+tuning-key to this over-fine, demi-semi-_tone_ was turned by the
+Minister's lady merely, who had all sciences in her head, and to
+be sure at-her tongue's end, and for that reason held a weekly
+_bureau-d'esprit_. In this ridiculous position, Sebastian played away
+his evening and gobbled down his _souper_; he could tell a good story,
+but he had no story to tell,--in the few _contes_ which stayed by him
+all was anonymous, and to the circle about him the names were precisely
+the things of the first importance; nor could he make use of his humor
+either, because a humor like his places the possessor himself in a mild
+comic light, and because, therefore, only among good friends whose
+respect one cannot lose, but not among bad friends whose respect
+one must hold by defiance, can it venture out in its sock and
+harlequin's-collar,--he did not even enjoy the happiness of inwardly
+laughing at them all, because he had no time for it, and because he
+never found people ridiculous till their backs were turned.
+
+He was confoundedly badly off. "You'll not catch me here again very
+soon," he thought to himself; and when, through the two tall glass
+doors of the balcony, which looked out upon the garden, the moon stole
+in with its dreamy light, which out there fell upon stiller dwellings,
+fairer prospects, and calmer hearts,--then he stole out upon the
+balcony (as his partnership at the card-table was broken up by the
+Prince after supper), and the night that glistened on the earth and in
+the heavens exalted his bosom with greater scenes. With what love
+thought he then of his father, whose philosophic coldness was like the
+January snow, which covers the seed from the frost, whereas that of the
+court resembles the snow of March, which devours the buds! How sorely
+did he reproach himself for every discontented thought about his honest
+Flamin's slight want of refinement! O, how his inner man erected itself
+like a fallen and forgiven angel, when he imagined to himself Emanuel
+leading Clotilda by the hand, and rapturously asking him, "Where hast
+thou found to-day an image of this my friend?" At this moment he
+yearned inexpressibly to be back again in his St. Luna....
+
+His quickening heart-beats were all at once checked by _Joachime_, who
+came out with a burst of laughter directed toward the parlor. As it was
+a burden to her to sit for a single hour, (I wonder how she could lie
+in bed a whole night,) she extricated herself as often as she could
+from the curb-bit of the card-table. The Princess released her this
+time, who suspended this _night-work_ of great people on account of the
+weakness of her eyes. Joachime was no Clotilda, but still she had two
+eyes polished like two rose-diamonds, two lips like painted ones, two
+hands like casts, and, in fact, all the duplicate members were very
+pretty.... And with these a court-physician can keep house well enough,
+though the single ones (heart, head, nose, forehead) are not those of a
+Clotilda. As now under the open heaven he recovered his spirits, and
+on the balcony, which for him was always a parlor, the use of his
+tongue,--as Joachime's tone attuned him again to his own,--as she
+assailed the taciturnity of the English, and he defended the
+exceptions,--as he could now run, like a spider, up and down along the
+thread of the conversation, and was no more to be disturbed by the
+Princess, who had followed after to cool off in the night-air her
+inflamed eyes,--and as one complains of feeling ennui only when one
+himself inflicts it,--and as I transcribe all this, I do enough (I
+think) for a reviewer, who stands up behind the coach-body of the
+Prince, and reflects and wonders what he shall have to hold on to
+(except the footmen's straps), in case Victor, sitting before him in
+the carriage, does not during the ride home wish the Minister's house
+at the Devil, but thinks more contentedly,--Well, it's tolerable
+enough![200]
+
+Victor's society agreed so well with the Prince, that he fancied he
+could as little do without him as a canoness out of the house can think
+of taking the badge of her order off her person. He always plunged into
+the sacred cup and welcome of the warm spring of a new friendship as
+immoderately as a guest at Carlsbad does into his. When he felt ennui,
+the Medicus was besought to come and drive it away; when he experienced
+an inward jubilee, that person was again entreated to appear, that he
+might participate in the jubilation. Only those times at which January
+felt neither ennui nor the contrary were left to his friend to spend
+entirely at his own pleasure. Victor had sworn beforehand to make an
+easy matter of refusing, and had broken out upon people of easy
+consent; now, however, he said, "The Devil may say, No! Just let a man
+find _himself_ in the same situation first!" ... And so must our poor
+Victor describe nothing but empty, dizzying gyres in the court-circle
+of the throne, among people for whose tone he could more easily have an
+_ear_ than a _tongue_, and whom he could read, but could not win.
+
+A youth in whose breast hang the night-pieces of Maienthal and St.
+Luna,--or one who has just arrived from a watering-village,--or one who
+has it in mind to fall in love,--or one who, in great cities or in
+their great circles, must be an _idle_ spectator,--every such one is
+also, for that very reason, a _dissatisfied_ spectator therein, and
+blows into his critical pipe against the trifling company, till he
+himself is drawn in. But when all these causes actually meet in one and
+the same man, then can he find no relief against his gall-bladder nor
+any biliary duct, except to take some fine paper and send off to the
+Eymanns in St. Luna a confounded satirical letter upon what he has
+seen.
+
+My hero despatched the following to the Parson:--
+
+
+"MY DEAR SIR AND ADOPTED FATHER:"--
+
+"I have not had hitherto spare time enough to lift my eyes up and see
+what moon we have. Verily, a court wants time for virtue. The Prince
+carries me about with him everywhere, like a smelling-bottle, and shows
+up his foolish Doctor. Erelong they will not be able to endure me: not
+because I am good for anything,--on the contrary, I am convinced they
+could bear the most virtuous man in the world quite as well as the
+worst, and that merely because he would be an Anglicism, an _homme de
+fantaisie_,[201] a _lusus naturæ_,--but because I do not talk enough.
+Business-people never trouble themselves about any conversational or
+epistolary style; but with court-people the tongue is the artery of
+their withered life, the spiral-spring and flag-feather of their souls;
+they are all born critics, who look at nothing but fine turns,
+expression, fire, and speech. This comes of their having nothing to do;
+their good works are _bon mots_,[202] their exchange business consists
+in visiting-cards, their housekeeping is a card-party, and their
+agriculture a hunting-party, and the _minor service_ a physiognomy.
+Hence they must have other people's faults all day long in their ears
+as an antidote to tedious leisure, as the physicians inoculate with the
+itch to counteract stupidity; a court-establishment is the regular
+penny post-office of the smallest items of news, even about you
+commoners, when you happen to have done anything really ridiculous. It
+were to be wished that we had festivals, or card-parties, or plays, or
+assemblies, or _soupers_, or something good to eat, or some amusement
+or other; but that is not to be thought of. We have, to be sure, all
+these things, but only their names; the President of the Exchequer
+would shrug his shoulders, if we should undertake to be, four times in
+a year, so brilliantly happy as you are four times a month. As our week
+consists of seven Sundays, it follows that our amusements are only
+signs in the calendar, epochs of time, to which no one pays heed; and a
+festival is nothing but a play-room for the plans which every one has
+in his head, the boards on which he is to act his leading part, and the
+season for continuing the intrigue against victims of love and of
+ambition. Here there is, every minute, a stinging mosquito, and the
+thistle-seed of beautifully painted trouble flies round far and wide.
+
+"There are many women here who are good, and disciples of Linnæus, and
+their eyes classify men botanically, according to his fine and simple
+_sexual_-system; they make a great distinction between virtuous and
+vicious love,--namely, that of _degree_, or at least of time; and the
+_best_ often speaks on the subject like the _worst_, and the worst like
+the best. Meanwhile we have here female virtue and manly fidelity, in
+their way,--but no idea of them can be communicated to a parson; for
+these two jellies are so soft and delicate, that, if I should undertake
+to carry them down over all the steps of the throne to the parsonage,
+they would arrive there in such a spoiled and ruined state, that one
+would give them down below there the two opposite names,--for which,
+however, we ourselves have up here our special and corresponding
+objects. Your commoners would find our elderly men ridiculous in
+matters of love, as _they_ would your daughters. But what often
+embitters for me this happy court-life is the universal want of
+dissimulation. For no one believes here what he hears, and no one
+thinks how he looks; all must, according to the regular laws of the
+game, like cards, have the upper side uniform, and put on an external
+stillness of face as a cover to the internal fire, as the lightning
+destroys only the sword and not the scabbard. Consequently, as a
+universal dissimulation is none at all, and as every one gives every
+other credit for poison, no one can _deceive_ another, but only
+_outwit_ him; only the understanding, not the heart, is taken in.
+Meanwhile, to speak the truth, that is not truth; for every one has two
+masks,--the general and the individual. For the rest, the colors which
+are used upon the scientific, refined, and philanthropic painting of
+the outer man are necessarily scraped off from the inner man, but
+advantageously, since there is not much on the inner man, and the study
+of appearance lessens reality: so have I often seen hares lying in the
+woods that had not an ounce of flesh or a drop of fat on their bodies,
+because all had been absorbed by the monstrous fur which had continued
+to grow after their death.
+
+"If one compares the substantial value of the throne and that of the
+low ground of the commonalty, the physical and moral exaltation of
+men appears to bear an inverse relation to that of their soil,
+just as the inhabitants of marshy lands are larger than mountaineers.
+But, nevertheless, those elevated people bear the state easily on
+butterfly-wings, survey its wheel-work with the hundred-eyed papilio's
+eye, and with a walking-cane defend the people from lions, or chase
+therewith the lions among the people, as in Africa the children of the
+herdsmen scare away with a whip the real lions of Natural History from
+the grazing cattle.... Dear Mr. Court-Chaplain, this satire began to
+pain me already on the former page; but here one is malicious, just as
+he is vain, without knowing when: the former, because one is obliged to
+take too much notice of others; the latter, because he is compelled to
+think too much of himself. No! Your garden, your sitting-room, are
+pleasanter; there, is no stony breast on which one _crucifies_ the arms
+and veins of friendship like a tree trained on an espalier; there, one
+is not obliged, as I am, to be twice a day under the barber's hands,
+and three times a day under the hair-dresser's; there, one has leave
+at least to put on his polished boot. Write soon to your adopted son,
+for I still deny myself the festival of a visit to you. Are there
+many baptisms and burials? What is _Fox_[203] doing, and the deaf
+bellows-blower? At this very moment I hear the mortar, instead of your
+rat-drum, pounding down below. Farewell.
+
+"And now at last I greet you, beloved mother! My hand is warm, and in
+my heart a pair of souls are beating; for now your face, full of
+motherly warmth, shines on all my satirical ice-peaks, and melts them
+into warm blood, which will throb for you and for you flow. How good it
+feels to love again! Your second son, Flamin, is well, but too busy,
+and at present in St. Luna.[204] Greet my sisters and all that love
+you.
+
+                                                      "Sebastian."
+
+
+He reserved the letter in order to despatch the Regency-Counsellor, who
+wanted to take his person along with him, with a freight at least.
+
+Meanwhile his and January's joint visits, with their stage
+entanglements, grew to quite other ones, even a ganglion of friendship
+between January and himself,--and at the same time gave this friendship
+increased notoriety. In St. Luna, in Le Baut's house, three times as
+much was made out of it as there was in it,--in the parsonage, nine
+times. To this was added a trifle, namely, a scuffle,--properly, two. I
+have the incident from Spitz,--Victor got it from Flamin,--he from
+Matthieu,--in whose noble historical style it can here be handed
+over to posterity. The Evangelist was never ashamed of a commoner,
+provided he could make a fool of him. Therefore he visited the
+court-apothecary without scruple. To the latter, who cordially hated
+the barrack-physician, Culpepper, on account of his coarse arrogance,
+and on account of the reason given in the note[205] below, Matthieu had
+long since promised to upset the Doctor. As the latter and the podagra
+had actually been banished by Victor from January's feet, the
+Evangelist gave the apothecary to understand that he himself would,
+without _his_ hint and wishes, have contributed far less to the fall of
+Culpepper than he had done. Zeusel, especially as he had the successor
+of the barrack-physician in his house, came after some days to the
+billiard-table with the certain conviction that he, from his
+apothecary's-shop, had thrust under Culpepper's posteriors the
+invisible leg, and hurled him down from the steps of the throne. There
+were present, unfortunately, the barrack-physician himself, and the
+noble Mat. Zeusel came upon this stage with the festoons of three
+watch-chains, with a pair of breeches on whose knees some Arabesques
+were printed, with a double waistcoat and double neck-tie, and with
+double signs of exclamation in his face at the barrack-physician;--his
+money-purse lay exactly under the _os sacrum_, because he, like some
+Englishmen, had caused his breeches-pocket to be concealed in the
+region of the breeches buckle. He had with him as his chamber-moor his
+long, lean dispenser, who in the adjoining drinking-room encountered
+the very short dispenser of the second apothecary's-shop, or shop of
+the _canaille_. The short dispenser, out of malice, followed the tall
+one about everywhere, merely to vex him; but this time he had just come
+back from the country with some hens'-eggs which he had collected as
+fees from convalescent patients.
+
+Matthieu, after an exegetic hint to Zeusel, took the liberty of
+being of Culpepper's opinion in regard to the Prince's gout. Culpepper,
+who would fain be an old German,--such old Germans can never
+dissemble when they are angry, though they can very well do so from
+self-interest,--fired away and said the English doctor was a complete
+ignoramus. Zeusel displayed with a broad smile, as with a printer's
+vignette, his contempt for the coarse man. The Medicus looked like the
+Equator, the apothecary like Spitzbergen. Now the tourney went on
+merely upon the subject of the gout. The second and umpire, Matthieu,
+gave it to be understood, that "Zeusel, to be sure, loved his prince
+and lord, but still he could wish that this love had had the best means
+and the wholesomest influences. "In bawdy-houses," said Culpepper,
+"_that fellow there may_ have influence." When the apothecary, at these
+words, proudly and contemptuously straightened himself up, the Doctor
+slowly jammed him down on the chair and on his money-purse, and,
+bringing down his fist upon his shoulder, nailed the little coxcomb
+with his purse to the seat.
+
+This pinning-down vexed the tailor-bird most of all, and he replied,
+trying to get up, that "he would this very day, if he were consulted,
+advise his Highness to adhere to his present better choice." The
+barrack-physician might perhaps have too hurriedly withdrawn his hand
+from the shoulder which it covered; for he grazed with it, as with a
+cannon, the nose of his adversary, whereupon the latter, like Saint
+Januarius, discharged some blood. The Evangelist was personally grieved
+"that two such sensible men could not fall out and fight with each
+other without personal hatred and heat, since they _might_, like
+princes who go to war, attack each other without either,--but the
+bleeding too well attested Zeusel's ebullition." ... Zeusel cried out
+to the Doctor, "You lout!" The latter, in his fury, actually took
+Matthieu's opinion, that the former bled only from fury, and compared
+him to those corpses which in old times bled, indeed, at the approach
+of the murderer, but from none other than quite natural causes. The
+Medicus, therefore, looked for his cane, which like a prince was
+gold-headed, and took his leave with the crowned stick, drawing it a
+few times, as with magnetic passes, across Zeusel's fingers; but I
+would call the staff, if I were in the place of other people, neither
+an ear-trumpet for Zeusel, which the physician applied to him, as they
+often do to persons hard of hearing, that the latter might hear better,
+nor yet a door-knocker, which he stretched out before the truth, that
+it might the more easily get admission into the apothecary. What he
+wanted was merely to oblige him to let his handkerchief drop, in order
+that he might look him in the face as he bade farewell, which he
+clothed in the following forbearing and neatly turned remark: "You tell
+your Doctor that he and you there are the two greatest blockheads in
+town."
+
+Under these last words both dispensers kept themselves still enough in
+other respects, though not with their tongues, indeed; for the tall
+dispenser saluted, as second chorus, the short one with the same
+war-song, and was a genuine Anti-Podagrist. Whoso considers that the
+tall one loved my hero on account of his politeness, and could not bear
+the short one, because Culpepper sent all his prescriptions to _his_
+shop,--such a one cannot expect anything less of the couple than a
+reflection of the scene in the billiard-room; but the tall dispenser
+was composed, and never, like Portugal, propagated edifying truths with
+blood, but--the moment the barrack-doctor called the court-physician a
+blockhead--he quietly took the hat of the short dispenser, who had
+deposited his income of eggs therein to guard them from being broken,
+and coolly, without the least resentment, placed the aforesaid hatful
+of eggs on the head of the professional brother; and by a slight
+squeeze fitted the Doctor's hat, which sat half an ell too high, upon
+the head of his friend,--with all the more propriety, as Castor and
+Pollux also had on egg-shells,[206]--and having effected this
+promotion, he went his way, without exactly caring to have much thanks
+for the felt-stuffing and the streaming face-poultice.
+
+Fisticuffs spread abroad lesser truths, as wars do great truths. The
+Court-Chaplain Eymann sent a long letter of congratulation to Victor,
+and called him "January's kidney-keeper," and begged for his promised
+visit. A travelling[207]-advocate knocked at his door as at that of a
+superior court, and begged him for a princely injunction against the
+Regency-College. The apothecary, with his application about the
+_lavement_,[208] still holds back.
+
+Victor still laid up for himself his first visit to St. Luna like a
+ripening fruit, and thereby vexed the Regency-Counsellor, who wanted to
+persuade him into it. But he said: "Those who are left behind in a
+place long indescribably for him who has gone from it, until he has
+made his first visit; and so, too, with him. After the first, both
+parties wait quite coolly and composedly for the second."--What he
+neither said nor thought, but felt and feared, was this: that his
+demigoddess, Clotilda, who inhabited the most holy place in his breast,
+and who by her invisibleness had become dearer, more indispensable, and
+for that very reason more sure to his soul, would, perhaps, at her
+appearance, take away at once all hopes out of his heart.
+
+It was on the evening of the day when he received Eymann's letter, that
+he thus fantasied: "Ah, if January would only continue so well! He must
+have exercise, but of an unusual kind,--the rider must walk, the
+pedestrian must drive. We ought to travel together on foot through the
+country, in disguise. Ah, I might, perhaps, be of service to many a
+poor devil! We would steal homeward through St. Luna,--No, no, no!" ...
+
+He started back himself, affrighted at a certain idea,--for he feared
+he should, when he had once had it, even execute it; hence he said to
+it three times, No. The idea was this,--to persuade the Prince to visit
+Clotilda's parents. But it was of no use; he remembered that his father
+had held too strict a court of cognizance over the Chamberlain and the
+Minister. "And yet, what harm can Le Baut do to me? If I should only
+draw three sun-glances from January upon the poor fool! The wisest
+thing for me is, not to think any more about it to-day."
+
+The dog will bring us the answer; I, for my part, make a bet--a fine
+connoisseur of human nature on my island bets the contrary--that he
+does not carry out this joke.
+
+
+
+
+                           18. DOG-POST-DAY.
+
+   Clotilda's Promotion.--Incognito-Journey.--Petition of the Majors of
+      the Chase.--Consistorial Messenger.--Caricature of the
+      Flachsenfingeners.
+
+
+To be sure he did--carry out the joke; but still at bottom I do not
+lose my bet. For it happened in this way. From the day when Doctor
+Culpepper had made that pass with his coarse hand, as with an
+electrical discharger, before the full-blooded nose of Zeusel, the man
+with three watches pressed his company upon my hero, who carried only
+one, and that, too, the clumsy one of the Bee-father. Zeusel always
+thanked God, if only a court-courier got drunk at his house, or the
+court-dentist over-ate himself. He always brought with him, when he
+came, certain secret items of intelligence, which were to be published.
+He kept nothing to himself, not though one had threatened to hang him
+in the cellar of his shop. He told our hero that the Minister was
+making interest in behalf of his Joachime for the place of second
+maid-of-honor to the Princess, who could select only the female part of
+her service for herself,--but that he could not fairly do it, because
+he, or his son Matthieu, had promised the Chamberlain Le Baut to
+procure the same place for Clotilda; he therefore begged my hero, who,
+as he saw, he said, was Matthieu's friend, to spare him the
+embarrassment, and induce the Prince (which would cost only _one_ word)
+himself to intercede with the Princess in behalf of Joachime; the
+Princess, who, besides, patronized the Minister, would, on more than
+one ground, do it with pleasure, and then the Minister could not help
+it, if the Chamberlain, the enemy of his Lordship, went away empty.
+
+The simpleton, as one can see, had guessed out, merely from the two
+accounts, which he had got hold of, of the two office-seekers, the
+whole of the remaining case; and the very circumstance, which Matthieu
+disclosed to him, that the Minister was vacating a quarter of a wing of
+his palace, for a companion of his deceased daughter Giulia, had only
+strengthened his conviction. To such a degree does malice supply the
+place, not only of years, but also of information and insight!
+
+My hero could say nothing to him except that--he did not believe a word
+of it. But after three minutes of private reflection he believed it
+all: for that was the reason, he saw, why the dear Clotilda had to come
+back from the seminary just at the arrival of the Princess,--that was
+the reason why Le Baut built around the Minister's son so many altars
+of incense and thank-offerings,--that was the reason why the old
+lady (in the Sixteenth Dog-Post-Day) serenaded, and so loudly,
+court-life,--in fact, as he further saw, two such outlawed, captive
+Court-Jews in Babylon must have the live Devil in them, until they are
+reinstated in the old holy city, and if they happen to have a handsome
+daughter, they will use her as the relay of their journey, and the
+Montgolfier of their balloon-ascension....
+
+"O, only come, Clotilda!" he cried, glowingly;--"the court-pool will
+then be to me an Italian cellar, a flowery parterre. If thou art only
+once settled at the Minister's, then I shall have spirits enough and
+sparkle properly. What will my father say, when he sees us stand with
+two leading-strings, with one of which thou holdest the Princess, and
+I, with the other, the husband?" ... At this moment, Clotilda's recent
+objections to court-life fell like ice-flakes into his boiling blood;
+but he thought to himself: "Women, however, are a little mite more
+pleased with the court-residence of splendor than they themselves
+suspect or say, and far more than men are. Cannot he, too, bear, then,
+with a like soul-edifying position? She, as step-daughter of the
+Prince, is only half-miserable, compared with him,--and does she know,
+then, whether she may not some time be recalled from her _field-état_
+to the court-garrison by an accident?" By this _accident_ he meant a
+marriage with Sebastian. Finally, he tranquillized himself with
+something which I also believe,--namely, that she had at that time,
+merely out of politeness, made a show of a certain coldness towards her
+new separation from her parents, and therefore towards the new place
+also; and then, too, pleasure at such a prospect might have been
+taken for warmth toward _somebody_ or other at court, e. g. toward
+her--_brother_, he thought to himself.
+
+And now yesterday's idea, upon which I have lost my wager, came forth
+again, having shot up astonishingly in _one_ night,--namely, that, if
+he could persuade the Prince to make the journey and the visit to the
+Chamberlain, and while they were still on the road, could plead with
+him for a good word to the Princess in behalf of Clotilda,--then was
+it, in the first place, impossible for the stepfather to refuse a
+prayer for the most beautiful stepdaughter,--and, secondly, impossible
+for the Princess, when her spouse should exercise the privilege of the
+first petition, not to draw all possible advantage from the first
+opportunity of laying him under obligations to her.
+
+--Eight days after, just at dusk,--in the autumn days night comes
+sooner,--the Court--Chaplain Eymann was standing on the observatory and
+peering at the sun, not for its own sake, but in reference to the
+evening-redness and the weather, because he wanted to sow the next
+morning,--when suddenly and with alarm he sprang down from the
+watch-tower into his house, and delivered the Job's tidings, that the
+Consistorial Messenger would be there in a moment, together with a
+French emigrant, and for the one there was not a farthing, and for the
+other not a bed in the house....
+
+No soul came.
+
+I can easily comprehend it; for the Consistorial Messenger reconnoitred
+around the parsonage, and so soon as he saw the court-physician,
+Victor, in wax, sitting up at the window, he marched instanter out of
+the village, straight back to Flachsenfingen. The emigrant had turned
+in at his professional cousin's, Le Baut's.
+
+The two travellers were named January and Victor, and were returning
+this very day from their facetious flying tour.
+
+That is to say, seven days ago, the Prince, who loved mask-dances and
+incognito-journeys and the ways of the commonalty, and who wished only
+the Minister's mental masks and incognito _further_, had started off on
+foot, with Victor, behind a fellow who had sallied forth in advance on
+horseback with the masquerade dresses and masquerade refreshments.
+January carried a sword in his hand, which was contained, not in any
+sheath, but in a walking-cane,--an emblem of court-weapons! He gave
+himself out in the market-town for the new Regency-Counsellor, Flamin.
+My hero, who at the outset had passed himself through the mint, and
+come out stamped as a travelling dentist, recoined himself in the third
+village into a Consistorial Messenger, simply because the couple met
+the true Messenger. This financial collector of the Consistory was made
+to hand over to the physician for this week--it cost the Prince only a
+princely resolution and an indulgence--his receipt-book and his
+ecclesiastical robe of office, together with the tin-plate sewed
+thereto. These plates are attached to Messengers, and the silver stars
+to coats of distinction, as the leaden ones are to bales of cloth, that
+one may know what the trumpery is worth.
+
+For Büsching such a Rekahn's journey would be a windfall,--to me it is
+a true torment; for my manuscript is, besides, so large already, that
+my sister sits on it when she plays the piano-forte, because the seat
+is not high enough without the addition of the Dog-Post-Days.
+
+What did January see, and what Victor? The Regency-Counsellor, January,
+saw among the public servants nothing but crooked backs, crooked ways,
+crooked fingers, crooked souls. "But a bow is crooked, and the bow is a
+sector of the circle, that emblem of all perfection," said the
+Consistorial Messenger, Victor. But what vexed January most was, that
+the officials respected him so exceedingly, when after all he gave
+himself out only for a regency-counsellor, and not for a regent. Victor
+replied: "Man knows only two neighbors: the neighbor at his head is his
+master, the one at his feet is his slave; what lies out beyond either
+of these two is to him God or beast."
+
+What did January see still further? Untaxed knaves he saw, who enriched
+themselves at the expense of taxed poor men,--honest advocates he
+heard, who did not, like his courtiers or the English highwaymen, steal
+under the mask of virtue, but without any mask, and to whom a certain
+remoteness from enlightenment and philosophy and taste will not after
+death be prejudicial, because they can then in their own defence set up
+against God the exception of their ignorance, and represent to Him,
+"that no other laws but those of their own sovereign and of Rome can
+bind them, and that neither is God Justinian, nor is Kant
+Tribonian."[209] He saw hanging from the heads of his country-justices
+bread-baskets, and from those of their subjects muzzle-baskets; he saw,
+that, if (according to Howard) it takes two men to support one
+prisoner, here there must be given twenty incarcerated ones, that one
+city-magistrate may live.
+
+He saw cursed stuff. But, on the other hand, as an offset, he saw on
+pleasant nights the cattle in fair groups feeding in the fields,--I
+mean the republican ones, namely, stags and wild boars. The
+Consistorial Messenger, Victor, said to him, that he had to thank the
+masters of the chase for this romantic spectacle, whose tender hearts
+had been as little able to execute the princely order of shooting wild
+game as were the Egyptian midwives to execute that of slaughtering the
+Jewish male children. Nay, the Financial Messenger at an alehouse had
+some yellow ink and black paper brought to him, and there,--while the
+slater drummed away on the roof to get some more slates brought to him,
+and the guests knocked on the pitchers to get them replenished, and the
+tavern-boy _tooted_ in at the window through a beer-siphon,--amidst
+this Babylonian din the Consistorial Tithingman drew up one of the best
+petitions that the noble gentlemen of the chase ever yet despatched to
+the Prince.
+
+               A PLAIN RELATION, FROM THE PETITION OF THE
+                      CHIEF MASTERS OF THE CHASE.
+
+"That, as the wild game could neither read nor write, it was the
+bounden duty of the masters of the chase, who could, to write for them,
+and on conscience report that all the wild game of Flachsenfingen was
+pining under the tyranny of the peasant, as well the red game as the
+black.[210] That it made a chief-forester's heart bleed, to stand out
+of doors at night and see how the country-folk, out of an incredible
+ill-will to the deer, all night long, in the coldest weather, kept up
+on the borders of the fields a noise and fire, whistling, singing,
+shooting, so that the poor game might not be able to eat. To such hard
+hearts it was not given to reflect, that, if one should station around
+their potato-tables, as they do around their potato-fields, just such
+shooters and pipers, who should shoot away every potatoe from their
+mouths, that then they would necessarily grow lean. From just this
+cause the game was so haggard, because it could but slowly accustom
+itself to such treatment, as cavalry-horses learn to eat their oats
+from a beaten drum. The deer had often to go miles away, like one who,
+in Paris, picks up his breakfast at the inns,--in order, at last, to
+dash into a cabbage-field, which was beset by no such coast-guards
+and adversaries of the wild game, and there get a good bellyful. The
+dog-boys, therefore, said justly, that they trampled down in _one_
+stag-hunt more grain than the game got to eat the whole week. These,
+and none other, were the reasons which had moved the chief masters of
+the chase to appear before his Highness with the humble prayer--
+
+"That your Highness would be pleased to enjoin it upon the
+country-people to stay at night in their warm beds, as thousands of
+good Christians do, and as the game itself does by day.
+
+"Thereby--the majors of the chase were emboldened to promise--a lift
+would be given at once to the country-folk and the stags, the latter
+could then graze the fields in peace, like the day-cattle, and would
+certainly leave the countryman the gleanings, while they contented
+themselves with the first-fruits. The country-folk would be happily
+freed from the ailments which come of night-vigils, from chills and
+exhaustions. But the greatest advantage would be this,--that, whereas
+hitherto peasants had grumbled at the hunting-socages (and not wholly
+without justice), because they delayed the time of the harvest, that
+then the deer in their place would undertake the harvest in the night,
+as the young men in Switzerland took upon themselves to cut the grain
+over night in the place of their sweethearts, so that the latter, when
+they came to their work in the morning, should find none there,--and
+thus would the hunting-socages no longer disturb any one in the matter
+of the harvest, except at most--the game," &c.
+
+
+But what have we to tell of the Consistorial Fee-Messenger, Victor?
+That ecclesiastical collecting-servant astonished all parsons by his
+drollery, and all parsons' wives by his readiness, and nothing but his
+tin and his papers could adequately certify the genuineness of such a
+specimen of a Messenger. He collected all that the Consistorial
+Secretary had liquidated, and excused himself by the plea that it
+became neither him nor the Secretary in this case to be conscientious.
+In his brief administration, he bagged without shame all back-standing
+marriage-pledges of the smallest value, ("We in the College," said he,
+"are greedy for a half-bats,"[211])--moneys, when parties were
+divorced,--moneys, when marriages were concluded by councils, whether
+by indulgences for mourning-time, for blood-relationship, or for want
+of parental consent,--moneys, when the moneys were only once (_or
+twice_) paid, but not yet for the second (or third) time, although the
+Consistory always required this after-ring or resonance of the money in
+the single case where people had lost the receipt,--moneys which the
+parsons had to pay down merely for decrees wherein they were _exempted_
+from payment.----
+
+Thereupon he emptied his bag before the Prince, and flattened down the
+billow of money, and began:--
+
+
+"Your Highness!
+
+"The Devil is in the Consistory: it might be a Lutheran _Penitentiaria_
+for all the Commandments, and is so only for the sixth. What an honest
+Consistorial administration has been able to scrape together lies there
+on the table. The pile might be as broad again, if the Consistory had
+sense enough to say, 'Who buys? fresh, new letters of indulgence for
+everything!'--It has shown, that, beyond certain degrees of
+relationship, it can grant bulls of dispensation as well as the Pope:
+why will it not, then, apply its indulgence to any nearer degrees? It
+would be able to dispense from great as well as from small, if it
+really set about it, and just as well from fast-day penances as from
+mourning, and thrice publishing, that erotic fast-time. By Heaven!
+if a single man, like the Pope, can be the spiritual washing-machine
+of whole continents, and can clean souls in bundles in the year
+of jubilee, then surely we all in the College may serve for the
+washing-machine of a single country. If that is not done, then we
+take--for we mean to live--sin-money and perquisites for the few things
+which we have graciously to wink at; and if in Sparta the _judges_
+worshipped the goddess of Fear, so with us the _parties_ revere this
+fair _ens_.[212]--Had we only, at least, power to absolve from five or
+six great sins,--only, e. g., from a murder,--then could we allow
+divorces and expeditings of marriages, (these wholly opposite
+operations we perform successfully, just as the Karlsbad water at the
+same time dissolves the stone in the bladder and petrifies what is
+dipped into the well,) and do it for half the money."
+
+Then, after a long pause,--"Your Excellency, it is, after all,
+impracticable, because the Devil has the secular counsellors mixed in
+among the ghostly; a half-_profane session-table_ cannot by any
+cabinet-making process be made over into a _holy chair_; there is,
+therefore, nothing to be wished--except a good digestion[213]--but a
+spirit of concord, that clerical and secular counsellors may properly
+feed upon the parties around which they sit, saving a couple of bones,
+that shall fall to us scribes and messengers. So have I often seen on
+the carcass of a dead horse starlings and ravens at once, in a motley
+row, sitting amicably together, and pecking away and devouring."----
+
+My correspondent assures me that by these addresses the Court-Physician
+effected more with January than the Court-Chaplain by his. Many parties
+got their money, and some judges a most gracious letter, from the
+Prince's own hand.
+
+Before I arrive with our disguised span in the suburbs of St. Luna,
+one or two things are still to be mentioned. To January's soul more
+knee-pedals were attached than to a pianoforte, which the favorite's
+knee, while it seemed to bend itself, moved at its pleasure. He was
+always the son of the present moment, and the reflection of his
+company. If he read in Sully, then he did not neglect for a week at a
+time the Regency-College, and sent for the President of Finance. If he
+read in Frederick II., then he was for furnishing the imperial
+contingent and himself commanding it, and went forenoons to the parade.
+He contemplated with pleasure the ideal of a good government, whether
+in print or in a speech, and often attempted approximations to it,
+reformations, investigations, and compensations, for whole weeks,--with
+the exception of _retrenchments_, which, after all, are the only merit
+a prince can earn without the help of others. During the whole crusade
+he was a true Philosopher Antoninus, and stood ready everywhere to
+reward and to punish and to enact; he felt, too, that he could make it
+practicable, if one only did not absolutely require him to _labor_ and
+to _abstain_; under _that_ the other part also went to the Devil.
+
+In the beginning, he was pleased with the sentimental journey; when it
+was over, he was so again; but in the midst of it, all that was pressed
+out after the first runnings grew more and more bitter, and he wished
+for himself, instead of the country bill-of-fare, his dietetic
+dial-plate. Then, too, he had accustomed himself so much to valor,
+that, for want of it,--i. e. of his body-guard,--he was, so to speak,
+timid; hence, on one occasion, in the dark, at the tavern, he was while
+in bed, about to run through a young weaver with his cane-sword,
+because the weaver had confounded at night the princely bed with one of
+more peaceful contents. For the rest, all the rays of his favor now
+converged to a focus upon the single man of rank, the only courageous
+and confidential friend whom he had,--his Victor.
+
+But my hero had everywhere something to enjoy,--at least, the thought
+of St. Luna; everywhere something to eat,--at least, when they came to
+a fruit-tree; everywhere something to read,--and though it were only
+charms against fires on the house-doors, old calendars on the walls,
+exhortations to charity on the alms-boxes; everywhere something to
+think of,--of the travelling pair, of the four acts of Nature's
+seasons, which are annually given over again, of the thousand acts in
+man, which never return; and everywhere something to love and to dream
+of,--for this was the very road which Clotilda had so often gone over
+on her journeys between Maienthal and St. Luna, and the friend of her
+rich heart found on this classic avenue nothing but great remembrances,
+magic passages, and a long, quiet, homelike bliss....
+
+"St. Luna!" cried January, delighted at the mere thought of seeing once
+more a man of the world,--Le Baut. The mask of an emigrant was a
+thought he had himself hit upon, the better to draw out the
+Chamberlain, with whom he meant finally to give himself out as an
+hereditary foe of the Prince. Had there been in Le Baut's soul a higher
+nobility than the heraldic, or had Victor but known that the
+Chamberlain would recognize the Prince at the first glance, and that he
+would be able to do so for the very reason that the genuine suspended
+Consistorial Messenger had probably before this whispered the whole
+secret in the ear of the city of Flachsenfingen, he would have
+dissuaded him from the _noble masque_.
+
+Sebastian, as we have mentioned, stayed back and in the open air,
+probably out of shame at his part, and evidently from a longing to look
+upon Clotilda's sunny face, which for so long a time had not risen upon
+him, in a scene more convenient and congenial to his heart. "And the
+parents will be glad to see me again," he thought beside, "when they
+have something to thank me for,"--namely, Clotilda's place at court.
+More than once did he start, as he stood watching there behind the
+blanket of the dark, to hear his name called out of the Parsonage, and,
+in fact, with such love and such longings for his answer that he could
+almost have given one. But it was only the people of the Parsonage
+talking with his little godson, and saying to him, "Dearest good
+Sebastian! Just see here: what have I got for you?" How the veiled
+paradise of to-day's spring lay in old relics around him! How he envied
+the shadowy heads in the palace, which he saw moving about the lights,
+and the old Parson's pug-dog, who would fain wag him in to the
+Parsonage-inmates, and who continued in there to perform his part on
+the stage of so sweet a past! But when some thistles round the palace
+reminded him of the mosaic ones on the floor within-doors, then was the
+envier to be envied, and, with the fairest dreams that were ever traced
+over the ground of his dark life, he went back to the Apothecary's.
+
+The next day January followed, delighted with the parents, enraptured
+with the daughter, because they were so fine and she so fair. It cost
+my hero nothing but a word to move the step-father to the intercession
+for the appointment of the step-daughter, which our hero and the father
+had so often longed to see; and it cost the step-father, too, only a
+word with the Princess to get his and their petition granted....
+Clotilda became maid-of-honor.
+
+Immediately upon that, the Minister von Schleunes, in a congratulatory
+letter, pressed upon Clotilda's parents the quarter-wing of his house,
+and was happy, in the epistle, "that a higher petition had _repeated_
+his own with such effect." I set up this nobleman as a model to all
+people of the world; although, at present, all writes itself _noble_ in
+the _moral_, as the Viennese do in the _heraldic_ sense.
+
+Victor, who with his soul's eyes was peeping all day long into the
+Chamberlain's window, could hardly wait to see Clotilda, first in St.
+Luna, and next at court. He put off the visit from day to day, and
+night after night made it in dream. Not even his visiting-card--his
+letter to the Parson--had he sent off; he wanted, not only to carry it,
+but actually to supersede it, himself. But this, last thought--of
+suppressing the letter, for fear Clotilda might possibly get hold of
+this malicious conduct-list of courts, and therefrom contract a
+repugnance to the new office--he hurled forthwith out of his soul, as
+Paul did the viper from his hand. Woe to the heart that is not sincere
+towards a sincere one, is not great towards a great one, and warm
+towards a warm one, when it should be all this even towards one that is
+nothing of it all!
+
+For the rest, he needed such a visit, and such a reciprocal visit,
+every day more and more; for he was not happy; and for this there were,
+besides himself, to blame, first, the Prince, secondly, Flamin,
+thirdly, nine thousand and thirty-seven persons. The Prince could not
+well help it; he poured out the whole cornucopia of his love on the
+Doctor, and took away from him all the freedom which the latter had
+been minded in the beginning so sacredly to maintain. Victor shook his
+head as often as he wrote in his journal, or log-book of his voyage of
+life, (at his father's behest,) and saw by his chart that he had passed
+over quite other seas and degrees of latitude and longitude than he or
+his father had desired. "However, I shall land right, at least," said
+he.--
+
+But his Flamin brought still more sadness to his soul, which everywhere
+at once sought and bestowed love. He wanted to impart to the
+Counsellor, with the news of Clotilda's appointment, a joy like
+his own; but his friend received it as coldly as he did its bearer.
+The dust of law-papers lay thick on the organ-pipes of his
+spirits.--Chained to the session- and writing-tables, he was now, like
+chained dogs, wilder than he had been before when unfettered.--The
+efforts of his colleagues to dislocate the body politic into an anagram
+did not get from him the approbation which they deserved.--Then, too,
+there lodged itself in his soul the leaven of the jealousy of
+friendship, which could not feel it right that his Victor should see
+him seldomer and others oftener.[214]--But most was he affronted by
+Victor's refusal, when he besought his company to St. Luna.... In a
+word, he was vexed.
+
+The nine thousand and thirty-seven men who were to my hero nine
+thousand and thirty-seven tormenting spirits are the gentlemen of
+Flachsenfingen jointly and severally, by means of their absurd
+character, which deserves not to be sketched here, but in an extra
+flyleaf.
+
+
+                            EXTRA FLY-LEAF,
+
+_Wherein is sketched the Ridiculous Character of the People of
+   Flachsenfingen,--or Perspective Plan of the City of Little Vienna_.
+
+Little Vienna is the name many give to my Flachsenfingen, just as we
+have a Little Leipsic, Little Paris,[215] &c. There can hardly,
+however, be two cities wider apart in manners than Flachsenfingen,
+where one gluts and drowns his life and his soul, and Vienna, where
+one, perhaps, does not sufficiently shun the opposite fault of a
+Spartan asceticism. The Little-Viennese, or Flachsenfingeners, open
+their hearts to the enjoyment of Nature far less than the orifice of
+the stomach.--Pastures are the kitchen-pieces of their cattle, and
+gardens those of the owners thereof; the Milky Way does not chain and
+satisfy their spirits half so much (though it is longer) as the
+Königsberg sausage of 1583 would have done, which was five hundred and
+ninety-six ells long, and four times as heavy as the learned man
+himself who has portrayed it to posterity,--Herr Wagenseil.[216]--Are
+these the traits upon which carriers ground the name of Little Vienna?
+I have often been in Great Vienna, and am personally acquainted with
+the grand crosses, little crosses, and commanders of the Order of
+Temperance, which is there so common. I can certainly, therefore,
+represent a valid witness, and must be believed, when I say, that,
+while in Little Vienna they guzzle extraordinarily, of Great Vienna,
+and emphatically of its cloister-people, I can and must maintain
+something very different: they have not only all the time the greatest
+thirst,--which certainly must needs be gone, if they quenched it,--but
+they also make use, against drunkenness, of a fine method of Plato's.
+That ancient advises us, in case of drunkenness, to look into a glass,
+in order, by the distorted figure therein which reminds us of our
+desecration, to be forever warned away from the vice. Hence whole
+chapters, the dean, the sub-senior, the junior canons, &c., often set
+vessels full of wine or beer before them, and lift them to their eyes,
+and in this _metamorphotic_ or caricaturing glass, which, by shaking,
+distorts still more the distorted features, contemplate themselves,
+according to the philosopher's advice, a good long while. I ask whether
+people who peer so deeply into the glass can love drinking?--
+
+It does not, however, follow from this, that I deny the Great-Viennese
+a resemblance to the Flachsenfingeners, in such traits as do honor.
+Thus, for example, I must gladly allow a similarity of the former to
+the latter in this respect, that they, neither of them, are ever down
+with the disease of poetry or enthusiasm or sentimentalism,--which are
+all one. Victor would make this eulogy sound in his language somewhat
+thus: "The Viennese authors (even the best of them, only Denis and
+hardly three others excepted) give the reader no wings to bear him up
+over the whole world of the actual by that nobility of soul, by that
+contempt of the earth, by that reverence for old virtue and freedom and
+the higher love, wherein other German geniuses shine as in holy
+rays."[217] And he would refer for proof to the "Vienna Sketches," to
+"Faustin,"[218] to Blumauer,[219] and to the "Vienna Almanac of the
+Muses." This reproach even a Viennese would accept and turn to
+his credit, by asking us whether we have to show (like him) a
+"Musen-Almanach," with a sediment of filth, whereupon one might write,
+"With approbation of the brothel."--This feeling of literary difference
+compelled even a Nicolai,--otherwise no special _amoroso_ of the Vienna
+authors,--in his "Universal German Library," to build up for them a
+separate side-box, although he throws writers of all other German
+circles together into _one parterre_, or pit. In like manner have I
+seen in Bavaria, on the gallows, beside the usual post for the three
+Christian fellow-confessors, a special schismatic cross-beam attached,
+to which only the Jew tribe were strung up.
+
+The Flachsenfingener knows that there is nothing in poets; and in
+books, where rills of verse run through the prose, he skips clean over
+the rills, just as certain people come late to church in order to
+escape the singing. He is a true servant of the state, who knows of
+what use the poetic golden vein is in the revision-, commission-,
+relation-, and enrolling-systems,--none at all; meanwhile, although he
+cannot appreciate a Klopstock or a Goethe, nevertheless he will not, in
+his leisure hours, despise a doggerel verse or crambo-rhyme. A soul of
+such a fortunate, robust nature, wherein one aims less to exalt his
+spirit than his income, makes it, to be sure, comprehensible how there
+may be a kine-pox, by means of which the Flachsenfingener has been
+able, like Socrates, to wander round alone in the plague of
+sentimentalism without being infected. The full moon produced with them
+full crabs, but no full hearts; and what they planted under it, that it
+might favor the growth, was not love, but--turnips. The genuine
+Little-Viennese shoots at much nearer targets than that white one over
+yonder. They marry there with true gusto, without having first shot
+themselves or sighed themselves to death,--they know no obstacles to
+love but ecclesiastical,--female virtue is a belt-buckle, which must
+hold as long as the surname of the daughter,--the hearts of daughters
+are there like letter-envelopes, which, when they have once been
+superscribed to one lord, can easily be turned so as to be addressed to
+another man,--the girls love there, not from coquetry, but from
+simplicity, any devil, except poor devils....
+
+In short, my correspondent, from whom I have all this, is almost
+prepossessed in favor of Little Vienna, and therefore contradicts
+vehemently the author of the "Travelling Frenchman," who is said to
+have said somewhere--if I had him in the house, I should know how
+Little Vienna is properly named--that the Flachsenfingener has not
+energy enough to be at least a highwayman. Knef says, however, he will
+not give up the hope that they have been thieves, and backs himself by
+the cases of those that have been hung.
+
+    _End of the Extra Fly-Leaf, wherein was sketched the Ridiculous
+         Character of the People of Flachsenfingen,--or of the
+             Perspective Plan of the City of Little Vienna_.
+
+But among such people my hero, with all his toleration, could not take
+any comfort whatever,--he who so hated all selfishness, especially in
+the sensual form, and who would gladly have attended Dr. Graham's
+lectures, wherein he taught men to live without eating,--he who so
+gladly opened his heart to the seed of truth winged by poesy,--who
+bore an Emanuel in his heart, and held the want of poetic feeling
+even as a sign that the _moral_ man had not yet laid aside all
+caterpillar-skins,--he who looked upon this whole life and the whole
+body politic as the hull in which the kernel of the next life
+ripens,--O, whoever thinks this is too lonely among them that think
+otherwise!--
+
+So it stood with the world around him, when he got a line from the good
+wife of the Parson:--
+
+
+"The general talk here is that you are dead. But I express my mind
+against people, that, as you let so little be heard from you, and have
+forgotten all the world, you must, for that very reason, be still
+alive. Do confirm my proposition! We all have a fond and foolish
+longing for you, and I should like to beg you to come on the
+twenty-first (if the wedding at the senior Parson's hinders you no more
+than it does my Flamin). We have nothing to offer you here, but the
+birthday of our Clotilda. O good my Lord, and my beloved Lordship, how
+has it been possible for you hitherto to remain so long mute and
+invisible? A true friend, who has nothing at all of the ladies of your
+court about her, not even their fickleness, wishes heartily to have you
+before her eyes and beside her ears,--and that lady is myself,--and
+when I see you come, I shall certainly weep for joy, let me laugh or
+pout the while as I will.
+
+                                                     "E."
+
+
+When did he receive this letter, so full of soul? And what answer did
+his make to it?--
+
+It was on the loveliest evening, which announced the coming of the
+loveliest Sunday morning and of the magic after-summer,--he looked at
+the evening red under which lay Maienthal's mountains, and his heart
+beat heavily within him,--he looked toward the dawning red of the full
+moon which kindled over St. Luna, and his yearning thitherward became
+inexpressible,--he thought of Clotilda, whose birthday fell upon
+to-morrow,--and so, very naturally, as to-day closed, he went--to bed.
+
+
+
+
+                           19. DOG--POST-DAY.
+
+   The Hair-Dresser with a (musical) Disease of the Lungs.--Clotilda in
+     Victor's Dream.--Extra Lines on Church-Music.--Garden Concert by
+     Stamitz.--Quarrel between Victor and Flamin.--The Heart without
+     Solace.--Letter to Emanuel.
+
+
+The October Sunday with which I fill up this Dog-Post-Day was,
+even at nine and a half o'clock in the morning, such a glad,
+glistening day in St. Luna, that the whole Parsonage thought of the
+Court-Physician.--"Ah, he ought to come to the concert this evening!"
+The _virtuoso_ Stamitz was to give one in Le Baut's garden.--"O, better
+earlier, even to dinner!"--"And to my forenoon sermon, if he will not
+come to the children's catechizing." Eymann, as he said this, had, more
+than anything else, his newly dressed peruke in his head, which Herr
+Meuseler had to-day placed _on_ it. This clever peruke-maker visited
+those of his diocesans (the parsons) who wore no hair of their own,
+often and with greater benefit to their heads than the Superintendent
+himself, that _Commander of the Faithful_, to whom most chaplains said,
+Your Excellency! If he could only have weaned himself from singing,
+lying, and drinking too much,--the _friseur_,--most of the clergy would
+have ordered their toupees--those artistic cock's-combs--of him; but as
+it was, they did not.
+
+As the Chaplain loved to make the _confitures_ of Fate, among which
+false hair is to be reckoned, bitter in some way, and to give them, as
+it were, an infusion of hops, he naturally sought to embitter to-day's
+peruke (for whose false curls he gave, in place of payment, genuine
+hair cut off from his people's heads) by the misgivings which he
+conjured up about the long staying away of Victor. He bethought
+himself: "We must have affronted him in some way,--he does not even
+write,--he has, perhaps, fallen out with my son,--something has
+occurred,--and then, too; the old Lord no longer gives us a
+side-glance,--our rats, also, had a hand (or a foot) in helping drive
+him away."
+
+By such elegies he threw at first himself, and at last even his
+hearers, into agony. He was not to be refuted in any way, except by
+one's bringing out some new subject of distress. The breaking-away spot
+in his cloud, or his _little book for help in distress_, was this time
+a literal book, the "Anecdotes for Preachers," by Teller, of Zeitz,
+which he to-day received through the peruke-maker from the clerical
+reading-circle. Clergymen, especially country clergymen, carry
+everything out with a minute, punctilious solicitude, into which they
+are partly scared by their reigning bugbear and dragon of a Consistory.
+Now in this book-club there was a law current--commentators and editors
+keep it--that every member who should find a grease-spot or ink-stain
+or rent in the book he was reading should enter it on the fly-leaf in
+an index and inventory of spots, together with the number of the page
+"where." Very naturally, every one who was even half-way an honest
+Lutheran would deny the _immaculate re_-(or _con_-)_ception_ of it, and
+the freckles were therefore all regularly registered, but nobody fined.
+Only the conscientious Court-Chaplain took upon himself, as scapegoat,
+the punishment of other people's sins; for he never could sleep a wink
+the whole night, when he found in a book more blots than in the
+sin-register, because he clearly saw that he should be made adoptive
+father of the anonymous smutch and buyer of the book.--Now Teller's
+Anecdotes for Black-Coats was a complete pile of linen for the wash,
+black with dirt. Was there not one dog's-ear upon another,--compound
+dog's-ears,--blot upon blot? were not the leaves regular
+_proof-sheets_,--and, in fact, speaking _without metaphor_? Eymann
+began, "And if money should come flying in to me through the
+window"....
+
+Just then Victor's letter flew in at the window, and its--author
+through the door.
+
+But, of course, the case was this:--Victor, before pleasant weather,
+had pleasant dreams; before bad weather, Satan and his kin appeared to
+him. The beautiful weather of Saturday, and the thought of Clotilda's
+birthday and of the after-summer, gave him a morning dream, which, in
+turn, gave him a stage on which only her sweet image played. A person
+whom he had seen behind the veil of dream stood before him all the next
+day in a magic reflection. With him dreams,--those night-moths of the
+spirit,--like the real moths, strayed out beyond the bounds of night
+and sleep; at least for the forenoon, he went on loving, awake, every
+person whom he had begun to love in dream. This time, by an exactly
+reverse process, waking love flowed on into dreaming love, and the
+actual Clotilda coincided with the ideal to form one saintly image, so
+radiant that any one who knows his dream will easily enter into the
+rest. Therefore must the dream be given to the readers, the poetic ones
+especially: for others I should be glad to prepare an expurgated
+edition of the Dog-Post-Days, in which it should be left out; for
+unpoetic souls that have no dreams themselves should not read any.
+
+But to you, ye good, seldom requited female souls,--ye who have
+a second conscience of your own, beside the first, for pure
+manners,--whose single virtue, when one looks at it nearly, is seen to
+bloom up into one wreath made of all the virtues, as nebulous stars,
+seen through glasses, fall into millions,--ye who, so changeable in all
+purposes, so unchangeable in the noblest one, go from the earth with
+unrecognized wishes, with forgotten worth, with eyes full of tears and
+love, with hearts full of virtue and grief,--to you, dear ones, I
+gladly tell the little dream and my long story!...
+
+"A hand which Horion did not see laid hold of him; lips which he saw
+not spake to him, 'Let thy heart now be clean and holy, for the genius
+of female virtue resides in this region.'--Lo! there stood Horion on a
+field clothed with forget-me-nots, over which the sky like a blue
+shadow fell; for all the stars had been withdrawn from it, only the
+_evening star_ stood gleaming alone up in the place of the sun. White
+ice-pyramids, streaked with down-trickling lines of evening redness,
+closed in, as with a wall of gold and silver ore, the whole dark
+horizon.----Therein Clotilda passed by, sublime as one dead, serene as
+a human being in the next world, conducted now by winged children, now
+by a veiled nun, now by an earnest angel, but she passed forever by
+before Horion; she smiled upon him in blissful lovingness while thus
+passing, but she passed by.--Flowery hillocks, almost like graves, rose
+and sank, for every one was stirred by the breathing of a bosom
+slumbering beneath it; a white rose stood over the heart that lay
+veiled below; two red ones grew over the cheeks, where tender blushes
+hid themselves in the earth; and overhead in the night-blue of heaven
+the white and red reflections of the hill-flowers glided fitfully into
+each other as often as the roses of the heart and the cheeks swayed
+with the hillock.--Dying echoes, awakened, however, by unheard voices,
+gave answer to each other behind the mountains; each echo lifted the
+little hills of slumber still higher, as if a deep sigh or a bosom full
+of rapture heaved them; and Clotilda smiled more blissfully, sinking at
+every resonance more deeply into the flowery earth.--The tones were too
+full of ecstasy, and the dissolved heart of man was fain to die
+therein. Clotilda sank now into the graves up to her heart; only her
+silent head still smiled above the meadow; the forget-me-nots at last
+reached up to the sunken eyes that were full of blissful tears, and
+bloomed over them.--Then suddenly a hill of slumber crept over the
+saint, and from beneath the flowers her words came up, 'Rest thou, too,
+Horion!'--But the sounds, growing more distant, transformed themselves
+during the burial into dim harmonica-tones.... And lo! as they sank
+into silence, there came up a great shadow like Emanuel, and stood
+before him like a short night, and covered the unknown moment as with a
+hand from a higher world. But when the moment and the shadow had passed
+away, then had all the hills sunk.--Then the reflections of the
+flowers, flowing together, gilded over the undulating heavens.--Then
+were seen _white_ butterflies, _white_ doves, _white_ swans, climbing
+up to the purple peaks of the ice-mountains with outstretched wings as
+with arms, and behind the mountains, as if by an uncontainable
+transport, blossoms were flung up, and stars and garlands.--And there
+on the highest ice-mountain, as it rose tranquil in clear radiance and
+purple blaze, stood Clotilda, glorified, consecrated, radiant with
+supernatural rapture, and on her heart fluttered a nebulous globe,
+which consisted of little vaporized tears, and on which Horion's pallid
+form was delineated, and Clotilda spread wide her arms."----
+
+But to embrace? or to soar away? or to pray?... Ah! he awoke too soon,
+and his eyes streamed down in greater tears than the nebulous ones, and
+a sinking voice cried incessantly all around him, "Rest thou, too!"
+
+O thou soul of woman,--thou that goest, weary and unrewarded, wounded
+and bleeding, but great and unspotted, up from the smoking battle-field
+of life,--thou angel, whom the heart of man, reared by storms, soiled
+by the world's dealings, can respect and love, but cannot reward or
+reach,--how does my soul at this moment bow down before thee! how do I
+wish thee now the soothing balm of Heaven, the requiting goodness of
+the Eternal! And thou, Philippina, precious soul, glide away into a
+secret cell, and, amidst the tears which thou hast already so often
+shed, lay thy hand upon thy soft, rich heart, and swear, "Forever shalt
+thou continue consecrated to God and virtue, even if not to repose!" To
+thyself swear it,--not to me, for I believe it without an oath.----
+
+What a parade-night, full of stars and dreams, was that! and what a
+gala-day of Nature followed upon it! In Victor's brain stood nothing
+but St. Luna, veiled in blue, bespangled with silver dew-drops, and
+graced by the loveliest angel, who to-day raised moist, glad eyes to
+the friendly heaven, and thought, "How beautiful art thou to-day, just
+upon my birthday festival!"--Even the Senior Pastor and his daughter,
+who both made a wedding,--the former an anniversary second wedding with
+his Senioress, the latter a first one with the preacher of the Orphan
+Asylum,--slipped themselves into the procession of his joyous thoughts
+as two new couples.
+
+He did not mean to go to St. Luna, but he said; "I will dress myself up
+just for a little walk."--
+
+"It is all one where I go to-day," he said, when he was out of doors;
+and so he took the St. Luna road.--
+
+"I can turn round at any time," he said, when he had gone half-way.--
+
+"But it would be something still more ridiculously funny, if I should
+be at once correspondent and postman, and deliver my own letter," said
+he, and drew it out.--
+
+"And answer my good mother's orally by the same opportunity," he
+continued, half in dream, and full of greater love towards her who had
+sent him the sweet nocturnal one by the intelligence of the birthday.--
+
+----But when he heard the first bells of St. Luna ringing for church,
+then he sprang up, and said, "Now I will no longer embitter the way by
+further scruples, but will march boldly and decidedly into the
+village."
+
+And so, taking the hand of Fortune, with all Nature smiling after him,
+with dreams in his heart, with innocent hope in his freshly blooming
+countenance, he entered into the Eden of his soul.
+
+Flamin he had not asked to go with him, in order not to rob the Senior
+Pastor of his wedding-guest, and because he did not know, himself, that
+he should reach St. Luna, and perhaps, too, because he did not want to
+have his fantasying attention to the sparkling morning disturbed by any
+news about juristic cases. In fact, he would rather take a walk with a
+woman than with a man. Men are almost ashamed, beside one another, of
+any except silent emotions; but womanly souls love to unfold to each
+other their bashful sensibilities; for they cover up the naked heart
+with maternal warmth, that it may not become chilled during the
+unveiling.
+
+As Victor passed round the Parsonage below, he saw himself up at the
+window, in his _second edition for a few good friends_; but the wax
+Victor had forthwith to be banished behind a false partition, that it
+might not frighten the fleshly one. The reception of the latter, and
+the feast of jubilee thereupon, need not be described by me in a more
+lively manner than by my saying that the pug-dog was almost crushed
+underfoot, the bulfinch hopped round in vain for his breakfast, nor did
+the Parson's wife offer any to the guest, in her joy at staring at him,
+and church did not begin till after the double usance of half an hour;
+so that this time more parishioners went to church drunk than usual.
+
+Victor, too, went thither intoxicated, but with joy. There is nothing
+more agreeable than to be a parson's wife, and to say to one's husband,
+while putting on his clerical bands, "Make the service a little longer
+to-day, else the mutton will not be quite roasted through."--Domestic
+trifles gratified my hero full as much as courtly ones provoked him.
+
+He went with the Parson and with the Parson's wife, who abridged all
+the processes of kitchen and toilet in a summary and manlike way. His
+toleration for the faults of the clerical order had nothing in common
+with that of the distinguished people who are fit for high dignities
+and dinners, which arises from supreme contempt, and which can endure a
+Christian priest as easily as an Egyptian; but it grew out of his
+opinion that the churches are still the only Sunday-Schools and Spartan
+school-gates for the poor commoners, who cannot hear their _cours de
+morale_ from the _state_. Besides, he loved, as a youth, the favorites
+of his childhood.
+
+Many preachers try to combine the rule of Quintilian, who requires that
+_bad_ arguments should be put forward in the earlier part of the
+discourse, with that of Cicero, who is for keeping them back till the
+latter part, by posting them in _both_ places; but Eymann held good
+feelings to be better than bad reasons, and wound around the peasants
+chains, not of reasoning, but of flowers.
+
+The _friseur_ above-mentioned, at first, would not go to church,
+because it was beneath his dignity, but afterward he could not do
+otherwise; for, on account of the court stranger present to-day,
+church-music was to be made.
+
+It is the only fault of the peruke-maker Meuseler, that he loves to
+sing too well, and is too fond of intruding his natural pipes into all
+church-music that is made in his perukial diocese, especially on Holy
+Whitsuntide. The St. Luna chorister could never bear this; but how to
+cheat him and feast a thousand ears? Simply thus: He frizzled out
+to-day what was still to be frizzled, (not to-day alone, but it was
+always so,) and merely glided up the choir-steps. Here he leaned and
+watched, till the chorister, seated on the musical sausage-sledge,
+struck with his finger the first note of the church-music. Then, like a
+sunbeam, he darted up into the choir, and filched away from the young
+counter-tenor his part, and sang it into the ears of the congregation,
+but with much whining and puffing, as if he were chanting his
+manuscript to the reviewers. For one must now, once for all, make it
+known to the world, that the enraged musician at the clavichord had,
+with a sharp-cornered triangle of elbows, furiously thrust back at the
+frizzling counter-tenor, in order to push the strange singing-bird out
+of the bird-house of the choir. But as the singer made his right arm
+the firm note-desk of his text, and the other a war-club,--like the
+Jews, who built up Jerusalem with one hand full of building-tools and
+the other full of weapons,--one sees that the peruke-maker, even
+amidst this continuance of fighting and fa-sol-la-ing, could do his
+very best, and execute somewhat during the musical truce of God. But
+so soon as the music had drawn its last breath, then the harmonious
+bird-of-passage and stormy-petrel skipped nimbly out across the choir,
+accompanied by the memory of a thousand ears and a single elbow. The
+chorister could not catch him, nor get scent of him.
+
+If, on the contrary, he had the good fortune to be passing with his
+bandboxes through a village just as parson and schoolmaster and
+pedagogic frog-spawn were quacking and croaking[220] round a deaf
+corpse,--all which many name, more concisely, a dirge,--then could the
+_virtuoso_, without the counter-prop of elbows, spring gayly with both
+feet into the motet,[221] work out the funeral serenade given to the
+dead man by his heirs, throw in gratis some final cadences to the
+funeral procession, and yet have time to offer in the village to the
+bailiff an entirely new bag-wig.--
+
+To our hero the music in country churches gave the greatest satirical
+pleasure. But little should we get by it, had I not the forethought to
+beg leave just for one poor little extra-syllable--one shall hardly see
+it--upon church-music.
+
+              POOR LITTLE EXTRA-SYLLABLE ON CHURCH-MUSIC.
+
+It always gives me pleasure to see the people keep their seats during
+church-music, because it is a proof that no one is bitten by the
+tarantula; for, if they should run out, one would see that they could
+not endure any discords, and so had been bitten. I, as profane
+music-master, compose for few churches,--that is to say, only
+the consecration-noise for new ones, or old ones that have been
+repaired,--and therefore, in truth, I understand nothing of the matter
+whereupon, in passing, I purpose to express myself; but thus much let
+me still be allowed to assert, that the Lutheran church-music is good
+for something,--in the country, not in the capitals, where, perhaps,
+the fewest discords are correctly delivered. Verily, a miserable,
+sottish, blue chorister, who in bravura-airs sings himself brown
+and beats others brown,--there are, therefore, two kinds of
+_bravura_-airs,--is able, with a few mechanics who on Sundays work at
+the fiddle, with a trumpeter who might blow down without an instrument
+the walls of Jericho, with a smith who lays about him with the sticks
+of the kettle-drums, with a few spasmodic youngsters that do not yet
+even understand singing, and still resemble a female singer, who
+labors, not, like the fine arts, for _ear_ and _eye_ alone, but also
+(only in a worse acceptation than the youngsters) for a third sense,
+and with the little wind which he draws from the lungs of the organ and
+his own lungs,--such a thumper, I say, is able, with so extraordinarily
+little musical rubbish, nevertheless, to get up a much louder
+thundering and fiddle-rosin-lightning around the pulpit Sinai--I mean,
+to draw a far more vehement and discordant church-music out of his
+choir--than many much better sustained theatre-orchestras and
+chapels, with whose harmonies temples are so often desecrated. Hence
+such a noisy man is pained afterward, when people misunderstand and
+falsely judge his church scraping and squeaking and groaning. Shall,
+then, the soft, low Moravian music steal into all our provincial
+churches?--Fortunately, however, there are still city choristers who
+are working against this, and who know wherein pure choral tone and
+discord are to be distinguished from court-tone.
+
+I expect, not readers, but organists, to know why mere dissonances--for
+consonances are to be endured only among the voices of the
+instruments--belong to the choir. Dissonances--according to Euler and
+Sulzer--are relations of tones which are expressed in high numbers;
+they displease us, therefore, not on account of their incongruity, but
+on account of our inability to reduce them rapidly to an equation.
+Higher minds would find the near relations of our harmonies too easy
+and monotonous,--the larger ones of our discords, on the contrary,
+charming and not above their comprehension. Now, as divine service is
+held more in honor of higher beings than for the profit of men, the
+church style must insist upon this, that a music shall be made,
+suitable for higher beings,--namely, of discords,--and that precisely
+that which is the most abominable to our ears shall be chosen as most
+appropriate for the temple.
+
+If we once open the church-doors to the instrumental music of the
+Moravians, then we shall at last be infected with their singing, and by
+degrees all that vocal bleating and bellowing will be lost which makes
+our churches so lively, and which to castrated ears is such a
+disagreeable hammer of the law, but for us so good a proof that we
+resemble the swine, which the Abbé de Baigne, at the command of Louis
+XI., arranged according to the scale, goaded with jacks, and set to
+squealing.--These are my thoughts on church-music, or modern German
+battle-song.
+
+              _End of the Extra-Syllable on Church-Music_.
+
+
+I should not have let the hair-dresser sing and strut so long, if my
+hero had been available for anything else, all this Sunday, than
+a supernumerary; but he did nothing of consequence the whole day,
+except, that, out of a sort of humanity, by unpacking, himself; her
+chests-of-drawers and bandboxes, he compelled old Appel, who would
+rather dress hams than her person, to prepare the usual Sabbath edition
+of the latter, printed with typographic splendor, as early as three
+o'clock in the afternoon; otherwise she would not have delivered the
+same till after supper. The Jews believe that they get, on the Sabbath,
+a new Schabbes-[222] or Sabbath-Soul: into maidens there enters one at
+least; into the Appels, two or three.
+
+But why do I expect my hero to make any more active demonstration
+to-day,--him who, to-day, buried in that dream-night and in the coming
+evening, his emotions stirred by every kindly eye, and by the
+_rudera_[223] and urns of a spring which he had dreamed away,--softly
+dissolved by the calm, bland summer, which still lay smiling and dying
+on the incense-altars of the mountains, on the crape-clad fields, and
+amidst the mute funeral escort of birds, and at the rising of the first
+cloud would pass away from the boughs,--Victor, I say, who to-day,
+greeted with a melancholy smile by nothing but tender remembrances,
+felt that he had hitherto been too mirthful? He could only look upon
+the good souls around him with glistening eyes of love, then turn them
+away, more intensely glistening, and go out. Over his heart and all
+its notes stood written, _Tremolando_. No one is more profoundly sad
+than he who laughs too much; for when this laughter ceases, everything
+has power over the exhausted soul, and a meaningless lullaby, a
+flute-concert,--whose D sharp and F sharp keys and mouthpieces are
+merely the two lips wherewith a young shepherd whistles,--opens the
+flood-gates of the old tears, as a whisper loosens the poised and
+trembling avalanche. He felt as if his dream of this morning absolutely
+did not allow him to address Clotilda; she seemed to him too holy, and
+still escorted by winged children, and placed upon icy thrones. As,
+upon the whole, he had to-day neither a tongue nor an ear for Le Baut's
+conversations in the realm of the morally dead, he preferred to listen
+unseen in the great leafy garden to this Stamitz concert, and at the
+farthest let himself be introduced to the company by accident. His
+second reason was, that his heart was made for a sounding-board of
+music, and gladly drank in the fleeting tones without disturbance, and
+loved to conceal their effects upon him from ordinary men, of the
+world, who can truly quite as little do without Goethe's, Raphael's,
+and Sacchini's things (and for not a whit inferior reasons) as without
+Löschenkohl's own. Emotion, it is true, raises one above being ashamed
+to show emotion; but while his emotions lasted, he hated and shunned
+all attention to another's attention, because the Devil smuggles in
+vanity among the best feelings, often one knows not how. In the night,
+in a shady nook, tears fall more gracefully, and by-and-by evaporate.
+
+In all this he was strengthened by the Parson's wife; for she had
+secretly sent to town and invited her son, and artistically prepared in
+the garden a surprise.
+
+The Parson's family repaired at last to the embowered concert-hall, and
+gave not a thought to the consideration how much they were despised by
+Le Baut's household, who held only noble metals and noble birth, never
+noble deeds, to be cards of admission, and who, highly valuing the
+people of the Parsonage as friends of his Lordship and of Matthieu,
+would, however, have valued them still higher as lap-dogs of either.
+
+Victor kept back a little in the Parsonage garden, because it was
+still too light, and also because he pitied poor Apollonia, who was
+peering solitary and unseen, in full finery, from the window of the
+summer-house, out into the air, and dandling perpendicularly the little
+god-son, whom she hung now over her head, now under her stomach. After
+the manner of a cit, he did not put on his hat in the summer-house, in
+order to strengthen her spirit by courtesy. An infant is, as it were,
+prompter and bellows-blower to the nurse: the young Sebastian sent
+Appel timely and sufficient succor under the siege by the elder one,
+and she undertook at last to speak, and remark that the god-son was a
+dear, good, beautiful, little "Basty." "But," she added, "the young
+leddy (Clotilda) must not hear that: she will have it that we should
+call him Victor, when she hears father call him Basty." Now she began
+to magnify how Clotilda loved his godchild, how often she would snatch
+the little monkey and smile on him and hug and kiss him; and the
+eulogist repeated on a small scale everything that she praised. Nay,
+the grown-up Sebastian did it after her, but he sought on the little
+lips only the kisses of _others_; and perhaps, in Appel's case, again,
+_his_ were among the things which are sought. Made happier himself, he
+left one whom he had made happier; for Love despatched now one gayly
+attired hope after another as messengers to his heart, and all said,
+"Truly, we do not deceive thee: trust us!"
+
+At last Stamitz began to tune up, about whom the stiff family of the
+Lord Chamberlain would certainly not have concerned themselves, because
+to-day there were no strangers present, had not Clotilda begged for
+this garden-concert as the only festival of her birth-night. Stamitz
+and his orchestra filled a lighted bower,--the noble audience sat in
+the next brightest niche, and wished the thing were already over,--the
+commonalty sat farther off, and the Chaplain, for fear of the
+catarrhal, dewy floor, twisted one leg round the other above the
+thighs,--Clotilda and her Agatha reclined in the darkest leafy box.
+Victor did not steal in, till the overture announced to him the seats
+and the seating of the company: in the remotest arbor, in a true
+aphelion, this comet took its place. The overture consisted of that
+musical scrawling and flourishing, of that harmonious phraseology, that
+crackling of fire-works produced by the mutual contact of sounding
+passages, which I so extol, when it is nowhere but in the overture.
+There it is in place; it is the sprinkling rain which softens the heart
+for the great drops of the simpler tones. All emotions in the world
+need _exordia_; and music paves the way, or the tear-ways, (lachrymal
+ducts,) for music.
+
+Stamitz--after a dramatic plan which not every conductor marks out for
+himself--gradually descended from the ears into the heart, and from
+allegros to adagios: this great composer sweeps in ever-narrowing
+circles around every bosom in which there is a heart, until at last he
+reaches it and folds it in a rapturous embrace.
+
+Horion trembled alone, without seeing his loved ones, in a gloomy
+arbor, upon which a single withered twig let in the light of the moon
+and of its pursuing clouds. Nothing ever stirred him more during music
+than to look at the chase of the clouds. When he accompanied with his
+eyes and with the tones these nebulous streams in their everlasting
+flight around our shadowy globe, and when he imparted to them all his
+joys and his wishes, then he thought, as in all his joys and sorrows,
+on other clouds, of another flight, of other shadows, than those above
+him,--then did his whole soul pine and languish; but the strings
+stilled the panting bosom, as the cold leaden bullet in, the mouth
+allays thirst, and the tones discharged the heavy tears from the full
+soul.
+
+Dear Victor! there is in man a mighty wish which was never fulfilled:
+it has no name, it seeks its object, though all that thou namest it and
+all joys are not its reality; but it recurs, when in a summer night
+thou lookest to the north or towards distant mountains, or when
+moonlight is on the earth, or the heavens are studded with stars, or
+when thou art very happy. This great, vast wish lifts our soul aloft,
+but with sorrow: ah! here below we are thrown upward in a prostrate
+position like epileptics. But this wish, to which nothing can give a
+name,--our strings and tones name it to the human spirit; the yearning
+soul then weeps more profusely and can no longer comprehend itself, and
+calls inward in rapture of lamentation between the tones: "Ay, all that
+ye name to me is what I want!" ...
+
+Mortal man, the enigmatical creature, has also a nameless, monstrous
+dread, which has no object, which awakes at hearing of spiritual
+apparitions, and which one sometimes feels when one only speaks of
+it....
+
+Horion yielded up his bruised heart, with quiet tears which no one saw
+flow, to the high adagios which laid themselves with warm wings of
+eider-down over all his wounds. All that he loved entered now into
+his shady arbor,--his oldest friend and his youngest; he hears the
+thunder-storm-bells of life toll, but the hands of friendship stretch
+forth to meet each other, and they clasp each other, and even in the
+second life they hold each other fast in withering grasp. All tones
+seemed the unearthly echoes of his dream, sent back by beings whom one
+neither saw nor heard....
+
+He could not possibly stay longer in this dark inclosure with his
+burning fancies, at this too great distance from the Pianissimo. He
+went--almost too boldly and too closely--through a leafy avenue up to
+the tones, and pressed his face far through the leaves, in order at
+last to see Clotilda in the dim and distant green glimmer....
+
+Ah, and he saw her! But in too angelic, too paradisiacal a form! He saw
+not the thinking eye, the cold mouth, the calm person, that forbade so
+much and desired so little; but he saw for the first time her mouth
+encircled by a sweet harmonious sorrow, with an inexpressibly touching
+smile,--for the first time her eye weighed down under a brimming tear,
+as a forget-me-not bows itself beneath a tear-drop of rain. O, this
+good soul surely concealed her fairest feelings most of all! But the
+first tear in a beloved eye is too mighty for a soft heart.... Victor
+knelt down, overpowered by reverence and rapture, before the noble
+soul, and lost himself in the darkling, weeping form, and in the
+weeping tones. And when he saw at length her features turned to
+paleness, because the green foliage overspread her lips and cheeks with
+a deathly hue from the reflection of the lamps,--and when his dream
+came back to him, with Clotilda sunk under the flowery hill,--and when
+his soul, dissolved into dreams, into sorrows, into joys, and into
+wishes for her who consecrated her birthday festival with devout
+tears,--oh, was there then any need, for the completion of his
+euthanasia, that the violin should die away, and that the second
+harmonica, the _viole d'amour_, should send its music-of-the-spheres to
+his naked, enkindled, palpitating heart? O, the pang of bliss quieted
+him, and he thanked the Creator of this melodious Eden, that He, with
+the _highest_ tones of His harmonica, which with unknown forces shiver
+the heart of man to tears, as high tones shatter glasses, had at last
+exhausted his bosom, his sighs, and his tears: amidst these tones,
+after these tones, there were no more sounds; the full soul was wrapped
+up in foliage and night and tears; the speechless swelling heart drank
+the tones into itself, and took the outer ones for inner ones; and at
+last the tones played like zephyrs around the head that was drowsy with
+bliss, and only in the innermost part of the dying soul still stammered
+the too happy wish: "Ah, Clotilda, could I surrender to thee to-day
+this mute, glowing heart!--ah, that I might on this imperishable
+heavenly evening, with this trembling soul, sink dying at thy feet, and
+say the words, 'I love thee!'"
+
+And as he thought of her festive anniversary, and of her letter to
+Maienthal, which had given him the greatest praise, that of being a
+scholar of Emanuel, and of little tokens of her regard for him, and of
+the sweet fraternization of his heart with hers,--ay, then did the
+heavenly hope of winning this ennobled heart for the first time draw
+near to him amidst the music, and that hope caused the sounds of the
+harmonica, like dying echoes, to float far and wide over the whole
+future of his life....
+
+"Victor!' said some one, in a slowly lengthened tone. He sprang up and
+turned his exalted features toward the--brother of his Clotilda, and
+embraced him with joy. Flamin, into whom all music flung war-flames and
+more open sincerity, looked at him wonderingly, inquiringly, and with
+an imperceptible suspicion, and with that friendliness which resembled
+scorn, but which was never anything but the smarting of injuries
+received.
+
+"Why didst thou not take me, too, with thee to-day?" said Flamin, in a
+friendly tone.
+
+Victor pressed his hand, and was silent.
+
+"No! speak!" said he.
+
+"Let it be for to-day, my Flamin; I'll tell thee some time," replied
+Victor.
+
+"I will tell it to thee myself," Flamin began, more quickly and warmly.
+"Thou thinkest, perhaps, I shall be jealous. And look thou, did I not
+know thee, I should be so: truly, another would be so, if he had thus
+lighted upon thee here, and put all things together,--thy late retreat
+from our summer-house out into the foliage, thy writing without a
+light, and thy singing of love"----
+
+"To Emanuel," said Victor, softly.
+
+"Thy sending off that leaf to her"----
+
+"It was another from her album," said he.
+
+"Still worse; _that_ I did not even know. Thy lingering in St. Luna,
+and a thousand other signs, which do not immediately occur to me,--thy
+going off alone today"----
+
+"O my Flamin, this is going too far! thou seest with other eyes than
+those of friendship."--
+
+Here Flamin, who never could dissemble without immediately becoming
+what he assumed, and who could never recount an offence without
+falling into the old anger, grew warmer, and said, in a less friendly
+manner,--
+
+"And others, too, see it,--even the Chamberlain, and the Chamberlain's
+wife."
+
+This tore Victor's heart.
+
+"Thou dear old friend of my youth! so, then, we are to be drawn and
+torn asunder, bleed we ever so much; so, then, this Matthieu is to
+succeed (for all comes from him, not from thee, thou good soul!) in
+getting thee to torment thyself, and me to torment thee. No, he shall
+not succeed; thou shalt not be taken from me. See, by Heaven!" (and
+here the feeling of his innocence stood in Victor erect and sublime,)
+"and though thou shouldst for years misunderstand me, still the time
+will come when thou shalt start back, and say to me, 'I have done thee
+wrong!'--But I shall gladly forgive thee."
+
+This touched the jealous one, who to-day, indeed, (for a special
+reason,) was more composed.
+
+"See," said he, "I believe thee always: say, dost thou never do
+anything against me?"
+
+"Never, never, my dear fellow!" answered Victor.
+
+"Now, then, forgive my heat," the other continued. "Thus have I
+already, with my cursed jealousy, once tormented Clotilda herself in
+Maienthal. But wrong not Matthieu; it is he, rather, who tranquillized
+me. He told me, to be sure, what Clotilda's parents thought they
+observed; nay, still more,--see, I tell thee everything,--he said they
+had even, on account of thy presumed liking and thy present influence,
+which the Chamberlain would fain avail himself of for his
+reinstatement, spoken of a possible betrothal to their daughter, and
+had even spoken to her and sounded her on the subject; but (to thee,
+however, this is a matter of indifference) my beloved remained true to
+me, and said, No."
+
+Now was the hitherto so happy heart of our friend broken: that hard No
+had never yet been uttered to him. With an inexpressible, crushing, but
+meek woe, he said, softly, to Flamin,--
+
+"Be thou, too, always true to me, for I have very little; and never
+torment me more as thou hast to-day."
+
+He could say no more; the stifled tears stormed surging up over his
+heart, and painfully collected themselves under the pupil; he must
+needs now have a still, dark place, where he could weep to his heart's
+content; and in his lacerated and smarting bosom there remained only
+one soft and balmy thought: "Now, in the night, I can weep as much as I
+will, and no one can see my shattered face, my shattered soul, my
+shattered fortune."
+
+And when he thought, "Ah, Emanuel, if thou shouldst see me as I am
+to-day!" he could hardly any longer contain himself.
+
+He fled, with suppressed tears, unconcerned who saw it or did not see
+it, out of the garden, over which a dark angel let float a great
+funereal banner and the music of a dirge. He bruised himself against
+a stone garden-roller which was used to crush the _sprinkled_
+grass-blades and _flowerets_,--he wept not yet, but on the observatory
+there would he satisfy himself and steep himself in abundant
+sorrow,--he kept repeating, "But she remained true, and said, No, no,
+no!"--the concert-tones glided after, like fire after the conjurer,--he
+waded through moist, slumbering lawns, which concealed their flowers,
+and, swifter than he, swept over the earth the shadowy outlines of the
+clouds overhead chased by the wind,--he stood at the foot of the
+observatory, still held back every tear, and hurried up,--he threw
+himself on the bench where he had seen Clotilda for the first time afar
+off, in a white dress,--"Rest thou, too, Horion!" she had called to
+him out of his dream from under the flowery hill, and he heard it
+again.----
+
+Here he tore open joyfully all his wounds, and let them bleed out
+freely in tears; they overspread with mournful streams the face which
+once had often smiled, but always good-naturedly, and which from other
+eyes had never wrung any, but only wiped them away; every flood was a
+load taken off, but the heart grew heavy again upon it, and poured out
+a fresh one.--At last he could hear the tones again; most of them sank
+and were lost before they were wafted to the tower; little ones arrived
+dying, and expired in his darkling heart; every tone was a falling
+tear, and made him lighter, and expressed his anguish. The garden
+seemed to consist of softly resounding, dark-green waves of shadow,
+veiled under a broken twilight. Stung by memory, he tore his eye away
+from it: "What does it concern me any longer?" he thought. But at last
+from this shadowy Eden and from the _viole d'amour_ came up the song,
+"Forget me not," to his weary heart, and gave him back the softer pang
+and the past love. "No," said he, "I never will forget thee, though
+thou hast not loved me! thy form will assuredly forever move me, and
+remind me of my dreams! ah, thou heavenly one, it is, indeed, now, the
+only thing that does not pain me, to think I forget thee not!"
+
+All was silent and extinguished; he was alone in the presence of night.
+At length, after remaining a long time in silence, he went down and
+back to Flachsenfingen, exhausted with weeping, and a poor man. And as,
+on the way, he cast a hurried glance up at the dark-blue heaven, in
+which floating clouds lay flung around the moon like _scoriæ_, and a
+hurried glance again over the half-annihilated shadowy landscape, over
+the shadow-hills and shadow-villages, all appeared to him dead, empty,
+and vain, and it seemed to him as if, in some brighter world, there
+were a magic-lantern, and through the lantern glasses moved on which
+earth and springs and human groups were painted, and we called the
+descending, dancing images of these glasses _us_ and an earth and a
+life; and _after all that was bright and many-colored, a great shadow
+followed on_.----
+
+Ah, I stir up, perhaps, once more, in many a breast, long-forgotten
+troubles! But it is good for us--since sorrows occupy so large a place
+in our memory--that this bitter winter-fruit should grow mild by lying,
+and that there is but a small difference between a past sorrow and a
+present bliss.
+
+Poor Victor arrived after midnight, with a pale face and burning eyes,
+at the house of the Apothecary. He asked for nothing, that he might not
+betray his broken voice. When he saw his every-day overcoat hanging in
+the moonbeams, and when he imagined himself a strange person to whom
+the coat belonged, and who took it off so joyfully in the morning and
+now would put it on again so sorrowfully, then did a certain compassion
+which he had for himself seize again with too strong an impression his
+exhausted heart. Marie came, and he turned not away from her even the
+signs of this compassion. She stood surprised; he said to her with the
+softest voice, woven of sighs, that he wanted nothing; and the good
+soul went slowly out without courage to console or to weep, but all
+night long she shed invisible tears for those of another, and for a woe
+which had not been whispered in her ear.
+
+Why did Fate to-day, of all days, open all the veins of his heart? Why
+must the Senior Pastor's silver wedding and the first marriage of his
+daughter to the preacher of the Orphan-House fall just on this day?
+Why, if indeed the two nuptial feasts had to coincide on this day, must
+they last till after midnight, when they gave poor Victor occasion to
+gaze into all the mouldering scenes of his burnt-up hopes, when he
+could see from his dark chamber, in a brilliantly lighted room, the
+love which linked hand in hand, pressed lips to lips, and mingled eyes
+and souls? At another time he would have smiled at the Orphan-House
+preacher and at two catechists of the poor; but tonight he could only
+sigh over them,--and it is a soft line of beauty on his inner man, that
+he did not grudge, but felicitated, the poor people's possession of
+what he was deprived of himself. "Ah, you are happy!" said he. "O, love
+each other truly, press your throbbing, transitory hearts ardently to
+each other, ere the wing of Time shatters them, and glow on each
+other's bosoms during the short minute of life, and exchange your tears
+and kisses ere eyes and lips freeze in the grave! Ye are happier than
+I,--I, who can give my heart full of love to no one but the worms of
+the grave, and on whose coffin a joiner shall paint the inscription,
+which like myself shall be buried in the earth: 'Ye good children of
+men, you loved me not, and yet I loved you so well!'"
+
+Every happy smile, every fleeting touch of the violin, every thought,
+became now, to his soft tear-bathed heart, a hard, sharp corner,--just
+as a hand which dips itself under the water feels everything hard to
+the touch.
+
+His unbounded sincerity, his unbounded tenderness, he could now satisfy
+in no other way than by a letter to Emanuel, into which he let his
+whole soul overflow.
+
+
+"O Dearly Loved Friend!
+
+"Ought I to hide it from thee, when griefs or follies unman me? Ought I
+to show thee the faults I have repented of, and never my present ones?
+No, come hither, dear one, to my wounded breast! I will lay open to
+thee the heart therein, let it bleed and beat under the exposure as it
+will. Thou wilt, perhaps, still cover it up again with thy fatherly
+love, and say, 'I love thee still.'
+
+"Thou, my Emanuel, reposest in thy lofty solitude, on the Ararat of the
+saved soul, on the Tabor of the shining One: there thou gazest, softly
+dazzled, into the sun of Deity, and seest calmly the cloud of death
+swim in over the sun; it veils the orb: thou growest blind under the
+cloud; it melts away, and again thou standest before God. Thou lovest
+men as children who cannot offend,--thou lovest earthly enjoyments as
+fruits, which one plucks for refreshment, but without hungering for
+them; the storms and earthquakes of life pass by thee unheard, because
+thou liest in a life-dream full of tones, full of songs, full of
+meadows,--and when death awakes thee, thou art still smiling over the
+bright dream.
+
+"But, ah! more than one tempest thunders into the life's-dream of the
+rest of us, and makes it distressful. If a higher being could enter
+into the hurly-burly of ideas which encompasses our spirit, and from
+which it must draw its breath, as we breathe in an air composed of all
+kinds of gases poured together,--if he were to see what kinds of
+nutriment pass through our inner man, from which it has to extract its
+chyle: that medley of comic operas,--Bayle's Dictionaries,--concerts of
+Mozart,--Messiahs,--military operations,--Goethe's poems,--Kant's
+writings,--table-talks,--lunar observations,--vices and virtues,--men
+and sicknesses and sciences of all sorts:--if the Being should examine
+this _olla-podrida_ of life, would he not be curious to know what
+heterogeneous and mutually repulsive juices thereby run together in the
+poor soul, and would he not wonder that anything settled and uniform is
+left as a residuum in man? Ah, Emanuel! if thy friend is now in a fine
+banquet-hall, now in a garden, now in an opera-box, now under the
+great night-heavens, now in the presence of a coquette, and now before
+thee,--surely, this ambiguous alternation of scenes must bring him
+sorrows, and perhaps leave stains....
+
+"No, I will not deceive my Emanuel----O, are, then, the trifles and
+the pebbles of this life worth our choosing crooked paths to avoid
+them, as the sapping-caterpillar submits to winding courses through the
+twig-work of its leaf? No, all that I have said is true; but I should
+not have said it, had not other sorrows led me to speak of these also;
+and yet, thou innocently, simple-heartedly, sublimely trusting teacher,
+thou wouldst have believed me! Ah, thou hast too good an opinion of
+me!... O, it is a long and weary step from admiration to imitation! But
+now look into my open heart!
+
+"Since I have, here in the charnel-house of my childish joys, in the
+beds where my childhood's years bloomed and faded, been conversing with
+perhaps too many dreams of the past,--and, still more, from the day
+when thou gavest my heart the provocative to the fever-stroke which has
+shaken my whole life,--since thou disclosedst to me the life wherein
+man exfoliates, and the thin, sharp moment whereon he so painfully
+stands,--since that farewell-night when my soul was great and my tears
+inexhaustible,--an eternal wound has been running within me, and the
+sigh of a longing which nothing can name but dreams and tears and
+love has lain like a stagnant vein, oppressive and consuming in my
+breast.----Ah! I still smile as ever, I still philosophize as ever, but
+my innermost heart only the beloved friend sees to whom I now lay it
+bare.
+
+"O Fate, why dost thou strike in man the spark of a love which must be
+smothered in his own heart's blood? Have we not all, abiding within us,
+the sweet image of a beloved, of a friend, before whom we weep, after
+whom we seek, for whom we hope,--ah, and so vainly, so vainly? Does not
+man stand before a human bosom, as the turtle-dove before a mirror,
+and, like her, coo himself hoarse before a dead, flat image therein,
+which he takes for the sister of his complaining soul? Why is it, then,
+that every fair spring-evening, every melting lay, every overflowing
+rapture, asks us, 'Where dost thou find the beloved soul to which
+thou wilt tell and impart thy bliss?' Why does music give the
+tempest-stricken heart, instead of peace, only greater waves,--as the
+tolling of bells, instead of dispelling, draws down the thunder-storms?
+And why is it, that out of doors, on a fair, still, bright day, when
+thou lookest over the whole unrolled picture of a landscape, over the
+seas of flowers that tremble upon it, over the shadows flung down by
+the clouds which fly from one hill to another, and over the mountains
+which stretch like shores and walls round our flowery circle,--why does
+then a voice within thee cry incessantly, 'Ah! behind the smoking[224]
+mountains, beyond the clouds that repose upon them, there rests a
+fairer land, there dwells the soul thou seekest, there heaven lies
+nearer to the earth'? But behind the mountain and behind the cloud
+there sighs also an unappreciated heart, that looks over towards this
+thy horizon, and thinks, 'Ah, in that far region I should doubtless be
+happier!'
+
+"Are we _not_, then, all happy?----Do not assert it, nor say to me,
+Emanuel, that, in the winter of this life, the few warm sunbeams that
+interrupt it burst and destroy the better man like a vegetable; say not
+that every year steals away something from our heart, and that, like
+ice, it grows less and less, the farther it drifts down the stream of
+Time; only say not that the wandering Psyche, though she hears her
+second self in her prison, yet can never get into its arms.----But thou
+hast already somewhere said: 'All loving souls on earth dwell apart
+from each other in two bodies, as on two hills; a waste lies between
+them, as between solar systems; they see each other, speak across by
+distant signs; at last they hear each other's voices from hill to hill;
+but they never touch each other, and each embraces only its thought.
+And yet this poor love crumbles like an old corpse, when it is
+exhibited; and its flame flickers like a burial-lamp, when it is
+uncovered.'
+
+"Are we, then, all not happy?--Do not say so!--Ah, man, who, even from
+childhood up, has been calling after an unknown soul that grew up in
+_one_ heart with his own,--that entered into all the dreams of his
+years, and therein gleamed from afar, and, after his waking, started
+his tears,--that in spring sent him nightingales, that he might think
+of her and long for her,--that in every tender hour visited his soul,
+with so much virtue, so much love, that he would so gladly have offered
+in his heart, as in a sacrificial chalice, all his blood to the
+beloved,--but who, alas! never, appeared, and only sent her image in
+every fair form, but forever kept back her heart;--oh, if at last, oh,
+if suddenly, oh, if blissfully, her heart beats against his heart, and
+the two souls embrace each other forever, he can no longer say it, but
+we can: 'This man, indeed, is happy, and is loved.' ...
+
+"Good Emanuel, thou forgivest me the pain of the fear that I may never
+be the happy man,--no, never!--Oh, even for this earth, broken up into
+graves, I should be perhaps too happy, I should be permitted to enjoy,
+perhaps, too great an Eden for so young a life, and one justified by
+such slight merits, if my too soft soul, which even now gives way under
+three happy minutes, which loves every human being, and hangs with the
+arms of a child on the heart of the whole creation,--oh, which is
+already made too blissful by this mere dream of love, and is
+overpowered by this description!--no, it were too blessed, such a soul,
+long since dissolved by melancholy and humanity, if it should once,
+after such a long, deathly yearning, at last, at last--O Emanuel, I
+tremble again for joy, and yet it can never, never be!--if it should
+find all its wishes, its whole heaven, so much love, accumulated in one
+dear, dear soul; if in the presence of great Nature, and before the
+face of Virtue, and before God himself, who gave love to her and to me,
+I could dare to say, weeping, to this only, this sweet, this beloved--O
+God, how shall I name her? this fore-loved one, whom in my frenzy I
+would now name: 'At last my heart has thee, thou good soul! to-day God
+gives us to each other, and we remain together through all eternity!'
+No, I would not say it; I should for ecstasy be dumb and die!
+
+"--Lo! it seemed to me just now as if a form passed across my chamber,
+and called, 'Victor!' I looked round, and beheld my empty room, and the
+Sunday clothes which I had taken off, and now, for the first time, I
+remembered that I was unhappy and not loved.
+
+"But thou, irreplaceable friend, misunderstand me not. I swear to thee
+that I will give thee these sheets unaltered, though to-morrow, when
+the whirlpools of to-night flow stiller and smoother, I should find all
+sorts of alterations necessary. Thy foolish friend remains,
+nevertheless, thy friend forever.
+
+                                                   "S. V. H."
+
+
+
+
+                           20. DOG-POST-DAY.
+
+  Letter from Emanuel.--Flamin's Fruit-Pieces on the Shoulders.--Walk
+                              to St. Luna.
+
+
+"Poor Sebastian!" said I, as I opened to-day's letter-bag, "before I get
+it open, I know already beforehand, that, after such a night, thou must
+have shut thyself up all day, to turn thy pale, exhausted face toward
+the garden of sorrow, that thou to-day lovest these poison-drops better
+than the vulnerary balsam, and that thou lookest into the glass to weep
+for this still, innocent form which it shows thee with its gashes, as
+if it were the form of a stranger.--Oh, when man has nothing more to
+love, he embraces the gravestone of his love, and sorrow becomes his
+loved one! Forgive one another the short delusion of mourning; for,
+among all the weaknesses of man, this is the most innocent, when,
+instead of soaring away like the bird of passage above winter, and
+flying to warmer zones, he sinks before it, and helplessly stiffens in
+his cold grief."
+
+Victor coffined himself, so to speak, that day in his chamber, which he
+opened to no one but a next-door neighbor of sorrows,--Marie,--whose
+form affected him as softly as an evening sun. Every other female face
+on the street gave him stings; and the brother of the lost Clotilda,
+whom he saw at the window, and to-day would gladly have embraced, lent
+to the remembrance which tears had dimmed, new colors.... Reader!--my
+female reader will be, of herself, more reasonable,--laugh not at my
+good hero, who _is_ none precisely where the strength of the soul
+becomes the strength of sorrow: at least, let me not hear it. Whoever
+has the sympathetic nerve of life--love--tied up or cut asunder, can
+well, if for no other reason, sigh and say, "Anything on earth can man
+lose more patiently than fellow-men."
+
+And yet at evening an accident--namely, a letter--made all his
+sorrows pass once more through his weary heart. A short letter from
+Emanuel--not, however, an answer to the one just sent to him--arrived.
+
+
+"My ever-loved one!
+
+"I have learned the day of thy entrance upon a new scene of tumultuous
+life, and I have said, 'May my beloved still continue happy! may the
+tranquillity of virtue wall in his heart as with a breast against the
+frosts and storms of his new life! may neither his sorrows nor his
+raptures be loud! may he mourn softly and silently as a princess in
+soft white! may he enjoy softly and silently, and in the temple of his
+heart may Pleasure play only as a noiseless fluttering butterfly in a
+church! and may Virtue float before him in the higher heaven above our
+sun, and warm and irradiate and gradually attract to herself his
+heart!'
+
+"In thy affectionate anxiety for my parting life, thou wilt not have me
+write often: so little, dear one, dost thou believe my hope! Oh, the
+weights of my machine, as they run down, fall slowly and softly upon
+the grave; this earthly life arrays itself to my soul in ever fairer
+colors, and adorns itself for the farewell; this mock-summer around me,
+which stands beside the August summer like a mock-sun,--this and the
+coming spring take me beguilingly out of the arms of Nature.
+
+"So does the All-Gracious overhang with foliage, overspread with
+flowers, the churchyard-wall of life, as we cover the wall of an
+English garden with ivy and evergreen, and gives the end of the garden
+the appearance of a new thicket.--
+
+"So ascends the spirit even here in this _dark_ life, as the barometer
+ascends even during thick weather, and feels the influence of the
+_brighter_ life even under the clouds.
+
+"But I obey thy love, and will write to thee no more, except once in
+winter, when I describe to thee the great night wherein I told my blind
+Julius, for the first time, that there is an Eternal One.--In that
+night, my beloved, rapture and devotion bore me too high, and came near
+to rending my thin life. I bled a long time. In winter, when the charms
+of heaven take the place of those of earth,[225] forbid me not to paint
+the summer picture.
+
+"O my son!--I was compelled, indeed; to write to thee, because my
+friend Clotilda complains that the new year will draw her out of the
+green bower of solitude to the crowded market-place of the court; her
+soul is dark with sorrow, and stretches out its arms after the tranquil
+life which is being taken away from her. I know not what a court is;
+thou wilt know, and, I conjure thee, release my friend, and turn aside
+the hand that would draw her from St. Luna. If thou canst not do it,
+still forsake not at court the beloved soul; be her only, her most
+ardent friend; draw the bee-stings of earthly hours from her gentle
+heart. When cold words, like snow-flakes, fall upon this flower, then
+let the breath of love melt them to tears that shall flow before thy
+sight; when a tempest shall come up, over her life, then show her the
+angel who stands in the sun, and draws over our tempests the rainbow of
+hope. O thou whom _I_ so love, my sister also will so love thee; and
+when my friend discovers to her his gentle heart, his tender eye, his
+virtue, his soul, the home of Nature and of the Eternal, then will he
+see my sister grow happy before him, and the exalted countenance which
+melts into tears and smiles and love before him will remain forever in
+his heart.
+
+                                                  "EMANUEL."
+
+                               *   *   *
+
+Lo! in this glowing moment the exalted form which he had seen yesterday
+appeared again before his heart, with the sadly smiling lips and the
+eyes full of tears; and as the form continued floating before him, and
+gleamed and smiled, his soul rose up before her as before one dead, and
+during the uplifting of himself all his wounds began to bleed again,
+and he cried, "Now, then, never do thou vanish from my heart, thou
+sublime shape, but rest forever on its wounds!" Disconsolateness,
+exhaustion, and sleep overwhelmed his spirit, as well as his latest
+thought,--to go back shortly to St. Luna, and persuade her parents not
+to force her to court...
+
+The long sleep of death closes our _scars_, and the short sleep of life
+our _wounds_. Sleep is the half of time which heals us. On awaking,
+Victor, whose fever of love had yesterday been so aggravated by
+sleeplessness, saw today that his sorrow had been unmoderated
+because his hope had been immoderate. At first he had wished,--then
+observed,--then assumed,--then seen,--then interpreted,--then
+hoped,--then sworn to it. Every little circumstance, even his share in
+Clotilda's nomination as maid-of-honor, had poured mild oil of love
+into his flame. "Oh, fool that I am!" said he, with the three
+swearing-fingers placed upon his forehead; and, like all energetic men,
+he was so much the more spirited in proportion as he had been
+spiritless. Nay, he felt himself all at once too light; for a too
+sudden cure betokens, in the case of souls also, a relapse. A new
+consolation was his yesterday's resolve, that he would render Clotilda
+a service,--namely, save her from the court-service. He still reflected
+upon his determination to see her again.--Feelest thou, haply, Victor,
+that everything which Love does, in order to die, is only an expedient
+for rising again from the dead, and that its epilogues are only
+prologues to the Second Act?
+
+But a basket of apples in the market confirmed him again in his
+resolution. That is to say, Flamin came in. He began immediately with
+questions about the disappearance on Sunday, and with reports of the
+general uneasiness about the dear runaway. Victor, heated again
+by the whole recollection, and almost a little enraged against the
+image-breaker and government-attorney of a vain love, gave him the true
+answer:--"Thou tookest away from me in part my pleasure; and why should
+I, at so late an hour, come upon the stage?" The more vividly Flamin
+painted the affectionate concern of the Parson's wife and Clotilda
+about his disappearing, so much the more painful grew the maze of
+contending feelings within him. But for his conscience calling him
+back, it would now have been easier for him to confess the love that
+was hopeless, than formerly the love that was hopeful.--Accidentally
+Flamin wondered at the ripeness of the apples down below in the market,
+and desired some. A lightning beam now darted before Victor's eye at
+the inherited fruit-pieces on Flamin's shoulders, which always appeared
+in the after-summer at the time of the apples' ripening, but which, in
+the previous whirl of his feelings, he had forgotten. Heaven knows
+whether it has not escaped the reader himself, that Flamin bears this
+winter-fruitage (his maternal mole) on his back, which may become a
+Sodom-apple and Eve's-apple for him. Might not Matthieu, who until now
+could not examine upon Flamin this seal of his princely relationship,
+suddenly become convinced of all that which, with his thievish glances
+at his Lordship's letter, he had only been able to guess? And might he
+not afterward go to the Prince, and there mix for all our friends the
+most poisonous broths?--As, however, the magic image generally faded in
+one week, Victor needed for only so long a time to keep its wearer out
+of sight; he therefore laid before his friend, thus tattooed by Nature,
+the request to take for once a social walk to St. Luna, as they had day
+before yesterday missed each other.
+
+"I can't do it," said Flamin, who had the lesser delicacy not to avail
+himself of the request for company on account of the reproaches in Le
+Baut's garden, and forgot in that the greater delicacy of not imputing
+such a reference to his Victor.
+
+The latter, in a passionate hurry to avert two such evils (Clotilda's
+court-office and Matthieu's inspection), seized upon the singular
+expedient of proposing to the page to share the journey with him.
+
+"With pleasure!" said the Evangelist; "_this_ week I have to do
+cabinet-service, but I can _next_ week."
+
+And it was precisely this week that Victor wanted it to be done.--So
+many sudden miscarriages confounded him to such a degree, that he,
+whose careless and innocent heart was always an open letter with flying
+seal, dissembled now towards his dear, good friend Flamin.--He wanted
+at least to investigate the maternal mole and its distinctness for
+himself, He therefore went to him, and found him bent over his writing,
+and with a glowing work-face. He conjured him to consider that
+recreation and holidays were indispensable to him, and urged it upon
+him that he should work, like a compositor, standing. Then he came
+gradually upon the subject of Flamin's full-blooded chest, and upon the
+question whether it could bear his exertions without stingings and
+oppressions. Then he arrived at the point, and proposed that Flamin
+should, at all events, have a Burgundy-pitch plaster applied as
+lung-conductor to his shoulder-blades; yes, he would himself do it for
+him now, and show him how all was to be prepared. He hoped, besides, to
+draw thereby a curtain around the apple-piece. But he dissembled so
+wretchedly,--for he always succeeded in his innocent intrigues with
+maidens, and comic disguises for satirical purposes, while his
+serious ones always miscarried,--that even Flamin heard him out, and
+dryly replied, he had already had on such a plaster for two days,
+and--Matthieu had advised, and himself applied it.
+
+There was a fix.--Sebastian had nothing further left him than, with a
+singular _sangfroid_, which, on the St. Luna road, was mixed only with
+a few stings from the old thorny latelings of his withered Paradise, to
+go unaccompanied to the Chamberlain Le Baut, to say what was to be
+said, hardly to peep into the Parsonage, and quietly to trudge off
+again without a single--hope.
+
+Dear Fortune! better beheaded than scalped,--better _one_ disaster than
+ten miscarriages; I mean, break man upon thy wheel rather from above
+than from below upward!--
+
+Victor, to be sure, knew as yet not a word of the turn he should give
+to the subject, in order to put two such court-emigrants as the Le
+Bauts, who knew nothing holier than the _Latreia_ towards a prince, the
+_Douleia_ towards his minister, and the _Hyperdouleia_ towards his
+w--, out of humor with Clotilda's promotion; but he thought, "I will do
+what I can."
+
+Clotilda's parents received him with so much civility,--i. e. with so
+much courtesy of the body, with so much powdered sugar on every
+feature, with so much sirup of violets on every word,--in short, he
+found the report which Matthieu had rendered to Flamin of their amiable
+disposition towards him so well grounded,--that he could have selected
+no better opportunity than this to dissuade them from the transplanting
+of their daughter, had they not begun to thank him for having been
+himself the very transplanter. They had learned or guessed all, and
+thanked him for his intercession, to which they probably attached more
+self-interested views than the daughter did. It would have been
+ridiculous, in Clotilda's presence, to advise _her_ against
+Flachsenfingen, and dissuade from that for which they thanked him;
+still, however, he attempted something. He told the Chamberlain "his
+daughter deserved rather to _have_ a court than to adorn one; nay, that
+_he_ deserved at most in the whole matter--an excuse, as Clotilda would
+certainly prefer the society of her parents to the constraint of court;
+in that case, he would promise to put the index back again with the
+Prince, and rectify everything without disadvantage." The father took
+this expression for a strong deprecation of gratitude; the step-mother,
+for some piece of knavery or other; the daughter, for--words. She said,
+a little curtly, "I think it was easy to choose between disobedience
+and absence." For, unbending as she was to her step-mother, she
+willingly followed the hints of her father, whom, with all his
+weaknesses, and as the only soul on the earth attached to him, she
+tenderly loved. Victor, at last, though reluctantly, was forced to give
+it up; but why does man find it harder to resign himself to the future
+than to the past?--The coldness of the daughter was naturally not less
+(but sincerer) than the warmth of the parents.... And this coldness was
+precisely what refreshed his glowing brain. This cold, indifferent form
+was wrapped as a veil about the sublime and loving one, as it ever
+floated before him with that melancholy look which he could not endure.
+Without the consciousness of anything wrong, satisfied with his
+obedience to Emanuel's request, he withdrew, with his feelings
+oppressed by decorum, returning coldness with greater coldness.--He
+would have been a poor lover, if he had known what he wanted; for
+otherwise he never could have desired of Clotilda, even in case of her
+love for him, any extraordinary warmth towards a medicus whom her
+parents forced upon her (which injures a man even more than ugliness),
+who so impolitely took himself out of the garden without a birthday
+_carmen_, and who pressed her into the seven gilded towers of
+court-service, despite her reluctance, despite every probability of her
+future _prison-fever_.--But for the _vacant freehold_ of his heart this
+very vexation was wholesome....
+
+If my good reader ever has to take an eternal farewell of a too dear
+friend, let him take it _twice_.--The _first_ we all understand, as a
+matter of course, when he sinks in the intoxication of sorrow, in the
+hemorrhage of heart and eyes, and when the beloved object burns itself
+with flames into the tender soul; but _then_ he will never be able to
+forget the being thus torn from his heart. Therefore he must take a
+_second_ farewell, which is colder even for the reason that passionate
+emotions admit no _dal segno_[226] of repetition; nay, (if he will take
+the wisest course of all,) he must endeavor, after the first tragic
+leave-taking, to see her in a public place (e. g. at a coronation),
+where she must appear cold. Her frosty face will then snow over her
+glowing one in his brain; and my good reader has, undoubtedly,
+collected together again wits enough to know what he reads in the
+Dog-Post-Days....
+
+--Upon my word, if Jean Paul does not write industriously, then no one
+does; it has already struck one, and he took it for a quarter to
+twelve; my sister will already be folding her hands before the
+tucked-up smoking pike, which, like the serpent of eternity, has his
+tail in his mouth, and saying, incessantly, "It is all growing
+cold!"--"It must be so, after such glowing chapters," say I, "if thou
+meanest the reader and the author."--Already, while I still sit over
+the twentieth chapter, the post-dog is frisking round in the chamber
+with the twenty-first; and yet I will starve myself, unless I can still
+utter before dinner, like the seven wise men, seven golden sayings:--
+
+1. When one who is stung by a bee or by fate does not keep still, the
+sting tears out, and is left behind.
+
+2. Miserable earth, which three or four great or bold men can reform
+and agitate! Thou art a true stage: in the foreground are some fighting
+players and a few canvas-tents; the background swims with painted tents
+and soldiers!
+
+3. States and diamonds are in these days, when they have stains, cut up
+into little ones; and as
+
+4. Men in great states and bees in great hives suffer a loss of courage
+and warmth; accordingly now-a-days they join to small countries other
+small countries, as they do to beehives colony-hives.
+
+5. Man takes _his_ suffering for that of _humanity_, as the bees take
+the dropping of their bee-stand, when the sun already shines out again,
+for rain, and stay in-doors.
+
+6. But he commits daily a _lesser_ error: he regards as an _eternity_
+(that Aristotelian Unity of Time to the drama--of Existence) at first
+his present _hour_,--then his _youth_,--then his _life_,--then his
+_century_,--then the duration of the _globe_,--then that of the
+_sun_,--then that of the _heavens_,--then (this is the least error)
+_time_ itself....
+
+7. There are in man, in the beginning and at the end, as in books, two
+blank bookbinder's leaves,--childhood and old age; and so, too, in the
+Dog-Post-Days: see the end of this day and the beginning of the next.
+
+
+                         FIFTH INTERCALARY DAY.
+
+            _Continuation of the Register of Extra-Sheets_.
+
+                                   K.
+
+Cold.[227]--In our age decrease of _stoicism_ and increase of _egotism_
+are found side by side. The former covers its treasures and germs with
+ice; the latter is itself ice. So, in physics, _mountains_ wear away,
+and _glaciers_ increase.
+
+                                   L.
+
+Library (Circulating) for Reviewers and Young Ladies.--I still always
+adhere to my purpose of having it inserted in the Intelligence-leaf of
+the Literary Gazette, that I shall not destroy the purchase-money which
+I raise upon my _evening star_ [Hesperus], nor, like Musæus, fritter it
+away in the purchase of summer-houses, but shall lay out the whole
+capital upon a complete collection of all German _prefaces_ and
+_titles_ that appear from fair to fair. I can carry out the plan, if I
+give out a preface a week, on the payment of a penny, to reviewers, who
+do not care to read the book itself when they review it.
+
+That not even the surplus of the aforesaid mintage may lie as dead
+capital in my house, I shall employ it--if I do not change my mind--in
+getting the bookbinder to publish the _heavier_ German masterpieces,--e. g.
+Frederick Jacobi's, Klinger's, Goethe's Tasso,--likewise the better
+satirical and philosophical ones, in a _lighter_ ladies' edition, which
+shall consist wholly of so-called _puzzle-volumes_, which have no book
+slid into them. I shall thereby, methinks, be playing something pithy
+into the hands of my fair readers, which shall be as well bound and
+as well titled as the booksellers' edition, and in which--because the
+hard stone-fruit is already _shelled out_, and there is nothing
+inside--they can lay not only just as much of silk threads and silk
+snippings as in the printed edition, but six ounces more. _Allwill's_
+correspondence--a heavy, two-yolked ostrich's egg of the author's,
+which I have had _blown out_ by the bookbinder in this manner, because
+most of the fair readers are too _cold_ to hatch it--is now quite _light_.
+But of the German romances I shall never prepare such a work-box edition
+of empty state-carriages of the God of the Sun and the Muses, because I
+fear the trade would cry out about _piracy_.--A happy man were I, if
+the joint subscribers to my circulating-capsule-library had only been
+shown round as much as twice in some Italian and Portuguese bookeries:[228]
+they would there, where often only the titles of works--and of the
+stupidest, into the bargain--are daubed on the wall, be astonished to see
+what a miserable figure such useless libraries, beside my bookery of
+regular puzzle-books, which I select from so many departments and with
+some originality, cannot do otherwise than cut.
+
+--Thus, of course, German capsule-readers among the ladies will never
+be overtaken by you Portuguese women! Much rather will the former
+follow in the footsteps even of the men, advocates and business people,
+who subscribe to similar capsule-journalistics, and jointly read and
+circulate the covers of the best German journals,--which latter are
+often annexed as _curiosa_ even to the capsules, and fill them out....
+Such is my plan and sketch; but even sheep would presume I were merely
+playing off a joke here, unless I really carried it through.
+
+                                   M.
+
+Maidens.--Young maidens are like young turkey-hens, that thrive poorly,
+if one touches them often; and mothers keep these soft creatures, made
+of floating pollen, like _pastel-pictures_, under window-glass--because
+everything is afraid of us princess-stealers and fruit-thieves--until
+they are fixed. Meanwhile the proper crown-guard around a female heart
+is neither solitude,--which leads only to an untried innocence,[229]
+that falls, to be sure, not before the debauchee, but yet before the
+hypocrite,--nor society, nor hard labor,--otherwise no country girl
+would ever fall,--nor good teachings,--for these are to be had in every
+mouth and in every circulating library; but these four first and last
+things do it all at once, and they are at once superseded, united, and
+replaced by a wise and virtuous mother.
+
+                                   N.
+
+Names of the Great.[230]--When I see, as I do, how they scatter their
+productions for the Fair, occasional writings and fugitive pieces
+(children born out of wedlock) as anonymously as if they were reviews,
+then I say: "Herein I recognize genuine modesty; for natural children
+are precisely their best and their own, and can, besides, be
+acknowledged by the Prince _as_ genuine; whereas their supernatural [or
+extra-natural] ones born in wedlock have to do without the
+certification; and yet they will not let the world know the name of the
+benefactor, but quite as often (nay, oftener) get people _into it_ as
+_out of it_ secretly. What the child in other cases first learns to
+pronounce, such parents speak to him last,--their name. Methinks they
+follow herein Goethe's fine ear; for they hide themselves, while they
+fill the orchestra of the world with children's voices and with
+_vingt-quatre_,[231] and with alarm-works and repeating-works, (what a
+juxtaposition of unlike things!) just as Goethe demands of the playing
+musical artist that he shall work for the ears, but hide himself for
+the sake of sparing the eyes. Quite as beautifully do they do the thing
+when they finally adopt as children, and show to the world, their
+children by the thirtieth marriage (often after the five or twenty
+years' limitation), and thus imitate the greenfinches, which, it is
+said, make their nest and its inmates invisible by means of the
+so-called greenfinch-stone, till the latter are fledged."
+
+                                   O.
+
+Ostracism.--It was among the Greeks, as is well known, no punishment.
+Only people of great merits achieved it; and so soon as this banishment
+from the country was lavished upon bad men, it went entirely into
+disuse. An imperial citizen must lament that we, who have a similar
+public educational institution,--namely, banishment,--squander it often
+upon the very wretchedest rascals, and therefore--with the design of
+making one circle or country the spit-box and secreting-vessel of
+another--drive out of the country scoundrels who are hardly fit to stay
+in it. Thereby is this clearing of the country deprived for the most
+part of the honorable and distinguishing feature which it might have
+for the man of merit, and an honest man--e. g. a Bahrdt[232]--is almost
+ashamed to be invested with such an honor. There should, therefore, be
+an imperial police-regulation that only ministers, professors, and
+officers of decided worth, like important documents, should be
+dismissed and banished. To similar men I would also limit hanging. With
+the Romans, in truth, only great heads and lights were interred on the
+_way_[233] at the expense of a whole state; but what shall I think of
+the Germans, with whom seldom serviceable subjects, but mostly finished
+rogues, are buried at public expense, which they call hangman's fees,
+having been previously hanged on the gallows by the roadside?--Not even
+in his lifetime can a man, unless he has extraordinary, and often
+_eccentric_ merits,--although eccentric men fall back into the truth,
+as _comets_ do into the _sun_, as fuel,--make his calculations upon
+being, in some manner, as the ancients duplicated their noble men in
+statues and pictures, hung up in _effigy_ in a thick stone frame....
+Let me have an answer; I allow myself to be talked with.
+
+                                   P.
+
+Philosophy.--Some critical philosophers have now borrowed from the
+algebra a mathematical method, without which one cannot for a single
+minute--not so much think as--write philosophically. The algebraist, by
+the transposition of mere _letters_, catches truths which no chain of
+reasoning could ever draw out of the deep. In this the critical
+philosopher has imitated him, but with greater advantage. As he
+cleverly mixes together, not letters, but whole _technical words_,
+there rises from the alliteration of the same a cream of truths which
+he could hardly have dreamed of. Such philosophers are forbidden, and
+rightly, like the preachers of Gotha (Goth. Public Ordinances, P. III.
+p. 16), to use allegories, or any flower of speech, which, as other
+flowers do for the drawing-hounds, would spoil the scent.--Properly,
+however, the picturesque style is more definite than the technical
+word-style, which finally, as all _abstract words are pictures_, is
+also itself a picturesque style, only one full of pictures that have
+run out and faded. Jacobi is not obscure in consequence of his
+_images_, but in consequence of the new _ideas_ which through them he
+would communicate to us.
+
+I have lately been looking over the birth-lists of the learned and
+teaching republic, and counting up the young little Kants whom the old
+Kant--otherwise unmarried, like his cousin Newton--has for the last ten
+Fairs begotten. Demetrius Magnus, who wanted to make a book of authors
+of the same name, must have been very stupid, if he had undertaken to
+write in our times, and yet at the same time, though he nevertheless
+communicated that there had been sixteen Platos, twenty Socrateses,
+twenty-eight Pythagorases, thirty-two Aristotles, had very sinfully
+omitted to say that there are now as many philosophers and
+philosophists as those make when reckoned all together--namely,
+ninety-six--who could bear the name of Kant,--that is, if they chose
+to. Such mechanics--thus may I call the magisters, because formerly the
+mechanics, inversely, were called magisters, and the upper master
+arch-magister--one should take into account as the best propaganda
+which bulky books can have. They are, at best, competent to diffuse the
+system, because they know how to separate from it the incomprehensible,
+the spiritual, and to extract what is popular and palpable, i. e. the
+words for readers, who, otherwise simple, nevertheless would not die
+without a critical philosophy. The most miserable theological and
+æsthetic stone receives now a Kantian setting in words. Although every
+new system introduces a certain _one-sidedness_ of view into all
+heads,--especially as every cold philosopher has so much the more
+_one-sidedness_, precisely as he has the more _insight_,--still that is
+no matter; for great bars of truth come forth through the joint digging
+of the whole thinking-works.[234] Whoever has seen Kant standing on his
+mountain among his learned fellow-laborers, is reminded with pleasure
+of a similar incident in Peru, which Buffon communicates. When
+Condamine and Bouger were measuring there the equatorial degrees of the
+earth (as Kant did of the intellectual world), whole troops of apes
+appeared as coadjutors, put on spectacles, looked at the stars and down
+at the clocks, and reduced one thing and another to writing, although
+without salary, which is their only distinction from the vicariate
+Kants.
+
+Every man of genius is a philosopher, but not the reverse. A
+philosopher without fancy, without history, and without a _general
+knowledge_ of the most important things, is more one-sided than a
+politician. Whoever has adopted, rather than discovered, a system;
+whoever has not had beforehand dark presentiments thereof; whoever has
+not at least pined for it beforehand; in short, whoever does not bring
+with him a soul like a full, warm, ground filled with germs, which
+waits only for its summer,--such a one may indeed be a teacher, but not
+a scholar of the philosophy which he degrades to a mercenary
+profession; and, briefly, it is all one what place one climbs as his
+philosophical observatory,--a throne, or a Pegasus, or an Alp, or a
+Cæsar's-couch, or a bier,--and they are almost all higher than the desk
+in a lecture-room and hall of disputation.
+
+                              Q (_see_ K).
+
+                                   R.
+
+Reviewers.--An editor of a review should have six tables. At the first
+should sit and eat the advertisers of the _existence_ of a book; at the
+second, the wholesale appraisers of its _value_; at the third, the
+epitomists of it; at the fourth, the grammarians and philologists, who
+distribute to the public _catalogues raisonnés_ of other men's
+grammatical blunders; at the fifth, the fighters, who refute a new
+book, not by a new book, but by a sheet; at the sixth should stand the
+critical, princely bench, on which might sit Herder, Goethe, Wieland,
+and perhaps yet another, who survey a book as a human life, who
+apprehend its _individuality_, indicate at once the spirit of the
+literary creation and creator, and separate that incarnation and
+embodiment of the divine beauty which takes the form of an individual
+_from_ the beauty, and then disclose and pardon it.
+
+These six critical benches, which might edit six different literary
+periodicals, are now thrown over each other, and form _one_.--Frankly,
+however, as I come out against this jumbling together of learned (1)
+advertisements, (2) reviews, (3) extracts, (4) verbal and (5) real
+criticisms, and (6) artistic judgments, still I am ready and glad to
+admit that the critical _Fauna_ and _Flora_ of the first _five_ tables
+root out, perhaps, full as many shoots of weeds as they put forth
+themselves from their own germs; and I therefore appeal to a private
+letter of my own, which is beyond the suspicion of flattery, and
+wherein I associate it with a toadstool, which, although it produces,
+itself, upon an affusion (in this case, of ink), whole hosts of
+insects, nevertheless eradicates the flies.--But as among the reviewers
+there are also authors, like myself; as among the Portuguese
+inquisitors there are Jews; and, in fact, as I should want to talk
+whole intercalary years on the subject,--why talk a whole intercalary
+day?
+
+                                   S.
+
+Stripes.--"He that knoweth his Lord's will, and doeth it not, shall
+receive double stripes."--Who, then, gets the single ones? Not he,
+surely, who knows not the will and does it not?--It follows, therefore,
+that greater knowledge, not _aggravates_, but itself _creates_, moral
+guilt; for in so far as I absolutely do not discern a moral obligation,
+my offence against it is surely not less, but none at all.
+
+I will be my own Academy of Sciences, and assign to myself the
+following prize-question, which I will myself answer in a prize essay:
+"Since only such actions are virtuous as proceed from love for
+goodness, it follows that only those can be sinful which proceed from
+mere love of evil, and reference to self-interest must lessen the
+degree of a sin, as well as that of a virtue. But, on the other hand,
+what could there be but self-interest in our nature, which should impel
+us to what is bad? And if evil were done from a pure propensity to
+evil, then there would be a second, although opposite, autonomy[235] of
+the will."
+
+                                   T.
+
+Trouble, Tribulation.--Now, as I write these distressful sounds, which
+announce to me that Nature makes only _thorn-hedges_, but men _crowns
+of thorns_, all pleasure in lashing about me with the thorns of satire
+dies away, and I would rather draw some thorns out of your hands or
+feet.
+
+
+
+
+                           21. DOG-POST-DAY.
+
+        Victor's Professional Visits.--Concerning Houses full of
+               Daughters.--The Two Fools.--The Carrousel.
+
+
+The following remark comes not from the dog's knapsack, but from my own
+head: One needs not to be a panegyrist of our times, to see with
+pleasure that authors, princes, women, and others have now mostly laid
+aside the unnatural _false_ masks of virtue (e. g. bigotry, pietism,
+ceremonial behavior), and have entirely assumed instead the _genuine_
+tasteful _show_ of virtue. This improvement of our character-masks,
+whereby we hit more finely the exterior of virtue, is contemporaneous
+with a similar one on the stage, where they play their antics and their
+tragics no longer, as once, with _paper_ clothes and badly imitated
+laces, but with the _true_ ones.--
+
+"The Princess wanted you yesterday," said the Prince to the
+Court-Physician, almost as soon as he had entered with his exhausted
+face. The inflammation of Agnola's eyes had, in consequence of the
+autumn weather, night-feasts, and Culpepper's bold practice and her
+own--for the red capital letters of beauty (namely, painted cheeks) she
+was always putting on afresh--very much increased. Properly, Victor was
+too proud to let himself be sent for as a mere physician; nay, he was
+too proud to let himself be in demand for anything else (and though it
+were philosophy or beauty) than his character; for his father, who had
+just as much delicate pride, had taught him that we must not serve any
+one who does not respect us, or whom we ourselves do not respect,--nay,
+that one must not accept a favor from any one to whom one can only
+return outward, but not inward thanks. But this tender sense of honor,
+which never came into an unequal conflict with his self-interest,
+though it might well with his humanity, could never bind the hands
+wherewith he might relieve an unhappy Princess--unhappy, like himself,
+from a famine of love--at least of the pains of her eyes; perhaps,
+also, of _younger_ pangs; for his good-heartedness suggested to him
+nothing but reconciliations,--of the Prince with Le Baut, with the
+Princess, with the Minister. Nothing is more dangerous than to
+reconcile two persons,--unless, indeed, one is himself one of them; to
+set them at variance is much safer and easier.
+
+He found Agnola, even in the afternoon, still in her chamber, because
+its green tapestries flattered (not the face, to be sure, but) the hot
+eye. A thick veil over the face was her screen from daylight. When she,
+like a sun, lifted her veil, he could not comprehend how in Tostato's
+shop he could make, out of this Italian fire and these quick
+court-eyes, the face, red with weeping, of a blonde. A part of this
+fire belonged, to be sure, to her sickness. Her first word was a
+decided disobedience to his first; meanwhile she flew in the face of
+the Messrs. _Pringle_ and _Schmucker_, as well as himself; for the
+whole triune College advised leeches round the eyes; but those were
+disgusting to her. The medicus then suggested cupping-glasses at the
+back of the head; but her hair was more precious to her than her eyes.
+
+"Must, then, everything be bought with blood?" said she, with Italian
+vivacity.
+
+"Realms and religions ought not to be, but health should," said he,
+with English freedom of speech.
+
+Once more he demanded her blood. She would not give it to him, however,
+until he changed the sacrificial knife, and proposed opening a vein in
+the eye. Persons of rank, like learned men, are often ignorant of the
+commonest things: she thought the Doctor would open the vein. And as
+she thought so, he did it, with a hand trained by the couching-needle.
+
+Meanwhile, if (according to Pliny) a kiss on the eye is one on the
+soul, the opening of a vein in that organ is no joke; but one may,
+while he inflicts a wound, himself get one. The poor Court-Medicus
+must, with his swimming, friendly eye, from which only within a few
+days the tear of love has been dried away, boldly gaze into the sun
+pent up in an eye-socket, and, what is more, softly rest his finger on
+the warm face, and from the fountain of tears make bright blood spurt
+out.... One ought, before undertaking such an operation, to have a
+similar one performed on himself, for the sake of the cooling. But, in
+truth, fate had given him nothing this week but lancet-cuts into his
+heart's arteries. Let one, further, represent to himself how the whole
+female sex appeared to him like a magic, far-receded shape, which had
+once gleamed near to him in a dream, and as a paled moon by day, which
+he had worshipped in a bright night; and then will one have opened his
+good innocent heart to behold therein, beside a great ever-active
+sorrow, a thousand sympathetic wishes for the compassionated Princess.
+Despite her singular mixture of pride, liveliness, and refinement, he
+still thought he discovered a change in her, which he could explain
+partly by his to-day's assiduity and partly by his influence on the
+Prince, which had been thus far so favorable to her,--a change which
+would have given him greater courage, had he not insisted upon being
+threatened with special drafts upon his courage by the billet above the
+imperator of the compass-watch. At the former and first visit his
+courage was lamed, because he thought himself avoided, as the son of a
+father who seemed to fortify his influence by his care for natural
+children; for a man full of love beside one full of hatred is dumb and
+stupid.
+
+What put him most in heart to-day, next to the quarrels in which he was
+defeated (as the one about leeches, &c.), was the last and following,
+in which he conquered (one grows more courageous and prosperous when
+one contradicts a proud woman than when one flatters her): He saw a
+mask lying there; now, as he knew that in Italy ladies wore them in
+bed, as ours do gloves, using them as a sort of glove to the face, he
+straightly forbade her the mask, as being tinder to the inflammation of
+her eyes. It was no flattery when he said to her that the mask might
+take from her more than it gave. In short, he insisted upon it.--
+
+He was, perhaps, too tolerant towards the doubt which only a woman
+could make _endurable_ and _enduring_,--the doubt which one she mistook
+for the other, the Court-Physician or the favorite; for at last--though
+not without a fear of saying too much, which, with people of his fiery
+temperament, is a sign that the thing has already happened--he told
+her, what he had in the beginning kept back, that the sympathy
+(_empressement_) of the Prince had sent him to her; and he extolled the
+latter at his own expense, and so much the more, as he had nothing
+further of an extraordinary nature to adduce with regard to him, but
+only that he had--sent him to her.
+
+Then he went. With the Prince he bestowed on her as many
+_beatifications_ and as many _canonizations_ (two contrarieties on this
+earth) as decorum and his humor (two still greater contrarieties) would
+allow. Singular! she had, for all her fire, no humor. He knew January
+succumbed, not merely to the slanderer, but also to the flatterer. The
+crowned theatre-managers of the earth have determinations put into
+their hearts, and decrees into their mouths; they know what they mean
+and what they say two or three days later than their throne-prompter. A
+favorite is a Shakespeare and poet, who, from behind the persons he
+makes act and speak, never peeps or coughs out himself, but is a
+ventriloquist, and gives _his_ voice the sound of another's.
+
+When he visited his patient the next day, the eye-sockets were cooled
+down, though not the eyes. Agnola sat convalescent in a cabinet full of
+images of the saints. With the indisposition of her eyes had been taken
+away, at the same time, a source of conversation; and her pride blocked
+up the way at once to his sensibility and to his humor. Although he
+said to her a hundred times in his innermost heart, "Torment not
+thyself, proud soul; I am no favorite; I will not rob thee of anything,
+least of all of thy pride or another's love,--oh, I know what it is to
+win none,"--nevertheless he remained (in _his_ opinion) cold before
+her, and retired with the annoying prospect that his successful cure
+had cut off his return; for the other court visits were, after all, no
+confidential visits to the sick. Of the plaguy compass-watch he stood
+daily less and less in terror, except just when he was happier than
+usual.
+
+--Many people would sooner live without houses than without
+building-schemes; Victor, sooner without air to breathe than without
+castles in the air. He must always have on hand the lottery-chance and
+stocks of some plan or other for the future; and a woman was, in most
+cases, the partner in this grand-adventure trade. This time he was
+keenly bent upon the reconciliation of January and Agnola. He reasoned
+thus:--"It is easy on both sides. January will now always seek Agnola's
+society, though merely out of cunning, for the sake of getting with
+more decency into that of her future maid-of-honor, Clotilda, whom, in
+her condition of singleness, he can, according to his _vow_, still love
+with impunity. As he can neither withstand a long praise nor a long
+intercourse, this will imperceptibly accustom him to Agnola. She, who
+is now left alone on the side of the Minister Schleunes, will not
+reject the united regards of Victor and January," &c.... But whether
+only the beauty of the action, and not also the beauty of the Princess,
+incited him to this mediatorial office, that is what the Twenty-First
+Chapter cannot yet know; meanwhile, so far as I am concerned, let the
+following stand: his cold inner man, exhausted by bleeding, from which
+the harpsichord and the name of Clotilda and the awaking at morning
+still draw bloodless daggers, needs so much indeed the din of the world
+and everything that may benumb its wounds!
+
+With the design of such preliminaries to a peace, he excused his future
+disobedience to his father, who had counselled him against frequenting
+the house of Schleunes; for as the Princess always went there, it was
+the fittest neutral place for the peace-congress. Oh for only half
+an----
+
+
+                EXTRA-LEAF ON HOUSES FULL OF DAUGHTERS!
+
+The house of Schleunes was an open bookstore, whose works (the
+daughters) one could read there, but not carry home. Although the five
+other daughters stood in five private libraries as wives, and one,
+under the earth at Maienthal, was sleeping away the child's plays of
+life, there were, nevertheless, in this warehouse of daughters, three
+free copies left for sale to good friends. The Minister, at the
+drawings of the lottery of offices, loved to give his daughters as
+premiums for great winnings and prizes. To whom God gives an office, to
+him he gives, if not understanding, yet a wife. In a house rich in
+daughters, as in St. Peter's Church, there must be confession-pews for
+all nations, for all characters, for all faults, that the daughters may
+sit therein as mother-confessors, and absolve from everything, celibacy
+alone excepted. I have, as naturalist, often admired the wise
+arrangement of Nature for the propagation as well of daughters as of
+vegetables. Is it not a wise provision, I said to the natural historian
+Goetze, that Nature gives precisely to those maidens who need for their
+life a rich mineral fountain something _attaching_, by which they may
+fasten on to miserable nuptial finches, who shall carry them to fat
+places? Thus Linnæus[236] observes, as you know, that those kinds of
+seeds which only thrive in rich earth have little hooks on them, in
+order to hang the more easily on the cattle which carry them to the
+stable and manure-heap. Wonderfully does Nature scatter about by the
+wind--father and mother must make it--daughters and pine-seeds into the
+arable places of the forests. Who does not observe the final cause why
+many daughters receive from Nature certain charms in designated
+numbers, that some canon or other, a German Herr, a cardinal-deacon, an
+appanaged prince, or a mere country squire, may come along and take the
+aforesaid charmer, and, as groomsman or English bride's-father, hand
+her over, ready finished, to some blockhead or other, in a distant
+place, as a ready-made wife on sale? And do we find in the case of
+bilberries any less precaution on the part of Nature? Does not the same
+Linnæus observe, in the same treatise, that they are enveloped in a
+nutritious juice, that they may attract the fox to eat them, whereupon
+the knave--he cannot digest the berries--becomes, for all he knows, the
+sower of them?--
+
+Oh, my innermost spirit is more serious than you think. I am vexed with
+those parents who are traders in souls; I pity the daughters who are
+negro slaves. Ah! is it any wonder, then, if the daughters who were
+obliged to dance, laugh, talk, and sing at the West Indian market, in
+order to be carried home by the master of a plantation, if they, I say,
+are treated just as much like slaves as if they were sold and bought?
+Ye poor lambs!--and yet ye are quite as hard as your sheep mothers and
+fathers. What shall one do with his enthusiasm for your sex, when one
+travels through German cities, where every richest or most
+distinguished man, and though he were a distant relation of the Devil
+himself, can point with his finger to thirty houses, and say: "I don't
+know,--shall I pick out and marry one from the pearl-colored, or from
+the nut-colored, or perhaps from the steel-green house? The shops are
+all open for purchasers."--What, ye maidens! is, then your heart so
+little worth that you can cut it down, like old clothes, to suit any
+fashion, any breast? and is it, then, like a Chinese ball, now great,
+now tiny, in order to fit into the ball-form and wedding-ring case of a
+man's heart?--"It must indeed be so, unless one will continue to sit
+alone, like the Holy Virgin over yonder," is the reply of those to whom
+I make no reply, because I turn away from them with contempt, in order
+to say to the so-called Holy Virgin: "Forlorn, but patient one!
+Unappreciated and withered one! remember not the times when thou still
+didst hope for better ones than the present, and never repent the noble
+pride of thy heart! It is not always a duty to marry, but it is always
+a duty not to forgive one's self anything, never to be happy at the
+expense of honor, and not to avoid celibacy by infamy. Unadmired,
+solitary heroine! In thy last hour, when the whole of life and the
+former goods and scaffoldings of life, crushed into ruins, sink
+beforehand,--at that hour thou wilt look out over thy emptied life;
+thou wilt see there, it is true, no children, no husband, no wet eyes;
+but in the vast, void twilight a great, saintly form; angelically
+smiling, radiant, godlike, and soaring to the divine ones, will hover,
+and beckon to thee to ascend with her. Oh, ascend with her; that form
+is thy _virtue_."
+
+                        _End of the Extra-Leaf_.
+
+
+Some days after the Princess gave the Prince an _eye en médaillon_ with
+the fine conceit: she gave this _votive-tablet_ to the saint (this was
+so much the more _apropos_ as the Prince was named _Januarius_) who had
+sent her his wonder-worker, and who now received that which he had
+caused to be healed. January said to Victor, to whom he showed the eye,
+"She confounds St. Januarius with you, with St. Ottilia,"--who, as is
+well known, is the patroness of eyes.
+
+Victor was glad that Matthieu came to him to go with him to St. Luna;
+for the latter begged him, because this was done without him, to go
+with him to his mother's, "because to-day at the Princess's there was a
+great _souper_, but at his mother's not a soul,"--that is, hardly more
+than nine persons. Victor therefore--it mattered not to-day that the
+distinguished and interesting eye-sufferer was absent--gladly followed
+into Schleunes's Nuremberg _Exchange Library_ of daughters behind the
+tender Jonathan-Orestes-Mat, whom he, in fact, out of forbearance
+towards their mutual friend Flamin, treated now with more toleration.
+_Men_, like _ideas_, are associated together quite as often on the
+principle of _simultaneousness_ as on that of _similarity_; and as
+little can be inferred from the choice of _acquaintances_ as to the
+character of a youth, as in regard to that of a woman from her choice
+of a husband. Matthieu introduced him to his mother in the reading
+cabinet, just as she was hearing an English author read, with the
+words, "I bring you here a real live Englishman." Joachime was
+reading in a catalogue,--it was not a catalogue of books, but of
+stock-gillyflowers,--in order to select some gillyflowers for herself,
+not for the purpose of planting, but of imitating them--in silk. She
+hated flowers that grew. Her brother said, ironically, "She hated
+changeableness, even in a flower." For the truth was, she loved it even
+in lovers, and was quite different from April, which, like women, is in
+our climate far more steady than is pretended. In the cabinet there
+were also two fools, whom my correspondent does not so much as name to
+me, because he thinks they would be adequately designated and
+distinguished, if I should call the one the fragrant fool, and the
+other the fine one.
+
+Both fools were buzzing round the beauty. In fact, whenever I have
+wanted to study fools at great parties, I have always looked round
+regularly for a great beauty; they gather round such a one like
+wasps around a fruit-woman. And if I had no other reason--I have,
+however--for marrying the handsomest woman, I would do it for this
+reason, if for no other, that I might always have the queen-bee sitting
+in the hollow of my hand, after whom the whole foolish bee-swarm would
+come buzzing. I and my wife would then be like the fellows in Lisbon,
+who, having in their hands a pole of parrots strung together, and at
+their feet a leash of _monkeys_ skipping after them, trudge through the
+streets, and offer their crazy _personæ_ for sale.
+
+The fragrant fool, who was to-day on the _sunny side_ of Joachime, was
+reading to the mother; the fine one, who was on the _weather-side_,
+stood near Joachime, and seemed not to trouble himself about her
+_cooling of the temperature_. Victor stood there as transition from the
+torrid zone to the frigid, and represented the temperate; Joachime
+played three parts with one face. The fragrant fool shot, with his left
+hand, the swivel-gun of a silver _joujou_. This hanging seal of a fool
+he kept in motion, either, as the Greenlander does a block with his
+feet, for the sake of keeping himself warm,--or he did it, as the grand
+sultan for similar reasons must always be whittling with a jackknife,
+in order not to be always having somebody killed out of love,--or in
+order, as the stork always holds a stone in his claws, to have all the
+time an Ixion's-wheel in his hands, as a rowel on his heels,--or for
+the sake of health, in order to counteract the _globulus
+hystericus_[237] by the motion of an external one,--or as rosary
+bead,--or because he didn't know why.
+
+Each was satisfied with himself. When the mother begged our Englishman
+to read to her with his native accent, the _fine_ fool said, "The
+English, like certain sentiments, is easier to understand than to
+pronounce." That is to say, this fine sheep had universally the habit
+of being metaphorical. If a maiden said to him, "I cannot keep myself
+from feeling cold to-day," he made out of it coldness of the heart. One
+could not say, "It is cloudy, warm, the needle has pricked me," &c.,
+without his taking this as a ball-drawer, to extract his heart from the
+fire-arm of his breast, and exhibit it. It was impossible in his
+hearing not to be fine, and from your good-morning he twisted a
+_bon-mot_. Had he read the Old Testament, he would not have been able
+to admire sufficiently the fine turns that occur there. On the other
+hand, the _fragrant_ fool limited his whole wit to a lively face. He
+unfolded before you this bill of invoice and insurance-policy of a
+thousand bright conceits, and held it up to you, but nothing came. You
+could have sworn by the advertising-poster of wit in his fiery eye,
+"Now he is going to blaze out,"--but not in the least! He used the
+weapon of satire, as the grenadiers do hand-grenades, which they no
+longer throw, but only wear imitated on their caps.
+
+When the fine one had said his erotic _bon-mot_, Joachime looked at our
+hero, and said, with an ironical glance at the fine one, "_J'aime les
+sages à la folie_."
+
+The pride of the fragrant one in his to-day's superiority, and the
+apparent indifference of the fine fool to his own neglect, proved that
+neither was often in to-day's ease, and that Joachime coquetted in a
+peculiar style. She always made fun of us stately male persons, when
+two were with her at once,--of one alone less so; her eyes left it to
+our self-love to ascribe the fire in them more to love than to wit; she
+seemed to blab out what came into her head, but many things seemed not
+to come into her head; she was full of contradictions and follies, but
+her _intentions_ and her inclination nevertheless remained doubtful to
+every one; her answers were quick, but her questions still quicker.
+To-day, in the presence of the three gentlemen,--at other times she did
+it in the presence of the whole _bureau d'esprit_,--she stepped up to
+the looking-glass, took out her paint-box, and retouched the gay
+box-piece of her cheeks. One could not possibly think how she would
+look if she were embarrassed or ashamed.
+
+The virtue of many a lady is a thunder-house, which the electric spark
+of love shatters to pieces, and which they put together again for new
+experiments; to our hero, spoiled by the highest female perfection, it
+appeared as if Joachime must be classed among those thunder-houses.
+Coquetry is always answered with coquetry. Either this latter it was,
+or too feeble a respect for Joachime, which led Victor to make the two
+adorers ridiculous in the eyes of the goddess. His victory was as easy
+as it was great; he encamped on the foe's position,--in other words,
+Joachime took an increased liking to him. For women cannot bear him
+who, before their eyes, succumbs to another sex than their own. They
+_love_ everything that they _admire_; and one would not have made such
+satirical explanations of their predilection for physical courage, if
+one had considered that they feel this predilection for everything that
+is distinguished,--for men distinguished by wealth, renown, learning.
+The dry and wrinkled Voltaire had so much fame and wit, that few
+Parisian hearts would have rejected his satirical one. Add to this,
+that my hero expressed his regard for the whole sex with a warmth which
+the individual appropriated to herself; then, too, his favorite
+universal-love, furthermore his eye swimming in sorrow over a lost
+heart, and finally his infectious human tenderness, secured him an
+attention from Joachime which excited his to the degree, that he
+proposed to himself the next time to investigate what it might
+signify.----
+
+The next time soon came. So soon as the advent of the Princess was
+predicted by the Apothecary,--for _he_ was for the little future of the
+court his witch of Endor and of Cumæ, and his Delphic cave,--he went
+thither; for he did not drive. "So long as there is still a shoe-black
+and a pavement," said he, "I do not drive. But as to the more
+distinguished gentry, I wonder that they even travel on foot from one
+wing of the palace to the other. Could not one, just as they have a
+penny-post for a city, introduce a conveyance for the interior of the
+palace? Might not every chair be a sedan-chair, if a lady were less
+afraid of an Alpine tour from one apartment to another? And various
+circumnavigatresses of the world would even venture to make a
+pleasure-tour through a large garden in a close litter."--Victor's own
+journey lay straight through one,--namely, that of Schleunes. It was
+too bright and pleasant as yet to let him screw himself like a
+sewing-cushion to the card-table. He saw in the garden a gay little
+party strolling about, and Joachime among them. He joined them.
+Joachime expressed an artist's pleasure at the groupings of the clouds,
+and it was becoming to her beautiful eyes when she lifted them in that
+direction. As they had nothing clever to say, they sought to do
+something clever, so soon as they came to the _carrousel_.[238] They
+seated themselves in it, and caused it to be set agoing. Many of the
+ladies had absolutely not the courage to climb this potter's-wheel;
+some ventured into the seats; only Joachime, who was full as daring as
+she was timid, mounted the wooden tourney-steed, and took the lance in
+hand, to spear away the ring, with a grace which was worthy of finer
+rings. But in order not to expose herself to being thrown by the
+whirling Rosinante, Joachime had set my hero beside her as a banister,
+that she might hold on to him in time of need. The revolution of the
+axle grew more rapid, and her fear greater; she clung to him more and
+more firmly, and he clasped her more firmly in order to anticipate her
+effort. Victor, who understood very well the legerdemain and hocuspocus
+of women, easily saw through Joachime's Wiegleb's-natural-magic and
+"Trunkus Plempsum Schallalei";[239] besides, the reciprocal pressure
+had passed to and fro so rapidly, that one could not tell whether it
+had an originator or an originatress....
+
+As they are now all within doors, and I stand alone in the garden by
+the horse-mill, I will reflect ingeniously on the subject, and remark
+that great people, like women and the French and the Greeks, are
+great--children. All great philosophers are the same, and, when they
+have almost destroyed themselves with thinking, revive themselves by
+child's fooleries, as, e. g., Malebranche did; even so do great people
+refresh themselves for their more serious, noble diversions by true
+childish ones; hence the hobby-horse chivalry, the swing, the
+card-houses (in Hamilton's _mémoires_), the cutting out of pictures,
+the _joujou_. With this passion for amusing themselves, they are in
+part infected by the custom of amusing their superiors, because the
+latter resemble the ancient gods, who, according to Moritz, were
+appeased, not by atonement, but by joyous festivals.
+
+As he was acquainted with the whole theatre-company of the Minister,
+and, secondly, as he was no longer a lover,--for such a one has a
+thousand eyes for _one_ person, and a thousand eyelids for the
+rest,--he was not embarrassed at the Minister's, but actually enjoyed
+himself. For he had, to be sure, his plan to carry through there; and a
+plot makes a life entertaining, whether one _reads_ or _executes_ it.
+
+He was successful to-day in having a tolerably long talk with the
+Princess, and, to be sure, not about the Prince,--she avoided that
+subject,--but about her trouble of the eyes. That was all. He felt it
+was easier to play off an exaggerated regard than to express a real.
+The apprehension of appearing false _makes_ one appear so. Hence a
+sincere man has the look, with a suspicious one, of being half false.
+Meanwhile, with Agnola, who, in spite of her temperament, was
+coy,--hence a peculiar, lowered tone reigned in her presence at
+Schleunes's,--every step sufficed which he did not take backward.
+
+But toward the sprightly Joachime he took half a step forward. Not so
+much she, as the house, seemed to him to be coquettish; and the
+daughters therein--they constitute the house--he found to resemble the
+old Litones,[240] or people of the Saxons, who were one third free and
+two thirds serf, and who therefore could mortgage a third of their
+estate. Each had still a third, a ninth, a segment, of her heart left
+to her own free disposal. In fact, whoso has ever seen codfishing can
+learn the thing here from metaphor,--the three daughters hold long
+fishing-rods over the water (father and mother splash, and drive the
+codfish along), and have their hooks baited with state-uniforms
+or their own faces,--with hearts,--with whole men (as luring
+rivals),--with hearts which have already been once taken out of the
+stomach of another captured codfish;--from this, I say, one can see in
+some sort how they catch the other cod in the sea, precisely as they do
+the stock-fish on land,--namely, besides what has been mentioned (now
+let one read back again), with bits of red rag, with glass-pearls, with
+birds' hearts, with salted herrings and bleeding fishes, with little
+cods themselves, with fishes which one has taken out, half digested,
+from stock-fish formerly caught.----Victor thought to himself,
+"Joachime may be only lively or coquettish for all me; I can easily
+skip over marten-traps which I can see set right before my nose." Well,
+run, Victor; the _visible_ steel shall lead thee precisely upon that
+which is _concealed_. One may observe in the same person coquetry
+towards every other, and yet overlook it toward himself, as the fair
+one believes the flatterer whom she sets down as a consummate flatterer
+of all others.--He observed that Joachime had somewhat oftenish looked
+up at the new ceiling this evening, and he could not rightly tell why
+it pleased her. At last he saw that she was only pleased with herself,
+and that raising her eyes was more becoming to them than looking down.
+He undertook presumptuously to investigate this, and said to her, "It
+is a pity the painter of the Vatican had not made it, that you might
+look up at it oftener."--"Oh," said she, in a tone of levity, "I never
+would look up with others; I do not love admiration." By and by she
+said, "Men dissemble, when they wish to, better than we; but I tell you
+just as few truths as I hear from you." She confessed outright that
+coquetry was the best remedy against love; and with the observation
+that his frankness pleased her, but hers must please him too, she ended
+the visit and the Post-Day.
+
+
+
+
+                           22. DOG-POST-DAY.
+
+   Gun-Foundery of Love; e. g. Printed Gloves, Quarrels, Dwarf-Flasks,
+      and Stabs.--A Title from the Digests of Love.--Marie.--Court-Day.--
+      Giulia's dying Epistle.
+
+
+The reader will be vexed with this Dog-Post-Day; I, for my part, have
+already been vexed about it. My hero is evidently becoming entangled in
+the meshes of two female trains, and even in the bonds of the princely
+friendship... Nothing more is wanting than that Clotilda should
+actually be joined to the hurly-burly.----And something of this kind it
+becomes necessary for a mining-superintendent, an islander, to
+communicate confidentially to the people on the mainland.
+
+Besides, it must be done chronologically. I will dissect this
+Dog-Post-Day, which reaches from November to December, into weeks.
+Thereby more order will be observed. For I understand the Germans. They
+want, like the metaphysician, to know everything from the beginning
+onward, very exactly, in royal octavo, without excessive brevity, and
+with some _citata_. They furnish an epigram with a preface, and a
+love-madrigal with a table of contents; they determine the zephyr by
+compass and the heart of a maiden by conic sections; they mark
+everything, like merchants, in black-letter, and prove everything, like
+jurists; their cerebral membranes are living parchments, their legs
+private surveyors'-poles and pedometers; they cut up the veil
+of the Nine Muses, and apply to the hearts of these damsels
+turners'-compasses, and insert gauging-rods in their heads; poor Clio
+(the muse of history) looks, for all the world, like the Consistorial
+Counsellor Büsching, who trudges along slowly, bent up under a land
+freight of surveyors'-chains, clocks to calculate _thirds_, and
+Harrison's longitude-watches, and interleaved writing-almanacs, so that
+I specially weep for the poor Büsching as often as I see him striding
+along, since all Germany, (from which I should have expected something
+different,)--every magistrate, every stupid justice of the peace, (only
+we of Scheerau have never saddled him,)--has loaded down the good
+topographical carrier and Christopher (cross-bearer), like a statue
+hung with pledges, from knee to nostril, (so that the good man is
+hardly to be seen, and I wonder how he stays on his feet,)--has
+palisaded, I say, and built him in with all sorts of cursed devil's
+whisks, with village inventories, with advertising sheets, with
+heraldic works, with books of ground-plats and perspective plans of
+pigsties.
+
+They have even--that I may only _relate_ an example out of my own
+history of the German statistic stupidity, although in the very
+doing of it I _give one_--infected Jean Paul. Is it not an old
+story that he has approximately assigned in degrees, by means of a
+Saussure's cyanometer,[241] the blueness of the fairest eyes into
+which an _amoroso_ ever looked, and inspected the fairest drops that
+fell from them during the measurement, correctly enough, with a
+dew-measurer?--And has not his attempt to catch and prove female sighs
+by a Stegmann's measurer of the purity of the atmosphere found more
+than too many imitators among us?----
+
+
+                WEEK OF THE 22D POST-TRINITATIS, OR FROM
+                      NOV. 3d to 11th (EXCLUSIVE).
+
+Almost the whole of this week he sat out at the Minister's. Many
+people, when they have been only four times in a house, come again
+daily, like the quotidian fever,--in the beginning, like the spring
+sun, every day earlier; afterward, like the autumn sun, every day
+later. He saw, indeed, that he could not contribute anything at this
+court-and-ministerial party, either a mystery, or property, or a heart,
+because it would resemble honest courts of justice, which--just as
+the monks call their property a deposit, and say nothing belongs to
+them--inversely promote every deposit into a piece of property, and say
+all belongs to them. But he made no account of that. "I come indeed
+only for fun," thought he, "and no harm can be done to me."----
+
+The Minister, whom he met only over the table, had all the civility
+towards him which can be united with a face full of persiflage, and
+with a class of society in whose eyes all the world is divided into
+spies and thieves; but Sebastian perceived, nevertheless, that
+he looked upon him as a smatterer in medicine and the serious
+sciences,--as if they were not all serious,--and as an adept merely in
+wit and in the liberal arts. He was, however, too proud to turn to him
+any other than the empty new-moon-side, and concealed from him all that
+might convert him. Consequently, Victor must needs, in the eyes of the
+stupidest government-officer who had seen it, have deprived himself of
+all respect by the fact that, when the Minister started an interesting
+conversation with his brother, the Regency-President, about imposts,
+alliances, or the exchequer, he either did not attend, or ran off, or
+looked up the women.----Then, too, he loved in the Prince only the man;
+the Minister loved only the Prince. Victor could himself, when with
+January, deliver discourses on the advantages of republics, and the
+latter would often, in his enthusiasm, (if the supreme courts and his
+stomach had allowed it,) gladly have raised Flachsenfingen to a free
+state, and himself to the President of Congress therein. But the
+Minister hated all this with a mortal hatred, and fastened on all
+political free-thinkers--on a Rousseau, on all Girondists, all
+Feuillants, all Republicans, and all philosophers--the name of
+_Jacobin_, as the Turks call all foreigners, Britons, Germans,
+Frenchmen, etc., _Franks_. Meanwhile this was a reason why Victor now
+took a greater liking to Mat, who thought better on this subject, and
+why he fled from the father to the daughter.
+
+This week he got into Joachime's good graces. She gave to the fine and
+fragrant duo of fools, as we do to _virtue_, only the second prize, and
+to my hero, as we do to _inclination_, the prize-medal. But as he
+respected, at most, merely a certain sentimentalism in friendship and
+in love, he could, he thought, have ridden through the moon with this
+waggish girl, without sighing _for_ her (though he might, indeed,
+_over_ her). But these jolly ones, my Bastian, have seen the old Harry;
+for whenever they change to anything else, one changes with them to the
+same thing. She told him she wanted to give _pleasure_, like a Lutheran
+holy picture, but she would not be _adored_, like a Catholic one. She
+prepossessed him most by the gift peculiar to her sex, of understanding
+tender allusions,--women are so easy at guessing the meaning of others,
+because they always oblige others to guess their meaning, and
+_complete_ and _conceal_ each _half_ with equal success. But among her
+attractions I reckon also her constraint before the Princess, and
+before those who listened with their--eyes. For the rest, his heart,
+which Clotilda had rejected, was now in the situation of children who
+have made a bet that they will receive blows upon their hands without
+crying, and who still continue to smile when the tears already flow.
+
+
+              WEEK OF THE 23d POST-TRINITATIS, OR 46th OF
+                             THE YEAR 179-.
+
+Now he is there even in the forenoon. It is worthy of notice, that
+on St. Martin's day he scraped her powdered forehead with the
+powder-knife, and that he applied to her for some court offices in
+connection with the toilet. "I can be your rouge-box bearer, as the
+Great Mogul has tobacco-pipe and betel-bearers, or else your _cravatier
+ordinaire_, or your _sommier_ (i. e. prayer-cushion-bearer).--I would,
+if you did not kneel yourself on the cushion, myself do it before
+you.----I knew in Hanover a handsome Englishman who had his left knee
+stuffed and padded, because he did not know whom he should to-day have
+to adore, and how long."
+
+It is something quite as important, that on St. Jonas's day he forced
+her to accept a pair of fine gloves, on which a very simple face was
+painted. "It was his own," he said; "she should have the face only by
+night, in bed, in, or on, her hand, that it might look as if he kissed
+her hand through the whole November night."
+
+I go on with my pragmatic extracts from this siege-journal, and find
+recorded on Leopold's day that, as early as in the forenoon, Joachime
+said she would have her parrot, if she kept a master of languages for
+him, repeat nothing out of the whole dictionary except the word
+_perfide_! "Every lover," said she, "should keep a poll for himself,
+which should incessantly cry out to him, _perfide_!"--"The ladies,"
+said my hero, "are alone to blame: they want to be loved too long;
+often whole weeks, whole months. The like of that is beyond our powers.
+Have not the Jesuits made even love to God periodical? Scotus limits it
+to Sunday, others to the festival days.--Coninch says, it is enough if
+one loves Him once every four years.--Henriquez adds a year more to
+it.--Suarez says, it is enough if it is only done before one's
+death.----To many ladies the intermediate times have hitherto fallen;
+but the hours of the day, the seasons of the year, the days of
+betrothal, of burial, form just as many different sects among the
+Jesuits of Love."--Joachime made a beginning of putting on an angry
+look. The court-physician loved nothing better with a fair one than a
+quarrel, and added: "_C'est à force de se faire haïr qu'elles se font
+aimer--c'est aimer que de bouder--ah, que je vous prie de vous
+fâcher!_"--His humor had carried him beyond the mark.--Joachime had
+reason enough to fulfil his prayer for her wrath.--He wanted to
+continue the quarrel in order to settle it, but as there are cases
+where the _aggravation_ of an offence brings about forgiveness quite as
+little as the _taking of it back_ step by step, he did wisely in coming
+away.
+
+He wondered that he should think of her all day long. The feeling of
+having done her wrong brought her face with a suffering expression
+before his softened soul, and all her features were at once ennobled.
+Tacitus says, we hate another when we have offended him; but good men
+often love another merely on that account.
+
+The day following, Ottomar's day,--_Ottomar_! great name, which makes
+the long funeral procession of a great past sweep by all at once before
+me in the dark,--he found her serious, neither seeking nor shunning
+him. The two fools remained in her eyes the two fools, and gained
+nothing in any way. As, therefore, he clearly perceived that out of a
+transient resentment there had grown true repentance for her previous
+openness,--of which he seemed to have made too free a use and too
+selfish an interpretation,--it was now his duty to do in earnest that
+which he had hitherto done in joke, namely, to seek her and get her to
+be reconciled.
+
+But she stood all the time by the Princess, and nothing was done.
+
+I have not said it myself, because I knew the reader would see
+it without me,--that my hero thinks Joachime regards him as the
+image-worshipper of her charms, and as the moon-man, or satellite
+attracted by her. My hero has, therefore, long since made up his mind
+to leave her in this error. As to removing such an error,--for _that_ a
+man or a woman seldom has strength enough; but Victor had, besides,
+several reasons for indulging her with faith in his love (that is,
+himself, also, with faith in hers). In the first place, he wanted to
+conceal the reason of his coming; secondly, he knew that in the great
+world, and among the Joachimes, a lover is sought for only as third man
+in the game,--with them there is no dying of love, one does not even
+live on it; thirdly, he reserved for himself in all cases the
+sheet-anchor of making earnest out of jest; "when the knife is at my
+throat," thought he, "then I will set myself down and fall truly in
+love with her, and then all will be well"; fourthly, a coquette makes a
+_coquet_.[242] ... Here I began already, as is well known, to be vexed
+about the 22d Post-Day, although I know as well as anybody why all
+mankind, even the most sincere, even the male kind, incline to little
+intrigues towards their beloved; that is to say, not merely because
+they are little and _reciprocated_, but because one thinks by his
+intrigues to give more than he steals. Only the highest and noblest
+love is without real trickery.
+
+
+              WEEKS OF THE 24th AND 25th POST-TRINITATIS.
+
+On Sunday there was a ball. "Very naturally," said he, "she will not
+look on me. In ball-dress the fair sex are more implacable than in
+morning dress." Hardly had she seen him when she came to meet him,
+like an agitated heaven, with her fixed stars of brilliants and her
+pearl-planets, and in this splendor begged of him the forgiveness of
+her freak. She had at first made believe angry, she said, then had
+actually become so; and not until the next day had seen that she did
+wrong to appear so and had a right to be so. This prayer for
+forgiveness made our Medicus more humble than was necessary. She begged
+him sportively to beg her pardon, and made him acquainted with her
+percussion-gold of sudden resentment.
+
+For a space of two days this Westphalian peace was kept.
+
+But one quarrel with a maiden, like one fool, makes ten; and
+unfortunately one only likes the angry one so much the better (at
+least, better than the indifferent), just as people run most after
+_those_ Methodist preachers who damn them the most roundly. Joachime
+grew daily more susceptible of anger,--which he ascribed to an
+increasing love,--but so did he, too. Let them have spent the whole
+visit in the finest imperial and domestic peace, at the leave-taking
+all was put upon a war-footing again, ambassadors and furloughed ones
+(if I may be allowed these poetical expressions) recalled. Then with
+the angry sediments in his heart he withdrew, and could hardly wait for
+the moment of the next interview,--i. e. of his or her justification.
+Thus did they spend their hours in the writing of peace-instruments and
+manifestoes. The matter of dispute was as singular as the quarrel
+itself: it concerned their demands of friendship; each party proved
+that the other was the faulty one, and demanded too much. What most
+enraged our Medicus was, that she allowed the fine and the fragrant
+fools to kiss her hand, which she forbade him to do, and in truth
+without any reasons for the decision. "If she would only lie to me, and
+say, such or such is the reason,--that at least would be something,"
+said he; but she did him not the pleasure. To my sex, refusal without
+reasons, even conjecturable ones, is a pit of brimstone, a threefold
+death; upon Joachime, reasons and cabinet-sermons had equal influence.
+
+
+                        EXTRA-LEAF ON THE ABOVE.
+
+I have a hundred times, with my legal burden of proof on my back,
+thought of women who are able, with a certain effort, to act as well as
+to believe without any reasons. For surely, in the end, everybody must
+(according to all philosophers) reconcile himself to actions and
+opinions for which reasons are entirely wanting; for, since every
+reason appeals to a new one, and this again rests upon one which refers
+us to one, which again must have its own reason, it follows that
+(unless we mean to be forever going and seeking) we must finally arrive
+at one which we accept without any reason whatever. Only the scholar
+fails in this, that precisely the most important truths--the highest
+principles of morals, of metaphysics, &c.--are the ones which he
+believes without reasons, and which, in his agony,--thinking to help
+himself out thereby,--he names necessary truths. Woman, on the
+contrary, makes lesser truths--e. g. there must be drives, invitations,
+washing to-morrow, &c.--the necessary truths, which must be accepted
+without the insurance and reinsurance of reasons;--and just this it is
+which gives her such an appearance of soundness. For them it is easy to
+distinguish themselves from the philosopher, who thinks, and into whose
+eyes the sun of truth flames so horizontally that he cannot see, for
+it, either road or landscape. The philosopher is obliged, in the
+weightiest actions,--the moral,--to be his own lawgiver and law-keeper,
+without having the reasons therefor given him by his conscience. With a
+woman, every inclination is a little conscience, and hates
+_Heteronomies_,[243] and beyond that pronounces no reasons, just as the
+great conscience does. And it is precisely this gift, of acting more
+from private sovereignty than from reasons, which makes women so very
+suitable for men; for the latter would rather give them ten commands
+than three reasons.
+
+                 _End of the Extra-Leaf on the above_.
+
+
+What was full as bad was, that Joachime at last, only for the sake of
+removing his documentary piles of complaints and imperial grievances,
+allowed him her fingers, without giving him the least reason for it. He
+could, therefore, show no title of possession, and, in case of need,
+would have had no one who could protect him therein.
+
+There is, however, a well-grounded rule of right or Brocardicon[244]
+for men: that everything grows firmer with women, when one builds upon
+it, and that a little stolen favor legitimately belongs to us, so soon
+as we sue for a greater. This rule of right bases itself upon the fact
+that maidens always abate with us, as one does to Jews in trade, the
+half, and give only a couple of fingers when we want the hand. But if
+one has the fingers, then arises, out of the Institutions, a new title,
+which adjudicates to us the hand: the hand gives a right to the arm,
+and the arm to everything that is appended to it, as _accessorium_.
+Thus must these things be managed, if right is to remain right. There
+will, in fact, have to be a little manual written by me, or some other
+honest man, wherein one shall expound and elucidate to the female sex
+with the torch of legal learning the _modos_ (or ways) _acquirendi_ (of
+winning) them. Otherwise many modi may go out of use. Thus, e. g.,
+according to civil law, I am rightful proprietor of a movable thing, if
+it was stolen thirty years ago (in fact, it should be further back, and
+I should not be made to suffer for it, that one began the stealing
+later); so, too, by prescription of thirty minutes (the time is
+relative) everything belonging to a fair one lawfully falls to me,
+which (of a movable nature--and everything about her is movable) I may
+have purloined from her, and therefore one cannot begin soon enough to
+steal, because before the theft the prescription cannot begin to take
+effect.
+
+Specification is a good modus. Only one must be, like me, a
+Proculian,[245] and believe that a strange article belongs to him who
+has imparted to it a different form; e. g. to me, the hand which I have
+put into another shape by pressure.
+
+The late Siegwart said: _Confusio_ (mingling of tears) is my modus. But
+_commixtio_ (mixture of dry articles, e. g. the fingers, the hair) is
+now with almost all of us the _modus acquirendi_.
+
+I was going once to treat the whole thing according to the doctrine of
+the _Servitudes_,[246] where a woman has a thousand things to suffer
+(though all these servitudes are entirely extinguished by the
+consolidation[247] of marriage); but I do not myself any longer rightly
+retain the doctrine of the Servitudes, and would much rather examine
+any one in them than be examined myself.----
+
+I return to the Medicus. Since, then, he knew that a kissed hand is a
+warrant to the cheeks,--but the cheeks the sacrificial tables of the
+lips,--these of the eyes,--the eyes of the neck;--accordingly he would
+have proceeded exactly according to his text-book. But with Joachime,
+as with all antipodes of coquettes, _no favor paved the way for
+another, not even the great one for the small one_; you passed from one
+antechamber to another,--and what said my hero to this? Nothing but
+"Thank God that for once there is one better than she seemed, who,
+under the appearance of being our plaything, plays with us, and makes
+her coquetry the veil of virtue!"
+
+He felt now, as often as her name was mentioned, a soft warmth breathe
+through his bosom.
+
+
+                FROM THE END OF THE ECCLESIASTICAL YEAR
+              (DEC. 1) TO THE END OF THE CIVIL (DEC. 31).
+
+Flamin, whose patriotic flames found no air in the session-chamber, and
+stifled himself first, grew shyer and wilder every day. It was
+something new to him, that it took whole boards and commissions to do
+what one person might have done,--that the limbs of the state (as is
+also the case, indeed, with the limbs of the body) are moved by the
+_short arm_ of the lever, so as to do less with greater power, and a
+board, particularly, resembles the body, which, according to
+Borellus,[248] spends 2,900 times as much strength on a leap as the
+load which it has to lift requires. He hated all great people, and
+never went to see any: the page Mat did not even get visits from him.
+My Sebastian made his visits to _him_ seldomer, because his leisure and
+his calms of dissipation fell exactly upon Flamin's working hours. This
+separation, and the eternal sitting at Schleunes's,--which Flamin, from
+not being acquainted with Joachime's influence, was obliged at all
+events to ascribe to Clotilda's, for future visits to whom Victor must
+be creating a pretext by his present ones,--and even the Prince's favor
+towards the latter, which in Flamin's eyes could not be any result of
+his spirit of freedom and his sincerity;--all this drew the intertwined
+bonds of their friendship, which had made life to them hitherto a
+four-handed piece of music, further and further asunder; the faults and
+the moral dust which Victor could once brush off from his darling he
+hardly dared to blow off; they behaved towards each other more
+delicately and attentively. But my Victor, to whose heart Fate applied
+so many tongues of vampyres, and who was compelled to shut up in _one_
+breast the bitterness of lost love and the woe of failing friendship,
+was made by it all--really merry. O, there is a certain gayety of
+stagnation and grief, which is a sign of the soul's exhaustion, a smile
+like that on men who die of wounds in the diaphragm, or that on the
+shrivelled, drawn-back lips of mummies! Victor plunged into the stream
+of amusements, in order, under it, not to hear his own sighs. But
+often, to be sure, when he had all day long been sprinkling over ruined
+follies comic salt, which full as often bites the hand of the sower and
+makes it ache, and when he had not been able all day long to refresh
+himself with any eye, to which he would have dared to show a tear in
+his own,--when, thus weary of the present, indifferent to the future,
+wounded by the past, he had just passed by the last fool, the
+Apothecary, and when from his bow-window he looked out into the
+night hanging full of worlds, and into the tranquillizing moon, and
+upon the eastern clouds over St. Luna,--then were his swollen heart
+and his swollen eyeball sure to burst, and the tears which night
+concealed to stream down from his balcony on the hard pavement. "O,
+only _one_ soul," cried his innermost being with all the tones of
+melancholy,--"give but _one_ soul, thou eternal, loving, creative
+nature, to this poor, languishing heart, which seems so hard and is so
+soft, which seems so joyous and yet is so sad, seems so cold and yet is
+so warm!"
+
+It was well that, on such an evening, no chamberlain, no man of the
+world, stood in the balcony, just as poor Marie--on whom her former
+life has been precipitated like a crushing avalanche--came to desire
+his breakfast-orders; for he would get up, without wiping away a drop,
+and advance kindly to meet her, and grasp her soft, but red and
+hard-worked hand, which from fear she did not draw back,--although from
+fear she did turn away her face, hardened into stone against hope,--and
+say, as he softly stroked her eyebrows horizontally, with a voice
+rising from a heart full of the deepest emotion, "Thou poor Marie, tell
+me--I am sure thou hast little comfort--is it not so? There seldom
+comes any longer into thy gentle eyes anything that they love to see,
+unless it is thy own tears? Dear girl, why hast thou no courage before
+me? why dost thou not tell me thy woe? Thou good, tortured heart,--I
+will speak for thee, act for thee: tell me what weighs on thee, and if
+ever of an evening thy heart is too heavy, and thou mayest not venture
+to weep down below, then come up to me ... look at me now frankly ...
+truly I will shed tears with thee, let them say what they will and be
+hanged." Although she held it to be uncourteous to weep before so
+distinguished a gentleman, nevertheless, it was impossible for her, by
+a forcible bending away of her face, to thrust aside all the tears
+which his voice, full of love, drew in rivers from her eyes.... Take it
+not ill of his over-boiling soul, that he then pressed his hot mouth to
+her cold, despised, and unresistingly trembling lips, and said to her:
+"Oh, why are we mortals so unhappy, when we are too soft-hearted?"--In
+his chamber she seemed to take all as jest,--but all night long she
+heard the echo of the humane man;--even as jest, so much love would
+have been a comfort to her; then her past flowers once more
+crystallized in the window-frost of her present wintry-time; then she
+felt as if she were to-day, for the first time, unhappy.--In the
+morning she said nothing to any one, and towards Sebastian she was
+merely more devoted, but not more courageous; only, at times, she would
+concur with the dispenser down below, when he praised him, and say, but
+without further explanation, "One should cut up one's own heart into
+little bits, and sacrifice it for the English gentleman."
+
+Poor Marie! my own innermost heart repeats after the Doctor, and adds
+besides: Perhaps at this very moment, just such an unhappy woman, just
+such an unhappy man, is reading me. And I feel as if; now that I have
+struck the funeral bells of their past sad hours, I must also write
+them a word of consolation. But for one who has to be ever striding
+across new gaping ice-chasms of life, I know no resource but my own:
+the moment things grow bad, fling all _possible hopes_ to the Devil,
+and with utter renunciation fall back upon thyself, and ask, How now,
+if even the worst should come, what then? Never reconcile thy fancy to
+the _next_ misfortune, but to the greatest. Nothing relaxes one's
+spirits more than the alternation of warm hopes with cold anguish. If
+this method is too heroic for thee, then seek for thy tears an eye that
+shall imitate them, and a voice that shall ask thee why thou art thus.
+And reflect: the echo of the next life, the voice of our modest,
+fairer, holier soul, is audible only in a sorrow-darkened bosom, as the
+nightingales warble when one veils their cage.
+
+Often did Sebastian worry himself about this, that he could here exert
+so little his noble powers in behalf of humanity; that his dreams of
+preventing evil and accomplishing good through the Prince remained
+fever-dreams, because, e. g., even the best men at the helm of the
+state filled offices entirely according to circumstances and
+recommendations merely, and held offices, whether those of others or
+their own, never as obligations, but as mining-curacies. He was
+troubled about his uselessness; but he consoled himself with its
+necessity: "in a year, when my father comes, I set myself free and rise
+to something better," and his conscience added, that his own personal
+uselessness was serviceable to the virtue of his father, and that it
+was better to be, in a wheel, with all one's fitness for a pendulum, a
+tooth, without which the machinery would stop, than to be the pendulum
+of a toothless wheel.
+
+In such cases he always asked himself afresh: "Is Joachime, perhaps,
+like me, better, tenderer, less coquettish than she seems? and why wilt
+thou condemn her on the strength of an outward appearance, which is, to
+be sure, the same as thine own?" Her conduct seldom confirmed these
+favorable suppositions, nay, it often absolutely refuted them;
+nevertheless, he went on to expose himself to new refutations and to
+desire confirmation still. The necessity of loving drives one to
+greater follies than love itself; every week Victor let himself abate
+one perfection more from the female ideal, for which, as for the
+unknown god, he had already for years had the altar set up in his
+brain. During this haggling the whole of December would have slipped
+away, had it not been for the first day of Christmas.
+
+On that day, when he saw through every window laughing faces and
+gardens of Hesperides, he too would fain be joyful, and flew amidst the
+church-chorals to Joachime's toilet-chamber, in order there to make
+himself a Christmas pleasure. He had brought her for a present, he
+said, a bottle-case of liqueurs, a whole cellar of Rataffia, because he
+knew how ladies drank. When, at last, he drew his gantry full of
+bottles out of his--pocket: it was a miserable little box full
+of cotton-wool, in which stood imbedded neat little bottles of
+sweet-smelling waters, almost as long as wrens'-eggs. What is neat
+always pleases girls--as well as what is splendid. He delivered a long
+discourse to Joachime upon the temperance of her sex, who ate as little
+as humming-birds and drank as little as eagles: with a few show-dishes
+and a smelling-bottle he would feast an army of the female sex five
+thousand men strong, and there should still be something left. The
+physicians observed that they who had borne hunger longest had been
+women,--even in the middle classes the whole bee-flora on which these
+saints lived consisted of a colored ribbon, which they wore as sash or
+scarf, by way of a nourishing poultice and portable soup, and to which
+they attached nothing further, except at most a lover. Joachime, during
+the eulogy, drew out a bottle, because she thought it wax. Victor, by
+way of refuting her--or for some other reason--pressed it tightly
+into her hand, and fortunately crushed it. A mining-superintendent
+of my disposition would hardly introduce the crushing of a bottle,
+not big enough to cover one of Eymann's cucumbers with, into his
+Dog-Post-Days,--because he loves to serve up things of importance,--did
+not the bottle itself acquire an importance from the fact that it cut
+the softest hand upon which the hardest jewel ever yet threw lustre,
+till it ran blood. The Doctor was startled,--the patient smiled,--he
+kissed the wound, and these three drops fell like Jason's blood, or
+like a blood rectified by an alchemist, as three sparks into his
+inflammable veins, and the blood-coal of love assumed three glowing
+points;--nay, a little more, and he would have obeyed her, when she
+playfully commanded him (in order to spare him a greater embarrassment
+than he had) to revive the antiquated fashion of the Parisians, of
+writing to ladies with rose-colored ink, and here on the spot to
+despatch three lines to her in her own blood. Thus much is, at least,
+certain, that he told her he wished he were the Devil. To the
+last-named personage, as is well known, the warranty-deed or rather
+partition-treaty of the soul is despatched with the blood of the
+proprietor as fist-[249]pledge and consideration. Blood is the seed of
+the Church, the Catholic Church says; and here we are speaking of
+nothing less than the _temple_ of the fair.
+
+So it was--and so it stood--when the Court of the Princess was
+announced for to-day. This was, in the first place, plaguily awkward
+for him, because this evening was spoiled; and, secondly, it was
+agreeable to him, because Joachime was obliged to-day to put away the
+hat which he and she so loved. Since, as is customary, ladies had the
+robes and frisures prescribed to them by the Princess, in which they
+must celebrate in her presence the court-day, i. e. the incendiary
+Sunday of their freedom: accordingly, she could not to-day keep on the
+crape-hat which she so loved, and Victor too, but not on her; for it
+was just the mate of that which Clotilda had worn when, during the
+concert, she covered her moist eyes with the black-lace veil, which
+from that time always hung down over his bereaved eyes.
+
+I will describe the Court-day.
+
+The main object of the Court in setting forth at six o'clock in the
+evening was, to drive home again at ten o'clock in a right sulky mood.
+I can, however, deliver this ten times as copiously:--
+
+At six o'clock Victor, with the rest of the communion of brethren and
+sisters under orders, drove to the Paullinum. He envied, or rather
+blessed, the weaver, the boot-polisher, the wood-cutter, who had at
+evening his jug of beer, his prayers, his Johnny-[250]cakes and his
+trumpeting children; likewise their wives, who already had foretaste of
+the morrow, namely, of the marbled, speckled dresses which were to
+array them for the second holiday. In the May-colored atmosphere and
+zodiac stood the Princess as a sun, full as unhappy as her unhappy
+planets; _only dream_ (thought he) _can make a king happy or a poor man
+unhappy_. When he saw how they all, after a scanty frog-rain of words;
+and after refreshments, i. e. beatings and exhaustions, were harnessed,
+one post-team after another, according to the Court almanac and
+directory, to the card-tables,--to every board came the same motley set
+of old faces,--he wondered first of all at the universal patience; on a
+negro of the gold coast of the court (he swore to himself) if one only
+considers what he has to _hear_ and to _endure_, the _ears_ and the
+_skin_ are certainly, as in the case of roasted sucking-pigs, the best
+parts. Here the lion must beg _that_ animal to let him have his skin
+for a domino, which has usually borrowed his of him. Here among these
+forms bent up by small souls (as leaves also crook up when leaf-lice
+live on them) no great, no bold thought can be carried: like wheat
+which is _beaten down_, they can yield only _empty_ grains.
+
+Before the sitting down at table, that part or segment of
+the--halo[251] encircling the Italian _sun_, which was not invited,
+drove home, disgusted at the tediousness of play, and still more
+disgusted that certain persons in particular were honored with the
+tediousness of a seat at the table.
+
+Joachime, in whom the retiring Agnola found little satisfaction, went
+away with them, but not the Doctor, nor her brother Mat either, who had
+the honor of making, behind the chair of the Princess, in the column of
+march formed by herself, her chamberlain, a page, and a court lackey,
+exactly the central point; he stood, as every one knows, immediately
+behind the chamberlain, and was the only one who looked like a legible
+lampoon upon the _tout ensemble_. About the table, during[252] which
+there was little said, at most in a very low tone by two neighbors,
+here also there shall be nothing said.
+
+After dinner the Prince came and disturbed the stiff ceremonial, which
+he hated from love of comfort, just as Victor despised it on
+philosophical grounds. "Verily, an archangel," Victor would often say,
+"who should remark the wisdom and virtue observed by mortals in all
+trifles at their session-tables, altars, receptions, must needs bet his
+heaven and his wings that we are worth a farthing--or at least
+something--in greater things; but we all know where the conclusion
+limps; and this very disgust at the stiff, pedantic, decent micrology
+and machinery of men is the humor of the satirist. Moral deterioration
+comes about, it is true, through trifles, but not improvement: Satan
+creeps into us through Venetian blinds and _sphincters_[253]; the good
+angel enters through the front door."--Agnola rewarded our hero to-day
+for his previous so well meant assiduity with a warmer attention, which
+was made more beautiful in his eyes by her ornaments--she wore those of
+the former princess, her own, and those of her mother before her--and
+by her whole state-attire; for he loved finery on women and hated it on
+men. His esteem borrowed a tender warmth from the painful fact that she
+confounded January's selfish intentions in his visits (with reference
+to the future Clotilda) with fairer ones, and that nevertheless one
+could not say so to her. How came it that Agnola reminded him then of
+Joachime; that the latter was the _conductor_ of regard for the former;
+and that all loving emotions with which the Princess inspired him
+turned out wishes that Joachime might deserve and receive them?
+
+With a soul full of such longing, he drove back this very day without
+ceremony to that Joachime on whose hand, as we know, he had left a
+slight wound. He said to her, "He must, as murderer and Medicus, look
+once more to-day after the wound"; but a charming new trouble on
+Joachime's face fell like sunshine with a warming influence into his
+soul. He was impatient to go out with her on the balcony, to talk about
+it. Out there, he in a few minutes made the gash and the December chill
+a pretext for taking the hand and the gash into his own to warm it.
+"Cold is bad for wounds," he said; but the fine fool would here have
+had his own comment on the subject. The vacant evening, the
+remembrances of the childish joys of Christmas, the starry heaven,
+looking down from overhead, which magically illuminates all dark wishes
+of man, like flowers in the night,--these and the silence surcharged
+and burdened his forlorn soul, and he pressed the only hand which human
+kind at this moment extended to him. He put the question to her
+directly about her trouble. Joachime answered more softly than usual,
+"I was going to ask you the same; but with me it is natural." For she
+had, she related, on her return found the luggage of Clotilda and the
+news of her arrival, and--which is the precise point--the clothes of
+her sister Giulia, which Clotilda had hitherto given a place among her
+own. This Giulia, it will be remembered, had expired on Clotilda's
+heart, a day before the latter removed from Maienthal to St. Luna.
+
+A chaos shot through his heart; but out of the chaos only the faded
+Giulia took shape,--for Clotilda daily receded into a duskier sanctuary
+of his soul; her pale Luna-like image caressed with rays of another
+world his sore nerves, and he willingly suffered himself to believe
+that Joachime had her form. In his poetic exaltation, so seldom
+intelligible to women, the dead threw the halo which Clotilda diffused
+over her back again upon her sister. Joachime had to-day read over
+again the letter which Giulia had dictated to her in her last hour
+through Clotilda, and she still had it with her. Probably a heart full
+of unrequited love had borne the fair enthusiast down under the earth.
+Victor with gleaming eyes begged her for the letter; he opened it in
+the moonlight, and when he saw the beloved handwriting of his lost
+Clotilda, his whole heart wept.
+
+
+"Good sister!--
+
+"Forever farewell! Let me say that first, because I know not what
+moment may close my lips. The tempests of my life are going home.[254]
+I speak this farewell and my heartiest wish for thy welfare through my
+friend Clotilda's pen. Give the enclosed to my dear parents, and join
+thy prayer to mine, that they will leave me in my beautiful Maienthal,
+when I am gone. I see now through the window the rose-bush which stands
+by the sexton's little garden in the churchyard: there a place is given
+me, which like a scar shall testify that I once existed, and a black
+cross with the six white letters _Giulia_,--no more. Dear sister, do
+not, I beseech thee, allow them to confine my dust in a tomb!--O no! it
+shall flutter in the shape of Maienthal's roses, which I once so loved
+to sprinkle!--Let this heart, when it shall have dissolved into the
+pollen of a new eternal heart, play and hover in the beams of the moon,
+which has so often in my lifetime made my heart sad and soft. If thou
+ever drivest, dear sister, along by Maienthal, then will the cross peep
+out upon the road through the roses; and if it does not make thee too
+sad, then look over to me.
+
+"It seemed to me just now, for some minutes, as if I drew breath in
+ether,--in little thin draughts. It will soon be over. But tell my
+playmates, if they ask for me, that I was glad to go, though I was
+young. Very glad. Our teacher says, the dying are flying clouds, the
+living stationary ones, beneath which the former glide away, but verily
+at evening both are gone. Ah, I thought I should have to yearn for
+death a long time yet, from one year of sorrow to another; ah! I feared
+these pale cheeks, these eyes sunk with weeping, would not prevail upon
+death, that he would let me grow superannuated, and not take away my
+withered heart until it had throbbed itself to exhaustion: but, lo! he
+comes sooner. In a few days, perhaps in a few hours, an angel will
+appear before me and smile, and I shall see that it is death, and I,
+too, shall smile and say most joyfully, Take my beating heart into thy
+hand, thou ambassador of eternity, and care for my soul.
+
+"'But art thou not young?' the angel will say; 'hast thou not just
+stept upon this earth? Shall I recall thee so soon, even before it has
+its spring?'
+
+"But I shall answer: Look on these sunken cheeks, and these exhausted
+eyes, and only shut them to. O, lay the snake-stone[255] on my bosom,
+that it may suck out all the wounds, and not fall off till they are
+healed. Ah! I have haply done no good in the world, but also no evil.
+
+"Then will the angel say: 'If I touch thee, thou becomest
+stiff,--spring and mankind and the whole earth vanish, and I alone
+stand beside thee. Is, then, thy young soul already so weary and so
+sore? What sorrows, then, can there be thus early in thy breast?'
+
+"Only touch me, good angel!--Now he says, 'If I touch thee, thou
+crumblest to dust, and all thy loved ones see nothing more of thee--'
+
+"O, touch me!..."
+
+
+Death touched the bleeding heart, and a human being had passed on....
+
+While Victor read the sorrowful sheet, the sister of the dead one had
+several times wiped her eyes, because she imagined to herself what he
+was reading, and when he looked up at her, there glimmered therein the
+seed-pearls of a tender soul. But he wished now that his face could be
+invisible, or that he could be in the balcony of his chamber, so as to
+give way to all sighs and emotions unseen. Had he been in a citizen's
+house, he might now have gone without being derided to the unpacked
+clothes, and into the future apartments of Clotilda; and he might have
+seen again, as it were, the green lawns of Maienthal, if he had seen
+the romantic dresses, wherein Giulia had roamed through them, locked up
+amidst the last kisses of a sister. But in such a house it was an
+impossibility.
+
+He could now, as he seldomer had the enjoyment of another's
+sensibility, easily pardon its even being carried to excess. That it
+shatters the body was to him the wretchedest objection, because,
+indeed, everything of a nobler sort, every effort, all thinking, wears
+it out; in fact, the body and life were only means, but not an end.
+"Giulia's heart in Giulia's body," said he, "is a pure dew-drop in a
+tender flower-cup, which everything crushes, chokes, dries up, and
+which yet has escaped the noonday sun; such souls, too pliable for a
+world full of storm, which have too many nerves and too few muscles,
+deserve for their sensibility's sake not the corroding salt of satire,
+which gnaws them like snails. Earth and we can give them few joys; why
+will we take from them the rest?"
+
+But the lines of sorrow which sympathy now drew through Joachime's
+smiles imprinted themselves distinctly in Victor's heart, and that
+which she would here conceal made her more charming than all that she
+had ever sought to show.
+
+Nothing is more dangerous than--as he had done some weeks before--to
+make believe he was in love: one becomes so forthwith in reality. Thus,
+the voluptuary _Baron_, when he had played one of Corneille's heroes,
+himself was one for some days. Thus Moliere died of a _malade
+imaginaire_, and Charles V. of a rehearsal-burial. Thus the paper crown
+which Cromwell had worn in a school-drama made him covet a harder
+one.--The second lesson which is to be learned from this (this,
+however, to be sure, presupposes Joachime's being a coquette) is, that
+a hero may scent coquetry, and yet run into the trap; a poet, like the
+nightingale (which he resembles in plumage, throat, and simplicity)
+sits up on the tree, and sees the snare set, and skips down and--into
+it.
+
+After some days,--while the question about Joachime's worth and his own
+love was rising and falling like a wave in Victor's mind,--while he
+stood on bad terms with Flamin, good ones with the Princess, and
+better with the Prince, who kept asking every day when Clotilda was
+coming,--she came.
+
+
+
+
+                           23. DOG-POST-DAY.
+
+       First Visit to Clotilda.--The Paleness.--The Redness.--The
+                              Race-Weeks.
+
+
+"Ay, I must confess," said Victor, as on the day after Clotilda's
+arrival he ran round in his chamber, "I could look with more courage
+into a thunder-storm or a tempestuous sea than into that little
+face,--into a radiant heaven, three noses long." He got relief,
+however, by striking a detached fortissimo chord on the piano: then he
+could go to see Clotilda. Only on the way he said: "Nowhere is there so
+much jangling as within a man. What a devilish uproar in this five-foot
+Disputatorium about the smallest trumpery, till a bill grows into an
+act! A portable national convention _in nuce_,[256] that is what I am;
+I cannot take a step, without the _right_ and _left_ first haranguing
+on the subject, and the _enragés_ and the _noirs_,[257] and the Duke of
+Orleans and Marat. The most detestable thing about this interior
+Ratisbon diet of man is, that Virtue sits therein with ten seats and
+one voice, but the Devil with one rump and seven votes."--
+
+By these humorous soliloquies he sought to divert himself from the
+aspect of his confused, stubborn, cold-sore spirit, which was always
+lifting Joachime to the level of Clotilda. He was finally put in
+perfect tune again merely by the virtuous resolution not to conceal now
+his love for Joachime,--"not to be ashamed of her," he had almost
+thought to himself. "If I _feign_ myself to be somewhat warmer toward
+Joachime and colder towards the other than I perhaps am, then the Devil
+must have his game in it, if I do not finally _become_ so."
+
+But the Devil had his game, and in fact a true game of Ombre[258] for
+_four_ persons,[259] with a dummy:[260] this croupier[261] had made the
+original vault of playing out the face[262] of Clotilda with a wholly
+different _color_ from what he had given her in Le Baut's palace.
+Victor found her, on meeting her again at Schleunes's, infinitely more
+beautiful than he had left her,--that is to say, more _pale_. As she
+was no nervous patient, never avoided the cold, even on December
+evenings walked out alone in the village, her cheeks were usually more
+like dark rosebuds than opened and whitened rose-leaves. But now the
+sun had become a moon: she had, in some sorrow or other, like the
+sapphire in the fire, lost nothing but color; instead of the blood, the
+soul, grown more still, lovely, and tender, seemed itself to look more
+nearly through the white crape curtain. All the blood which had receded
+from her cheeks flowed over into his, and rose like a magic potion into
+his head; meanwhile he tried to get into the latter the thought,
+"Probably it is more the quarrel with her parents, and less the
+affliction of being driven hither, that has made her sick."
+
+When one has once proposed to himself to make believe cold, one becomes
+still more so when one finds reasons for _not_ being so: Victor was
+made still colder by Clotilda's parents, who had come with her, and
+from whose faults the mantle seemed to him to be at once removed. Upon
+persons whom, for the sake of a third, one has esteemed too highly, one
+avenges himself, when the third no longer exerts the constraining
+influence, by a so much the greater depreciation of them. Then, too, he
+said to himself: "As she now seldom sees her brother Flamin, it would
+be a piece of simplicity to expose her to a minute's embarrassment by
+the announcement that I know the relationship." Poor Victor!
+Nevertheless, it was impossible for him even to charge his heart with
+so much electrical warmth--though he might rub it with cat-skins and
+beat it with fox-tails--as would be requisite in order that his pulse
+should beat full for Joachime, not to say feverishly; but _this very
+thing_ decided him to conduct himself exactly as if heart and pulse
+were fuller. "It were ignoble," thought he, "if the good Joachime
+should be made to atone for it, that I once had other hopes and wishes
+than my hitherto newest ones." This sacrifice warmed him to a proper
+degree of regard; this regard gave him the manly pride, which defies
+with its love and its choice all the four quarters of the world; this
+pride, again, gave him freedom and joy,--and now he was in a condition
+to talk with Clotilda like a reasonable man.
+
+All this inner history occupied, of course, twelve times as great a
+space of time as Mohammed's journey through all the heavens,--almost
+a good hour. But an accident threw itself into the midst of all
+his ideas. Namely, as the Minister's lady was a true female
+philosopher,--she knew that a couple of quartz crystals with some
+preparations and a drowned f[oe]tus do not make a philosopher, but
+nothing short of a lecture-room full of natural curiosities, and a
+reading cabinet,--and as the Chamberlain Le Baut was a philosopher, for
+his cabinet was quite as large,--the collection was exhibited to the
+Chamberlain, which he had himself helped to enrich. One would suppose
+that they must have laughed at each other in their sleeves, and taken
+each other for fools; but they really held each other for philosophers;
+for with great folks the fruits of the tree of knowledge grow so into
+the window and into the mouth,--they have so much facility in gaining
+knowledge (and therefore a second in showing it),--they so seldom seek
+in the wells of truth anything else than their own knee-pieces made
+with water-colors, and to wade into the depths of this fountain would
+give them such a chill,--and yet, on the other hand, they converse with
+so many sorts of persons of information in all departments,--that they
+get a smattering of everything over the table, and by oral tradition,
+like the disciples of the ancients, become through the ears living
+cyclopædias. If, afterward, they actually know how to absolutely
+renounce that which they have never heard, what difference is there,
+then, between them and the poorest philosopher, except in
+consciousness?
+
+In the cabinet of books and natural curiosities lay the whole
+New-Year's freight of buzzing chafers, with golden wing-sheaths minus
+wings,--I mean the gilt Musen-Almanachs. Matthieu, that mimic of the
+actual nightingales, was the sworn foe of the human ones, namely, the
+poets. He said,--what would have suited better for a Review,--"He was a
+great friend of verses, but only in winter,--for when he went roaming
+so through the flower-beds of an Annual, he became, like one who walks
+through a poppy-field, drowsy enough, and could go to sleep. And just
+as the nights grew longer, and one therefore needed a longer sleep, it
+was a fine thing that the Annuals should appear, exactly at the
+beginning of winter, and that these flowers should bloom at the same
+season of the year with the mosses; in this way one could at least be
+lulled to sleep beside the brook that murmured in the verses, when
+there was no more murmuring or sleeping on the frozen meadow."----
+
+Our Victor was as satirical as the Evangelist; he had in Hanover
+laughed as well as this fellow here,--e. g. he had complained that most
+Annual-minstrels unfortunately labored more for _connoisseurs_ than for
+dull readers, and were well contented if they only got the former to
+sleep,--that a man who could not write prose should try whether he
+might not make a popular bard, as only those birds can _sing_ who do
+not learn to talk,--that he could get through a good Annual at the
+quickest and most agreeable rate, if he only ran over the rhymes,--and
+that flat heads, like flat diamonds, to which no facettes can be given,
+became _hearts_, and instead of thoughts gave us tears, in which there
+swam not so much as the infusorium of an idea....
+
+But he saw still one side more than Matthieu, namely, the noble side.
+It was his custom to turn this side forward precisely when another had
+been showing the bad side, and _vice versâ_. His opinion was, that the
+poets were nothing but intoxicated philosophers,--but whoever could not
+learn philosophizing from them, would learn it quite as little from the
+systematicians. That philosophy made only the _silver-wedding_ between
+ideas, but poetry the first marriage; empty _words_ there might be, but
+no empty _sensations_. That the poet, in order to move us, has only to
+take for his lever all of noble that there is on the earth,--Nature,
+Freedom, Virtue, and God; and the very magic-words, the magic-rings,
+the magic-lamps wherewith he sways us, react at last upon himself.
+
+He delivered this opinion--when Matthieu had given his and Joachime her
+own, namely, that there were three or four leaves, at least, in the
+Musen-Almanachs which pleased her, namely, the smooth parchment
+leaves--much more briefly than we have put it;--the Minister's lady was
+of his opinion (for she herself was a versifex);--the Chamberlain said,
+"Every city and every prince did indeed adore the poets in appropriate
+temples,--namely, in the play-houses." Clotilda ventured now to join
+herself to the victors:[263] "When one reads a poet in January, it is
+as lovely as when one goes to walk in June. I cannot read either
+philosophers or learned men; there would, therefore, be left to me"
+(she meant to say, to her sex) "quite too little, if one should take
+from me the dear poets." "You would at most," said the Minister at
+last, "find your disciples in them; poets, like the saints, concern
+themselves little about the world and its knowledge; they can sing of
+the state, but not instruct it." "O thou grinning mummy!" thought
+Victor, "a precious stone which thou canst not work into the wall of
+the state-building is less to thee than a block of sandstone. If thou
+couldst only install every flaming soul sent into the world as a
+completion of the republican antiques, in the office of under-clerk,
+custom-house collector, or warden of the treasury (as the people of
+Grand Cairo transform their ruins into stables and horse-troughs)!" The
+noble Mat merely subjoined: "There was a painter in Rome who never
+talked with any one but by singing; and I knew a great poet who not
+even in common life could speak prose; but he could not do much beside,
+and had little of the world, but a great many worlds in his head. When
+he comes out in print, he will hardly play off more deception on
+his readers than any one has already played off on him, who chose
+to."--Victor saw, by Clotilda's downcast eye, that she observed, as
+well as he, that the Devil meant her Dahore: but he was silent; his
+soul was sad and embittered: he had, however, long since been hardened
+by court life to endure those whom he must needs hate.
+
+During this disputation the noble Mat had, unobserved, cut out the
+whole group in black paper. "Ah!" said Joachime, "this is not the first
+time that he has given _blackened_ likenesses of companies." But as
+Victor could never see silhouette-groups, without thinking of us
+fleeting shadows of mortals, of this dwindling and drying-up
+dwarf-life, of the night-pieces drawn upon life, and of the shadowy
+companies called peoples,--and as he was reminded of this not only by
+his melancholy, and not only by a wax-skeleton, by Madame Biheron,[264]
+which stood there among the natural curiosities, but still more by the
+pale form of Clotilda,--and as, casting a glance of comparison at the
+skeleton and the profile, she said softly to Victor, "So many
+resemblances might at another time make me sad,"--then was his full
+heart transpierced with a sharp pang at the thought of his eternal
+poverty, and at the certainty, "This great, beautiful heart will never
+stir for thine, and when her friend Emanuel is dead, thou art left
+forever alone"; and he stepped to the window, threw it open violently,
+drank in the north-wind, pressed his fist against his two eyeballs, and
+went back with his former expression of countenance to the rest of the
+company.
+
+But for to-day such agitations had torn deeply into his heart. And when
+Clotilda, at a solitary second, said to him that the Parson's wife and
+Agatha were angry at his staying away, then was he, to whom at these
+names the whole beclouded past opened like a heaven, in no condition to
+give an answer.
+
+When he returned home, Clotilda's voice, which he could of all her
+attractions least forget, kept incessantly speaking, and like the echo
+of a funeral-song, in his soul.... Reader, when that which thou lovedst
+has long vanished from the earth or from thy fancy, then will
+nevertheless the beloved _voice_ come back and bring with it all thy
+old tears, and the disconsolate heart which has shed them!... But not
+merely her voice,--everything came thronging back in the darkness upon
+his fancy: her modest eye, which did not in court-like style sparkle
+and bid defiance and express desire, as did those of the others,--that
+watchful delicacy, which since his entrance on court-life no longer
+appeared to him, either in her or in his father, too great,--to this
+add the image of Joachime and his chaos of inconsistencies, and the
+remark that a man whom the most certain proofs have satisfied that he
+is not loved, still suffers afresh at a _new_ one,--and then one can
+understand the commotions which sleep, that lull on life's ocean, had
+in his case to appease.--
+
+"That was the last fever-shake," said he the next morning, relying upon
+his present heart, whose eruptions, like those of volcanoes, daily
+burnt out its crater more and more. He enjoined upon himself,
+therefore, a weekly flight from the too dear soul, with the design that
+the new resonance of his love might cease its vibrations in his heart,
+and all become still again within him.
+
+But after a week he saw her again: verily, there sat the Devil again at
+the card-table, and played another color against him,--the _red_.
+Clotilda looked, not pale, but, though only slightly, red. This redness
+made a great blot on his inner man, and adulterated his inner coloring,
+as black does every color of the painter. For when he found her well
+again; it was not so much _agreeable_ to him,--for he saw how few
+claims he any longer had upon her tranquillity,--how she did not so
+much as distinguish him in this warehouse of human waste-paper, and how
+stupid he had been in letting himself dream so secretly, so very
+secretly, that her previous paleness proceeded actually from her vain
+longing after such a one as he;--at the same time it was not
+_disagreeable_ to him,--for he would have poured out all his heart's
+blood, if he could thereby have brought a single artery in her to its
+old course;--I say it was not so much either agreeable or disagreeable
+to him, as it was both, as it was unexpected, as it was a hint to--give
+himself to the Devil. His heart, and the image which had been too long
+therein, were absolutely crushed in two. "Be it so!" said he, and bit
+the convulsive lip with which he said it. For some days he cared not
+even to see Joachime. "Has _she_ then an eye for nature and a heart for
+eternity?" asked he, and he knew well the answer.
+
+Now came on a time for him, which was the precise opposite of the
+Sabbatical weeks,[265]--one may call them the _race-weeks_ or the
+_Tarantula-dancing-hours_ of visiting. It is a cursed time; man knows
+not where he stands. With Victor it fell just upon the winter-months,
+when, besides, the honeymoons of city and court occur. I will now
+portray them regularly.
+
+Victor sought, namely, to drown deeper his unhappy, discordant
+heart,--not with the drum-roll of amusements; under this it would only
+bleed the more, just as wounds flow more strongly under the sound of
+drumming; but with--people; these were the blood-stanching screws
+which he applied to his soul. His body was now, like the Catholic
+reliquiary body of an Apostle, in all places; he spent the whole day in
+running to and fro, now with the Prince and now without him.
+
+At last there was not a lady left in Flachsenfingen whose hand he had
+not kissed,--nor a toilet-table where he would have been satisfied.
+He made in the _racing-weeks_ double-knots, French _pas_,--dotted
+sketches of patterns,--little plays,--charades,--receipts for
+canary-birds,--verses for fans,--a thousand visits,--and still more,
+morning notes....
+
+These last, which he received and sent, were written in French and
+folded French-wise,--namely, crushed into the shape of hair-rollers.
+"They are," said he, "the hair-rollers of the fibres of the female
+brain,--the cartridges full of Cupid's powder,--the cocoons of loving
+butterflies": he spoke of the rise and fall of these female notes, and
+called them still further the proof-sheets of the female heart, and the
+outer-title-pages of the coquettish Edicts of Nantes. "I assert this,"
+he added, "to distinguish myself from the page Matthieu, who denies it,
+because he actually contends, that at first one presses letters upon
+the fair sex, then things of more cubic contents, e. g. fans, jewels,
+hands, then finally one's self; just as the mails at first only took
+letters, then packages, finally passengers."--
+
+He found those women daily more amusing who steal away from us people
+of understanding the heart out of the breast and the brain out of the
+head, and, to be sure, (as a certain nobleman did other stuff,) not
+from love for the stolen goods, but from love of robbery itself; the
+next morning, like the nobleman, they honestly send the goods back
+again to the owner. Their refinements,--his own,--his turns to
+escape theirs,--the attention which one had to bestow upon one's
+self,--the opportunity of bringing all emotions under the finest
+dissecting-knives, or solar and lunar microscopes,--the facility of
+taking away from the most sincere truths the sour taste and from the
+most agreeable the sickly-sweet,--all this made the toilet-tables of
+women, particularly of coquettes, to him _Lectisternia_[266] and tables
+of the gods. "By heaven," said the toilet-table-boarder or
+pensioner,[267] "a man is merely a Dutchman, at most a German, but a
+woman is a native Frenchwoman, or in fact a Parisian: man conceals his
+moral as he does his physical breast: thoughts and flowers, which do
+not fall through the racks of the four faculties, emotions which cannot
+be described in the acts or in a physician's report, one must really
+say only to a woman, and not to a man, especially one of
+Flachsenfingen"--or Scheerau.
+
+By way of excusing himself for associating with coquettes on the
+footing of a general lover, he appealed to his motive,--that of merely
+wishing to become acquainted with their ways,--and to the excellent
+Forster, who in Antwerp _knelt down_, as well as any born Catholic,
+before Rubens's altar-piece of the Virgin Mary ascending to heaven,
+merely to examine her more nearly.
+
+He had a still more dangerous excuse. "Man," said he, "should be
+everything, learn everything, try everything,--he should labor for the
+_union_ of the two _churches_[268] in his soul,--he should, if
+only for a couple of months, have been a city-musician,[269]
+grave-digger, gallows-_pater_,[270] an engineer, tragedy-manager,
+upper-court-marshal, an imperial vicar, deputy sheriff, a reviewer, a
+lady, in short, everything a man should have been for some days, in
+order that the hues of the prism might at last melt together into the
+perfect white."
+
+These principles are the more dangerous with one like him, who, strung
+with the tense strings of the most dissimilar powers, easily gave every
+one's note, not from dissimulation, but because his social poetic
+faculty could transport itself deeply into another's soul; hence he
+gained, tolerated, and copied the most unlike persons, notwithstanding
+his sincerity. But I pity him, that he has everywhere so much to
+suppress, his seeing through the Prince, his state of heart toward
+Clotilda, his conciliatory intrigues towards Agnola, his knowledge of
+Flamin's relations, &c. Ah, reserve and dissimulation easily run
+together; and must not a constant dropping, when one stands directly
+under it, at last wear scars in the most solid character?
+
+Nothing chills the noblest parts of the inner man more than intercourse
+with persons in whom one cannot take any interest. This hotel-life at
+court, this daily seeing people who never even say "I," whose relations
+one ignores as indifferently as their talents, unless some necessity
+seeks them,--this snatching only at the next moment, this racing by of
+the finest and most intellectual strangers and ant-swarms of visitors,
+who in three days are forgotten,--all this, which makes palaces like
+Russian ice-palaces, where even the stove full of naphtha flames is a
+lump of ice, and to which I need not at all add the _comic_ salt,
+which, besides, chills all warm blood, as that of _Glauber_ does hot
+water,--all this made his heart desolate, his days bald and burdensome,
+his nights distressful, his conduct too cold towards the good, too
+tolerant towards the bad.
+
+In addition to this, his Emanuel was silent, and, like nature, shut up
+his flowers within himself. He whom nature nourishes and builds up, is
+not in so good a mood in winter as in summer. The earth had on her
+powder-mantle of snow, and her night-gown on all day; the trees had
+wrapped up their buds in fleecy hair-papers, and the twigs looked like
+hair-pins. Victor's soul was like nature: O may Heaven soon warm in
+both the flowers of spring!
+
+As the pathological history of my Victor reminds me too painfully of
+the latent poisons in the human body, it shall soon come to an end. It
+pleased him that he became, by this fluttering round, more and more
+gallant and cold towards all women: the cord of love cuts less deeply
+into the bosom, when, plucked out into threads and floss, it flutters
+about everybody. He who, like his namesake, Saint Sebastian, looked
+like one stuck all full with (Cupid's) arrows, shot off arrows of
+another kind against the whole sex, though never against individuals.
+In this last circumstance his bitterness differed from Matthieu's, who
+could say of his own cousin, for example, who had lost her beauty by a
+late attack of small-pox: "Her beauty held out right valiantly against
+the small-pox, and brought off from this victory the most glorious
+_scars_, and all of them indeed, like those of Pompey's knights;[271]
+in front and in the face."
+
+As assaf[oe]tida is used for _haut gout_, so does one season the
+finest _savoir vivre_ by sundry bold incivilities. Bastian in the
+Tarantula-season was not to be embarrassed by anything: he went and
+came like a Parisian, without ceremony; he sought often bold, but
+advantageous postures of his body; during the play he made tours
+through the boxes as the Prince did through the coulisses; five times
+he carried matters so far (though with difficulty, and always only by
+means of setting before himself the example of the courtiers), that he
+listened indifferently, or absolutely looked away, when another was,
+telling him a story: all which things, if not essential, are
+nevertheless incidental to true politeness.
+
+Nor will I let it be unnoticed in his praise, that he took to himself
+the regular _exotic_ and _satirical_ liberties of the _Gallican_ Church
+toward several women at once, for in the presence of a single one he
+had still the old veneration of a noble heart. I will give at least one
+example of that. Once he was among five slanderesses (the company
+consisted of six females and a male person); the ugliest blackened all
+maidens, even those in print, e. g. the deceased Clarissa, whom she
+charged with not having in her intercourse with Lovelace been quite
+able to _sauver les dehors de la vertu_.[272] One can anticipate how
+the Königsberg school will receive it in their reviews, that he let
+himself down on one knee before the calumniatress, and said with some
+seriousness: "_O Clarisse! voici votre Lovelace; retranchons quatre
+tomes, commençons comme les faiseurs d'Epopées par le reste_."[273]
+
+To be sure, he frequently during the Tarantula-season reproached
+himself for the Tarantula-season; and when the Gentile-fore-court of
+his heart grew so full of women, while in the Holy of Holies there was
+nothing but mute darkness, and when his brain became an entomological
+cabinet of court trifles, then, of course, he often sighed in his
+balcony: "O come soon, good father, that thy sinking son may soar out
+of this unclean March fog into a clearer life, before he has utterly
+stained himself, so as no longer even to frame this wish." And
+as often as he got sight, in Joachime's chamber, of the views of
+Maienthal,--which Giulia had had taken by the painter of Clotilda's
+portrait,--then in the midst of his jestings he turned his eye away
+from them with a sigh.----But he was not healed, until fate said, Now!
+Then all at once the theatre-key struck, which bids men come and act in
+the players' rehearsal of life;--the play itself is not given till the
+next life;--and then transpired something which I shall at once report
+in the following chapter, when I have done relating in this one how
+Victor stood with all the people about him.
+
+With many, properly speaking, badly,--in the first place, with
+Clotilda. She resided, to be sure, at the Minister's; as maid of honor,
+she would have belonged in the Paullinum, only the Prince had so
+contrived it for the greater facility of seeing her; but she was always
+about the Princess, with whom she was soon linked in intimacy by a
+similarity of seriousness and a similarity of reserve. Her indifference
+to one who had with her a common friend and teacher inspired this
+Victor with a still greater, especially as he knew she must feel that,
+in this cold mountain- and court-air, only a single, though faded,
+carnation slip of her fair soul bloomed, namely, himself. Then, too,
+the obligation of decorum, to look upon her coldly, must become a
+habit. The worst thing for him was that she was indifferent towards him
+without ill-feeling, and cold towards him with respect. Others were
+quite furious about the "phlegmatic virtue of this Pygmalion's statue."
+The noble Mat called her often the _Holy_ Virgin, or the Demoiselle
+Mother of God. It is made out very clearly by the Dog-documents, which
+I have opened, that some gentlemen of the Court, after various abortive
+attempts to explain to themselves a virtue irreconcilable with so much
+beauty, now on the ground of temperament, now of concealed love,
+and now of a coquettish coyness, ending at last, like the water
+at St. Clermont, in petrifying and becoming _its own bridge over
+itself_,--that these cunning gentlemen most felicitously fell upon the
+conjecture that Clotilda wore this mask over her face as a copy of the
+face of the Princess, for the sake of continuing in favor. Hence
+Clotilda's discreet virtue was judged by most with greater indulgence,
+while one could excuse it, as an intentional imitation of a similar
+fault in the Princess, even by the example of like imitations, as
+courtiers often aped the greatest external natural faults, nay, even
+the virtues of a prince. So thought at least the more reasonable
+portion of the Court.
+
+Agnola was assiduous in testifying an ever increasing gratitude to our
+hero for January's visits, although, as I think, she could detect the
+faithless intentions of the Prince in the presence of Clotilda full as
+well as she might sometimes see into Victor's soul in the presence of
+Joachime.... In fact, I should have begged the reader long since to be
+on the look-out; I deliver the facts with excusable stupidity, though
+with historic fidelity; if, now, there are therein fine, knavish,
+significant, intriguing traits and hints, it is without my knowledge,
+and therefore I cannot point them out to the reader with an index-hand,
+or announce them with a fire-drum,[274] but he himself--as he
+understands court histories--must know what I mean by my hints,--not
+_I_.
+
+With Joachime Victor would have gone on very well,--as he set down all
+faults which he found in other women, and not in her, to her credit as
+virtues, and as he grew more intimate with her personally; for the
+faults of maidens, like chocolate and tobacco, appear at first the more
+odd to the palate the better they taste to it afterward: he would have
+got on very well, but for two sharp corner-stones; but they were there.
+The first was,--for I will not reckon his slight annoyance at the short
+duration of her Christmas sentimentality,--that she was always finding
+fault with Clotilda, particularly with her "affected" virtue. The
+second was, that Clotilda sought her society quite as little: Victor
+could love no one whom Clotilda did not love. And now the race-weeks
+and visiting-Tarantula-dance hours of one man are at an end; but, alas!
+all posterity must yet cross the same hot _line_ of folly and of youth.
+
+
+
+
+                           24. DOG-POST-DAY.
+
+    Rouge.--Clotilda's Sickness.--The Play Of Iphigenia.--Difference
+               between Plebeian and Patrician[275] Love.
+
+
+On the 26th of February Victor found in the morning at Joachime's--the
+proud Clotilda. I know not whether it was by accident that she was
+here, or from politeness, or for the purpose of meeting more nearly a
+person whom Victor treated with some interest. But, O heavens! the
+cheeks of this Clotilda were pallid, her eyes were as if breathed over
+by an eternal tear, her voice emotional, as it were broken, and the
+pale marble body seemed only the image standing on the monument of the
+departed soul. Victor forgot the whole past, and his innermost soul
+wept for longing to succor her and wipe out from her life all dark
+winter landscapes. "I am as well as usual to-day," said she to his
+professional inquiry, and he knew not what to make of this unexpected
+paleness; he could not, in fact, to-day make anything, not so much as a
+joke or a piece of flattery; his soul, dissolved into sympathy, would
+not take any form; then, too, he was embarrassed. Clotilda soon took
+leave;--and it would not have been possible for him to-day, not for all
+Great Poland (that ice-floe beautifully ground down under the sledging
+of emigrating nations and crowns), after she was gone, to stay half an
+hour longer.
+
+Besides, he would have been obliged to go; for the page Matthieu called
+him to the Princess. The time was unusual; he could not wait to see,
+nor could he guess what was the matter. The Evangelist smiled (that he
+did now somewhat often when the Princess was the subject), and said:
+"To Princes and Princesses weighty things were trivial and trivial
+things weighty, as Leibnitz[276] said of himself. When the crown and a
+hair-pin fall from their heads together, they look first of all for the
+hair-pin."[277]
+
+By the way! It would be malice on my part toward the noble Matthieu, if
+I should longer suppress, the fact, that for some time he has been much
+more tender and ardent towards my hero,--which on any other man than
+he, I mean on a lurking villain, would be a Cain's-mark, and would have
+somewhat of the same meaning as the wagging of a cat's tail.
+
+Victor was astonished at the request of the Princess,--that he would
+cure Clotilda: that is to say, not at the fact of her making a
+request,--for she often did him that honor,--but at the intelligence
+that Clotilda, on whose cheeks he had hitherto seen the apple-blossoms
+of health at his soul's expense in the _race-weeks_, had worn only dead
+blossoms,--namely, rouge, which the Princess had been obliged to
+enforce upon her for the sake of having a uniformity of bloom with the
+remaining red copper-flowers[278] of the court. Agnola, who, like her
+rank, was quick, besought him further, when he was appointed to the
+medical upper-examining-commission, to enter on his office as soon as
+might be, this very day forthwith, at the play, where he would find the
+candidate for examination.
+
+And he found her. The play was a sparkling brilliant brought from
+Eldorado,--Goethe's _Iphigenia_. When he saw the patient again with the
+evening-red of the rouge, wherein she was to glow at another's behest
+even during her going down,--when he saw this still victim (marked
+red, as it were, for the altar), which he and others had driven away
+from its meadows, from its solitary flowers, to the midst of the
+sacrificial knives of the Court, mutely enduring, the extinction of its
+wishes, and when he compared with woman's dumb patience man's raging
+restlessness,--and when it seemed as if Clotilda had lent her sorrow to
+Iphigenia with the prayer, "Take my heart, take my voice and mourn with
+it,--mourn with it over thy separation from the fields of youth, over
+thy separation from a beloved brother,"--and when he saw how she tried
+to fasten her eyes more steadfastly on Iphigenia, when she pined for
+her lost brother, in order to control their overflow and their
+direction (towards her own brother in the Parterre, towards Flamin), O
+then did such great sorrows and their signs in his eyes and looks need
+a pretext like the omnipotence of genius, in order to be confounded
+with pangs growing out of poetic illusion!
+
+Never did a physician question his patient with greater sympathy and
+forbearance than did he Clotilda in the next interlude: he excused
+his importunity with the commands of the Princess. I must first
+state that the fair patient--although he had been hitherto a falling
+Peter, whom many a cock-crow had brought rather to tears than to
+repentance--nevertheless remained the _second person_, whom he never
+denied, ... i. e. whom, he never addressed with the frivolous,
+whimsical, bold, entrapping turns of conversation now so common with
+him. The _first person_--whom he esteemed too highly to write to him in
+the present state of his heart--was his Emanuel.
+
+Clotilda answered him, that "she was as well as ever; the only thing
+there was sickly about her," she said, smiling, "namely, her color, was
+already under the hands of a female surgeon, who, against her
+inclination, healed her only outwardly." This playful allusion to the
+rouging decreed by the Princess had the double design of excusing her
+painting and of diverting the Doctor from his tender-hearted
+seriousness. But the first was unnecessary,--since in the theatre even
+ladies who never wore rouge put it on as they entered the box and wiped
+it off on going out, in order not to hang there as the only quinces on
+a tree full of glowing Stettin-apples, and as, in fact, mineral cheeks
+were required of the whole female court-retinue as facial court livery.
+The second was vain; much more likely were the wounds of his heart to
+be aggravated by two causes: by that cold, almost fanatical resignation
+to fading away,--and by something inexpressibly mild and tender which,
+in the female face, often betokens the breaking heart, the failing
+life, as fruit by _soft_ yielding to _pressure_ announces its ripeness.
+
+O ye good creatures, ye women, while joy already beautifies you, is the
+reason why sorrow makes you still more beautiful and too touching
+_this_, that it so often overtakes you, or is it because sorrow borrows
+the dress of joy? Why must I here confess so passingly my pleasure at
+your endurance and veiling of sorrows, when at this moment before my
+fancy so many hearts full of tears sweep by with open countenances full
+of smiles, and win for your sex the praise of opening its heart as
+gladly to sorrow as to joy, as flowers, although they *unclose only
+before the sun, yet also burst open when it is overcast by a cloudy
+heaven?
+
+Victor, without being led off his track by her answer, continued:
+"Perhaps you cannot wean yourself from fair nature and from
+exercise,--these late hours, which I myself feel"----She prevented his
+finishing the sentence, to remind him that she had, he must remember,
+brought her present complexion with her from home. One sees, however,
+in this reminder more forbearance than truth; for she would not
+complain of her court office before the very one who had helped her
+gain it.----Victor, who saw her sickliness so clearly, and yet knew not
+how to propound another question, stood there dumfounded. Their own
+silence loosens reserved people's tongues: Clotilda began of herself,
+"As I do not know what harms me here, except the rouge, I beg my
+physician to prohibit me this dietetic fault," i. e. to persuade the
+Princess into a revocation of her rouge-edict. "I should be glad," she
+continued, "to gain some resemblance at least to two such good friends
+as Giulia and Emanuel,"--i. e. a pale color, or else the notion of a
+speedy death. Victor threw out a hasty "Yes," and turned his smarting
+eye toward the rising curtain.
+
+Never, haply, were the scenes of players and hearers more like each
+other. Iphigenia was Clotilda; the wild Orestes, her brother, was her
+brother Flamin; the soft, radiant Pylades was his friend Victor. And as
+Flamin stood below in the pit with his cloudy face,--(he came only for
+the sake of seeing his sister more conveniently,)--then did it seem to
+our and his friend as if he were addressed by him, when Orestes said to
+Pylades:--
+
+
+     "Remind me not of those enchanting days,
+      When a free room thy house afforded me:
+      Thy noble father wisely, tenderly,
+      Nursed the half-stiffened blossoms of my youth;
+      When thou, an ever-gay associate,
+      Even as a motley, light-winged butterfly
+      Plays round a dark-hued flower, day after day
+      Didst dance and hover round me with new life,
+      And win thy bliss a way into my soul."
+
+
+Clotilda felt quite as painfully that they were playing her life on the
+stage, and struggled against her eyes.... But when Iphigenia said to
+her brother Orestes,--
+
+
+     "O hear me! Look on me! See how my heart
+      Opens at last, after so long a time,
+      To the sweet bliss of kissing that dear brow,
+      Most precious treasure earth yet holds for me, ....
+      O let me,--let me--for in brighter waves
+      Not from Parnassus leaps the eternal stream
+      From rock to rock down to the golden vale,
+      Than from my bosom joy outgushing flows
+      And like a sea of bliss enclasps me round";--
+
+
+and when Clotilda mournfully surveyed the greater interval of sorrows
+and days between herself and her brother; then gushed up the inner
+fountains and filled her large eyes, so often fixed upon the heavens,
+and a quick bending forward hid the sisterly tear from all eyes
+untouched by emotion. But it did not escape the feeling eyes with which
+her friend beside her imitated her.... And here a virtuous voice said
+within Victor: "Disclose to her that thou knowest the secret of her
+relationship,--lift off from this sorely oppressed heart the load of
+silence: perhaps she is withering under a grief which a confidant may
+cool and take away!" Ah, to listen to this voice was indeed the least
+with which he could content his infinite sympathy! He said in an
+extremely low tone, and which emotion rendered almost unintelligible to
+her: "My father has long since disclosed to me, that Iphigenia knows
+the presence of her brother and of my friend." Clotilda turned suddenly
+and blushingly towards him; for a more minute explanation he let his
+eyes glide down to Flamin; turning pale; she looked away and said
+nothing; but during the whole play her heart seemed to be far more
+compressed, and she was compelled now to stifle still more tears and
+sighs than before. At last in the midst of her sadness she gave
+gratitude its rights, and whispered to him for his sympathy and his
+confidence, as if with a dying smile, her thanks. He laid upon the
+distaff of the conversation entirely new and foreign material, because
+he would fain, during the spinning, get a clearer and more certain
+light upon the sad impression which his confession seemed to have
+produced. He inquired after the latest letters from Emanuel. She
+replied: "I only wrote to him yesterday all through the eclipse of the
+moon; he cannot answer me often, because writing pains his breast."
+Now, as the eclipse of the 25th of February began at twenty minutes
+after ten in the evening, at eleven o'clock and forty-one minutes was
+at its climax, and at one o'clock and two minutes was over: accordingly
+Victor, as physician, could fall upon the medical sinner with sermons
+and hammers of the law and pronounce the verdict; now, it was no
+wonder. Pass it by, Doctor! These dear creatures can more easily obey a
+man--the Ten Commandments,--books,--Virtue,--the Devil himself more
+easily, than the Dietician. Clotilda said: "The midnight hours are
+simply my only free hours,--and Maienthal, indeed, I can never forget."
+
+"Ah, how could one?" said he.
+
+The music before the last act, and the tragic tone, and the sorrows
+inspired her, and she continued: "Did not one drink of _Lethe_, when
+one trod the shores of Elysium and when one left it?" ... She paused.
+"I would drink of no Lethe, not in the first case, still less in the
+_last_,--no!" And never was "No" said in a lower, softer, more
+slow-drawn tone. In Victor's heart a three-edged compassion passed
+painfully to and fro, as he imagined to himself Clotilda mocked by
+fate, writing and weeping in the midnight under a moon dismembered and
+beclouded by earth's shadow; he said nothing, he stared rigidly into
+the mournful scenes of the stage, and still wept on when the joyous
+ones had, there, already evolved themselves in their place.
+
+At home he made his brain-fibres Ariadne's threads to extricate himself
+from the labyrinth of  the causes of her trouble, and particularly of
+the _new_ one which had seemed to come upon her at his disclosure. But
+he remained in the labyrinth; undoubtedly grief begat the sickness, but
+who begat the grief? It would be hard for these poor, tender
+butterflies, if there were more than one mortal affliction; in every
+lane, in every house, thou wilt find a wife or a daughter who has to go
+to church or to the Tragedy to sigh, and who must go up into the upper
+story to weep; but this aggregated trouble is worried away with smiles,
+and years increase for a long time side by side with the tears. On the
+contrary, there is a grief which breaks them off,--think of that, dear
+Victor, in the joyful hours of thy general love,[279] and think of it,
+all ye who with warm, loving hands draw the throbbing heart of such a
+delicate creature out of its breast, to take it into your own by the
+side of your own heart, and warm it forever! When you then throw
+away this hot heart, which you have torn out like a butterfly's
+honey-proboscis: still, like that, it continues to quiver, but then it
+grows cold, and erelong beats no more.
+
+Unhappy love, then, was the gnawing honey-dew on this flower, Sebastian
+concluded. Naturally he thought of himself first; but all his nicest
+observations, his now so familiar _ricochet-glances_ out of the _corner
+of his eye_ had long since convinced him that he had to ascribe the
+distinction, which she did not deny him, more to her impartiality than
+to her inclination. Who else it could be at Court,--that was a thing
+which he in vain applied one electrometer after another to draw out.
+And he knew beforehand that he should experiment in vain, since
+Clotilda would baffle all auscultation of her inner state, if she had
+an unreciprocated inclination; reason was with her the wax, which they
+stick to one end of the magnetic needle, in order to obviate or conceal
+the sinking (_inclination_) of the other. Nevertheless, he made up his
+mind the next time to hold some divining-rods to her soul.----
+
+I must here utter a thought, which may discover some sense and my
+general speculation in the matter. My Dog-Post-Master Knef did not
+probably foresee that I should calculate the year and the duration of
+this whole story merely from the lunar eclipse of the 25th of February,
+which he announced, just as, in fact, great astronomers, by means of
+the moon's phases, found out so much about the earth's geographical
+longitude. 1793 was the year in which what is related in this chapter
+occurred: I am good for that; for as, at all events, the whole story,
+as is well known, takes place in the ninth decade of the eighteenth
+century, and as no lunar eclipse of a 25th of February is to be found
+there at all, except in the year 1793, i. e. the present year, my
+proposition is made out. To make assurance doubly sure, I have compared
+all the changes of moon and weather occurring in this book with those
+of 1792 and 1793; and all fitted together beautifully;--the reader
+should also reckon it after me. It is uncommonly gratifying to me,
+that, consequently, as I write in July, the history follows in a
+half-year from my description.--
+
+Victor delayed not his visit to the Princess's, that he might there
+announce the reserved Clotilda as a complete nervous patient. He
+himself laughed inwardly at the expression,--and at the Doctors,--and
+at their nervous cures,--and said, that, as formerly the French kings
+in their treatment of the goitre had to say, "The King touches thee,
+but God heals thee," so should physicians say, The city and country
+physician feels thy pulse, but God works the cure. Here, however, he
+had three good intentions in giving out that she was a nervous
+sufferer: first, that of gaining for her the abolition of her
+Court-vassalage,--at least her deliverance from the precise office of
+maid of honor, because the splinter of the reproach was continually
+festering in his heart, "It is my fault that she is obliged to be
+here"; further, of securing for her in advance permission to take the
+spring and country air, in case she should by and by sue for it;
+finally, of releasing her from her compulsory resemblance to those
+ladies on whose lead-colored faces, as on the leaden soldiers of
+children, the red daily wears off and is daily renewed. But as Agnola
+herself painted, he was obliged, out of courtesy, as physician, to
+forbid it to both at once. The Princess countersigned all his petitions
+very graciously: only as to the rouge-article she gave, in regard to
+herself, no resolution at all, and in regard to Clotilda the following:
+she had nothing to say against her appearing in her presence, except on
+court days and at the play, without rouge; and she would willingly
+grant her a dispensation from both, unless her health was restored.
+
+He could hardly wait for the moment of taking leave, so impatient was
+he to carry this imperial-recess or resolution to the beloved patient.
+He himself wondered at this complaisance of the Princess, with whom,
+generally, petitions were sins, and who refused nothing--except what
+was asked. His perplexity was now only this,--how to communicate to
+Clotilda the indulgences of the Princess, without the offensive
+confession of having made a plea of her illness. But out of this slight
+evil a great one extricated him: when he came into her presence, she
+looked ten times as sick as she had day before yesterday, at the
+disclosure of her relationship: her blossoms, heavy with cold dew,
+drooped to the earth.
+
+Gait and posture were unchanged; there was the same external
+joyousness, but the glance was often too fluttering, often too fixed;
+across the lily-cheeks darted often a hectic flush, through the lower
+lip at one moment a subdued convulsion.... At this point sympathy
+frightened her friend out of the bounds of courtesy, and he told her
+outright the consent of the Princess. He summoned to the aid of his
+burdened heart his previous court-boldness, and commanded her to make
+the coming spring her apothecary's shop, and the flowers her medicinal
+herbs, and her--fancy her pharmacy. "You seem," said she, smiling, "to
+count me among the larks, who must always have _green turf_ in their
+cage. However, that my Princess and you may not have had your kindness
+for nothing, I will, finally, do it. I confess to you, I am at least a
+_valide imaginaire_.[280] I feel myself well." ... She interrupted
+herself to question him, with the frankness of virtue and with an eye
+swimming in sisterly love, about her brother, whether he was happy and
+contented, how he worked, how he filled his position? She told him how
+sad a burden these questions, hitherto locked up so deeply in her soul,
+had been to her and she thanked him for the gift of his confidence with
+a warmth which he took as a delicate reproof of his previous silence.
+Of old she always loved to stand in a flower-garland of children;
+but in Flachsenfingen she had gathered still more of these little
+nebulous stars about her brightness, and indeed for a peculiar reason,
+namely, to cover the fact, that she drew to herself Giulia, a little
+five-years-old grandchild of the city Senior, with whom her brother
+resided, as his unwitting biographer and news-carrier. More than three
+times he felt as if he must fall at the feet of this lily-white angel,
+borne higher and higher by her cloud, and say with outspread arms:
+"Clotilda, be my friend, before thy death,--my old love for thee is
+long since crushed out, for thou art too good for me and for all of us;
+but I will be thy friend; my heart will I conquer for thee; for thee
+will I resign my heaven. O, thou wilt, besides, not live to see the
+evening dew of age, thou wilt soon close thy eyes, and the morning dew
+still hangs therein!" For he held her soul to be a pearl, whose
+mussel-body lies open in the dissolving sun, that the pearl may the
+earlier be dislodged. On leaving, he could with the frankness of the
+friend, which had taken the place of the lover's reserve, offer a
+repetition of his visits. Altogether he treated her now more warmly and
+unconstrainedly; first, because he had so utterly renounced her noble
+heart, that he wondered at his former bold claims to it; secondly,
+because the feeling of his disinterested, self-sacrificing honesty
+towards her poured balm on his previous stings of remorse.
+
+To this sickness was added an evening or an event, which the reader, I
+think, will not know how to understand. Victor was to take Joachime to
+the play, and her brother, was to come and fetch him first. I have
+already twice set it down, that for some weeks Matthieu had no longer
+been so repulsive to him as a mouse is to an elephant: he had, after
+all, found out a single good side, dug out some moral yellow mica
+attaching to him,--namely, the greatest attachment to his sister
+Joachime, who alone had the key to his whole heart, closed to his
+parents, the sole claim on his secrets and his services; secondly, he
+loved in Matthieu what the Minister condemned,--the spirit-of-salt of
+freedom; thirdly, it is so with us all: when he have heated our
+heart for some female one out of a family, we afterwards extend the
+stove-warmth to the whole kin and trenchership,--brothers, nephews,
+fathers; fourthly,  Matthieu was continually praised and excused by his
+sister. When Victor arrived at Joachime's, she had with her headache
+and dressing-maids,--finery and pain were increasing; at last she sent
+off the live fitting-machines, and so soon as she was hardened into a
+Venus out of the foam of powder and jewel boxes, rouge-rags and
+_mouchoirs de Vénus_, _poudres d'odeur_ and lip-pomades, then she sat
+down and said she should stay at home on account of headache. Victor
+stayed too, and very gladly. Whoso knows not the framework and cellular
+work of the human heart will wonder that Victor's friendship for
+Clotilda brought a whole honey-comb of love for Joachime into his
+cells; it was delightful to him when they visited and embraced each
+other; he sought not in the blessing-fingers of the Pope so much
+healing virtue as in Clotilda's; her friendship seemed to him an excuse
+for his, and to set Joachime on the pedestal of esteem, to which with
+all his windlasses he had not been able to raise her. Even the sense of
+his increasing worth gave him new right to love; and to-day even
+Clotilda's crape and princely hat would have asserted its helmet
+ornaments on Joachime's aching and more than commonly patient head. To
+her continued flirtation with the pair of fools he had long since
+adapted himself, because he knew very well _which one_ among the three
+wise men from the East she had not for a fool, but for an adorer. But
+to return!
+
+Matthieu, who also stayed at home to please his sister,--he and Victor
+and she made the entire band of this _concert spirituel_. Joachime on
+the sofa leaned back her delicate, sick head against the wall and
+looked at the inlaid floor, and her drooping eyelids made her more
+beautiful. The Evangelist went out and came in. Victor, as he always
+did, dashed round the chamber. It was a very fine evening, and I wish
+this of mine were so. The conversation turned upon love; and Victor
+asserted the existence of two kinds,--the citizenly, and the
+_distingué_ or French. He loved the French in books and as a general
+love, but he hated it the moment it was to be the only love; he
+described it to-day thus: "Take a little ice,--a little heart,--a
+little wit,--a little paper,--a little time,--a little incense; pour
+together and put into two persons of rank; in that way you have a good,
+true French Fontenellian love." "You forgot," added Mat, "one
+ingredient,--a small amount of senses, at least a _fifth_ or _sixth_
+part, which must be added to the medicine as _adjuvans_ or
+_constituens_.[281] Meanwhile, it has at least the merit of shortness;
+love, like a tragedy, should be restricted to unity of time, namely, to
+the space of one day, that it may not take still more resemblance to
+the tragic. But describe now common love!"
+
+_Victor_: "That I prefer."
+
+_Matthieu_: "Not I. It is merely a longer madness than anger. _On y
+pleure, on y crie, on y soupire, on y ment, on y enrage, on y tue, on y
+meurt,--enfin, on se donne à tous les diables, pour avoir son
+ange_.[282] Our talks are to-day for once full of arabesques and _à la
+grecque_: I will make you a cookery-book receipt for a good citizenly
+love: take two young and large hearts,--wash them clean in baptismal
+water or printer's ink of German romances,--pour on them warm blood and
+tears,--set them on the fire and under the full moon, and let them
+boil,--stir them briskly with a dagger,--take them out and garnish
+them, like crabs, with forget-me-not or other wild-flowers, and serve
+them up warm: in that way you have a savory citizenly heart-soup."[283]
+
+Matthieu further added, that "in the ardent commonalty-love there was
+more agony than amusement; in it, as in Dante's poem, the Hell was
+worked out best, and the Heaven worst. The older a maiden or a pickled
+herring was, so much the darker was the eye in both, and the eye was
+made dark by love. Every lady in one of the higher circles ought to be
+glad that she needs to retain nothing of the man's to whom she is
+chained but his portrait in the ring, as Prometheus, when Jupiter had
+once sworn to leave him soldered for thirty thousand years to Caucasus,
+wore during the whole period only a small bit of this Bastille on his
+hand in the shape of a finger-ring." Whereupon Matthieu darted out, as
+he always did after witty explosions. Victor loved the bitterest and
+most unjust satire in another's mouth, as a work of art; he forgave
+all, and continued cheerful.
+
+Joachime then said, jestingly: "If, then, no style of love is good for
+anything, as you two have proved, there is nothing left for us but to
+hate."
+
+"Surely not," said he, "your respected brother has simply not said a
+true word. Imagine to yourself, that I were the poor people's
+catechist[284] and in love. I am in love with the second daughter of
+the _pastor primarius_; her part is that of a listening-sister;[285]
+for maidens in citizenly life know not how to talk, at least they can
+do it better in hatred than in love. The poor's catechist has little
+_bel esprit_, but much _saint esprit_, much honesty, much truth, too
+much soft-heartedness, and infinite love. The catechist cannot spin out
+any gallant intrigue for several weeks or months, still less can he
+dispute the Pastor's second daughter into love, like a _roué_;--he
+holds his peace to keep up his hope, but with a heart full of eternal
+love, full of devoted wishes, trembling and silent, he follows every
+step of the loved and--loving one; but she guesses not his feelings,
+nor he hers. And then she dies.... But before she dies, comes the pale
+catechist disconsolate to the side of her dying bed, and presses her
+trembling hand ere it relaxes, and gives the cold eye one more tear of
+joy ere it stiffens, and breaks in even upon the pangs of the wrestling
+soul with the soft spring sound, 'I love thee.' When he has said it,
+she dies of the last joy, and then he loves no one on earth any more."
+...
+
+The past had come over his soul. Tears hung in his eyes, and confounded
+in a singular obscurity the image of the sick Clotilda with that of
+Joachime;--he saw and conceived a form which was not present;--he
+pressed the hand of the one that looked on him, and thought not that
+she might refer all to herself.
+
+Suddenly Matthieu entered, smiling, and his sister smiled with him, in
+order to explain everything, and said, "The court-physician has been
+taking the trouble to refute thee."
+
+Victor, suddenly chilled, replied ambiguously and bitterly: "You will
+comprehend, Herr von Schleunes, that it is easiest for me to put you to
+flight when you are not in the field."
+
+Mat transfixed him with his eyes; but Victor cast his down and repented
+his bitterness. The sister continued indifferently: "I think my brother
+is often in the condition of changing with the fashion." He received it
+with a sunny smile, and thought, as did Victor, that she alluded to his
+gallant adventures and sham-fights with women of all ranks that sit at
+the Diet. But when she had sent him off to inquire of her mother who
+was coming to the _cercle_ this evening, she said to the Medicus: "You
+do not know what I meant. We have at court a sick lady, who is the very
+incarnation of _your_ Pastor's daughter,--and my brother has not so
+much nor so little spirit as to act the poor's catechist." Victor
+started back, broke off and took his leave.
+
+Why? How so? On what account? But does not the reader perceive, then,
+that the sick lady must be Clotilda, who seeks to escape Mat's fine
+approaches within ear-shot and bow-shot of her heart? In fact, Victor
+had seen well enough that the Evangelist had been hitherto playing a
+more devoted part towards Clotilda than before her entrance into his
+Escurial and robber's castle he could carry on; but Victor had ascribed
+this politeness simply to the fact of her having there her quarters.
+But now the map of his plan lay open there: he had intentionally met a
+person who was indifferent towards him with the show of contempt
+(which, however, he finely directed more at her future small income
+than at her personal attractions), in order thereby to win her
+attention,--that next-door neighbor of love,--and afterward, by a
+sudden change to complaisance, to win something more than attention.
+"O, thou canst win nothing!" every sigh in Victor exclaimed. And yet it
+gave him pain, that this noble woman, this angel, must strike such an
+adversary with her wings. Now there were thirty things at once
+suspicious to him. Joachime's disclosure and coldness, Matthieu's
+smile, and--everything.
+
+So far this chapter, to which I have nothing more to append than some
+mature thoughts. Of course, one sees plainly, that poor Victor
+mutilates his soul to the size of every female one, as that tyrant did
+the bedfellows to the length of their bed.[286] To be sure, respect is
+the mother of love; but the daughter is often some years older than the
+mother. He takes back one hope of female worth after another. Latest of
+all, indeed, did he give up his demand or expectation of that sublime
+_Indian_ sense of eternity, which imparts to us, shadowy figures
+hanging in the magic smoke of life, an inextinguishable luminous point
+for self-consciousness, and which lifts us above more than _one_ earth;
+but as he saw that women, among all resemblances to Clotilda, acquired
+this last, and as he bethought himself that a worldly life grinds down
+all the greatness in man, as the weather gnaws away from statues and
+gravestones precisely the _relieved parts_, there wanted nothing to his
+handing over to Joachime the declaration of love which had long been
+fairly written out, nothing except, on her part, a misfortune,--a wet
+eye, a storm of the soul, a buskin. In more perspicuous words, he said
+to himself: "I wish she were a sentimental ninny and absolutely
+intolerable. Then when, some time or other, she had her eyes right
+full, and her heart too, and then, when I could not tell, for emotion,
+where my head was standing,--then I could advance and take out my heart
+and reach it to her and say, It is poor Bastian's, only keep it." It
+seems to me as if I heard him in thought softly add, "To whom else
+could I give it?"
+
+That he really had the first thought, we see from the fact that he
+inserted it in his diary, from which my correspondent draws everything,
+and which he, with the sincerity of the freest soul, made for his
+father, in order as it were to atone for his faults by protocolling
+them. His Italian lackey did hardly anything but engross it.---Did it
+not depend on the dog and his news-box, his declaration of love should
+take place this very day: I would break an arm of Joachime's,--or lay
+her in the sick-bed,--or blow out the Minister's lamp of life, or bring
+on some disaster or other in her house,----and then I would conduct my
+hero to the suffering heroine, and say: "When I have gone, kneel down
+and hand her thy heart." But in this way the chemical process of his
+love-making may last full as long as a process at law, and I am
+prepared for three quires.
+
+But here I will confess something which the reader's pride conceals:
+that he and I, at the entrance of every lady in these Dog-Post-Days,
+have made a _mis-shot_ of _salute_,--every one of them we have taken for
+the heroine of the hero,--at first Agatha,--then Clotilda,--then, when
+he enclosed his declaration of love in the watch of the Princess, said,
+"I see now beforehand through the whole business." Then we both said,
+"After all, we were right about Clotilda." Then in distress I laid hold
+on Marie, and said, "I shall not reveal anything further." At last
+it turns out to be one whom none of us had thought of (at least not
+I),--Joachime.--So it may fare with myself, when I marry....
+
+Before passing from the Post-Day to the intercalary day, the following
+additional minutes are to be passed: Clotilda put off her illegitimate
+cheeks, her _joues_[287] _de Paris_, her rouge, and seldomer exposed
+now her withering heart to the shaping of the court napkin-press. The
+Prince, who for her sake had attended as a transient hearer in the
+lecture-hall of his consort, stayed away somewhat often, and then
+called at Schleunes's: nevertheless, the Princess had magnanimity
+enough not to make our Victor atone, by the taking back of her
+gratitude, for the withdrawal of January's favor.--In Victor there was
+a long war, whether he should impart to Clotilda's brother the new
+proofs of her sisterly love:--at last,--moved by Flamin's suffering,
+impoverished heart, stung by reports and rascals and suspicion, and by
+the thought that he had been able hitherto to give so little pleasure
+to this ingenuous friend,--he told him almost everything (_except_ the
+relationship).
+
+P. S.--The undersigned testifies, by request, that the undersigned has
+completed his 24th Post-Day in due order on the last day of July, or
+Messidor. On the island of St. John's, 1793.
+
+                                     JEAN PAUL,
+
+                       _Mining-Superintendent of Scheerau_.
+
+
+                         SIXTH INTERCALARY DAY.
+
+      Concerning the Wilderness and the Promised Land of Humanity.
+
+There are vegetable men, animal men, and divine men.--
+
+When we were to be dreamed, an angel grew drowsy and fell asleep and
+dreamed. Then came _Phantasus_,[288] and swept broken meteorological,
+phenomena, things like nights, fragments of chaos, conglomerated
+plants, before him, and disappeared with them.
+
+Then came _Phobetor_, who drove herds of beasts along before him, that
+murdered and grazed as they passed, and disappeared with them.
+
+Then came _Morpheus_ and played before him with happy children, with
+crowned mothers, with shapes that kissed each other, and with fleeting
+mortals, and when the angel awoke with ecstasy, Morpheus and the human
+race and the world's history had disappeared....
+
+--At present the angel still sleeps and dreams,--we are still in his
+dream,--only _Phobetor_ is with him, and Morpheus still waits for
+Phobetor with his beasts to disappear....
+
+But let us, instead of dreaming, think and hope; and for the present
+ask: will _vegetable_ men, _animal_ men, at last be succeeded by
+_divine_ men? Does the _going_ of the world-clock betray as much design
+as the building of it, and has it a _dial-plate_ wheel and an _index
+hand_?
+
+One cannot (with a well-known philosopher) reason directly from final
+causes in _Physics_ to final causes in _History_, any more than I, in
+the individual, can deduce from the teleological (intentional)
+structure of a man a teleological biography of the same, or any more
+than, from the ingenious structure of animals, I call infer a
+continuous plan in their universal history. Nature is iron, always the
+same, and the wisdom shown in her framework is never obscured; the
+human race is free, and, like the infusorial animal, the multiform
+Vorticelle, assumes every moment, now regular, now anomalous shapes.
+Every physical disorder is only the hull of an order, every foul spring
+is the hull of a fair autumn; but are, then, our vices the buds of our
+virtues, and is the earthly fall of a continually sinking villain
+nothing but a disguised ascension of his to heaven?--And is there an
+object in the life of a Nero? Then I could just as well take back and
+reverse all and make out virtues to be the heart-leaves of disguised
+vices. But if, as many a one does, we carry the abuse of language so
+far as to reverse _moral_ height and depth, like _geometrical_,
+according to the _point of view_, as _positive_ and _negative_
+magnitudes; if, therefore, all gouty knobs, spotted fevers, and
+_lead_-[289] or _silver_-colics of the human race are nothing but a
+different kind of healthiness: then we certainly need not ask whether
+man will ever get well; in that case he could never in any possible
+maladies be anything but well.
+
+If a monk of the tenth century had shut himself up in a fit of
+melancholy, and meditated on the earth, not however on its end, but on
+its future: would not, in his dreams, the thirteenth century have been
+already a brighter one, and the eighteenth merely a glorified tenth?
+
+Our weather-prophesyings from _present_ temperature are logically
+correct and historically false, because new casualties, an earthquake,
+a comet, reverse the currents of the whole atmosphere. Can the
+above-imagined monk correctly calculate, if he does not assume such
+future magnitudes as America, Gunpowder, and Printer's ink?--A new
+religion, a new Alexander, a new disease, a new Franklin, can break,
+swallow up, dam, turn back the forest stream whose course and contents
+we propose to reduce on our parchment. There lie still four quarters of
+the globe full of enchained savage races;--their chain daily grows
+thinner,--time unlooses it;--what desolation, at least what changes,
+must they not bring about on the little _bowling-green_ of our
+cultivated countries? Nevertheless, all nations of the earth must one
+day be fused together and be purified in a common fermentation, if ever
+this atmosphere of life is to be cleared up.
+
+Can we draw from some miniature earthquakes and volcanoes, which we
+ourselves have produced with iron-filings and aquafortis, (in this
+case, types and printer's ink,) conclusions as to the Ætna eruptions,
+i. e. from the revolutions of the few cultivated peoples as to those of
+the uncultivated? Since we may assume that the human race lives as many
+thousands of years as the individual does years, may we venture from
+the sixth year to set the horoscope of youth and manhood? Add to this
+that the biography of this childish period is precisely the most
+meagre, and that awakened nations--almost all quarters of the globe are
+as yet full of sleeping ones--in _one_ year produce more historical
+material, and _consequently_ more historians, than a sleep-buried
+Africa in a century. We shall, therefore, _then_ be best able to
+prophesy from universal history, when the awaking nations shall have
+appended to it their million or two supplementary volumes.--All savage
+nations seem to have been under _one_ stamp; on the contrary, the mint
+of culture coins each one differently. The North American and the old
+German resemble each other more strongly than Germans do Germans of
+neighboring centuries. Neither the Golden Bull, nor the _Magna Charta_,
+nor the _Code Noir_, could Aristotle inlay into his forms of government
+and obedience; else he would have extended them; but are we then
+confident of foreseeing any better the future national convention in
+Mongolia, or the Decretal Letters and Extravagants of the enlightened
+Dalai-Lama, or the Recesses of the Arab Imperial Bench of Knights?
+Since Nature coins no people with _one_ mint-stamp or one hand alone,
+but with thousands at once,--hence on the German race is there a
+greater multitude of impressions than on the shield of Achilles,--how
+do we, who cannot even calculate the past, but simpler, revolutions of
+the globe, expect to look into the moral ones of its inhabitants?
+
+Of all that follows from these premises I believe the opposite,
+excepting the necessity of prophetic modesty. Scepticism, which makes
+us, instead of slow to believe, unbelieving, and instead of the _eyes_
+proposes to purge the _light_, becomes nonsense and the most fearful
+philosophical impotence and atony.
+
+Man regards his century or his half-century as the culmination of
+light, as a festal-day, to which all other centuries lead only as
+week-days. He knows only two golden ages,--the one at the beginning of
+the world, and the one at the end of it,--by which he understands only
+his own; he finds history to be like great woods, in the middle of
+which are silence, night-birds, and birds of prey, and whose borders
+only are filled with light and song.--Certainly all things serve me;
+but I too serve all. As Nature, who in her eternity knows no loss of
+time, in her inexhaustibleness no loss of power, has no other law of
+frugality assigned her than that of prodigality,--as she, with _eggs_
+and _seed-corns_, ministers equally well to _nourishment_ and to
+_propagation_,[290] and with an undeveloped germ-world sustains half a
+developed one,--as her way leads over no smooth bowling-alley, but over
+alps and seas;--our little heart must needs misunderstand her, whether
+in its hopes or in its fears; it must, as it becomes enlightened,
+reciprocally interchange _morning_ and _evening red_; it must, in
+its contentment, now regard after-summer as _spring_, and now
+_after-winter_ as _autumn_. _Moral_ revolutions mislead us more than
+_physical_, because the former according to their nature occupy a
+_greater_ play-room and space of time than the latter,--and yet the
+Dark Ages are nothing but a dipping into the shadow of _Saturn_, or an
+eclipse of the sun of short duration. A man who should be six thousand
+years old, would say to the six creation-days of the world's history,
+They are very good.
+
+But one should never set _moral_ and _physical_ revolutions and
+developments too near to each other. All Nature has no other motions
+than _former_ ones; the circle is her path, she has no other years than
+Platonic,--but man alone is _changeable_, and the straight line or the
+zigzag describes his course. A sun has its eclipses as well as the
+moon, has its bloom and decay like a flower, but also its
+_palingenesia_ and renovation. But there lies in the human race the
+necessity of an everlasting mutation; yet here there are only
+_ascending_ and _descending_ signs, no culmination; they do not
+necessarily draw one another after them, as in physics, and have no
+extreme limit. No people, no period returns; in physics, all must come
+back again. It is only accidental, not necessary, that nations, at a
+certain age and stage of progress, and on a certain rotten round of the
+ladder, fall again,--one only confounds the _last_ step, from which
+nations fall, with the _highest_; the Romans, with whom not single
+rounds, but the whole ladder broke, were not necessitated to sink by a
+culture which does not equal even our own.[291] Nations have no age, or
+old age with them often precedes youth. Even with individuals the
+crab's-walk of the mind in old age is only accidental; still less has
+virtue in them a summer-solstice. Humanity has then the capacity of an
+endless improvement; but has it the hope also?--
+
+The disturbance of the _equipoise_ of his own faculties makes the
+individual man miserable; the _inequality_ of citizens, the
+_inequality_ of nations, makes the earth miserable; just as lightnings
+arise from the neighborhood of the ebb and flow of the ether, and all
+storms from unequal distributions of air. But fortunately it lies in
+the nature of mountains to fill the valleys.
+
+Not inequality of goods,--for the majority of voices and fists on the
+part of the poor balances in the scale the power of the rich,--but
+inequality of culture, does most to create and distribute the political
+fly-presses and forcing-pumps. The _Lex agraria_ in the fields of
+science passes over at last into the physical fields. Since the tree of
+knowledge has thrust out its branches from the school windows of
+philosophy and the church windows of the priesthood into the common
+garden, all nations have become stronger.--Unequal cultivation chains
+the West Indies to the feet of Europe, Helots to Spartans, and the iron
+hollow-head[292] with the trigger on the negro's tongue presupposes a
+hollow-head of another kind.
+
+With such a frightful disparity among nations in power, wealth,
+culture, only a universal rush of storms from all points of the compass
+can terminate in a lasting calm. A perpetual balance of Europe
+presuppose a balance of the four remaining parts of the world, which
+one may, deducting small librations, promise our globe. In future men
+will quite as little discover a salvage as an island. One people must
+draw another out of pits blundering years. A more equal culture will
+conclude commercial treaties with more equal advantages. The longest
+rainy months of humanity--which always fell upon the time of national
+transplantations, just as one always sets out flowers on cloudy
+days--have spent themselves.
+
+One spectre still remains from the midnight, which reaches far into the
+hours of light,--War. But the claws and bill of the armorial eagle grow
+on, till, like the boar's tusks, they crook up and make themselves
+useless. As it was calculated in regard to Vesuvius, that it contained
+material for only forty-three eruptions more,--so might one also reckon
+the number of future wars. This long tempest, which already for six
+thousand years has been standing over our planet, will continue to
+storm till clouds and earth have charged each other full with an
+_equal_ measure of electric matter.
+
+_All_ nations become illuminated only in joint fermentation; and the
+precipitate is blood and dead men's bones. Were the earth narrowed
+to one half of its size, then would the time of its moral--and
+physical--development be shortened one half.
+
+With wars the strongest drag-chains of the sciences are cut off. Once
+war-machines were the sowing-machines of new knowledges, while they
+crushed old harvests; now it is the press which scatters the pollen
+more widely and gently. Instead of an Alexander, Greece would need now
+to send to Asia nothing but a--compositor; the conqueror grafts, the
+author sows.
+
+It is a characteristic of enlightenment that, although it still leaves
+to individuals the possibility of the illusion and weakening of vice,
+nevertheless it releases nations from company-vices and national
+deceptions,--e. g. from wrecking, piracy. The best and worst deeds we
+do in company; war is an example. The slave-trade must in our days,
+unless indeed the trade in subjects begins, come to an end.[293]
+
+The highest and steepest thrones stand, like the highest mountains, in
+the warmest lands. The political mountains, like the physical, daily
+grow lower (especially when they spout fire), and must at last be with
+the valleys in a common plain.
+
+From all this follows:--
+
+There comes one day a golden age, which every wise and virtuous man
+even now enjoys, and when men will find it easier to live well because
+they will find it easier to live indeed,--when men will have, not more
+pleasure (for this honey they draw from every flower and leaf-louse),
+but more virtue,--when the people Will take part in thinking, and the
+thinker--in working,[294] in order that he may save himself the need of
+Helots,--when military and judicial murder shall be condemned, and only
+occasionally cannon-balls shall be turned up with the plough. When that
+time comes, then will a preponderance of good no more stop the machine
+by frictions. When it comes, then will the necessity no longer lie in
+human nature of degenerating again and again breeding tempests (for
+heretofore the noble element has merely kept up a flying fight with the
+overpowering evil), just as, according to Forster, even on the hot
+island of St. Helena[295] there are no storms.
+
+When this festal day comes, then will our children's children be--no
+more. We stand now in the evening and see at the close of our dark day
+the sun go down with a red-hot glory, and promise us behind the last
+cloud the still, serene sabbath-day of humanity; but our posterity have
+yet to travel through a night full of wind, and through a cloud full of
+poison, till at last over a happier earth an eternal morning-wind full
+of blossom-spirits, moving on before the sun, expelling all clouds,
+shall breathe on men without a sigh. Astronomy promises the earth an
+eternal vernal equinox;[296] and history promises it a higher one;
+perhaps the two eternal springs may coincide.--
+
+Since man disappears among men, we downcast ones must erect ourselves
+before humanity. When I think of the Greeks, I see that our hopes move
+faster than fate.--As one travels by night with lights over the icy
+Alps, in order not to be terrified at the abysses and at the long road,
+so does fate spread night around us, and hands us only torches for the
+way immediately before us, that we may not worry ourselves about the
+chasms of the future, and the distance of the goal.--There were
+centuries when humanity was led with bandaged eyes--from one prison to
+another;--there were other centuries when spectres rattled and
+overturned all night long, and in the morning nothing was disturbed;
+there can be no other centuries except those in which individuals die,
+but nations rise, and in which nations decay, but mankind rises: when
+mankind itself sinks and falls to ruins, and ends with the scattering
+of the globe in a dust-cloud ... what shall console us?--
+
+A veiled eye behind the bounds of time, an infinite heart beyond
+the world. There is a higher order of things than we can
+demonstrate,--there is a Providence in the world's history and in every
+one's life which reason has the boldness to deny, and which the heart
+has the boldness to believe;--there must be a Providence, which,
+according to other rules than we have hitherto assumed, links this
+confused earth as daughter-land to a higher city of God,--there must be
+a God, a Virtue, and an Eternity.
+
+
+
+                               FOOTNOTES:
+
+[Footnote 1: His collected works, Vol. III. p. 68.]
+
+[Footnote 2: In Faust,--Scene of the Easter Holidays.--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 3: A Jew once separated from his wife when she appeared with
+bare arms; but it is difficult to ascribe the present frequent divorces
+in Paris to that cause.]
+
+[Footnote 4: It is amusing to hear Jean Paul call it so, but the German
+diminutive, "Werk_lein_," also expresses attachment to the thing in
+question. Thus children say _Väter-chen_, "Little Papa; Daddy."--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 5: Descriptive of Venus, or written under her
+influence.--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 6: The stick on which a painter rests his arm.--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 7: Similarity of the parts to the whole.--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 8: _Fliegende Blätter_.--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 9: Of course, "Forgive us our debts."--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 10: A city of the Tauric Chersonesus, the modern
+Crimea.--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 11: A Jesuit astronomer, A. D. 1598-1671, who named the
+moon's spots Tycho, Plato, Hercules, St. Catharine, &c.--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 12: He alludes to the chimney-sweeper of his perukes.]
+
+[Footnote 13: The name the Germans give to Death. _Hein_ would seem to
+mean Hal.--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 14: Probably peas, which the children, as now, blew through
+long tubes with great force.--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 15: In Upper Alsace, where every three years only the best
+youth receives the crown and medal, and the jurisdiction of the
+pastures.]
+
+[Footnote 16: A sort of fire-ball, which, as it goes, emits smoke to
+blind the enemy.--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 17: Small balls invented by him to put into a horse's ear,
+and act as a spur.--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 18: An island of the Malay Archipelago, wooded, volcanic, and
+spicy.--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 19: It is notorious how little I know of mining operations;
+I therefore thought I had reason to apply to my superiors for a
+spur which might stimulate me to do something in such a weighty
+science,--and such a spur is certainly the office of mining-superintendent.]
+
+[Footnote 20:  Except the two emperors Silluck and Athnac, and the four
+kings Sgolta, Sakeph-Katon, etc., I never had intercourse with any; and
+that only as upper-class scholar, because we jurists, with the Devil's
+help, had to learn Hebrew, wherein just the above-mentioned six
+potentates appear as the names of the accents on words. Perhaps,
+however, my correspondent means the great, acute, crowned accents of
+nations. [_Sakeph-Katon_ is the only one the translator has not been
+able to verify of these interesting names. _Kauton_ is given among the
+Hebrew accents, but not Sakeph.--Tr.]]
+
+[Footnote 21: Justus Möser, author of the "Patriotic Fantasies," one of
+Germany's dearest memories, in many respects a Franklin.--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 22: Lane of the mine.--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 23: Ass's Post.--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 24: Instrument for taking the distance of a star north or
+south from the equator.--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 25: Instrument for reckoning the deviation of the hour-circle
+from the meridian.--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 26: Jean Paul seems to indulge here in an hexameter himself:
+"Welches sie auch mehr bedarf, als der harmonische Gessner."--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 27: _Bewähren_ and _bewahren_ are the two German words.--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 28: E. g. their honor suffers, if their carriage does not
+pass ahead of another carriage of rank.]
+
+[Footnote 29: Such letters as David sent by Uriah to Joab. (See 2
+Samuel xi. 14, 15.)--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 30: _Kleeblatt_ (_trefoil_) in the German.--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 31: After an operation for the cataract, the sensitive retina
+represents everything magnified.]
+
+[Footnote 32: A piece of charred bone or horn used by natives of the
+East to absorb the blood from wounds made by the bite of a snake. See
+Tennent's Natural History of Ceylon, p. 312.--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 33: The _Psalter_ in the ox's stomach is the _Blättermagen_
+(lit. _leaf-stomach_), the third stomach of ruminant animals, the
+tripe. So we speak of the _leaves_ of fat.--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 34:
+           "My spirit flew in feathers then,
+              That is so heavy now."--Hood.]
+
+[Footnote 35: Joint-reporter.--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 36: A kind that heads in the form of a capuchin's hood.--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 37: When one's five numbers are all drawn in their order, it
+is a quinterne.--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 38: _Aufgebunden_ may mean either tied up or untied.--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 39: Burlesque and serious operas.--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 40: Or, figure in history.--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 41: The ideal of the beautiful.]
+
+[Footnote 42: As the Rabbins believe, according to Eisenmenger's
+Judaism, Part II. 7.]
+
+[Footnote 43: _Usance_ means the month's grace allowed for the
+payment of a bill of exchange; double usance, of course, allows two
+months.--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 44: Petrarch, like German reviewers, avoided nightingales,
+and sought frogs.]
+
+[Footnote 45: "Schatten_riss_ oder Schatten_schnitt_" is the
+German.--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 46: The literal rendering would be "_cut out of the eyes_,
+or, rather, out of the face." The phrase in Italics is a German idiom
+for expressing an exact likeness.--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 47: The readers of Boswell's Johnson will remember that
+interesting native of the South-Sea Islands.--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 48: Matthieu being the French for _Matthew_.--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 49: _Zeusel_ was a court-apothecary, mentioned on page 7, of
+whom we shall hear more.--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 50: An Italian word, meaning literally gallant, applied to
+those Platonic lovers who, with the connivance of the husbands,
+attended married ladies, and were everywhere seen in confidential chat
+with them.--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 51: La Mettrie was a noted medical man and materialist in his
+day, b. 1709.--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 52: Remember the beautiful passage in Bede's History, where
+the Northumbrian prince compares man's life to the flight of the
+swallow through the lighted hall out of darkness into darkness.--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 53: An allusion, perhaps, to the legend, so lovely to the
+fancy, that a crucifix in Naples, when Alphonso was besieged there, in
+1439, bowed its head before a cannon-ball, which consequently took off
+only the crown of thorns!--_Voyage d'un François_, Tom. VI. p. 303.]
+
+[Footnote 54: This clover insures him who accidentally finds it against
+future deception. Hitherto it has been found only by--princes and
+philosophers.]
+
+[Footnote 55: _Matz_, in German, means also both a starling and a
+blockhead.--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 56:  Elegant paper for the upper classes.--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 57: In the original, "hang hares' tails on us," i. e. "make
+fools of us."--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 58: Literally, spit-devils,--a sort of firework.--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 59: I. e. Birthday-festival.--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 60: Not one of the commonplace souls that jog steadily on
+like the hexameter.--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 61: This was a common practice of our old New England Puritan
+parsons.--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 62: Disciples of Kennicott, the well-known English verifier
+of the general accuracy of the Sacred Text.--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 63: A trap extemporized by setting up a heavy book obliquely,
+with one end resting on a stick, and the cheese attached.--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 64: Christina, daughter of Charles XII., abdicated in May,
+1654, at the age of twenty-eight.--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 65: A famous and popular old volume delineating the world of
+nature and life in pictures, with numbers referring to the different
+parts of each picture.--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 66: That is, threw into them, as into scrap-baskets, the bits
+of paper on which he had written his thoughts.--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 67: Allusion to Ezekiel.--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 68: Literally, _God's-box_.--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 69: _Gesprungen_ seems to mean both _vibrated_ and
+_snapped_.]
+
+[Footnote 70: _Haupt_- und _Staat-actionen_, the phrase used by Faust in
+his first dialogue with Wagner. Schlegel says the title was affixed to
+dramas designed for marionettes when they treated heroic and historical
+subjects.--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 71: Epiglottis.--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 72: What has come into the world feet foremost.--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 73: Basselisse (French).--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 74: _Ladenhüter_ (shop-keeper) is the German word,
+meaning goods that keep the store as a sick man keeps his
+bed,--_shop-ridden_.--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 75: A court that decided matters in dispute among the
+sovereigns of the German Confederation.--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 76: A selection of choice learning.--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 77: Midsummer-day.--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 78: A name given by the Greeks to the Hebrew word Jehovah,
+which consists, in the original, of _four letters_.--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 79: The thumb of a hanged thief was considered as a
+lucky-bone.--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 80: Full.--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 81: Or it _went a begging_, as we say.--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 82: "Rara avis."--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 83: See page 67.--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 84: It is precisely the possession of _heterogeneous_
+faculties in _similar_ degree that makes one inconsequent and
+inconsistent; men with one predominant faculty act by it with more
+equableness. In despotisms there is more quiet than in republics; at
+the hot equator there is a more even rate of the barometer than in the
+zones of four seasons.]
+
+[Footnote 85: One of Burns's words.--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 86: The bust of the Vatican Apollo, by which he would learn
+to model no other figure than his own.]
+
+[Footnote 87: There is something in the use and application of the word
+_Wissenschaft_ which requires for its appreciation an understanding of
+the peculiar genius of the German mind.--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 88: Bacon's remark will recur to the reader.--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 89: A solar system is only a dotted profile of the genius of
+the world, but a human eye is his miniature. The _mechanics_ of the
+bodies of the universe the mathematical masters of reckoning may
+calculate, but the _dioptrics_ of the eye, growing bright amidst
+nothing but dull moistures, transcends our algebraic audit-offices,
+which therefore cannot reckon away from the imitated eyes (the glasses)
+the space of diffusion and the narrow field.]
+
+[Footnote 90: Jean Paul would probably have said Rubicon if he had not
+been going to say it elsewhere,--e. g. p. 199.]
+
+[Footnote 91: Hieronym. cont. Jov. L 2.]
+
+[Footnote 92: _Hof_ means in German _both_ court--and yard.--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 93: Bayle's Dictionary, Art. _François d'Assise_, Note C.]
+
+[Footnote 94: A half-way house.--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 95: Jean Paul probably means, that such noble hearts as
+Victor's Le Baut might shut up into silence, but could not with his
+Chamberlain's master-key open and find out their secrets.--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 96: In a later edition Jean Paul substitutes for _Schein-tod_
+(sham death) a half French word, _Postiche-tod_ (supposititious
+death).--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 97: "On whose board he had a _stone_," literally,--a proverb
+for being in one's good graces.--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 98: There is an inconsistency in date of month here with p.
+135.--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 99: The dog as well as myself know what island that is, but
+no more.]
+
+[Footnote 100: "Burning-chambers," a name originally given to the place
+for judging criminals of state belonging to illustrious families. The
+room was lined with black, and lighted with flambeaux. Originated with
+Francis I. in 1535, in his persecution of heretics.--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 101: Plebeian.--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 102: One at hearing from Emanuel, the other at seeing
+Clotilda.--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 103: Red drops fall from butterflies in their last
+transformation, which they used to call bloody rain.]
+
+[Footnote 104: When one looks a long time into the blue of heaven, it
+begins to undulate, and these waves in the air one imagines in
+childhood to be angels at play.]
+
+[Footnote 105: This monologue is a fragment from an earlier dark hour,
+such as every heart of sensibility once suffers.]
+
+[Footnote 106: _Noth-münzen_ means originally coin containing alloy,
+struck off in hard times.--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 107: The Hebrew language has but three vowels
+("vowel-points") which, from the assistance they gave in enunciating a
+vast variety of words, were called _matres lectionis_, or mothers of
+the reading.--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 108: I. e. bowing so low.--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 109: Herkommen, as a common noun, means _tradition_ or
+_custom_.--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 110: An infusorial or minute animal, called in natural
+history _rotifera_ (wheel-bearer).--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 111: _Famulus_ is the Latin name in the German. Wagner was
+one in Faust.--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 112: So called in allusion to the _shaking_ they were giving
+it.--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 113: _Kopfstück_ (lit. _head-piece_), a coin bearing the head
+of the regent.--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 114: The billiard-pockets (like the contribution-bags) used
+to have bells to them.--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 115: Who felt himself to be "a child picking up pebbles on
+the shore of the great ocean of truth."--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 116: A conventual term,--a six.--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 117: God bless you!--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 118: Many thanks!--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 119: Of course a parody on "Verbum sat _sapienti_,"--"A word
+for the _fool_," &c.--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 120: Or reading-_easel_ (the latter word seeming to be an
+English corruption of the German _Esel_, ass),--any book-rest.
+_Maler-esel_ means a painter's easel.--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 121: When they occur in actual life.--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 122: Eclectic or miscellaneous science, not confined to one
+department.--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 123: A King of France once sent a vassal _illum baculum,
+quo se sustentabat, in symbolum traditionis_. (Du Fresne's
+Glossary.) So far as I know, there has never been made a good and
+serviceable--abridgment of this _glossarium_ for ladies.]
+
+[Footnote 124: Just as there are _listening sisters_ (_les Tourières_
+or _S[oe]urs écoutés_) who go with the nuns into the conversing room,
+to overhear their talk.]
+
+[Footnote 125: Or absentee-curates.--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 126: Literally _looker-on_,--one admitted to behold the
+secret ceremonies in the Eleusinian mysteries.--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 127: To know how to obey is a glory equal to that of
+commanding.--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 128: "Slaves are accounted nobodies."--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 129: In real life.--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 130: _To make one a queue_ is a proverb for imposing on him
+(like pinning a rag to one's coat-tail?).--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 131: _Diet_ (from _dies_) _implies_ the idea of _day_,
+but the German "Reichs_tag_" makes the pun more palpable in the
+original.--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 132: A lady's watch, as is well known, shaped like a heart,
+provided on the back with a dial-gnomon and magnetic needle. The latter
+points out to the ladies (who hate _cold_) the _south_ also, in fact,
+and the sun-dial-index serves as a moon-dial-index.]
+
+[Footnote 133: "Rome concealed the name of her god, and she was wrong;
+I conceal the name of my goddess, and I am right."]
+
+[Footnote 134: Or _Tensa_, the carriage on which they bore the images
+of the gods in the Circensian games.--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 135: A shrine.--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 136: Properly, a pitcher, or urn.--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 137: Here Jean Paul inserts, after "in die Federn," "(_nicht
+in die Feder_),"--i. e. _not into the pen_ (a German phrase for
+_dictating_). The pun could not be kept.--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 138: A watch that tells only the hours.--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 139: The reference is to Laurence Sterne, and the snuff-box
+he mentions in the early part of the "Sentimental Journey," as given
+him by a monk, and carried ever after as an amulet.--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 140: Ignatius's-plate means probably a breastplate, or
+medallion, consecrated by Ignatius Loyola.--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 141: I. e. to throw light upon it.--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 142: Like John Buncle, who went round, as was said, to
+propagate his faith and his species.--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 143: A fourth reason would be, that now, every time be loves
+another than Clotilda, he seems to earn a new claim to the gratitude of
+his friend.]
+
+[Footnote 144: Italian for everybody.--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 145: May there be a sly allusion--here to the possibility of
+their putting their hair up in papers torn from the leaves of Jean
+Paul's works?--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 146: Schickaneder was the Director of a Theatre in Vienna in
+the time of Mozart, and wrote the text for the _Magic Flute_.--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 147: A wreath given in derision to brides who before marriage
+had been unchaste.--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 148: And then are ready to verify the proverb: _Curses, like
+chickens, come home to roost_.--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 149: Musical interval.--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 150: Old scholastic term for a _past_ eternity, in
+contradiction to a coming eternity, _a parte post_.--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 151: The Invisible Lodge; a Biography in Two Parts. [A work
+of Jean Paul's.--Tr.]]
+
+[Footnote 152: Such was the name of his Lordship's wife, who in her
+twenty-third year sank to rest in the eternal arms.]
+
+[Footnote 153: In the original, _Semper-freie_ (always free,--eligible
+to office).--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 154: Hence too it was, that, so long as Victor was at the
+Parsonage, she avoided Flamin's society.]
+
+[Footnote 155: The reader will remember this same remark, in so many
+words, on p. 223.--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 156: It turned out more fortunately, and without loss of the
+stones, and I had the satisfaction to find that no woman who read the
+first edition of this work has, in her womanlike _castling_ or
+_rotation in office_, at all interchanged the two _thats_. Nay, even
+the female readers of the second edition have remained consistent with
+themselves.]
+
+[Footnote 157: Demoralization.--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 158: The German word _kleiden_; it has a corresponding double
+meaning of _dressing_, and also of _suiting_.--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 159: Science,--Mathematics.--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 160: Step-measurers.--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 161:  Men entitled to lecture in three branches.--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 162: Or disciple of the indifferential calculus.--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 163: Or, in prose, fiery water-wheel.--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 164:
+           "And what if all of animated nature
+            Be but organic harps diversely framed,
+            That tremble into thought, as o'er them sweeps,
+            Plastic and vast, one intellectual breeze,
+            At once the soul of each and God of all?"
+                                     Coleridge, _The Æolian Harp_.]
+
+[Footnote 165: _Fromm_ is the German. It is time the words _religious_
+and _pious_ were redeemed from the base uses of sectarianism and
+bigotry.--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 166: _Enlightenment_ in an _empty_ heart is mere memory-work,
+let it strain the faculty of acumen ever so much. Most men of our day
+resemble the new houses in Potsdam, in which (according to Reichard)
+Frederick the Second caused _lights_ to be placed at night, that every
+one, including Reichard himself, might think they were--_occupied_.]
+
+[Footnote 167: Most men have, perhaps, only an equal number of good
+_thoughts_ and _actions_; but it is still an open question how long the
+virtuous man may interrupt his good thoughts (which have less need than
+good actions of the outer world) by indifferent ones.]
+
+[Footnote 168: For the noblest leans just the most on loving souls, or
+at least on his ideals of them, with which, however, he is only in so
+far satisfied as he regards them as pledges of future prototypes. I do
+not except either the Stoic (that Epicurean God) or the Mystic: both
+love in the Creator only the sum total of his creatures; we the former
+in the latter.]
+
+[Footnote 169: The German _Vorwand_ means literally front wall (not far
+from the etymological meaning of _pretext_); so that there may be a
+figurative element here beyond what appears to the casual reader.--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 170: The reader of this letter will readily presuppose that
+Clotilda, as she does not know into whose hands it may fall,--in fact,
+it is actually in ours,--will have to hurry over her relations and
+mysteries (e. g. respecting Flamin, Victor, &c.) with an obscurity
+which to her proper reader was clear enough.]
+
+[Footnote 171: Let the reader remember that she is master of as much of
+this biography as he, if not more.]
+
+[Footnote 172: She means Giulia, from whose corpse grief had hurried
+her away.]
+
+[Footnote 173:
+
+           "Now spring returns, but not to me returns
+            The vernal joy my better years have known," &c.
+                                                    Michael Bruce.]
+
+[Footnote 174: "Fly not from me, because I am always encompassed by a
+great shadow, which increases till at last it shall wall me up."]
+
+[Footnote 175: Every seven years of human life.--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 176:
+
+           "Or had it drizzled _needle-points of ice_
+            Upon a feverish head made suddenly bald."
+
+                                            Coleridge's _Remorse_.]
+
+[Footnote 177: As the spots in the moon are fields of flowers and
+plants.]
+
+[Footnote 178: Here ended (in the original) the first volume.--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 179: So called, as it was made to answer for both bed and
+board. See the next sentence but one.--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 180: The rudiments of printing.--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 181: He is indignant, it is true, only at the _typographical_
+history of learned works, and despises only the anxious search after
+the birthdays, &c., of deceased and stupid books in the midst of a
+world full of wonders; but here, too, he must needs consider that
+brains which can let nothing _press_ upon them more than operations of
+the _press_ still do better this little something, which saves and
+accumulates most for the better ones, than nothing at all, or anything
+beyond their ability.]
+
+[Footnote 182: A name given to screens used for partitions.--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 183: A well-known good writer on the eyes.]
+
+[Footnote 184: Or crystalline lens?--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 185: Glands in the eyelids, discovered by Meibom in
+1673.--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 186: A glandule at the corner of the eye, which secretes
+moisture.--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 187: Honeymoon. One of Jean Paul's variations on the
+phrase.--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 188: The Germans are peculiarly rich in synonymes for the
+honeymoon. The word used here is _Flitterwochen_ (Spangle-weeks).--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 189: Moldavian or Wallachian governor.--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 190: Some of the German written letters are like the Greek.
+_Alphabet_ (at the end of the sentence) is a printer's term for 23
+sheets.--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 191: The Fetzpopel, or _ragged ninny_, was a sort of
+scarecrow or bugbear.--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 192: A fistful.--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 193: An Indian moss used for the gout.--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 194: An allusion to a scandalous Scotch imposture of
+1780.--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 195: Sledges for riding astraddle.--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 196: The Britons found out that whalebone shavings made the
+softest kind of bed.]
+
+[Footnote 197: The English of this seems to be:--
+
+     "Turkey rhubarb powdered.
+      Starred anise-seed.
+      Fennel   do.
+      Peel of green orange.
+      Carbonate of potash,--equal parts,--1 drachm.
+      Leaves of Alexandrian senna without stalks,--2 drachms.
+      Half an ounce of white sugar."
+
+And the final direction may read, "Of which let him take a mixture,
+finely pulverized, given in sufficient quantity to produce ejection.
+Mark [i. e. on the paper], Wind-powders," &c.--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 198: The name given to the halo about the head, when one is
+electrized.]
+
+[Footnote 199: An allusion, perhaps, to the pasteboard images carried
+about on the heads of Italian peddlers, in which the loose-hung head
+bobs right and left to the spectators.--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 200: The German expression for all this is too elliptical to
+be literally rendered. It is simply "Meinetwegen!" (For all me!)--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 201: Fancy-man.--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 202: Their good works are good words.--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 203: The horse referred to on page 91.--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 204: That is, he would be, when this letter arrived, for he
+was going to carry it.--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 205: Culpepper never did him the pleasure, for which he had
+so often begged him, of prescribing for the Prince a clyster, which
+then the apothecary himself would have administered, in order just for
+once to _get at_ the ruler, and transform _his_ weak side into his own
+sunny side.]
+
+[Footnote 206: When those twins chipped the shell of Leda's egg, out of
+which they were born.--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 207: Literally, "Knapsack."--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 208: French for clyster.--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 209: A Greek jurist, compared by Gibbon to Bacon, of great
+influence in the first half of the sixth century,--dishonest, but
+able.--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 210: The red-deer, and the wild-boar, bear, badger, &c.--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 211: i. e. about two kreutzers.--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 212: Entity.--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 213: "_Gesegnete Mahlzeit_" is the familiar phrase Richter
+uses; it was formerly common, at the close of dinner, to shake hands
+and wish "a blessing on the meal."--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 214:
+
+           "Hast thou a friend, take care to keep him,
+            And often to his threshold wend:
+            Briers and thorns o'ergrow the path
+            On which a man neglects to walk."--_Old Saying_.
+
+                                                            Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 215: Little Britain.--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 216: He with the long shoes, in his "Education of a Young
+Prince, 1705."]
+
+[Footnote 217: Thus did merely the first edition, in 1797, speak of the
+Viennese; a third, improved one, in 1819, acknowledges also an improved
+edition of them, although it retains lively _shadows_ of their former
+times.]
+
+[Footnote 218: A coarse writer no longer known.--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 219: Author of the Burlesque Virgil.--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 220: The author appears to have had in his mind a
+reminiscence of a passage in Bürger's "Lenore":--
+
+           "Like croak of frogs in marshy plain,
+            Swelled on the breeze that dismal strain," &c.--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 221: Sacred musical composition of a stylish character.--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 222: The Jewish name for Sabbath in the Middle Ages. See
+Auerbach's Spinoza.--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 223: Latin for ruins, fragments of old buildings, &c.--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 224: "He toucheth the hills, and they smoke."--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 225: December is most favorable to astronomical
+observations.]
+
+[Footnote 226: A musical direction: Go back to the sign; Begin
+again.--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 227: The German word is _Kälte_, which explains the
+incongruity of our English heading.--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 228: A word copied exactly from the German, and well enough
+justified by the analogy of _rookery_, for instance.--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 229: See that noble passage of Milton, beginning
+
+     "I cannot praise a fugitive and cloistered virtue."--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 230: I have wholly recast the letter N, because in the first
+edition I unfortunately had a good idea, which, without recollecting
+its first publication, I gave the world a second time, as a learned
+thief of my own property, in the commentary on the woodcuts. [Probably
+the ones illustrating the Ten Commandments, in the _Campaner Thal_,
+Jean Paul's work on Immortality.--Tr.]]
+
+[Footnote 231: The royal band (of twenty-four).--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 232: A freethinker and Freemason, in the latter half of the
+eighteenth century imprisoned, for a certain comedy, in Magdeburg
+fortress.--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 233: The highway.--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 234: As an example, we have now the First Principle of
+Morals, and that of the Forms of Government.]
+
+[Footnote 235: Self-government.--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 236: See his _Am[oe]n. Acad_., the treatise on the habitable
+globe.]
+
+[Footnote 237: The hysterical ball, i. e. the hysteric morbid feeling,
+as if a ball were rolling up into the throat.]
+
+[Footnote 238: Used here by Jean Paul evidently, with figurative
+freedom, for a Russian swing, but meaning originally a _chariot-race_
+(afterward tournament), and derived from _currus solis_ (chariot of the
+sun).--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 239: Conjurer's jargon.--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 240: "The _Litones_ were slaves among the old Saxons, who
+still possessed a third of their property, and could make contracts for
+it." _Flegeljahre_, No. 8.--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 241: An instrument for determining the blueness of the sky.]
+
+[Footnote 242: French for a male flirt.--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 243: Differing laws.--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 244: Axiom in law; named from Brocard, a Bishop of Worms, who
+made a collection of canons called "Brocardica Juris."--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 245: Proculus and Sabinus were the founders of two rival
+schools of jurisprudence in Rome (Proculians and Sabinians) in the
+first century of our era.--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 246: A term from the Pandects of Justinian, meaning
+liabilities to burdens or duties.--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 247: Alluding to the consolidating of stocks, debts,
+&c.--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 248: An Italian astronomer and anatomist, born in 1602.--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 249: Faust (meaning both fist and the Faust of story) is the
+word in the original.--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 250: Or journey.--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 251: There is a play on words in the original, _Hof_ meaning
+_court_, and also, when applied to the sun or moon, a _circle_ round
+the luminary.--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 252: The original has a slight pun; _über die Tafel_ meaning
+both _on the subject_ of the table and _during_ the table (or
+dinner).--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 253: A name given to different groups of delicate muscles in
+certain sensitive parts of the human body.--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 254:
+           "But where of ye, O tempests, is the goal!
+            Are ye like those within the human breast,
+            Or do ye find, like eagles, some high nest?"
+                                                  _Childe Harold_.]
+
+[Footnote 255: The snake-stone sucks at the wound till it has sucked
+out all the poison.]
+
+[Footnote 256: In a nutshell.--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 257: The conservative or court party in the French Revolution
+were called the _noirs_ (blacks), from the fact of the emigrant nobles
+wearing black velvet. The _Ensragés_ was the name of a radical
+club.--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 258: Literally, the game of _man_ (_ombre_, Spanish).--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 259: Joachime, Clotilda, Victor, and the Devil.]
+
+[Footnote 260: _Mort_ (French) in the original.--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 261: Manager of the game.--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 262: Or face-card.--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 263: No pun in the original.--Tr.]
+[Footnote 264: A Parisian anatomiste (b. 1719) persecuted by the
+profession to London, where she exhibited her wax-skeleton with
+success.--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 265: Described on pages 127-134.--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 266: Entertainments for the gods, at which their images
+were laid on couches (_lecti_), and food was served up to them in
+public.--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 267: _Panist_ from the Latin _panis_,--an allusion to an old
+class of charity scholars. It might be rendered, _loafer_.--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 268: Alluding to the long attempts in Germany to fuse the
+Calvinistie and Lutheran Churches.--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 269: _Musicus_ here, not _musicant_, which latter means the
+more common performer, fiddler, or whatever else.--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 270: Father confessor.--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 271: Plutarch mentions how vain Pompey's cavaliers were of
+their personal appearance, and that Cæsar accordingly directed his
+soldiers to aim at their faces; "for Cæsar hoped that those young
+cavaliers who had not been used to wars and wounds, and who set
+a great value on their beauty, would avoid above all things a stroke
+in that part, and immediately give way, as well on account of the
+present danger as the future deformity. The event answered his
+expectation."--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 272: To save the external decencies of virtue.--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 273: I. e., O Clarissa! behold your Lovelace; let us skip the
+first four volumes, and, like the makers of Epics, begin with the
+rest!]
+
+[Footnote 274: A kind of fire-alarm.--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 275: These terms are adopted as the shortest correspondents
+of the German _bürgerlich_ and _stiftfähig_.--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 276: He mistakes; Leibnitz only said, everything difficult
+was light to him, and everything light difficult.]
+
+[Footnote 277: As the old fellow who carried his pipe in his boot, when
+his leg was shot off at the battle of Prague, grabbed at his pipe first
+and then at his leg. (See Old Song.)--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 278: "Colors produced on ores by the action of the
+air."--Adler.]
+
+[Footnote 279: _Viel-Liebe_ is Jean Paul's word, to match which, after
+the analogy of Polygamy (marriage to many), we might coin the word
+_Polyagapy_ (love to many).--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 280: Instead of _malade imaginaire_, an imaginary invalid,
+she was an imaginary _convalescent_.--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 281: _Adjuvans_ is the ingredient which strengthens the
+powers of the main ingredients; _constituens_ is what gives the
+medicine the form of pill, electuary or mixture.]
+
+[Footnote 282: One weeps, one cries, one sighs, one lies, one raves,
+one kills, one dies,--in fine, one gives himself to all the devils, in
+order to have his angel.--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 283: As we say _pea-soup_, _vermicelli-soup_.]
+
+[Footnote 284: Referring to the one whose marriage to the Senior
+Parson's daughter Victor witnessed that night from his window.--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 285: See note to page 194.--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 286: Of course, Procrustes.--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 287: Cheeks.--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 288: The God of sleep was attended by three beings:
+_Phantasus_, who could change himself only into lifeless things;
+_Phobetor_, who could assume and conjure up all animal forms; and
+_Moropheus_, who could, all human forms. Metamorph. Lib. II. Fab. 10.]
+
+[Footnote 289: Painter's colics.--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 290: "Seed to the sower and bread to the eater."
+(Isaiah.)--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 291: Nor yet by a luxury, whose magnitude one exaggerates in
+comparing their outlays with our income, and which injured them only in
+this way, that they inherited the nations like East Indian cousins. It
+was that of a cobbler who has won the highest prize in the lottery; it
+was the squandering of a soldier after the plundering. Hence they had
+luxury without refinement. It could maintain its greatness only by
+growing greater. Had one thrown to them America with its gold bars,
+they might, with greater luxury, have gone on this crutch some
+centuries longer.]
+
+[Footnote 292: It is well known that the head of the poor negro is shut
+up in a hollow one of iron, which presses down his tongue.]
+
+[Footnote 293: Written in the year 1792.]
+
+[Footnote 294: The millionnaire presupposes the beggar, the scholar,
+the Helot; the higher culture of individuals is purchased by the
+degradation of the mass.]
+
+[Footnote 295: Written in 1792. At present the tempest which once stood
+in the heavens over all Europe lies out there in the level earth.]
+
+[Footnote 296: For after 400,000 years the earth's axis, as Jupiter's
+is now, will be perpendicular to the plane of its orbit.]
+
+
+
+                             END OF VOL. I.
+
+
+
+                           *   *   *   *   *
+      Cambridge: Stereotyped and Printed by Welch, Bigelow, & Co.
+
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+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Hesperus or Forty-Five Dog-Post-Days
+Vol. I., by Jean Paul Friedrich Richter
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+<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN">
+<html>
+<head>
+<title>Hesperus or Forty-five Dog-Post-Days. Vol. I.</title>
+<meta name="Author" content="Jean Paul Friedrich Richter">
+<meta name="Publisher" content="Ticknor and Fields">
+<meta name="Date" content="1865">
+<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8">
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+
+<pre>
+
+The Project Gutenberg EBook of Hesperus or Forty-Five Dog-Post-Days Vol. I., by 
+Jean Paul Friedrich Richter
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: Hesperus or Forty-Five Dog-Post-Days Vol. I.
+       A Biography
+
+Author: Jean Paul Friedrich Richter
+
+Translator: Charles T. Brooks
+
+Release Date: May 9, 2011 [EBook #36071]
+[Most recently updated: November 13, 2021]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: UTF-8
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK HESPERUS OR FORTY-FIVE ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Charles Bowen, from page scans provided by the Web Archive
+
+
+
+
+
+</pre>
+
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<p class="hang1">Transcriber's Note:<br>
+<br>
+1. Page scan source: Making of America
+http://www.archive.org/details/hesperusorforty01paulgoog<br>
+<br>
+2. Greek words are transliterated within brackets, e.g. [Greek:
+naos].<br>
+<br>
+4. [=a] represents a macron above the letter a.</p>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<h2>JEAN PAUL'S WRITINGS.</h2>
+
+<hr class="W10">
+
+<h3><i>TITAN</i>.</h3>
+<h5>2 vols. 16mo.</h5>
+<br>
+
+<h3><i>FLOWER, FRUIT, AND THORN PIECES</i>.</h3>
+<h5>2 vols. 16mo.</h5>
+<br>
+
+<h3><i>LEVANA, OR THE DOCTRINE OF EDUCATION</i>.</h3>
+<h5>1 vol. 16mo.</h5>
+<br>
+
+<h3><i>THE CAMPANER THAL, AND OTHER WRITINGS</i>.</h3>
+<h5>1 vol. 16mo.</h5>
+<br>
+
+<h3><i>HESPERUS</i>.</h3>
+<h5>2 vols. 16mo.</h5>
+<br>
+
+<h3><i>LIFE OF JEAN PAUL</i>.</h3>
+<h5>By Mrs. E. B. Lee. Preceded by his Autobiography.</h5>
+<h5>1 vol. 16mo.</h5>
+
+
+<hr class="W20">
+<p class="continue" style="font-size:90%">The above are published in uniform volumes by</p>
+<p class="right"><b>TICKNOR AND FIELDS, Boston</b>.</p>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<h1>HESPERUS</h1>
+
+<h5>OR</h5>
+
+<h2><i>Forty-Five Dog-Post-Days</i></h2>
+
+
+<h3>A BIOGRAPHY</h3>
+
+<h5>FROM THE GERMAN OF</h5>
+
+<h3><i>JEAN PAUL FRIEDRICH RICHTER</i></h3>
+
+
+<h5>TRANSLATED BY</h5>
+<h3>CHARLES T. BROOKS</h3>
+
+<br>
+<p class="normal">&quot;The Earth is the <i>cul-de-sac</i> in the great city of God,&mdash;the
+camera obscura full of inverted and contracted images from a fairer
+world,&mdash;the coast of God's creation,&mdash;a vaporous halo around a better
+sun,&mdash;the numerator to a still invisible denominator,&mdash;in fact, it is
+almost nothing at all.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="right"><i>Selections from the Papers of the Devil</i>.</p>
+<br>
+
+<h3>IN TWO VOLUMES.<br>
+VOL. I.</h3>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<p class="center"><img src="images/illus.png" alt="illus"></p>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+
+<h3>BOSTON:<br>
+TICKNOR AND FIELDS.<br>
+1865.</h3>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<h5 style="line-height:250%">Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 1864, by<br>
+<span style="font-size:120%">TICKNOR AND FIELDS</span>,<br>
+In the Clerk's Office of the District Court of the District of
+Massachusetts.</h5>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<h5><span class="sc">University Press</span>:<br>
+<span class="sc">Welch, Bigelow, And Company</span>,<br>
+<span class="sc">Cambridge</span>.</h5>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<p class="center"><img src="images/shieldstart.png" alt="shieldstart"></p>
+<br>
+
+<h2>TRANSLATOR'S PREFACE.</h2>
+<br>
+
+<p class="normal">A work which has three prefaces by its author may be thought by some to
+need, and by others not to permit, a very long one from its translator.
+This is the first of Richter's romances which took hold of the German
+public. After he had long tried in vain, by a variety of literary
+devices, to entice or provoke the people's attention, and win or force
+a way to their hearts for his wit and his wisdom, his odd fancies and
+his noble sentiments, on the appearance of Hesperus, the siege, as
+Carlyle says, (&quot;the ten-years'-siege of a poverty-stricken existence&quot;
+Jean Paul himself calls it,) may be said to have terminated by storm.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">It was the Hesperus that brought Richter to Weimar. It was in Hesperus,
+and as Hesperus, that this singular genius rose on the horizon of
+Goethe and Schiller,&mdash;the latter of whom (as will be well remembered)
+tells his great friend that he has met &quot;Hesperus,&quot; a strange being,
+like a man who has dropped from the moon. English readers may have
+different opinions on the question whether he &quot;came down too soon&quot; or
+too late. The Translator seems to see signs that Jean Paul is to be
+better and better understood and appreciated among us in this free and
+forming Western world, and he concludes his introduction of this second
+great labor to the public with the benediction upon the book which, in
+the closing paragraph of <i>his</i> second Preface, the author so touchingly
+pronounces on this evening and morning star of his heart.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">The Translator is exceedingly indebted to his friend, Professor Knorr
+of Philadelphia, and to his former teacher, Dr. Beck of Cambridge, for
+their kind and patient assistance in correcting the proof-sheets of his
+work; and from the keen and practised eye of Mr. George Nichols he also
+received for some time valuable aid.</p>
+
+<p class="normal"><span class="sc">Newport, R. I</span>.</p>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<p class="center"><img src="images/flowerstart.png" alt="flower-start decoration"></p>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<h2>PREFACE</h2>
+<h3>TO THE THIRD EDITION.</h3>
+
+
+<p class="normal">Two long Prefaces follow on the heels of this third,&mdash;the first that of
+the second edition, and the next that of the first. Now, if I make this
+third again a long one,&mdash;and perhaps also, in fact, the many remaining
+ones of future editions,&mdash;I do not see how a reader of these latter can
+get through the lane of antechambers to the historical picture-gallery:
+he will die on his way to the book.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">I report, then, briefly. In this edition such amendments have been made
+as were most needed and easiest. In the first place, I have frequently
+translated myself into German out of the Greek, Latin, French, and
+Italian, and in fact in every instance where the speech-cleanser, with
+proper respect for the subject itself, demanded it. Once for all, we
+writers must all accommodate ourselves to the verbal-alien-bill, or
+decree for exiling foreigners, of Campe, Kolbe, and others; and even
+our beloved Goethe, however much he too &quot;emergiert&quot; and &quot;eminiert,&quot;
+will at last, in some future edition or other, have, for example, to
+throw both of these very words, which in the latest<a name="div2Ref_01" href="#div2_01"><sup>[1]</sup></a> he brings
+forward in the same line, out of the book. Is it not time, now that we
+have ejected the foreign peoples which had been long enough encamped in
+Germany, that we should send after them what has still longer remained
+behind,&mdash;their echo, or words?</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Only let Kolbe, or any other Purist, be a reasonable man, and not
+exhort us to change the technical words which are the common property
+of cultivated Europe&mdash;e. g. of music, of philosophy&mdash;into vernacular
+ones which will not be understood, especially in cases where the hand
+of the interpreter would snatch and pluck away the butterfly-dust of
+variegated allusions. For example, the name Purist itself may serve as
+an example. Supposing one should call Arndt a <i>political Purist</i> of
+Germany, and Kolbe should substitute political <i>speech-purifier</i>, or
+pure of speech, this small conceit would give up in the translation the
+little bit of ghost that it haply possessed.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Even if the author, however, has not turned out such things,&mdash;as some
+philological anchorites do, who, like the windpipe, eject all foreign
+matter with disagreeable coughing and spitting, and only retain their
+native air,&mdash;still he has at least sought to imitate the glaciers,
+which from year to year gradually shove down foreign bodies, such as
+stone and wood, from their sides. How diligently I have done this in
+the present edition of Hesperus, on every side, may be seen by the old
+printed copy interlined with the new emendations, and I could well wish
+Herr Kolbe would just travel to Berlin and inspect the copy. At least I
+will beseech the German Society there, which some years ago made me a
+member, to go to the bookstore and see for themselves what their
+colleague has done, what erasions and substitutions he has made.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">The ones who have properly sinned the most against the German language,
+and against those who understand no other, are the natural-historians,
+who&mdash;e. g. Alexander von Humboldt&mdash;import the whole Latin Linnæus into
+the midst of our language, without any other German signs of
+distinction than the final flourishes of German terminations, or
+tail-feathers, wherewith, however, they are as little intelligible to
+the mere speaker of German as a man would be to a stranger behind him
+through his mere queue. Has not our inexhaustible language already
+shown its capability of creating a German Linnæus when we read a
+Wilhelmi, and still more that true German in heart and speech, Oken?</p>
+
+<p class="normal">For the rest, the German language will, in general, never shrink up and
+grow impoverished, even by the greatest hospitality towards strangers.
+For it steadily produces (as all dictionaries show) out of its ever
+fresh stems a hundred times as many children and grandchildren and
+great-grandchildren as the foreign birth it adopts in the place of
+children; so that after centuries the thicket that has sprung from our
+prolific radical words must overshadow and choke up the strange words
+which have shot up only as flying seed, and finally rear itself into
+a true banian forest, whose twigs grow down to roots, and whose
+upward-planted roots strike out into summits. How entangled and wild
+with foreign growth will, on the contrary, after some centuries, the
+English language be, for instance, with its native but powerless stem
+full of engrafted word-shrubbery, capable only of inoculation, and
+fetching back from its duplicate, America, more new words than wares!</p>
+
+<p class="normal">The second, but easier thing which has been done for this third,
+improved edition of Hesperus, of course is, that I have gone slowly
+through the whole Evening Star with weeder in hand, and carefully
+eradicated all the fungous weeds of genitives, or <i>Es</i>'s, in compound
+words, wherever I found them, which on the very title-page of the
+<i>Dog's</i>-Post-days was unfortunately the case. I had, however, much to
+endure in this work. Of the old actions of our over-rich language
+against itself, too many are attachments upon its real estate, and I
+was compelled, therefore, to leave many a nested crew of Es's where it
+had too long been settled, and appealed to witnesses and ear-witnesses
+for right of possession.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Even up to the hour of this Preface, the author of the &quot;<i>Morgen-Blatt</i>
+letters on compound words&quot; has been waiting, not so much for a
+thorough-going <i>examination</i>, (it were, perhaps, too soon for that,)
+but first of all for a comprehensive <i>reading</i> of them, which, to be
+sure, the scattering archipelago of sheets, like islands lying apart
+from one another, will make difficult so long as the periodical has not
+yet run through its circle of numbers. But then I shall hope from the
+speech-investigator, when he has them complete in his house and hands
+before his judgment-seat, a thorough refutation or approbation.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Finally, in the third place, after the double amendment of two
+editions, (for the first received great improvements, and in fact
+<i>before</i> it was printed,) a third was undertaken which had for its
+object to let fly at harshnesses, obscurities, mistakes, and other
+over-lengthenings and overshortenings of dress.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">But, heavens! how often must not a writing-man have to improve upon
+himself, who is hardly over half a century old! Were he to live, in
+fact, into a Methusalem's millennium, and continue to write, the
+Methusalem would have to append so many volumes of emendations that the
+work itself would have to be annexed to them as mere preliminary
+matter, appendix, or supplementary sheet.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">For several years the author has found in his earlier works, in a high
+degree, a fault which he has met with in Ernst Wagner, Fouqué, and
+others, frequently repeated or imitated, namely, the passion for
+enacting, in his authorial person, the trumpeter, or usher, of the
+emotions, which the subject himself should have and show, but not the
+poet. E. g. &quot;With sublime calmness Dahore replied.&quot; Why add <i>sublime</i>,
+when it is superfluous, presumptuous, and premature, provided the
+answer really exalts, or, if it does not so, the result is still more
+pitiful? The poet who, in this way, is the <i>fore-echo</i> of his
+personages, takes for his model certain modern tragic poets, like
+Werner, Müllner, &amp;c., who prefix to every speech for the actor the
+bookbinder's directions: &quot;With touching emotion,&quot;&mdash;&quot;with a sigh of
+painful remembrance out of the depths of sorrow,&quot;&mdash;mere sentences of
+intensity, or rather of impotence, which only a pantomimic dance needs
+or can follow, but which no piece of Shakespeare's, of Schiller's, or
+of Goethe's needs, because, indeed, the speech itself teaches how to
+speak it.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">For the rest, I have not the courage, now that I am a quarter of a
+century older and more aged, to give the first youthful outstreamings
+of the heart a different channel, and a weaker fall and course. Man in
+later life too easily regards every change in his junior as an
+improvement; but as no man can take the place of another, so, too,
+cannot the same man act as his own substitute in his different periods
+of life, least of all the poet.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">The best <i>wedded</i> love is not what the <i>maidenly</i> was; and so, too, is
+there in inspiration and delineation a maiden muse. Ah, all first
+things in poesy, as in life, whatever else may be wanting to them, are
+so innocent and good; and all <i>blossoms</i> come so <i>pure-white</i> into the
+world, in which by and by,&mdash;as Goethe says,<a name="div2Ref_02" href="#div2_02"><sup>[2]</sup></a> even of material colors,
+&quot;The sun tolerates no white.&quot; Therefore shall all the ardent words of
+my inspiration for Emanuel's dying and Victor's loving and weeping, and
+for Clotilda's sorrow and silence, stand evermore in Hesperus uncooled
+and unchanged. Even the Now shall take nothing from the Once. For
+although during these twenty-five years I have been made, by some
+imitations and echoes of the book, actually sick of myself,
+nevertheless I overcome the disgust of this self-surfeit by the hope
+that the youth who wrote will again, by and by, find young men and
+young women to read him, and that hereafter, even for older readers,
+more will survive of the thing imitated than of the imitations.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">And so, then, may this Evening Star&mdash;which was once the morning star of
+my whole soul&mdash;run its <i>third</i> circuit around the reading world in the
+fuller light of a better position toward the sun and the earth!</p>
+
+<p class="right">JEAN PAUL FR. RICHTER.</p>
+
+<p class="normal"><span class="sc">Baireuth</span>, January 1, 1819.</p>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<p class="center"><img border="0" src="images/rivetstart.png" alt="rivetstart"></p>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<h2>PREFACE</h2>
+<h3>TO THE SECOND EDITION.</h3>
+
+
+<p class="normal">I have as yet completed nothing of this Preface beyond a tolerable
+sketch, which shall here be given to the leader unadorned. I may
+perhaps, by the gift of this sketch, also raise the curtain which
+continues to hang down before my literary workshop, and which hides
+from posterity how I labor therein as my own serving brother and as
+master of the Scottish chair. A plan is with me, however, no outline of
+a sermon in Hamburg, which the head pastor gives out on Saturday and
+fills out on Sunday. It is no automaton, no lay figure, no canon, after
+which I work; it is no skeleton for future flesh, but a plan is a leaf
+or sheet on which I make myself more comfortable and move more at ease,
+while I shake out upon it my whole brain-tree, in order afterwards to
+pick over and plant the windfalls, and cover&mdash;the paper with organic
+globules and layers of ph&#339;nix ashes, that whole brilliant
+pheasantries may rise out of it. In such a sketch I keep the most
+unlike and antagonistic things apart by mere dashes. In such sketches I
+address myself, and <i>thou</i> myself like a Quaker, and order myself about
+a great deal; nay, I frequently introduce therein conceits which I do
+not have printed at all, either because no connection can be contrived
+for them, or because they are of themselves good for nothing.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">And now it will be time that I should really present the reader such a
+sketch, which happens to be this time the plan of the present Preface.
+It is headed:&mdash;</p>
+<br>
+<br>
+<p class="hang1">ARCHITECTURAL PLAN AND BUILDING MATERIAL FOR THE PREFACE TO THE SECOND
+EDITION OF HESPERUS.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;But make it short, because, as it is, the world will find it a
+long way through two antechambers into the passengers'-room of the
+Book.&mdash;Joke in the beginning.&mdash;Seldom does a man bowl all the Nine
+Muses on the literary ninepin-alley.&mdash;The conclusion from the
+reflection.&mdash;Bring out many resemblances between the title Hesperus and
+the Evening Star, or Venus, of which the following must be specimens:
+That mine, like the latter, is full of high, sharp mountains, and that
+both owe their greater splendor to their unevenness; further, that the
+one as well as the other, in its transit across the sun (of Apollo),
+appears only as a black spot.&mdash;(In your copy-book of letters you must
+have made numbers of such allusions.)&mdash;The world expects that the
+Evening Star in the second edition will come up from below, as Lucifer,
+or Morning Star, and that the glorified body of the paper will
+tabernacle a glorified soul: let it pass, and bring the world to its
+right bearings.&mdash;Regard pedants, who sustain and fodder themselves on
+words, not on things, as like the after-moths, which devour and digest
+wax cakes, but no honeycomb.&mdash;No one so very much resembles as pedants
+do the magpies, which are at once thievish and <i>garrulous</i>: they dilute
+and filch.&mdash;Into the critical hell precisely those classes of persons
+are not cast, which the Talmud also exempts from the Jewish, namely,
+the poor, those who cannot count, and those who are carried off by the
+diarrh&#339;a.&mdash;Be a fox, and cajole the critical billiard-markers who
+announce loss and gain.&quot;&mdash;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">This last I do not understand myself, because this sketch was written
+as long ago as the winter. I can rather confess, without irony, that
+the critical quarter-judges, or country-judges, have spared my life,
+and have not thrown over me either a Spanish mantle, or a cloak of
+humility, or a bloody shirt and hair-shirt. This indulgence of the
+critics for a writer of books, who, like a Catholic, performs more good
+works than he needs for salvation, is certainly not their worst
+characteristic, as they thereby exert such a beneficial influence on
+our empty days. For one must now be very glad if only four or five new
+similes are sent to the Easter fair, and if at Michaelmas only a few
+flowers, which are novelties, are offered for sale. Our literary
+kitchen-servants know how to play off on the table-cloth and into our
+mouths the same <i>goutée</i> over and over again, under the appearance of
+six different dishes, and entertain us twice a year with an imitation
+of the celebrated potato-banquet in Paris. At first came on merely a
+potato-soup; then potatoes again in another preparation; the third
+course, on the contrary, consisted of potatoes rehashed; so, too, the
+fourth. For the fifth, now, one could serve up potatoes again, when one
+had only announced for the sixth, potatoes cut into the novel form of
+brilliants,&mdash;and so it went on through fourteen dishes, of which,
+fortunately, one could still say, that at least bread, confectionery,
+and liquor comforted the stomach, and consisted of potatoes.&mdash;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Censure is an agreeable lemon-juice in praise; hence both are always
+bestowed by the world together, as if in the form of an oxymel; just
+as, according to the Talmud, a few fingerfuls of assaf&#339;tida were
+thrown with the other things upon the altar of burnt-offerings. The
+only thing, accordingly, which I will expose about the reviewers after
+the foregoing praise, and with which they really offend, is this, that
+they seldom (their heart is good) understand much of the subject or
+writing on which they pass judgment; and even this blame applies only
+to the greater part of them.&mdash;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Weave it in (the sketch goes on) that you cannot make out what the
+unveiling and unshelling of women's arms,<a name="div2Ref_03" href="#div2_03"><sup>[3]</sup></a> bosoms, and backs at the
+present day can mean, just as, formerly, peacocks were served up on the
+game-dish with precisely the corresponding parts, necks, wings, and
+heads, unpicked.&mdash;It will be well, therefore, if you conjecture that
+the shell-less ladies are female Jesuits and Freemasons in disguise,
+because in both orders the mysteries and veilings begin with
+denudation; or lay these unfeathered limbs at the door of some
+starvation or other, as a chicken creeps forth from an egg, out of
+which one has only drawn off a few drops of the white, with featherless
+spots.&mdash;Threaten, at least, that ladies and crabs are best when caught
+and boiled in the moulting-season.&quot;&mdash;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">This is one of the cases of which I said above, that in them I was
+obliged to give up and throw away conceits of the sketch, for want of
+connection with the main subject: for really the whole matter of the
+moulting of the limbs has nothing in common with the Preface, except
+the year of birth.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;You must deviate from other authors,&quot; the plan goes on, &quot;and glide
+silently over the approbation you have reaped, so that the world may
+see just what you are.&mdash;One expects from the Preface to a second
+edition a little map of products, or a harvest register of all the
+after-bloom which exalts the second above the first: give them the
+register!&mdash;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">With pleasure!&mdash;First, I have corrected all typographical
+errors,&mdash;then all slips of the pen,&mdash;then many cacophonies of
+language,&mdash;moreover, verbal and real blunders enough; but the conceits
+and the poetical tulips I have seldom rooted out. I saw that if I did
+so there would be left in the world not much more of the book (because
+I should strike out the whole style) than the binding and the list of
+errata. The theologian hates juristic allusions,&mdash;the jurist,
+theological ones,&mdash;the physician, both,&mdash;the mathematician, all of
+them. I love them all. What shall one leave out or retain?&mdash;The woman
+is displeased with satire, the man with softening warmth, (for
+<i>coldness</i> in <i>books</i>, as in <i>cakes of chocolate</i>, he holds to be
+proof
+of excellence,) and the public itself has forty-five opinions upon a
+chapter, as Cromwell dictated four contradictory letters to the same
+correspondent, merely for the sake of concealing from his scribes the
+purport of the one which he really despatched.&mdash;To which opinion
+shall an author adhere in such a disagreement?&mdash;Most properly to his
+own, as the world to its own.&mdash;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">For the rest, my little<a name="div2Ref_04" href="#div2_04"><sup>[4]</sup></a> work can hardly see so many <i>printed</i>
+editions as I have arranged of <i>written</i> and improved ones in
+my study; and therefore great alterations in it are, if not less
+indispensable, at least more difficult. In the plan of the story
+itself, therefore,&mdash;even supposing I had forgotten that it is a
+true one,&mdash;there is little to change for the better, because the work
+is like my breeches, which were not made by a tailor, but by a
+stocking-loom, and in which the breaking of a single stitch of the
+right shank unravels the whole fabric of the left. For it is an
+essential, but undeniable, fault of the book,&mdash;which I easily explain
+by the want of episodes,&mdash;that the moment I take out from the first
+story (or volume) any defective stone whatever, immediately in the
+third all totters, and at last comes down. Of course I thereby fall far
+in the rear of the best new romances, where one can break out or build
+in considerable pieces without the least injury to the composition and
+fire-proof quality, simply because they resemble, not, like my book, a
+mere house, but a whole toy-city from Nuremberg, whose loose, unhitched
+houses the child piles away in his play-house, and whose mosaic of huts
+the dear little one easily puts together for his amusement, streetwise,
+just as he fancies. A true story always has the annoying thing about
+it, that in its case this cannot be done.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">However, I sufficiently excuse my work on the score of artistic
+<i>changes</i> and <i>improvements</i> by true <i>enlargements</i> of it through
+historical additions. As I fortunately have for some years myself lived
+and been housed among the persons whom I have portrayed, accordingly I
+am perfectly in a position, as fly-wheel of this fair family circle, to
+supply, from the depositions of living witnesses, a thousand
+corrections and explanations which otherwise no man could learn, which
+however throw light on the somewhat dark history. Let the critic simply
+turn over the two nearest chapters of the book, or the remotest, or any
+others.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">My critics would complacently persuade me that I should have avoided in
+the additions what they call superfluous wit, and skilfully watered the
+gleaming naphtha-soil of my Evening Star, which was neither to be
+quenched nor sunk, with fresh history.&mdash;Heaven grant it! I have slim
+hope of it; but I should be glad if the reviewers would assure me that
+I had&mdash;although not sold at auction or covered up the crowded images in
+my Pantheon-Pandemonium&mdash;still, however, at least hung them farther
+apart.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;On the whole,&quot; continues the sketch, &quot;take in hand the historical
+<i>grafting-knife</i> rather than the <i>weeder</i>!&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">I just said that I have done so.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;But as touching those dried-up, withered men, in whose eyes nothing is
+great but their own image, and whose stomach at the sight of a fairer
+movement of the exalted heart is taken with a <i>reverse</i> movement,&mdash;in
+short, whom everything nauseates (except what is nauseous),&mdash;make
+believe as if you did not perceive them; and so much more as they
+resemble patients who are gnawed by the tape-worm, and who, according
+to medical observations, sicken and vomit at all music, especially
+organs, think rather of the good souls whom thou knowest and lovest,
+and of the good ones whom thou only lovest,&mdash;and therefore at the end
+of the Preface be earnest and grateful and rejoice!&quot;&mdash;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Verily that I should have done, even without the sketch!&mdash;How could I
+remain insensible to the indulgence with which, on the whole, the world
+has appropriated the Aphrodito-graphic<a name="div2Ref_05" href="#div2_05"><sup>[5]</sup></a> fragments of my Evening Star,
+which runs around the sun with such remarkable aberrations, or
+deflections, and in so little of a planetary ellipse, that it may
+easily, as often happens to the Hesperus in the sky, be taken for a
+hairy, bearded, and tailed comet?&mdash;And how hard and cold must the soul
+be which could remain without emotion and without joy at the thought of
+the shortest happy day, nay, even happy second, or <i>third</i>, into which
+it had been able to introduce suffering men; and at the wide-spread
+relationship of lofty wishes and holy hopes, and friendly feelings,
+and at the gracious concordat wherein the brawlers and wranglers in
+this first world of the prosaic life give each other their hands
+in the <i>second</i> world of poetry, in mutual recognitions, and become
+brothers?&mdash;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Once more, good Asterisk and secondary planet of the soft evening-star
+above me, I follow thee on thy way with the wishes of three years ago
+for every soul which thou canst gladden. Only never rise upon any eye
+as a rainy star,&mdash;only never lead one astray, so that it shall take the
+<i>moonlight</i> of poesy for the <i>morning</i> of truth, and dismiss too early
+its morning dreams!&mdash;But into the torture-chambers and through the
+prison-gratings of forsaken souls throw a cheering radiance; and for
+him whose blessed island has sunk away from him to the bottom of the
+sea of eternity, transfigure thou the low, dark region; and whoever
+looks round and looks up in vain in a dismantled Paradise, to him may a
+little ray from thee show, down on the ground, under the yellow leaves,
+some hidden sweet fruit or other of a former time; and if there is any
+eye to which thou canst show nothing, draw it softly upward to thy
+brother, and to the heaven in which he shines.&mdash;Nay, and if I ever grow
+too old, then comfort me also!</p>
+
+<p class="normal"><span class="sc">Hof</span>, May 16, 1797.</p>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<p class="center"><img border="0" src="images/barstart.png" alt="barstart"></p>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+
+<h2>PREFACE, SEVEN REQUESTS, AND CONCLUSION.</h2>
+<br>
+<br>
+<h3>PREFACE.</h3>
+
+<p class="normal">I Was going to be indignant, in the beginning, at some hosts of readers
+with whom I know not what to do in this book, and I was about to
+station myself at the gate of Hesperus as porter, and with the greatest
+incivility send off particularly people who are good for nothing, for
+whom, as for a prosector, the heart is nothing but the thickest muscle,
+and who carry a brain and heart and interior parts generally as moulds
+of plaster statues do their stuffing of wood, hay, and clay, merely in
+order to turn out <i>hollow</i> from the casting. I was on the point, even,
+of scolding at honest business-people who, like Antoninus the Great,
+thank the gods that they never did much at poetry; and at those to whom
+the chapel-leader, Apollo, must discourse on a rebeck, or straw fiddle,
+and his nine soprano girls with the ale-house fiddle and corn-stalk
+bass-viol. Nay, even at the reading sisterhood of the Romances of
+Chivalry, who read as they marry, and who among books, as among
+gentlemen's faces, pick out, not the fair, feminine ones, but the wild,
+masculine ones.&mdash;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">But an author should not be a child, and embitter for himself his
+Preface, when it is not every day that he has to make one. Why did I
+not rather in the first line address <i>those</i> readers, and take them by
+the hand, to whom I joyfully give my Hesperus, and whom I would present
+with a free copy of it if I knew where they lived?&mdash;Come, dear, weary
+soul, thou that hast anything to forget, either a sad day or a clouded
+year, or a human being that afflicts thee, or one that loves thee, or a
+dismantled youth, or a whole life of heaviness; and thou, crushed
+spirit, for whom the present is a wound and the past a scar, come into
+my <i>Evening-Star</i> and refresh thyself with its little glimmer; but, if
+the poetic illusion gives thee sweet, fugitive pains, be this thy
+conclusion from it: perhaps that, too, is an illusion which causes me
+the longer and deeper ones.&mdash;And as to thee, loftier man, who findest
+our life, which is passed only in a <i>glass</i>, darkly, less than thyself
+and death, and whose heart a veiled great spirit grinds brighter and
+purer in the dead dust of other mouldered human hearts, as one polishes
+the diamond with the dust of a diamond, I may call thee, too, down into
+my evening and night star to such eminence as I am able to throw up,
+that, when thou seest gliding around it at the foot, as around
+Vesuvius, <i>morganic fays</i> and mist groupings and dreamy worlds and
+shadowy lands, thou shalt perhaps say to thyself, &quot;And so is all dream
+and shadow around me; but dreams imply spirits, and clouds countries,
+and the shadow of the earth a sun and a universe?&quot;&mdash;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">But to thee, noble spirit, who art weary of the age and of the
+after-winter of humanity, to whom sometimes, but not always, the human
+race, like the moon, seems to go backward, because thou mistakest the
+procession of clouds flying by below it for the course of the heavenly
+body, and who, full of exalted sighs, full of exalted wishes, and with
+silent resignation, hearest indeed beside thee a destroying hand and
+the falling of thy brothers, but yet castest not down thy eye, upraised
+to the ever serene, sunny face of Providence, and whom misfortune, as
+lightning does man, destroys, but not <i>disfigures</i>; to thee, noble
+spirit, I have, to be sure, not the courage to say, &quot;Deign to look upon
+my play of shadows, that the Evening-Star which I usher before thee may
+make thee forget the earth on which thou standest, and which now with a
+thousand graves lays itself, like a vampyre, upon the human race, and
+sucks the blood of victims!&quot;&mdash;And yet I have thought of thee all
+through the book, and the hope of bringing my little night and evening
+piece before wet, upraised, and steadfast eyes has been the sustaining
+maul-stick<a name="div2Ref_06" href="#div2_06"><sup>[6]</sup></a> of my weary hand.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">As I have now written too seriously, I must, out of the seven promised
+petitions, among which only four are such, omit three. I therefore
+present only the</p>
+
+<p class="normal">First Request. That the reader will pardon the title, &quot;Dog-Post-Days,&quot;
+until the first chapter has explained and excused it; and the</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Second. Always to read a whole chapter, and never half a one, because
+the great whole consists of little wholes, as, according to the
+Homoiomereia<a name="div2Ref_07" href="#div2_07"><sup>[7]</sup></a> of Anaxagoras, the human body consists of innumerable
+little human bodies; and the</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Seventh Request, which flows partly from the second, but concerns the
+critics only, not to anticipate me in their <i>fugitive leaves</i>,<a name="div2Ref_08" href="#div2_08"><sup>[8]</sup></a> which
+they call Reviews, by the publication of my leading incidents, but to
+leave the reader some few surprises, which, to be sure, he can have
+only once. And finally the</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Fifth Petition, which one knows already from the Lord's Prayer.<a name="div2Ref_09" href="#div2_09"><sup>[9]</sup></a></p>
+<br>
+<br>
+<h3>CONCLUSION.</h3>
+
+<p class="normal">And now, then, become visible, little peaceful Hesperus&mdash;Thou needest a
+little cloud to veil thee, and a little year, in order to have
+completed thy orbit!&mdash;Mayest thou stand nearer to Truth and Virtue, as
+thy image in heaven does to the sun, than the earth into which thou
+shinest does to either of the three; and mayest thou, like that star,
+never withdraw thyself from the sight of men, except by hiding thyself
+in the sun! May thy influence be fairer, warmer, and surer than that of
+the Almanac-Hesperus, which superstition places on the misty throne of
+<i>this</i> year!&mdash;Thou wouldst make me happy a second time if thou shouldst
+be an <i>Evening-Star</i> to some withered mortal, and to some blooming one
+a <i>morning star</i>. Sink with the former and rise with the latter; glow
+in the evening sky of the first between his clouds, and overspread his
+past life-road up the mountain with a soft lustre, that he may
+recognize again the far-off flowers of youth; and rejuvenate his
+antiquated recollections into hopes!&mdash;Cool off the fresh youth in the
+early hours of life, as a tranquillizing morning star, ere the sun
+falls hot upon him and the whirl of day sets in!&mdash;But for me, Hesperus,
+thou art now well set; thou hast hitherto journeyed on beside the
+earth, as my companion-planet, as my second world, on which my soul
+disembarked as it left the body to the buffetings of earth; but to day
+my eye falls sadly and slowly off from thee and thy white flower-bed,
+which I planted around thy coasts, down upon the damp, cold ground
+where I stand, and I see how we are all encompassed with coolness and
+evening, torn far away from the stars, amused with glowworms,
+disquieted with <i>ignes fatui</i>, all veiled from each other, every one
+alone, and feeling his own life only through the warm, throbbing hand
+of a friend, which he holds in the dark.&mdash;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Yes, there will indeed come another age, when it will be light, and
+when man will awake out of sublime dreams and find&mdash;the dreams again,
+because he has lost nothing but sleep.&mdash;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">The stones and rocks, which two veiled shapes, Necessity and Sin, like
+Deucalion and Pyrrha, throw behind them at the good, shall become new
+men.&mdash;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">And on the western gate of this century stands written: Here is the
+road to Virtue and Wisdom; just as on the western gate of Cherson<a name="div2Ref_10" href="#div2_10"><sup>[10]</sup></a>
+stood the sublime inscription: Here leads the way to Byzantium.&mdash;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Infinite Providence, thou wilt make the day dawn.&mdash;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">But still struggles the twelfth hour of the night; nocturnal birds of
+prey shoot through the darkness; spectres rattle; the dead play their
+antics; the living dream.</p>
+
+<p class="right">JEAN PAUL.</p>
+<p class="normal">In the <i>Vernal Equinox</i>, 1794.</p>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<p class="center"><img border="0" src="images/hornstart.png" alt="hornstart"></p>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<h2>CONTENTS OF VOL. I.</h2>
+<hr class="W10">
+
+<h3><a name="div1_01" href="#div1Ref_01">1. DOG-POST-DAY.</a></h3>
+
+<p class="hang1"><span class="sc2">Difference between the 1st and 4th of May.&mdash;Rat-Battle-Pieces.&mdash;
+Nocturne.&mdash;Three Regiments in future Breeches.&mdash;Couching-Needle.&mdash;Overture and Secret Instructions of the Book.</span></p>
+<br>
+
+<h3><a name="div1_02" href="#div1Ref_02">2. DOG-POST-DAY.</a></h3>
+
+<p class="hang1"><span class="sc2">Antediluvian History.&mdash;Victor's Plan of Life.</span></p>
+<br>
+
+<h3><a name="div1_03" href="#div1Ref_03">3. DOG-POST-DAY.</a></h3>
+
+<p class="hang1"><span class="sc2">Sowing-Day of Joys.&mdash;Watch-Tower.&mdash;Fraternization of the Heart.</span></p>
+<br>
+
+<h3><a name="div1_04" href="#div1Ref_04">4. DOG-POST-DAY.</a></h3>
+
+<p class="hang1"><span class="sc2">Profile-Cutter.&mdash;Clotilda's Historic Figure.&mdash;Courtiers, and a Noble
+Man.</span></p>
+<br>
+
+<h3><a name="div1_05" href="#div1Ref_05">5. DOG-POST-DAY.</a></h3>
+
+<p class="hang1"><span class="sc2">The Third of May.&mdash;The Nightingale.&mdash;The Abbate sitting on Music.</span></p>
+<br>
+
+<h3><a name="div1_06" href="#div1Ref_06">6. DOG-POST-DAY.</a></h3>
+
+<p class="hang1"><span class="sc2">The Threefold Deception of Love.&mdash;Lost Bible and Powder-Puff.&mdash;
+Churching.&mdash;New Concordats with the Reader.</span></p>
+<br>
+
+<h3><a name="div1_07" href="#div1Ref_07">7. DOG-POST-DAY.</a></h3>
+
+<p class="hang1"><span class="sc2">The Great Parsonage-Park.&mdash;Orangery.&mdash;Flamin's Promotion.&mdash;Festal
+Afternoon of Domestic Love.&mdash;Rain of Fire.&mdash;Letter to Emanuel.</span></p>
+<br>
+
+<h3><a name="div1_08" href="#div1Ref_08">8. DOG-POST-DAY.</a></h3>
+
+<p class="hang1"><span class="sc2">Examinatorium And Dehortatorium Of Conscience.&mdash;The Studious
+Honeymoon of a Scholar.&mdash;The Cabinet of Natural History.&mdash;Answer
+From Emanuel.&mdash;The Packed-up Chin.&mdash;Arrival of the Prince.&mdash;First
+Intercalary Day.</span></p>
+<br>
+
+<h3><a name="div1_09" href="#div1Ref_09">9. DOG-POST-DAY.</a></h3>
+
+<p class="hang1"><span class="sc2">A heavenly Morning; a heavenly Afternoon.&mdash;A House without Walls; a
+Bed without a House.</span></p>
+<br>
+
+<h3><a name="div1_10" href="#div1Ref_10">10. DOG-POST-DAY.</a></h3>
+
+<p class="hang1"><span class="sc2">The Bee-Master.&mdash;Zeusel's Oscillation.&mdash;Arrival of the Princess.</span></p>
+<br>
+
+<h3><a name="div1_11" href="#div1Ref_11">11. DOG-POST-DAY.</a></h3>
+
+<p class="hang1"><span class="sc2">Transfer of the Princess.&mdash;Smuggling of a Kiss.&mdash;Montre à
+Regulateur.&mdash;Simultaneous Love.</span></p>
+<br>
+
+<h3><a name="div1_12" href="#div1Ref_12">12. DOG-POST-DAY.</a></h3>
+
+<p class="hang1"><span class="sc2">Polar Fantasies.&mdash;The Singular Isle of Union.&mdash;One more Bit from
+previous History.&mdash;The Stettin-Apple as Coat-of-Arms.&mdash;Third
+Intercalary Day.</span></p>
+<br>
+
+<h3><a name="div1_13" href="#div1Ref_13">13. DOG-POST-DAY.</a></h3>
+
+<p class="hang1"><span class="sc2">Concerning his Lordship's Character.&mdash;An Evening of Eden.&mdash;
+Maienthal.&mdash;The Mountain and Emanuel.</span></p>
+<br>
+
+<h3><a name="div1_14" href="#div1Ref_14">14. DOG-POST-DAY.</a></h3>
+
+<p class="hang1"><span class="sc2">The Philosophical Arcadia.&mdash;Clotilda's Letter.&mdash;Victor's
+Confessions.</span></p>
+<br>
+
+<h3><a name="div1_15" href="#div1Ref_15">15. DOG-POST-DAY.</a></h3>
+
+<p class="hang1"><span class="sc2">The Parting.</span></p>
+<br>
+
+<h3><a name="div1_16" href="#div1Ref_16">16. DOG-POST-DAY.</a></h3>
+
+<p class="hang1"><span class="sc2">The Potato-Form-Cutter.&mdash;Drag-chains in St. Luna.&mdash;Wax
+Embossments.&mdash;Chess according to the <i>Regula Falsi</i>.&mdash;The
+Thistle of Hope.&mdash;Escort to Flachsenfingen.&mdash;Fourth Intercalary
+Day.</span></p>
+<br>
+
+<h3><a name="div1_17" href="#div1Ref_17">17. DOG-POST-DAY.</a></h3>
+
+<p class="hang1"><span class="sc2">The Cure.&mdash;The Prince's Palace.&mdash;Victor's Visits.&mdash;Joachime.&mdash;
+Copperplate Engraving of the Court.&mdash;Cudgellings.</span></p>
+<br>
+
+<h3><a name="div1_18" href="#div1Ref_18">18. DOG-POST-DAY.</a></h3>
+
+<p class="hang1"><span class="sc2">Clotilda's Promotion.&mdash;Incognito-Journey.&mdash;Petition of the Majors
+of the Chase.&mdash;Consistorial Messenger.&mdash;Caricature of the
+Flachsenfingeners.</span></p>
+<br>
+
+<h3><a name="div1_19" href="#div1Ref_19">19. DOG-POST-DAY.</a></h3>
+
+<p class="hang1"><span class="sc2">The Hair-Dresser with a (musical) Disease of the Lungs.&mdash;Clotilda in
+Victor's Dream.&mdash;Extra Lines on Church-Music.&mdash;Garden Concert by
+Stamitz.&mdash;Quarrel between Victor and Flamin.&mdash;The Heart without
+Solace.&mdash;Letter to Emanuel.</span></p>
+<br>
+
+<h3><a name="div1_20" href="#div1Ref_20">20. DOG-POST-DAY.</a></h3>
+
+<p class="hang1"><span class="sc2">Letter from Emanuel.&mdash;Flamin's Fruit-Pieces on Shoulders.&mdash;Walk to
+St. Luna.&mdash;Fifth Intercalary Day.</span></p>
+<br>
+
+<h3><a name="div1_21" href="#div1Ref_21">21. DOG-POST-DAY.</a></h3>
+
+<p class="hang1"><span class="sc2">Victor's Professional Visits.&mdash;Concerning Houses full of
+Daughters.&mdash;The Two Fools.&mdash;The Carrousel.</span></p>
+<br>
+
+<h3><a name="div1_22" href="#div1Ref_22">22. DOG-POST-DAY.</a></h3>
+
+<p class="hang1"><span class="sc2">Gun-Foundery of Love; e. g. Printed Gloves, Quarrels, Dwarf-Flasks,
+and Stabs.-A Title from the Digests of Love.&mdash;Marie.&mdash;Court-Day.&mdash;
+Giulia's dying Epistle.</span></p>
+<br>
+
+<h3><a name="div1_23" href="#div1Ref_23">23. DOG-POST-DAY.</a></h3>
+
+<p class="hang1"><span class="sc2">First Visit to Clotilda.&mdash;The Paleness.&mdash;The Redness.&mdash;The
+Race-Weeks.</span></p>
+<br>
+
+<h3><a name="div1_24" href="#div1Ref_24">24. DOG-POST-DAY.</a></h3>
+
+<p class="hang1"><span class="sc2">Rouge.&mdash;Clotilda's Sickness.&mdash;The Play of Iphigenia.&mdash;Difference
+between Plebeian and Patrician Love.&mdash;Sixth Intercalary Day.</span></p>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<p class="center"><img border="0" src="images/shieldstart.png" alt="shieldstart"></p>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<h1>HESPERUS,</h1>
+
+<h4>OR</h4>
+
+<h2>45 DOG-POST-DAYS.</h2>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<h2><a name="div1Ref_01" href="#div1_01">1. DOG-POST-DAY.</a></h2>
+<br>
+
+<p class="hang1"><span class="sc2">Difference between the 1st and 4th of May.&mdash;Rat-Battle-Pieces.&mdash;
+Nocturne.&mdash;Three Regiments in future Breeches.&mdash;Couching-Needle.&mdash;
+Overture and Secret Instructions of the Book.</span></p>
+<br>
+
+<p class="normal">In the house of the Court-Chaplain Eymann, in the bathing-village of
+St. Luna, there were two parties: the one was glad on the 30th of April
+that our hero, the young Englishman, Horion, would return from
+Göttingen the 1st of May to stay at the parsonage,&mdash;the other disliked
+it; they did not want him to arrive till the 4th of May.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">The party of the 1st of May, or Tuesday, consisted of the Chaplain's
+son, Flamin, who had been educated with the Englishman till his twelfth
+year in London, and till his eighteenth in St. Luna, and whose heart
+with all its venous ramifications had grown into the Briton's, and in
+whose ardent breast during the long Göttingen separation there had been
+<i>one</i> heart too few; next, of the Chaplain's wife, a native
+Englishwoman, who loved in my hero a countryman, because the magnetic
+vortex of nationality reached her soul over land and sea; and, finally,
+of their eldest daughter, Agatha, who all day long laughed out at
+everything and doted on everything without knowing why, and who, with
+her polypus-arms, drew every one to herself who did not live quite too
+many houses off from her, as food for her heart.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">The sect of the 4th of May could measure itself with its rival, for it
+also made out a college of three members. Its adherents were Appel
+(Apollonia, the youngest daughter), who acted as cook, and whose
+culinary reputation and certificate of good bakery would suffer by it,
+if the guest should come before the bread rose; she could well
+conceive what a soul must feel who should stand before a guest with
+her hands full of skewers and needles, beside the flat-iron of the
+window-curtains, and without having even the <i>frisure</i> of her hat, or
+of the head which was to be under it, so much as half ready. The second
+adherent of this sect, who ought to have had most to say against
+Tuesday,&mdash;although he said least, because he could not talk and
+had only recently been baptized,&mdash;was to be carried to church on
+Friday for the first time; this adherent was the godchild of the
+guest. The Chaplain knew, to be sure, that the moon sent round her
+godfather-bidder, Father Riccioli,<a name="div2Ref_11" href="#div2_11"><sup>[11]</sup></a> among the <i>savans</i> of earth, and
+got them into the church-book of heaven as godfathers to her spots; but
+he thought it was better for him to take a godfather within a
+circumference of not more than fifty miles. The Apostles'-day of the
+churching and the Festival-day of the arrival of the distinguished
+godfather would then have beautifully coincided; but now the plaguy
+fine weather was bringing godfather along four days too soon!</p>
+
+<p class="normal">The third disciple of Friday was, at bottom, the heresiarch of this
+party, the Court-Chaplain himself: the parsonage wherein Horion was to
+have his temporary court residence was all full of rats,&mdash;a regular
+ball-room and <i>plaza de armas</i> of the same,&mdash;and of these the Chaplain
+wanted first of all to clear his house. Few court-chaplains, with
+hectic in their bodies and rats in their houses, ever made so much
+stench on that account as did this one in St. Luna against the beasts.
+It would have taken very few clouds of it to smoke all the court-dames
+out of Europe. Did not our hectic patient burn as much of the hoof of
+his nag as he had sawed off from it? Didn't he even take one of the
+sharp-toothed creatures themselves prisoner, and smear him with
+gudgeon-grease and train-oil, and then let the arrested subject go,
+that he might as a pariah trot up and down through the holes, and
+constrain by his ointment rats of higher caste to emigrate? Did he not
+go to work by the wholesale, and actually take a buck to board, of
+which he wanted nothing except that he should stink and displease the
+tailed monks? And were not all these remedies as good as useless?...
+For the deuse take rats and Jesuits! Meanwhile, I will at least offer
+people here on the very third page the moral, that against both of
+these pests, as against toothache, mental troubles, and fleas, there
+are a thousand excellent recipes which have no effect.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">We will now, in a body, make our way farther into the parsonage, and
+concern ourselves as minutely about the family history of the Eymanns
+as if we lived only three houses distant from them. Horion,&mdash;the accent
+must fall on the first syllable,&mdash;or Sebastian, by abbreviation
+<i>Bastian</i>, as the Eymanns called him,&mdash;or Victor, as Lord Horion, his
+father, called him, (for I give him now one name and now another, just
+as my prose-prosody requires,)&mdash;Horion had, through the Italian
+Tostato, who was a peripatetic Auerbach's court for that whole region,
+and was hurrying on to St. Luna, caused the little oral lie to be
+palmed upon his dear friends at the parsonage, that he was coming on
+Friday: he wanted, first, to give them a real surprise; and, secondly,
+he wanted modestly to tie the hands, which on his account <i>would</i> be
+scouring, brushing up and serving up; and, thirdly, he regarded an oral
+lie as at least more trivial than a written one. To his father,
+however, he wrote the truth, and fixed his entrance into the parsonage
+for the 1st of May, or Tuesday. His Lordship had his abode in the
+residence city of Flachsenfingen, where he applied to the Prince at
+once moral blinders and <i>eye-glasses</i>, and <i>guided</i> his vision while
+he
+<i>sharpened</i> it; but he was himself blind, though only physically. For
+that reason his son had to bring an oculist with him from Göttingen,
+who should operate upon him in the Chaplain's house on Tuesday. When he
+caused his Victor to be made Doctor of Medicine, many Göttingen people,
+to my knowledge, wondered that so high-born a youth should put on the
+Doctor's head-piece,&mdash;that <i>Pluto's helmet</i>, which makes, not, like the
+mythological one, the wearer, but others indeed invisible,&mdash;and thrust
+on his finger the Doctor's ring,&mdash;that <i>ring-of&mdash;Gyges</i>, which only to
+others imparts invisibility: but was, then, the condition of his
+father's eyes unknown or an insufficient apology to the people of
+Göttingen?</p>
+
+<p class="normal">His Lordship wrote to the Court-Chaplain that he and his son would
+come to-morrow. The Chaplain read over the Job's-post silently three
+times in succession, and thrust it back with comic resignation into
+the envelope, saying: &quot;We have now ample hope that to-morrow our
+Doctor will certainly arrive with the rest;&mdash;fine tournaments and
+watering-place amusements do I anticipate, wife! when to-morrow comes
+in, and my rats in a body dance like children before him;&mdash;besides, we
+have nothing to eat; and then, too, I have nothing to put on, for not
+before Thursday can I extort from that Flachsenfingen wind-bag<a name="div2Ref_12" href="#div2_12"><sup>[12]</sup></a> a
+hair-bag,&mdash;and you laugh at it? Is not one of us in the very middle of
+April made an April-fool of?&quot; But the Chaplain's lady fell on his
+shoulder with redoubled exclamations of delight, and ran right off to
+gather to this rose festival of her good soul the little brethren and
+sisters of the church of the children. The whole family circle now
+resolved itself into three terrified and three delighted faces.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">We will seat ourselves only among the joyous ones, and listen
+while they, during the afternoon, work away as portrait-painters,
+drapery-painters, and gallery-inspectors, at the picture of the beloved
+Briton. All remembrances are made into hopes, and Victor is to bring
+nothing with him that is changed except his stature. Flamin, wild as an
+English garden, but more fruitful, refreshed himself and others with
+his delineation of Victor's gentle truthfulness and honesty, and of his
+head, and praised even his poetic fire, which he generally did not rate
+very high. Agatha called to mind his humorous knight's-leaps,&mdash;how he
+once took the drum of a passing dentist and drummed the village
+together for nothing before his theatre, because he had previously
+bought out the whole travelling apothecary's shop of this honest and
+true friend Hain,<a name="div2Ref_13" href="#div2_13"><sup>[13]</sup></a>&mdash;how he would often, after a child's baptism,
+post himself in the pulpit, and there be-preach two or three devout
+spectators in their work-day sward, till they laughed more than they
+wept,&mdash;and many another piece of waggery, whereby he would make no one
+ridiculous but himself, and set no one laughing but other people.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">But women will never approve of it (only men can) when one, like
+Victor, belongs to the British subdivision of humorists;&mdash;for with them
+and courtiers wit itself is caprice;&mdash;they cannot approve that Victor
+should love to <i>descend</i> to carriers, clowns, and sailors, whereas a
+Frenchman would rather <i>creep upward</i> to people of <i>ton</i>. For women,
+who always respect the citizen more than the man, do not see that the
+humorist makes believe that all which these plebeians say he prompts
+them to, and that he intentionally exalts the involuntarily comic to
+what is artistically so,&mdash;folly to wisdom, the earth's madhouse to a
+national theatre. Quite as little does an official comprehend, or a
+cit, or a metropolitan, why Horion should so often make such a wretched
+choice of reading from among old prefaces, programmes, advertisements
+of travelling artists, all which he would peruse with indescribable
+gusto,&mdash;merely because he made believe to himself that all this
+intellectual sack of fodder, which belonged properly only to the
+rag-picker, he had himself prepared and filled, with satirical design.
+In fact, as the Germans seldom appreciate irony and seldom write it,
+one is forced to foist fictitiously a malicious irony upon many serious
+books and reviews, in order to get any of it at all. And that, indeed,
+is no more nor less than what I myself aim at, when in court-session I
+elevate in thought the court-house to a play-house, the advocate to a
+juristic Le Cain and Casperl, and the whole assembly to an old Greek
+comedy; for I never rest till I have made myself believe that I have
+caused the good people just to study out the whole case as a star-part,
+and am therefore really theatre poet and manager. Thus, in fact, do I
+merrily carry my dumb head as a comic pocket-theatre of the Germans
+through their most august institutions (e. g. the university, the
+administration), and exalt, in perfect silence&mdash;behind the dropped
+curtain of my face-skin&mdash;the comic of Nature to the comic of Art.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">To return: the Chaplain's wife now related as much about Victor as all
+knew before. But this repetition of the old story is just the fairest
+charm of domestic discourse. If we can often repeat to <i>ourselves</i>
+sweet thoughts without <i>ennui</i>, why shall not another be suffered to
+awaken them within us still oftener? The good lady pictured to her
+children how gentle and tender, how delicate and womanly, her dear son
+was (for Victor always called her his mother),&mdash;how he relied upon her
+in all things,&mdash;how he was always sporting without ever teasing
+anybody, and always loved all human beings, even the greatest
+strangers,&mdash;and how she could open before him better than to any
+matron her oppressed heart, and how fondly he wept with her. A
+court-apothecary, with a heart of pumice-stone,&mdash;<i>Zeusel</i> he writes
+himself,&mdash;once even regarded this melting of the warmest soul as a case
+of <i>lachrymal fistula</i>, because he thought that no eyes could weep but
+diseased ones.... Dear reader, do you not feel now just as the
+biographer does, who can hardly wait for the entrance of this good
+Victor into the parsonage and the biography? Will you not offer to him
+the friendly hand, and say: &quot;Welcome, unknown one! Lo, thy soft heart
+opens ours here on the very threshold! O thou man with eyes full of
+tears, dost thou, then, feel with us, that in a life whose banks are
+lined with affrighted ones clinging to the <i>twigs</i>, and despairing ones
+clinging to the <i>leaves</i>, that, in such a life, where not only follies,
+but woes also hedge us round, man must keep a wet eye for red ones, an
+aching heart for every bleeding one, and a gentle hand that shall, in
+sad sympathy, hold the thick, heavy chalice of sorrow for the poor man
+who must drain it, and shall slowly raise it to his lips? And if thou
+art such a one, then speak and laugh as thou wilt, for no one should
+laugh at men but he who right heartily loves them.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">In the afternoon the Chief Chamberlain, Le Baut,&mdash;a fragrant
+leaf-skeleton,&mdash;sent his page, Seebass, to the Chaplain to beg that
+he would&mdash;for the palace lay near the parsonage across the way&mdash;remove
+the buck for a while, only until the wind should change, because
+his daughter was coming. &quot;Esteemed Mr. Seebass!&quot; answered the
+rat-controvertist, with emotion, &quot;carry back my submissive compliments,
+and you see my distress. Tomorrow the Lord and his son and his oculist
+will gladden me with their presence, and the cataract is to be couched
+here. Now, at present, the whole house stinks, and the rats still carry
+on composedly their night-dance in the midst of the perfume; I assure
+you, Mr. Seebass, we can take assaf&#339;tida and stuff the parsonage
+with it up to the ridge-pole, not a tail shall we expel thereby; nay,
+it pleases them the more. I, for my part, am already preparing myself
+to see them to-morrow, during the operation, spring up on the very
+oculist and patient. Thus it fares with us all, please announce at the
+palace, but say that I was going to-day also to try an excellent
+rosewood-oil.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">He fetched, therefore, a great sack of hops and dragged it up under the
+roof, in order there, in a literal sense, to lead the rats by the nose
+into the bag. Rats are notoriously as dead-set upon rosewood-oil as men
+are on anointing-oil, which, so soon as only six drops fall on the
+skull, makes one a king or bishop on the spot, which I see by the fact,
+that in the first case a golden hoop shoots round the hair, and in the
+second it actually falls off. The militia, that is, the Chaplain,
+sprinkled the sack with some oil, and laid it with its mouth stretched
+and fastened wide open to receive the enemy;&mdash;he himself stood in the
+background, concealed behind a similarly oiled stove-screen. His plan
+was, to start out when the beasts were once in the sack, and carry off
+the whole crew like bees in a swarming-bag. The few chamber-hunters who
+read me must have frequently used this kind of trap. But they may not
+have stumbled over it as the Chaplain did, who was caught with the
+fragrant stove-screen between his legs, and who lay unable to stir,
+while the enemy ran off. In such a situation a man is refreshed by the
+trill of a curse. So after the Chaplain had struck a few such trills
+and thrills, had betaken himself to the family, and said to them, <i>en
+passant</i>: If there were in the temperate zone a fellow who from his
+swaddling-clothes rode a mourning-steed, who was lodged in a second
+mouse-tower of Hatto, and in an Amsterdam house of correction, and in
+limbo,&mdash;if there were any such correctioner, in regard to whom the only
+wonder was how he continued alive,&mdash;he alone was the one, and no devil
+beside him ... after he had relieved himself of this, he left the rats
+in peace,&mdash;and was himself very much so.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">In the night nothing memorable occurred, except that he kept awake and
+listened in every direction to hear if something with a tail might not
+be stirring, because he was minded to vex himself to his heart's
+content. As there was no sign of the beasts to be detected, not so
+much as a side-leap, he got out and sat on the floor, and pressed his
+spy's-ear to that. As good luck would have it, just then the movements
+of the enemy with their ballets and gallopades burst upon his ear. He
+started up, armed himself with a child's drum, and woke his wife up
+with the whisper: &quot;Sweet! go to sleep again, and don't be frightened in
+your sleep; I'm only drumming a little against the rats; for the
+Zwickau Collection of Useful Observations for Housekeepers in Town and
+Country, 1785, recommends this course.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">His first thunder-stroke gave his hereditary foes the repose which it
+snatched from his blood relations.... But as I have now put everybody
+into a condition to imagine the Chaplain in his shirt and with the
+cymbal of the soldiery, let us rather go to the bed of his son Flamin,
+and see what <i>he</i> is doing therein. Nothing,&mdash;but out of it he is at
+this moment taking a ride at this late hour, and that, too, without
+saddle or waistcoat. He, whose bosom was a cave of Æolus, full of
+pent-up storms&mdash;(any discreet prothonotary in Wetzlar would have
+scraped his fish-head or partridge's-wing cleaner or brushed his
+velvet-knee cleaner than he)&mdash;could not possibly lie longer on his
+pillow,&mdash;he to whom a drum came so near to-night, and to-morrow a
+friend. Anybody else, of course (at least the reader and myself), in
+the midst of the transparent night wherewith April was closing, the
+wide stillness on which the drum-sticks fell, the longing for a loved
+one with whom to-morrow would again make whole a desolate heart and a
+dismembered life, would have been filled by all this with tender
+emotions and dreams;&mdash;its only effect on the Chaplain's son was to
+fling him on his nag and out into the night: his inward earthquakes
+could only be allayed by a bodily gallop. He flew up and down the hill,
+on which he would to-morrow reunite himself to his Horion, ten times.
+He cursed and thundered at all his passions&mdash;to be sure <i>with</i>
+passion&mdash;which had hitherto laid the bone-saw to their hands linked in
+friendship. &quot;Oh! when I once have thee again, Sebastian,&quot; he said, and
+twitched his nag round, &quot;I will be so gentle, as gentle as thou, and
+never misconstrue thee; if I do, may the thunder&mdash;&quot; Ashamed at his
+self-contradictory impetuosity, he rode merely at an ambling-pace home.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">His longing for his returning friend he expressed in the stable by
+plucking out some hairs from the top of the horse's head, drawing the
+cue-hair like the fourth string of a fiddle, and twisting off the bit
+of the key to the fodder-chest. Only a man who languishes for a friend
+<i>exactly</i> as for a loved woman deserves either. But there are men who
+go out of the world without ever having been troubled or concerned at
+the fact that no one in it had loved them. He who knows nothing higher
+than the <i>commercial treaty</i> of self-interest, the <i>social contract</i>
+of civility, or even than the <i>boundary</i> and <i>barter agreement</i> of
+love, such a one,&mdash;but I wish he had never ordered me from the
+publisher!&mdash;whose withered heart knows nothing of the <i>Unitas Fratrum</i>
+of men joined in friendship, of the intertwining of their nobler
+vascular system, and of their sworn confederacy in strife and
+sorrow&mdash;But I see not why I should talk so long of this ninny, as he
+knows not how to enter into the least feeling of Flamin's yearning, who
+desired a loving, appreciative eye, because his faults and his virtues
+stood out in equal relief; for with other men, either at least the
+spots balance the rays, or the rays the spots.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Only in princely stables is there an earlier and louder din than there
+was in the parsonage on the blessed 1st of May. I ask any female reader
+at random, whether there can ever be more to polish and to boil than on
+a morning when a lord with a cataract is expected, and his son, too,
+and an eye-doctor? Men's resting-days always fall upon women's
+rasping-days; father and son went composedly to meet the doctor and the
+coucher.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">The 1st of May began, like man and human history, with a mist. Spring,
+the Raphael of the northern earth, stood already out of doors and
+covered all apartments of our Vatican with his pictures. I love a mist
+whenever it glides off like a veil from the face of a fair day, and
+whenever it is created, not by the &quot;four <i>faculties</i>,&quot; but by greater
+ones. When (as this one did on the 1st of May) it webs-over summits and
+streams like a drag-net,&mdash;when the clouds, pressed down by their
+weight, crawl along on our lawns and through wet bushes,&mdash;when in one
+quarter it soils the heavens with a pitchy vapor and lines the wood
+with a heavy, unclean fog-bank, while in the other, wiped off from the
+moist sapphire of the sky, it gilds with minute drops the flowers, and
+when this blue splendor and that dirty night pass over close by each
+other and exchange places,&mdash;who does not feel, then, as if he saw lands
+and nations lying before him, on which poisonous and mephitic mists
+move round in groups, now coming and now going? And when, further, this
+white night encompasses my melancholy eye with flying streams of vapor,
+with floating, fluttering particles of perfume-dust, then do I sadly
+see in the vapor human life pictured, with its two great clouds on our
+rising and setting, with its seemingly light space around us, and its
+blue opening over our heads....</p>
+
+<p class="normal">The Doctor may have thought so too, but not father and son, who are
+going to meet him. Flamin is more powerfully affected by distant than
+by near nature, by the gross than by the detail, just as he has more
+feeling for the state than for the family room, and his inner man loves
+best to twine upward on pyramids, tempests, Alps. The Chaplain enjoys
+nothing about the whole thing except&mdash;May-butter, and from his mouth,
+amidst all this moral apparatus, issues nothing but&mdash;spittle, and both,
+because he is afraid of the damp's preying upon him and gnawing at his
+throat and stomach.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">As they strode down from the hill which was the scene of the nocturnal
+gallop into a valley confused with patches of mist; there marched out
+from it to meet them three garrison regiments on the double-quick. Each
+regiment was four men strong and as many deep, without powder or shoes,
+but provided with fine openwork high-ruffles,&mdash;that is to say, with
+porous pantaloons, and with superfluous officers, because there were no
+privates for them at all. When I now go on in my description to add,
+that both staffs, as well the regimental as the general staff, had over
+six hundred cannon in their pockets, and in fact a whole siege-train of
+artillery, and that the first platoon had wholly new <i>yellow</i>
+balls,<a name="div2Ref_14" href="#div2_14"><sup>[14]</sup></a> unusual in war, which germinated sooner than the gunpowder
+sowed by the savages, and which they thrust with the tongue into the
+muskets,&mdash;I should (I fear) make my readers, especially my lady
+readers, a little too distressed (and the more as I have not yet hinted
+whether these were soldier-parents or soldier-children) if I were to
+dip my pen again, and actually append the annoying circumstance that
+the troops began to fire at the befogged Court-Chaplain,&mdash;unless I
+leaped forward instanter with the information beforehand that a man's
+voice from behind the army cried, &quot;Halt!&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Forth came out of the rear ranks the general field-marshal, who was
+just as tall again as his lieutenant of artillery;&mdash;with a round hat,
+with flying arms and hair, he rushed impetuously upon Flamin, and
+attacked him with intent to destroy,&mdash;less from hatred than from love.
+It was the Doctor! The two friends hung trembling in each other's arms,
+face buried in face, breast pushed back from breast, with souls that
+had no words, but only tears of joy: the first embrace ended in a
+second,&mdash;the first utterances were their two names.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">The Chaplain had volunteered as a private along with the army, and
+stood with tried feelings on his insulating-stool, with a bare neck,
+around which nothing clung. &quot;Just hug each other a moment longer,&quot; said
+he, and turned half-way round: &quot;I must station myself only just a
+minute or two at the hazel-bush yonder, but I will be back again
+directly, and then I, in my turn, will embrace Mr. Doctor with a
+thousand pleasures.&quot; But Horion understood the natural recoil of love;
+he flew from the son's arms into those of the father, and lingered long
+therein, and made all good again.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">With appeased love, with dancing hearts, with overflowing eyes, under
+the full bloom of heaven and over the garniture of earth,&mdash;for Spring
+had opened her casket of brilliants, and flung blooming jewels into all
+the vales, and over all the hills, and even far up the mountains,&mdash;the
+two friends sauntered blissfully along, the British hand clasping the
+German. Sebastian Horion could not say anything to Flamin, but he
+talked with the father, and every indifferent sound made his bosom,
+laden with blood and love, breathe more freely.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">The three regiments had gone out of every one's head; but they had
+themselves marched obediently after the general field-marshal.
+Sebastian, too humane to forget any one, turned round toward the escort
+of little Sansculottes, who came, however, not from Paris, but from
+Flachsenfingen, and had attended him as begging soldier-children. &quot;My
+children,&quot; said he, and looked at nothing but his standing army,
+&quot;to-day is for your generalissimo and you, the memorable day on which
+he does three things. In the first place, I discharge you; but my
+retrenchment shall not hinder you any more than a prince's would from
+begging; secondly, I pay each of you arrearage for three years; namely,
+to each officer an allowance of three seventeen-kreutzer-pieces,
+because we have in these days raised the wages; thirdly, run back again
+to-morrow, and I will have all the regiments measured for breeches.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">He turned toward the Chaplain, and said: &quot;It is much better to make
+presents in articles than in money, because gratitude for the latter is
+spent as soon as that is; but in a pair of presented pantaloons,
+gratitude lasts as long as the overhauls themselves.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">The only bad thing about it will be, that the Prince of Flachsenfingen
+and his war-ministry will at last interfere in the matter of the
+trousers, since neither can possibly allow regular troops to have more
+<i>on</i> their bodies than <i>in</i> them, namely, anything at all. In our
+days it should at last enter the heads of the stupidest commissary
+of equipment and provisioning,&mdash;but in fact there are discreet
+ones,&mdash;first, that, of two soldiers, the hungry is always to be
+preferred to the well-fed one, because it is already known, by the case
+of whole peoples, that the less they have, so much the braver they are;
+secondly, that just as, in Blotzheim,<a name="div2Ref_15" href="#div2_15"><sup>[15]</sup></a> of two equally virtuous
+youths, the poorer is crowned, even so the poor subject is preferred to
+the rich, though they may be equally courageous, and is alone enlisted,
+because the poor devil is better acquainted with hunger and frost; and,
+thirdly, that now, when on all the steps of the throne, as on walls,
+cannon are placed (as the sun receives its brilliancy from thousands of
+vomiting volcanoes), and, as in a well-conditioned state, the rod of
+up-shooting manhood is forced into ramrods,&mdash;the people advantageously
+fall into two classes of paupers,&mdash;the protected and their protectors;
+and, fourthly, the Devil take him who grumbles!</p>
+
+<p class="normal">When my three beloved <i>personæ</i> at length arrived in front of the
+parsonage, the whole disbanded army had secretly marched after them and
+demanded the breeches. But something still greater had travelled after
+them from Flachsenfingen,&mdash;the blind lord. Hardly had the Britoness
+smiled-in her young guest, not politely, but delightedly, hardly had
+Agatha, for the first time, seriously, hid herself behind her mother,
+and old Appel behind the pots and kettles, when Eymann, who was in the
+midst of his cleaning, made a long leap from the window at which four
+Englanders&mdash;not foreigners, but horses&mdash;came trotting up. Now for the
+first time the question occurred to every one, where the oculist was;
+and Sebastian had hardly time to reply, that there was no one else to
+come, for he himself was to operate on his father. Into the short
+interval which the father occupied in passing from the carriage-door to
+the room-door the son had to squeeze in the fib, or rather the entreaty
+<i>for</i> the fib, which the family was to put upon his Lordship, that his
+son had not yet arrived, but only the oculist, whom a recent apoplectic
+attack had deprived of his speech.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">I and the reader stand amidst such a throng of people, that I have not
+yet been able even to tell him that Dr. Culpepper had as good as
+punched out the lord's left eye with the blunt couching-needle; in
+order, therefore, to save the right eye of his beloved father,
+Sebastian had applied himself to the cure of those impoverished beings,
+who, as regards their sight, already grope round in Orcus, and only
+with four of their senses stand any longer outside the grave.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">When the son beheld the dear form veiled in such a long night, for whom
+there was no longer child or sunlight, he slid his hand, whose pulse
+trembled with pity, joy, and hope, under Eymann's, and hurriedly
+extended it, and pressed the father's under a strange name. But he had
+to go out of the house door again, till the trembling of his hand under
+the weight of the salvation it was bringing should subside, and he
+restrained out there his heart beating with hope by the thought that
+the operation might be unsuccessful; he looked with a smile up and down
+along the twelve-horse-team of the corps of cadets, that the emotion
+and yearning might pass from his excited breast. In-doors, meanwhile,
+the Chaplain's wife had made the blind man a still blinder one, and
+lied to him <i>quantum satis</i>; whenever a lie, a pious fraud, a <i>dolum
+bonum</i>, a poetic and legal fiction is to be gotten up, women offer
+themselves readily as business secretaries and court-printers, and help
+out their honest man. &quot;I very much wish,&quot; said the father, as the son
+entered, &quot;that the operation might at once proceed before my son
+arrives.&quot; The Chaplain's wife brought back the anxious son and
+disclosed to him the paternal wish. He stepped lightly forward amidst
+the embarrassed company. The room was shaded, the couching-lancet
+brought forth, and the diseased eye steadied. All stood with anxious
+attention around the composed patient. The Chaplain peered with a
+ludicrous anxiety and agony at the sleeping infant, prepared, at the
+least cry, to run with it immediately out of the couching-chamber.
+Agatha and Flamin kept themselves far from the patient, and both were
+equally serious. Flamin's noble mother drew near with her heart seized
+at once by joy and anxiety and love, and with her overflowing eyes,
+which obeyed her agitated heart. Victor wept for fear and for joy
+beside his dumb father, but he passionately smothered every drop that
+might disturb him. Thus does every operation, by the climax of
+preparation, communicate to the spectator heart-beating and trembling.
+Only the veiled Briton,&mdash;a man who lifted his head coldly and serenely,
+like a high mountain over a torrid zone,&mdash;he offered to the filial hand
+a face silent and motionless; he kept composed and mute before the fate
+which was now to decide whether his dreary night should reach even to
+the grave or no farther than this minute....</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Fate said, Let there be light, and there was. The invisible destiny
+took a son's anxious hand and opened therewith an eye, which was worthy
+of a finer night than this starless one. Victor pressed the mature lens
+of the cataract&mdash;that smoke-ball<a name="div2Ref_16" href="#div2_16"><sup>[16]</sup></a> and cloud cast over creation&mdash;down
+into the bottom of the pupil; and so, when an atom had been sunk three
+lines deep, a man possessed immensity again, and a father his son.
+Oppressed mortal! thou that art at once a <i>son</i> and a <i>slave</i> of the
+dust, how slight is the thought, the moment, the drop of blood or
+tear-drop, that is required to overflow thy wide brain, thy wide heart!
+And if a couple of blood-globules can become, now thy Montgolfier's
+globes and now thy Belidor's percussion-balls,<a name="div2Ref_17" href="#div2_17"><sup>[17]</sup></a> ah, how little earth
+it takes to exalt or to crush thee!</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Victor! thou? Is it thou who hast cured me, my son?&quot; said the
+delivered man, taking the hand that was still armed with the surgical
+instrument. &quot;Lay it aside and bandage me again! I rejoice that I saw
+thee first of all.&quot; The son could not stir for emotion. &quot;Bandage me,
+the light is painful! <i>Was</i> it thou? speak!&quot; He bandaged in silence the
+open eye amidst the glad tears of his own. But when the bandage hid
+from that noble stoical soul everything, his blushing and his weeping,
+then was it impossible for the happy son to contain himself any
+longer;&mdash;he gave himself up to his heart, and clung with his tears upon
+the veiled countenance to which he had given back brighter days; and
+when he felt on his trembling breast the <i>quicker</i> beatings of his
+father's heart, and the <i>tighter</i> embrace of his gratitude,&mdash;then was
+the best child the happiest,&mdash;and all rejoiced at his joy, and
+congratulated the son more than the father....</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Twelve cannon went off from that number of door-keys. They shot this
+History dead.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">For now it is actually gone,&mdash;not a word, not a syllable of it do I
+know any longer. In fact I have never in my life seen or heard or
+dreamed of, or romantically invented, any Horion or any St. Luna;&mdash;the
+Devil and I know how it is; and I, on my part, have, besides, better
+things to do and to lay open now, namely,</p>
+<br>
+
+<h3>THE OVERTURE AND SECRET INSTRUCTIONS.</h3>
+
+<p class="normal">Another would have been stupid enough to begin at the very beginning;
+but I thought to myself, I can at any time tell where I live,&mdash;in fact,
+at the Equator, for I reside on the island of <i>St. John's</i>, which lies,
+as is well known, in the East Indian waters, which are entirely
+surrounded by the principality of <i>Scheerau</i>. For nothing can be less
+unknown to good houses, which keep their regular literary waste-book
+(the Fair-Catalogue) and their regular stock-book (the Literary Times),
+than my latest home product, the <i>Invisible Lodge</i>,&mdash;a work, the
+reading of which my sovereign should make still more obligatory on his
+children, and even on his vassals, (it would not expressly contradict
+the Recesses,) than the attending the national university. In this
+Lodge, now, I have placed the extraordinary pond better known by the
+name of the East Indian Ocean, and into which we, of Scheerau, have
+steered and moored the few Moluccas and other islands on which our
+productive business lies. While the invisible lodge was being
+transformed by the press into a visible one, we again prepared an
+island,&mdash;namely, the isle of <i>St. John's</i>, on which I now live and
+write.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">The following digression ought to be attractive, because it discloses
+to the reader why I prefixed to this book the crazy title,
+Dog-post-days.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">It was day before yesterday, on the 29th of April, that I was walking
+in the evening up and down my island. The evening had already spun
+itself into haze and shadow. I could hardly see over to Tidore
+Island,<a name="div2Ref_18" href="#div2_18"><sup>[18]</sup></a> that monument of fair, sunken spring-times, and my eye
+glanced round only on the near buddings of twig and blossom, those
+wing-casings of growing Spring,&mdash;the plain and coast around me looked
+like a tiring-room of the flower-goddess, and her finery lay scattered
+and hid in vales and bushes round about,&mdash;the moon lay as yet behind
+the earth, but the well-spring of her rays shot up already along the
+whole rim of heaven,&mdash;the blue sky was at length pierced with silver
+spangles, but the earth was still painted black by the night. I was
+looking only at the heavens,&mdash;when something plashed on the earth....</p>
+
+<p class="normal">It was a little Pomeranian dog, who had leaped into the Indian Ocean,
+and was now heading full for St. John's. He crawled up on my coast and
+rained a shower of drops as he waggled near me. With a dog who is an
+utter stranger, it is still more disagreeable undertaking to spin a
+conversation than with an Englishman, because one knows neither the
+character nor the name of the animal. The dog had some business with
+me, and seemed to be a plenipotentiary. At last the moon opened her
+sluices of radiance, and brought me and the dog into full light.</p>
+
+
+<p class="center">&quot;<i>To his Well-Born</i>,<br>
+<i>Superintendent of Mines</i>,<a name="div2Ref_19" href="#div2_19"><sup>[19]</sup> </a><i>Mr. Jean Paul</i>,<br>
+<i>on</i></p>
+<p class="normal"><i>Free</i>.</p>
+<p class="right" style="margin-top:-24pt"><i>St. John's</i>.&quot;</p>
+<br>
+
+<p class="normal">This address to me hung down from the neck of the animal, and was
+pasted to a gourd-bottle which was tied to his collar. The dog
+consented to my taking off his iron collar, as the Alpine dogs do their
+portable refectory-table. I extracted from the bottle, which in
+sutlers' tents had often been filled with spirit, something which
+intoxicated me still better,&mdash;a package of letters. <i>Savans</i>, lovers,
+people of leisure, and maidens are passionately sharp-set upon letters;
+business-people, not at all.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">The whole package (name and hand were strange to me) turned upon the
+one point, to wit, that I was a famous man, and had intercourse with
+kings and emperors;<a name="div2Ref_20" href="#div2_20"><sup>[20]</sup></a> and that there were few mining intendants of my
+stamp, etc. But enough! For I must needs not have an ounce of modesty
+left in me if, with the impudence which some really possess, I should
+go on excerpting and extracting from the letters, that I was the Gibbon
+and the Möser<a name="div2Ref_21" href="#div2_21"><sup>[21]</sup></a> of Scheerau, (to be sure only in the biographical
+department, but then what flattery!)&mdash;that every one who possessed a
+life, and would see it biographically delineated by me, should set
+about the matter at once, before I was pressed away by some royal house
+as its historiographer, and could absolutely no longer be had,&mdash;that
+it might occur in my case as in that of other mine-intendants, before
+whom often the deluded public never took off its hat, until they had
+already passed into another lane,<a name="div2Ref_22" href="#div2_22"><sup>[22]</sup></a> i. e. world, etc. Who apprehends
+this last more than myself? But even this apprehension does not
+bring a modest man to the point of lowering himself down to be the
+bellows-blower to the man that shall sound his eulogy; as I to be sure
+should have done, if I had gone on to lay myself entirely bare. To my
+feeling even those authors are odious, who, in their shamelessness,
+only <i>then</i> bring up the rear with the final flourish, that <i>modesty
+forbids them to say more</i>, when they have already said everything that
+modesty <i>can</i> forbid.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">At length my correspondent ventures out with his design, namely, to
+make me the compiler of an unnamed family history. He begs, he
+intrigues, he defies. &quot;He is able,&quot;&mdash;he writes more copiously, but I
+abridge all, and in fact I deliver this epistolary extract with
+uncommonly little understanding; for I have been this half-hour
+scratched and gnawed in an unusually exasperating manner by a cursed
+beast of a rat,&mdash;&quot;to establish everything for me by documentary
+evidence, but is not allowed to communicate to me any other names of
+the personages in this history than fictitious ones, because I am not
+wholly to be trusted,&mdash;in time he will explain everything to me,&mdash;for
+this is a history upon which and its development destiny itself is
+still working, and what he hands over to me is only the snout thereof,
+but he will duly make over to me one member after another, just as it
+falls off from the lathe of time, until we get the tail;&mdash;accordingly
+the epistolary <i>Spitz</i> will regularly swim back and forth as a <i>poste
+aux ânes</i>,<a name="div2Ref_23" href="#div2_23"><sup>[23]</sup></a> but I must not on any account sail after the postman;
+and thus,&quot; concludes the correspondent, who signs himself <i>Knef</i>,
+&quot;shall the dog, as a Pegasus, bring me so much nutritious sap, that,
+instead of the thin Forget-me-not of an annual, I may rear a thick
+cabbage-head or cauliflower of folios.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">How successfully he has accomplished his purpose the reader knows, who
+is fresh from the first chapter of this story, which, from Eymann's
+rats to the cannonade complete, was all in Spitz's bottle.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">I wrote back to Mr. Knef in the gourd only so much as this: &quot;Anything
+nonsensical I seldom decline. Your flatteries would make me proud if I
+were not so already; hence, flatteries harm me little. I find the best
+world to be contained in the mere microcosm, and my Arcadia stretches
+not beyond the four chambers of my brain; the Present is made for
+nothing but the maw of man; the Past consists of history, which,
+again, is an aggregate present peopled by the dead, and a mere
+<i>Declinatorium</i><a name="div2Ref_24" href="#div2_24"><sup>[24]</sup></a> of our perpetual <i>horizontal</i> deviations from the
+cold pole of truth, and an <i>Inclinatorium</i><a name="div2Ref_25" href="#div2_25"><sup>[25]</sup></a> of our <i>vertical</i> ones
+from the sun of virtue. There is left, therefore, to man, who wants to
+be happier in than out of himself, nothing but the Future, or fancy,
+that is, romance. Now, as a biography is easily exalted into a romance
+by skilful hands, as we see by Voltaire's 'Charles' and his 'Peter,'
+and by autobiographies, I undertake the biographical work, on condition
+that in it the truth shall be only my maid of honor, but not my guide.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;In visiting-parlors one makes one's self odious by general satires,
+because every one can take them to himself; personal ones they set down
+as among the duties of <i>medisance</i>, and so pardon them, because they
+hope the satirist is attacking the person rather than the vice. In
+books, however, it is exactly the reverse, and to me, in case several
+or more knaves, as I hope, play parts in our biography, their
+<i>incognito</i> is a quite pleasing feature. A satirist is not so
+unfortunate herein as a physician. A lively medical author can describe
+few maladies which some lively reader shall not think he himself has;
+he inoculates the hypochondriac by his historical patients with their
+pains as thoroughly as if he put him to bed with a real attack of them;
+and I am firmly convinced that few people of rank can read living
+descriptions of the unclean disease without imagining they have it, so
+weak are their nerves and so strong their fancies, whereas a satirist
+can cherish the hope that a reader will seldom apply to himself his
+pictures of moral maladies, his anatomical tables of spiritual
+abortions; he can freely and cheerily depict despotism, imbecility,
+pride, and folly, without the least apprehension that any one will
+fancy himself to have anything of the kind; nay, I can charge the whole
+public, or all Germans, with an æsthetic lethargy, a political
+enervation, a politico-economical phlegma towards everything which does
+not go into the stomach or the purse; but I rely upon every one who
+reads me, that he at least will not reckon himself in the number, and
+if this letter were printed, I would appeal to every one's inner
+witness. The only performer whose true name I must have in this
+historical drama&mdash;especially as he plays only the prompter&mdash;is
+the&mdash;Dog.<span style="letter-spacing:50px">&nbsp; &nbsp;</span> <span class="sc">Jean Paul</span>.&quot;</p>
+<br>
+
+<p class="normal">I have, as yet, got no answer, nor any second chapter; so now it
+depends wholly on the Dog whether he will present the sequel of this
+History to the learned world or not.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">But is it possible that a biographical mining intendant, merely for the
+sake of a cursed rat, who, besides, is not working at any journal, but
+only in my house, must just run away from the public and thunder
+through all rooms, to worry the carrion to death?...</p>
+
+<p class="normal">... <i>Spitzius Hofmann</i> is the name of the dog; <i>he</i> was the rat, and
+was scratching at the door with the second chapter in the flask. A
+whole crammed provisionship, which the learned world may nibble at
+have I taken off from Hofmann's neck; and now the reader, who loves to
+read wise things as well as stupid ones, shall have opened to him
+to-day&mdash;for henceforth it is certain that I shall go on with my
+writing&mdash;glad prospects which, from a certain feeling of modesty,
+I do not designate.... The reader sits now on his sofa, the
+fairest reading-Hours dance round him and hide from him his
+repeating-watch,&mdash;the Graces hold my book for him and hand to him the
+sheets,&mdash;the Muses turn over the leaves for him, or in fact read it all
+to him;&mdash;he has nothing to disturb him, but the Swiss or the children
+must say, &quot;Papa is out.&quot; As life has on one foot a sock and on the
+other a buskin, he loves to have a biography laugh and weep in one
+breath; and as the fine writers always understand how to combine with
+the useful moral of their writings a something immoral which poisons,
+but charms,&mdash;like the apothecaries, who draw at once <i>medicines</i> and
+<i>aqua vitæ</i>,&mdash;so does he willingly forgive me, in consideration of the
+immoral which is prominent, the religious quality which I sometimes
+have, and <i>vice versâ</i>; and as this biography is set to music, because
+Ramler sets it beforehand into hexameter (which it certainly needs far
+more than Gessner's harmonious prose<a name="div2Ref_26" href="#div2_26"><sup>[26]</sup></a>), he can, when he has done
+reading, stand up and play or sing it.... I, too, am almost as happy as
+if I read the work;&mdash;the Indian Ocean flings up the peacock-wheels of
+its illuminated circle of waves before my island,&mdash;I stand on the best
+footing with all, the Reader, the Reviewer, and the Dog;&mdash;everything is
+ready to hand with each Dog-post-day: a recipe for ink from an
+alchemist; the gooseherd with quills was here day before yesterday; the
+bookbinder with gay writing-books only to-day: nature buds, my body
+blooms, my mind produces,&mdash;and so I hang my blossoms over the tan-bed
+and forcing-bed (i. e. over the island), send my root-fibres through
+the soil, unable (Hamadryad that I am) to guess from my foliage how
+much moss years may collect on my bark, how many woodchafers the future
+may gather upon the pith of my heart, and how many tree-lifters Death
+may lay under my roots,&mdash;nothing of all this do I surmise, but swing
+joyfully&mdash;thou good destiny!&mdash;my boughs in the wind, lay my suckling
+leaves to the bosom of a Nature filled with light and dew, and, with
+the breath of universal life fluttering through me, stir up as much
+articulate noise as is necessary, that one or another sad human heart,
+while contemplating these <i>leaves</i>, may forget, in short, gentle
+dreams, its stings, its throbbings, its stiflings&mdash;O, why is a man
+sometimes so happy?</p>
+
+<p class="normal">For this reason: because he is sometimes a <i>littérateur</i>. As often as
+Fate, under its veil, dots off from the great world atlas to a special
+map the little life-stream of a <i>literatus</i>, which runs over some
+lecture-halls and bookshelves, it may possibly think and say thus:
+&quot;Surely there is no cheaper or rarer way of making a creature
+happy than by making him a literary one: his goblet of joy is an
+inkhorn,&mdash;his feast of trumpets and carnival is (if he is a reviewer)
+the Easter-fair,&mdash;his whole Paphian grove is compressed into a
+bookcase,&mdash;and what else do his blue Mondays consist of than (written
+or read) Dog-post-days?&quot; And so Fate itself leads me over to the</p>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<p class="center"><img border="0" src="images/flowerstart.png" alt="flowerstart"></p>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<h2><a name="div1Ref_02" href="#div1_02">2. DOG-POST-DAY.</a></h2>
+<br>
+
+<p class="hang1"><span class="sc2">Antediluvian History.&mdash;Victor's Plan of Life.</span></p>
+<br>
+
+<p class="normal">At the gate of the First Chapter, the readers ask the incomers: &quot;What
+is your name?&mdash;your character?&mdash;your business?&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">The Dog answers for all: H. Januarius&mdash;i. e. Herr Januarius, not Holy
+Januarius; but the Prince of Flachsenfingen bore that name&mdash;had, in his
+younger years, made the grand tour or journey round the beautiful and
+the great world. He everywhere distributed gifts to strangers, which
+cost him but a single <i>don gratuit</i> from his subjects, and he succored
+and pitied many oppressed peasants in France, who fared as badly as his
+own did in Flachsenfingen. For the defenceless female sex, like all
+travelling princes, he did, if possible, still more; one may say of the
+greater number of them, that, like Titus, or like one sailing westward
+round the world, they, to be sure, sometimes lose a <i>day</i>, but seldom a
+<i>night</i>, without making others, and consequently being themselves,
+happy. In fact, the Regent must have foreseen the present depopulation
+of France; for he took measures betimes against it, and left behind him
+in three Gallic seaboard cities three sons, and on the so-called Seven
+Islands only one. The first was called the Welshman, the second the
+Brazilian, the third the Calabrian; the one on the Seven Islands, the
+Monsieur, or <i>Mosye</i>: these names were probably meant to allude to
+Princes of Wales, Brazil, and Asturias. He let his children grow up in
+no worse ignorance than ignorance of their rank: they were to be formed
+for future co-workers in his administration. Januarius was, to be sure,
+sensual and somewhat feeble, but&mdash;except where he <i>feared</i>&mdash;extremely
+philanthropic.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Lord Horion met Prince January twice on his journeys: the first time he
+cut across the princely planetary orbit as a comet, in the sense of a
+hairy star; the second, as a comet with a tail when in its perihelion.
+What I mean is this: it was just when Horion was in love with a scion
+of January's house, who lived in London, that he saw the Prince for the
+second time, and at his house in London entertained him and his court.
+Upon this very distant relative of the Prince my papers&mdash;from an
+excessive deference to political and domestic relations&mdash;throw an
+unseasonable veil. She was, at the time of marrying his Lordship,
+twenty-two years old, and her whole person was (if I may venture to
+adopt the bold expression of a London eulogist) nothing but a single,
+tender, still blue eye. That is all which is vouchsafed to the public.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">The Prince willingly let himself be mastered and managed&mdash;by the lord,
+whom a singular mixture of coldness and genius constituted an unlimited
+monarch and commander of souls. The lord had, moreover, a beautiful
+niece in his house, whose charms in princes' eyes made such a spiritual
+Old Man of the Mountain as he at once <i>younger</i> and more <i>smooth</i>.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">But the death-bell threw its discords into these harmonies of life. The
+beloved of his Lordship fled from the rough earth, and left behind her
+his first-born son as a memorial, and pledge of love; she died in her
+twenty-third year, as it were of the life of her child, some days after
+its birth, and the thin, tender twig broke down under the ripe fruit.
+Lord Horion bowed silently to fate. He had loved her terribly, without
+showing it: he mourned her in the same manner, without moistening his
+deep black eye.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">The Prince found in the niece, i. e. in a true Englishwoman, something
+to his taste, for the reason that he <i>had</i> found what was still more so
+in the Frenchwomen; and on this ground he would, inversely, have loved
+them, had he previously known her. The subsequent Chief Chamberlain, Le
+Baut, had the same sentiments, and, what is still more, toward the same
+person; and as Indian courtiers imitate all wounds of their sovereign,
+so did Le Baut with an arrow of Cupid copy those of his master, and
+transferred to himself therewith one of the severest.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">These London histories cannot last much longer, and then we shall
+happily get back again to our St. Luna.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">A burning fever seized the Regent, which his physician, Dr. Culpepper,
+held to be merely zigzag dartings of fitful, gouty matter. I have been
+unable, hitherto, to ascertain whether this Culpepper has any tolerably
+near relationship to his well-known namesake and professional co-master
+in London. The fever hunted January so hard, and the Father Confessor
+instituted with his conscience, instead of extinguishing processes, so
+many incendiary ones, that in the agony of death he took a solemn oath
+never again at the sight of a maiden to think of Depopulation and
+Revolution. The same weakness which strengthened his superstition and
+childlike credulity ministered to his sensuality; when he was up again,
+he absolutely knew not what to do. The niece and his oath were
+next-door neighbors in the chambers of his brain. A clever ex-Jesuit
+from Ireland, who lived only for doubts of conscience, and had himself
+a <i>conscientia dubia</i>, flew to the help of the doubter, and gave him to
+understand that &quot;his vow, especially before getting absolution from it,
+he must conscientiously keep, excepting the sinful and impossible point
+therein, that, namely, which, without the consent of his spouse, he had
+neither the right to promise nor the power to fulfil.&quot; In other words,
+the Jesuit failed not to show him, that he had in his fever sworn off
+only from the <i>unmarried</i> sex, and limited his celibacy merely to nuns,
+that accordingly his vow did not, to be sire, forbid him compound
+adultery, (which confession would do away) but it did with extreme
+strictness the simple kind. January was too religious not to refrain
+wholly from the simple form.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">It is hard to investigate the relation in which his now <i>increased</i>
+love for his four grand dukes or <i>little</i> dukes in Gaul stood to the
+fulfilment of his vow; in short, he gave his Lordship the commission
+and full power to fetch the four little persons from Gaul to London,
+because he wanted to take his beloved anonymous little posterity with
+him to Germany. It was uncertain whether he loved the mothers so
+heartily for the children's sake, or the children for the sake of the
+mothers. His Lordship went gladly, like Kotzebue (but differently),
+after the death of his beloved, to France. At last there came, not from
+him, but from the tutors of the Welshman, the Brazilian, the Calabrian,
+the sad intelligence, that in one night, probably according to a
+concerted plan of conspired prince-stealers, the three children had
+been abducted; and not long after that the sorrowful post was not only
+confirmed by his Lordship, but aggravated by the new one, that the
+Monsieur or Mosye on the Seven Islands was no more&mdash;to be found there.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Fate often gives man the balsam before the wound: January received his
+fifth son, whom I shall never call anything but the Infante, still
+earlier than the tidings of his forfeited blessing of children. The
+chief Chamberlain, Von Le Baut, had wedded the mother of the Infante
+(his Lordship's niece); but he dated his marriage three quarter-days
+back, instead of announcing it one later. I have never been able to see
+the connection of this anachronism or misreckoning of time with the
+Prince's vow. For the rest, dangerous as January's <i>votum</i> made him to
+the <i>husbands</i> of his court, and harmless to the <i>fathers</i>,
+nevertheless, the virtuous confidence which the husbands reposed in the
+female virtue which they had appropriated to themselves by marriage was
+so unlimited, that they, without hesitation, led that virtue into the
+midst of his unbridled flames. Nay, they even disdained the fear of
+being suspected of doing so in order that, when he laid down his crown
+on the toilet-table of their spouses, they might play with the shining
+wall-crown (<i>corona muralis</i>) as with a <i>joujou</i>, and with its
+brilliancy throw a dazzling light into people's windows: for a courtier
+cares more to own his wife than to watch over her.<a name="div2Ref_27" href="#div2_27"><sup>[27]</sup></a></p>
+
+<p class="normal">It will come on presently, cry the puppet-players; it will be over
+presently, say I.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">When, at length, his Lordship returned empty-handed, he was
+greatly surprised, not at the presence of the Infante, but at his
+adoption,&mdash;namely, at the marriage of Le Baut. But this High
+Chamberlain was&mdash;and no one minded it less than Horion&mdash;an ardent
+friend of the Prince; this rendered him capable of doing for him
+(as Cicero requires) even that which he would never have done for
+himself,&mdash;namely, a dishonorable action. In fact, it is an uncommon
+piece of good fortune for a courtier or a world's man, whose honor his
+high position exposes often to the worst of weather, that this honor,
+however sensitive to slight contusions,<a name="div2Ref_28" href="#div2_28"><sup>[28]</sup></a> easily gets over great
+ones, and can, if not by words, yet by deeds, be assailed without
+injury. Something similar is remarked by physicians in regard to
+madmen, or rather their skin, which to be sure feels the lightest
+touch, but on which no blister will draw. The Prince was knit to Le
+Baut by a threefold ligament,&mdash;by gratitude, son, and wife; his
+Lordship plucked the ligament asunder; that is to say, he laid bare
+to his niece the Chamberlain's heart, and discovered to her the
+poison-bag therein, and a dramatically carried out <i>plan</i>, which she
+had hitherto regarded as an <i>indulgent confidence</i>. All the nobility
+and pride of her nature flamed up in her with shame and wrath, and,
+pursued by crashing recollections, she flew with her child, and with
+the prospect of a second, out of the city to a country-seat of his
+Lordship's.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Now the Prince with his Lordship and his court (including even Dr.
+Culpepper) returned to Germany. Le Baut tarried awhile longer to
+appease the niece and persuade her to take the journey. But it was not
+only impossible to draw all her deeply sunk roots out of the land of
+freedom and go with the party to Germany, but she even separated
+herself, not only by seas, but by a bill of divorce, from the filthy
+favorite. She was obliged to leave with the Chamberlain her second
+child, his real daughter; but the first, the Infante, she clasped to
+her maternal breast. Le Baut was glad enough to let it be so, and
+thought that after the building-oration the scaffolding of the building
+should also go into the house-stove. But when he appeared under the
+German throne-canopy, his sun (January) stood at the summer solstice,
+which from decreasing warmth gradually passed over to cold storms.
+January's love could more easily rise and fall than stay still, and the
+greatest crime with him was absence. Le Baut, stripped of both wife and
+child, must needs lose now in comparison with his Lordship, because the
+latter came upon the stage, and under January's throne-canopy as
+treasurer and coast-warden of two treasures left behind in London. But
+there were deeper reasons. His Lordship easily governed the Regent,
+because he held him in neither by his own nor other people's vices, but
+by his own virtues. In the first place, he required nothing of him, not
+so much as diet and chastity. Secondly, he lifted no cousins into the
+saddle, but tipped bad men out of it; he bore him like a hawk on his
+gloved fist, but the falconer did it not for the purpose of darting the
+Prince upon doves and hares, but in order to make him at once
+<i>watchful</i> and <i>tame</i>. Thirdly, his firmness and his fineness mutually
+compensated each other: the best one to rule over changeable men is the
+unchangeable. Fourthly, he was not the favorite, but the associate,
+remained always a Briton and a lord and the country's beneficent
+bee-father (apiary), whereas January was the queen-bee and in the
+queen-bee's prison. Fifthly, he was one of the few men to whom one must
+be <i>equal</i> in order to resist their will; and any one who would play
+the juggler's trick of throwing a padlock on his mouth slyly, soon had
+one to fetters and manacles on his own soul. Sixthly, he had a good
+cheese. This last point needs no copious explanation. In Chester he had
+a farmer, who produced a cheese, the like of which was not to be found
+in Europe; but to princes generally an extraordinary cheese is more
+gratifying than an extraordinary address of thanks from the provincial
+syndic.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">With such a conjunction of ill stars, of course our Chamberlain found
+the bill of divorce, which at first was written with sympathetic ink in
+January's face, gradually more and more legible. Still he read it
+through several times every week, in order to read it correctly; he
+could now no longer procure any lapdog a place, that is, a lap,&mdash;his
+letters of recommendation were Uriah's-letters,<a name="div2Ref_29" href="#div2_29"><sup>[29]</sup></a>&mdash;and now, when he
+actually succeeded in getting, through his Lordship, the charge of
+chief Chamberlain, he thought it high time to try, against the gout in
+his knee, bathing at his knightly seat of St. Luna year in and year
+out, and so he set off, having first been obliged to solemnly promise
+the whole court that he should come back well.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Properly, now, the preliminary history would be, according to promise,
+ended, so that I might get well on in the later history this work
+contains, were I not absolutely obliged on the Court-Chaplain's account
+to add this much more:&mdash;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">The only place of which Le Baut had the presentation at court was
+the parish of St. Luna. He invested therewith, as its patron, the
+Rat-contradictor Eymann, who had begged from him in London the oral
+vocation to the Court-Chaplaincy, and who could no longer obtain it.
+Hence the Dog-post-days always call him the Court-Chaplain, although in
+fact he is only a country pastor.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">From the slight circumstance that Eymann, as travelling preacher,
+accompanied January's retinue, a great deal grew out. Eymann, at his
+Lordship's country-seat, offered to his present wife the neck- and
+breast-pendant of a heart hollowed with consumption, as a slight gift,
+which was accepted. To the couple while still in England their Flamin
+was born. Her Ladyship loved in the person of the Court-Chaplain's wife
+a worthy sister of her sex, and a worthy fellow-citizen of her native
+land; she urged her with fervent prayers to stay in England, and when
+all were refused, she begged and prevailed upon her at least to let her
+Flamin&mdash;in order to be at all events half a Briton&mdash;stay behind in the
+society of Victor and the Infante, till the friendly trio<a name="div2Ref_30" href="#div2_30"><sup>[30]</sup></a> should be
+transplanted simultaneously into German soil.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">The Parson's wife was strong enough to sacrifice for the sake of her
+Flamin's finer education the enjoyment of his presence, and left him
+behind under the eyes of love and in the little arms of childish
+friendship. The same training hand&mdash;<i>Dahore</i> was the name of the
+teacher&mdash;reared and watered the three noble flowers, which sucked from
+one kind of bed and ether three kinds of color, and developed unlike
+stamens and honeycups. Dahore had the hearts of all children in his
+tender hand, simply because his own never boiled and blustered, and
+because an ideal beauty sat upon his youthful form and an ideal love
+dwelt in his pure breast. The three children loved and embraced each
+more warmly in his presence, as the Graces enfold each other before
+Venus Urania: they even bore all the same name, as the Otaheitans
+exchange names with those they love. When they had attained some
+ripeness of years, his Lordship came to put them all with Dahore on
+board ship for Germany. But before the embarkation the Infante caught
+the small-pox and was made blind, and Dahore was obliged to return with
+him to the distressed and weeping lady. Victor had long and
+speechlessly hung on the neck of his sick friend and clung around
+Dahore's knee, refusing to part from his two loved ones; but his
+Lordship parted them: Flamin and Victor were, from that time, educated
+in Flachsenfingen, the former for a jurist, the latter for a physician.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">There are some improbabilities in Spitzius Hofmann's gourd-flask; but
+the Dog must be held responsible for what he delivers. Now the story
+goes straight forward again.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">His Lordship, during the cannonading of the tattered or riddled
+garrison, withdrew with Victor into another apartment; and his first
+word was, &quot;Unbandage me a moment, and leave thy hand in mine, that I
+may be sure of thy attention, for I have much to say to thee.&quot; Good
+man! we all remark that thou art more tender than thou art willing to
+appear, and we all praise it. Not <i>coldness</i>, but <i>cooling-off</i>, is
+the
+greater wisdom; and our inner man should, like a hot metal-casting in
+its mould, cool but slowly, in order that it may round itself out to a
+smoother form: for that very reason has Nature&mdash;just as they <i>warm</i> the
+mould for statuary metal&mdash;poured his soul into an <i>ardent</i> body.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">He continued: &quot;I have, my dear boy, in my blindness been able to
+dictate to thee only empty letters; I meant to save my secrets for thy
+arrival. I am watched by a small gunpowder-conspiracy.&quot; Victor
+interrupted him with the question, how he had so suddenly become blind.
+His Lordship answered, reluctantly, &quot;One eye was probably so already
+before thy departure for Göttingen, but I did not know it.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;But the other?&quot; said Victor.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Over his Lordship's face glanced the cold shadow of a buried pang; he
+looked on his son a long time, and answered, as if abstractedly and
+hurriedly, &quot;Also! as I look on thee, thou seemest to me much taller and
+larger.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;That is, perhaps,&quot; replied he, for he guessed his thought, &quot;an ocular
+illusion of the sensitive retina.<a name="div2Ref_31" href="#div2_31"><sup>[31]</sup></a> You spoke of a gunpowder-plot.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;They have found out,&quot; his Lordship continued, &quot;that the Prince's son
+is not in London: they even assume that the disease was given to him at
+that time designedly; and the Prince daily speaks of the moment when I
+shall bring his son back to him. Perhaps he knows these suspicions. I
+was obliged to postpone my departure for London till my cure. Now I
+shall shortly start for England, where the son is not, to bring his
+mother; him I shall bring from otherwheres, and with just as good eyes
+as thou hast given me.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Then,&quot; Victor broke out, &quot;not the best of men, but his enemies, will
+be hurled down.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;No, I am to be <i>hurled down</i> first (to express myself in thy
+fashion),&mdash;but thou hast interrupted me: I have never had the courage
+to interrupt other people like fools,&mdash;for my absence is just what they
+want.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">I, as installed historiographer, ask no leave of any one, and interrupt
+whom I will. One who is interrupted may jest, indeed, but he can no
+longer argue. The Socrates grafted upon Plato, who never let a sophist
+have his talk out, was therefore one himself. In England, where they
+tolerate systems even among the wine-cups, a man can spread himself
+out like a royal folio: in France, where the spectacles of wisdom
+are splintered into sharp, shiny bits, one must be as curt as a
+visiting-card. A hundred times is the wise man silent before the
+coxcomb, because he needs twenty-three sheets to express his opinion.
+Coxcombs need only lines; their opinions are upstarting islands, held
+together by nothing but emptiness.... I add the remark, that between
+the lord and his son a fine, courteous wariness reigned, which in the
+case of so near a relationship is to be justified only by their rank,
+their mental structure, and their frequent separation.&mdash;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;But my presence is, perhaps, still worse. The Princess&mdash;&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">(The Prince's bride, since his first wife died early and without
+children, as Spitz says.)</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;The Princess brings along with her a stream of diversions, in which he
+will no longer hear any voice but that which lures to pleasure. An
+interrupted influence is as good as lost. And then, too, I am, up to a
+certain point, so tired of this game, that I gladly flee from the new
+engagements in which this new arrival would involve me. Should she, as
+they say, not love him, she might so much the more easily govern him;
+and then my absence would be, again, not good. But, setting me aside,
+what dost thou propose to do during my absence?&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">After a crotchet-rest, he answered himself, &quot;Thou wilt be his
+Physician-in-ordinary, Victor.&quot; Victor's hand twitched in his father's.
+&quot;Thou hast already been promised to him; and he longs for thee, simply
+because I have often named thee. He is impatient to see for himself how
+any one looks whose father he knows so well. As Physician-in-ordinary,
+thou canst, with thy art and thy fancy, keep him clear of strange
+fetters until I come again; then will I impose still softer ones on
+him, and go back forever. My engagement has had hitherto the design
+merely of averting strange ones, particularly a certain&mdash;&quot; Then, with
+full heart and changed voice, &quot;My beloved! it is hard in this world to
+win Virtue, Freedom, and Happiness, but still harder to diffuse them.
+The wise man gets everything from himself; the fool, from others. The
+freeman must release the slave, the philosopher think for the fool, the
+happy man labor for the unhappy.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">He rose, and presupposed Victor's Yes. The latter had therefore to
+dribble out his rhetorical flood during the leave-taking. He began
+with compressed breath: &quot;I detest most cordially the simoom of the
+court-atmosphere ...&quot; (his Lordship has to answer for it with me, that
+the son leaves out here the concessive conjunction, &quot;to be sure&quot;:
+whoever lets it be seen that he expects obedience, gets it at least in
+a prouder shape) &quot;which sweeps over nothing but prostrate men, and
+turns him to powder who remains upright! I wish I could be in an
+antechamber on a court-day; I would say to all in my thoughts: 'How I
+hate you and your sour honey of pleasure- and plague-parties; the
+cursed watchman's- and rower's-bench of your card-tables; the gifts of
+full dishes of slaughtered provinces (I mean your gaming-plates and
+your meat-plates)!' But I know very well I can never express myself
+strongly enough upon the servile, tide-waiting court-oysters, who know
+not how to stir or open anything&mdash;not excepting their hearts&mdash;but only
+their shell, to draw something in ...&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;I have not <i>interrupted</i> thee yet,&quot; said his Lordship, and stood still
+for a moment.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Meanwhile,&quot; the son continued, &quot;I wade with the greatest pleasure down
+to the oyster-bank ... O, my dear father! how could I help going? Why
+have I not hitherto left your diseased eye unbandaged, that you might
+see in my face the absence of a single objection to your wishes? Ah!
+around every throne hang a thousand wet eyes, upturned by maimed men
+without hands; above sits iron Fate in the form of a prince, and
+stretches out no hand. Why shall not some tender-hearted man go up, and
+guide Fate's rigid hand, and with one hand dry, down below, a thousand
+eyes?&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Horion smiled, as one who should say, Young man!</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;But I beg only for some legal postponements and delays, in order that
+I may get time to be more stoical and foolish,&mdash;foolish,&mdash;that is, I
+mean&mdash;contented. I should be glad to laugh and go on foot for two
+months longer among the good people around us, and by the side of my
+Flamin, particularly just now in the almanac spring and in that of my
+years, and before the ship of life freezes into the harbor of old age.
+Stoical I must be at any rate. Verily, did I not lay Epictetus's manual
+as a serpent-stone<a name="div2Ref_32" href="#div2_32"><sup>[32]</sup></a> to myself and my wounds, in order that the stone
+might suck out the moral poison; were I to go out of the house with a
+breast full of cancer-sores; what would the court think of me?... Ah!
+but I mean it seriously. The poor inner man&mdash;dried up by the
+intermittent fever of the passions, exhausted by the heart-palpitation
+of pleasure, burning with the wound-fever of love needs, like any other
+sick man, solitude and stillness and tranquillity, in order to get
+well.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Though he named the word &quot;tranquillity,&quot; his inner being was agitated
+even to the dissolving-point, so much had the passions already stirred
+his blood and shaken his heart.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">And now the two went back in a deepening silence of harmony to Eymann.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;I have a request for my Flamin.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;What is it?&quot; said his Lordship.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;I do not yet know, but he wrote me he would soon name it.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Mine to him is,&quot; said his Lordship, &quot;that, if he will get a place, he
+must love the Pandects better than tactics, and, instead of the rapier,
+take the pen.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">The son had been treated too politely by the father to have courage
+enough to ask for his secrets, especially that relating to the
+whereabouts of January's son. I treat the reader with the same
+delicacy, and hope he will have just as little courage; for, when any
+one explains himself guardedly, nothing is more uncivil than to put a
+new question.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">His Lordship now travelled back, a cured man, to the Prince.</p>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<p class="center"><img border="0" src="images/rivetstart.png" alt="rivetstart"></p>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<h2><a name="div1Ref_03" href="#div1_03">3. DOG-POST-DAY.</a></h2>
+<br>
+
+<p class="center"><span class="sc2">Sowing-Day of Joys.&mdash;Watch-Tower.&mdash;Fraternization of the Heart!</span></p>
+<br>
+
+<p class="normal">The departure of his Lordship was the removal of the dam which had
+hitherto stood in the way of the flood of narrations, questions, and
+pleasures. The first investigation upon which the Parsonage entered
+was, to see whether it was really the old Bastian. And he it was, hide
+and hair; even the left side-lock he had still, as of old, shorter than
+the right. When the butcher's boy comes home from Hungary, he wonders
+that his kin are the same old pennies; they, however, wonder that he is
+no longer so. But in the present case there was mutual delight at the
+unchangedness on both sides. On every face lay the halo of joy, but
+on each composed of different rays. On a soft face, like Victor's,
+rapture looks like virtue. Old Appel, who had never, in all her life,
+turned over any leaves but those of David's Psalter and that in an
+ox's stomach,<a name="div2Ref_33" href="#div2_33"><sup>[33]</sup></a> expressed her pleasure all day long to the brass
+kettles by scouring them with unusual zest. The Vienna hospital for
+animals&mdash;consisting of an old pug and puss, who no longer hated
+each other, just as in the old man the good and bad souls are
+reconciled&mdash;and the bird-collection under the stove, which was one
+rusty-black bulfinch strong, took their full share of interest in the
+general uproar, and introduced themselves, and&mdash;which no ambassador
+would have done&mdash;waived the right of the first visit. Agatha expressed
+her joy only with her lips, by keeping silence with them, and pressing
+them to her brother's. To the Court-Chaplain's credit, it is reported
+that he took the invalid pug, who had the podagra in his hind-feet and
+the chiragra in his fore-paws, and shoved him quietly in his basket
+keeping-room and chamber under the stove again; restored the
+architectural order of the chairs without scolding; and rocked the
+little Bastian amidst the joyful confusion of tongues, that he might
+not wake up and aggravate it. But in the highly refined heart of
+Victor's countrywoman, the Chaplain's wife, the rays of joy from the
+whole family came to a focus, and diffused through her whole bosom the
+living glow of love. She smiled right into Victor's face to such a
+degree that she knew no way of escape but by bethinking herself of his
+destined chamber, which she directed to be opened and shown to him.
+Agatha flew forward with the jingling bunch of keys; and the guest, as
+he entered, was followed by only so many people as there were in the
+house, all eager to see what he would say to it.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">He surrendered himself to all this friendly handling, not with the vain
+egotism of a cultivated stranger, but with a delighted, docile, almost
+child-like confusion; it gave him not the least concern that he looked
+like a child, so gentle, so glad, and so unpretending. In such hours it
+is hard to sit down, or to listen to a story, or to tell one....
+Everybody began one, but the Chaplain interposed: &quot;We have quite other
+things to talk about.&quot; But no <i>quite other things</i> came. Everybody
+wanted to enjoy the stranger where there were only four ears, but the
+six remaining ears could not be kept away. My description of his
+confusion is itself confused, but so it is with me always; for
+instance, when I describe haste, I do it, unconsciously, with the
+greatest. To a heart like his, that hung rocking in the feathers<a name="div2Ref_34" href="#div2_34"><sup>[34]</sup></a>
+of love, was there any need that it should see in every notched
+window-sill, in every smooth pavement-pebble, in every round hole
+drilled by the rain in the door-step, his boyhood's years mosaically
+pictured, and that he should enjoy in the same objects age and novelty?
+Those boyish years, which appeared to him out of a shadow, abiding on
+the lawns of St. Luna, between happy Sundays and among beloved
+faces,&mdash;those <i>boyish years</i> held a dark mirror in their hands, in
+which the glimmering perspective of his <i>childish years</i> ran backward;
+and in that remote magic-night stood, dimly gleaming, the form of
+<i>Dahore</i>, his never-to-be-forgotten teacher in London, who had so
+loved, so indulged, so improved him. &quot;Ah!&quot; thought he, &quot;thou unrequited
+heart, too warm for this earth, where beatest thou now? why can I not
+unite my sighs with thine, and say to thee, Teacher, Beloved? O, man
+often perceives but late how much he was loved, how forgetful and
+ungrateful he was, and how great the heart he misunderstood.&quot; What
+nourished his still pleasure the most was the thought that he had
+earned it by his filial obedience to his father, and by his resolve to
+undertake the future labors-of-Hercules at court; for into every great
+joy of his the doubt would fall, like a bitter stomach-drop, whether he
+deserved it,&mdash;a doubt which reigning houses, palatines, patriarchs, and
+grand-masters have skilfully taken from them in childhood. The better
+sort of men find pleasure sweetest only after a good action,&mdash;the
+Easter-Festival after a Passion-Week.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">My lady-readers will now want to hear what was cooked for dinner;
+but the documents of this Post-day, which reach me half by wheel and
+half by water, state, in the first place, that no one had any
+appetite,&mdash;which joy takes away more than grief,&mdash;except the three
+regiments, which slashed like veterans into the enemy,&mdash;that is, into
+the leavings of the table; secondly, that the meal was still leaner
+than the guest himself. We will, however, hereby invite all the
+reading-societies in a body to the <i>immovable</i> feast of the 4th of May,
+the Friday when, for the first time, Victor's arrival and his godson's
+churchgoing are suitably celebrated.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">The Parson's wife extricated the beset darling in the afternoon from
+the musical circle of so many tones, and smuggled him away from under
+the eyes of her husband, whose Directress and Lady Mayoress she was,
+and led him to his chamber, that she might there, before him alone,
+distress and delight herself, and speak out her heart, like a mother.
+Long-suppressed sighs and antiquated tears now forced their way out of
+the opened motherly heart into another and tender one, which was,
+indeed, her son's best friend. She complained to him of Flamin's
+excitability, which Victor used always to allay; of his love for
+military life, while, after all, he was a scholar; and, finally, of the
+company he kept,&mdash;namely, he went roving round with a young page, one
+<i>Matthieu</i>, son of the Minister <i>Von Schleunes</i>, a dissolute,
+universally-beloved, universally-spoiled, bold, artful young scoffer,
+who, when his service allowed it, would spend his time either over
+yonder with the Chamberlain's people, or here with her son: &quot;Heaven
+only knew what designs he had in his visits at a citizen's house.&quot; She
+rejoiced that Victor would bear off his old friend out of the traps and
+fangs of this rake. Victor pressed her hand with emotion, and said: &quot;I
+could hardly think of sharing his heart with the best bond-fellow.
+Not so much as fall in love should he dare to, if it depended on me.
+Only me must he love, and one other person, who depicts him quite
+wrongly,&mdash;namely, yourself.&quot; He greatly mistrusted, also, her drawing
+of the sun-spots of Matthieu, because women seldom comprehend eccentric
+men, and because maidens, indeed, often love wild youths, but matrons
+(enlightened by marriage) always prefer gentle ones.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">He easily drew the hearts of married women into his drag-net by a
+certain kindly gallantry towards them which a German saves for
+unmarried ones. Old ladies and old tobacco-pipes, however, easily
+cleave to men's lips. The younger pigeons he enticed to himself by his
+<i>comic salt</i>, as they catch turtle-doves by another kind. A <i>bon-mot</i>
+is to them a <i>dictum probans</i>; a <i>pasquin</i>, a <i>magister sententiarum</i>;
+and the critical calendar of scandal is to them a Kant's Critique of
+the Pure Reason, in an improved edition. With his medical doctor's
+ring, also, he fastened to himself female souls; as physician, he laid
+claim to corporeal mysteries, and then the spiritual easily follow
+these.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">In the evening, when the woodland stream of the first jubilation had
+run out, three sober words were at length possible. The Parson, too, by
+this time, scolded less; for joy had made him rabid in the forenoon.
+Anger and the body are strengthened together, and therefore by
+pleasure. Hence in January and February, when dogs get the longer
+madness, men have the short one of wrath; hence convalescents grumble
+more at all about them, just as people do under strong mental
+excitements,&mdash;e. g. Dog-post scribes; hence, too, in the exhaustion
+following sick-headache, or a fit of intoxication, one is gentler than
+a lamb.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Towards evening, there already transpired something of consequence.
+Apollonia swept and dusted her blood-relationship and her guest with
+her whisks even sooner than the spiders and the dust. On the 4th of May
+was this day's arrival of the long-absent fugitive to be right properly
+celebrated. Flamin and Victor led the way through the Parsonage garden,
+whose <i>memorabilia</i> and <i>curiosa</i> are so edifying that the
+correferent<a name="div2Ref_35" href="#div2_35"><sup>[35]</sup></a> of these acts wishes he could, by the Dog-express,
+portray the garden to me more clearly. The Chaplain had stamped off
+many beds, not into rectangles, but had curved and twisted them into
+the shape of Latin characters, in double black-letter, to represent the
+initials of his family. His own (E) he had sowed with radishes;
+Apollonia's (A), with capuchin-lettuce;<a name="div2Ref_36" href="#div2_36"><sup>[36]</sup></a> Flamin's (F), with
+rape-cole; Sebastian's (S), with sweet-root, or <i>Glycyrrhiza vulgaris</i>
+(liquorice). Whoever was not present had left for him, at all events, a
+vacant place and <i>almanac royal</i> among squashes and Stettin-apples,
+round which was wrapped a perforated paper with the name cut out,
+which, after the peeling off of this wrappage, would appear green or
+red on the pale fruit. Victor, as he passed along by a C made of
+tulips, asked his Flamin the meaning of it. &quot;Why dost thou ask?&quot; he
+inquired; and the loquacious Parsonage-people, following after, drove
+away the answer.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Beyond the Parsonage-meadow stood&mdash;one had only to leap the brook&mdash;a
+hill, and thereon an old watchtower, in which there was nothing but a
+wooden staircase, and overhead nothing but a board covering instead of
+the Italian roof, both of which the Chamberlain had had made, that the
+people&mdash;not himself, for the unfeelingness of magnates labors for the
+feeling of minorites&mdash;might up there look round them a little. One
+could see from there the columnar architecture of the Creator, the
+Swiss mountains, standing, and the Rhine moving along with his ships.
+On the tower two linden-trees had grown aloft, twined together by
+nature, so as, sometimes, with their foliage, which had been hollowed
+out into a green niche and underlaid with a grassy bench, to fan, up
+there, a fevered islander. The loving party climbed the battlement, and
+carried up with them in their rural breasts a tranquillity which softly
+copied therein the still outer heaven that encircled these good hearts
+with its veiled suns. One lingering cloud gave a farewell glow, but it
+melted away before it burned out.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Now could the supplementary volumes of the Universal History of St.
+Luna be conveniently issued. Eymann could deliver his folio volumes of
+<i>gravamina</i> (grievances) upon the consistorial councils and the rats.
+All at once, Agatha, like her saintly namesake, was invoked down below
+by the organ-blower <i>loci</i>, who was <i>valet-de-place</i> of the village,
+and Parsonage-coachman. When certain authors say, &quot;The coachman was
+blind, and the horse was deaf,&quot; they exactly reverse the case. The
+churl was deaf. He had in his <i>mouchoir de Vénus</i>&mdash;the handkerchief is,
+with the common people, at once letter-bag and envelope, because a
+letter is as important and rare a thing to them as a good one is to a
+reviewer&mdash;to-day discovered and unwrapped an epistle to Agatha, which
+he should have delivered yesterday with his Lordship's: but coachmen
+consider a master only as the mock-sun and second party to the horse,
+and the lady absolutely as no more than a parasite-growth of the
+stable; hence &quot;immediately&quot; means with them one or two or three days;
+and &quot;to-morrow forenoon&quot; meant, on the Ratisbon notification-programme
+of matters to be voted on, one or two or three years. Agatha, with more
+eagerness, hurried down, held the letter towards the lighter quarter of
+the west, and deciphered something, which, with sparkling eyes, she
+carried in a gallop up the stairs. &quot;She is coming to-morrow!&quot; she cried
+out to Flamin; for she seemed almost, in the person of every one of her
+friends, to love only the companion and friend of her other friends.
+The case was this: <i>Clotilda</i>, Le Baut's only daughter by his first
+wife (his Lordship's niece), was coming from the Girls' Institute in
+Maienthal, where she had been educated, back to her father.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Do <i>you</i> take good care!&quot; said the Chaplain's wife; &quot;she is very
+beautiful.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Then,&quot; said he, &quot;I shall much rather take care <i>not</i> to take care.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;In fact,&quot; she continued, &quot;all that is beautiful is now gathering
+around you&quot; (here he tried to confuse and chastise her by a flattering
+look, but in vain). &quot;The Italian Princess comes, too, on St. John's
+Day; and she is said to be as charming as if she were no princess at
+all, but only an Italian woman.&quot; There she did most princesses wrong;
+but a certain irony upon her own sex was the only fault of the
+Chaplain's wife, to whom, as to many other mothers, there were almost
+no step-sons and hardly anything but step-daughters.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">He hoped, he replied, that very few princesses, even in America, had
+yet been married, in whose affections he could not have become
+completely entangled, and that merely from pity for such a poor, tender
+creature or heraldic beast, pressed under the seal-stamp and then on
+the contracts, which were often the only children of these marriages.
+&quot;The young Mothers of the Country are really, like bee-mothers, set up
+for sale in their queen's prison, and wait to see into what hive the
+bee-father, or Father of the Country, will this year trade them off
+again.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">A woman cannot possibly comprehend how a man whom she esteems can
+fall in love, except with her; and she can hardly wait to get sight of
+his beloved. Quite as curious is she about this man's style in his
+love,&mdash;that is, whether it is of the Flemish or French or Italian
+school. The Chaplain's wife questioned her confidential guest on this
+point also.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;My harem,&quot; he began, &quot;reaches from this watchtower to the Cape, and
+away round the globe: Solomon is but a yellow straw-widower compared
+with me. I have in it even his wives; and, from Eve with her Sodom's
+Borsdorf-apple down to the latest Eve with an Imperial apple, and even
+to a marchioness with a mere fruit-piece, they are all in my hold and
+breast.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">A lady excuses esteem for her sex on the ground that she is included
+therein. Women themselves have not so much as an idea of the
+peculiarities of their sex.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;But what says the favorite Sultana to this?&quot; asked the Grand
+Inquisitress.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;She&mdash;&quot; He paused, less from embarrassment than as one sunk in the
+fulness of glowing dreams. &quot;<i>She</i>, of course&mdash;&quot; he continued. &quot;I pledge
+my head, meanwhile, that every youth has two periods, or, at least,
+moments. In the first, he stakes his head that he would sooner let his
+heart mould in his thorax or chest, and his <i>poples</i> or knee-joint grow
+lame, than that either should stir for any other woman than the very
+best of her sex,&mdash;for a real angel, a decided Quinterne.<a name="div2Ref_37" href="#div2_37"><sup>[37]</sup></a> He
+absolutely insists on the highest prize in the marriage Loto,&mdash;that is,
+in the first period; for the second comes, and cheats him out of so
+much. The female Quinterne would naturally require a <i>male</i> one; and,
+in case he were <i>that</i>,...</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;I am a stupid drawing, an <i>ambe</i>, a double number, I say, and
+absolutely refuse to let the period have its talk out; but I shall
+still be on the look-out for the <i>Quinterne</i>.... And here let me ask,
+What would be the use of being a man if one were not a fool? Well, now,
+if I should draw the above-mentioned Quinterne,&mdash;which, to be sure,
+without any extravagant hope, I may well presuppose,&mdash;I should not be
+indifferent on the subject, but in raptures. Good heavens! I must
+instanter be frizzled, and have my profile taken. I should make verses
+and <i>pas</i>, and both with their traditional <i>pedes</i> (or feet); I should
+bend myself oftener than a devout monk, to make bows and (where there
+was anything to gather) bouquets; body, soul, and spirit I should have
+consist with me of so many finger-tips and feelers, that I should
+perceive at once (the Quinterne would perceive it still quicker) if our
+two shadows should come in collision. The touch of the smallest little
+end of a ribbon would be a good conductor to the electrical ether,
+which would shoot out from me in lightnings, as she would be charged
+negatively and I positively; and as to touching her hair, that could
+not create any less explosion than if a world should fall into the
+dishevelled<a name="div2Ref_38" href="#div2_38"><sup>[38]</sup></a> hair of a bearded comet....</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;And yet what does it all amount to, if I have sense, and consider what
+she deserves, this good creature, this faithful, this undeserved one?
+What, in fact, were dull verses, sighs, shoes (boots I should put
+away), one or two hands pressed, a sacrificing heart, but a slight
+<i>gratial</i> and <i>don gratuit</i>, if thereby a creature was to be obtained
+who, as I see more and more, has everything belonging to the fairest
+angel that conducts man through life (invisibleness perhaps excepted);
+who has all virtues, and arrays them all in beauties; who gleams and
+gladdens like this spring evening, and yet, like it, conceals her
+flowers and all her stars, except the star of love; into whose
+all-powerful and yet gentle harmonica of the heart I would fain be so
+absorbed in listening; in whose eyes I would behold with such
+extraordinary delight the tear-drops of the tenderer soul, and the
+beamings of the loftier one; by whose side I could so fondly remain
+standing through the whole flying <i>opera buffa</i> and <i>seria</i><a name="div2Ref_39" href="#div2_39"><sup>[39]</sup></a> of
+life,&mdash;so fondly, I say, that so the poor Sebastian might at least,
+when, in life's holy evening, his shadow grew longer and longer, and
+the landscape around&mdash;him melted away to a broad shadow, and he
+himself, too, that I might at least behold <i>both</i> shadowy hands,&quot; (one
+of them Flamin was just then holding,) &quot;and exclaim&mdash;&quot; (Checking
+himself:) &quot;Here comes the-old bellows-blower, too, with something in
+one of his!&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">As he could no longer either hide his emotion behind jest, nor the
+signs of it in his eyes behind some low-hanging linden-leaves, it was a
+real piece of good luck, that, just at the second when his voice was
+about to give way to it, he looked over the watch-tower, and saw the
+coachman come racing over again. The man cried from below, &quot;he had got
+it from Seebass, but not till this moment.&quot; Agatha flew down
+passionately, and, after reading a billet below, darted off across the
+meadow. The bellows-blower ascended slowly, like a barometer before
+settled weather, and lifted himself and the billet he had brought back
+with him,&mdash;not a minute the sooner for all the beckoning overhead
+there,&mdash;with his levers, to the top of the tower. In the billet was
+written, in Clotilda's hand, &quot;Come to thy bower, beloved friend!&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">All eyes now ran after the runner, and fluttered with her through the
+clear-obscure of evening into the Parsonage, around whose arbor,
+however, no one could yet be seen. Hardly had Agatha caught sight of
+the opening of the latter, when her hurrying became flying; and when
+she was almost up to it, a white form flew out with widespread arms and
+into hers, but the arbor concealed the end of the embrace, and the eyes
+of all lingered long in vain expectation up in the cloister of love.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">The Chaplain's wife, who generally would allow maidens only
+degradations and not elevations of rank, now imparted to Clotilda all
+the seven consecrations, and praised her so much&mdash;perhaps also because
+she was a countrywoman of hers on the mother's side&mdash;that Victor could
+have embraced the eulogist and her subject at once. The Chaplain added,
+as his mite to her praise, that he had printed the initial of her name
+(C) with tulips in red, like a title, and that the letter would shine
+out, when the bed bloomed, far and wide.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">The husband and husbandman began now to break in more and more upon the
+sphere-music of night with the reed-stops of his cough; at last, he
+made off with Victor's enthusiastic female friend, and left the two
+friends alone, in the lovely night, with the two full hearts that
+panted to pour themselves out into each other.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Flamin had, during this whole day, shown a deepening silence of
+touching tenderness, which seldom found its way into his being,
+and which seemed to say, &quot;I have something on my heart.&quot; When the
+watch-tower was comparatively deserted, Victor, who had become full of
+loving and softening dreams, could no longer conceal his tear-swimming
+eyes: he opened them freely before the oldest darling of his days, and
+showed him that open eye which says, &quot;Look right through, if thou wilt,
+down to my very heart; there is nothing therein but clear love.&quot; ...
+Silently the vortices of love swept round the two, and drew them nearer
+together; they opened their arms for each other, and sank into each
+other's without a sound, and between the brother-hearts lay only two
+mortal bodies. Covered deep by the stream of love and ecstasy, they
+closed for a moment their enraptured eyes; and when they opened again,
+there stood the night sublimely before them, with its suns withdrawn
+into eternal depths; the milky-way ran, like the ring of eternity,
+around the immensity of space; the sharp sickle of the earthly moon
+glided, cutting, across the short days and joys of men.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">But in that which stood under the suns, which the ring encircled, which
+the sickle smote, there was something higher, clearer, and more lasting
+than they: it was the imperishable friendship lodged in these
+perishable integuments.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Flamin, instead of being satisfied by this exhausting expression of our
+speechless love, became now a living, flying flame. &quot;Victor! in this
+night give me thy friendship forever, and swear to me that thou wilt
+never disturb me in my love to thee.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;O thou good soul! I have given thee my heart long since, but I will
+gladly swear to thee again to-day.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;And swear to me that thou wilt never plunge me into misfortune and
+despair.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Flamin! that distresses me too much.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;O, I beseech thee, swear it! and lift thy hand and promise me, even if
+thou hast made me unhappy, nevertheless that thou wilt not forsake me
+nor hate me.&quot; ... Victor pressed him to his bosom. &quot;But we will come up
+hither when we can no longer be reconciled,&mdash;O, it pains me, too,
+Victor!&mdash;up hither, and embrace each other, and throw ourselves down
+and die!&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Ay!&quot; said Victor, in a low and exhausted voice. &quot;O God! has anything
+happened, then?&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;I will tell thee all. Now let us live and die together.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;O Flamin! how inexpressibly I love thee to-day!&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Now will I let thee see into my whole heart, Victor, and reveal to
+thee all.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">But, before he could do it, he had to man himself by holding his peace;
+and they remained a long time silent, lost in the depths of the inner
+and outer heavens.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">At last he was able to begin, and to tell him that that Clotilda, about
+whom he had jested to-day, had written herself in ineffaceable
+characters on his heart; that he could neither forget nor possess her;
+that the creeping fever of a frightful, frenzied jealousy burned,
+galling, within him; that he could not, to be sure, say a word to her
+about his love, according to her prohibition, until her brother (the
+Infante) should come back and be present; but that she, to judge by her
+demeanor, and according to Matthieu's assurances, had perhaps some
+regard for him; that her position must be an eternal wall of separation
+between them, so long as he took the <i>juristic</i> instead of the
+<i>military</i> road to promotion; and that on this last, if his Lordship
+would lend him a hand in the matter, he would attain to Clotilda more
+swiftly on similar steps; and that the request of which he had spoken
+in his letters to Victor was just this,&mdash;that he would repeat all to
+his Lordship, and beg his assistance. In fact, his wild arm could hold
+the sword better than the balance of justice. A frightful
+predisposition to jealousy, which even from future possibilities
+catches palpitations, was the chief reason.&mdash;Victor rejoiced that he
+could give his feelings the best language,&mdash;namely, action, and
+assented to all he required, with delight at his confidence, and at the
+absence from his communication of dreaded news; and so, newly attached
+to each other, they went to rest. And the Twins&mdash;that ever-burning,
+intertwined name of friendship&mdash;glimmered in the west, beckoning upward
+out of an <i>earthly</i> eternity; and the heart of the Lion blazed on their
+right....</p>
+
+<p class="normal">There are men laid upon this earth, and bound to the soil, who never
+erect themselves to the contemplation of a friendship which winds
+around two souls, not earthy, metallic, and unclean bonds, but the
+spiritual ones that interweave this world itself with another and man
+with God. Such ones, degraded to the dust, it is, that, like
+travellers, regard from below the temple that hangs round the Alpine
+peaks as baseless and airy, because they do not themselves stand on
+the heights, and on the great floor of the temple,&mdash;because they know
+not that in friendship we revere and love something higher than self
+(which latter cannot at once be the <i>source</i> and the <i>object</i> of
+love),&mdash;something higher, namely, the embodiment and reflection of the
+virtue which in ourselves we only <i>approve</i>, and not till we see it in
+others can <i>love</i>.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Ah! can, then, higher beings judge severely the weaknesses of the
+shadowy groups that seek to hold fast to one another, driven apart as
+they are by north winds,&mdash;who would fain press to their bosoms the
+noble, invisible form of each other over which the thick and heavy
+earthly mask hangs,&mdash;and who fall, one after another, into graves into
+which the mourned draw their mourners?</p>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<p class="center"><img border="0" src="images/barstart.png" alt="barstart"></p>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<h2><a name="div1Ref_04" href="#div1_04">4. DOG-POST-DAY.</a></h2>
+<br>
+
+<p class="center"><span class="sc2">Profile-Cutter.&mdash;Clotilda's Historic Figure.<a name="div2Ref_40" href="#div2_40"><sup>[40]</sup></a>&mdash;Courtiers,
+and a Noble Man.</span></p>
+<br>
+
+<p class="normal">Clotilda, as Sebastian learned the next morning, had originally meant
+to stay at the seminary till after St. John's; but, as her best friend
+and schoolmate <i>Giulia</i> had gone beforehand, not to her parents, but to
+the long home, her distressed eyes must needs draw themselves away by a
+speedier departure from the grave-mound which lay like a ruin over her
+forlorn heart. Without packing up, she had fled from the flowerless
+Golgotha of her wounded soul; and a second contemplation of it, and a
+second departure, and a renewal of the old tears, still awaited her.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Never was a great beauty praised in a more unembarrassed manner by a
+little one than Clotilda was by Agatha. Generally, the only thing
+maidens appreciate about maidens is the heart; the evanescent charms of
+another's face have so little worth in their eyes, that they hardly
+care to mention them. Young men are justly reproached with selecting by
+preference beautiful youths for their friends. In the case of girls, on
+the contrary, their eulogists make much of the fact that they entirely
+despise female beauty, as a too loose and base cement-and-mortar of
+friendship, and that, therefore, to a beautiful woman, the <i>heart</i> of
+the very ugliest is more precious than the face of the handsomest on
+the five zones and scarfs of the earth. Agatha was otherwise: she ran
+over, the first thing in the morning, to the palace, to dress her
+friend.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Flamin behaved still worse. He could not wait for the reality itself to
+hang up Clotilda's Madonna-image in the chambers of Victor's brain: he
+anticipated it with the pen-and-ink sketch of a painter, which is, at
+least, not cold; for painters, in the <i>æsthetic</i> and in the
+<i>calligraphic sense</i>, seldom write well. The painter had, merely for
+the sake of seeing and sketching Clotilda, stretched himself, almost
+every Sunday morning, on a hill of Maienthal, where he transferred to
+his note-book the glittering landscape round the seminary; and the
+beautiful head which looked out of the eighth window he transferred
+into his heart. Even Flamin, who generally set even the vignettes of
+prose above the living oil-paintings of poetry, found, in the following
+Madonna or Clotilda of the artist, something to his taste:&mdash;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;When my conscious being is a single thought, and burns; and when, with
+the flames waving around me, I dip my hand into colors, to cool myself
+therein;&mdash;then, when the lofty beauty<a name="div2Ref_41" href="#div2_41"><sup>[41]</sup></a> that forever beams within me
+lets fall its image on the waves which tremulously picture heaven and
+earth, and sets on fire the clear stream; and then, when an image of
+Pallas, descending from heaven, rests upon the stream, a lily-casing
+and cast-off wing-wrappage of an up-flown angel,&mdash;a form whose
+unstained soul no body, but only the snow which lies around the throne
+of God, and out of which the angels weave their fleeting vehicular
+bodies,<a name="div2Ref_42" href="#div2_42"><sup>[42]</sup></a> encloses; and when the most delicate drapery is too coarse
+and hard, and becomes a wooden frame around that divine breath on the
+countenance, around that trembling flowered-velvet of flesh, around
+that skin of white roses transfused with a glow of red ones; when this
+reflection of my shining soul falls upon the colored surface,&mdash;then
+every one will turn round, and think Clotilda is lying asleep on the
+bank.... And here my art is over; for, ah! when she awakes, and when,
+for the first time, the soul shall move these charms like wings; when
+the fast-closed bud of the lips shall break into a smile, and the bosom
+breathes in half a sigh, and, from modesty, breathes it not out again;
+when the sighs, veiled in songs, steal from those lips,&mdash;which, like
+two souls, hover over without touching each other&mdash;as bees steal out of
+roses; when the eye stirs between gleams and tears;&mdash;then, when at
+length the goddess of heavenly love approaches her daughter, and
+electrically touches her still heart, and says, 'Do thou, too, love';
+and now, when all charms tremble and bloom out, shrink and languish,
+hope and shudder, and the dreaming heart shuts itself up more deeply
+into its blossoms, and hides itself, trembling, behind a tear, from the
+happy one who has divined and deserves it;&mdash;then the happy one is mute,
+the happy one and the artist.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Victor saw beside him the happy one, who was his friend, looked upon
+him with moist eyes, and said, &quot;Of that thou wast worthy!&quot; But now
+twenty rowels spurred him to follow Agatha to the palace;&mdash;the
+pen-and-ink drawing of the artist; the arrangement of dresses; the
+relationship; the desire which every man has to see the Grace and
+Infanta of his friend; the desire which <i>not</i> every one has, but he
+had, to speak with any one for the first time (rather than for the
+eighth time); and, most of all, the evening of yesterday. Flamin's fire
+had yesterday burned Victor's bosom to a heap of tinder, through which
+nothing but sparks were running. He should have set all before him
+indifferently, because the contest <i>against</i> love differs in nothing
+from the contest <i>for</i> it, except in order of precedence. But let not
+the reader by any means imagine that now (as in one of your emasculated
+and emasculating romances) the Devil is to break loose in our
+biography, and the hero is to march into the palace and there fall down
+before Clotilda, and beg, on bended knee, &quot;Be the heroine!&quot; and go
+about to wrangle with her, out of love, and with the former <i>pastor
+fido</i> out of hatred, and actually play nothing else than the æsthetic,
+self-seeking, sensitive&mdash;scamp. If I should wish this last, I could
+excuse myself only on the ground that then I might perhaps come to some
+biographical murders and duels. I hope, however, I may still, without
+injury to morals or honesty, in the course of these pages make out a
+murder or homicide or two, at least in the last volume, where every
+æsthetic reaper thins out his characters, and throws half of them into
+the <i>oubliette</i> or family-vault of the inkstand.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Victor had too many years and acquaintances to allow himself, with so
+little regard to days of grace and double usance,<a name="div2Ref_43" href="#div2_43"><sup>[43]</sup></a> on the spot,
+before supper,&mdash;<i>cito citissime</i>,&mdash;what hast thou, what canst thou?&mdash;to
+fall in love. His optic nerve daily unravelled itself into finer and
+more delicate fibres, and touched all points of a new form, but the
+sore feelers curled back again more readily; every month the sight of a
+new face, like new music, made a <i>stronger</i> and <i>shorter</i> impression.
+He could only talk his way into love, not see it. Only words winged by
+virtue and sensibility are the bees which, in such cases, carry the
+pollen of love from one soul into another. But such a love, of the
+better kind, is annihilated by the least immoral alloy. How could it
+form and filter up in a defiled heart, filled with high-treason against
+a friend?</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Victor would have gone to the palace as early as half past nine, but
+the Lady Chamberlain had not yet combed out her eyebrows and the King
+Charles's spaniel.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Seebass brought a billet to Flamin:&mdash;</p>
+<br>
+
+<p class="normal">I cannot see you, my dearest, to-day. Three Graces hold me fast, and
+the third you yourself have sent. Tell your British friend he must love
+me because I love you. Surgery may do without sympathy, but friendship
+cannot.</p>
+
+<p class="right">&quot;Your <span style="letter-spacing:50px">&nbsp; &nbsp;</span><span class="sc">Matthieu</span>.&quot;</p>
+<br>
+
+<p class="normal">An absurd billet! When Victor heard that Agatha was the third Grace,
+there was a great hole torn in the curtain of the theatre in which
+Matthieu played Flamin's friend and Agatha's&mdash;first lover. Nothing is
+more annoying than a nest in which there sit none but brothers or none
+but sisters: the nest must be shaken up into a mixed and motley
+gradation,&mdash;that is to say, of brothers and sisters, packed in layers,
+so that an honest <i>pastor fido</i> can come and ask after the brother when
+he is only on the look-out for the sister; and so, too, must the girl
+who loves a brother absolutely and by stronger necessity have a sister
+whose friend she is, and who may be hook and handle to the brother. Our
+<i>Turkish</i> decorum required, therefore, that Matthieu should point his
+opera-glass at Flamin to see Agatha; and that Clotilda should visit the
+latter, since Flamin, as a man without ancestors, but of honor, could
+not possibly force his citizen's-visits upon the house of a
+chamberlain. Clotilda came often, and thereby involved herself in a
+contradiction, which I have till now been unable to solve, with the
+womanly refinement of her character.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Flamin dipped Matthieu's likeness into a quite different dyeing-copper
+from that the mother used: he was a jolly genius, and nothing worse. He
+personated everything in the world, and no one could personate him. He
+could imitate and travesty all the players of the Flachsenfingen
+troupe, and the boxes too. He understood more sciences than the whole
+court; yes, and more languages, even to the voices of the nightingale
+and the cockerel, which he mimicked so perfectly that Petrarch<a name="div2Ref_44" href="#div2_44"><sup>[44]</sup></a> and
+Peter would have run away. He could do with women what he chose, and
+every court dame excused herself by the example of her neighbor; for it
+used to be part of the <i>ton</i> in Flachsenfingen to have one's fidelity
+once put to the proof. They say love for him began to be knit, like a
+stocking, at the calf, but it is utterly false. It is therefore no
+wonder that, with such uninterrupted moderation in courtly pleasures,
+he grew stronger and <i>healthier</i> than the whole burnt-out, evaporated
+court, only he was too caustic, and too philosophic, and almost too
+roguish.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Victor and the reader and I have still, after all, only an indistinct,
+blurred crayon-drawing of Matthieu in our heads. My hero was somewhat
+pleased with him, as every eccentric man is with an eccentric one; it
+was a fault of his, that he pardoned too easily those of energy, even
+moral ones. With redoubled curiosity did he now take his way to the
+palace, or rather to its great garden, which joined thereto its
+semicircle of green beauties. He put in at the harbor of an embowered
+alley, and was delighted at the way in which the pierced shadow of the
+arbor, around whose iron skeleton tender twigs wound-like soft hair
+around hair-needles, glided dazzlingly over his body. Side by side with
+his arbor another parallel one passed along. He followed some scattered
+black paper snippings as way-marks. The fluttering of the morning wind
+tossed down from a twig a little leaf of fine paper, which he picked up
+to read. He was still on the first line, &quot;Man has two minutes and a
+half, one in which to smile once, ...&quot; when he ran against an almost
+horizontal queue, which was a black club of Hercules, compared with
+mine or the reader's plaited capillary tube. The queue was projected by
+a head crooked downward, which, peering in a listening attitude out of
+a niche in the arbor, was cutting a female profile, the original of
+which in a by-avenue was talking with Agatha. At the rustle of Victor's
+approach, the person, whose half-face was being stolen through the
+niche, turned round with surprise, and saw the proprietor of the
+Cyclops-queue with the profile-scissors, and also the hero of the
+Dog-post-days. The proprietor, without saying a word, thrust his
+artistic hand through the bush-work, and reached out to her her shadow
+or shadow-cutting.<a name="div2Ref_45" href="#div2_45"><sup>[45]</sup></a> Agatha took it, smiling; but the nameless one
+seemed to assume toward the cutter of forms and faces that seriousness
+which, on female faces, is nowise distinguished from contempt but in
+its ambiguousness, because his scissors awoke too strong a suspicion of
+his having been listening. Victor could perceive nothing of the
+nameless one yet except her stature, which, although bent forward a
+little, still surpassed the ordinary height. The face-cutter turned
+about with two flashing black eyes toward Victor, received him very
+politely, knew his name, told his own,&mdash;Matthieu,&mdash;and had, at his
+eighth pace, already had four good ideas. The fifth was, that he,
+unsolicited, introduced my hero to the couple in the side-arbor. The
+leafy nunnery-grating came to an end; a female form stepped forth, and
+Victor was so struck by it, that he, who knew little about
+embarrassments, or was made only more quick-witted by them, began his
+introductory sermon without the exordium, and that was&mdash;Clotilda. When
+she had said three words, he listened so to the melody instead of the
+text, that he understood not a word of what she was saying....</p>
+
+<p class="normal">I have here, lying beside me, on the snow-white ground of vellum, the
+very <i>silhouette</i> which Matthieu had taken of her with the scissors. My
+correspondent will have me depict Clotilda as uncommonly beautiful.
+Otherwise, he says, a hundred things in this history are
+incomprehensible; and therefore he sends me (because he cannot trust my
+fancy) at least her profile. And that is to be, even during my writing,
+steadily looked at all the time,&mdash;so much the more, as it might seem
+actually to have been cut from the very face<a name="div2Ref_46" href="#div2_46"><sup>[46]</sup></a> of another loveliest
+female angel that ever flew out of an unknown paradise down to this
+earth: I mean the Fräulein von * * *, <a name="div2_83a" href="#div2Ref_83a">at present maid-of-honor</a> in
+Scheerau; I am not sure whether all my readers know her.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Victor felt as if his blood had been driven outward, and with warm
+touches described its circles on the external skin. At last Clotilda's
+cold eye, of which not the intoxicated pride of beauty, but the sober,
+retiring pride of innocence belonging only to the female sex, was
+mistress, and her nose, which betrayed too much reflectiveness, brought
+his new Adam to his legs again, upon which the old Adam had already set
+himself up. He congratulated himself that he was Flamin's friend, and
+consequently had some claims upon her attention and her society.
+Nevertheless he continued to feel all the time as if everything she did
+occurred now for the first time in the world; and he watched her as one
+does a man who has been operated on for blindness from his birth, or an
+Omai,<a name="div2Ref_47" href="#div2_47"><sup>[47]</sup></a> or a Li-Bu. He kept thinking, &quot;How could sitting down ever
+become her,&mdash;or the handing of a fruit-dish, or the eating of a cherry,
+or stooping down to read a note?&quot; I am a still worse ninny beside the
+above-mentioned court dame.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">At last came Le Baut into the garden, after the first toilet, and his
+wife after the second. The Chamberlain&mdash;a short, supple, bedizened
+thing, that will pull off its hat before the Devil in hell when it
+enters there&mdash;received the son of his hereditary enemy in an uncommonly
+complimentary manner, and yet with a dignity, for which, however, not
+his heart, but his rank, gave him strength. Victor, for the mere reason
+that he imagined him an injured person, cherished a predisposition of
+good-will towards him. Although Le Baut's tongue was almost, like his
+teeth, false and inserted, and consequently the words were so, too,
+which were made up of dentals and linguals, still his neither coarse
+nor uncourteous flatteries&mdash;among which his attitudes and intentions
+also are to be counted&mdash;pleased our honest Victor, who could not hate
+fine flatterers, as being weak persons. The Chamberlain's lady&mdash;who was
+already in the years which a coquette seeks to conceal, although she
+had still more reason to conceal the preceding ones&mdash;received our
+well-disposed hero with the sincerest voice that ever yet issued from a
+false Judas's bosom, and with the most artful face, on which it seemed
+impossible that the deceptions of love could ever have found room for a
+glance.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">The new company took away Victor's embarrassment at once. He soon
+remarked, indeed, the peculiar fighting- and dancing-positions of the
+circle towards each other. Clotilda seemed reserved and indifferent
+towards all, except her father. The step-mother was refined towards the
+Chamberlain, haughty towards her step-daughter, obliging towards
+Victor, and bore herself with an easy and subservient coquetry towards
+Matthieu, who, on his part, was, toward the wedded pair, alternately
+complimentary and ironical; towards Clotilda, cold as ice; and towards
+my hero, as courteous as Le Baut was to all. Nevertheless Victor was
+more joyous and free than any of them, not merely because he was under
+the free heavens,&mdash;for a room always lay upon him like a blockhouse,
+and a chair was like the stocks,&mdash;but because he was among <i>fine</i>
+people, who, despite the most angular relations, give to conversation
+four butterflies'-wings, that it may&mdash;in contrast to the clinging
+caterpillar, who impales himself on every thorn&mdash;fly without noise and
+in little curves over all prickles, and alight only on blossoms. He was
+the greatest friend of fine people and fine turns of expression; hence
+it was that he took so much pleasure in the society of a Fontenelle, a
+Crébillon, a Marivaux,&mdash;of the entire female sex, and particularly of
+the decently coquettish portion of it. Do not mistake me. Ah! upon his
+Flamin, upon his Dahore, on all great men who were exalted above the
+refined, cowardly, vacant microcosmologists of the great world, his
+whole soul hung glowing; but for that very reason did he seek out,
+with a view to greater completeness, the smaller men, as fringe and
+corner-trimmings, with so much zeal.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Four persons had at this moment four telescopes pointed at once at his
+soul: for himself, he took nothing of the kind into his hand, because
+he was too good-natured and too happy to be the spy of a heart; and
+only after the lapse of some days did he observe the image which any
+one with whom he had been in company left behind in his brain. He did
+not conceal himself, and yet he was seen in a false light: good men can
+more easily see into bad ones than the latter can into the former. He
+guessed others better than they guessed him. Only Clotilda deserves a
+word of defence for having, even until after dinner,&mdash;during which Le
+Baut, the greatest story-teller of this story-telling century, carried
+through his part,&mdash;regarded him as too malicious and satirical. But she
+could hardly do otherwise: a woman easily discerns the human, but
+hardly the divine (or devilish), nature in a man, with difficulty his
+worth, but easily his intentions, and his inner complexion more so than
+his contour. Matthieu gave occasion for her error, but also (as I shall
+presently report) for its retraction. This Evangelist,<a name="div2Ref_48" href="#div2_48"><sup>[48]</sup></a> who was a
+much greater satirist than his namesake in the New Testament, placed
+almost all Flachsenfingen on his private pillory, from Prince and Court
+down to Zeusel;<a name="div2Ref_49" href="#div2_49"><sup>[49]</sup></a> only the Minister (his father) and his many sisters
+he was compelled, unfortunately, to leave out, and likewise those
+persons with whom he happened at the moment to be talking. What was
+called calumny in him was at bottom an exaggerated Moravianism. For, as
+St. Macarius commands that one shall, out of humility, add twenty
+ounces of evil when one has five, but with regard to good, the
+reverse,&mdash;accordingly ingenuous, courtly souls, seeing that no one will
+use this modest language, endeavor to speak it in every one's name, and
+always ascribe to him whose humility they wish to represent fifteen
+ounces more of evil and less of good than he really has. On the
+contrary, in the case of present company, they find this mediatorial
+system of satisfaction unnecessary: hence the life of such court-nobles
+is wholly dramatic; for as, according to Aristotle, comedy paints men
+as worse, and tragedy as better, than they are, so do the nobles
+referred to bring forward in the former only <i>absent</i>, in the latter
+only <i>present</i> persons. I do not know whether this perfection will go
+to the length of atoning for a real fault of the Evangelist,&mdash;namely,
+that, like the Romans on the Lupercalia, he&mdash;too often made thrusts at
+the female sex. Thus, for instance, he said to-day, maidens and
+raspberries were wormy before they were ripe; female virtue was the
+red-hot iron which a woman (as was also the case in the old ordeals)
+had to carry from the font (the baptismal-day) to the altar (the
+wedding-day), in order to maintain her innocence, &amp;c. Nothing fell upon
+Clotilda&mdash;and the same I have always found the case with the best of
+her sex&mdash;more keenly than satire upon her whole sex; but Victor was
+astonished at her art&mdash;very peculiar to her sex and to worldly
+experience at once&mdash;of concealing the fact, that she both&mdash;endured and
+despised.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">The Evangelist's example brought it about that Victor, too, began to
+phosphoresce at all points of his soul; the spark of wit ran round the
+whole circle of his ideas, which, like Graces, clasped each other by
+the hand, and his electrical chime of bells outdid the Page's
+discharges, which were lightnings, and stank of brimstone. Clotilda,
+who was very observing, mistrusted Sebastian's lips and heart.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">The young nobleman held him to be one of his feather, and in love
+with Clotilda; and that, on the ground that &quot;the gayer or more earnest
+tone into which a man fell in company was a sign that a female
+electrical-eel had struck at his bosom.&quot; I must confess it,&mdash;Victor's
+effervescent soul never allowed him to hit that expression of respect
+for women which does not run into untimely tenderness, and for which he
+often envied cultivated people of the world; his regard unfortunately
+always looked like a declaration of love. The Chamberlain's lady
+accounted him as false as her Cicisbeo.<a name="div2Ref_50" href="#div2_50"><sup>[50]</sup></a> People like her cannot
+comprehend any other kind attentions than polite or artful ones.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">They kept our hero over there all day and half the evening.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Not once in the whole day was he able,&mdash;although the invisible eyes of
+his inner man stood full of tears at Clotilda's noble figure, at her
+secret grief for her cold, buried friend, at her thrilling voice when
+she merely spoke to Agatha,&mdash;for all that, he never found himself able
+to say so much as an earnest word: toward strangers his nature always
+impelled him in the beginning to make sundry satirical leaps and other
+caprioles. But in the evening, when they were in the festal garden,
+where his usual shudder at the emptiness of life was made more intense
+by merriment, as it always was,&mdash;whereas serious, sad, passionate
+conversations diminished it,&mdash;and when Clotilda granted him only a very
+cold civility, as if shown to him at a father's dictation, and did not
+divine in its full extent the difference between him and Matthieu, who
+assumed no second world, nor any inner man organically adapted to it:
+then was there a stifled feeling about his yearning heart; too many
+tears seemed to fill his whole breast and press for a passage; and as
+often as he looked up to the great, deep heavens, something whispered
+in his soul: Take not the least thought for the fine circle, but speak
+out!</p>
+
+<p class="normal">But there was only <i>one</i> soul for him, to which Nature had attached
+those treadles, as to pedal-harps, which impart to every thought a
+higher tone of the spheres, to life a holy worth, and to the heart an
+echo from Eden: that soul was not his once so-loved Flamin, but his
+teacher, Dahore, in England, whom he had long ago lost from sight, but
+never from his dreams. The shadow of this great man stood, as it were,
+projected upon the night, hovering and erect before him, and saying,
+&quot;Dear one, I see thy inward weeping, thy sacred longing, thy desolate
+heart, and thy outstretched, trembling arms; but all is in vain; thou
+wilt never find me, nor I thee.&quot; He gazed at the stars, whose exalting
+science his teacher had even then instilled into his youthful soul; he
+said to Clotilda: &quot;The topography of the heavens should be a piece of
+our religion; a woman ought to learn the catechism and Fontenelle by
+heart.&quot; And then he described the astronomical lessons of his Dahore
+and the teacher himself.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">From Clotilda's face there broke forth a great transfiguration, and she
+depicted with words and looks her own astronomical teacher at the
+Seminary,&mdash;how he was just as noble and just as quiet,&mdash;that he called
+himself <i>Emanuel</i>, and bore no surname, because he said, &quot;With
+transitory man, with one whose genealogical tree so speedily sank into
+nothingness, the difference between family names and baptismal names
+was too slight&quot;;&mdash;that, unhappily, his noble soul inhabited a shattered
+body, which already bent low toward the grave,&mdash;that he was, according
+to the assurance of her Abbess, the gentlest and greatest man who had
+yet come from the East Indies (his native country), although there were
+some singularities of his way of life in Maienthal, which one had to
+overlook....</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Matthieu, whose wit borrowed from the snake his line of beauty, his
+poisonous tooth, his leap, and his coldness, said, softly and
+composedly: &quot;It is well for his withered body that he was not made
+astronomer and night-watchman here at once; he applied, several years
+ago, for a telescope and a horn.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Clotilda was, for the first time, suffused with a flush of angry
+redness, like the morning before the rain: &quot;If,&quot; said she, quickly,
+&quot;you know him merely from my portraiture, you cannot possibly seek this
+characteristic among his.&quot; But the Chamberlain came to the Page's
+assistance, and said that Emanuel had actually, five years before, been
+refused that application. Clotilda looked, as if for help, to the only
+one whose attentiveness was not ironical,&mdash;our Victor, on whom the
+reflection of her transfiguration threw its beauty,&mdash;and asked, more in
+the tone of hope than of assertion, &quot;Should one expect anything like
+that of such a mind?&quot; &quot;Of mine sooner,&quot; he replied, by way of evasion;
+for he, who could have contradicted the Pope to his face, found it
+often impossible to gainsay fair lips, especially when they propounded
+a question with so much reliance on his negative. &quot;As often as I walk
+through towns by night, I listen to the bodily night-watch with more
+pleasure than to the spiritual. In the silent, listening night, under
+the outspread starry heaven, there is something so sublime in the
+homiletic owl's-song or hoot of the night-watch, that I have a hundred
+times wished me a horn and six verses.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">The Chamberlain and his <i>associé</i> took this for clumsy persiflage; the
+latter&mdash;perhaps for the sake of displeasing Clotilda, to the advantage
+of his heart's czarina, armed with false bosom and false rump&mdash;went on
+unshamed with his, and asserted that the best method of making the
+aforenamed anonymous person sad was a very merry one, a comedy;&mdash;to be
+sure, a farce moved him still more strongly, as he himself witnessed in
+him at Goethe's moral puppet-play or fair.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Then flashed upon the surprised Victor a new face and a new relation;
+for he was exactly like Emanuel. A fair, with its human streams running
+up and down,&mdash;with its flitting of figures to and fro, as in a clock
+with images,&mdash;with its perpetually buzzing air, in which fiddle-squeak
+and human janglings and lowing of cattle conspire in one deafening
+roar,&mdash;and with the booths, crammed with commodities, offering a mosaic
+picture of our little life, patched up of varied necessities.... a
+village-fair, by all these reminiscences of the great, frosty
+<i>New-Year's fair</i> of Life, made Victor's noble bosom at once heavy and
+full; he sank away, sweetly overpowered, into the din, and the human
+ranks around him absorbed his soul into its stiller fantasies. That was
+the reason why Goethe's Hogarthian <i>tail-piece</i> of a village-fair (like
+Shakespeare) always left him melancholy; just as he was most fond,
+indeed, of finding in the low-comic the highest earnest (women are
+capable only of a reverse discovery), and a comic book, without any
+nobler trait or hint (e. g. Blumauer's Æneid), he could endure as
+little as La Mettrie's<a name="div2Ref_51" href="#div2_51"><sup>[51]</sup></a> disgustingly laughing face, or the faces on
+the frontispieces of the Vade Mecum.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Like a true youth, he forgot himself and all around him, half-stretched
+out his arms, and said, with an eye in which one saw a soul longingly
+laboring at a portrait of Emanuel: &quot;Now I know thee, thou nameless one!
+thou art the lofty man, who is so rare.... I assure you, Herr Von
+Schleunes, this Mr. Emanuel has something in him ... No, amidst this
+life on the wing, a thing which darts so <i>prestissimo</i> out of one
+rain-shower into another,<a name="div2Ref_52" href="#div2_52"><sup>[52]</sup></a> and from cloud to cloud, should not keep
+its bill open on the stretch for one continued peal of laughter.... I
+have read today somewhere: Man has only two and a half minutes, and
+only one for a smile....&quot; He had quite lost himself in the thicket of
+his feelings, else he would have kept back more than he did, especially
+the last line of the leaf found in the garden. Clotilda was startled at
+something or other. He would now gladly have read the leaf through. She
+related to him now those characteristics of her teacher into which she
+knew better how to enter; that he was a Pythagorean, went only in white
+robes, had himself put to sleep and waked with flute-music, ate no
+leguminous fruits or animal food, and often walked half the night under
+the stars.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Lost in mute rapture over the teacher, he hung with enthusiastic eyes
+upon the friendly lips of the pupil, who was ennobled by her interest
+in a sublime and singular genius. She found here the first man whom she
+had ever put into an unfeigned enthusiasm for her Pythagorean favorite;
+and all her chasms turned themselves, blooming, towards Emanuel's
+image, like flowers toward the sun. Two fair souls discover their
+affinity first of all by the like love which binds them to a third. The
+full, inspired heart loves to hush and hide itself in a finery-room,
+which holds only heterogeneous persons, but when it finds therein
+its second, then in its joy at that its silence and secrecy and the
+finery-room are all forgotten.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">The quicksilver of Victor's morning gayety had fallen ten degrees. In
+the twilight of his soul nothing peered forth but the paper which he
+wanted to read, and in fact presently read out in the avenue; and so he
+took an early leave.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">The leaf had blown out of Clotilda's loose Album, and was written
+by&mdash;Emanuel.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Man has here two and a half minutes,&mdash;one to smile, one to sigh, and
+half a one to love; for in the midst of this minute he dies.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;But the grave is not deep, it is the gleaming footmark of an angel who
+seeks us. When the unknown hand sends the last arrow at the head of
+man, he bends his head in anticipation, and the arrow merely takes off
+the crown of thorns from his wounds.<a name="div2Ref_53" href="#div2_53"><sup>[53]</sup></a></p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;And with this hope, go forth from Maienthal, noble soul! but neither
+continents nor graves nor the second world can sunder or bind together
+two human beings: but only thoughts part or marry hearts.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;O, may thy life hang full of blossoms! From thy first Paradise may a
+second, as from the midst of one rose a second, be destined to bloom!
+May the Earth glow in thy sight, as if thou stoodest above it, and
+followedst with thine eye its path in heaven! And as Moses died because
+God kissed him, so be thy life a long kiss of the Eternal! And may thy
+death be mine!... EMANUEL.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;O thou good, good soul!&quot; cried Victor, &quot;I can now no more forget thee.
+Thou must&mdash;thou wilt&mdash;take an interest in my weak heart!&quot; From his
+inner strings the drops of vapor that choked their music had now fallen
+off. His brain became a radiant landscape, in which there stood nothing
+but Emanuel's shining form. He arrived late at the parsonage, with a
+face expressive of blissful emotion; and in this glow he arrayed before
+his spectators the image of Clotilda, to whom he gave everything an
+angel has, even the wings that threatened a short stay. His friendship
+raised him so far above the suspicion of a suspicion, that he thought
+he could give his friend no warmer or tenderer proof of the same, than
+by the strongest sympathetic praise of Clotilda; Flamin's love for her
+passed over through this friendship into his soul. The feeling for the
+beloved of a friend carries with it an unspeakable sweetness and moral
+tenderness. For Victor I answer, in this matter, that he understood,
+indeed, how a friend can sacrifice his love to another, but not how the
+other can accept the offering; but for Flamin I cannot stand security
+that he is cool enough, and a sufficient connoisseur of men, to regard
+the prize-medals which Victor stamps upon Clotilda, and upon which he
+sets her beautiful face and his coat of arms, as only just so many
+coins <i>de confiance</i>, and as pledges of brotherly fidelity. He was too
+impetuous and too ambitious to see, or even to listen to, the truth;
+for his open-hearted friend had to suppress many a tender reproach,
+which would have tried him too much, because he had too much love of
+praise and fieriness of spirit, and too little self-confidence. Hence a
+flatterer like Matthieu fastened himself so much the more firmly with
+his ivy-hooks into the fissures of this rock. When he a little harshly
+called the nameless Emanuel an enthusiast, Victor said little more
+about him that day. Flamin&mdash;either because he was a Jurist, or because
+he was a Hotspur, or both&mdash;could endure anything better than poets,
+philosophers, courtiers, and enthusiasts,&mdash;one excepted, who was all
+these at once, namely, his Sebastian Victor.</p>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<p class="center"><img border="0" src="images/hornstart.png" alt="hornstart"></p>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<h2><a name="div1Ref_05" href="#div1_05">5. DOG-POST-DAY.</a></h2>
+<br>
+
+<p class="center"><span class="sc2">The Third of May.&mdash;The Nightingale.&mdash;The Abbate Sitting on Music.</span></p>
+<br>
+
+<p class="normal">I must here&mdash;premise, once for all, that I should be very stupid if I
+did not notice the multitude of improbabilities in this history: I am
+well aware of them all; nay, I have observed some of them&mdash;e. g. in
+Clotilda's behavior, or those in my hero's medical doctorship&mdash;even
+sooner than the reader, because I have&mdash;read everything before he has.
+I therefore delayed no longer, but entreated my correspondent by
+to-day's Hofmann-mail to write me by the dog the next time, in his
+portrait-box, what we were all about. I told him flatly, that the devil
+a bit did he know, though I did, however, of the readers and their
+tyranny. I must tell him (I said) that they were people of sense, whom
+a Biographer, nay, even a Romance-architect, dared not approach with
+poetic deception, but they would say, like the Areopagus, &quot;Give us the
+naked historical fact here, without any superfluous poetic dressing
+up.&quot; And in fact it was a marvel to me, I went on to say, that he
+should not yet know that they had so much, partly understanding and
+partly four-leaved clover<a name="div2Ref_54" href="#div2_54"><sup>[54]</sup></a> in them, that, if the greatest authors
+and tragic poets should undertake to be fine, and by æsthetic
+juggleries to excite in them fear, like cuppers, or pity, like beggars,
+they would cold-bloodedly let these men work till they were tired, and
+say, &quot;We are not to be caught.&quot; That the Reviewers, however, were still
+more crazy and clever, and were perhaps the best <i>Skotometers</i>
+(measurers of darkness), at the same time that they were the
+wretchedest <i>Photometers</i> (light measurers) going. And finally, I said
+right out to my historical adjutant, that it was no injury to him, but
+very much to me, that I should be translated into several languages,
+and therein, for every improbability in the text, be dragged down into
+the scourging-cellar of a note, and there sorely lashed, without daring
+to open my mouth, if the interpreting scoundrel who translated (or
+transported) my gourd-bottle-case like a cask of wine, from one country
+to another, should, on the way, as all carriers do, outwardly
+besprinkle and inwardly fill up the wine with water.&mdash;He must, at
+least, (I entreated him) give me an answer, that I might show it to the
+readers, as an evidence that I had written to him.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">By the next Dog-post-day, therefore, at all events, great things may be
+expected.&mdash;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Besides, the 4th of May comes into that also, with what should
+seem its two important Thanksgiving festivals for the arrival of the
+two Sebastians,&mdash;the little one into the world, the elder at the
+bathing-town.&mdash;Even Clotilda is to be there to-morrow, and Victor is
+very eager (and so am I) to see her in the sunshine of love beside
+Flamin; for over yonder all her charms seemed to bloom round a heart
+not yet smitten and ripened by love's ray, as flower-leaves hide the
+<i>white heart-leaves</i> from the sun.... Matthieu came to-day to take
+leave, because he was going back to-morrow to the city. Our hero was
+less and less pleased with him, and a Page's history, which he related
+of himself, renewed Victor's resolve to fulfil soon the entreaty of the
+Parson's wife by ridding himself of such a fellow.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Matthieu, as Page, rendered service to the chief Tutor's lady, I
+believe both the greater and the lesser service. Nevertheless, he had
+once to smuggle an Abbate and conscience-keeper into one of her
+cabinets, which was destined to be the confessional and holy place to a
+degree of which, to be sure, her stupid, jealous husband had no notion.
+Now there was in the next room a musical armchair, upon which, in fact,
+one played with no other instrument than the rump; so soon as one sat
+down in it, it began its overtures, and I myself once sat in such
+a one at Prince Esterhazy's. Our Mat,<a name="div2Ref_55" href="#div2_55"><sup>[55]</sup></a> as all the citizens of
+Flachsenfingen called him,&mdash;some government people called him even the
+Evangelist,&mdash;appointed the Abbate two hours too soon; but, lest the man
+with the shorn peruke should be tired of waiting, he first carried in
+the music-making chair as resting-bench and anchoring-ground for weary
+expectants. Toward three of the night, when the company was gone,
+except the chief Tutor, the counsellor of conscience, weary of
+standing, let his rump sink at last into the easy-chair stuffed out
+with favorite arias, and woke up with his breeches the whole wailing
+music therein with its thrilling passages, without the least
+possibility of stilling the cabinet-serenade of this alarmer. At last
+the husband darted like a herring at the final cadences (or falls), and
+dragged from his organ-stool the sedentary conscience-man in the midst
+of counterpoint and shakes, and spoiled his quail-call for him, I
+believe, by an administered cudgelling. The chief Tutor's lady easily
+guessed the master of the chair, Mat; but so very much a matter of
+course is pardon at court,&mdash;not merely <i>past</i> offences, but <i>future</i>
+ones being forgiven there by good, easy female souls,&mdash;that the chief
+Tutor's lady did not avenge herself upon Mat, although he <i>served</i> her
+two weeks and a half longer, till after just two weeks and a half....</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Victor was indignant at Flamin's laughter; he loved drollery, but not
+bantering. His sweetened blood began gradually with this <i>mother of
+vinegar</i> to grow sour towards this Mat, whose cold, ironical gallantry
+toward the honest Agatha of itself exasperated him, though her
+phlegmatic, and, as it were, married pulse, beat in his absence and in
+his presence at the same rate. Still more heart-burning matter and acid
+collected in Victor's bosom, from the fact that he, who tolerated
+everything,&mdash;vain men, proud ones, atheists, enthusiasts,&mdash;could
+nevertheless not endure men who regard virtue as a kind of refined
+provision-bakery, wantonness as allowed, the spirit as an almsgatherer
+for the flesh, the heart as a blood-syringe, and our soul as a new
+shoot of the body. But this was what Matthieu did, who besides had a
+passion for philosophizing, and threatened to infect Victor's friend,
+who, in fact, was as cold toward the whole world of poets and spirits
+as a statesman, with his philosophical cancer-poison.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">In the evening he endeavored to sound, a little nearer to Flamin's
+ear, a blast upon a second Trumpet of Fame against the departed
+pseudo-Evangelist. It was in the garden that he blew it. He took the
+hand of which Matthieu's was not worthy into his better one, and began,
+with the finest and heartiest forbearance,&mdash;which one must grant even
+to true friendship for a hollow friend,&mdash;his iconoclastic attack. For
+while he charged it upon the lady of the Chamberlain, that she threw
+down at Agatha from her high post looks nowise cleaner than what
+monkeys used to throw down from their high roosts at passers-by; and
+while he blamed the young Page, that, like many of the nobility, only
+among the nobility could he scent best (perhaps by the help of
+contrast) the heretical odor of one belonging to the burgher-class, and
+that his words and looks at the palace flew like icicles at the good,
+warm heart of Agatha; at the same time the reproach of this May-frost
+toward the sister was only a pretext behind which he veiled the
+observation, that the Page would not be Flamin's friend, if he were not
+Agatha's lover.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Flamin's silence (the sign of his indignation) gave the stream of his
+eloquence a new and swifter descent; in addition to this a nightingale,
+poetizing in Le Baut's garden, woke up all the echoes of love in his
+soul.&mdash;He therefore grasped, of course, both of Flamin's hands in that
+effervescence which always transformed his steps toward an object into
+springs, and thereby overshot the mark. Many plans miscarry, because
+the heart toils after the head, and because at the end of the execution
+one applies less caution than at its beginning. He looked upon his
+beloved, the fluting throat of the nightingale set the text of his love
+to music, and with indescribable emotion he said: &quot;Best one, thy heart
+is too good not to be outwitted by those who cannot reach thee. O if,
+some day, the sharp edge of court <i>ton</i> should pass bloodily across the
+veins of thy breast (Flamin's looks seemed to ask, Art thou not then
+even satirical?)&mdash;O if he, who has no faith in virtue and
+disinterestedness, should one day himself cease to show any; if he
+should sorely betray thee; should the hand, which court-life had
+hardened, like a lemon-squeezer, wring blood and tears from thy heart,
+then, I beseech thee, despair not, only not of friendship,&mdash;for thy
+mother and I love thee far otherwise. O verily, at the time when thou
+art forced to say, Why did I not hearken to my friend who so warned me,
+and to my mother who so loved me?&mdash;then mayest thou come to me, to one
+who never changes, and who prizes thy error higher than self-interested
+vigilance; then would I lead thee weeping to thy mother, and say to
+her, take him wholly, thou only art worthy to love him.&quot; To all this
+Flamin said not a word. &quot;Art thou sad, my Flamin?&quot; &quot;Tired!&quot; &quot;I am sad;
+the plaints of the nightingale strike upon my soul like echoes of
+<i>future</i> ones,&quot; said Victor. &quot;Are you pleased with this nightingale,
+Victor?&quot; &quot;Indescribably, as if she were a friend of my innermost soul.&quot;
+&quot;Thus are people imposed on; it is <i>Matthieu singing</i>,&quot; Flamin quickly
+answered. For the Evangelist differed from a nightingale in nothing
+except size. And then Flamin, somewhat irritated, and yet with a
+pressure of his friend's hand, took his departure.</p>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<p class="center"><img border="0" src="images/shieldstart.png" alt="shieldstart"></p>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+
+<h2><a name="div1Ref_06" href="#div1_06">6. DOG-POST-DAY.</a></h2>
+<br>
+
+<p class="center"><span class="sc2">The Threefold Deception of Love.&mdash;Lost Bible and Powder-puff.&mdash;
+Churching.&mdash;New Concordats with the Reader.</span></p>
+<br>
+
+<p class="normal">Knef's answer is wretched: &quot;By your well-born's favor, dated the 6th
+instant, I see that the public has taste and some refinement, which
+does not surprise me, since the same is treated like gold-leaves, which
+are beaten out thin and fine, first within a book of parchment, and
+then between two of sheep-skin leaves, and thus, in like manner, by
+being passed from one book to another, and therein through the force of
+the press-bar, is made as fine as cavalier-paper.<a name="div2Ref_56" href="#div2_56"><sup>[56]</sup></a> If the public
+keeps on reading in this way a year or two, it may at last be more
+clever than Germany itself. Touching the improbabilities in our
+work, several such are of course desirable, because without them a
+biography or a romance gives miserable satisfaction, since it wants the
+charm by which the German hospital-ship and ship of fools, full of
+original romances, proves so attractive to us, ... which ship, as
+secretive-gland of disagreeable works, may justly be called the liver
+of the Republic of Letters, and the bookstore the gall-duct. But in
+reference to improbabilities, I am myself only too apprehensive that
+even the few on which we rely may in the end disappear. I am, &amp;c.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">The wag, as one may easily see, would fain pull the wool<a name="div2Ref_57" href="#div2_57"><sup>[57]</sup></a> over my
+eyes and those of the reader. For me, however, it is a magnificent
+document in evidence that I have done my part by writing to the rogue.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">There are certain persons who, if in the evening they were very warm
+and friendly, the next morning are very gloomy and cold,&mdash;like
+Maupertuis's half-suns, which burn only on one side and disappear
+from us when they turn towards us the earthly half,&mdash;and if they were
+cold, the next time they are warm. Flamin forgot the next morning both
+the warm evening and the night-chill. Today is the festival of
+churching! Over there with Sebastian he launched out like a German
+police-puritan and purist, with fire-devils<a name="div2Ref_58" href="#div2_58"><sup>[58]</sup></a> and musketry against
+churching,&mdash;against infant-baptismal festivals,&mdash;against felling trees
+for Christmases and Whitsuntides,&mdash;against holidays, and against all
+the merry-makings of mankind.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Nothing in our century so enraged Victor as its haughty
+crusade-preachings against unfashionable follies, whereas with
+unfashionable vices it makes contracts of subsidy. He took a long
+breath to start with, and then showed that the good of a state, as of a
+man, consisted not in riches, but in the use of riches, not in its
+commercial, but in its moral worth, that the sweeping out of the
+ancient leaven and most of our institutions and pandects and edicts had
+for their object only to enhance princely incomes, not morality, and
+that one wanted to have vices and subjects, like the old Jews, bring
+their offerings only in one city, namely, the residence city,&mdash;that
+humanity, from time immemorial, had cut its nails only on its bare
+<i>hands</i>, not on its covered <i>feet</i>, which often themselves decayed on
+that account,&mdash;that economical and sumptuary laws were still more
+needful to princes themselves, at least to the highest classes, than to
+the lowest,&mdash;that Rome owed to her many holidays much of her
+patriotism.... Flamin had no eye for the little pearl-print of domestic
+joy, for infusory-flowerets of pleasure; on the contrary, his soul kept
+step with a Brutus when he strode majestically up to Pompey's statue,
+and with a sigh over fate drove the scissors of the Parcæ into the
+greatest heart of earth, which confounded its worth with its right.
+Victor had room in his heart for the most unlike feelings.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">I cannot repeat often enough, that to-day is the churching. I will
+sketch it for posterity; not, however, with that curtness with which a
+newspaper-writer condenses the funeral of a king into three sheets, but
+a little more circumstantially. For the stately initial letters of this
+day the Parsonage had quite other reasons <i>in petto</i> than one has ever
+yet, to my knowledge, been pleased to disclose to our age: three
+interested parties wished to deceive each other,&mdash;at least, two did a
+third.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">In the first place, the Lady of the Parsonage wished to deceive our
+hero, who did not know that to-day was the birthday of his father, and
+that that personage&mdash;whom she had taken the liberty of inviting&mdash;was
+coming today for the space of five minutes. In the morning, she set her
+two daughters to boiling yarn, in order that they might confess nothing
+to Victor,&mdash;at least, not the truth; for it is a well-known
+superstition that yarn boils whitest when one lies soundly over the
+operation. Hence we should be the more watchful when women lie, and
+inquire whether they mean, by their poetical deceptions, to <i>burn
+anything else white</i> except yarn. Her beloved Victor&mdash;that was her
+plan&mdash;should to-day present to her husband, whose cradle-festival<a name="div2Ref_59" href="#div2_59"><sup>[59]</sup></a>
+also fell on to-day, the usual congratulation, and afterward halve it,
+and carry it on to his Lordship, who was to arrive with his own
+birthday.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Secondly, Sebastian and she wished to deceive the old Chaplain, who had
+forgotten that he had been born, which absence of mind had already
+occurred to him at his first birthday. Mankind keep the run of
+another's life better than of their own; truly we make altogether too
+little account of a history which once was ours, and which is the shell
+of hours that have flown away, and yet the drops of time through which
+we swim do only in the distance of memory form the rainbow of
+enjoyment. Men know when all emperors were born and all philosophers
+died; women know, by reckoning time, only this, when their husbands,
+who are <i>their</i> regents and classic authors, underwent both. Victor,
+whose delicate feeling was seared by too great attentions to himself,
+was glad that Eymann's shoulders must bear half of to-day's honor.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Thirdly, the Lord of the Parsonage wanted to play his deception as well
+as any one else, and in fact upon everybody. As this Festival-day was
+to him&mdash;like the three High Festivals of the Cloisters&mdash;at the same
+time shaving-day, on which the wisest heads make the foolishest faces,
+the barber must needs cut with the razor-lancet upon the skin of the
+soul-keeper, as upon the bark of a birch-tree, a memorial of himself;
+but the little blood that flowed out suggested to the Parson a cleverer
+thought than what the cupper left therein, which, however, secreted the
+nervous sap, that, according to the merest sciolists, is the grease of
+our mental motions, the gold solution of our most significant ideas,
+and the spirit of our spirit. This cleverer thought which I so much
+praise was, to have a vein opened in his left arm, to conceal it from
+the whole household, in the evening to congratulate his Lordship and
+everybody, and, at last, to strip up his sleeve and show the wound,
+like a Roman, and say, &quot;Congratulate me, I pray, on the bleeding!&quot; He
+executed his idea, and the shaver was obliged, to his amazement, to
+hack something else beside the chin. The wounded man escorted him even
+to the outer door, not so much from politeness, as in order that he
+might not hold forth to the whole domestic company on the subject, but
+keep the occurrence absolutely to himself, except in houses where
+there was a beard and an ear. For let an historian be ever so much the
+<i>month-hand</i> of the age, and consequently the newspaper-compositor its
+<i>hour-hand</i>, and accordingly a woman its <i>second-hand</i>, still, after
+all, the beard-trimmer is both, woman and <i>second-hand</i>.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">As Flamin and Victor passed down into the sitting-prinking-summer and
+winter-room, from amidst none but glad faces protruded one sullen one,
+which belonged to the Parson, who was plunging about like one
+possessed: there were two things which he could not possibly nose
+out,&mdash;his Bible and his powder-puff. Three minutes before he had thus
+lamented: &quot;Am not I and my wretched life then singled out for a true
+Passion-history? Let an urn of fortune be given me, from which anybody
+else would claw out, as if he were crabbing, whole kingdoms. So soon as
+the Archfiend sees it to be me, he drops his dung in; and I claw that
+out instead of crabs and kingdoms, and nothing more. It would have gone
+finely to-day, the Devil saw,&mdash;we should have had until four o'clock in
+the afternoon no fun, but dog's-work; but then we should have broken
+loose; then would have come the dinner in the summer-house, the
+congratulation and salutation and real jollity.... And for you all
+this is still waiting; but to me, if the puff and the Bible do not
+appear, just send some of the soot and ashes (the leavings of the
+evening-feast) that I may brush therewith Fox's [his horse's] bit, and
+in the evening I can weed radishes by the summer-house.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">At this moment, he had to salute, with the dipped flag of his poll, his
+tasselled cap, the Briton just entering,&mdash;when the gesture shook out of
+the cap a hair-tuft, which, to be sure, was not the long-sought Bible,
+but was the puff, which had been given up for lost. That is to say, the
+thinking and reading world, to which one does not often disclose the
+weightier facts, must at least come at this one,&mdash;that the Court
+Chaplain, just as men are snatched from among men to overtop and master
+the rest, precisely so bound up the hairs which his comb plucked out,
+into a skin-fascicle or hair-union, in order to powder therewith the
+others that were left standing,&mdash;which now could not, of course, by
+this most exalted spirit and pentameter,<a name="div2Ref_60" href="#div2_60"><sup>[60]</sup></a> be well christened
+anything else than a hair-puff. Nevertheless, Eymann's face was longer
+than his cap; he let this syringe of the coloring powder of his head
+lie and cool there, and said, &quot;If I don't ferret out the Bible, then I
+don't see how this tuft alone is to get me out of the scrape.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">As the Bible was sought before Luther's time, so now was the Canstein
+Bible, with its black beetle's-wing-shells. If anything could make this
+hard blow still more bitter, it was this,&mdash;that Eymann's band, like his
+reason, lay between the lost canonical leaves<a name="div2Ref_61" href="#div2_61"><sup>[61]</sup></a> as in a napkin-press;
+for the clergy, especially the Pope, love to make the Bible commentary
+a smoothing-press and finery-box to their outer man. Although he had
+eight other Bibles, even the simple Biblical Chrestomathy of Seiler, in
+the house, and to-day, at week-day church, did not need any at
+all, still it was certainly better and more human&mdash;that is, more
+foolish&mdash;that he should whistle the head of his vestry-beadle, the
+schoolmaster, to the window, and postpone divine service, like a
+reformation, by a quarter of an hour's interim, than that, instead of
+simply the hour of tolling, he should change nothing less than Bible
+and bands. Good heavens! how like exegetists and Kennicottists<a name="div2Ref_62" href="#div2_62"><sup>[62]</sup></a> they
+searched and smiled! &quot;This hunting for the Bible,&quot; said Sebastian,
+&quot;redounds to a clergyman's honor, especially as he seeks the truths in
+the Bible only by <i>daylight</i>, not by <i>funeral-torches</i>.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">The monks, like the lighters of the street-lamps, have a <i>ladder</i> and
+much oil, but with the oil they <i>extinguish</i> the lamps and their own
+thirst, and with the ladder they conduct those who light them again up
+to the gallows.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">As the Chaplain passed along before the quiet head of the six-weeks'
+child, which to-day's lace-cap already oppressed, he went back, from
+vexation at its indifference, lifted its bedizened head with his right
+hand, and thrust the left through the stratum of the cradle-straw,
+thinking there to exhume the Bible, which is usually the pillow and the
+supporting amulet of children (particularly of <i>Dauphins</i>), saying,
+meanwhile: &quot;The miserable little brat would lie there through all our
+misery, perfectly cool, seeming to say, 'What's that to me?' if I
+didn't stir him up.&quot; And just at this moment something fell, not like a
+shot, but like a book, although it can be heard through my quill, even
+to the thirtieth century. Eymann flew, thoughtfully, into the second
+story, and found at his feet a smashed&mdash;mouse under his long-sought
+Bible. The Protestant imperial circles can never have been ignorant of
+the students' or Dr. Luther's mousetraps,<a name="div2Ref_63" href="#div2_63"><sup>[63]</sup></a> for which one needs only
+a book, and which are to mice what symbolical books were to candidates.
+Sebastian drew forth the corpse by the tail from under the Biblical
+vellum-mould, and Seiler's Bible-arrangement, swung the cadaver toward
+the light, and delivered extempore this funeral sermon: &quot;Poor
+schismatic! the Old and New Testaments were the death of thee, but
+neither thou nor the Testaments are to blame! Only be glad that the
+Bible did not absolutely singe thee to ashes, like a Portuguese
+Israelite; but thy lines fell in enlightened times, where it takes away
+nothing but livings. It is genuine wit, if I ask, As the Bible used to
+extinguish conflagrations into which it was thrown, why not, then,
+<i>auto-da-fés</i> also?&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">I have long been watching for an opportunity here to force the world to
+ask why the case of a mouse's death should interest it more than the
+shooting down of an army in general history,&mdash;the loss of another's
+hair-puff more than Christina's abdicated crown.<a name="div2Ref_64" href="#div2_64"><sup>[64]</sup></a> ... This interest
+arises from the source whence it comes with those to whom the case
+really occurs: because I relate it copiously, i. e. because the
+readers, like the heroes concerned in it, painfully live over one
+moment of childish history after another. Many little blows riddle the
+firmest man as surely as one great one; and it is all one whether fate
+does it or an author. And thus it comes that the modern man is placed
+so near to the index-finger of time, that he can see it move; hence a
+trifle, when it takes up <i>many</i> moments, becomes so great to us, and
+this short life, which, like the picture of our soul in the <i>Orbis
+Pictus</i>,<a name="div2Ref_65" href="#div2_65"><sup>[65]</sup></a> consists of points&mdash;of black and golden ones&mdash;seems so
+long. And hence, too, everywhere, as on this page, does our serious
+mood stand so near to our mirthful.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Except Flamin, all moved to church, godfather and godchild. It was a
+so-called week-day prayer-hour, such as will be set apart in every
+rational duchy and margravedom, where one still sees to it that the
+parson shall freeze once or twice a week, and that, as novices do for
+the exercise of obedience, they may be obliged to sprinkle dry sticks,
+to scatter the seed of the Divine word into empty pews, as Melancthon
+did into empty pots.<a name="div2Ref_66" href="#div2_66"><sup>[66]</sup></a> In German countries, mine and a few others
+excepted, it takes two centuries thoroughly to do away a folly,&mdash;one to
+recognize it, and one more to do it away. The <i>views</i> of a consistory
+always become rational a hundred years sooner than its orders
+(<i>circularia</i>) do.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">In the latticed pew of the Eymanns, whose door made nearly a right
+angle with that of the vestry, Sebastian found all the flowers again,
+or at least the flower-skeletons, which had bloomed around his fair
+childhood's days,&mdash;figurative and literal ones; and the literal ones,
+which had crept away all soiled under the footstool of the choir-pew,
+opened out again into flowers of memory. He thought of his childish
+sorrows here,&mdash;among them the length of the sermon,&mdash;and of his
+childish pleasures, among which were to be reckoned the length of the
+voluntary and Eymann's kneeling on the middle of the pulpit-stairs. He
+pushed back the wooden lattice-window, and found in its wooden groove
+his initials, V. S. H., notched by his own hands. So far is it from the
+child to the youth! And man wonders at the distance. &quot;Ah! then,&quot; said
+Horion,&mdash;and we will say it with him,&mdash;&quot;all was to thee as yet
+infinite, and nothing little but thy heart. Ah! in that warm,
+quickening time, when a father is still God the Father, and a mother
+the mother of God, not yet did the bosom, oppressed with spirits,
+graves, and storms, press itself for comfort to a human one. All the
+four quarters of the world were installed in this church; all rivers
+were named Rhine, and all princes January. Ah! this tranquil and lovely
+day was set in a golden horizon of infinite hope and a ring of
+morning-red. Now the day is gone, and the horizon sunk, and only the
+skeleton remains there,&mdash;the latticed pew.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">But if we now, even in the noonday hours of life, think and sigh thus,
+how much more at evening, when man folds up his flower-leaves, and
+becomes undistinguishable like other flowers,&mdash;at evening, when we
+stand low in the western horizon and go out,&mdash;then, when we turn round,
+and survey the short road strewed with trampled-out hopes,&mdash;oh! then,
+how much more sweetly will it not look upon us,&mdash;the garden of
+childhood, lying in the east, low down near the place of our rising,
+and still suffused with an old, pale redness,&mdash;how much more magically
+will it gleam on us, and yet how much more will it affect us to
+tenderness! And thereupon man lays himself down on the earth not far
+from the grave, and hopes here below no more.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">To Eymann it must be a touching thought, that he, as he had for years
+given the benediction in this church to newly-delivered mothers only
+parishionally related to him, could, for once, give his wishes to a
+nearer one. Victor crept back into all his boyish Sundays and their
+illusions by this simple act, that he to-day, as in his tenth year,
+went, while the whole congregation were singing, into the vestry, to
+the Parson, and asked him for the page of the hymn. He enjoyed it with
+a real childish gusto to think that there were four <i>moving</i>
+creatures<a name="div2Ref_67" href="#div2_67"><sup>[67]</sup></a> in the temple,&mdash;the Parson, the Schoolmaster, the
+Exchequer-master of the poor's-box,<a name="div2Ref_68" href="#div2_68"><sup>[68]</sup></a> and himself. Is there anything
+more sublime, thought he, than a jingling alms-bag-father with a long,
+horizontal balance-pole, walking to and fro alone, among nothing but
+stiffened statues?</p>
+
+<p class="normal">After church the festival began with mere preliminaries, as a treaty of
+peace does with articles about the neutral ground, about rank, &amp;c. Only
+the world must not suppose that anything came on sooner than five
+o'clock in the afternoon, or that any one could earlier than that slip
+out of his prosaic week-day clothes into the poetic festal ones, or
+quietly settle down beside a neighbor; but, according to the order and
+programme of pleasure, all must now run up and down, obedient to
+Apollonia, that <i>majoress-domo</i>,&mdash;must carry away bean-poles and
+seed-cornucopias out of the summer-house,&mdash;fan out therefrom
+butterflies that had burst the cocoons and waked up bottle-flies,&mdash;tie
+back the twigs which had grown over the windows,&mdash;lug down the
+orangery, which consisted of a hundred blossoms of a pomegranate-tree,
+out of the parsonage into the garden alley, in like manner an invalid
+harpsichord, whose sounding-board had not sprung<a name="div2Ref_69" href="#div2_69"><sup>[69]</sup></a> so often as its
+strings.... The serious Flamin was compelled by the bustling Sebastian
+to take part in these puppet-plays,<a name="div2Ref_70" href="#div2_70"><sup>[70]</sup></a> and between them, in this
+preparatory chase of pleasure, the tormented visage of Eymann had to
+labor, to which Victor delivered the most essential exhortations:
+&quot;Master Godfather, we cannot be earnest and busy enough,&mdash;this festival
+may yet be talked of in places where it will have influence; but a
+middle course between princely pomp and Belgian stinginess will, I
+think, throw upon us the most favorable light.&quot; All went well,&mdash;even
+the clouds dispersed,&mdash;Clotilda would come. The primate of the
+festival, in whose honor the church-going took place,&mdash;the little
+six-weeks'-man,&mdash;memorized his part aloud, which he had to perform
+after five o'clock, and which, as in the case of more than one hero of
+festivities, was to consist of nothing but going to sleep.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">The memorizing consisted of his waking and screaming in one steady
+scream for the bosom in which the Creator had stored up for him the
+first manna in life's wilderness. But not till five o'clock did the
+mother still him with the maternal sleep-potion, and enable the little
+speaker to close his throat-lid<a name="div2Ref_71" href="#div2_71"><sup>[71]</sup></a> and eyelids at once. At first I had
+come near suppressing&mdash;from respect for the Parson's lady&mdash;the fact
+that she suckled, and so, like a whale as it were, still reckoned among
+the mammalia, nourished at her bosom another child than Cupid; but I
+flattered myself, upon reflection, that a person who is neither a
+theatre-princess nor a crown-princess would not be so strictly judged
+as others, if she <i>had</i> children or milk....</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Before I say that Clotilda came, I will, inasmuch as she has eight
+residences,&mdash;although many a magnate who owns sixteen noble residences
+still seeks a seventeenth with walls in which he may sleep,&mdash;offer a
+slight excuse for her going into the house of a common citizen; but she
+needs after all no other justification than the fact that she was in
+the country, where often the oldest blood can avail itself of no better
+intercourse than that of citizens, unless perhaps it is that of cattle,
+which even some not uncultured cavaliers really prefer....</p>
+
+<p class="normal">It strikes five o'clock,&mdash;the matchless beauty enters,&mdash;the moon hangs
+down towards her out of heaven like a white leaf newly budded,&mdash;the
+gay, innocent blood in St. Luna rises under her influence like the
+tide,&mdash;all is rehabilitated.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">But the sixth chapter is run out.... And as Spitz is not yet on hand
+with the seventh, the reader and I can exchange with each other a
+rational word. I confess, he has long appreciated me and my doings; he
+sees clearly that all goes on in the finest biographical train,&mdash;the
+dog, my littleness, and the heroes of these dog-days. Nor have I ever
+denied that he will continue to be more and more dazzled by the
+splendor and sparkle of this foot-birth,<a name="div2Ref_72" href="#div2_72"><sup>[72]</sup></a> since I am so very busy,
+waxing, rubbing, and polishing at it,&mdash;more so than if it were a man's
+boot or a military horse's-hoof in Berlin. Nay, I need not wait to have
+it foretold to me from any cup of coffee-grounds (for I see it already
+from my knowledge of human nature and from the coffee which I drink)
+that this is saying the very least, and that the proper reading-rage
+will then, and not till then, come over the poor dear fellow, when, in
+the course of this work, at which, as in the low-warp tapestry,<a name="div2Ref_73" href="#div2_73"><sup>[73]</sup></a> two
+workmen weave sitting in one chair, the historic figures of this
+tapestry, together with their grouping, shall come forth from the ball
+of the foot to the seam of the skull. At present there is hardly a
+heel, a shin-bone, a stocking finished....</p>
+
+<p class="normal">But when twenty or thirty ells of the work have been run off, then can
+I and my by-sitter expect what I will here portray: the reader will
+hurry as if the Devil were after him; to get through one Dog-post-day
+he will let six courses grow cold and the dessert warm. But what am I
+saying? An incarnate Romish king shall ride through the streets and a
+cannon-thunder bring up the rear,&mdash;he shall not hear it; his better
+half shall give in his library the best of suppers to a connubial
+excrescence,&mdash;he shall not see it; the excrescence itself shall hold
+assaf&#339;tida under his nose, shall give him in sport light blows with
+a woodman's axe,&mdash;he shall not feel it, so beside himself shall he be
+on my account, regularly out of his senses.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Now that is a misfortune, the certainty of which I seek vainly to
+hide from myself. When it once comes on, and I have unhappily brought
+him into that historical clairvoyance where he no longer hears or
+sees anything except my characters, which are put in <i>rapport</i> with
+him,&mdash;neither father nor cousin,&mdash;then I may be sure that he will hear
+a mining-superintendent still less,&mdash;for story is what he wants, and of
+<i>me</i> he knows absolutely nothing more,&mdash;nay, I will suppose, I should
+let off the motliest fire-works of wit, yes, that chains of
+philosophical conclusions should hang down in skeins out of my mouth,
+like ribbons from a juggler's,&mdash;what would it avail me?</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Nevertheless, ribbons must hang down and fire-works play; but it shall
+be in this way: As from each year so many hours are left off that the
+remainder of four years makes out an intercalary day,&mdash;and as with me
+after four Dog-post-days there will always be so many Postscripts, so
+much wit and acuteness lying quite idle, as so much unsalable
+stuff,<a name="div2Ref_74" href="#div2_74"><sup>[74]</sup></a> that a regular <i>intercalary day</i> could well be made,&mdash;it
+shall be made as often as four dog-dynasties have gone by; only this is
+still requisite, that I first conclude and ratify with the reader the
+following boundary agreement and domestic contract, in form and manner
+to wit:&mdash;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">I. On the part of the reader it is allowed and granted to the
+mining-superintendent on St. John's, him and his heirs and assigns,
+from this time forward, after every fourth Dog-post-day, to prepare and
+print a witty and learned intercalary day, in which there is no
+narrative.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">II. On the part of the mining-superintendent permission is given the
+reader to skip over every intercalary day and read only the historical
+days, in consideration whereof both powers waive all <i>beneficia
+juris</i>&mdash;<i>restitutionem in integrum</i>&mdash;<i>exceptionem læsionis enormis et
+enormissimæ</i>&mdash;-<i>dispensationem</i>&mdash;<i>absolutionem</i>, <i>etc</i>. At the
+Congress
+of St. John's, May 4, 1793.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Thus reads the genuine instrument of the so-called Dog-contract between
+the mining-superintendent and the reader, and this Act of Renunciation
+may and must, in future misunderstandings between the two powers, be
+laid before an umpire or a confederate court,<a name="div2Ref_75" href="#div2_75"><sup>[75]</sup></a> as the single ground
+of decision.</p>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<p class="center"><img border="0" src="images/flowerstart.png" alt="flowerstart"></p>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<h2><a name="div1Ref_07" href="#div1_07">7. DOG-POST-DAY.</a></h2>
+<br>
+
+<p class="hang1"><span class="sc2">The Great Parsonage-Park.&mdash;Orangery.&mdash;Flamin's Promotion.&mdash;Festal
+Afternoon of Domestic Love.&mdash;Rain of Fire.&mdash;Letter to Emanuel.</span></p>
+<br>
+
+<p class="normal">His Lordship excepted, all are now sitting and waiting for me in the
+parsonage-garden; but the garden itself not a mortal soul is yet
+acquainted with. It is a Chrestomathy<a name="div2Ref_76" href="#div2_76"><sup>[76]</sup></a> of all gardens, and yet no
+larger than the church. Many gardens resemble it in being at once
+kitchen-gardens, flower-gardens, and orchards; but it is also a <i>jardin
+des animaux</i>, as it contains in fact the whole Fauna of St. Luna, and a
+botanical garden, too; it is overgrown with the entire Flora of the
+village; and it is a garden of honey-bees and humble-bees also, as
+often as they happen to fly into it. Meanwhile such minor merits are
+really hardly worth naming, when a garden once has, like this, the
+merit of being the greatest English garden through which a man ever
+strode. It hides not only its end,&mdash;as every park, like every purse,
+must do,&mdash;but even its beginning, and seems to be merely the terrace
+from which one can see into that which one cannot see over, but, like
+Cook, may well circumnavigate. In the English parsonage-garden there
+are not single ruins, but whole broken-up cities, and the greatest
+princes have rivalled each other in their passion for furnishing it
+with romantic wildernesses and battle-fields and gallows-trees, to
+which (and that carries the illusion still higher) real rogues are
+tied, into the bargain, as fruit-pendants. The buildings and shrubs of
+different parts of the world are there, not huddled together into an
+absurd neighborhood, but neatly kept apart from each other by regular
+seas or water-scapes, which its size easily makes possible, since it
+contains over nine million square miles; and with what taste, in fact,
+these masses are brought together, the reader may estimate from the
+fact that all lords and all reviewers in the literary periodicals, and
+the readers themselves, are drawn into the garden and often stay
+therein sixty years.&mdash;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">The Parson thinks also to get some credit from it as a Dutch garden,
+particularly by a peruke made of water, which hangs not on a wig-stand,
+but on a tin pipe, and which leaps so in curls that already several
+city-parsons have wished they could wear it. Butterfly-show-glasses
+kept off the night-chills from precocious roses of silk and early
+cucumbers of wax. Cucumbers which consisted of real cucumbers, he was
+the first among all pastors to put in, in order to worry himself with
+the fear that they might freeze; for this fear he must have, in order
+to rejoice whenever a glass bottle was broken in his house: he could
+then carry this ice- or glass-mountain (which, in the case of wines,
+unfortunately heightens every year as our thirst does) into the garden,
+and with this manure-bell cover the heart-leaves. Round more important
+beds he ran a motley, mosaic border of crockery; his family was his
+verge-tool,&mdash;I mean, they had to break for him the few porcelain cups
+which he needed, in order with this motley powdered sugar to set off
+the more considerable patches, as a prince enchases and berings himself
+with the variegated order-ribbons drawn through the button-holes of his
+antechambers. As he could not set <i>whole</i> cups round the beds, but must
+first analyze them by his chemists, a reviewer who eats with him must
+avail himself of my hint to understand how it happens, if such a
+consumptive patient is not beside himself for rage, when some very
+valuable vessel is broken; for only when it happens to worthless ones
+is he no longer master of himself. Every housewife should set off such
+a bed as an Arndt's garden of Paradise, as a Golgotha for porcelain
+whereof the <i>fashion is changed</i>, for the good of her soul, in order
+that she may not lose her senses when a cup falls. &quot;Dearest!&quot; I would
+say, &quot;bear up under this misfortune like a Christian woman; it, will
+turn out for thy advantage either in eternity yonder, or here in the
+garden.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Near a house, Dutch garden-ornaments, with their homely minuteness,
+make a better figure than thrilling Nature, with her eternal majesty.
+Eymann's clipped and carved parsonage-garden was in fact merely a
+continued family-room without roof or partition.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">As the Parson twitched our Victor round through the garden, the guest
+almost forgot to praise the garden as a magazine of ideas, simply
+because he was looking forward too curiously and warmly to the arrival
+of Clotilda, and her demeanor towards his friend. Fortunately it
+occurred to him that the Parson counted upon incense-offerings and
+censers; he was so unwilling to defraud a laurel-hoping heart, that he
+for that very reason loved to attach himself to people of some merit,
+that so he might indulge his humane disposition to praise, without
+expense to the truth. Victor rejoiced at the prospect of Flamin's and
+Clotilda's meeting: how beautifully, he thought, will the moonlight of
+soft love fall upon his and her proud faces! And he held in store a
+rich tolerance and love for their love. For he not only had so much
+insight into the fleeting nature of our pleasures, that he could hardly
+be angry over the maddest, but he could even be present at the
+journeyman's greeting (or methodology) of&mdash;two lovers with real
+pleasure. &quot;It is very foolish,&quot;&mdash;he said in Göttingen,&mdash;&quot;every
+good-hearted man opens his arms in sympathy, when he sees friends,
+brothers and sisters, or parents embrace each other; but if a couple of
+monkeys in love dance round before us at the end of Cupid's string, and
+though it were on the stage, not a devil of us will take any interest
+in them, unless they dance in a romance. But why? Certainly not from
+selfishness, otherwise the wooden heart in the human block would also
+in the presence of friendship between others, or filial love, remain
+nailed fast; but, because the love of lovers is selfish, we are so too;
+and because in a romance it is not so, we are not so either. I, for my
+part, go on in my thinking, and make believe to myself in regard to
+every span of lovers I meet, that they were printed and bound, and I
+had them from the circulating library for paltry reading money. It
+belongs to the higher disinterestedness to sympathize even with its
+opposite. And by all means with you, poor women! Would you or I, then,
+oftentimes, with this life of yours so frittered away in sewing,
+cooking, washing, know that you had a soul, unless it fell in love?
+Many of you through long tearful years have never lifted your head
+except in the short, sunny day of love, and after it your bereft heart
+sank back again into the cool depths; so water-plants lie all the year
+drowned in water, only at the time of their bloom and love do their
+ascending leaves sit upon the water and sun themselves gloriously,
+and&mdash;then fall down again.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">At last Clotilda entered, in conversation with the Parson's wife. She
+had on a crape hat, with a black lace portcullis, which at once
+beautified, divided, and concealed with a pierced shadow her beautiful
+face. But her eye avoided Flamin's eye, and only at times stole
+thoughtfully after it. He proved that precisely people of the greatest
+courage have the least with regard to beauty; he advanced not towards
+her one step. She asked our Victor eagerly about the arrival and the
+health of his Lordship. She then proposed to him, with the usual
+medical uncertainty of her sex, whether such an operation often
+transpired so easily, and whether he had already restored to many so
+much as he had to his father: he answered both questions in the
+negative, and she sighed openly. His respectful distance towards her
+would have increased by that at which his friend kept himself from her,
+had he not had something to hand her,&mdash;Emanuel's note. He could not
+steal it, as he had already repeated to her the first line; secondly,
+he must present it <i>under four eyes</i> (he could not through Agatha, for
+example), because he knew how she carried discretion to the extreme
+limits. Clotilda was one of those persons&mdash;troublesome to this
+biographer and his hero&mdash;who love to conceal all trifles: e. g. what
+they eat, where they are going to-morrow; who are furious with a friend
+if he blabs out how on St. Thomas's day last year they had a slight
+headache. With Clotilda it arose not from fear, but from a dark
+presentiment that he who babbled indifferent mysteries might at last
+tell weighty ones. He felt towards her, notwithstanding her pride, a
+mighty drawing to sincerity. He led her aside to the pomegranate-tree,
+and there&mdash;sparing her by his open-hearted lightness of manner the
+burdensome obligation she might feel with regard to a secret&mdash;handed
+her back the leaf. She was astonished, but said at once, her surprise
+related merely to her own negligence; i. e. she trusted him, but had
+some suspicion or other of her house-mates, and of the manner in which
+it got into the arbor. She took advantage of the orangery, and bent her
+inspired face close to the pomegranate blossoms. Victor could not
+possibly stand there alone so stupid; he, still a little struck with
+her astonishment, and at last with her almost too great pride, felt
+also a hankering after the pomegranate incense, and held his face down
+in it toward hers. He should have known, however, that any one who
+smells of anything does not look at the thing, but straight before him.
+Hardly, then, had he applied his olfactory nerves to the blossoms, when
+he opened his eyes, and Clotilda's large eyes stood opened full upon
+him; they were just at the highest and most effective elevation, of
+45°, whether you speak of eyes or bow-shots. He turned his pupils
+forcibly down toward the leaves; she, still more prudently, stepped
+back from the bewildering orangery.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">However, she was not embarrassed. He thought it unjust toward Flamin to
+observe her sentiments towards himself; but still he remarked this
+much,&mdash;that the observatory on which one would watch the occultations
+of her heart must be higher than is necessary in regard to other women.
+The custom of being admired had made her proof against that showing up,
+as in a glass, the impression of her charms with which men so often win
+to themselves the attention of woman's vanity. She was, as I have said,
+not embarrassed, but went on to tell her listener something further of
+Emanuel's character, which she lately, out of respect for her teacher,
+had not been willing to lay before such unholy ears,&mdash;namely, that he
+firmly believed he should die a year hence in the midnight of St.
+John's day.<a name="div2Ref_77" href="#div2_77"><sup>[77]</sup></a> Victor could easily guess that she herself believed it;
+but what he did not guess was, that this proud one, from pure
+tenderness of heart, had hastened her purpose of leaving Maienthal on
+St. John's day, in order not to meet the beloved man on the anniversary
+of the future day of his death. According to her account, this Emanuel
+had had a painfully exalted position among men; he was alone; he had
+had great friends on his bosom, but all had passed into the grave, and
+therefore he would also hide there his own head. Years give to stormy,
+over-vigorous men a finer harmony of the heart, but from refined, cold
+natures they take more than they give. Those strong hearts resemble
+English gardens, which age always makes greener, fuller, more leafy;
+whereas the man of the world, like a French one, is covered by years
+with dried-up and disfigured boughs.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Victor grew more troubled; every word which he won from her he regarded
+as a sacrilege upon his friend, the more so as the latter did not
+understand so well as he the art of opening a conversation with a lady.
+He had not the heart to shine, because he feared thereby to be a rival
+of his friend for her good graces. His Flamin seemed to him to-day
+taller, more beautiful, and better than ever, and he himself shorter
+and more stupid. He wished a thousand times his father had already
+come, that he might deliver to him with the greatest ardor Flamin's
+prayer for his aid in obtaining Clotilda.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">At last he came, and Victor drew a full breath again. The good youth
+often seeks, by acts of sacrifice, to reconcile his conscience again
+with his <i>thoughts</i>. With heart-beatings of enthusiasm he awaited the
+moment of solitude. A garden detaches and draws together people in the
+easiest manner, and only in such a place should one impart secrets;
+Victor could soon, in an arbor which wove itself on four chestnut-trees
+with its blooming vein-work nest-wise over their heads, embrace his
+father with trembling emotion, and speak and glow for his friend with
+tongue and heart. His Lordship's surprise was greater than <i>his</i>
+emotion. &quot;Here,&quot; said he, &quot;is something which has long since fulfilled
+thy prayer in a different way; but I wished to reserve for thee the joy
+of bearing the message&quot;;&mdash;and therewith he gave him a most gracious
+autograph, wherein the Prince called the practising Advocate Flamin
+into the Administrative Council.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">A most gracious autograph is the <i>Tetragrammaton</i><a name="div2Ref_78" href="#div2_78"><sup>[78]</sup></a> and means of
+grace, which works supernatural effects and state-miracles; and the
+illustrious writing-thumb is the magic thief's-thumb,<a name="div2Ref_79" href="#div2_79"><sup>[79]</sup></a> as it were,
+by which the different wheels of the state-repeating-watch&mdash;the
+lever-wheel, the face-wheel, often merely the hand&mdash;is shoved forward
+or backward, according as it desires an hour earlier or later.
+Hence ministers often climb up and cut off for themselves such a
+thief's-thumb to carry in their pockets.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Sebastian is seized by joy, as by Habakkuk's angel, by the hair of the
+head, and carried through the garden, and driven with his news to the
+first he might meet, and that proved to be the Chaplain, who, with a
+comic face, swore it was all a fib of Victor's; but his restrained
+jubilation almost burst his compressed veins. Victor had no time for
+refutation, but hurried off with such a message to the heart to which
+it rightly belonged,&mdash;the mother's. The mother could not shape her
+mouth to anything but a blessed smile, into which the drops of joy
+overflowed from her eyes. No joy in nature is so sublimely affecting as
+the joy of a mother at the good fortune of a child. But the son, in
+whose soul, such as it was to-day, this sunbeam of fate was really
+needed, could not, in the surprise, be immediately found.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">His Lordship, meanwhile, talked with Clotilda as with a daughter, and
+gave her a letter from her mother and the intelligence of his
+approaching departure. His manly kindness, guided by respect and graced
+by refinement, ennobled her attentiveness to his looks; and as she came
+forth from the affectionate and low-toned conversation with sparkling
+eyes, her tall form, which usually stooped a little, was raised by a
+certain inspiration to a noble stature, and she stood in the temple of
+Nature, as a priestess of the temple, infinitely beautiful. His
+Lordship separated from her. She found Flamin near the tulip-formed
+letter C, and the Goddess of Fortune appeared to him in the sweetest
+human incarnation, to deliver to him her gift. We need not say that the
+news and the news-bearer threw him into equal ecstasy.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Joy had shaken up the whole bee-garden in a swarming-bag and turned it
+into chaos. The foaming wine-fermentation could not work itself off
+till it ended in clear, tranquil rapture. His Lordship took himself out
+of the way of a gratitude swelled by so many ripieno<a name="div2Ref_80" href="#div2_80"><sup>[80]</sup></a> voices and off
+to his carriage, when the mother with her dumb heart-fulness overtook
+him; but nothing could she get from her blissfully burdened heart to
+her lips, save the modest words, that &quot;to-day was his birthday, and his
+son did not know it, and ought <i>also</i> to have been surprised with a
+rapture.&quot; He tried to escape from her with a grateful smile, and said
+that he must hasten back to the Prince, who perhaps had taken as kind
+an interest in this very day as she; but Sebastian, with his friend
+whom he had found, overtook him at the garden-gate, and the hurrying
+lord was delayed a little longer by a swift embrace of his son. Not
+until he was off did the mother, who longed to unburden her love, clasp
+tenderly Victor's hand, and, forgetting the agreement, asked: &quot;O
+dearest, why, then, did you not congratulate him on his birthday? For,
+indeed, <i>I</i> could not.&quot; Now for the first time he understood and felt
+the sudden embrace of his father, and stretched out his arms after him
+and would fain reciprocate it.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Here the old Parson, also coming out of the garden, struck in and said,
+as if talking nonsense, &quot;I wish he were Administrative Councillor&quot;; but
+his wife, without making any reply to that, said to him with
+overflowing voice and love, &quot;Such a cradle-festival thou hast never yet
+lived to see as to-day's, Peter!&quot; Agatha looked at her inquiringly and
+admonishingly. &quot;Just out with it,&quot; said she, and enfolded the children
+and drew them both into the paternal embrace, &quot;and wish your good
+father length of days and three more blessed children.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">The father could not say anything, but stretched his hand toward the
+mother, to round the group of the loving Eden. Victor's sympathetic
+blood swelled up in his heart, to dissolve it in love, and he thought
+the silent prayer: &quot;Never may any misfortune, All-gracious One, tear
+these entwined arms asunder!&quot; But Flamin soon drew himself out of the
+concatenation, and said to Victor with a most grateful pressure of the
+hand, &quot;Thou knowest not how I am always wronging thee.&quot; The Chaplain
+thought he should hide his emotion from all by saying: &quot;I wish I had
+not deceived you. I have let myself be bled, but it was a stupid thing;
+if I had only known! only known! It is true; there, see for
+yourselves!&quot; And finding that this mask was not adequate to cover the
+whole emotion of his soul, he called, in an overloud tone, to the poor
+forgotten Apollonia, who was rocking at the house door the awakened
+Bastian, to &quot;come here!&quot; But the poor girl, whose merely distant
+participation in the general mingling of hearts touched our Victor's
+tenderest feelings, shyly hesitated, till the mother came and
+indemnified her against any loss by all that for which mothers are
+never repaid. But not until the Parson's wife held her child in her
+arms and on her lips, did she feel that the imprisoned flames of her
+affections found vent, and her heart its alleviation.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Ah, that man should receive the fairest love precisely at the time when
+he does not yet understand it!&mdash;alas that not until late in life's
+year, as he contemplates with a sigh the love of other parents and
+children, he should say hopefully to himself, &quot;Ah, thus did mine
+certainly love me too!&quot;&mdash;alas that then the bosom to which thou wouldst
+hasten with thy thanks for half of a life, for a thousand unappreciated
+anxieties, for an inexpressible, never returning love, is already lying
+crushed under an old grave, and has lost the warm heart which so long
+loved thee!...</p>
+
+<p class="normal">In domestic happiness the calm, cosey pleasures driven in between four
+narrow walls are only the most accidental constituent; its nervous and
+vital fluid is the blazing fire-fountains of love which spring out of
+kindred hearts into each other. The involuntary surprise had
+disconcerted the intentional ones. But the flood of joy had swept all
+parties together; and they still remained in the same confidential
+closeness to each other, when it had abated again. They sat down to the
+entertainment in the summer-house. Seldom are banquets spiced as this
+one was, by two extraordinary advantages,&mdash;want of food and want of
+room. Nothing whets the appetite so much as the fear of its not finding
+enough to satisfy it. It had been contrived by Sebastian, that for each
+guest only his favorite dish should be provided; for the Parson,
+stuffed crabs and potato cheese; for Flamin, ham; for the Hero, good
+Harry's beans. But in this case every one wanted another's favorite
+dish, and set his own up at auction.<a name="div2Ref_81" href="#div2_81"><sup>[81]</sup></a> Even the ladies, who generally
+eat and do not eat, like fishes, nibbled a little. The second
+intoxicating ingredient which they had, thrown into their cup of joy,
+was the table, together with the garden-house, of which the former
+would not hold the food nor the latter the feeders. Sebastian had
+betaken himself, with Agatha, to an affiliated table which had been
+adjoined outside to the window of the banquet-hall, merely for the
+purpose of screaming in from out there and whining, more than eating.
+This caprice was, at bottom, a covered modesty which feared being
+honored inside at the expense of the other guests, on his Lordship's
+account. His own solitude&mdash;perhaps in a painful sense&mdash;pictured to him
+the shy Appel, who, as vestal of the hearth, ate only the drawback toll
+of returning dishes, merely to try how they had tasted to others. He
+could not longer endure the thought of this separation, but took wine
+and the best of the dessert, and carried it in to her in her kitchen
+winter quarters. As, in doing so, he displayed upon his face, instead
+of his gayety towards girls, of which she might have made a too humble
+interpretation, the greatest seriousness of courtesy; he was so happy
+as to have given to a soul pinched up by nature itself&mdash;with no other
+flower-pot here to send its roots round in than a cooking-pot, and only
+the kitchen for its concert-hall and the spit for its music of the
+spheres&mdash;a golden evening and a long memory of pleasure. Let no one
+maliciously thrust his fist in the way of such a good snail-soul, and
+laugh to see how she wriggles over it; and let him who stands upright
+willingly stoop and gently lift her along over her little stone.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">As to Clotilda, before dinner things went very well, but after dinner
+very ill. I speak of Sebastian, who, after the handing in of the
+petition to his Lordship, was happier and more light-hearted, and
+actually talked as frankly with Clotilda as if she were&mdash;a bride. For
+he had already said in Hanover, that &quot;there was not a more tedious and
+holy thing than a bride, particularly if it were a friend's; sooner
+would he fritter away his time about the musty Pandects in Florence, or
+a holy body in a glass shrine at Vienna, than about her.&quot; In fact, it
+was hard to fall in love with Clotilda; I know the reader would not
+have done it, but would have gone coldly away again. &quot;Her Grecian nose
+under the almost manly breadth of forehead,&quot; he would have said, &quot;this
+sister-nose to all Madonnas and this frontier wild-game<a name="div2Ref_82" href="#div2_82"><sup>[82]</sup></a> so rare on
+German faces, her still but bright eyes, which seek nothing beyond
+themselves, this British gravity, this harmonious thoughtful soul,
+raise her above the rights of love. And even if this majestic form
+should incline to love, who could ever be so selfish as to pocket the
+present of a whole heaven, or so proud as to shoot his heart into hers
+like a smoke-ball, and becloud thereby this still, pensive serenity?&quot;
+The reader will be glad to read his own words.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">But after dinner things went differently. Under Victor's cerebral
+membrane, some hobgoblin had so thrown into pi all the letters of his
+ideas in the inner letter-case, that he was up to this time gay, but
+unsatisfied. He had tried to tie and untie Agatha's hair, to separate
+her double-bows into unequal, and for that very reason into equal
+halves again; but the operation had not pleased him as usual,&mdash;to-day's
+interludes of domestic love had put his mirthful spirit wholly out of
+joint,&mdash;and it seemed to him as if, withdrawn from the present joy, he
+should be happier, at least for a few minutes, in some quiet corner,
+and he particularly longed to see the sun set.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Add to all this the sight of Clotilda's increased love towards
+Agatha,&mdash;the sight of his friend, who, by the deepening silence of his
+tenderness, his mildening voice, and by a devotedness so irresistible
+in impassioned natures, commanded every heart, &quot;Love me,&quot;&mdash;and,
+finally, the spectacle of night....</p>
+
+<p class="normal">He had already been long sad, when he seemed still gay. Now the mother
+took the little hero of the forenoon out under the bland evening heaven.
+They all stood outside of the garden-tabernacle-of-the-covenant, in the
+first temple of man's devotion. The evening-blood of the sinking sun
+flowed into the clouds, as into the sea sinks the blood of its giants
+dying in its depths. The porous cloud did not avail to hide the heavens;
+it swam round about the moon, and let her pale silver glisten from
+amidst the slags.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">The red clouds painted the infant. Every one took lightly his soft
+hands, which had already burst from the bud of pillows and the
+chrysalis of swaddling-bands. Clotilda&mdash;instead of lavishing on the
+little one carnally coquettish caresses, as many girls do <i>before</i> or
+<i>for</i> men&mdash;poured down a steadily streaming look full of hearty love on
+the new man, untied his too tight and cutting shirt-sleeve, screened
+from him the moon at which he was squinting, and said, playfully,
+&quot;Smile this way and love me, <i>Sebastian</i>!&quot; She could not possibly have
+meant to charge this line with metaphorical <i>ricochet</i>-shots; besides,
+the elder, unswaddled Sebastian knew full well that she could have
+anticipated no double sense; nay, he knew the rule, that the very
+anxiety wherewith some people banish certain subjects from their talk
+betrays the presence of the same in their thoughts. And yet, for all
+that, he had not the courage to smile like the rest, or to take the
+little hand which she had touched in his. She turned to him, and said,
+&quot;But how does the child learn <i>our language, unless it has already a
+language it can master</i>?&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">... I have, out of mere regard to the philosophers, had this printed in
+italics.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Then it follows,&quot; he answered, &quot;that the language of pantomime must
+signify just as much as articulate speech. As often as I see a deaf and
+dumb man go to sacrament, I think of this,&mdash;that all the instruction
+you can give imports nothing into man, but only indicates and arranges
+what is already there. The child's soul is its own drawing-master, the
+teacher is simply its colorist.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;What if this lovely evening,&quot; she continued, &quot;should one day come up
+again to the memory of this little one? Why does the sixth year look
+more beautiful in remembrance than the twelfth, and the third still
+more beautiful?&quot; A beautiful woman one cannot interrupt so easily as an
+ex-Dean; and so she was permitted to recur to this reminiscence: &quot;Herr
+Emanuel once said, one should relate to children every year the story
+of their past years, in order that they might one day look back through
+all their years, even into the haze of the second.&quot; It is as if I heard
+the above-mentioned maid of honor<a name="div2Ref_83" href="#div2_83"><sup>[83]</sup></a> personally speaking, under whose
+thin lace cap there lay more philosophy than under many a doctor's
+beaver, as quicksilver sticks in crape, and runs through leather.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Victor answered, with the usual sympathy of his good heart: &quot;Emanuel
+stands near to man, and knows him. Two scene-painters lead man, beset
+by magic, through the whole stage,&mdash;<i>Memory</i> and <i>Hope</i>; in the
+present
+he is uncomfortable; enjoyment is poured out for him, as for Gulliver,
+only into a thousand Liliputian moments; how shall that intoxicate or
+satisfy? When we picture to ourselves a happy day, we compress it into
+a single happy thought; when we come upon it, this thought is diluted
+through: the twenty-four hours.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;I think of that,&quot; she replied, &quot;as often as I walk through meadows; in
+the distance are flowers upon flowers, but, near at hand, they are all
+scattered apart, and separated by the grass. But yet, after all,
+<i>memory is enjoyed only in the present</i>.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Victor continued to think only of the flowers, and said, abstractedly,
+&quot;And in the <i>night</i> the flowers themselves look like grass,&quot;&mdash;when it
+began suddenly to sprinkle.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">They all stepped, in solemn mood, into the summerhouse, on whose
+roof the rain pattered down, while through the open windows the
+alternately shutting and opening moon's eye threw in like a glacier its
+snow-glances,&mdash;the tepid blossom-breath of the whole glistening
+landscape stole with healing balm on every human sigh, every burdened
+bosom. In this confined circle, separated from nature by the
+alternation of night and moonshine, one must needs take refuge in
+something near and familiar, in the old harpsichord. Clotilda's voice
+might make a flute-accompaniment to the whispering rain without. The
+Parson's wife begged&mdash;her to favor them, and with her favorite <i>aria</i>
+from Benda's Romeo,&mdash;&quot;Perchance, my lost repose! perchance one day in
+the grave I may find thee!&quot; &amp;c.,&mdash;a song whose tones like fine
+dissolving perfumes penetrate the heart through a thousand entrances,
+and tremble there, and tremble more and more intensely, till at last
+they shiver it to atoms, and leave nothing of it behind in the
+harmonious annihilation but tears.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Clotilda without any hesitating vanity consented to sing. But for
+Sebastian, in whom all tones came in contact with naked, quivering
+feelers, and who could work himself into sadness at the very songs of
+the herdsmen in the fields&mdash;this, on such an evening, was too much for
+his heart; under cover of the general musical attentiveness, he had to
+steal out of the door....</p>
+
+<p class="normal">But here, under the great night-heaven, amidst higher drops, his own
+can fall unseen. What a night! Here a splendor overwhelms him, which
+links night and sky and earth all together; magic Nature rushes with
+streams into his heart, and forcibly enlarges it. Overhead, Luna
+fills the floating cloud-fleeces with liquid silver, and the soaked
+silver-wool quivers downward, and glittering pearls trickle over smooth
+foliage, and are caught in blossoms, and the heavenly field pearls
+and glimmers. Through this Eden, over which a double snow-shower of
+sparks and of drops played and whirled through a misty rain of
+blossom-fragrances, and wherein Clotilda's tones, like angels that had
+got lost, went flying about, now sinking and now soaring through this
+magic-maze, Victor staggered, dazzled, overwhelmed, trembling and
+weeping, and sank down exhausted into the arbor where he had to-day
+fallen on his father's heart. He thought over the wintry life of that
+good father amidst mere strangers to the heart, and his solitary, sad
+celebration of today's festival, and the cold, empty room in the
+paternal bosom, which once the lost form of the beloved one had
+inhabited, and he yearned painfully for the heart of his invisible
+mother. He lifted his leaning head into the rain, and from the large
+open eyes fell not strange drops alone. He glowed through his whole
+being, and night-clouds must cool it. His finger-tips hung down,
+lightly folded in one another. Clotilda's tones dropped now like molten
+silver-points on his bosom, now they flowed like stray echoes from
+distant groves into this still garden. He spoke no name, he thought no
+thought, he neither acquitted himself nor accused himself; he saw it
+all as in a dream, when now a thick night glided across the garden, and
+now a sea of light swept after it.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">But it seemed to him as if his bosom would burst, as if he should be
+blest could he at this moment embrace beloved persons, and crush in the
+closeness of that embrace in a blissful frenzy his bosom and his heart.
+It was to him as if he should be over-blessed, could he now before some
+being, before a mere shadow of the mind, pour out all his blood, his
+life, his being. It was to him as if he must scream into the midst of
+Clotilda's tones, and fold his arms around a rock, only to stifle the
+painful yearning.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">He heard the leaves drip, and took it for a continuing rain. But the
+<i>Staub-bach</i> of the heavens had scattered itself in spray, and only
+Luna's fall of light any longer besprinkled the landscape. The sky was
+deep-blue. Agatha had been seeking him during the rain, and had only
+just found him. He woke up, obediently and silently went out with her,
+and met only cleared-up heavenly faces,&mdash;then all his nerves quivered,
+and he was compelled with a mute obeisance to take his painful and
+friendly leave. Each one had his own thoughts on the subject. But the
+Parson's wife told the company, he loved to hear music at a distance,
+only it always made him too melancholy.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Ah, when he reached his chamber, a happy and consoling thought embraced
+his soul. Clotilda's dirge, and all, fixed before his sight the form of
+the exalted Emanuel,&mdash;and it seemed to say: &quot;In a year I shall be
+already under the ground, only come to me, poor child, I will love thee
+till I die!&quot; Without desiring a light, he wrote with streaming eyes,
+which no light could have helped, this letter to Emanuel:&mdash;</p>
+<br>
+
+<p style="text-indent:.5in">&quot;<span class="sc">Emanuel</span>!</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Say not to me, I know thee not! How can man, on this little grain of
+sun-dust called the earth, on which he warms himself, and during the
+swift moments which he counts off on his pulse between the flash of
+life and the stroke of death, still make a distinction between
+acquaintances and non-acquaintances? Why do not these little creatures,
+who have wounds of the same kind, and for whose coffins Time takes the
+same measure, fall without hesitation into each other's arms, and sigh,
+'Ah, we are doubtless like each other and acquainted!' Why must first
+these fleshly statues into which our spirits are chained move towards
+and touch each other, before the beings disguised therein can imagine
+and love each other? And yet it is so human and so true a thought: what
+then does Death take from us except fleshly statues, what from our eyes
+but the loved countenance, what from our ears but the dear voice, and
+the warm bosom from our own? Ah, Emanuel! be to me no dead man! Accept
+me! Give me thy heart! I will love it!</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;I am not very happy, my Emanuel! When my great teacher, Dahore,&mdash;that
+shining Swan of heaven, who, fastened to life by his broken wing-joint,
+looked up wistfully at other Swans, as they winged their way toward the
+warmer latitudes of the second life,&mdash;ceased to write to me, he did it
+in these words: 'Seek my duplicate! Thy breast will continue to bleed,
+until thou coverest its scar with another, and the earth will agitate
+thee more and more violently, if thou standest alone,&mdash;and only around
+the solitary do ghosts creep.'</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Emanuel, art thou not tranquil and gentle and indulgent? Does not thy
+soul yearn to love all men, and is not a single heart too narrow for it
+to shut itself up therein with its love, as a bee is shut up in a tulip
+when it folds itself to sleep? Hast thou not had enough of the
+repeating-work of our merry bells and mourning-bells, and art thou not
+weary of the family likeness of all evenings and times? Dost thou not
+look, out from this fleeting earth over the long way above thee, that
+thou mayst not grow nauseous and giddy, as one for the same reason
+looks out of a carriage into the road? Believest thou not in men around
+whom floats the mountain air of a higher position, and who up on their
+height stand in the midst of a still heaven, and look down into the
+thunders and rainbows near the earth? Believest thou not in a God, and
+seekest thou not his thoughts in the lineaments of nature, and his
+eternal love in thy breast? If thou art and thinkest all this, then
+thou art mine; for thou art better than I, and my soul would fain lift
+itself to a higher friend. Tree of the higher life, I embrace thee, I
+twine around thee with a thousand faculties and tendrils, that I may
+mount up out of the trampled mire around me! Ah, a great man might
+heal, tranquillize, quicken, exalt me,&mdash;me, poor creature, only rich in
+wishes, distracted by the war between my dreams and my senses,&mdash;flung
+sorely to and fro between systems, tears, and follies,&mdash;disgusted at
+the earth, which I cannot replace for myself, laughing merely from
+anguish at the tearful comedy, the most contradictory, saddest, and
+merriest shadow among all the shadows in the wide night.... O fair,
+good soul, love me!</p>
+
+<p class="right">&quot;<span class="sc">Horion</span>.&quot;</p>
+<br>
+
+<p class="normal">Leaning his head on his hand, he let his tears flow, without thinking
+or looking, till nature was spent. Then he went to the harpsichord, and
+sang over to its accompaniment the most passionate passages of his
+letter; what strongly moved him always impelled him to singing,
+especially the emotion of longing. What can it matter to us that it was
+prose?</p>
+
+<p class="normal">At the last line of his epistolary song the door slowly opened.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Is it thou?&quot; said a voice.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Ah, come in, Flamin!&quot; he answered.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;I only wanted to see whether you had come back,&quot; said Flamin, and went
+away.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">I think it is necessary that I should here insert at least the
+following, namely, that Victor possessed too much fancy, humor, and
+thoughtfulness not to give out, when these three strings were violently
+struck at once, pure dissonances, which, with more harmonious intervals
+between these faculties,<a name="div2Ref_84" href="#div2_84"><sup>[84]</sup></a> would not have appeared; that he had,
+therefore, more <i>leaning</i> to enthusiasms and enthusiasts than
+<i>disposition</i> that way; that his negative-electrical philosophy had
+always to contend with his positive-electrical enthusiasm for the
+balance of power, and that from the effervescing of these two spirits
+came nothing but humor; that he wanted to have all his carnations of
+joy on the same bed, although one adulterated the colors of the rest
+(e. g. refinement and enthusiasm, exaltation above the world and
+familiarity with the tone of the world); that from all this, beside
+irony and the highest tolerance, must also result a heavy, immovable
+feeling of the nothingness of our inner moods, so fleeting and sketched
+with such a contrariety of colors; and that he, whom the bad man
+regards as two-sided and the well-disposed one as changeable, needs
+nothing, for the gracing and rounding off of his Adam or Palladium
+buried up in so much wood, but the scythe of Time. Time then be it.</p>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<p class="center"><img border="0" src="images/rivetstart.png" alt="rivetstart"></p>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<h2><a name="div1Ref_08" href="#div1_08">8. DOG-POST-DAY.</a></h2>
+<br>
+
+<p class="hang1"><span class="sc2">Examinatorium and Dehortatorium of Conscience.&mdash;The Studious
+Honeymoon of a Scholar.&mdash;The Cabinet of Natural History.&mdash;Answer
+from Emanuel.&mdash;The Packed-up Chin.&mdash;Arrival of the Prince.&mdash;First
+Intercalary Day.</span></p>
+<br>
+
+<p class="normal">I wish the story were done, so that I might get it printed; for I have
+already too many subscribers to it among the common folk. An author
+in our days accepts advance payment for his book from the lowest
+fellow,&mdash;the tailor makes his pre-payment in clothes, the hair-dresser
+in powder, the landlord in rooms.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Every morning Victor gave himself a curtain lecture under the bed-quilt
+for the evening previous; the bed is a good confessional and
+audience-hall of conscience. He wished that yesterday's garden-club
+would take him for a veritable fool instead of a lover. &quot;Ah, if Flamin
+himself should torment himself with jealousy, and if our hearts, once
+so long parted, should already come to be so again!&quot; Here the bed-box,
+from a confessional, grew to be a fiery oven. But an angel laid himself
+in beside him, and blew away the blaze. &quot;But what, then, have I done?
+Have I not with a thousand-fold pleasure spoken, acted, kept silence
+for his sake? Not a look, not a word, can be charged against me,&mdash;what
+else then?&quot; The angel of light or fire had now to blow terribly against
+the shooting flame. &quot;What else? Thoughts, perhaps, which however, like
+field-mice of the soul, leap under the feet, and stick like adders. But
+could the disciples of Kant impute to me then, that I took the little
+image of the loveliest and best form, which I hitherto vainly summoned
+up in the lands of three lords, and threw such a Raphael's head, such
+an antique of Paradise, out of the window of the <i>villa</i> of my brain,
+like apple-parings and plum-stones? I should wonder at the Kantians, if
+they did. And if it must stay there, am I to be an ox, ye Catechists,
+and coldly glower<a name="div2Ref_85" href="#div2_85"><sup>[85]</sup></a> at it? Not I. Nay, I will trust myself, and
+demand of the fairest heart even friendship, and yet leave to it its
+love!&quot; Dear reader, during this whole summary process before the
+judicial commission of conscience, I have said to myself, over thirty
+times, &quot;Neither of you, you nor the reader, is a hair more honest with
+your conscience!&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">He drew himself slowly by the bed-cord out of the bed, which he used to
+quit with a spring; some wheel of his ideas stuck within him. He read
+his yesterday's letter, and found it too stormy. &quot;That is just our
+insignificance,&quot; said he, &quot;that everything which man holds to be
+eternal freezes over night; not across our face do the most vehement
+gales pass more swift and traceless than across our heart. Why then am
+I not to-day what I was yesterday, and perhaps shall be to-morrow? What
+does man gain by this boiling up and down? And what has he then within
+himself to build upon?&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Meanwhile, the fire-wheel of our earthly time, the sun, had whirled up
+its revolving streams, and burned on the shore of the earth. He flung
+up the window, and was fain to bathe his naked breast in the fresh
+morning wind, and his hot eye in the Red Sea of Aurora; but something
+within him interposed itself like an after-taste between him and the
+enjoyment of the morning-land. The remorse of conscience for <i>future</i>
+actions spoils a good man utterly for enjoyment.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">There rose slowly within him an overmastering emotion,&mdash;the former
+night passed by again before him with its flashing rain, and brought
+back to him his passionate heart and Emanuel's shadow,&mdash;he ran more and
+more vehemently, and in fact transversely, through the chamber,&mdash;tied
+his night-gown tighter, shook something from his eye, gave a
+perpendicular jump, jerked out a &quot;No!&quot; and said, with an inexpressibly
+serene smile, &quot;No! I will not cheat my Flamin! I will neither seek nor
+shun her, nor will I desire her friendship till the time of his highest
+happiness. As I look upon thee<a name="div2Ref_86" href="#div2_86"><sup>[86]</sup></a> yonder, so will I upon her glorious,
+heavenly bust, without desiring that it take on warmth, and turn on me
+its cold plaster eye. But thou, my friend, be happy and all blessed,
+and never mayst thou once remark my conflict!&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Now, for the first time, did the church-attire of morning gladden him,
+and the morning air flowed like a cool necklace over his hot bosom, and
+threw back the playing hair and shirt-frill. He felt that now he was
+worthy to have written to Emanuel, and to have looked up at the
+heavens....</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Flamin entered with some coldness, which was increased by the sight of
+the letter. Victor was not to be made cold; only when, down below, no
+one reminded him by a word of his yesterday's Dithyrambics, then did
+he, from fear of being betrayed, make an angry, covert oath, if <i>she</i>
+came, not to come,&mdash;which could be kept, too, for she did not come. She
+had still to bring away luggage from Maienthal, to besprinkle her
+friendships, and once more to set foot in the magic circle of her
+beloved teacher; and had, therefore, gone off.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">The following weeks danced now like just so many hours in Anglaises and
+Cotillons before Sebastian. His forenoons hung full of fruits, his
+afternoons full of flowers; for in the morning his soul with its
+exertions lived in his head, towards evening in his heart. In the
+evening one loves cards, poems, confidential talk, woman, music, very
+much; in the morning, very little; in the spirit-hour is that love at
+its highest strength.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Except two other doubts that troubled him,&mdash;the first was, whether
+his Emanuel would write to him soon enough to enable him to visit
+him before he should be harnessed to the pole of the court and
+state-carriage; the second was the fear of being so too soon,&mdash;now he
+had hardly anything to do except to be happy or to make others so; for
+precisely in these weeks fell his holy or Sabbatical weeks...</p>
+
+<p class="normal">I know not whether the reader is yet acquainted with them; they are not
+found in the improved almanac; but they occur regularly (with some men)
+either immediately after the vernal equinox or in the after-summer.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">With Victor the first alternative was the one,&mdash;exactly in the middle
+of spring. I need not inquire whether it is the body, the weather, or
+who or what, that rings in this truce of God in our breast; but I must
+describe how they look, the Sabbatical weeks. Their form is precisely
+this: in a holy or Sabbatical week, many&mdash;e. g. I&mdash;are put off with
+mere Sabbatical days or hours. At first, one slumbers lightly, as on
+balanced clouds,&mdash;one awakes like a serene day. At evening one had made
+a firm resolve beforehand, and had therefore written it down in ciphers
+on the door, to grow better, and to apply the weeding-knife every day
+to one bed of weeds at least,&mdash;on awaking one is still so minded, and
+in fact carries it out. The gall, that excitable spirit, which usually,
+when it is poured, instead of into the duodenum, into the heart or
+heart's blood, sends up boiling and hissing clouds, is now in a few
+seconds absorbed or precipitated, and the exalted mind <i>feels calmly
+the bodily effervescence</i> without any of its own. In this lull of the
+wings of our lungs, one utters only soft, low words, one clasps
+lovingly the hand of every one with whom he speaks, and one thinks,
+with melting heart, &quot;Ah! I could not begrudge it to one of you, if you
+were still happier than I.&quot; On the clean, healthy, tranquil heart, as
+on the Homeric gods, light wounds immediately close. &quot;No!&quot; thou keepest
+saying in the Sabbatical week, &quot;I must for some days to come maintain
+this tranquillity.&quot; Thou requirest, as material for joy, hardly
+anything but existence; nay, the sun-sting of a rapture would condense
+this cool, magical, transparent morning haze into a tempest. Thou
+lookest up steadily into the blue, as if thou wouldst fain give thanks
+and weep, and around upon the earth as if thou wouldst say, &quot;Wherever I
+might be to-day, there I should be happy!&quot; and a heart full of sleeping
+storms thou carriest, as a mother does her child sunk into slumber,
+shyly and watchfully over the soft flowers of joy.... But the storms
+start up, nevertheless, and assail the heart!...</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Ah, what must we not all already have lost, if the pictures of blissful
+days win from us nothing but sighs! O tranquillity, tranquillity, thou
+evening of the soul, thou still Hesper of the weary heart, which always
+abides beside the sun of virtue, if at thy very name our inner being is
+dissolved into tears, ah, is not that a sign that we seek thee, but
+have thee not?</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Victor owed the <i>siesta</i> of his heart to the sciences,<a name="div2Ref_87" href="#div2_87"><sup>[87]</sup></a> particularly
+<i>Poetry</i> and <i>Philosophy</i>, which two move, as do <i>comets</i> and
+<i>planets</i>, around the <i>same sun</i> (that of Truth), and differ only in
+the <i>shape</i> of their orbits, as comets and poets have the <i>greater
+ellipse</i>. His training and talents had accustomed him to the vital air
+and oxygen of the study, which is also the only dormitory of our
+passions, and that only cloister and haven of bliss for men who would
+escape the broad whirlpool of the senses and fashions. The sciences
+are, more than virtue, their own reward, and they make one a partaker
+of happiness,&mdash;she only makes him worthy of it; and the prize-medals,
+pensions, and positive rewards, and the <i>patent</i> which many scholars
+would fain get for their studying, belong at most to the literary
+apprentice-brethren, who make it a penance and a torture, but not to
+the masters of the chair, who make it a pleasure and a delight. A
+scholar has no <i>ennui</i>; only a throne-incumbent has to prescribe for
+himself, against this nervous consumption, a hundred court-festivals,
+cavaliers of honor, whole countries, and human blood!</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Good heavens! a reader who, in Victor's Sabbatical weeks, should have
+taken a ladder and climbed up to his window,&mdash;would he have espied
+anything there but a jubilant thing, that went gliding about over the
+fields of learning as among islands of the blest?&mdash;a thing which, in
+its ecstasy, knew not whether it should think or compose or read, and
+particularly <i>what</i> or <i>whom</i>, out of the whole <i>high</i> nobility
+of
+books ranged before it. In this bridal chamber of the mind (such are
+our study-chambers), in this concert-hall of the finest voices gathered
+from all times and places, the æsthetic and philosophical enjoyments
+almost overpowered his faculty of choice. Reading hurried him into
+writing, writing to reading, thinking to sentiment, and the latter to
+the former.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">I could go on with more satisfaction in this description, if I had
+previously written how he studied; namely, that he never wrote without
+having read himself full<a name="div2Ref_88" href="#div2_88"><sup>[88]</sup></a> on the subject, and the reverse, that he
+never read without having first <i>thought</i> himself <i>hungry</i>. One
+should,
+he said, without an intense occasion and impulse from without, i. e.
+from within, not only not make verses, but even a philosophical
+paragraph; nor should any one set himself down and say: &quot;Now, at three
+o'clock on this Bartholomew's day, I will go at it, and cleverly prove
+the following proposition.&quot; I can now proceed.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Now when, in this mental laboratory, which served less for analytic
+chemistry than for synthetic science, he ascended from the turmaline
+which attracts grains of ashes to the sun which attracts worlds, and
+even to the unknown sun toward which solar systems fly; or when the
+anatomical charts were to him the perspective sketch of a divine
+architecture, and the dissecting-knife became the gnomon of his
+favorite truth: that, in order to believe in a God, there was need of
+nothing more than two men, of whom the one might be dead, too, that the
+living one could study him, and turn over his leaves<a name="div2Ref_89" href="#div2_89"><sup>[89]</sup></a>; or when
+Poetry, as a second nature, as a second music, wafted him upward softly
+on her invisible ether, and he chose undecidedly between the pen and
+the keys, when he wanted to communicate aloft; ... when, in short, in
+his heavenly sphere, supported on a human cervical-vertebra, the nebula
+of ideas gradually resolved itself into bright and dark parts, and
+beneath an unseen sun filled itself more and more with ether,&mdash;when one
+cloud became conductor to another,&mdash;when at last the gleaming mass of
+cloud came together,&mdash;then did the inner heaven (as the outer one often
+does), by eleven o'clock in the forenoon, grow from all the flashes
+into one sun, from all the drops into one flood, and the whole heaven
+of the upper faculties came down to the earth of the lower ones, and
+... some blue patches of the second world were for a flying moment
+open.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">We cannot delineate our inner states more philosophically and clearly
+than by metaphors, i. e. by the colors of related states. The narrow
+defamers of metaphors, who, instead of the brush, would rather give us
+the black-lead, ascribe to the <i>coloring</i> the unrecognizableness
+of the <i>drawing</i>; but they ought to charge it merely on their
+non-acquaintance with the original subject. Verily, nonsense plays
+hide-and-seek more easily in the roomy, abstract, artificial words of
+the philosophers&mdash;since words, like Chinese shadows, increase with
+their circumference at once the obscurity and the emptiness of their
+contents&mdash;than in the narrow green hulls of the poets. From the Stoa
+and the Portico of thought one must have an outlook into the Epicurean
+gardens of poetry.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">In three minutes I shall come back to my story. Victor said, he must
+have mountain-, garden-, and swamp-meadows, because he possessed
+<i>three</i> different whimsical souls, which he must drive to pasture on
+three sorts of grounds. He meant by that, not, as the scholastics do,
+the vegetative, animal, and intellectual souls, nor, as the fanatics
+do, the three parts of man, but something very like,&mdash;his <i>humorous</i>,
+<i>sentimental</i>, and <i>philosophical</i> souls. Whoever should take away
+from
+him one of these, he said, might as well strip him of the remaining
+ones. Nay, sometimes, when the humorous soul happened at the moment to
+be sitting uppermost on the revolving cross-bench, he carried his
+levity so far as to express the wish that a joke might be made even in
+Abraham's bosom, and that he might with his three souls sit down at
+once on the twelve thrones.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">His afternoons he gave up now to a streaming humor which did not even
+find its proper hearers,&mdash;now to the people of the parsonage,&mdash;now to
+all the school-going youth of St. Luna, whose stomachs (to the vexation
+of every good schoolmaster) he provisioned more than their heads,
+because he thought that, in the short years when the bib expands to a
+napkin, enjoyment must find its way over the children's <i>serviette</i>,
+and had no other entrance than the mouth. He never went out without a
+whole military-chest full of small change in his waistcoat pocket. &quot;I
+scatter it without thinking,&quot; said he; &quot;but if from this metallic seed
+sowed broadcast whole evenings of joy spring up for the poor devils,
+and if just the innocent ones so seldom have them, why shall not one do
+something for the saved virtue and for pleasure at once?&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">He said he had heard moral lectures, and desired for his extra-judicial
+donations and merciful endowments nothing but forgiveness. His Flamin,
+who pronounced him a careless sowing-machine on rocks, spent his little
+holidays before approaching the session-table in ardent hopes of being
+serviceable there, and in preparations for being able to be so; often,
+when the higher patriotism, with saintly halo and Moses'-glory, broke
+out on the beloved Flamin's face, tears of friendly gladness stood in
+Victor's eyes, and in the moment of a lyric philanthropy both swore on
+their hearts for the future a mutual support in well-doing and joint
+sacrifices for mankind. The difference between them was merely
+reciprocal exaggeration,&mdash;Flamin treated vice too intolerantly, Victor
+too tolerantly; the former, as administrative counsellor, rejected,
+like the Anabaptists, all festivals, and, like the first Christians,
+all flowers (in every sense); the latter, like the Greeks, loved both
+too much;&mdash;the former would have sacrificed to honor human victims; the
+latter knew no robber of honor but his own heart: he overleaped at the
+tea-table the paper half-nobility of our miserable points of honor,
+and, mocking at mockery, submitted himself only to the high nobility of
+virtue....</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Victor sucked, with the feet of a green-frog, on every flower-leaf of
+joy,&mdash;at children, animals, village-Lupercalia, lessons; but dearest of
+all to him was Saturday. Then he made excursions through the glad
+unrest of the village, along by servant-men, hammering at their
+scythes, not to magnetize, but to sharpen them, and before the
+shop-door of the schoolmaster, at which his eye, like a Swiss, often
+stood for half an hour. For he could very well study the state of St.
+Luna's commerce in the little great-adventure-trade of the
+schoolmaster, who knew no smaller merchants' exchange than the one in
+his breeches' pocket. From this East India House he saw at a late hour
+people procuring the cheap pleasures of Sunday,&mdash;the wholesale dealer
+(the schoolmaster is meant), supported by his negro slaves, made the
+Sunday morning of St. Luna sweet with his syrup and hot with his
+coffee; and as well by the tobacco-culture of Germany was this
+tradesman enabled with spiral cables of pigtail to furnish the heads of
+the pipes, as through the silk culture the daughter's heads with
+Sabbath-streamers out of his Auerbach's court.... Our hero all knew.
+From every kennel a dog came wagging his tail to meet him to whom he
+had thrown in bread; from every window children screamed after him,
+whom he had bantered; and many boys, whom he passed, counted themselves
+happy if they had a cap on,&mdash;for then they could take it off before
+their master. For his first growing up in St. Luna was the history of
+St. Luna, which must have been drawn from the oral blue-books of the
+historic persons, and from the Imperial Postilion, the Parson's wife.
+This last, as a Mrs. Plutarch, always held up two characters, like
+pieces of cloth, side by side; and her husband read to him according to
+the best of his science and conscience upon the Church- and
+Reformation-history of his diocese. Victor devoted himself to this
+microcosmic world-history from two motives: first, in order&mdash;which is
+the object of professional students with the larger history&mdash;to dismiss
+it again clean from memory; secondly, in order to be as much at home in
+the village as the constable or the midwife, whence he hoped to derive
+the advantage of being grieved if a St. Lunite should die, and glad if
+he had previously married.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Now the story strides forward again, from one day to another, as if on
+the stones of the stream of time.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">So sweetly then had the spring passed along before him with Sabbatical
+weeks, with Whitsuntides, with white blossoms, which fell gradually,
+like butterflies' wings, from the flying season. Victor had postponed
+the visit to Le Baut, thinking, &quot;I shall have, at all events, to budge
+soon enough down out of the soft lap of Nature, and up to the court
+wire-bench and the object-holder (the throne) of the court-microscope&quot;;&mdash;he
+had, to be sure, daily exhorted himself, now, soon, before Clotilda's
+arrival, to start so as not to draw any suspicion upon his intentions,
+but always in vain, ... when suddenly (for the day before it was the
+13th of July) the 14th appeared, and with it Clotilda's luggage without
+her. Now he actually (according to the official dog-reports) crossed on
+the 15th the Brook of St. Luna,<a name="div2Ref_90" href="#div2_90"><sup>[90]</sup></a> passed the Alps of the Chamberlain's
+steps, and pitched his Cæsar's tent on Le Baut's sofa. He knew that
+to-day no one was there, not even Mat.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Heaven keep our politeness safe and sound,&quot; said he; &quot;without it there
+were not only no holding out among a set of knaves, but it pays also
+minute-tributes of pleasure, whereas benevolence pays only quarterly
+assessments and exchequer-instalments, and charitable contributions.&quot;
+Mr. and Mrs. Le Baut were as courteous as never before (I could swear,
+they had nosed out something of Victor's court-doctor's hat and
+Doctor's crown); only they knew not what sort of a mouth-piece they
+should screw on to such a whimsically twisted instrument as Victor was.
+Like all study-inhabiting crustacea, he would rather talk of things
+than of persons; Flamin, however, the reverse. For the married pair,
+there was nothing in any Messiad more sublime than that now, on St.
+John's day, the Italian Princess would be coming: of that no mortal
+could talk enough, especially in the village. I know not to what slip
+of Victor's it was owing, that he led most women into the notion that
+he loved them. Suffice it, the Chamberlain's wife, who at her years
+demanded no longer <i>love</i>, but the <i>show</i> of love, thought, &quot;Perhaps!&quot;
+Let no one mistake her, she, to be sure, always spent the first hour
+with a man on the <i>watch-tower</i> of observation; but the second, then,
+only on the <i>hunting-screen</i>, if the first had been fortunate, and she
+was cool enough not to hope more than she saw: she even made a jest of
+every one who, in view of her vanity&mdash;a womanly vanity, however&mdash;of too
+easily presuming upon conquests, should think to flatter her otherwise
+than openly. Suffice it, she judged our Victor to-day too favorably, in
+her sense, or too unfavorably in ours; as, in general, mere courtiers
+can see through only mere courtiers. Of Clotilda not a word was said,
+not even of the time of her return.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">In fact, the Le Baut had a monstrous pride in herself to contend with
+towards her step-daughter,&mdash;of which my correspondent should have
+informed me what it rested upon, whether on relations or on merits; for
+of both there was an ample supply, inasmuch as the Chamberlain's wife
+had been the w&mdash;, that is, the mistress, of the present Prince's
+deceased father. I and a clever man have considered the question <i>pro</i>
+and <i>con</i>, whether she resembled Cæsar in love or in ambition. The
+clever man says, &quot;In love,&quot; because a woman never forgets love, when a
+prince has been her teacher therein. The illustrious deceased father's
+heart had adored two beauties in her particularly, which aforetime the
+Scots<a name="div2Ref_91" href="#div2_91"><sup>[91]</sup></a> used to be so fond of eating, namely, the bosom and the rump.
+The great have their peculiar <i>grossièretés</i>, which the little dream
+not of. I would not print it, but it was known to the whole court, and
+therefore to many of my readers also. Well, the Devil brought along
+Time, who whetted his scythe and mowed away all of each of these charms
+which <i>hung over</i> in his territory. Now with women at courts&mdash;or in the
+courtyard<a name="div2Ref_92" href="#div2_92"><sup>[92]</sup></a> of a school, or a warehouse, or in a cow-yard&mdash;vanity, so
+soon as old Saturn (i. e. Time) attacks it with his scythe-chariot and
+with the small shot from his hour-glass, makes one of the most skilful
+retreats that I know of. Vanity lets itself be driven from one work or
+member after another; but at last it throws itself out of the weak
+parts into <i>strongholds</i>, e. g. into finger-nails, foreheads, feet,
+&amp;c., and from there the Devil himself cannot dislodge it. The
+Chamberlain's wife had first to make herself such a part, namely, a
+<i>gorge de Paris</i> and a <i>cul de Paris</i>; these four <i>boundary hills</i>
+of
+her kingdom had daily to be restored, and raised, out of respect for
+property, against the shifting of boundaries produced by years. From
+this, now, my clever man concludes that her soul is always writing
+letters of marque to her body.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">I am precisely the antipode of the clever man, and contend that Cupid
+is only her serving-brother, not the master of the lodge,&mdash;her
+adjutant, not her generalissimo; and this for the reason that she is
+still always applying either her own or Le Baut's hand to the
+restoration of the Solomon's Temple wherein she used to be adored as a
+goddess, side by side with the god,&mdash;because in marrying him she
+married nothing but the Chamberlain's key and his <i>assemblées</i> and his
+hopes of future influence,&mdash;because her hostility to Clotilda relates
+not to the face, but to the brain,&mdash;because her love is now without
+jealousy. That is to say, she stood in a certain amatory relation with
+the Evangelist Matthieu, which (according to our feeling as common
+citizens) differs from hatred in nothing but&mdash;duration. Persiflages of
+love were their declarations of love; their glances were epigrams; his
+hours of assignation he seasoned with comic accounts of his
+corresponding hours in other places; and at the time of day when a holy
+man usually prays off his psalm,<a name="div2Ref_93" href="#div2_93"><sup>[93]</sup></a> both were ironical. Such an
+<i>erotic</i> connection is nothing but the subdivision of a <i>political</i>....
+But to return to the story.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">The Chamberlain proposed now to show his guest something of more
+interest to a doctor and a scholar. To the chamber wherein the
+something was, they passed through the Chamberlain's wife's, and
+through Clotilda's. As they made a day of rest<a name="div2Ref_94" href="#div2_94"><sup>[94]</sup></a> in the former,
+Victor's eyes were fixed dreamily on Clotilda's profile, which Matthieu
+had lately cut out of nothing, and which the Chamberlain's wife, out of
+flattery to the profile-cutter, had hung up here under glass.
+Singularly&mdash;i. e. accidentally&mdash;the glass at this moment flew to pieces
+over the fair face, and Victor and the father were startled; for the
+latter was, like most great folk, for want of time, at once
+superstitious and sceptical; and it is well known that superstition
+regards the flying to pieces of a portrait-glass as a forerunner of the
+death of the original. The distressed father reproached himself with
+the permission he had given Clotilda to stay so long in Maienthal,
+since she would certainly injure her health there by unprofitable,
+youthful enthusiasms. He meant her mourning for her buried Giulia; for
+it was merely from sorrow for her, that, on the first of May, she had
+hurried hither without any baggage; and even the clothes of the beloved
+friend she had to-day sent among her own. He broke off in a cheerful
+tone, for Matthieu came, the brother of this Giulia, who only wanted to
+show and excuse himself, because, like several of the court church of
+half-brothers, he was going to meet the Princess.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Victor grew stiller and sadder; his bosom became at once a swelling
+flood of invisible tears, whose source he could not trace to his heart.
+And when next they had to pass through Clotilda's still and vacant
+chamber, where order and simplicity too intensely reminded him of the
+fair soul of the proprietor, his sudden and touching dumbness struck
+others also. He tore his eyes hurriedly away from some flower-drawings
+by her own hand, from her white inkstand, and from the beautiful
+landscape of the oil-tapestry, and stepped up hastily to that which Le
+Baut was unlocking. It was not any noble heart which the latter, with
+his golden key, although bored like a cannon, could fasten,<a name="div2Ref_95" href="#div2_95"><sup>[95]</sup></a>&mdash;the
+Titular Chamberlains in Vienna apply only an hermetically sealed
+one,&mdash;but what he opened was his <i>Cabinet d'histoire naturelle</i>. The
+cabinet contained rare copies and some <i>curiosa</i>;&mdash;a calculus taken
+from the bladder of a child, two seventeenths of an inch long and two
+seventeenths of an inch broad, or the reverse; the hardened <i>vena cava</i>
+of an old Minister; a pair of American feather-trousers; tolerable
+Fungites, and better specimens of <i>Strombi</i> (e. g. a staircase-shell,
+<i>not genuine</i>); the model of a midwife's chair and of a sowing-machine;
+species of gray marble from Hof in Voigtland; and a petrified
+bird's-nest,&mdash;duplicates not included.... Meanwhile I and the reader
+prefer to all this dead trumpery the living ape who was the cabinet's
+sole ornament and&mdash;owner. Camper should cut off from this living
+specimen the Chamberlain's head, and dissect it, if only to see how
+near the monkey borders upon man.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">A great person has always some branch or other of science which he
+cares nothing about, and to which, therefore, he particularly devotes
+himself. To Le Baut's soul, hungering for knowledge, it was all one
+whether it were set in a cabinet of seals or of gems or of pistoles.
+Were I a great person, I would with the greatest zeal make buttons&mdash;or
+deliveries&mdash;or books&mdash;or Nuremberg wares&mdash;or wars&mdash;or right good
+institutions, merely from cursed ennui, that <i>mother of vinegar</i> to all
+vices and virtues which peep forth under ermine and stars of orders.
+Nothing is a greater proof of the general growth of refinement than the
+general growth of ennui. Even the ladies, out of mere flat ennui, a
+hundred times contrive pastimes for themselves; and the cleverest man
+utters his greatest number of platitudes, and the best his greatest
+number of slanders, merely to a circle that knows how to adequately
+bore him.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">The court-page was the cicerone of the cabinet, perhaps for the sake of
+going about. Victor wronged him by the medical supposition that he
+affected a certain loose, unsteady, slouchy gait common to debauchees
+in high life; for he really had it, and for the reason that he, on
+quite other grounds than Victor's fine ones, never loved to&mdash;sit. But
+to proceed: Unless the Chamberlain's wife meant to tear aside the
+curtain from before Victor's soul, and spy out therein his sentiments
+toward herself and Clotilda by the fright which I am about to relate,
+then it can have been nothing but a very bad spirit which led the hand
+of the said Chamberlain's wife to a silver ingot. Behind the ingot lay,
+perhaps killed by crumbs of arsenic, a mouse. A female reader, who in
+similar dangers has suffered as a patient, can imagine how the
+Chamberlain's wife felt when she grasped, with the hard substance,
+something soft, and drew it forth, and then saw what it was. A <i>real</i>
+fainting-fit was inevitable. I confess I should myself hold her swoon
+merely as a feint, were the occasion less; e. g. had it been, not her
+senses, but her honor, that was assailed: but a mouse is a very
+different matter. In fact, before such malicious spectators as her
+husband and her Cicisbeo, she must long since have banished from her
+stage, as the French from theirs, this Fifth Act Murder; nay, I do not
+believe she could in any way have rendered herself so ridiculous in the
+eyes of a triumphant enemy of her virtue (except by a real swoon) as by
+a fictitious one. Terror at the trance<a name="div2Ref_96" href="#div2_96"><sup>[96]</sup></a> deprived the Evangelist of
+the use of his reason, and left him only the use of his wickedness and
+his hands, with which he instantly tore open the whole blind- and
+fence-work of her bosom, in short, the whole optical breast, to get air
+enough for the true one, on whose board he had a piece,<a name="div2Ref_97" href="#div2_97"><sup>[97]</sup></a> namely, her
+heart. But Victor pushed him away, and, sprinkling her with a few drops
+of ice-water, out of tender respect for her charms and her life, soon
+raised her up again. However, she forgave the page all that she
+guessed, and thanked the court-physician for all in which she was
+mistaken....</p>
+
+<p class="normal">... Let me look away a moment from this black cobweb, and refresh
+myself with surveying the fairer world around me on my island, where
+there is no enemy,&mdash;and the flashing play of fishes and children on the
+shore,&mdash;and the playing mother who flings to them flowers and watchful
+glances,&mdash;and the great maple-trees which, softly murmuring with a
+thousand leaves and flies, bend downward to meet the foliage that
+glimmers in mimic dance under the waves,&mdash;and how the warm earth and
+the warm sky rest on each other in slumbering love, and bear one
+century after another....</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Victor, before the end of his rural day, went sadly home. Saturday (the
+16th of June<a name="div2Ref_98" href="#div2_98"><sup>[98]</sup></a>) sped softly by, and in its flight shook out a whole
+flower-head of winged seed for new flowers of joy.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">The stars glided lightly over its night. A friendly, blue Sunday
+morning hung floating over the village in its finery, and held its
+breath lest it should snatch off a ripe, linden-blossom, or the down of
+a marsh-marigold. Victor could hear the forte-pianissimo sounding down
+from the palace over the reposing village, and must needs sigh with the
+asthma of blissful longing, &quot;Ah, when shall I have to cease swimming
+upon this still, shining sea, over this fair anchorage of life?&quot; ...
+When Fate answered, &quot;To-day!&quot; For this very day, on Sunday, there came
+from the residence-city of Flachsenfingen a light-headed fool (in fact,
+two) in a no less light-bodied Berlin, and took out of his package a
+letter to him from his Lordship.</p>
+<br>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;On the 21st of June (Thursday), the Italian Princess makes her entry
+into Kussewitz. On Wednesday, I leave here, and present thee in St.
+Luna to the Prince, who accompanies me to that place. I pray thee,
+however, to repair on the Saturday following to the <i>Island of
+Union</i>,<a name="div2Ref_99" href="#div2_99"><sup>[99]</sup></a> because the little which, for want of opportunity, I cannot
+say to thee in St. Luna, I shall reserve for the island. Thou wilt find
+me there. The bearer of this is our respected court-apothecary
+<i>Zeusel</i>, in whose house thou wilt, as court-physician, have thy future
+residence. Farewell!&quot;<span style="letter-spacing:50px">&nbsp; &nbsp;</span> H.</p>
+<br>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Zeusel?&quot; asks the reader, and ponders the matter. &quot;I know not the
+Zeusels.&quot; No more do I; but I say to myself, Is not this carrying
+things too far? And is it not a regular imposition, that the
+correspondent of this work cannot, by all the representations made to
+him by me through the dog, be induced even to arrange things in this
+history in as orderly a manner as they are, indeed, in every wretched
+romance, and even in&mdash;a house of correction, where every new
+correctioner rehearses neatly to the old ones, in the very first hour,
+his total <i>Fata</i>, even to the introductory cudgelling on entering, from
+which the historian has freshly arrived. By Heaven! people actually
+rush and leap into my work, as into a passengers' room, and neither
+reader nor Devil knows who their dogs and cats are.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;I wish...&quot; said Victor, and made six circumflexes upon it as
+apostrophes of the same number of omitted curses. For he was now to
+pass over from the Idyl of country life into the travestied Æneid of
+city life, and no road is surely more wretchedly paved than that from
+the study into the court smelting-houses and <i>chambres ardentes</i>,<a name="div2Ref_100" href="#div2_100"><sup>[100]</sup></a>
+from peace to turmoil. Besides, Emanuel had not yet written. Clotilda,
+the <i>Hesper</i> of those two fair evenings, was like the Hesperus in the
+sky, not to be seen over St. Luna. As we said, it was a wretched state
+for him. And now, in addition to all this, that Zeusel, his future
+landlord, the Court Apothecary, was, so to speak, a fool, full as
+light as his Berlin, or as the court-fourier, with whom he came, but
+fifty-three years older than the carriage, that is to say, fifty-four
+years old, and, taken for all in all, a human diminutive and
+vinegar-eel in body and soul, <i>peaked</i> in all respects, in chin, nose,
+wit, head, lips, and shoulder. This fine vinegar-eel&mdash;for the eel
+contends that he understands a certain refinement, which never could
+belong to any Roturier,<a name="div2Ref_101" href="#div2_101"><sup>[101]</sup></a> and he does not deny that his great
+ancestors wrote themselves, not Zeusels, but <i>Von Swobodas</i>&mdash;was
+travelling with the court-fourier, who administered the
+quartermastership in Kussewitz for the princely bride, toward that
+place, in order to remain there just so long as he was not wanted.
+Zeusel meant absolutely to have influence on the Flachsenfingen court
+by something beside his clyster-hydraulics, and to work upon the court
+household with something more than senna-leaves; therefore he bought up
+at a high price all private intelligence (he improved it forthwith into
+public) which he could collect of new meteorological phenomena in the
+court-atmosphere, and then, when certain people turned somersets down
+from the steps of the throne, he smiled finely enough, and remarked
+that he hoped such persons had regarded him as their friend, and not
+noticed the leg which he had thrust out of his shop-door by way of
+giving them a sly lift. He was, in spite of some good-heartedness, a
+liar from the beginning, not because he wanted to be malicious, but
+refined; and he evaporated his sound understanding, that it might drop
+in wit.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Towards Victor, as future courtier and patron, he knew not, for all
+that, how to assume the upright court-dignity which respects at once
+itself and others; but towards the people of the parsonage he amply
+observed the regular courtly contempt, and showed them well enough how
+little, without designs upon the Lord's son, he should have thought of
+even <i>looking</i> over their garden-wall or window-sill, to say nothing of
+<i>coming</i> over. Victor never hated anything else in his neighbor but
+hatred of other neighbors; and his respect for all classes, his
+contempt for all <i>eminent</i> fools, his disgust at ceremonies, and his
+inclination as a humorist for the little theatres of life, formed the
+greatest contrast to the pharmaceutic infusorium, and to its disgust
+with men and deference for grandees.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Victor gave his landlord thirty greetings to carry with him to the
+Italian <i>Tostato</i> in Kussewitz, who had travelled with him, laughing
+and dancing, a day and a half out of Göttingen. The Apothecary, at his
+departure, left behind in Victor an annoying, sour sediment; even at
+the organ-blower, who brought up the coffee every Sunday, he could not
+laugh as usual. I will explain why he used to laugh at him.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">On that day the coachman was shaved, and, in fact, at first
+hand,&mdash;namely, by his own. Now the chin of this lazy box-incumbent had
+thrown up more mole-hills&mdash;so I euphoniously name warts&mdash;than are
+necessary for shaving and mowing. Among these the old man hacked and
+planed on Sunday morning,&mdash;for then it is that the common people put
+off at once the old Adam and the old shirt, and leave sins and beard to
+grow only on working-days,&mdash;boldly slipping his knife up and down among
+the warty <i>chagrin</i> and cutting away. Now the man would have looked
+pitifully, with his ploughed-up facial foreground,&mdash;so that one must
+needs have wept blood at that which ran in red lines down over the chin
+of this stone river-god,&mdash;if the Prosector, like a Roman, had, out of
+stupidity, exhibited his wounds. But he showed nothing,&mdash;he had more
+sense than that; he picked tobacco-spunk into small caps, and put the
+headpieces upon the sore warts, and so made his appearance.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Let a Spener, a Cato the younger,&quot; said Victor, &quot;just come into my
+study, and not laugh when a bellows-blower follows with coffee-cups,
+and with sixteen scalped warts and his chin bound up in spunk, looking
+like a garden-rockery overgrown with beautifully distributed moss,&mdash;let
+a Spener, I say, help laughing, if he can.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">To-day he could help it himself. Weary of the day, he went out into the
+peaceful evening, and laid himself on his back on the summit of a steep
+hill; and when the sun, dissolved into a cloud of gold, tremulously
+flowed away over the liquid gloss of the flowers, and swam down on the
+grassy sea of the mountains, and as he lay nearer to the warm,
+throbbing heart of Nature, sunk down upon the soft earth as if in the
+repose of death, drawing down the clouds into him with sighs, fanned by
+winds coming from afar, lulled by bees and larks,&mdash;then did
+remembrance, that after-summer of human joy, steal into his soul, and a
+tear into his eye, and longing into his breast, and he wished that
+Emanuel might not reject him.&mdash;Suddenly slight steps drew nigh to his
+reclining ears; he started up, alarmed and causing alarm. A heavy
+travelling carriage came staggering lazily up the hill; behind, instead
+of servants, three pale foot-soldiers had thrust their hands into the
+footmen's straps, who had only a single leg among them which was of
+flesh, while they footed it on five wooden stilt-legs or boot-makers'
+signs, which, with something still longer, made of wood,&mdash;namely, three
+well-wrought beggar's staffs,&mdash;they had taken from the enemy; a
+coachman walked beside the carriage, and a gentlewoman, and close by
+Victor, as he sprang up, stood&mdash;Clotilda.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">She came from Maienthal. This sudden illumination eclipsed all the
+tables of the law hung up in his soul, and he could not at once read
+the tables. She looked upon him with softer rays than ever, and the sun
+lent some too. With a smile, as if she anticipated his first questions,
+she gave him a&mdash;letter from Emanuel. A shrinking &quot;Ah!&quot; was his answer;
+and before he could accommodate himself to two ecstasies,<a name="div2Ref_102" href="#div2_102"><sup>[102]</sup></a> the
+carriage was already at the top of the hill, and she in it, and all had
+gone off.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">He hesitated with trembling to gaze, absorbed, into the still, blue
+paradise of the fairest soul that ever overflowed. At last he looked
+upon the traces of a beloved human hand which he had not as yet
+touched, and read:&mdash;</p>
+<br>
+
+<p style="text-indent:.5in">&quot;<span class="sc">Horion</span>!</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Man climbs a mountain, as the child does a chair, in order to stand
+nearer the face of the infinite Mother, and to reach her with his puny
+embrace. Around my height the earth lies sleeping, with all its eyes of
+flowers under the soft mist; but the heavens already lift themselves up
+with the sun under the eyelid; under the paled Arcturus mists begin to
+glow, and colors extricate themselves from colors; the globe of earth
+rolls, vast and full, to rapture, of blossoms and living creatures,
+into the burning lap of morning.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;So soon as the sun comes, I look into it, and my heart lifts itself up
+and swears to thee that it loves thee, Horion!... Glow, Aurora, through
+the human heart as through thy field of cloud, illuminate the human eye
+like thy dew-drops, and send up into the dark breast, as into thy
+heaven, a sun!...</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;I have now sworn to thee, I give thee my whole soul and my little
+life, and the sun is the seal on the bond betwixt me and thee.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;I know thee, beloved; but knowest thou whose hand thou hast taken into
+thine? Lo, this hand has closed in Asia eight noble eyes,&mdash;no friend
+survives me,&mdash;in Europe I veil myself,&mdash;my sad history lies near the
+ashes of my parents, in the waters of the Ganges, and on the 24th of
+June of the coming year I go out of the world.... O Eternal One, I go;
+on the longest day the happy spirit wings its way out of this temple of
+the sun, and the green earth opens and closes with its flowers over my
+sinking chrysalis, and covers the heart that is gone with roses....</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Waft greater waves upon me, morning-air! Draw me into thy broad floods
+that stand over our lawns and woods, and bear me in clouds of blossoms
+over sparkling gardens and over glimmering streams; and dizzied between
+flying blossoms and butterflies, melting away under the sun with
+outspread arms, faintly floating over the earth, let me die, and let
+the bloody garment, dissolved into a red morning-vapor, like the ichor
+of the butterfly<a name="div2Ref_103" href="#div2_103"><sup>[103]</sup></a> just released, fall into the flowers, and let a
+hot sunbeam absorb the azure-bright spirit out of the rose-chalice of
+the heart up into the next world.... Ah, ye beloved, ye departed, are
+ye indeed departed? are ye, then, moving along as dark waves<a name="div2Ref_104" href="#div2_104"><sup>[104]</sup></a> in
+the quivering blue of heaven? even, now, in that abyss, full of veiled
+worlds, do your ethereal garments billow around the hidden suns? Ah,
+come back, sweep hitherward; in a year I melt and flow into your heart!</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;&mdash;And thou, my friend, seek me soon! No one on earth can love thee so
+truly as a man who must soon die. Thou good heart, which these mild
+days press into my hands, even at this last moment, for a farewell, I
+will love and warm thee inexpressibly. During this year in which I am
+not yet taken away, I will stay with thee entirely; and when Death
+comes and demands my heart, he shall find it only on thy breast.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;I know my friend, his life and his future. In thy coming years stand
+open dark chambers of martyrdom; and when I die, and thou art with me,
+I shall sigh, Why can I not take him with me, before he sheds his
+tears?</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Ah, Horion! there lies in man a black Dead Sea, out of which only when
+it is agitated the blessed island of the next world lifts itself up
+with its clouds. But my lips will already lie under the earthly clod
+when the cold hour comes to thee in which thou wilt no longer see any
+God,&mdash;in which Death shall lie on his throne, and mow around him, and
+fling even to the domain of nothingness his frosty shadows and the
+lightnings of his scythe. O beloved, my grave-mound will then be
+already standing when thy <i>inner</i> midnight comes on; with anguish thou
+wilt mount upon it, and look sternly into the soft wreaths of the
+constellations, and cry:<a name="div2Ref_105" href="#div2_105"><sup>[105]</sup></a> 'Where is he whose heart crumbles beneath
+me? Where is eternity, the mask of time? Where is the Infinite One? The
+veiled self grasps after itself on all sides, and strikes against its
+cold form.... Gleam not upon me, broad starry field; thou art only the
+conglomerate <i>picture</i>, formed of colored earths, on an infinite
+<i>churchyard-gate</i>, that stands before the desert of a life buried under
+space.... Laugh me not to scorn, ye shapes on higher stars, for, if I
+melt away, ye melt away also. One, one thing, which man cannot name,
+glows forever in the immeasurable smoke, and a centre without limit
+calcines a circumference without limit.&mdash;Still I exist; the Vesuvius of
+death yet smokes above me, and its ashes envelop me; its flying rocks
+bore through suns, its lava-torrents move dissolved worlds, and in its
+crater the former world lies stretched out, and it sends up nothing but
+graves.... O Hope, where abidest thou?' ...</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Float enraptured around me, animated gold-dust, with thy thin
+wings,&mdash;I will not crush thy short flower-life; swell upward, giddy
+zephyr, and waft me down into thy blossom-cups. O thou immeasurable
+flood of radiance, fall from the sun over this narrow earth, and bear
+up on thy waves of splendor the heavy heart before the highest throne,
+that the eternal and infinite Heart may take the little ones which are
+nigh to ashes, and heal and warm them!</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Is, then, a poor son of this earth so unhappy that he can quail in the
+midst of the splendor of morning, so near to God on the hot steps of
+his throne?</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Fly not from me, my dear one, because a shadow always encompasses me,
+which daily grows darker, until at last it shall wall me in as a little
+night. I see the heavens and thee through the shadow, in the midnight I
+smile, and in the night-wind my breath goes forth full and warm. For, O
+man, my soul has stood erect toward the stars; man is an asthmatic, who
+suffocates if he lies down and does not lift up his breast.&mdash;But darest
+thou despise the earth, that forecourt of heaven, which the Eternal has
+thought worthy to move along as one in the bright host of his worlds?
+The great, the godlike, which thou hast in thy soul and lovest in
+another's,&mdash;seek it not in any sun-crater, on any planet-floor; the
+whole next world, the whole of Elysium, God himself, appear to thee in
+no other place than in the midst of thee. Be great enough to despise
+the earth; be greater, so as to respect it. To the mouth which is bent
+down to it, it seems a rich, flowery plain; to man in his <i>perigee</i>, a
+dark world; to man in his <i>apogee</i>, a glimmering moon. Then, and not
+till then, will the holy element, which from unknown heights is sent
+down into man, flow from the soul, mix itself with the earthly life,
+and quicken all that surrounds thee. So must the water, shed from
+heaven and its clouds, first run under the earth, and well up from it
+again, before it is purified into a fresh, clear draught. The whole
+earth is trembling now for rapture, till all rings and sings and
+shouts, as bells sound of themselves during an earthquake. And the soul
+of man is made greater and greater by its nearness to the Invisible....</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;I love thee exceedingly!</p>
+
+<p class="right">&quot;<span class="sc">Emanuel</span>.&quot;</p>
+<br>
+
+<p class="normal">Horion read through swimming eyes. &quot;Ah,&quot; he wished, &quot;were I only, this
+very day, near thee, with my disordered heart, thou glorified one!&quot; and
+now, for the first time, occurred to him the nearness of St. John's
+day, and he proposed to himself on that day to see him. The sun had
+already vanished; the evening red fell like a ripe apple-blossom; he
+felt not the hot drops on his face, nor the icy dew of twilight on his
+hands; and with a bosom illuminated by dreams, and a heart
+tranquillized and reconciled to earth, he wandered back....</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&mdash;By the way! is it, then, necessary that I should elaborate an apology
+for Emanuel as stylist and as <i>stylite</i> (in the higher sense)? And if
+such is necessary, need I therein bring forward anything more than
+this,&mdash;that his soul is still the echo of his Indian palms and the
+River Ganges; that the walk of the better sort of unfettered men, just
+as in dream, is always a flight; that he does not manure his life, like
+Europeans, with the blood of other animals, nor hatch it out of dead
+flesh, and this abstinence in eating (quite another effect than that of
+excess in drinking) makes the wings of fancy lighter and broader; that
+a few ideas, to which he guides with partial hand all the mental sap
+and nutriment (and this distinguishes not only madmen, but also
+extraordinary men; from ordinary ones), must in him obtain a
+disproportionate weight, because the fruits of a tree become so much
+thicker and sweeter when the rest have been plucked; and more of the
+same sort? For, to speak candidly, those readers who desire an apology,
+themselves need one, and Emanuel deserves something better than
+a&mdash;criminal defence.&mdash;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">At this moment the consolation leaped up within my hero like a
+fountain, that he was to begin on Thursday his metempsychosis through
+nature,&mdash;his journey. &quot;Deuse take it!&quot; said he, skipping up; &quot;what
+needs a Christian to coin money for the present distress,<a name="div2Ref_106" href="#div2_106"><sup>[106]</sup></a> and put
+on mourning-cloaks, when he can journey on Thursday to Kussewitz to see
+the handing-over of the Italian Princess, and on Saturday to the <i>Isle
+of Union</i>, and, what is more, on the same day, which is <i>one</i> day
+before St. John's, to Maienthal, to his dear one, his angel?&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">O Heavens! I would that he and I were already about the
+journey,&mdash;really it may perhaps, unless all hopes deceive me, be quite
+tolerable!&mdash;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">During the week-day prayer-hour of Wednesday, two carriages rolled
+along. Out of the full one stepped his Lordship and the Prince; out of
+the empty one, nobody. Old Appel had dressed herself up splendidly, and
+locked herself into the pantry. The Chaplain was happier,&mdash;he taught in
+the Temple. Seldom does one make a clever face when one is presented,
+or a stupid one when one presents. His Lordship led his son to the
+Prince's hand and heart, as a collateral security for his future
+loyalty, but with a dignity which won as much reverence as it showed.
+My good hero behaved himself like a&mdash;fool; he had far more wit than our
+deference for higher persons, or theirs towards us, allows. A talent
+which expresses itself outside the limits of feudal service may be
+regarded as high-treason.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">His wit was only a covered embarrassment, into which he was thrown by
+two faces and a third cause. First, the Prince's....</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&mdash;If the reading world complains that so gradually, as they observe,
+one new name and actor after another steals into this star Venus, and
+makes it so full, that, at last, the historical picture-gallery becomes
+a regular gallery of vocables, in which they must wander round with a
+directory in their hands, they have really only too much ground for the
+complaint, and I have myself already complained the most bitterly of
+the same thing; for, after all, the greatest load remains on my
+shoulders, inasmuch as every fresh ninny is a new organ-stop drawn out,
+which I have to take into my performance, and which makes the pressing
+down upon the keys more disagreeable to me; but my correspondent
+forwards to me in the gourd-flask, without leave asked, all these
+people to be quartered on me, and the rogue actually writes me I have
+only to tell the world, <i>There are still more people coming</i>.&mdash;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">The Prince's face threw our hero into embarrassment, not from anything
+imposing about it, but because everything of that kind was discharged
+from it. It was a week-day and <i>current</i> face, that belonged on coins,
+but not on prize-medals,&mdash;with arabesque lines, which mean neither good
+nor evil,&mdash;tinged with a little dead gold of court-life,&mdash;anointed with
+a soft oil, which might stifle the strongest waves,&mdash;a sort of sweet
+wine, more drinkable for women than men. Of the finest turns, which
+Victor had intended to reciprocate, there was nothing to be heard or
+seen; but of apt and easy ones so much the more. Victor was embarrassed
+by the conflict and interchange of politeness and truth. Social
+embarrassments arise not from the uncertainty and impracticableness of
+the path, but from the crossways of choice and the perplexity of the
+scholastic ass between his two bundles of hay. Victor, whose politeness
+always sprang from philanthropy, must to-day let it spring from
+self-interest; but this was precisely what he could not get into him.
+Beside the paternal face, before which, with most children, the whole
+wheelwork of a free behavior grates and sticks, a third cause made him
+disconcerted and witty,&mdash;namely, that he was after something. I can
+tell by the look of every one,&mdash;except a courtier, whose life, like a
+Christian's, is a constant prayer for something,&mdash;the moment he enters
+the door, whether he calls as an alms-beggar and saint-by-works, or as
+merely a member of the joy-club.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Long before the people left the church, Victor already conceived a
+hearty love for the Prince,&mdash;the reason was, he was determined to love
+him, though the Devil himself stood before him there incarnate. He
+often said, Give me two days, or <i>one</i> night, and I will fall in love
+with whomsoever you propose. He was delighted to find on January's face
+no second-hands, no minute-hands, of those assignation-hours with which
+a good Cæsar generally seeks gladly to interleave, as with honeymoons,
+the tedious years of wedlock; but on his face nothing was displayed but
+continence, and Victor would rather swear by the face than by the
+reputation. He misses the mark; for on the male face&mdash;although it is
+made of mere printed characters of physiognomy, as certain pictures are
+of written letters&mdash;Nature has, nevertheless, written the <i>matres
+lectionis</i><a name="div2Ref_107" href="#div2_107"><sup>[107]</sup></a> and signs of sensuality very small, but upon the female
+larger, which is really lucky for the former and stronger and less
+chaste sex. In fact, adultery is, with princes of the January stamp,
+nothing but a milder sort of ruling and conquering. And yet honest
+regents always return&mdash;with pleasure the wives, so soon as they have
+conquered them, to their former lords. This, however, is only the same
+greatness which led the Romans to deprive the greatest kings of their
+realms, in order afterward to present them with them again.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">As princes are not, like jurists, bad Christians, but prefer to be none
+at all, January prepossessed our Victor by sundry sparks of religion,
+and by some hatred of the French Encyclopedists; although he saw that
+for a prince religion has indeed its good, but also its bad side, since
+only a crowned Atheist, but no Theist, possesses the invaluable
+<i>privilegium de non appellando</i>, which consists in this, that the
+accused party is not permitted (<i>per saltus</i> or by a <i>salto mortale</i>)
+to appeal to the highest jurisdiction beyond the pale of earth.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">The conversation was indifferent and empty, as in such cases it always
+is. In fact, men deserve, for their conversation, to be dumb; their
+thoughts are always better than their talk; and it is a pity that one
+could not apply to good heads some barometrograph, or compositor's
+harpsichord, which should write off outwardly what is thought within. I
+would bet that every great head goes to the grave with a whole library
+of unprinted thoughts, and lets only some few book-shelves of printed
+ones go out to the world.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Victor submitted to the Prince the usual medical interrogatories, not
+merely as physician-in-ordinary, but also as a man, for the sake of
+loving him. Although people from the great world and the greatest have,
+like the sub-man, the orang-outang, lived out and died out in
+their twenty-fifth year,&mdash;for which reason, perhaps, in many
+countries kings are placed under guardianship as early as their
+fourteenth,&mdash;nevertheless January had not ante-dated his life so far,
+and was really older than many a youth. The Prince won the good, warm
+heart of Sebastian most by the unpretending simplicity which served
+neither vanity nor pride, and whose ingenuousness differed from the
+usual sort only in refinement. Victor had seen vassals stand in such a
+manner beside the mouth<a name="div2Ref_108" href="#div2_108"><sup>[108]</sup></a> of their liege-lord; that the latter
+looked like a shark carrying a man crosswise in his jaws; but January
+resembled a Peter-fish, which holds forth in <i>its</i> jaws a fine
+<i>stater</i>.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">The Court-Chaplain, when he arrived, in his astonishment at a crowned
+guest, found it impossible to stir lip or foot; he remained immovable
+in the broad water-spout of the priestly frock, which was thrown around
+him like a sheet of royal paper round marchpane. The only thing in
+which he indulged, and on which he ventured, was&mdash;not to put away the
+Bible (the mouse-trap), but&mdash;to send his eyes secretly round the room,
+to spy out whether <i>it</i> had been properly stitched, folded, and
+superscribed by the registresses of rooms.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">The Prince proceeded at once on his journey with his Lordship, who had
+to reserve his leave-taking of his son and his farewell sermons till
+the solitary day they were to spend on the Isle of Union. The son
+contracted a liking for the company of the Prince, when he thought over
+his demeanor towards his father; he had a double joy, a filial and a
+human, as that father transformed his own happiness into the happiness
+of the poor country, and only for the sake of doing good made
+foot-tracks for himself in the rock of the throne, as in Italy the
+footsteps of angels who have appeared and left a blessing are shown
+in the rocks. Other favorites resemble the executioner who hollows
+out for himself foot-holes in the sand, so as to stand steadier when
+he&mdash;beheads.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">When the room was emptied, the first of Eymann's members to wake
+up&mdash;he still stood in the sentry-box of the priest's frock&mdash;was the
+index-finger, which stretched itself out, and pointed out to the
+family-circle the bed. &quot;It would have been more satisfactory and
+serviceable to me,&quot; said he, &quot;to have been strangled to death with that
+rag, than to have had his <i>Serenissimus</i> spy it out.&quot; He meant,
+however, his own soiled cravat, which he himself had thrown upon the
+nuptial bed,&mdash;that art-chamber and wareroom of his linen. Whenever one
+contradicted any tormenting notion of his, he argued it so long that at
+last he believed it himself; but if one admitted it, then he conjured
+up certain scruples, and adopted a different opinion. &quot;His Highness
+must inevitably have seen the tattered thing through the bed-curtains,&quot;
+he replied. Finally he travelled over all the places where January had
+stood, and took observations at the torn neck-tie, and investigated its
+parallax. &quot;We must adhere to the <i>blinding</i> of the windows, if we want
+to have any <i>peace</i>,&quot; he concluded, and&mdash;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">So do I.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">P. S. I shall always remark after an eighth chapter (because I get
+ready exactly two Dog-post-days in a week), that I have again worked
+for the space of a month. I therefore report that to-morrow June comes
+on.</p>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<h3>FIRST INTERCALARY DAY.</h3>
+
+<p class="center"><span class="sc">Must Treaties be kept, or is it enough that they are made?</span></p>
+<br>
+
+<p class="normal">The latter.&mdash;To-day the mining-superintendent exercises, for the first
+time, on the reader's ground and soil the right (<i>servitus oneris
+ferendi</i>, or I may say <i>servitus projiciendi</i>) which, according to the
+contract of May 4, he actually possesses. The main question now is,
+whether a dog-contract between two such great powers&mdash;inasmuch as the
+reader has all the quarters of the world, and I, in turn, have the
+reader&mdash;must, after being concluded, also be kept.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Frederick, the Antimachiavellist, answers us, and backs himself by
+Machiavelli: Certainly every one of us must keep his word so long as
+it&mdash;is for his advantage. So true is this, that such treaties would
+never be broken, if they were not once&mdash;concluded; and the Swiss, who,
+as late as 1715, swore one with France, might quite as well in all the
+Cantons have lifted their fingers and taken an oath they would every
+day regularly&mdash;make water.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">But so soon as the advantage of contracts ceases, then is a regent
+entitled to break them in two cases,&mdash;those which he makes with
+other regents, and those he makes with his own step-children of the
+country,&mdash;his subjects.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">While I was already at work in the cabinet, (not later than six
+o'clock, with the goose-wing, dusting the session-table, not with the
+pen,) I had under the latter a clever fugitive paper, wherein I
+proposed to show that the <i>ouverture</i> of treaties (<i>au nom de la Sainte
+Trinité</i> or <i>in nomine Sanctissimæ et individuæ Trinitatis</i>) was the
+cipher which ambassadors sometimes place over their reports, meaning
+that the opposite is to be understood. Nothing, however, came of the
+fugitive paper but a&mdash;manuscript. In this I was simple enough, and
+proposed first to advise princes, that, in regard to lies of necessity
+and truths of necessity, they must have, for every latitude and
+hour, <i>declinations</i> and <i>inclinations</i>. I proposed to whistle the
+state-chanceries to myself into a corner, and whisper in their ears, I
+would never suffer it, and, though I had only nine regiments in pay and
+starvation, that my hands and feet should be glued together with the
+sealing-wax of contracts, and my wings clogged with ink. That
+would I for the first time introduce into state-praxis; but the
+state-chanceries laughed at me, afar off in my foolish corner, and
+said, The whistler may believe, himself,&mdash;we do the thing otherwise.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">In the works of Herr <i>Herkommen</i><a name="div2Ref_109" href="#div2_109"><sup>[109]</sup></a>&mdash;the best German publicist, who,
+however, writes no <i>acta sanctorum</i> it is proved that a reigning prince
+need not observe at all any treaties, privileges, and concessions
+granted by his predecessor to his subjects; hence it follows that he is
+far less bound to keep his <i>own</i> covenants with them, since the
+enjoyment of the benefit of these covenants, which consists in nothing
+but the keeping or breaking, manifestly vests in him as proprietor. Mr.
+Herkommen says the same on every page, and absolutely swears to it.
+Nay, can there be a dean or rector magnificus who exercises so little
+reason&mdash;considering that, according to a general assumption, a king
+never dies, and consequently predecessors and successors grow together
+into one man&mdash;as not to draw from this the conclusion that the
+successor may regard his own covenants as those of his predecessor, and
+accordingly, since the two make only one man, may break them just as
+much as if they were transmitted ones?</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Whoso chose to discourse philosophically about this might prove that,
+in fact, <i>no man whatever</i> needs keep his word, not merely no prince.
+According to physiology, the old body of a king (a reader, a
+superintendent of mines) in <i>three</i> years makes way for a new one. Hume
+carries it still farther with the soul, inasmuch as he considers that
+as a fleeting (not frozen) stream of phenomena. How much soever, then,
+the king (reader, author) may, at the moment of making a promise, be
+bound to keep it, still he cannot possibly be held thereto the next
+minute after, when he has already become his own successor and heir; so
+that, in fact, of us two contracting parties of the 4th of May, nothing
+more is extant than our mere <i>posthumi</i> and successors,&mdash;namely,
+ourselves. As now, fortunately, promising and fulfilling never enter
+into one and the same moment, herefrom may follow the conclusion,
+pleasant to all of us, that, in fact, no one at all is bound to keep
+his word, whether he is the top of a throne or only a chip thereof. Nor
+will courtiers (the corner-clips of the throne) oppose this
+proposition.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">The public is requested to consider the Preface as the Second
+Intercalary Day, for the sake of symmetry.</p>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<p class="center"><img border="0" src="images/barstart.png" alt="barstart"></p>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<h2><a name="div1Ref_09" href="#div1_09">9. DOG-POST-DAY.</a></h2>
+<br>
+
+<p class="center"><span class="sc2">A Heavenly Morning; a Heavenly Afternoon.&mdash;A House
+without Walls; a Bed without a House.</span></p>
+<br>
+
+<p class="normal">Ah, the poor miner, the delver in rock-salt pits, and the island-negro
+have in their calendar no such day as is here described or repeated!
+Sebastian stood on Thursday, as early as three o'clock, on the
+flying-board of his bee-hive, in order in one day to land in <i>Great
+Kussewitz</i> and be off again before people were up. A reader who
+has an atlas on the floor at his feet cannot possibly confound this
+market-town, where the presentation of the Princess takes place, with a
+namesake of a town, which the city of Rostock has annexed to its
+immovable property. Unfortunately, the whole house loved him so that it
+had already, for half an hour earlier, been out of the morning feathers
+of which the greatest wings of dream are made. Amidst the din of
+carriage-chains, dogs, and cockerels, he tore his tender heart away
+from eyes that were all love, and, as the beating of the former and the
+melting of the latter annoyed him, all grew still worse; for external
+noise stills the inner tumult of the soul.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Out of doors all the grass-pastures and grain-fields were bathing
+in the <i>shower-bath</i> of the dew and in the cold <i>air-bath</i> of the
+morning-wind. He hardened in it, like hot iron; a morning-land full of
+immeasurable hopes encircled him; he stripped his breast, threw himself
+all aglow into the dripping grass, washed (but not with any higher
+purpose than girls have) his firm face with liquid June-snow, and;
+strung with tenser fibres, stepped back from the shower-bath to his
+toilet,&mdash;only hair and breast he confined in no imprisonment.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">He would certainly have started earlier, but he wanted to avoid the
+moon, whom he could no more marry to the sun than he could their
+respective children to each other,&mdash;namely, night-thoughts and
+morning-thoughts. For when the morning-clouds envelop man in their dew,
+when the loving birds dart noisily through the gleaming mist, when the
+sun looms forth out of the hazy glow, then does man, quickened in
+spirit, press his foot more deeply into the earth, and cling with new
+ivy-twigs of life more firmly to his planet.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Slowly he waded through a low avenue of hazel-bushes, and reluctantly
+swept off their chilled chafers; he held himself in, and stopped at
+last, in order to make himself late, that he might not reach the
+neighboring thicket just when the sun was entering his theatre. Already
+he heard the musical <i>mêlée</i> in the thicket; rosy clouds were spread
+like flowers in the sun's pathway; the watch-tower of the parsonage and
+village, that high altar whereon his first lovely evening had glowed,
+kindled again; the singing world of the air hung exulting in the hues
+of morning and the heavenly blue; sparks of clouds darted up from gold
+bars along the horizon; at last the flames of the sun streamed in over
+the earth....</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Truly, were I every evening to depict sunrise, and every morning to see
+it, still I should cry, like the children, Once more, once more!</p>
+
+<p class="normal">With benumbed nerves of vision, and with flakes of color swimming
+before him, he passed on slowly into the wood, as into a dark minster,
+and his heart swelled even to devotion....</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&mdash;I will not assume that my reader has such a prosaic feeling in regard
+to morning as to deem this poetic one irreconcilable with Victor's
+character; nay, I venture to presume that his knowledge of human nature
+will find little trouble in discovering the <i>key-note</i> between two such
+distant tones in Victor as humor and sensibility. I will therefore
+commit myself unconcernedly to the happy contemplations of his feeling
+soul, and to my assurance of having all hearts in unison with mine.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">The planet Venus and a grove show most beautifully in the morning and
+the evening; on both, at these hours, more rays of the sun fall than at
+any other. Hence our Victor felt, in the thicket, as if he went through
+the gate of a new life, as on this fiery morning he sauntered onward
+with the sun, which darted beside him from twig to twig, through the
+murmuring wood, away along under symphonious branches, which were so
+many music-barrels set in motion, over moss that lay in green sun-fire,
+and under evergreen bathed in heavenly blue. And this morning renewed
+in his heart the painful likeness of <i>four</i> things,&mdash;life, a day, a
+year, a journey, which resemble each other in their fresh, exultant
+beginning, in the oppressive interlude, in the weary, sated close.&mdash;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Outside in the copse, in the background of the woodland, Nature
+unrolled before him her altar-piece, miles long, with its chains of
+hills, with its dazzling country-houses, which had decked themselves
+with gardens as with festoons, and with the miniature-colors of the
+flowerets which played on the silver line of beauty traced by the
+brooks. And a cloud of enraptured, sporting, buzzing little creatures
+of silk-dust swept or hovered over the undulating picture.&mdash;What way
+should Victor take in the labyrinth of beauty?&mdash;All the sixty-four
+radii of the compass stretched themselves out as so many fingerposts,
+and he had sense enough not to propose to himself any particular hour
+of arriving. He therefore slipped off everywhere, to the right and to
+the left; he climbed over into every vale that hid itself behind a
+hill; he visited the pierced shadow-projection of every row of trees;
+he laid himself down at the feet of a more than commonly beautiful
+flower, and refreshed himself with pure love by its spirit, without
+breaking its body; he was the travelling-companion of the powdered
+butterfly, and observed his burying himself in his flower, and the
+hedge-sparrow he followed through the bushes to her brooding-cell and
+nursery; he let himself be spell-bound in the circle which a bee drew
+around him, and quietly suffered himself to be immured in the shaft of
+his own nosegay; he exercised upon every village which the motley
+landscape held up to him the right of way, and loved best to meet the
+children, whose days played even like his hours&mdash;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">But men he avoided....</p>
+
+<p class="normal">And yet there leaped from his heart a high fountain of love, which
+penetrated even to the remotest brother; and yet was he so entirely
+free from egotism, from that <i>sensitive</i> intolerance, which has its
+degree and source in common with the <i>Moravian</i>.&mdash;-The reason, however,
+was this: the first day of a journey was wholly different from the
+second, third, eightieth; for on the second, third, eightieth, he was
+prosaic, humoristic, social,&mdash;i. e. his heart adhered everywhere like
+hooked seed, and sent the roots of its happiness into every other
+being's lot. But on the first day came veiled spirits from all hours
+into his soul, who vanished if a third spoke,&mdash;a soft intoxication,
+which the atmosphere of nature, like that of a wine-store, communicated
+to him, spread itself, like an enchanted solitude, around his soul....
+But why shall I depict the first day before I depict him?</p>
+
+<p class="normal">In the first hours of the journey, he was to-day fresh, glad, happy,
+but not blissful; he drank as yet, only he was not drunken. But when he
+had thus for some hours wandered on, with drinking eye and absorbing
+heart, through pearl-strings of bedewed web-work, through humming
+vales, over singing hills, and when the violet-blue sky peacefully
+joined itself to the smoking heights and to the dark woods, rising like
+garden-walls behind each other,&mdash;when Nature opened all the pipes of
+the stream of life, and when all her fountains leaped up, and,
+flashing, played into each other, painted over by the sun,&mdash;then was
+Victor, who went through these flying streams with a rising and thirsty
+heart, lifted and softened by them; then did his heart swim, trembling
+like the sun's image in the infinite ocean, as the salient point of the
+wheel-animal<a name="div2Ref_110" href="#div2_110"><sup>[110]</sup></a> swims in the fluttering water-globule of the mountain
+stream.&mdash;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Then did flower, meadow, and grove dissolve into a dim immensity, and
+the color-grains of Nature melted away into a single broad flood, and
+<i>over</i> the glimmering flood stood the Infinite One as a sun, and <i>in</i>
+it, as a reflected sun, the human heart.&mdash;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">All was one; all hearts grew to one greatest heart; a single life
+throbbed; the blooming pictures, the growing statues, the dusty clod of
+earth, and the infinite blue vault became the beholding face of an
+immeasurable soul.&mdash;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">He might shut his eyes as much as he pleased, still there lingered in
+his dark breast this blooming immensity.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Ah, if he could have plunged up into the clouds, so as to sweep thereon
+through the undulating heavens over the boundless earth!&mdash;ah, if he
+could have floated with the flower-fragrance over the flowers,&mdash;could
+have streamed with the wind over the summits, through the woods!&mdash;O now
+would he rather have fallen on the heart of a great man, and sunk,
+enraptured and weeping, into his bosom, to stammer out, &quot;How happy is
+man!&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">He must needs weep, without knowing why; he sang words without sense,
+but their tone went to his heart&mdash;he ran, he stopped&mdash;he dipped his
+glowing face into the cloud of blossoming bushes, and would fain lose
+himself in the humming world between the leaves; he pressed the
+scratched face into the deep, cooling grass, and hung delirious on the
+breast of the immortal mother of Spring.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Whoever saw him from a distance took him for a madman; perhaps many a
+one does so still, who has never himself experienced how, through the
+cleared-up, blissful breast, as through the serenest sky, storm-winds
+may sweep, which in both dissolve in rain.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">In this hour of his regeneration-day, his genius gave his heart the
+fiery baptism of a love, which clasped all men and all creatures into
+its flames. There are certain precious minutes of rapture&mdash;ah, why not
+years?&mdash;when an inexpressible love towards all human creatures flows
+through thy whole life, and opens thy arms softly to every brother. The
+least that Victor could do, whose heart was on the sunny side of love,
+was, if any one met him near a mountain, to turn out for him toward the
+steep side,&mdash;not to pass by any one who was fishing, for fear of
+throwing a frightening shadow on the water,&mdash;to wander slowly through a
+flock of sheep, and, if a child was shy of him, to make a long circuit
+aside. Nothing could surpass the soft voice with which he wished every
+pilgrim more than <i>this</i> good morning; nothing the look of anticipating
+emotion with which in every village he sought to spy out any poor body
+whose calluses and scars and gashes required a sponge or pain-killing
+drops. &quot;Ah, I know as well as an amanuensis<a name="div2Ref_111" href="#div2_111"><sup>[111]</sup></a> to a Professor of
+Morals,&quot; he said to himself, &quot;that it is no virtue, but only a luxury,
+to take away the crown of thorns from a lacerated brow, the prickly
+girdle from sore nerves; but this innocent pleasure will still be
+begrudged me, and when on so many roads mangled men are lying, why on
+mine does no one stretch out his hand that I might place in it some
+compensation for this undeserved heaven in my breast?&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">He would fain carry his joy to another's heart to be tasted, as the bee
+delivers its mouthful of honey to the lips of another bee. At length
+two children came puffing along, one of whom was tackled as pulling
+beast of burden to a wheelbarrow, and the other harnessed on in front
+as pushing driver. The barrow was freighted with six porous bags full
+of pine-cones which the poor span were hauling to feed a consumptive
+fire. The two frequently exchanged places, so as to hold out; and the
+driver always wanted presently to be the horse again. &quot;My good
+children! can't your father push, then?&quot;&mdash;&quot;The tree has broken
+both his legs short off.&quot;&mdash;&quot;Then certainly your big brother could go to
+the wood?&quot;&mdash;&quot;He has to plough over yonder.&quot;&mdash;Victor stood on the
+fallow-field beside a waistcoat with full as many colors as holes, and
+near a dirty bread-sack, both which belonged to the brother, who at a
+distance was ploughing on the stage of this scene with half a post-team
+of lean cows. The emptying of a full hand into the lap of misery
+lightened Victor's heavy soul, as did the outgushing, which followed,
+of the full eye; his conscience, not his selfishness, was his objector
+to the <i>greatness</i> of his gift&mdash;he gave it, however, but in coins of
+small denominations&mdash;the children left their merchandise, and while one
+of them ran across the field to the plough, the other ran down to the
+village to his mother. The ploughman in the distance pulled off his
+hat&mdash;would fain have uttered loud thanks, but could only blow his
+nose&mdash;went on ploughing without his hat; but when at length he called
+out his thanks after the youth, the latter had already escaped far
+beyond earshot....</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Do not, dear reader, wish this or the succeeding interlude of human
+sorrow left out of the great scenes of happy nature; and may thy heart,
+like Victor, by giving deserve to receive!</p>
+
+<p class="normal">In his good-hearted haste he soon overtook a journeyman blacksmith sick
+with fever, whose travelling-trunk or portmanteau was a filled
+handkerchief; he also carried on a stick a wretched, faded pair of
+boots, which he had to spare, because the other which he dragged along
+on other sticks, namely, on his legs, was still wretcheder and less
+without color than without soles. When he had tenderly greeted the
+feverish man and made him a present, he looked into his pale, livid
+face, and he could not deny him some smart-money.... Ah, the whole
+smart-money for this life is not paid out till we reach a higher! When
+he had civilly questioned him and informed himself about his hungry
+journeyings, about his correction-house fare, about his flights from
+one country to another, and about his thin viaticum which the mistress
+denied him when the master was out,&mdash;then was he ashamed, before the
+All-gracious One, of his flower-field of rapture, which he no more
+deserved &quot;than that poor devil there,&quot; and he made him an additional
+present; and when he again waited for him to speak, and learned that he
+was fifty years old without any prospects, and when the distress
+overmastered him which he always felt at the sight of <i>old</i> but
+<i>undeveloped</i> men, gray apprentices, old clerks, old dispensers, old
+amanuenses, then was he somewhat excusable for running back again and
+silently giving the astonished old man the new signs of his
+overflowing, benignant soul; and when, at this renewed parting, he felt
+his heart, which was dissolved into love, and only floated, as it were,
+round his soul, thirst more and more for doing good, and felt an
+incomprehensible inclination for fresh giving, and a longing to pour
+out upon somebody to-day everything, everything, then for the first
+time did he perceive that he was now too tender and too happy and too
+giddy and too weak.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">So soon as the people in the village had in hand the certain
+intelligence of this transit-toll of generosity, in the afternoon about
+fifteen children stationed themselves on different posts along the way,
+manned the narrow passes, and distributed sentries and <i>enfans perdus</i>
+to prevent evasion of the revenue-laws....</p>
+
+<p class="normal">A man who, like Victor, construed three straight leagues into seven
+crooked ones, is often hungry, but certainly more so than he;&mdash;he took
+merely a Leibnitz's monad-meal out of his pocket, biscuit and wine, and
+appeased therewith the stomach which hung and drew upon his spirit, in
+order not to darken and foul, by throwing in any pieces of flesh, the
+clear lake of his inner being, with its reflected arch of heavenly blue
+and heavenly red. In fact, he hated gormandizers as men of too gross
+selfishness, as well as all living larders, where layers of fat crush
+in the spirit, as masses of snow do a house. The soul, he said, takes
+an odor from the contents of the body, just as wine does from the fruit
+which is near it in the cellar, and in the mephitic vapor in which the
+souls of the Flachsenfingenites bob up and down over the brew-kettles
+which seethe their potatoes and beer, the poor birds must surely fall
+down tipsy and stifled into this dead sea.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">He broke his biscuit not in any house, but in the skeleton, i. e.
+framework of a house, which had just come from the hands and axes of
+the carpenters into the sight of the village. As he looked through all
+the divisions and subdivisions of this architectural skeleton, and saw
+at once through sitting-room, kitchen, stable, and loft, he thought to
+himself: &quot;Another play-house for a poor, little human troupe, who are
+here to play out their benefit comedy, their Gay's Beggars'-opera, with
+no voice to cry from the stage-box, <i>Encore!</i> Ah! before these beams
+have blackened to ebony by the winter smoke, many an eye-socket will
+have grown red with grief; many a northwester of life will blow through
+the window upon trembling hearts, and into these nooks, which are yet
+to be darkly walled up, will many a back, sore with bruises from the
+warfare of common life, creep away to wipe off sweat or blood. But joy
+(he went on soliloquizing as he looked at the place for stove and
+table) will also set a gilliflower-tree or two before the window for
+your inmates, and drive up before your house-door, which is yet to be
+hung, and unload its freight of the three holy feasts, and the church
+fair, and the child's baptism.&mdash;Heavens! how foolish that I should
+prefer thinking all this in the mere ribs of a house to seeing it
+yonder in the walled-up houses of the village!&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">During this table-talk and house-warming-oration, whereat, however, no
+drinking-glass was shivered, the white breast of a swallow swooped low
+across the road, and her bill took up a load of slacked lime for her
+little garret. The wasp shaved off from the joist-work paper-shavings
+for the layers of her bulbous sphere. The spider had already knit her
+spider's house into the larger one. All creatures played the carpenter
+and mason in building up for themselves their little islands in the
+infinite sea; but grovelling man looks not over his shoulder, and sees
+not that all is like him.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Sebastian quitted his wooden inn, his skeleton of a Frankfort Red
+House, more intoxicated with happiness than he could have gone from a
+fully-built one. In certain men a dark melancholy diffuses itself,&mdash;a
+shadow of the soul all the greater when the shadows around them are the
+smallest: I mean about one o'clock of a summer afternoon. When in the
+afternoon the lawns lie more intensely perfumed, and the woods with
+drooping leaves stand, more softly sighing and sleeping beneath the
+brooding sun, and the birds sit on the trees as dumb figurants or
+supernumeraries,&mdash;then in the Eden that lay sweltering under the cloud
+of blossoms an oppressive yearning seized upon his heart,&mdash;then was he
+wafted by his fancies under the eternally blue sky of the East, and
+under the wine-palms of Hindustan,&mdash;then did he rest himself in those
+still lands, where, without stinging necessities or scorching passions,
+he sank dissolved into the dreamy tranquillity of the Brahmin, and
+where the soul in its elevation holds itself steady and no longer
+trembles with the trembling earth, like the fixed stars whose gleam
+trembles not, seen on mountains,&mdash;then was he too happy for a German
+colonist, too poetic for a European, too luxurious for a neighbor of
+the North Pole.... Every summer morning he feared that in the summer
+afternoon he should fantasy too effeminately.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Fasting, wine, heaven, and earth had to-day so lavishly filled the
+chambers of his heart with the sleep-potion of rapture, that they must
+needs, when anything more was poured in, overflow through the eyes.
+These now gushed forth; and behind his dimmed eyes, in the overshadowed
+inner chamber, lined with the green of nature, and darkened, as it
+were, with curtains of evening redness, a colored night came on,
+wherein all the little shapes of his childhood rose cloudily before
+him,&mdash;the earliest playthings of life were laid out,&mdash;his first May
+months played like little angels on an evening cloud, and they could
+not in their wing-clothes fly round the great cloud, and the sun did
+not scorch them.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Ah! what he had long forgotten,&mdash;long lost,&mdash;long loved,&mdash;songs without
+sense and tones without words, nameless plays,&mdash;buried nurses,&mdash;dead
+servants,&mdash;all these came to life again; but before all, and greatest
+of all, moved the form of his first, his dearest teacher, Dahore, in
+England, who said to his melted soul, &quot;We were once side by side.&quot;&mdash;O
+this eternally loved spirit, who even then saw in our Victor the wings
+that lift themselves toward the next world,&mdash;who even then was more the
+friend than the master of his so tender, tempestuous, loving, aspiring
+heart,&mdash;this never-to-be-forgotten spirit would not leave him; his form
+pushed aside the shroud, began to shine and to say, &quot;Horion, my Horion,
+did I not hold thee by the hand, wast thou not in my heart? But it is
+long since we loved each other, and my voice is no longer recognizable
+to thee, scarcely my face; ah, the seasons of life roll not back, but
+onward, downward, forever.&quot; He leaned against a tree and kept drying
+his eye, which could no longer find the road, and his sight was fixed
+calmly on the woods which stretch toward St. Luna, and on the hazy
+hills that separate him from Maienthal and from his second teacher....</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Kussewitz burst upon him. But too soon; his soul in its emotion was not
+ready to go among strangers. He was glad to come upon an overturned
+trough, out of which sheep were licking salt, and a hedge-pen, which
+folded them at night, and the hut on two wheels wherein their keeper
+slept. He had a peculiar curiosity and predilection for little copies
+of houses; he always walked into or up to every collier's hut, every
+hunter's and fowler's house, for the sake of saddening and comforting
+himself with his own confinement, and with the parodies of our little
+life and with the ground-floor of poverty. He never went blindly by
+anything small, over which the world's man and business man stalk so
+scornfully; just as, on the other hand, he never stopped before any
+pomp of citizenly life. He opened, therefore, a little door to the
+travelling bed of the shepherd: it looked so poverty-stricken in
+there, and the straw, which took the place of eider-down and silk
+pillow-cases, was so lowly and rumpled, that he felt an indescribable
+longing to enter; he needed now a diving-bell that should separate him
+from the rushing, crushing, sublime sea around him. I wish one could
+conceal the fact from the European cabinets, the Imperial Diet, and the
+Chief Commissary, that he actually laid himself down therein. But now
+the excitement of his senses, into which the door of his bedchamber
+admitted only a small section of the blue sky, soon passed over into
+the exhaustion of slumber, and over the hot eye the lid closed.</p>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<p class="center"><img border="0" src="images/hornstart.png" alt="hornstart"></p>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+
+<h2><a name="div1Ref_10" href="#div1_10">10. DOG-POST-DAY.</a></h2>
+<br>
+
+<p class="center"><span class="sc2">The Bee-Master.&mdash;Zeusel's Oscillation.&mdash;Arrival of the Princess.</span></p>
+<br>
+
+<p class="normal">Since the last Post-day our hero has been sleeping. The German
+<i>Reviewers</i> should do me the favor to start him up.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">But they are knaves, these headsmen and partners of the censors; they
+wake up neither readers nor princes, but only Homeric sleepers. The sun
+already hangs low, and peers horizontally into his Dr. Graham's-bed,
+and he still lies there glowing in the face of it....</p>
+
+<p class="normal">The sheep had to do it with their bleating and bells. When the
+belfry-bell of Great Kussewitz, with the accompaniment of sheep-bells,
+wafted into his opening ears an evening prayer set to music,&mdash;when into
+his opening eyes the red outline of the departed sun which had
+illuminated his to-day's paradises entered, and the evening glow, whose
+gold leaves the evening wind breathed upon the clouds,&mdash;when the air,
+bedewed like his nosegay, refreshed his bosom,&mdash;then was to-day's
+sultry afternoon rolled back a whole week; Victor had dropped upon a
+new island of the blest; new-born and rejoicing, he crept back out of
+his piece of travelling property. &quot;O mad me!&quot; he said; &quot;but I do not
+rejoice extraordinarily in the fact that half an ounce of grains of
+sleep can eat away clean out of man a whole glowing world, and that the
+turning over of the body is the sinking of his paradise and his hell.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">On the high road two sedan-bearers went jogging off at a short gallop
+between the supporting poles of their leather die.<a name="div2Ref_112" href="#div2_112"><sup>[112]</sup></a> He made after
+them,&mdash;their load, he thought, must be far lighter to them than a whole
+country and its sceptre, both which, however, a regent knows how to
+balance, as a juggler does a sword, dancing, on the nose, on the teeth,
+everywhere. They bore, however, the heaviest thing in the world,
+beneath which cities, thrones, and continents have often broken down.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;What are you moving round with at such a rate?&quot; he asked. &quot;With our
+most gracious Lord!&quot; It was January,&mdash;it is, however, quite in
+accordance with the æsthetic and artistic tricks wherewith an author so
+extraordinarily excites the expectation of his readers, that I do not
+divulge what it was of January that sat in the bounding litter, until I
+utter the next word.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">It was his image. The bust always travelled ahead before the bride, in
+order to arrive in season at her bedchamber, and hang itself up by a
+nail to the wall. On the whole <i>sentimental journey</i> the <i>cubic
+contents</i> of the bride had slept only in chambers, on which the
+<i>superficial area</i> of the bridegroom hung down like a garden-spider all
+night long....</p>
+
+<p class="normal">As I do not mean in any manner to cut myself of, by the barrier-treaty
+which I have concluded with my cousin the reader, from the right of
+making, beside the Intercalary Days, extra-leaves, extra-leaflets, and
+pseudo-extra-leaves, inasmuch as I have, the rather, by certain secret
+and separate articles, which I have made merely in my own head, as the
+Pope does certain cardinals, reserved to myself the privilege, I will
+now exercise the right which my self-made By-Recess offers me on the
+spot.</p>
+<br>
+
+<h3>EXTRA LEAFLET UPON THE ABOVE BUST-PIECES.</h3>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;I maintain,&quot; said I, in the billiard-room at Scheerau, at a moment
+when I was not striking, &quot;that dukes, margraves, and other graves, and
+many of high nobility, would be stupid, if in our day,&mdash;or, in fact,
+in future days,&mdash;when the crown grows bald before the chin gets a
+beard,&mdash;when many a face wants no requisite for spectacles except the
+bridge,&mdash;when particularly the man of rank is glad to be, instead of a
+<i>cast</i>, at least an <i>outline</i>, of a man,&mdash;they would not be wise, I
+recapitulate, if they celebrated no better marriage than a true
+one,&mdash;that is, no pictured&mdash;one; if their busts were stamped on
+nothing better&mdash;that is, on no breast&mdash;than on the pewter covers of
+beer-pitchers, so that they could <i>intoxicate</i> people in no other way
+than this latter; and if they, who uniformly act by plenipotentiaries,
+on imperial benches, in session-chairs, in bridal beds (marrying by
+ambassadors), should conceive that in the last-mentioned case there
+were any truer and more innocent chief commissary than their own
+picture on an ell of canvas.&quot; ... As we just then played in mass, and I
+happened to be king, and in my fiery state went on to say, &quot;What the
+Devil! we kings understand how to substitute skilfully enough, for the
+<i>plastic</i> arts in virtue and in marriage, the <i>delineative</i> arts; and
+<i>not merely</i> in billiards does a king stand quite idle with his
+sceptre-cue!&quot;&mdash;then the fire of my speech might well seem far from
+strange.</p>
+
+
+<p class="center"><i>End of the Extra Leaflet on the above Bust-pieces</i>.
+<br>
+
+<p class="normal">At the house of the Count of O&mdash; (so was called also a famous officer
+in the Seven Years' War, and by Shakespeare the world, and the whole
+territory of an old lady; and, according to Bruce, with the Hebrews
+this vowel was a particular favorite; but this is, after all,
+unprofitable learning here) the Princess and the painted bridegroom
+alighted. Victor would not, with his to-day's dress and his to-day's
+heart, mingle in the tumult of the world; and yet he would gladly have
+seen all.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">As he approached Kussewitz, a little red and white house peered forth
+to meet him,&mdash;red as a squirrel-cage, and smiling as a summer-house. He
+stepped up to it and to its gleaming windows, but immediately stepped
+back again; he would not hinder an old human couple, for whom the bell
+had been the organ, from finishing their prayer. When he entered, with
+his face exalted by the reflection of to-day's transfiguration, an old
+man turned a silver head, which stood like a mild moon over the evening
+of his life, and a face of smiling wrinkles, toward the guest. Only a
+hypocrite&mdash;that stockjobber of virtue&mdash;is not, after praying, more
+gentle and complacent. The old woman was the first to lay aside the
+look of devotion. Victor, with his victorious simplicity, asked a
+night's lodging. To grant it to him was what only such contented people
+as these could do; to request it was what none could do, except one
+who, like him, shunned landlords, because their cold, selfish sympathy
+and love, coming and going with every guest, was too repulsive to his
+warm soul. Secondly, he was attracted by the cleanliness which even the
+slut loves in <i>strangers'</i> houses, and which, in them, is a proof of
+contentment and of&mdash;childlessness. Thirdly, he wanted to remain to-day
+incognito, and out of the thronged streets, with his soul so
+consecrated by Nature.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">He soon felt himself at home; even before the supper was washed and
+picked and ready, he found out, or, rather, took it in, that the gentle
+old man, named <i>Lind</i>, was a bee-keeper. The latter I believe; for
+otherwise he would not have been so mild, as, in fact, in most cases,
+animal society is less corrupting than human. Hence Plato assigns the
+Lange's colloquies of man with the animals as the best thing left of
+Saturn's golden reign. It is not all one whether one is a dog-keeper, a
+lion-keeper, or a bee-keeper; for our menagerie in the lower viscera,
+according to the Platonic allegory, barks and bleats in unison with the
+external one.&mdash;When Victor actually went with the old man round the
+house and among the bee-hives, then he came back into the supper-room
+with the face of a man who claimed already a seat in the Kussewitz
+Church and a page in the church-book. Did he not already know that the
+bee-father had followed three parsons and five squires in Kussewitz to
+the grave; that he had celebrated his first marriage with his &quot;mother&quot;
+(so he called his wife) at the age in which the silver wedding usually
+falls; that his head had still memory and hair; that he expected to
+carry black eyebrows under the coffin-lid; that he, Lind, had not the
+least need, like old <i>Gobel</i> and even the beadle <i>Stenz</i>, for the
+sake of his eyes, to take his place near the church-window, but
+could read his verse anywhere; and that he once every year went to
+Maienthal to church, and thrust a sovereign<a name="div2Ref_113" href="#div2_113"><sup>[113]</sup></a> into the church
+billiard-pocket,<a name="div2Ref_114" href="#div2_114"><sup>[114]</sup></a> because the churchyard there covered all his
+relations on the father's side?</p>
+<br>
+
+<p class="normal">O, this contentment with the evening-clouds of life refreshes the
+hypochondriacal hearer and spectator, whose melancholy strings in an
+old man's presence begin so easily to tremble like a death-watch; and
+an ardent old man seems to us an immortal being, hardened against the
+scythe of death, and a finger-post pointing to the next world! Victor
+especially saw, with heavy thoughts, in an old man, an organized past,
+a bent incarnation of years, the plaster cast of his own mummy standing
+before him. Every childish, forgetful, petrified old man reminded him
+of the masters of forges, who in their old age, like the human soul,
+have to undergo a crab-like promotion, and on account of their usual
+loss of sight become casters again,&mdash;then head smiths,&mdash;then foundery
+apprentices. The good Newton,<a name="div2Ref_115" href="#div2_115"><sup>[115]</sup></a> Linnæus, Swift, went back to be
+foundery-apprentices of learning. But so singularly timid is man, that,
+while he regards his soul, in its greatest <i>advantageous</i> dependence
+upon his organs, still as a <i>vowel</i>,&mdash;and justly,&mdash;nevertheless, in the
+case of an <i>injurious</i> dependence upon the same, fears it may be merely
+a <i>consonant</i> of the body,&mdash;and <i>that</i> unjustly.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">As a walk about a strange place gives a traveller the best
+naturalization act, and as Victor was incapable of being anywhere a
+stranger, he went&mdash;out a little way. There are many nights when it is
+not night. He saw outside, not far from the garden-fence of the senior
+(not the seignior of nobility, but the senior parson), a very beautiful
+girl sitting, buried in a Latin Whitsuntide programme, and praying from
+it with folded hands. A case of beauty and craziness united he never
+could resist; he greeted her, and would not let her roll up and put up
+her Latin prayer-book. The good soul, having lost her prayer-book and
+paternoster, had easily despatched her devotions out of the Whitsuntide
+programme <i>De Chalifis literarum studiosis</i>, as she neither understood
+Latin nor how to read, and looked upon the folding of the hands as a
+Masonic finger-speech, which would be readily understood in the <i>higher
+places</i>. She unrolled from a paper a sixth finger which had been cut
+off, and said the cloister of Mary in Flachsenfingen, on whose mother
+of God her father had wished to hang it as a thank-offering, would not
+accept it, because it was not made of silver. As Buffon ascribes to
+man's fingers the clearness of his ideas, so that the thoughts may be
+dissected at the same time with the hand, it follows that one who has a
+<i>sext</i><a name="div2Ref_116" href="#div2_116"><sup>[116]</sup></a> of fingers, must think 1/6 or 1/11 the more clearly; and
+such a one, with such a supernumerary writing-finger, could do more in
+the sciences than we with the whole hand.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">She related that her father would not marry her till after two years,
+and that his son could get her sister, if she were not only just
+six years old,&mdash;and they two had been adopted as children by the
+six-finger,&mdash;and that he had his bijouterie shop wherewith he wandered
+from one ducal palace to another; just now in that of the Count of
+O&mdash;, together with board and lodging, and that he was an Italian,
+named <i>Tostato</i>. Heavens! Victor knew him full well. Without further
+question&mdash;for he loved besides to go a Sabbath-day's journey or two
+with any girl or any Pomeranian dog, and used to say he never would
+make the least distinction between a new face and a pretty one, even if
+he were obliged to&mdash;he marched off with her straight toward the Count's
+to see her father. He peeled off more and more of the hull of his
+little maid of honor: she was not only uncommonly beautiful, but
+equally&mdash;stupid.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">But now she ran away from him; the Flachsenfingen Court came travelling
+along, and she must needs see the ladies alight. He kept close to the
+tail of the whole corps, which was still trailing along the street,
+while half the rump was already in the palace. The draggling tail was
+somewhat short and thin, consisting of the Court-apothecary Zeusel, who
+from vanity was on hand with his fifty-four years and his youthful
+clothes and his bumping coach to take part in the affair. The smallest
+man in the world, in the biggest carriage in the world, could so little
+be looked upon as an <i>entity</i>, that I count his coach as an empty
+ceremonial coach, in which the coachman shook him about like a dry
+kernel in a walnut.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">I will describe more copiously how the coachman winnowed and bolted
+him, and will make it up by being shorter in matters of less
+consequence.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Of course, if I should lay such an imputation upon the coachman as to
+say that he knew how by speed and stones to give the coach-body that
+hard pulsation, which made Zeusel sit more on the air than on the
+coach-cushion,&mdash;then would Kästner in Göttingen reply to me, and prove
+that the apothecary himself, by the counteraction which he produced
+upon the cushion by his posteriors, was to blame for the repulsion of
+the homologous pole; but we have, I trust, less to do here with the
+truth than with the apothecary. Victor, as Court-doctor, took a
+<i>distant</i> interest in the apothecary; nay, he would gladly have begged
+the favor of being allowed to get in and sit by his side, that he might
+see more distinctly how the skilful Vetturino sent the ball, Zeusel,
+into the air. But to the weak nerves of Victor comic scenes, by the
+physical suffering which they in reality brought with them, were too
+hard and sharp,&mdash;and he contented himself with following behind the
+bouncing box, and merely conceiving how the thing inside rose like a
+barometer to indicate the pleasant weather of the drunken coachman,&mdash;he
+merely pictured it out to himself (therefore I need not) how the good
+little courtier at a climax, to which the fellow brought him (who ended
+every lift with a higher one), would thrust his left hand, not into his
+waistcoat pocket, but merely into the coach-strap, while in his right
+he would be obliged to warm and squeeze for an hour a pinch of snuff,
+which for want of a quiet moment he could not raise to his empty nose
+till the rascal of a coachman cried, Brrr!</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Come along! said the stupid girl to Victor, and drew him to her
+father's. The Italian made his windmill gesture, and placed himself
+against Victor's ear and whispered into it, <i>Dio vi salvi!</i><a name="div2Ref_117" href="#div2_117"><sup>[117]</sup></a> and
+the latter thanked him in a still lower voice in Italian, <i>Gran
+mercè!</i><a name="div2Ref_118" href="#div2_118"><sup>[118]</sup></a> Thereupon Tostato breathed three or four uncommonly
+soft-voiced curses into Victor's ear-cell. He had not lost his wits,
+but only his voice, and that only by a cold. He cursed and condoled
+about it, that to-morrow, of all days, he should have to be dumb as a
+haddock, precisely when so much was to be cut. Victor congratulated
+him sincerely on that very account, and begged him to accept him till
+to-morrow, not only as Doctor, but also as partner and spokesman; he
+would talk for him in the shop to-morrow, in order the better and
+incognito to see all that went on. &quot;If you will tell me to-day,&quot;
+replied Tostato, &quot;one more funny story.&quot; And now when he actually
+produced the adventure of Zeusel with an Italian systole and diastole
+of the hands, and when Tostato grew foolish with laughing at the
+joke,&mdash;(the Italian and Frenchman laugh with the whole body, the
+Englishman only in the brain,)&mdash;then was it no wonder that he took him
+into partnership at once. His doctorship he began by pulling off the
+patient's stocking and binding it round the untuned throat, for a warm
+stocking is worn with equal medicinal benefit on foot and neck; with a
+garter it would be different.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Now the beauty and stupidity of the programme-pray-er appeared greater
+than ever in his eyes; he would gladly have kissed her, but it was
+impracticable: the Bijoutier followed him about everywhere, eager for
+his witty overflowings, and held both ears under to catch the drops.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">He took this occasion, as he thought of the German indifference
+to wit and the fine arts, to lay down the fundamentally false
+proposition,&mdash;The Englishman, the Frenchman, and the Italian are <i>men</i>;
+the Germans are <i>citizens</i>. The latter <i>earn</i> life; the former <i>
+enjoy</i>
+it. And the Dutch are a cheaper edition of the Germans on mere printing
+paper and without engravings.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">He was on the point of going back to bee-keeper Lind's: when at this
+late hour of the night&mdash;so late that the Court-courier had set down the
+appearance of this comet a whole hour too soon in his astronomical
+tables&mdash;the Princess with her attendant atmosphere arrived. As he had
+talked of her so long, he needed nothing more to make him love her,
+than to hear the rolling of her chariot and the silk-rustle of her
+walk. &quot;A princely bride,&quot; he said, &quot;can be much better endured than
+another; show me any other difference between a Crown-princess, a
+crowned bride, and a crowned wife, than that which the state-almanac
+assigns.&quot; Whoever shall further consider, that he knew her personal
+disinclination towards the Prince, who at his first marriage had
+postponed her for her sister,&mdash;and whoever reads now what I here
+mention that Tostato told him she had a handkerchief in her hand on
+alighting from her carriage,&mdash;such a one will already be wise enough
+not to be angry at his saying: &quot;I would that these crown-beasts, who
+are suffered to snap off the fair white hands of such a beautiful
+child, as swine eat off the tender ones of children&mdash;I would... but my
+wares, of course, will be near enough to her to-morrow to admit my
+seeing the handkerchief, Mr. Partner.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">At the Bee-father's, to whom he went home again, there was a more
+tranquil world, and his house stood in the green, silent as a cloister
+of sleep around a holy place of dreams. Victor pushed his little bed on
+the attic floor towards an opening through which the moon streamed in,
+and thus, overhung with hushed swallows' and wasps' nests, he saw peace
+in the form of Luna float down to his own nest; but she smiled upon him
+so potently that at length he sank away dissolved into guileless
+dreams. Good man! thou deservest the bright flower-pieces of dreams,
+and a fresh nosegay of head and breast on waking; thou hast never yet
+tormented any man, never yet supplanted any one, overcome no female
+honor, nor ever bartered away thy own; and thou art merely a little too
+volatile, too effeminate, too gay, too human.</p>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<p class="center"><img border="0" src="images/shieldstart.png" alt="shieldstart"></p>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+
+<h2><a name="div1Ref_11" href="#div1_11">11. DOG-POST-DAY.</a></h2>
+<br>
+
+<p class="center"><span class="sc2">Transfer of the Princess.&mdash;Smuggling of a Kiss.&mdash;Montre
+à Regulateur.&mdash;Simultaneous Love.</span></p>
+<br>
+
+<p class="normal">Voltaire, who never could write a good comedy, would not have been
+competent to create this Eleventh Dog-post-day.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">In regard to the Eleventh Dog-post-day I remark, to be sure, that
+Nature has created plants with all variety of numbers of stamens, only
+none with eleven, and seldom also men with eleven fingers.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Meanwhile life, like shell-fish, tastes best in the months without R.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">In reply to this, some say that the pen of an author goes, like a
+watch, the faster, the longer it has been going; but I reverse it, and
+say rather, men who write much make fast writers.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">And yet people cannot well bear men who are the fifth wheel of a coach;
+but every baggage-wagon has a fifth wheel strapped on behind it, and in
+case of accident this is a true <i>wheel of fortune</i>. Reinhold read
+Kant's Critique through <i>five times</i> before he understood it. I pledge
+myself to be more intelligible to him, and require to be read only half
+as often.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">To speak out freely, I cherish some contempt for a head full of elastic
+ideas, which jump with their spring-feet from one cerebral chamber to
+another; for I find no difference between them and the elastic worms in
+the intestines, which Götze saw, before a light, leap to the height of
+three inches.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Of course the following thought does not rightly hang together with the
+foregoing chain of conclusions and flowers; namely, that I am afraid of
+finding imitators, and so much the more as I am, here, myself, one of a
+certain class of witty authors. In Germany no great author can light a
+new torch, and hold it out into the world till he is tired and throws
+away the fag-end of it, without the little ones immediately pouncing
+upon it, and running round and shining round for half-years longer with
+the little end of a light. Thus have I (and others) in Ratisbon been
+run after a thousand times by the boys, who held in their hands
+remnants of wax-torches which the ambassadorial retinue had thrown
+away, and offered to light me to my landlord's for a few kreutzers ...
+<i>Stultis sat!</i><a name="div2Ref_119" href="#div2_119"><sup>[119]</sup></a></p>
+
+<p class="normal">In the morning Victor hastened to the palace. He got a tradesman's
+dress and the shop. At ten o'clock came on the &quot;transfer&quot; of the
+Princess. The three apartments in which it was to take place stood,
+with their folding doors, opposite to his shop. He had never yet seen
+the Princess&mdash;except all night in his dreams, and he can hardly wait
+for it all....</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Nor the reader either: does he not even now snuff his candle and his
+nose,&mdash;fill up pipe and glass,&mdash;change his position, if he rides
+upon a so-called <i>reading-ass</i>,<a name="div2Ref_120" href="#div2_120"><sup>[120]</sup></a>&mdash;press the book smoothly open, and
+say with uncommon delight, &quot;I am somewhat sharp-set for that
+description!&quot;&mdash;I verily, am not at all; I feel as if I were to be shot
+with arquebuses. Positively! an infantry-soldier who in midwinter
+storms a hostile wall of the thickest paper, in the opera, has his
+heaven on earth, compared with a mining-superintendent of my stamp.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">For one who drinks coffee and sets out to make a description of any
+school-act of the Court,&mdash;e. g. of a Court-day, of a marriage, (in
+fact, of the preliminaries thereof,) of a Transfer,&mdash;such a drinker
+pledges himself to reproduce scenes, whose dignity is so extremely fine
+and fugitive that the smallest false by-stroke and half-shadow makes
+them perfectly ridiculous,&mdash;hence even spectators, on account of such
+accidental touches, laugh at them <i>in naturâ</i>;<a name="div2Ref_121" href="#div2_121"><sup>[121]</sup></a>&mdash;he pledges
+himself, I say, so to reproduce such scenes, bordering on the comic,
+that the reader shall remark the dignity, and be as little able to
+laugh at them as if he himself were one of the performers. It is true I
+may presume to count upon myself somewhat, or rather upon the fact,
+that I myself have been at Courts and acted the part of master of the
+Harpsichord (whether this was a mask of higher honors or not, I leave
+here undecided); from a privilege, then, which has fallen to me alone
+of almost the whole scribbling Hansa, and to which I actually and
+gladly own my indebtedness for that preponderance which has (by some)
+been detected in me over the so inferior crew of authors in the
+<i>Scientiâ media</i><a name="div2Ref_122" href="#div2_122"><sup>[122]</sup></a> of courts,&mdash;therefrom, I say, one should promise
+one's self almost extraordinary things. I fear, however, we shall come
+off slimly; for I was not even able to rehearse to my pupil Gustav the
+crown-suit in Frankfort seriously enough to make him leave off
+laughing. So, too, Yorick never could scold in such a way as to drive
+his people off, but they always took it as a joke.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">It would have been my misfortune if I had depicted the transfer of the
+Princess (I thought at first, to be sure, there would then be more
+dignity in it) under the figure of the transfer of a house to creditors
+sealed with a chip of the door, or as a transfer of a fief by
+<i>investitura per zonam</i>, or <i>per annulum</i>, or <i>per baculum
+secularem</i>.<a name="div2Ref_123" href="#div2_123"><sup>[123]</sup></a> But I have luckily hit upon the thought of portraying
+the transfer, under the poetic garb of a historical benefit-comedy,
+with that dignity which theatres give. I have, for that purpose,
+as much and more unity of place&mdash;(three chambers)&mdash;of time&mdash;(a
+forenoon)&mdash;and of interest&mdash;(the whole joke)&mdash;in my hands, as I need.
+And if an author reads through beforehand, into the bargain, as I do,
+the saddest serious works, Young's Night Thoughts, the uncatholic
+<i>gravamina</i> of the Lutherans, the third volume of Siegwart, and his own
+love-letters; if, further, he has never yet trusted himself, without
+first laying before him and running through Home's and Beattie's
+excellent observations on the source of the comic, in order to know at
+once what comic sources he was to avoid;&mdash;such an author can safely,
+without fear of vainglory, make and fulfil the promise to his readers,
+that, thus comically guarding himself against the comic, he may perhaps
+be able, not wholly without touches of sublimity, to deliver and depict
+the following</p>
+<br>
+
+<h3>HISTORICAL BENEFIT-COMEDY OF THE TRANSFER OF THE PRINCESS.</h3>
+
+<h4>IN FIVE ACTS.</h4>
+<br>
+<p class="normal">The half-word Benefit signifies merely the profit which I myself gain
+from it.</p>
+
+<p class="normal"><span class="sc">Act First</span>.&mdash;Of three chambers, the middle one is the scene of the play,
+the trading-mart where they exhibit, the hall of <i>correlation</i>
+(Ratisbonically speaking) where all matters of importance are referred
+and matured. On the other hand, in the first adjoining chamber is
+stowed the Italian, and in the second the Flachsenfingen court, each
+calmly awaiting the beginning of a part for which Nature has formed it.
+These two apartments I regard only as the sacristies of the central
+one.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">The middle chamber, i. e. its curtain, which consists of two
+folding-doors, at last rises and shows to partner Sebastian, who is
+peeping out from his shop beside the catarrhal half of the firm, a
+great deal. There appears at the door of coulisse No. 1 a red-velvet
+chair; again, at the door of coulisse No. 2, another, a brother and
+relative of the first; these duplicates are the seats whereon the
+Princess sits in the course of the action, not because weariness, but
+because her rank, expressly desires it. One discovers now (caught in
+the Act it may be said to be) a long fringed table, dividing the middle
+chamber (which is itself a hyphen to the two coulisses) into two
+halves. One would not expect that this session-table, in its turn,
+would be again halved by something which a stupid person hardly sees.
+But let a man step into Victor's shop; then will he have a view of a
+strip of silk-cord, which, beginning under the pier-table, streaming
+across the agate floor and under the partition-table, ends in front
+on the threshold; and thus a mere silk-band easily divides the
+dividing-table and thereby the dividing-chamber, and finally
+the divided company of performers, into two of the most equal
+halves,&mdash;whence let us learn that at court everything is cut up, and
+even the prorector, in his time and turn, is stretched out on the
+dissecting-table. Of this silk-lace, wherewith the grand seignior
+divides his favorites from above downwards, but into fractions, we
+cannot and must not say any more in the First Act, because&mdash;it is
+over....</p>
+
+<p class="normal">I found it uncommonly easy to draw up this scene in a serious manner;
+for as, according to Plattner, the ridiculous attaches only to man, the
+sublime, which in my performance assumes the place of the comic, was
+easy to be had in an act where nothing living played, not even cattle.</p>
+
+<p class="normal"><span class="sc">Act Second</span>.&mdash;The stage grows now more alive, and upon it enters now the
+Princess, handed in by the Italian Minister from coulisse No. 1; both
+act at first, like nature, silently on this parade-ground, which on
+paper is already two pages long....</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Just one look from the stage into the stage-box! Victor is playing also
+on his own account, in the fact that he picks out from the lorgnettes
+which he has to sell the most concave, and gets therewith a view
+of the heroine of my benefit-comedy.... He saw the confession- and
+praying-stool on which she had to-day already knelt. &quot;I wish,&quot; he said
+to Tostato, &quot;I had been her father confessor to-day; I would have
+pardoned her her sins, but not her virtues.&quot; She had, in fact, that
+regular statuesque and Madonna's-face, which covers quite as often
+hollow as well-filled female heads; her courtly <i>début</i> concealed, it
+is true, every wave and every gleam of wit and expression under the icy
+crust of decorum; but a soft, childlike eye, which makes us eager for
+her voice, a patience, which remembers rather her sex than her rank, a
+weary soul which yearned for a twofold repose, perhaps for her maternal
+fields, even an unnoticeable line around the eyes, drawn by pain in
+those organs, or perhaps by still deeper ones,&mdash;all these charms, which
+grew into sparks, cast into the dry tinder of the partner behind the
+eye-glass, made him in his box regularly half-crazy at the fate of such
+charms. And how could it do otherwise than make one's head hot,
+especially when the heart is already so, to think that these innocent
+victims, like the Moravian women, must see alps and oceans rise between
+their cradle and bridal-bed, and that cabinets export them like
+silkworm-seed in the cornucopia of despatches?... We turn again to our
+Second Act, wherein one proposes nothing more than to&mdash;arrive.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Coulisses Nos. 1 and 2 are still choke-full of actors and actresses,
+who must now come out. This is the day on which two courts, like two
+armies, are halted over against each other in two rooms, composedly
+preparing themselves for the minute when they are to march out and
+stand face to face, until at last it actually comes to that point, to
+which after such preparations and in such nearness to each other it
+very naturally must come, that of going away. The cubic contents of No.
+1 stream after the Princess, consisting of Italians;&mdash;at the same
+moment, also, the court-retinue from coulisse No. 2 takes up its line
+of march towards head-quarters; it consists of Flachsenfingenites. At
+this moment two countries&mdash;properly only their abstracted and
+evaporated spirits&mdash;stand quite near each other, and now all depends
+upon the silken strings beginning to operate which I stretched
+across the room in the first Act; for the boundary shiftings and
+population-mixings of two so contiguous lands as Germany and
+Italy would be in one room almost as inevitable as in a <i>Papal
+brain-chamber</i>, had we not the string; but <i>that</i> we have, and this
+keeps two populations, threatening to run into each other, so
+effectually apart, that it is only a pity and a shame&mdash;honesty feels
+the greatest&mdash;that the German Cabinets have not drawn some such cordon
+between themselves and the Italian; and did it not, then, depend upon
+them, where they would apply the cord,&mdash;to the floor, or to Italian
+hands or to Italian necks?</p>
+
+<p class="normal">When the English General History of the world and its German abridgment
+shall once have so nearly come up with the times as to take in hand and
+relate the year of this transfer, and among other things are able to
+remark that the Princess, after her entrance, seated herself in the
+velvet chair,&mdash;then should the Universal History quote the author from
+whom it borrows, namely, myself.... That was the second Act, and it was
+a very good one, and not so much comic as sublime.</p>
+
+<p class="normal"><span class="sc">Third Act</span>.&mdash;In this there is nothing but talking. A court is the
+parlor or talking-room of the country; the ministers and envoys are
+<i>listening-brethren</i>.<a name="div2Ref_124" href="#div2_124"><sup>[124]</sup></a> The Flachsenfingen Secretary read at a
+distance an Instrument, or the emption-bill of her marriage. Thereupon
+speeches were whispered,&mdash;two by the Italian minister,&mdash;two, also, by
+the Flachsenfingen minister (Schleunes),&mdash;none by the bride, which was
+a shorter way of saying nothing than that of the ministers was.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Since, now, this sublime Act were verily ended, if <i>I</i> should say
+nothing: it will, I trust, be allowed me for once, after many weeks, to
+obtain by begging and to append a little <i>extra-leaf</i>, and therein to
+say something.</p>
+<br>
+<h3>AN EXTRA-LEAF (BY GRACIOUS PERMISSION) UPON THE
+GREATER FREEDOM ENJOYED IN DESPOTISMS.</h3>
+
+<p class="normal">Not only in Gymnasia and republics, but even (as may be seen on the
+former page) in monarchies, speeches enough are made,&mdash;not to the
+people, but still to their <i>curatores absentes</i>.<a name="div2Ref_125" href="#div2_125"><sup>[125]</sup></a> Even so is there
+in monarchies freedom enough, although in despotisms there may be still
+more of it than in them or in republics. A true despotic state has,
+like a frozen cask of wine, not lost its <i>spirit</i> (of freedom), but
+only compressed it from the watery circumference into a fiery point; in
+such a happy state freedom is distributed merely among the few who are
+<i>ripe</i> for it, the Sultan and his Bashaws, and that goddess (who is
+pictured still oftener than the bird Ph&#339;nix) holds herself
+indemnified, and more and better than that, for the reduced <i>number</i> of
+her worshippers, by their <i>worth</i> and <i>ardor</i>, since her few
+<i>epopts</i><a name="div2Ref_126" href="#div2_126"><sup>[126]</sup></a> or <i>initiates</i>&mdash;the Bashaws&mdash;enjoy her influence in a
+measure of which a whole people is never capable. Freedom, like an
+inheritance, is lessened by the multitude of heirs; and I am convinced
+that he would be most free who should be free alone. A democracy and an
+oil-painting are to be put only on a canvas without <i>knots</i>
+(inequalities), but a despotism is a piece of <i>relieved</i> work,&mdash;or
+something still more rare: despotic freedom lives, like canary-birds,
+only in <i>high</i> cages; republican liberty, like yellow-hammers, only in
+<i>long</i> ones.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">A despot is the <i>practical reason</i> of a whole country; the subjects are
+just so many impulses contending therewith, which must be overcome. The
+legislative power, therefore, belongs to him alone (the executive to
+his favorites);&mdash;even mere talented men (like Solon and Lycurgus) held
+the law-giving power in themselves alone, and were the <i>magnetic
+needle</i> which <i>guided</i> the ship of state; a despot consists, as their
+throne-successor, of almost nothing but laws, his own and others at
+once, and is the magnetic mountain, which draws the ship of state to
+itself. &quot;To be one's own slave is the hardest slavery,&quot; said an old
+man, at least an ancient and a Latin; but the despot demands of others
+only the easier kind, and takes upon himself the harder. Another says
+<i>Parere scire, par imperio gloria est</i>;<a name="div2Ref_127" href="#div2_127"><sup>[127]</sup></a> a negro slave, therefore,
+wins glory and honor as much as a negro king. <i>Servi pro nullis
+habentur</i>;<a name="div2Ref_128" href="#div2_128"><sup>[128]</sup></a> hence it is that political nullities feel so little the
+pressure of the court atmosphere; whereas despotic realities earn their
+freedom by the very fact that they know so well how to feel and prize
+its worth. A republican in the nobler sense, e. g. the Emperor of
+Persia, whose liberty-cap is a turban and his liberty-tree a throne,
+fights for freedom behind his military Propaganda and behind his
+Sans-culottes with an ardor such as the ancient authors demand and
+depict in the Gymnasia. Nay, we are never justified in denying such
+enthroned republicans a Brutus's greatness of soul, before we have put
+them to the proof; and if in history good were delineated more than
+evil, one would have even now the means of showing, among so many
+Shahs, Khans, Rajahs, and Califs, many a Harmodius, Aristogeiton,
+Brutus, &amp;c. who was able to pay for <i>his</i> freedom (slaves contend for
+another's) even with the death of otherwise <i>good</i> men and friends.</p>
+
+<p class="center"><i>End of the graciously allowed Extra-leaf upon the greater Freedom
+enjoyed in Despotisms</i>.</p>
+<br>
+
+<p class="normal">The extra-leaf and the Third Act are ended, but the latter was shorter
+and more serious than the former has been.</p>
+
+<p class="normal"><span class="sc">Fourth Act</span>.&mdash;By the act of dropping the curtain and raising it again, I
+have carried the world over from the shortest Act into the longest. To
+the Princess who now, as the German Imperial History announces, is
+sitting&mdash;came her compatriots in a body, who neither looked very
+honest nor very stupid, the chief-governess, the Court-confessor, the
+Court-Æsculapius, ladies and servants and all. This court-train does
+not say its farewell,&mdash;that has already been said privately,&mdash;but
+merely recapitulates it by a silent bow. The next step of the united
+Italians was from the middle chamber to&mdash;Italy.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">The Italians passed along before Sebastian's warehouse, and wiped off
+from their faces, whose hard parts were <i>en haut-relief</i>,&mdash;the German
+were <i>en bas-relief</i>, a nobler glimmer than that which courts
+communicate: Victor saw among so many accentuated eye-sockets the
+multiplied signs of the melancholy with which he himself was oppressed
+as he thought of the willing stranger-heart which remained behind alone
+under the frosty canopy of the German throne and clouds, torn away from
+her loved ways and scenes, brought before microscopic eyes, whose focal
+point scorches into tender feelings, and bound to a breast of ice....</p>
+
+<p class="normal">When he thought of all this, and saw the compatriots, how they pocketed
+their feelings and packed themselves off, because they were not
+permitted to exchange another word with the Princess; and when he
+looked upon the mute, submissive form within there, who was not allowed
+to show any other <i>pearls</i> than Oriental ones, (although the dream and
+the possession of the latter signifies Western ones, or of the evening
+land,&mdash;tears, I mean,) then did he wish, &quot;Ah, that I could only, thou
+good creature, draw a treble veil over thy eye long enough for it to
+shed a tear!&mdash;might I only kiss that hand, so rudely set up at auction,
+as thy court-ladies are now doing, so as to inscribe with my tears upon
+the sold hand the nearness of a sympathizing heart.&quot; ...</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Be tender and expand not your hatred of princes into hatred of
+princesses! Shall a bowed-down female head not touch our hearts with
+pity, because it leans on a mahogany table? and shall great tears not
+move us, because they fall upon silk? &quot;It is too hard,&quot; Victor said,
+when in Hanover, &quot;that poets and <i>magistri legentes</i>, when they pass by
+a chateau, make, with an envious, malicious pleasure, the remark, In
+there as much bread of sorrow is baked, perhaps, as in fishermen's
+huts. O yes, doubtless greater and harder loaves! But is the eye, out
+of which in the badger's kennel of a Scotchman nothing extorts a tear
+but the smoke of the room, worthy of a greater compassion than the
+tender one which, like that of an Albino, smarts at the very rays of
+joy, and which the spirit fills with spiritual tears? Ah, down in the
+valleys only the skin is punctured, but up on the high places of rank,
+the heart; and the index-hand of the village clock moves merely around
+the hours of hunger and sweat, but the second-hand, set with
+brilliants, flies round dreary, despairing, bloody minutes.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">But fortunately never is rehearsed to us the passion-history of those
+womanly victims, whose hearts are tossed to the mint, and, like other
+jewels, cast among the throne-insignia,&mdash;who, as flowers with souls,
+hung upon an ermine-clad dead man's heart, fall to pieces, unenjoyed,
+on the bed of state, mourned by no one, save by a distant, tender soul,
+which finds no place in the Court-almanac....</p>
+
+<p class="normal">This Act consists of nothing but <i>goings</i>: in fact, this whole comedy
+resembles the life of a child. In the first Act, there was <i>providing
+of household furniture</i> for the coming existence; in the second, the
+<i>arrival</i>; in the third, <i>talking</i>; in the fourth, <i>learning to walk</i>,
+&amp;c.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">When Germany had delivered discourses enough to Italy, and Italy to
+Germany, then Germany, or rather Flachsenfingen, or properly a piece of
+it, the Minister Schleunes, took the Princess by the hand and led her
+out of the torrid zone into the frigid; I mean, not from the bridal bed
+to the wedded bed, but&mdash;from the Italian territory of the apartment
+into the Flachsenfingenite, away over the silken Rubicon. The
+Flachsenfingen court stands over yonder as right wing, and has not yet
+gone into the fight. So soon as she had passed the silken line, then it
+was well that the first thing she did in her new land should be
+something memorable; and in fact she did, before the eyes of her new
+court, take 4½ paces and&mdash;sit down in the Flachsenfingen chair, which I
+set out vacant for that purpose in the very first Act. Now, at last,
+the right wing marched into fire, for the kissing of hands and sleeves.
+Each one in the right wing&mdash;the left not at all&mdash;felt the dignity of
+what he entered upon, and this feeling which melted into one with
+personal pride came&mdash;as according to Plattner pride is akin to the
+sublime&mdash;quite <i>apropos</i> to my Benefit-farce, in which I cannot succeed
+in being sublime enough. Great and silent, embarked in silken bow-nets,
+buried in a gulf of robes, the court-dames sail up with their lips to
+the still hand which is fastened with conjugal manacles to a
+stranger's. Less stately, but still stately, is urged on, also, the
+Adamitish portion of the <i>Dramatis Personæ</i>, among whom, unfortunately,
+I see the apothecary Zeusel.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">We know no one among them but the minister, his son Mat, who does not
+observe anything whatever of our hero, the Physician in ordinary to the
+Princess, Culpepper, who, transformed by fat and his doctor's beaver
+into a heavy Lot's-pillar-of-salt, pushes himself like a turtle into
+the presence of the Regent and Patient.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">No mortal knows how Zeusel torments me. Contrary to all order of
+precedence, I prefer to present, sooner than I do him, the fat
+livery-servants, swollen into knavish stupidity, whose coats consist
+less of threads than of laces, and who bend themselves like yellow
+ribbon-preparations before weary eyes, wont to look on fairer forms.
+Victor regarded, through his English opera-glass, the Italian glazed
+court-faces as at least picturesquely beautiful; on the contrary, he
+found the German parade-masks so worn out and yet so starched, so
+languid and yet so on the stretch, their looks so evaporated and
+yet so brimstone-smoked!... I still keep Zeusel back by means of some
+Easter-lambs or <i>agnus Dei's</i> of pages' faces, soft and white as mites;
+a nurse would like to lay them with their nipple-glass-mouths to her
+breast.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Zeusel was no longer to be restrained; he has broken through and has
+the Princess by the wing&mdash;the whole joke of this play, I mean the whole
+serious meaning of it, is now once for all spoiled. This gray fool has
+in his old days&mdash;his nights are still older&mdash;buttoned himself into a
+complete historical copper-plate, that is to say, into a zoölogical
+fashionable waistcoat, wherein, with his four variegated rings, too, he
+looks for all the world like a green game-wagon, on which the animal
+pieces of the whole chase are painted, and four rings for the ringing
+of the swine's snouts are there <i>in naturâ</i>.<a name="div2Ref_129" href="#div2_129"><sup>[129]</sup></a> I must now see and
+suffer it,&mdash;as he does everything in the past,&mdash;while he, fuddled with
+vanity and hardly able to distinguish watch-chains from gala-coats,
+runs up and catches at some silken stuff to kiss it. It was easy to
+foresee that the man would spoil my whole altar-piece with his
+historical figure; I would absolutely have suppressed the ninny and
+covered him up behind the frame of the picture, had he not with his
+flappers and skippers stood out too prominently and made too much of a
+chattering; and then, too, my correspondent has expressly introduced
+and designated him among the benefit-confederates. It hardly pays for
+the trouble to write&mdash;</p>
+
+<p class="normal"><span class="sc">Act Fifth</span>; since all is now thrown into pickle and the reading world is
+in a grin. In the Fifth Act, which I make without any gusto, there
+still continued to be nothing done,&mdash;whereas Tragedy-makers and
+Christians turn over the conversion and all important matter into the
+last Act, as, according to Bacon, a courtier thrust his petitions into
+the Postscript,&mdash;nothing, I say, except that the Princess let her new
+maids of honor do their first example in arithmetic and subtraction;
+namely, the problem of disrobing.... And as undressing concludes the
+fifth Acts of Tragedies, where Death does it,&mdash;and of Comedies, where
+Love does it,&mdash;so, too, would this Benefit-Comedy, which, like our
+life, wavers between Comedy and Tragedy, wearily end with an
+undressing.</p>
+
+<p class="center"><i>End of the Benefit-Comedy</i>.</p>
+<br>
+
+<p class="normal">I was too much excited yesterday. To be sure the Apothecary is the Dog
+and Cat, in my picture, biting each other under the table of the Holy
+Supper; but, upon the whole, the very farce is sublime. Let one just
+consider that all is carried on in a monarchical form of government,
+which, according to Beattie, more than the republican form, helps out
+the comic,&mdash;that, according to Addison and Sulzer, precisely the most
+waggish men are the gravest, and that, consequently, the same thing
+must hold in regard to the stuff they work;&mdash;one must then see at once,
+from the comic element which my Acts contain, that they are serious....</p>
+
+<p class="normal">My hero delivered in the shop a vehement Father Merz's controversial
+sermon <i>against</i> something which imperial cities and towns preach in
+favor of: &quot;That men can act so without brains, the white or the gray,
+and without a particle of taste, as not to be ashamed sinfully and like
+dogs to fritter away the two or three years in which Pain has them not
+yet in his game-ticket, nor Death on his night-list,&mdash;not in doing
+absolutely nothing, or in the half bar-rests of chancery-holidays or
+the whole bar-rests of comitial holidays, or with the whimsicalities of
+joy,&mdash;what were more laudable?&mdash;but with the whimsicalities of torture,
+with twelve Herculean labors to do nothing, in the correction-houses of
+antechambers, on the <i>tratto di corda</i> of tight-strung ceremonials....
+My dear seneschal, my fairest chief-governess, I approve all; but
+life is so <i>short</i> that it does not repay the trouble to make one's
+self a <i>long</i> queue<a name="div2Ref_130" href="#div2_130"><sup>[130]</sup></a> therein.&mdash;Could we not shake out our hair,
+and leap over all entrance-halls (or -hells), over all ushers and
+dancing-masters, away into the very midst of the May-flowers of our
+days, and into their flower-cups?... I will not express myself
+abstractly and scholastically; if I did, I should have to say, Like
+dogs, ceremonies grow mad with age; like dancing-gloves, each serves
+only for once, and must then be thrown away; but man is such a curséd
+ceremonious creature, that one must swear he knows no greater or longer
+day than the diet<a name="div2Ref_131" href="#div2_131"><sup>[131]</sup></a> of Ratisbon.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">While Victor was at his meal, Tostato was not present, but in the shop.
+Now he had already, the evening before, been unable to get out of his
+head a design of kissing the pretty dunce. &quot;If I can kiss a saint who
+is stupid as a cow but <i>once</i>, then I have peace for the rest of my
+life.&quot; But, unluckily, the so-called <i>smallest</i> (the sister), whose
+understanding and nose were too great, had to float round the dunce, as
+bob to the angle; and the bob would instantly have twitched, had he so
+much as put a lip to the bait. However, he was cunning, at least: he
+took our <i>smallest</i> on his knee, and danced her up as Zeusel's coachman
+did him, and called this <i>clever</i> one sweet names over her head, all of
+which he dedicated with his eyes to the <i>stupid</i> one (at court he will
+dedicate with reversed dissimulation). He covered up twice in joke the
+spying eyes of the <i>smallest</i>, merely in order to do it a third time in
+earnest, when he drew the dunce to himself, and with his right hand
+brought her into a position, where he could,&mdash;especially as she allowed
+it, because girls do not like to refuse a trick, often from the mere
+pleasure of guessing it,&mdash;amidst his court-services to the blind one,
+offer the other the hasty kiss, for which he had already contrived so
+many <i>avant-propos</i> and lines of march. Now was he satisfied and well;
+if he had been compelled to lie in wait two evenings longer for the
+kiss, he would have fallen deeply in love.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">He was again sitting at his masthead when the Princess dined. It took
+place with open doors. She stirred up his wild-fire of love with the
+gold spoon as often as she pressed it to her small lips; she scattered
+the fire apart again with the two toothpicks (sweet and sour) as often
+as she resorted to them. Tostato &amp; Co. disposed to-day of the most
+costly articles. No man knew the <i>&amp; Co</i>.,&mdash;only Zeusel looked more
+sharply into Victor's face, and thought, &quot;I must have seen you before.&quot;
+Towards half past two in the afternoon, good luck would have it that
+the Princess herself came to the shop, to look up Italian flowers for a
+little girl with whom she had fallen in love. In all masquerades, as
+every one knows, one takes masquerade liberties, and in every journey
+the freedom of a fair. Victor, who in disguises and on journeys was
+almost too bold, undertook to speak in the mother-tongue of the
+Princess, and, in fact, with wit. &quot;The Devil,&quot; thought he, &quot;cannot
+surely catch me for that.&quot; He remarked, therefore, with the tenderest
+complacency toward this fair child in Moloch's arms, simply this in
+regard to the silk-flowers: &quot;The flowers of joy, too, are unhappily,
+for the most part, made of velvet and iron wire, and with the
+<i>shaping-iron</i>.&quot; It was only a miracle that he was polite enough to
+leave out the circumstance that it was just the Italian nobility who
+elaborated the Italian Flora. She looked, however, at his goods, and
+bought, instead of flowers, a <i>montre à régulateur</i>,<a name="div2Ref_132" href="#div2_132"><sup>[132]</sup></a> which she
+requested to have brought over to her.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">He delivered the watch to her with his own hand; but, unfortunately, no
+less with his own hand&mdash;the reader will be frightened, but at first he
+himself was frightened, and yet thought over the conceit till at last
+he approved it&mdash;had he previously stuck on, above the <i>Imperator</i> of
+the watch, a delicate strip of paper, wherein, with his own hand, he
+had written, in pearl type: &quot;<i>Rome cacha le nom de son dieu et elle eut
+tort; moi je cache celui de ma déesse et j'ai raison</i>.&quot;<a name="div2Ref_133" href="#div2_133"><sup>[133]</sup></a></p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;I know this people well enough,&quot; thought he; &quot;they never open or wind
+up a watch in their life!&quot; Ha, Sebastian! what will my reader or <i>thy</i>
+lady reader think?</p>
+
+<p class="normal">She started this very evening for the country she had obtained by
+marriage, the future string-floor of her sceptre. Our Victor felt
+almost as if he had transferred another heart than the metal one with
+the billet, and thought with pleasure of the Flachsenfingen court.
+Before her ran her copied bridegroom or his litter, from which he
+alighted on the wall of the bedchamber. As he was her god, I can
+compare him or his image with the images of the ancient gods, who were
+carried round on a peculiar <i>vis-à-vis</i>, called a <i>thensa</i>,<a name="div2Ref_134" href="#div2_134"><sup>[134]</sup></a>&mdash;or
+in
+a portrait-box, called [Greek: &#957;&#945;&#959;&#962;, naos],<a name="div2Ref_135" href="#div2_135"><sup>[135]</sup></a>&mdash;or in a cage, called
+[Greek: kadiskon].<a name="div2Ref_136" href="#div2_136"><sup>[136]</sup></a></p>
+
+<p class="normal">Thereupon Victor went with his commercial consul round behind the
+coulisses of the benefit theatre. He untied the silken demarcation-line
+and barring-chain,&mdash;drew it up like a disgusting hair,&mdash;felt of
+it,&mdash;held it first far from his eye, then near to it,&mdash;and pulled it
+apart, before he said: &quot;The power may lie where it will,&mdash;a silk ribbon
+may insulate bodies politic as well as electrical, or it may be with
+princes as with cocks, who never can get a step farther, if one takes
+chalk and draws therewith a straight line from their bill to the
+ground,&mdash;nevertheless this much you see, partner,&mdash;if an Alexander
+should displace the boundary-stones, such a string would be, in
+opposition thereto, the best epitome of the natural law and a
+<i>barrière-alliance</i> of the same nature.&quot; He went into her bedroom, to
+the empty sepulchre,&mdash;that is, to the bed of the risen bride,&mdash;into
+which the <i>sponsus</i> could look down as he lay at anchor on the wall.
+Whole divisions of conceits marched mutely through his head, which,
+thus full, he pressed sidewise with his cheek against a silken pillow,
+as large as a lap-dog's, or the side-cushion of a carriage. Thus
+reclining and kneeling, he said, speaking half into the feathers:<a name="div2Ref_137" href="#div2_137"><sup>[137]</sup></a>
+&quot;Would that on the other pillow also there lay a face looking into
+mine! Dear Heaven! two human faces opposite each other,&mdash;each drawing
+the other into its eyes,&mdash;listening to each other's sighs,&mdash;breathing
+away from each other the soft, transparent words,&mdash;that were what you
+and I absolutely could not stand, partner!&quot;&mdash;He sprang up, gently
+patted down his hare's form smooth again, and said, &quot;Lay thyself softly
+around the heavy head which sinks upon thee; smother not its dreams;
+betray not its tears.&quot; Had even the Count of O&mdash;, with his fine,
+ironical look, come in at this moment, he would not have minded this.
+It is unfortunate for us Germans that we alone&mdash;while to the Englishman
+even a world's-man sets down his hare's leaps, caprioles, and gambols
+as so many elegant <i>pas</i>, <i>forward capers</i> and <i>backward capers</i>
+and
+<i>side-capers</i>&mdash;cannot possibly march along with sufficient gravity and
+composure.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">At evening he ran in again to the harbor of his beekeeper; and his
+tossing heart threw out its anchor into the tranquil, blooming nature
+around him. The old man had meanwhile mustered up all his old papers,
+baptismal and marriage-certificates, and private documents of reference
+for the Nuremberg Bee-father's case, and said, &quot;Let the gentleman read
+them!&quot; He wanted himself to hear it all over again. He showed also his
+&quot;Trinity-ring&quot; from Nuremberg, in which was inscribed:</p>
+<div class="poem">
+<p class="t5" style="text-indent:-8px">
+&quot;Here, by this ring, you see,<br>
+Father, Son, Spirit, three,<br>
+Make one sole Deity.&quot;</p>
+</div>
+
+<p class="continue">The Bee-father went on to make no secret of it, that he formerly,
+before he procured this ring in Nuremberg on a court-day, had not been
+able to believe in the Trinity; &quot;but now one must be a beast, if he
+could not comprehend it.&quot;&mdash;The morning before his departure, Victor
+was in a double embarrassment,&mdash;he was very desirous of having a
+present; secondly, of making one. What he wanted to have was a plump
+hour-watch,<a name="div2Ref_138" href="#div2_138"><sup>[138]</sup></a> won at a raffle where the ticket was twenty kreutzers.
+This piece of work, whose thick hand had measured off the thread of the
+old man's life on the dirty dial-plate in nothing but gay, joyous
+bee-hours, he wanted as a Laurence's-box,<a name="div2Ref_139" href="#div2_139"><sup>[139]</sup></a> an amulet, an
+Ignatius's-plate,<a name="div2Ref_140" href="#div2_140"><sup>[140]</sup></a> against hours of Saul. &quot;A manual laborer,&quot; said
+he, &quot;needs really only a little sun, to go warmly and contentedly
+through life; but we, with our fantasy, are often as badly off on the
+sunny side as on the stormy side,&mdash;man stands more firmly in mud than
+on ether and morning-redness.&quot; He wanted to press upon the acceptance
+of the happy veteran of life, as purchase-money for the hour-watch and
+prize-medal for his lodgings, his own watch that told the seconds.
+Lind had not the heart for it, but grew red. At last Victor represented
+to him that the second-watch was a good fire-ball<a name="div2Ref_141" href="#div2_141"><sup>[141]</sup></a> for the
+Trinity-ring, a thesis-image of that article of faith, for the
+<i>threefold</i> hands made, after all, only <i>one</i> hour.&mdash;Lind <i>swapped</i>.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Victor could neither be the mocker nor the Bunclish<a name="div2Ref_142" href="#div2_142"><sup>[142]</sup></a> reformer of
+such an erring soul, and his sympathetic whimsicality is nothing but a
+doubting sigh over the human brain, which has its seventy <i>normal
+years</i>, and over life, which is an interim of faith, and over the
+theological doctors'-rings, which are just such Trinity-rings, and over
+the theological lecture-rooms and recitation-rooms, wherein just such
+second-telling watches indicate and strike.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&mdash;At last he leaves Kussewitz at six o'clock in the morning. A very
+beautiful daughter of the Count of O&mdash; did not come back until seven
+o'clock; that is fortunate for us all, for otherwise he would be still
+sitting there.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">The Dog-post-day is run out. I know not whether I should make an
+extra-leaf or not. The Intercalary Day is at the door; I will therefore
+let it be, and only insert a Pseudo-extra-leaf, which, as is well
+known, differs from a canonical merely in this,&mdash;that in the apocryphal
+I do not give notice by any superscription, but only slip off from the
+history in an underhand way to mere irrelevant things.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">I take up my historical thread again, and ask the reader what he
+thinks of Sebastian's flirtations. And how does he explain them to
+himself?&mdash;He replies, and philosophically indeed: &quot;Through Clotilda;
+she, by her magnetizing, has put him <i>en rapport</i> with the whole female
+world; she has knocked at this swarm of bees, and now there is no more
+peace.&mdash;A man may sit for twenty-six years cold and sighless in his
+book-dust; but when he has once breathed the ether of love, then is the
+oval hole of the heart forever shut, and he must go forth into the air
+of heaven and be continually gasping at it, as I see by the coming
+dog-post-days plainly enough.&quot; The reader has accustomed himself to a
+quaint philosophical style, but what he says is true; hence a maiden
+never sues so eagerly for a second lover for her stage as after
+the decease of the first, and after her vows to throw away her
+recruiting-license.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">But how could the reader fail to hit upon still weightier
+reasons,<a name="div2Ref_143" href="#div2_143"><sup>[143]</sup></a>&mdash;1. General love, and 2. Victor's maternal marks?</p>
+
+<p class="normal">1. General love is too little understood. There is as yet no
+description of it extant but mine,&mdash;namely, in our days,
+reading-cabinets, dancing-halls, concert-halls, vineyards,
+coffee-tables, and tea-tables are the forcing-houses of our hearts and
+the wire-mills of our nerves; the former are too big, the latter too
+fine. Now when, in these marriage-seeking and marriageless times, a
+young man, who still watches like a Jew for his female Messiah, and
+still is without the highest object of the heart, accidentally reads
+with a dancing-partner, with a lady member of his club, or an
+<i>associée</i>, or sister in office, or other collaboratress, a hundred
+pages in the &quot;Elective Affinities&quot; or in the Dog-post-days,&mdash;or
+exchanges from three to four letters with her upon the culture of silk
+or clover, or on Kant's <i>Prolegomena</i>,&mdash;or scrapes the powder from her
+forehead some five times with the powder-knife,&mdash;or with her, and by
+her side, ties up the intensely fragrant kidney-beans,&mdash;or actually at
+the ghostly hour (which becomes full as often the sentimental hour)
+quarrels with her on the first principle of morals;&mdash;then is this much
+certain,&mdash;that the aforesaid youth (provided <i>refinement</i>, <i>feeling</i>,
+and <i>reflection</i> hold a mutual balance within him) must needs behave a
+little madly, and feel towards the aforesaid collaboratress (that is,
+if she does not by some higglings of head or heart offend against his
+feelers) something which is too warm for friendship and too <i>unripe</i>
+for love,&mdash;which borders on the former, because it includes several
+objects, and on the latter, because of this it dies. And this is, in
+fact, neither more nor less than my general love, which I have
+otherwise called simultaneous and Tutti-<a name="div2Ref_144" href="#div2_144"><sup>[144]</sup></a>love. Examples are odious;
+else I would adduce mine. This universal love is a glove without
+fingers (or mitten), into which, because no partitions separate the
+four fingers, any hand easily slips; into the partial love, or the
+glove proper, only a single and particular hand can squeeze itself. As
+I was the first to discover this fact and island, I can give it the
+name wherewith others will have to name and call it. It shall be
+christened henceforward collective or simultaneous love, though
+I might also, if I and Kolbe chose, let it be named preluding
+love,&mdash;confederate-tenderness,&mdash;general warmth,&mdash;the fidelity of
+adopted childhood.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">To please the theologians and humor their fiddle-faddle about final
+causes, I throw in here the following fixed principle: I should like to
+see the man who, without this general love, could in our times, when
+paired love is, by the demands of a greater <i>metallic</i> and <i>moral</i>
+capital, made more rare, hold out three years.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">2. The second cause of Victor's so easily falling in love with women
+was his maternal mark,&mdash;i. e. a resemblance to his own and every
+mother. Besides, he asserted that his ideas had exactly the pace&mdash;that
+is, the leap&mdash;of woman's, and that he had, in fact, a great deal of
+woman in him; at least, women resemble him in this,&mdash;that their love
+springs up through talking and intercourse. Their love, it may safely
+be said, has not much oftener begun than ended in hatred and coldness.
+An imposed and hated bridegroom makes often a loved husband. &quot;I will,&quot;
+he used to say in Hanover, &quot;get into her heart's ears, if not into her
+heart. Could Nature, then, have built into the female bosom two such
+spacious heart-chambers&mdash;one can turn round therein&mdash;and two such neat
+heart's-alcoves&mdash;the heart's treasure-bag I have not yet touched
+upon&mdash;merely for this purpose, that a man's soul should hire these four
+apartments all alone without a mother's son beside, as a female soul
+inhabits the four cerebral chambers of the head's female suite? Quite
+impossible! and in fact they do no such thing: but (but whoever is
+afraid of immoderate wit, let him now step out of my track) in the two
+wings of this rotunda and in the side-buildings everything takes up its
+quarters that goes in, i. e. more than comes out&mdash;as in a toll-house or
+pigeon-house there is a constant coming and going&mdash;one cannot count, if
+one is there to see&mdash;it is a beautiful <i>temple</i> in which there is
+<i>right of thoroughfare</i>.&mdash;Such regard not the few who so shut
+themselves up as to give the chief box of the heart to only a single
+lover, and merely the two side boxes to a thousand friends.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Nevertheless Jean Paul never could succeed&mdash;though there might be ever
+so much surplus room&mdash;even so far as to get into the heart's ears,
+which, to be sure, is the very least thing. Because his face looks too
+meagre, his complexion too sallow, his head is much fuller than his
+pocket, and his income that of a titular-mining-superintendency: so
+they quarter the good rogue merely in the <i>coldest</i> place away up under
+the eaves of the <i>head</i> not far from the hair-pins,<a name="div2Ref_145" href="#div2_145"><sup>[145]</sup></a>&mdash;and there he
+is still sitting now and laughing out (in writing) his Eleventh
+Chapter....</p>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<p class="center"><img border="0" src="images/rivetstart.png" alt="rivetstart"></p>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+
+<h2><a name="div1Ref_12" href="#div1_12">12. DOG-POST-DAY.</a></h2>
+<br>
+
+<p class="center"><span class="sc2">Polar Fantasies.&mdash;The singular Isle of Union.&mdash;One more Bit from
+previous History.&mdash;The Stettin-Apple as Coat-of-Arms.</span></p>
+<br>
+
+<p class="normal">We are living now in the dark middle-ages of this Biography, and
+reading on toward the enlightened eighteenth century or Dog's-day.
+Still, even in this twelfth, as in the night before a fair day, great
+sparks fly. &quot;Spitz,&quot; said I, &quot;eat me out of what thou wilt, only
+enlighten the world.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Sebastian hastened on Saturday with joyful soul under an overclouded
+heaven to the island of Union. He could arrive there, if he did not
+delay, before the cloudiness was absorbed. Under a blue heaven, like
+Schickaneder<a name="div2Ref_146" href="#div2_146"><sup>[146]</sup></a> he brought out the Tragedies, but under an ashen-gray
+one the comedies, of his inner man. When it rained, he absolutely
+laughed out. Rousseau built up in his brain an <i>emotional</i> stage,
+because he cared neither to go out of the coulisse nor into a box of
+actual life; but Victor had in his pay between the bony walls of his
+head a <i>comic</i> theatre of the Germans, merely for the sake of not
+ridiculing <i>actual</i> men; his humor was as ideal as the virtue and
+sensibility of other people. In this mood he delivered (like a
+ventriloquist) purely internal discourses to all Potentates;&mdash;he posted
+himself on the bench of Knights with church-visitation-discourses,&mdash;on
+the bench of the cities with funeral-discourses,&mdash;in the Papal chair he
+held forth in straw-wreath<a name="div2Ref_147" href="#div2_147"><sup>[147]</sup></a>-discourses to the <i>virgin</i> Europe and
+the Ecclesiastical <i>bride</i>. The potentates had all, to answer him
+again, but one may imagine <i>how</i>&mdash;when he, like a minister from his
+prompter's hole put everything into their mouths;&mdash;and then, to be
+sure, he went his way and made fun of every one of them.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Mandeville says in his Travels, that at the North Pole in the
+winter-half of the year every word freezes, but in the summer-half
+thaws out again and is audible. This intelligence Victor pictured out
+to himself on the way to the island; we will lay our ears to his head
+and listen to the inner buzzing.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Mandeville and I are not at all obliged to explain why at the North
+Pole words, as well as spittle, turn to ice as they fall, just as
+quicksilver does there; but we are obliged to reason from the
+phenomenon. If a laughing heir wishes there long years to his testator:
+the good man does not hear the wish sooner than the following spring,
+which may already have laid him dead. The best Christmas sermons do not
+edify good souls before haying-time. Vainly does the Polar court lay
+its New-Year's wishes before <i>Serenissimo</i>; he hears them not, till
+warm weather, and by that time half of them have already miscarried.
+They ought, however, to place a <i>circular stove</i> as speaking-trumpet in
+the antechamber, so that one might hear in the <i>warmth</i> the court
+speaker. An oratorical brother, without a stove-heater, would there be
+a defeated man. The faro-player, to be sure, vents his curses on St.
+Thomas's day; but not until St. John's day, when he has already won
+again, do they begin to travel;<a name="div2Ref_148" href="#div2_148"><sup>[148]</sup></a> and one might make summer-concerts
+out of the winter ones without any instruments: all one has to do is to
+seat one's self in the hall. From what other cause can it arise that
+the Polar wars are often carried on half-years before the declaration
+of war, except from this, that the declaration issued in winter does
+not make itself heard till <i>good weather</i>?&mdash;And so, too, one cannot
+hear anything of the winter-campaigns of the Polar armies till during
+the summer-campaigns. I, for my part, should prefer to travel to the
+Pole so as to be there only in winter, merely for the sake of uttering
+real insults to the people's, particularly the court-retinue's, face;
+by the time they came at last to hear them, the defamer would be snugly
+ensconced again at Flachsenfingen.&mdash;Their winter-amusements are not to
+blame for it, if the Northern administration fails to propose and
+decide a multitude of the weightiest things: but only during the
+canicular holidays is the voting to be heard; and then, too, can the
+decisions of the chamber upon matters of grace and <i>forest-law</i> take
+shape in speech. But, O ye saints, if I at the Pole&mdash;while the sun was
+in Capricorn and my heart in the sign of the Crab&mdash;should fall down
+before the fairest woman, and in the longest night make to her
+declarations of love all night long, which, however, in a third of
+a third<a name="div2Ref_149" href="#div2_149"><sup>[149]</sup></a> assumed the form of ice and reached her in a frozen
+state,&mdash;i. e. did not reach her ears at all,&mdash;what should I do in
+summer, when I had already grown cold and already possessed her, if at
+the very hour in which I was hoping to have a good quarrel with her,
+now, in the midst of the scolding, my Capricorn-love-declarations
+should begin to thaw out and to utter themselves? I could do nothing
+with any composure, but to make the rule, Let any one be tender at the
+Pole, but only in Aries or Cancer. And if, finally, the transfer of a
+Princess should take place at the Pole, and, in fact, at that point
+where the earth does not move, which is best suited to the twofold
+inactivity of a Princess and a lady, and if the transfer should
+actually occur in a hall, where every one, particularly Zeusel, had in
+the long winter evenings slandered her; then, when the air in the hall
+began to repeat the slanders, and Zeusel in his distress sought to
+escape,&mdash;then would I pat his shoulder in a friendly manner and say,
+Whither away, my friend?&quot;&mdash;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;To Grosskussewitz, I help in the catching department,&quot; replied the
+veritable beadle of St. Luna, who behind some masonry had with one hand
+unclasped a book and with the other buttoned up a wallet. Victor felt a
+happy pressure upon his heart at an antique from St. Luna. He asked him
+about everything with an eagerness that seemed as if he had been away
+for an eternity <i>a parte ante</i>.<a name="div2Ref_150" href="#div2_150"><sup>[150]</sup></a> The reader who buttoned up his
+wallet became an author, and drew up at sight for the gentleman the
+year-books, i. e. hour-books of what had since occurred in the village.
+Into twenty questions Victor involved the one he had to put about
+Clotilda, and learned that she had been hitherto every day at the
+Parson's. This vexed him. &quot;As if,&quot; thought he, &quot;I had not strength of
+soul enough to look upon a friend's love,&mdash;and then too, as if&mdash;.&quot; In
+fact, he thought, at such a distance, he was the more at liberty to
+think of her.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">The reading constable was a reader under my jurisdiction: the book
+which he carried about on his poaching-expeditions after thieves was
+the <i>Invisible Lodge</i>.<a name="div2Ref_151" href="#div2_151"><sup>[151]</sup></a> Victor requested the First Part to be
+handed to him: the Beadle was in the Second, just at the Pyramid, at
+the moment of the first kiss. Our hero made more and more rapid strides
+in reading and in walking, and ended book and walk together.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">The island stood before him!&mdash;Here, on this island, my reader, open
+both eyes and ears!... Not that any memorable things presented
+themselves,&mdash;for these would of themselves make their way into
+half-open ears and pupils,&mdash;but for the very reason that only everyday
+matters are to be recorded.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">His Lordship stood alone on the shore of the sea which flowed round the
+island, and awaited and received him with a seriousness which veiled
+his friendliness, and with an emotion which still wrestled with his
+wonted coldness. He was going now to cross over to the island, and yet
+Victor saw no means of transportation. There was no boat there; nor
+would it have been practicable to get one off, because iron spikes
+stood under the water in such numbers and direction that no boat could
+move. The guard that had hitherto been stationed on the shore to
+protect the island against the destructive curiosity of the populace
+was to-day removed. The father went with his son slowly around the
+shore, and dislodged out of their beds, one after another, twenty-seven
+stones which lay at equal distances from each other. The island had
+been constructed <i>before</i> his Lordship's blindness, and <i>then</i> was
+not yet prohibited to strangers; but during that affliction he
+had caused its interior to be completed and concealed by unknown
+nocturnal workmen. During the tour round the island Victor saw its
+fruit-espaliers of high tree-stems, which seemed to direct their
+shadows and voices toward the interior of the island, and whose
+foliage-work the tossing waves sprinkled with their broken suns and
+stars; bean-trefoils clasped the pine-trees, and round the cones
+ringlets of purple blossoms played their antics; the silver-poplar
+bowed down under the enthroned oak; fiery bushes of Arabian beans
+blazed from farther in out of leafy curtains; trees, grafted by
+approach, on double stems latticed up the avenues from the eye; and by
+the side of a fir, which overtopped all the summits, was a taller one,
+which had been bent down by storms half over the water, and which
+rocked itself above its grave. White columns lifted up in the middle of
+the island a Grecian temple, immovable above all the wavering
+treetops.&mdash;Sometimes a stray tone seemed to run through the green Holy
+of Holies. A tall, black gate reached to the tops of the pines, and,
+painted with a white sun-disk, looked toward the east, and seemed to
+say to man, Pass through me; not only thy Creator, but thy brother, has
+worked, here!&mdash;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Opposite to this gate lay the twenty-seventh stone. Victor's father
+displaced it, took out a magnet, bent down, and held its <i>south</i> pole
+to the gap. Suddenly machines began to gnar, and the waves to whirl,
+and an iron bridge rose out of the water. Victor's soul was overfilled
+with dreams and expectations. Shuddering, he followed his father, and
+set foot upon the magic island. Here his father touched a thin stone
+with the <i>north</i> end of the magnet, and the iron bridge sank down
+again. Before they stepped up to the elevated gate a key turned itself
+from within, and unlocked, and the gate flew open. His Lordship was
+silent. On his face a higher soul had risen like a sun: one no longer
+knew him; he seemed to be transformed into the genius of this magic
+island.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">What a scene! So soon as the gate was opened there ran to and fro
+through all twigs an harmonious murmur; breezes flew in through the
+gate, and absorbed the sounds into themselves, and floated on with
+them, trembling, and reposed only on bended blossoms.&mdash;Every step
+opened farther a great, sombre stage.&mdash;Round about the scene lay marble
+fragments, on which the blacksmiths' coals had drawn forms of
+Raphael's, sunken Sphinxes, map-stones, whereon dim Nature had etched
+little ruins and effaced cities, and deep openings in the earth, which
+were not so much graves as moulds for bells that had been cast therein.
+Thirty poisonous trees stood twined round with roses, as if they were
+signs of the thirty years of man's passionate madness. Three-and-twenty
+weeping birches had bent themselves down to form a low bush-work, and
+were crowded into each other; into this bush ran all the paths of the
+island. Behind the bushes ninefold crape-veils, in waves that mutually
+swallowed each other, obscured the sight of the high temple; through
+the veils five lightning-rods rose into the heavens, and a rainbow,
+formed of two shoots of water that leaped up and arched over into each
+other, hovered glittering over the twigs, and evermore the two streams
+arched themselves aloft, and evermore they shivered each other to
+pieces overhead by their contact.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">As Horion led his son, whose heart was grasped, affrighted, oppressed,
+kindled, chilled, by invisible hands, into the low birch thicket, the
+stammering dead-man's-tongue of an organ-trill began to speak, through
+the lone silence, to the sigh of man, and the tremulous tone sank too
+deeply into a soft heart.&mdash;There stood the two on a grave darkly built
+over with bush-work; on the grave lay a black marble, on which were
+chiselled a bloodless white heart, with a veil over it, and the pale
+words, &quot;<i>It is at rest</i>.&quot; &quot;Here,&quot; said his Lordship, &quot;my second eye
+became blind; <i>Mary's</i><a name="div2Ref_152" href="#div2_152"><sup>[152]</sup></a> coffin lies in this grave; when that
+arrived at the island from England, the diseased eye was too severely
+inflamed, and never saw again.&quot;&mdash;Never did Victor shudder so; never did
+he see on a face such a chaotic, shifting world of flying, coming,
+conflicting, vanishing emotions; never did such an ice of brow and
+eyes congeal upon convulsive lips;&mdash;and so a father looked, and a son
+felt every sensation repeated in himself.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;I am unhappy,&quot; said his father, slowly; a more bitter, biting tear
+burned on the pupil of his eye; he hesitated a little, and placed his
+five open fingers upon his heart, as if he would grasp and pluck it
+out, and looked upon the pale stone one as if he would say, Why is not
+mine resting too? The good, dying Victor, crushed with the anguish of
+affection, melting into pity, longed to&mdash;fall upon the dear, desolated
+bosom, and to say more than the sigh, &quot;O God, my good father!&quot; But his
+Lordship gently repelled him, and the tear of gall, unshed, was stifled
+by the eyelids. His Lordship resumed, but more coldly: &quot;Think not that
+I am specially affected; think not that I desire a joy or deprecate a
+sorrow: I live now without hope, and without hope I die.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">His voice came cutting over ice-fields; his glance was made sharp by
+frost.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">He continued: &quot;When I have, perhaps, made <i>seven</i> human beings happy,
+then must it be inscribed on <i>my</i> black marble, <i>It rests</i>.... Why
+dost
+thou wonder so? Art thou even <i>now</i> at peace?&quot;&mdash;The father stared at
+the white heart, and then stared more fixedly straight before him, as
+if a shape had risen out of the grave,&mdash;the freezing eye laid and
+turned itself about on a rising tear, as if to smother it. Suddenly he
+drew back a veil from a mirror, and said, &quot;Look in, but embrace me
+immediately after!&quot; ... Victor gazed into the mirror, and saw, with a
+shudder, an eternally loved face appear therein,&mdash;the face of his
+teacher <i>Dahore</i>; his knees smote together, but still he did not look
+over, his shoulder, and embraced that father who was without hope.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Thou tremblest far too violently,&quot; said his Lordship; &quot;but ask me not,
+my dear boy, why all is so. At a certain stage of years one opens no
+more the old breast, full as it may be.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Ah, I pity thee! For <i>those</i> wounds which can be disclosed are not
+deep; <i>that</i> grief which a humane eye can discover, a soft hand
+alleviate, is but small; but the woe which a friend must not see,
+because he cannot take it away,&mdash;that woe which sometimes rises into
+the eye in the midst of blessedness in the form of a sudden trickle
+which the averted face smothers,&mdash;<i>this</i> hangs in secret more and more
+heavily on the heart, and at last breaks it, and goes down with it
+under the healing sod. So are iron balls tied to man when he dies on
+the sea, and they sink with him more quickly into his vast grave.&mdash;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">He continued: &quot;I am going to tell thee something; but swear, here upon
+these precious ashes, never to divulge it. It concerns thy Flamin, and
+from him thou must conceal it.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Victor, so hurled from one wave to another, started at this. He
+remembered that Flamin had wrung from him on the watch-tower the
+promise, that, if ever they should have offended each other too sorely,
+they would die together. He hesitated to take the oath; at last he
+said, &quot;But shortly before my death may I tell it to him?&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Canst thou know when that will be?&quot; said his father.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;But in case&mdash;?&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Then!&quot; said his father, coldly and curtly.&mdash;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Victor swore, and trembled at the future import of the oath.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">He also had to promise not to visit this dark island before his
+Lordship's return.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">They passed out of the leafy mausoleum, and sat down on an overturned
+stalactite. At times, during the conversation, a strange harmonica-tone
+fell from leaf to leaf, and, at a great distance, the four rivers of
+Paradise seemed to go sounding away under a zephyr that trembled with
+it.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">The father began: &quot;Flamin is Clotilda's brother, and the Prince's
+son.&quot;&mdash;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Only such a lightning-flash of thought could now have penetrated into
+Victor's already dazzled soul; a new world now started up within him,
+and snatched him away from the great one before his senses.&mdash;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Furthermore,&quot; continued Horion, &quot;January's three other children still
+live in England,&mdash;only the fourth, on the Seven Islands, is invisible.&quot;
+Victor comprehended nothing; his Lordship rent away all veils from the
+past, and introduced him to a new outlook into the life immediately
+before him, and into that which had flown away. I shall, in the sequel,
+communicate all his Lordship's disclosures and secrets to the reader;
+at present I will first relate the leave-taking of father and son.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">While his Lordship accompanied his son into the dusky, subterranean
+passages of former times, and told him all that he concealed from the
+world, tears started from Victor's eyes at many a trifle which could
+not deserve any; but the stream of these soft eyes,&mdash;it was not the
+narrative, but the returning contemplation of his unhappy father
+and the neighborhood of the buried and mouldering fair form and of
+the funereal marble, that wrung it out of the incessantly weeping
+heart.&mdash;At last all tones on the island ceased,&mdash;the black gate seemed
+to shut to,&mdash;all was still,&mdash;his Lordship came to an end with his
+revelations, and said, &quot;Fulfil thy purpose of going to-day to
+Maienthal, and be cautious and happy!&quot;&mdash;But although he took his leave
+with that refined reserve which in his rank guides and governs the
+hands and arms of even parents and children, still Victor pressed his
+childish bosom, so big with sighs and emotions, to his father's, with
+such an intensity as if he would fain crush in two his impoverished
+heart for the sake of the tears which he was compelled to let rise to
+sight ever hotter and larger. Ah, the forsaken one! When the bridge
+which clove asunder the father's and the son's days had risen up,
+Victor went over it alone, staggering and speechless; and when it had
+sunk into the water again, and the father had disappeared into the
+island, pity weighed him down to the ground; and when he had drawn all
+his tears, like arrows, out of his suffering heart, slowly and dreamily
+he quitted the still region of riddles and sorrows, and the dark
+funeral garden of a dead mother and a gloomy father, and his whole
+agitated soul cried incessantly, &quot;Ah, good father! hope at least, and
+come back again, and forsake me not!&quot;&mdash;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">And now all that in the foregoing part of the story has created
+obscurities, all that his Lordship exposed to his son, we will explain
+to ourselves also. It will still be remembered that, at the time when
+he set out for France to fetch away the Prince's children,&mdash;the
+so-called Welshman, Brazilian, and Asturian, and the <i>Monsieur</i>,&mdash;the
+dark intelligence of their abduction came to hand. This abduction,
+however, he had (as he now confessed) himself arranged,&mdash;only the
+disappearance of the <i>Monsieur</i> on the Seven Islands had occurred
+without his knowledge, and he could therefore with his untruth mix some
+truth, as mouth-glue. These three children he caused secretly to be
+taken to England, and educated at Eton for scholars, and in London
+for civilians,<a name="div2Ref_153" href="#div2_153"><sup>[153]</sup></a> in order to give them back to their father as
+blood-related assistants of his tottering administration. Hence he had
+helped the so-called Infante (Flamin) become an administrative
+councillor. So soon as he once gets the whole infant colony together,
+he means to surprise and bless the father with the delightful
+apparition. The (at present) invisible son of the Chaplain, who before
+the embarkation took the small-pox and blindness, he therefore keeps in
+the dark, because otherwise it would be too easily guessed to whom
+Flamin properly belonged.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Victor asked him how he would convince the Prince of a relationship to
+four or five strangers. &quot;By my word,&quot; was Horion's first reply; then he
+subjoined the remaining evidences,&mdash;in Flamin's case, the testimony of
+his mother (the niece), who would come with him; in the case of the
+others; their resemblance to their pictures, which he still possessed,
+and finally the maternal mark of a Stettin apple.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Victor had already often heard from the Parson's wife that all
+January's sons had a certain mother's or father's mark on the left
+shoulder-blade, which looked like nothing, except in autumn, when the
+Stettins ripen; then it also grew red, and resembled the original. The
+reader himself must remember, in the annals of the curious and learned
+societies, whole fruit-basketfuls of cherries, whose red pencilling was
+only faint on children, and heightened in redness not until the
+ripening of the prototypes on the twigs. If I could believe a
+fellow-bather of mine, I myself should have such a Stettin fruit-piece
+hanging on my shoulder; the thing is not probable nor important;
+meanwhile next autumn,&mdash;for I have proposed it to myself several
+autumns, but now Knef, through his dog, reminds me of it,&mdash;so soon as
+the Stettins mature, I might, to be sure, take a looking-glass and
+examine myself behind.&mdash;And on the same ground this Stettin festoon
+puts off the return of his Lordship, at least the transfer and
+recognition of the children, till the autumnal season of its
+reddening.&mdash;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">I make no scruple of communicating here a satirical note from my
+correspondent. &quot;Make believe,&quot; he writes, &quot;in regard to this
+intelligence, as if you did it at my behest, and, when you have once
+related his Lordship's <i>exposé</i> and revelation, very quietly relate it
+over to your reader a second time; so that he may not forget, or get it
+confused. One cannot cheat readers enough, and a clever author will be
+fond of leading them into marten-traps, wolf-pits, and deer-nets.&quot; I
+confess, for such tricks I always had a poor talent; and, in fact, will
+it not be more creditable, both to me and to the reader, if he fixes it
+at once in his mind, at first hearing, that Flamin is January's natural
+and Le Baut's assumed son,&mdash;that the Parson's is blind, and not yet
+apparent,&mdash;that three or four other children of January's, from the
+Gallic seaboard towns, are still to follow;&mdash;more creditable, I say,
+than if I should now have to chew it over for him a second time, (in
+fact, it would be a third time,) that Flamin is January's natural and
+Le Baut's assumed son,&mdash;that the Parson's is blind, and not yet
+apparent,&mdash;and that three or four other children of January's, from the
+Gallic seaboard towns, are still to follow?</p>
+
+<p class="normal">The reason why his Lordship required of his son the oath of silence
+towards Flamin was, that the latter, by his native honesty, kept all
+secrets, but in a heat of passion betrayed all; because in such a case
+he would make his birth tell, merely for the sake of backing himself in
+a quarrel with an adversary; because he might the very next day, on
+account of this revelation, become, instead of a fencing-master with
+the sword of Themis, a fencing-scholar with the war-blade; and because,
+in fact, a secret, like love, fares still better between two partners
+than among three. His Lordship thought, too, that out of a man to whom
+you gave money in order that he might become something, more would be
+made than out of one who should be something because he had money, and
+who looked upon the coins as his hereditary arms, and not as the
+prize-medals laid out for his future redemption of them.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">After all these developments, his Lordship made to our Victor still one
+more, and a weighty one, upon which he was always to look back on the
+icy career of his future court-life as to a warning-tablet.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">When his Lordship was struck blind before the house that held the ashes
+of his beloved, his whole correspondence with England, with the niece
+and with the tutors of the princely children, was embarrassed, or at
+least changed. He was obliged to have the letters received by him read
+to him by a friend whom he could trust: but he could trust no one. Only
+one female friend he found out who deserved the distinguished
+preference of his confidence, and that was none else than Clotilda. He
+who did not, like a youth, squander his secrets, could nevertheless
+venture to put Clotilda in possession of his greatest, and to make
+her book-keeper and reader to him of the letters of her mother, the
+so-called niece. In fact, he held women's power of keeping a secret to
+be greater than ours,&mdash;at least in weighty matters and in the concerns
+of men whom they love.&mdash;But just hear what the Devil did last winter:
+to me it is memorable.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">His Lordship received a letter from Flamin's mother, in which she
+renewed her old entreaties for a speedier promotion of the beloved
+child, and her inquiries after his fortunes at the Parsonage. Luckily
+just then Clotilda was making a visit at St. Luna, and saved him the
+journey to Maienthal. He visited the Chamberlain, to hear the letter
+from the mouth of his reader. He had great difficulty in securing in
+Clotilda's chamber an hour free from eavesdroppers. When he at last got
+it, and Clotilda began to read to him the letter, the latter was called
+away from the reading by her step-mother. He hears her immediately come
+back again, read the letter over in a sort of darkly murmuring tone,
+and say softly that she was going away again, but would come back in a
+moment. After some minutes Clotilda appears, and when his Lordship asks
+why she went out the second time, she denies a second leaving,&mdash;his
+Lordship insists,&mdash;she likewise persists,&mdash;finally Clotilda falls upon
+the bitter conjecture whether Matthieu may not have been there, and
+with his theatrical art and throat, which contained all human voices,
+himself have mocked and travestied her, in order under her credentials
+to read the important letter. Ah, there was too much in favor of the
+conjecture and too little against it! To be sure Matthieu could not now
+undertake upon Flamin, whose academic career had just expired, the
+October-test of the shoulder-device; but he stuck (so it afterward
+seemed to Clotilda and his Lordship) with his green-frog-feet to that
+good soul, and, under the cloak of love for Agatha and for his friend,
+hung out his threads, let the wind swing and stretch them across
+between the princely palace and the Parsonage-house,&mdash;kept on spinning
+one after another, until at last his father, the minister Schleunes,
+should have woven the right web for the entangling of the prey.... I
+confess, this conjecture throws light for me on a thousand things.&mdash;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Victor was even more astounded than we are, and proposed to his
+Lordship whether he might not, without injury to his oath, reveal to
+Clotilda his induction into these mysteries, as he had two reasons for
+it: first, her delicacy would be spared embarrassment at the appearance
+which her sisterly love must otherwise, in her opinion, have in his
+eyes;<a name="div2Ref_154" href="#div2_154"><sup>[154]</sup></a> secondly, one keeps a secret better, if only <i>one</i> more
+person helps him hold his tongue about it, as is well known from the
+case of Midas's barber and the reeds; the third reason was, that he had
+several reasons. His Lordship naturally did not refuse.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">For the rest, he introduced his Victor with no pedantic rules of march
+to the ice-course and tilt-yard of the court. He merely advised him
+neither intentionally to seek nor to shun any one, particularly the
+house of Schleunes,&mdash;to unbridle his friend Flamin, who was in
+Matthieu's leading-strings, and to guide him, instead of by the bit,
+rather with a friendly hand,&mdash;and himself to covet the rank of a
+doctor, and nothing more. He said, rules before experience were like
+geometry before the operation for the cataract. Even after the harvest
+of experience Gratian's <i>homme de cour</i> and Rochefoucauld's Maxims were
+not so good as the memoirs and history of courts, i. e. the experiences
+of others. Finally he appealed to his own example, and said, it was
+only within a few years that he had understood the following rules of
+<i>his</i> father's.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">The greatest hatred, like the greatest virtue and the worst dogs, is
+quiet.&mdash;Women have more <i>flow</i>, and fewer <i>overflows</i>, of emotion than
+we.&mdash;There is nothing one hates so much in another as a <i>new</i> fault,
+which he does not show till after some years.&mdash;One commits the most
+follies among people who are of no account.&mdash;It is the most common and
+pernicious delusion, that one always takes one's self to be the only
+one who remarks certain things.&mdash;Women and soft-hearted people are
+timid only in their own dangers, and courageous in those of others,
+where they have to save them.&mdash;Trust no one (and though it were a
+saint) who in the smallest trifle leaves his honor in the lurch; and a
+woman of that kind still less.&mdash;Most persons confound their vanity with
+their sense of honor, and allege wounds inflicted on the one as wounds
+inflicted on the other, and the reverse.&mdash;What we undertake from
+humanity, we should always accomplish, if we mixed in no selfishness
+with our motive.&mdash;The warmth of a man is by nothing more easily
+misunderstood than by the warmth of a young man.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">The last observation, which perhaps had a nearer reference, he had made
+while he was already on the shore of the island in the attitude of
+leave-taking, which he did with that considerate courtesy which in his
+rank guides the hands and arms of even parents and children.<a name="div2Ref_155" href="#div2_155"><sup>[155]</sup></a></p>
+<br>
+
+<h3>THIRD INTERCALARY DAY.</h3>
+<br>
+<h4><span class="sc">Meteorological Observations upon Man.</span></h4>
+<br>
+<p class="normal">When, in the former chapter, I wrote down his Lordship's pithy sayings,
+I found that some came into my own head, which might be serviceable for
+the Intercalary Day. I have never made one observation alone, but
+always twenty, thirty, in succession, and this very first one is a
+proof of it!</p>
+
+<p class="center">*</p>
+
+<p class="normal">When any one remains modest, not after praise, but after censure, then
+he is really so.</p>
+
+<p class="center">*</p>
+
+<p class="normal">The talk of the people, and still more the letters of maidens, have a
+peculiar euphony, arising from a constant interchange of long and short
+syllables (Trochees or Iambuses).</p>
+
+<p class="center">*</p>
+
+<p class="normal">The two things which a maiden most easily forgets are, first, how she
+looks (hence mirrors were invented); and, secondly, wherein the pronoun
+<i>that</i> differs from the conjunction <i>that</i>. I fear, however, that they
+will from to-day forward observe the distinction, merely for the sake
+of upsetting my assertion. And <i>then</i> one of my two touchstones is
+lost<a name="div2Ref_156" href="#div2_156"><sup>[156]</sup></a> with which I have hitherto tested learned ladies; the second,
+which I retain, is the left thumb-nail, which the penknife has
+sometimes notched full of red marks, but seldom, however, because they
+drive the quill more easily than they make the pen.</p>
+
+<p class="center">*</p>
+
+<p class="normal">One who has received many benefits ceases to <i>count</i>, and begins to
+<i>weigh</i> them, as if they were votes.</p>
+
+<p class="center">*</p>
+
+<p class="normal">The transporting one's self into good characters does more harm to a
+poet or player, who retains his own, than entering into bad ones. A
+clergyman who, besides, is free to take only the first of these steps,
+is more exposed to moral <i>atony</i><a name="div2Ref_157" href="#div2_157"><sup>[157]</sup></a> than the maker of verses and
+parts, who is able to make up again for a holy part by an unholy one.</p>
+
+<p class="center">*</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Passion makes the best observations and the wretchedest conclusions. It
+is a telescope whose field is so much the brighter, as it is narrower.</p>
+
+<p class="center">*</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Men require of a new Prince, Bishop, Domestic Tutor, Nursery Tutor,
+Capon-Stuffer, Town-Musician, or Town-Recorder <i>only in the first week</i>
+very special merits which were wanting in his predecessor; for in the
+second they have forgotten what they required and what they missed.</p>
+
+<p class="center">*</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Such sentences please women most and stay by them longest.</p>
+
+<p class="center">*</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Therefore, by way of reward, I will manufacture more than one upon
+themselves.&mdash;They regard others only as younger, not as fairer, than
+themselves.</p>
+
+<p class="center">*</p>
+
+<p class="normal">They are even ten times more artful and false towards each other than
+towards us; but we are almost more honest to each other than to them.</p>
+
+<p class="center">*</p>
+
+<p class="normal">They look to it only that one <i>does</i> justify himself with them, no
+matter <i>how</i>.</p>
+
+<p class="center">*</p>
+
+<p class="normal">They forgive a loved man more stains than we do a loved woman. Hence
+the romance-writers let the heroes of their quill guzzle, storm, duel,
+and stay overnight anywhere and everywhere, without the least prejudice
+to the hero.&mdash;The heroine, on the contrary, must sit at home by her
+mother and be a little angel.</p>
+
+<p class="center">*</p>
+
+<p class="normal">On the whole, they are so delicate, so mild, so sympathetic, so
+refined, so loving and love-thirsty, that I cannot get it into my head
+why it is that they cannot really like each other, unless it is for
+some such reason as this, that they are too courteous to each other to
+be formally reconciled or formally at variance with each other. You
+dear ones! you sometimes love a man because he has a friend and is one.
+O how beautifully would a friend of your own sex <i>fit</i><a name="div2Ref_158" href="#div2_158"><sup>[158]</sup></a> you!</p>
+
+<p class="center">*</p>
+
+<p class="normal">One learns taciturnity best among people who have none, and loquacity
+among the taciturn.</p>
+
+<p class="center">*</p>
+
+<p class="normal">If self-knowledge is the road to virtue, so is virtue still more the
+road to self-knowledge. An amended and purified soul is darkened by the
+least moral poison, as certain precious stones are by every other, and
+now after the amendment one observes for the first time how many
+impurities still lurk in all corners.</p>
+
+<p class="center">*</p>
+
+<p class="normal">I will close with some rules for improvement. Never, when the bosom has
+to fear that thorn in the side, anger, eloquently represent to any one
+his faults; for in the very act of convincing him of his guilt thou
+persuadest thyself of it, and so becomest exasperated. Picture to
+thyself every morning the possible situations and passions into which
+during the day thou mayst fall; then thou wilt deport thyself better,
+for one seldom behaves badly, in a repeated case, the second time.&mdash;Is
+thy friend angry with thee, then provide him an opportunity of showing
+thee a great favor. Over that his heart must needs melt, and he will
+love thee again.&mdash;No resolves are great save those which one has more
+than once to execute. Hence <i>forbearing</i> is harder than <i>undertaking</i>;
+for the former has to be kept up longer, and the latter is also linked
+with the sense of a double expression of power, a psychological and a
+moral.&mdash;Only despair not at a single failing; and let thy whole
+repentance be&mdash;a nobler action.&mdash;Only make thyself (by stoicism, or in
+ally way thou canst) <i>tranquil</i>, then wilt thou have little trouble in
+making thyself <i>virtuous</i> also.&mdash;Begin the culture of thy heart, not
+with the rearing of noble motives, but with the extirpation of bad
+ones. When the weeds are once withered or uprooted, then will the
+nobler flowerage spontaneously and vigorously spring up.&mdash;The virtuous
+heart, like the body, grows sound and strong more by <i>work</i> than by
+good <i>food</i>.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Therefore I can stop.</p>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<p class="center"><img border="0" src="images/flowerstart.png" alt="flowerstart"></p>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+
+<h2><a name="div1Ref_13" href="#div1_13">13. DOG-POST-DAY.</a></h2>
+<br>
+
+<p class="center"><span class="sc2">Concerning his Lordship's Character.&mdash;An Evening of
+Eden.&mdash;Maienthal.&mdash;The Mountain and Emanuel.</span></p>
+<br>
+
+<p class="normal">In regard to his Lordship I have three words to say, that is, three
+opinions to state.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">The first is wholly improbable; it is, that, like all men of the
+world and of business, he regards mankind as an apparatus for
+experiments, as so much hunting-gear, war-material, knitting-work:
+such men look upon heaven only as the key-board to earth, and the soul
+as orderly-sergeant of the body; they carry on wars, not for the sake
+of winning crowns of oak-leaves, but to secure the oak soil and acorns;
+they prefer the successful man to the deserving one; they break oaths
+and hearts to serve the state; they respect poetry, philosophy, and
+religion, but as means; they respect riches, statistics of national
+prosperity, and health, as objects; all they honor about pure
+Mathesis<a name="div2Ref_159" href="#div2_159"><sup>[159]</sup></a> and pure female virtue is the transmutation of each into
+impure for manufactures and armies; in the higher astronomy all they
+care for is the transformation of suns into odometers<a name="div2Ref_160" href="#div2_160"><sup>[160]</sup></a> and
+way-marks for pepper-fleets, and in the most exalted <i>magister
+legens</i><a name="div2Ref_161" href="#div2_161"><sup>[161]</sup></a> they seek only an alluring tavern-sign for poor
+universities.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">The second opinion is at least the opposite of the first, and an
+improvement upon it: it is, that to his Lordship, as to other
+great men, the race-course is the goal and the steps taken the
+garlands.&mdash;Fortune and misfortune differ, with him, not in <i>worth</i>, but
+in <i>manner</i>; both are, in his view, two converging race-tracks toward
+the eternity's ring of inner promotion; all accidents of this life are
+to him mere arithmetical examples in <i>unknown</i> terms, which he solves,
+not however as a merchant, but as an indifferentialist<a name="div2Ref_162" href="#div2_162"><sup>[162]</sup></a> and
+algebraist, to whom products and multiplicands are of equal interest,
+and to whom it is all one whether he reckons by letters or by
+hundredweights.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Verily, a man has almost as much to reproach himself with, if he is
+discontented, as if he had committed a crime; and inasmuch as it
+depends upon his ocean of thoughts, whether he will raise out of it as
+an island an Otaheite-Arcadia or the lowest hell, he deserves all that
+he creates....</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Nevertheless, the third opinion is the true one, and at the same time
+it is mine: his Lordship, how much soever he may seem to be an
+indeclinable man, who has no object, but is a verb in <i>mi</i>, has
+nevertheless the following paradigm (and so inversely we find in the
+most ordinary man a short plan for the most singular one): he is one of
+the unhappy great ones who have too much genius, too much wealth, and
+too little repose and knowledge, to be habitually happy; they hunt
+pleasure instead of virtue, and miss both, and cry out at last
+over every bitter drop which is given them in a sugar-loaf; like
+silver-plate, precisely at the point of melting in the fire of pleasure
+are they the most inclined to overspread themselves with a dark skin;
+their ambition; which otherwise hides with plans the emptiness of high
+life, is not strong enough for their heart, which in this emptiness
+withers; they do good from pride, but without the love of doing it;
+they play with the empty shell of life as with a ringlet, and deem it
+not even worth the while to shorten it; and yet they do deem it worth
+the while, when they, who stand through this night-frost of the soul,
+outwardly smiling and cold, inwardly all in a fever, without hope,
+fear, or faith, renouncing all, making light of everything, and shut up
+in themselves,&mdash;when they feel a stroke of death, a great sorrow clutch
+at their unhappy hearts.&mdash;Ah the poor lord! can thy heart then find
+no rest till it finds it under the lid of black marble?</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Ah the poor lord!&quot; his son incessantly repeated, as with oppressed
+soul he went toward Maienthal. The outward heaven around him was still;
+a great cloud completely overspread it, but rested on a blue rim along
+the whole circle of the horizon. In Victor's breast, on the contrary,
+streams of air rushed against each other and whirled together into a
+hurricane, drinking up brooks and tearing up trees. His father's image
+hung pale in this tempest. Victor's future days were hurled to and
+fro.&mdash;His future life was compressed into a narrow, veiled image, and
+it distressed him just as much to think that he <i>must</i> live it as <i>how</i>
+he must.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">What saddened him most was the mere external and trifling circumstance
+that his father had remained alone and concealed in the depths of the
+island. Once the conjecture came over him, whether the greater part of
+what he had witnessed had not been mere dramatic machinery which his
+father (who in his youth had been a tragic poet) had employed to give
+more firmness to his vow of silence; but he was immediately disgusted
+at his own heart. Why are the purest souls tormented with a multitude
+of disgusting, poisonous thoughts, which like spiders crawl up on the
+shining walls, and which they only have the trouble of crushing to
+death? Ah, our <i>victories</i> are not wholly distinguishable from our
+<i>defeats</i>!</p>
+
+<p class="normal">It is singular that the <i>perspective</i> thought of Clotilda's
+blood-relationship to Flamin was the one which he followed out least of
+all.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">When man can obtain from reason no balsamic relief, he begs it at the
+hands of Hope and Illusion; and they two then willingly share his
+sorrow. Just as the blue sky of to-day by little and little peered
+through light seams in the clouds, and the sea of mist collected into
+hanging lakes, so also did the dark thoughts break asunder in Victor's
+soul.&mdash;And when the swollen masses of cloud in the broad blue passed
+into fleece, till at last the blue sea swallowed up all banks of vapor,
+and bore nothing on its infinite expanse but the blazing sun, then did
+Victor's soul also cleanse itself from vapors, and the sun-image of
+Emanuel, whom he was to-day to reach, shone soft and warm and cloudless
+into all his wounds.... The form of his loved Dahore, the form of his
+loved father, the form of his hidden mother, and all beloved images,
+reposed like moons in a mournful group over his head; and this sadness,
+and the sacred oath to keep himself virtuous and obey all his father's
+wishes, breathed upon his inflamed bosom some solace in regard to his
+father's fate.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">He could even to-day see the sun go down behind the church-tower of
+Maienthal.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">The broad cleared-up sky made him more tender, the thought of falling
+to-day upon the heart of a noble man, whose soul dwelt above this blue
+atmosphere, made him more exalted, the hope of being consoled by this
+man for his whole life made him more tranquil.&mdash;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">He hastened, and, his haste drew out the saddest lute-stop of his soul.
+For he seemed not to be going over the summer fields, but they seemed
+rather to be hurrying along before him; landscape after landscape,
+theatres of woods, theatres of grain-fields, flew by; new hills rose
+with other lights, and lifted up their woods, and others with theirs
+dropped down; long, shadowy steppes ran backward before the flood of
+yellow sunlight; now valleys full of flowers billowed around him, now
+bare, hot hill-shores carried him upward; the stream murmured close to
+his ear, and suddenly its windings glistened from far away across
+poppy-fields; white roads and green paths met him, and fled from him,
+and led round the broad earth; full villages, with gleaming windows,
+swept by, and gardens with undressed children; the declining sun was
+now lifted up, now lost again, and now withdrawn to the summits of the
+hills.&mdash;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">This fleeting of Nature's dissolving views bedimmed his moistened eye,
+and brightened the inner world; but the steady abiding of an incessant
+music, the constant choir of larks above him, whose contending cries
+melted to one in his soul, this distant hum from air and woods and
+bushes, this harmonica of Nature, moved him to say to himself: &quot;Why do
+I in this solitude hold back every drop that would fall? No; besides, I
+am too sensitive to-day, and I will exhaust myself before I see the
+beloved man.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">At last he ascended the broad mountain that stations itself with its
+scattered columns of trees and gray cubes of rock before Maienthal,
+which lies in greenness at its foot.... Then the earth, tuned by the
+Creator, rang with a thousand strings; the same harmony stirred the
+stream, divided into gold and gloom, the humming flower-cup, the
+peopled air, and the waving bush; the reddened east and the reddened
+west stood stretched out like the two rose-taffeta wings of a
+harpsichord, and a tremulous sea gushed from the open heavens and the
+open earth....</p>
+
+<p class="normal">He burst into a mingling flood of tears at once of joy and sorrow, and
+the past and the future simultaneously stirred his heart. The sun with
+ever-increasing swiftness dropped down the heavens, and the more
+swiftly did he climb the mountain, the quicker to follow its flight
+with his eye. And there he looked down into the village of Maienthal,
+that glimmered among moist shadows....</p>
+
+<p class="normal">At his feet, and on this mountain, lay, stretched like a crowned giant,
+like a transplanted spring-island, an English park. This mountain
+toward the south and one toward the north met and formed a cradle in
+which the peaceful village rested, and over which the morning and the
+evening sun spun and spread out their golden veil. In five gleaming
+ponds trembled five duskier evening heavens, and every wave that leaped
+up painted itself to a ruby in the hovering fire of the sun. Two brooks
+waded, in shifting distances, darkened by roses and willows, over the
+long meadow-land, and a watering fire-wheel,<a name="div2Ref_163" href="#div2_163"><sup>[163]</sup></a> like a pulsating
+heart, forced the sunset-reddened water through all the green
+flower-vases. Everywhere nodded flowers, those butterflies of the
+vegetable world, on every moss-grown brook-stone, from every tender
+stalk, round every window, a flower rocked in its fragrance, and
+scarlet lupines traced their blue and red veins over a garden without a
+hedge. A transparent wood of gold-green birches climbed, in the high
+grass over there, the sides of the northern mountain, on whose summit
+five tall fir-trees, as ruins of a prostrated forest, held their eyrie.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Emanuel's small house stood at the end of the village, in a tangled
+growth of honeysuckle, and in the embrace of a linden-tree which grew
+through it.&mdash;His heart gushed up within him: &quot;Blessings on thee, quiet
+haven! hallowed by a soul which here looks up to heaven, and waits to
+launch into the sea of eternity!&quot;&mdash;Suddenly the windows of the
+abbey where Clotilda had been educated flung upon him the flames
+of the evening-redness,&mdash;and the sun went, softly as a Penn, toward
+America,&mdash;and the thin night spread itself over nature,&mdash;and the green
+hermitage of Emanuel wrapped itself in obscurity.... Then he knelt
+there alone on the mountain, on that throne-step, and looked into the
+glowing west, and over the whole still earth, and into the heavens,
+and expanded his spirit to think on God.... As he knelt, all was so
+sublime and so mild,&mdash;worlds and suns came up from the east, and the
+little insect, with his play of colors, nestled down into his mealy
+flower-cup,&mdash;the evening-wind flapped its immeasurable wing, and the
+little naked lark rested warmly under the soft-feathered breast of the
+mother,&mdash;a man stood on the mountain-ridge, and a golden-chafer on the
+stamens; ... and the Eternal loved his whole world.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">His spirit was now made up to take in a great man, and he yearned for
+the voice of a brother.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">He staggered, without following any path, down into the village, with
+the pewit in its great circles, and the may-chafer in its little ones,
+sweeping around him. At the foot of the mountain the hybrid day grew
+darker,&mdash;in the starry heaven the curtain rose,&mdash;the vapor of evening,
+which had gone up hot, fell cold, as men do, back to the earth: one
+more loud lark went circling upward, as the last echo of day, over the
+mountain.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">At last he neared Emanuel's linden. He would rather have embraced him
+under the great heavens than under the close ceiling of a room. Through
+the window he saw an uncommonly beautiful youth standing and playing on
+a flute. The player drew out of its heavenly gates a fugitive and
+floating elysium. Victor listened to him for a long time, in order to
+still his beating heart; at last, with tearful eyes, he went round the
+house, and would fain have fallen speechlessly and blindly on the necks
+of the youth and of Emanuel. As he passed along before the window, the
+youth did not return his greeting; as he opened the house-door, a soft
+chime of bells began to make music. Then the youth came out
+immediately, and asked him, in a friendly tone, who was there; for he
+was blind. Victor stepped into a Holy of Holies when he entered the
+apartment lined with linden-leaves, which was the nest of the winged
+man, who at this moment was out of it, under the great night of God.
+Emanuel was to return toward midnight. The room was open and clean;
+some leaves of fruits which had been eaten lay on the table; flowers
+glowed around all the windows; a telescope leaned against the wall;
+remains of an Oriental wardrobe bespoke the East Indian....</p>
+
+<p class="normal">The voice of the beautiful youth had in his ear something inexpressibly
+touching, because it seemed like one he knew; it went deep into his
+heart, like the melody of a song that sounds up from childhood. He
+could rest freely with the steady gaze of love upon that face, that
+looked out into an eternal night; he wanted to kiss those childish lips
+full of melodies, and still he hesitated. But as he went out of the
+house again in quest of Emanuel, and when the bells began to chime
+again,&mdash;for they sounded whenever the door opened, to announce to the
+blind one every arrival,&mdash;then he could no longer restrain himself
+amidst the lovely music, but he touched the mouth of the blind one, as
+he leaned at the open window, with a kiss as soft as a breath. &quot;Ah,
+angel! art thou, then, come down again from heaven?&quot; said the blind
+one, confounding him with some well-known being or other.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">How good was it to be out of doors! The evening-bell of the village
+sounded its call over the slumbering fields, and a distant soul was
+inclining its ear, perhaps, to catch the dying echoes of its broken
+tones. The evening wind, rustling through twigs full of green fruits,
+joined in. The evening star&mdash;the moon of our twilight&mdash;rested kindly on
+the road of the sun and of the moon, and sent its solace in the
+interval during the absence of both.&mdash;&quot;Where mayst thou be at this
+moment, my Emanuel? Art thou resting, perhaps, in the sight of the
+evening-red,&mdash;or gazing into the starry sea?&mdash;art thou in the ecstasy
+we call a prayer,&mdash;or ...&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">At this moment, all at once the thought flashed up in him, that, as
+to-night St. John's day began, his Emanuel might have expired in the
+enjoyment of the evening.... The more eagerly did he seek after him
+with his eyes under every tree, in every deeper shadow; he looked up to
+the hills, as if he might see him there, and to the stars, as if even
+there he might venture to seek him.&mdash;He went round the village, whose
+circular wall was a festoon of cherry-trees which silvered the green
+circumference with a milky-way of blossoms long since fallen, and
+hurried over the ruins of the houses which the children had built
+during the day, towards the fading windows of the abbey, which rose on
+the southern mountain down whose slope he had entered the village; for
+the blind one had told him that this mountain was Emanuel's
+observatory, and that he went thither every night. The green stairway,
+which made its successive landings of terraces and moss-banks, and on
+which a balustrade of bush-work ran upward, led him to a mountain which
+terminated sublimely in the ether with a tall weeping-birch. With every
+grass-plot, as from a bath, new limbs of dark Nature lifted themselves;
+he went on, as if from one planet to another. Across the ascending,
+darkling fields streamed the night-wind, and lonesomely swept on from
+wood to wood, and its ruffling fingers played with the plumage of the
+sleeping bird and the down of the whirring night-butterfly. Victor
+looked over toward the evening-red which Night had taken as a rose to
+wear on the bosom whereon suns repose. The sea of eternity lay in the
+form of night on the silver-sand of worlds and suns, and from the
+bottom of that sea the grains of sand glistened far up through the
+deep.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Around the weeping-birch swelled an unaccountable melodious murmur,
+which he had this very day heard on the island. At length he stood up
+there under the birch, and the music, like that of an harmonica which
+has just stolen over paradises and through hedges of flowers, was loud
+around him; but he saw nothing further, save a high grassy altar (the
+birthplace of Emanuel's letter) and a low grassy bench. From what
+invisible hand, he thought with awe, can these tones issue, which seem
+to glide off from angels, as they fly over the next world, from
+mingling souls, when a too great bliss breathes itself out into a
+sigh, and the sigh dissipates itself into distant dying sound? It must
+be forgiven him, if on such a day, which threw his soul into growing
+agitations, in this awful hour of night, under this melodious
+mourning-tree, on this Holy of Holies of the invisible Emanuel, he at
+last came to believe that <i>he</i> had this evening taken his flight from
+life, and that his soul, full of love, was still floating around him in
+these echoes and yearnings for the first and last embrace. He lost
+himself more and more in the tones and in the silence round about
+them,&mdash;his soul grew to a dream within him, and the whole nocturnal
+landscape grew to a cloud made of the sleep in which this light dream
+hung,&mdash;the fountain of endless life, flung up by the Eternal, flew far
+above the earth in the immeasurable arch with the spraying silver-sparks
+of suns over immensity; gleaming it encircled the whole vault of night,
+and the reflection of the Infinite overspread the dark eternity.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">O Eternal One, if we saw not thy starry heaven, how much would our
+heart, sunk into the mire of earth, know of thee and of immortality?&mdash;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Suddenly in the east the night grew lighter, because the floating
+glimmer of the moon darted up on the Alpine ridges that hid the orb,
+and all at once the unaccountable tones and the leaves and the
+night-wind grew louder. Then Victor awoke as out of a dream and out of
+life, and clasped the harmonious, fleeting airs to his languishing bosom,
+and, amidst the gushing tears which, like a rain-cloud, veiled from him
+the whole landscape, he cried out, beside himself: &quot;Ah, Emanuel,
+come!&mdash;Ah, I thirst for thee&mdash;Float no more in sound, thou blessed one;
+take thy deposed human face, and appear to me, and slay me by a
+shudder, and keep me in thy arms!&quot; ...</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Lo! while the dim tear-drop still stood in his eye, and the moon still
+lingered behind the Alps, there came up the mountain a white form with
+closed eyes,&mdash;smiling, transfigured, blissful,&mdash;turning toward
+Sirius....</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Emanuel, dost thou appear to me?&quot; cried Horion, trembling, and melted
+into a new flood of tears. The form opened its eyes,&mdash;it spread out its
+arms. Victor saw not,&mdash;heard not; he glowed and trembled. The form flew
+to meet him, and he gave himself up, saying, &quot;Take me!&quot; They touched
+each other,&mdash;they embraced each other,&mdash;the night-wind swept through
+them,&mdash;the strange music sounded nearer,&mdash;a star shot down,&mdash;the moon
+flew up over the Alps....</p>
+
+<p class="normal">And when with its Eden-light it suffused the cheeks of the unknown
+apparition, Victor recognized that it was his dear teacher, <i>Dahore</i>,
+who had to-day cast his image into the mirror on the island. And Dahore
+said: &quot;Beloved son, dost thou still know thy teacher? I am Emanuel and
+Dahore.&quot; Then the embrace grew closer. Horion would fain have
+compressed his gratitude for a whole childhood into one kiss, and lay
+dissolved in the arms of the teacher and in the arms of loving ecstasy.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Twine around each other tightly, ye blessed ones; press your full
+hearts to each other even till you press tears out of them; forget
+heaven and earth, and prolong the sublime embrace!&mdash;Ah! so soon as it
+is dissolved, then has this frail life henceforward nothing firmer
+wherewith to knit you together than the beginning of the&mdash;second....</p>
+
+<p class="normal">At last Emanuel drew himself out of the attitude of love, and, bending
+aside, gazed like a sun, with large and open look, into Horion's face,
+and confronted with rapture the ennobled spirit and countenance of his
+blooming favorite. The latter sank before the look of love
+involuntarily on his knee, and said, with uplifted face: &quot;O my teacher,
+my father! O thou angel! dost thou, then, still love me so
+exceedingly?&quot;&mdash;But he wept too much for utterance, and his words were
+unintelligible, and died in his heart....</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Without answering, Emanuel laid his hand on the head of the kneeling
+pupil, and turned his glorified eye toward the glittering heavens, and
+said, with solemn voice: &quot;This head, thou Eternal One, dedicates itself
+now to thee in this great night. Let only thy second world fill this
+head and this heart, and may the little, dark earth never satisfy
+them!&mdash;O my Horion! here on this mountain, on which, after a year, I go
+up from the earth, I conjure thee, by the great second world above us,
+by all the great thoughts wherewith the Eternal at this moment appears
+in thee,&mdash;I conjure thee to be still good, even when I shall have long
+been dead.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Emanuel knelt down to him, held up the exhausted youth, and bent
+towards his paling face, and said, in a low and prayerful tone, &quot;My
+beloved! my beloved! when we both are dead, in the second world may God
+never part us,&mdash;never part me and thee!&quot;&mdash;He wept not, and yet could
+say no more; their two hearts, knit together, rested on each other, and
+night veiled silently their mute love and their great thoughts.</p>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<p class="center"><img border="0" src="images/barstart.png" alt="barstart"></p>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+
+<h2><a name="div1Ref_14" href="#div1_14">14. DOG-POST-DAY.</a></h2>
+<br>
+
+<p class="center"><span class="sc2">The Philosophical Arcadia.&mdash;Clotilda's Letter.&mdash;Victor's
+Confessions.</span></p>
+<br>
+
+<p class="normal">I have only two things to explain before going further,&mdash;the mysterious
+music and the shutting of the eyes. The former proceeded from an Æolian
+harp laid on the weeping-birch. As often as Emanuel came hither by
+night he let these breathed-out tones intermingle like blossoms with
+the whispering leaves, in order to exalt himself when he looked alone
+upon the exalted night. His eyes he often closed before the sun and the
+moon, whenever his inner man, winged like a cherub, had leave to bury
+itself in soft fantasies; into the streaming, many-colored waves of
+light which crowd through the eyelids he would then plunge, as into a
+zephyr, for a delicious swim, and in this light-bath the higher
+light-magnet within him drew heavenly light out of earthly light. As
+there are but few souls that know how far the harmony of outward nature
+with our own reaches, and in how very great a degree the whole creation
+is but an Æolian harp, with longer and shorter strings, with slower and
+swifter vibrations, passive before a divine breath,<a name="div2Ref_164" href="#div2_164"><sup>[164]</sup></a>&mdash;I demand not
+that every one should forgive this Emanuel.&mdash;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">After this finding of each other again, which threw a far gleam over a
+whole life, the two came home to the blind youth; and his flute carried
+the heart softly over in dream from the tossings of fevered blood into
+the tranquil ether of heaven.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">As I love so to be about Emanuel, the reader will not begrudge me the
+pleasure of turning over the leaves of all the hours which we are
+permitted to spend in his house, and to go along regularly, step by
+step.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">The morning for the first time disclosed to the pupil of Emanuel, as it
+does to children, what a Christmas present the night had provided for
+his heart. What a form came before him in the morning-radiance, when
+the still, childlike, composed face of the teacher, over which storms
+had once passed, as on the soft, white moon volcanoes have flamed,
+smiled upon him in such wise that his inner being melted into mute
+bliss! Especially when beheld in <i>profile</i> did this lofty form appear
+to stand on the brink of earth, and to look down into the <i>second</i>
+hemisphere of the heavens, which is hid from us by the gravestone and
+the rich pasture-ground of this life. His countenance was transfigured
+when he lifted it to heaven, when he named God or Eternity, when he
+spoke of the longest day; in its light the leaf-gold of the present
+paled to the dead-gold of the past, and his spirit hung hovering over
+the body, as genii bloom out of flowers in arabesques. Never did Victor
+so easily attune himself, when coming out of a dream, to the new day,
+as he did this morning with Emanuel's voice, which was, so to speak,
+the music of the spheres to the blue heaven of his eyes, from which,
+as from that of Egypt, never a drop fell; from incapacity of the
+tear-glands, he could never weep; nor did this life any longer agitate
+his soul.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">The pure morning-apartment seemed to make the soul pure and still. He
+was the greatest bodily Purist; he washed his body quite as often as
+his clothes; and the uncleanness of medical language, even to the very
+words,&mdash;as, e. g. toothpicks, &amp;c.,&mdash;was avoided by his stainless
+tongue. Even so did his heart remain unsoiled by so much as the images
+of great sins, and this unconscious innocence, as well as an
+unacquaintedness with our artful manners, made him, in the eyes of
+three different classes, either a child&mdash;or a maiden&mdash;or an angel.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">The breakfast of fruits and water, which, in fact, made up his whole
+bill of fare, called up reprovingly before our Victor the wine and
+coffee-grounds wherewith he had sometimes had to manure, like earthly
+ones, the flowers of his spirit. Flower-pots were Dahore's snuff-boxes,
+and glowed under the linden-green, which, with two tame, and yet
+free, ground-sparrows skipping through it, was the live, growing
+ceiling-piece of the apartment. His soul seemed also, like a Brahmin,
+to live on poetical flowers, and his speech was often, like his
+manners, Indian,&mdash;i. e. poetic. So was there throughout, as with divers
+magnates of men, a striking pre-established harmony between outward
+nature and his heart; he readily found in the corporeal the physiognomy
+of the spiritual, and <i>vice versâ</i>; he said matter, considered as
+thought, was just as noble and spiritual as any other thought, and that
+we represented to ourselves in it, after all, only the Divine
+conceptions of it. For example, during breakfast he lost himself in the
+glimmering dew-drop on a stock-gillyflower, and, by moving his eye to
+and fro, played through the gamut of its harpsichord of colors. &quot;There
+must,&quot; said he, &quot;be some harmony or other of accordant sounds between
+this minute particle of water and my spirit, as between virtue and me,
+because otherwise neither could so ravish me. And is, then, this accord
+which man makes with the whole creation (only in different octaves) a
+mere play of the Eternal, and no resonance of a nearer, greater
+harmony?&quot; In the same way he would often gaze at a glimmering coal,
+till in his eyes it had expanded to a flaming meadow, on which,
+illumined by tender fancies, he roamed up and down....</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Have patience, reader, with this flowery soul; we will both think that
+men can more easily have one religion than one philosophy, and that
+every system presupposes its peculiar weaving in the heart, and that
+the heart is the bud of the head.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">The only circumstance that pained the blessed Victor this morning was,
+that he could not embrace the fair blind youth, and ask, &quot;Have we not
+already once lived together, and is not my voice as familiar to thee as
+thine is to me?&quot; For he looked upon him (as I do too), for several
+reasons, as the concealed son of Pastor Eymann. But as Dahore kept
+silent on the subject,&mdash;into whose clear, bright heaven one could
+otherwise look down even to the least nebulous star,&mdash;he feared before
+these holy ears he should be speaking too near to the verge of his oath
+of silence, though he should only disclose his inquiring conjectures
+about the blind one. This Julius seemed to have only two root-fibres in
+his nature, of which the one went to his flute, and the other to his
+teacher. On his white face, whereon the rapture of the musical genius
+and the abstractedness of the blind dreamer were blended with an almost
+womanly beauty, lay the reflection of his teacher, and its fibres had,
+like lute-strings, stirred only to harmonious movements. The poor blind
+one, who looked upon his Dahore as his father, was turned about, like
+down, by his lightest breath. Victor often drew the head of the dear
+blind one close to his face, in order to inspect the disordered eyes,
+and judge whether they might be restored. But though he saw with pain
+that the unhappy one must remain incurable on the full, radiant earth,
+nevertheless he kept on repeating his minute investigation, merely for
+the sake of having the dear, enchanting form nearer to his eye and his
+soul.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">In the morning Emanuel, as cicerone of Nature, led his guest through
+the ruins and antiques of the earth: for every tree is an eternal
+antique. How different is a walk with a religious<a name="div2Ref_165" href="#div2_165"><sup>[165]</sup></a> man from one
+with a vulgar, worldly soul! The earth appeared to him holy, just
+fallen from the hands of the Creator; it was to him as if he were
+walking in a planet hanging over us and clothed with flowers. Emanuel
+showed him God and love everywhere mirrored, but everywhere
+transformed,&mdash;in the light, in&mdash;colors, in the scale of living
+creatures, in the blossom and in human beauty, in the pleasures of
+animals, in the thoughts of men and in the circles of worlds; for
+either everything or nothing is his shadow. So the sun paints its image
+on all creatures,&mdash;great in the ocean, many-colored in the dew-drop,
+small on the human retina, as mock-sun on the cloud, red on the apple,
+silvery on the stream, seven-colored in the falling rain, and gleaming
+over the whole moon and over all its other worlds.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Victor felt to-day, for the first time, the enlargement and
+transfiguration of his conscious being before a spirit which, <i>like</i>
+his, but <i>excelling</i> his, like a spherical concave mirror reflected all
+the features of his nobler part in colossal size. The whole vulgar
+portion of his nature crept away when the higher, painted by Dahore on
+a large scale, erected itself above the low impulses. A man whom the
+perihelion of a great man does not set on fire and beside himself is
+nothing worth. He was hardly willing to speak, so that he might only
+hear <i>him</i> all the time, although he had it in mind to stay here a good
+many days. As before a higher being and before the woman of his love,
+in whose presence one will neither show his head nor his tongue, so had
+he, renouncing self, sunk into pure truth and love. All the varnish of
+the little relations of place and citizenly respectability had cracked
+so clean off, and they all stood before him there so moss-grown, that
+he would not so much as name the names of Göttingen, of Flachsenfingen,
+or empty incidents of life, or strange personalities. In fact, Victor
+had a slight contempt for men who care more for the directions to the
+bookbinder than for the book, and more for the review of an author than
+for his system, and to whom the earth is no deciphering chancery of the
+book of nature, but a parlor (a talking-room), a news-office of
+wretched personalities, which they care neither to profit by, nor to
+retain, nor to estimate, but merely to tell; and he was disgusted with
+the German societies, in which there is so little philosophizing.&mdash;Oh,
+how blest he was, for once to think a whole day in company with
+another, and, what is still finer, to be permitted to poetize with him!</p>
+
+<p class="normal">His doubts upon the greatest matters which can weigh down our minds and
+lift up our hearts grew to-day to questions; the questions, to hopes;
+the hopes, to presentiments. There are truths of which one hopes that
+great men will be more strongly convinced than one can be one's self;
+and one will therefore by their conviction confirm and complete his
+own. Dahore held the two great truths (God and immortality) which, like
+two pillars, bear up the universe, firmly to his heart; but, like the
+rarer men to whom the truth is not merely the <i>shew-bread</i> of vanity
+and the dessert of the head, but a <i>holy supper</i> and <i>love-feast</i> full
+of the <i>spirit of life</i> for their weary heart, he cared little, if he
+could make no proselytes. Victor felt that <i>he</i> understood handling the
+artillery-train and the electric pistols and batteries of the art of
+disputation better than Emanuel; he would have abhorred his own tongue
+if he had directed its readiness against this fair soul. He was silent
+for two reasons. &quot;Undertake,&quot; said he, &quot;to give a molten image, an
+altar-piece, of a great, shining truth that embraces thy whole
+being,&mdash;to do this on the flying second-hand whereon one stands in
+transient conversation, with the few dry paints wherewith human ideas
+are to be colored, and with the clumsy human tongue wherewith you must
+daub on these grains of color,&mdash;I tell you, a <i>silhouette</i>, a
+transparent asterism, will be all you can produce.&quot; The light heaven of
+certain simple-hearted men of deep feeling veils, like the outer one,
+all its suns, except the warmest, under the sheen of a void blue; but
+the unclean heaven of others full of wit and logic is bedizened with
+<i>mock-suns</i>, bows, northern lights, clouds, and redness.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">The second, better reason why he scorned the honor of opposition was
+his heart, which contained in itself more than the head could throw
+light upon. Certain views cannot be detached so easily as wall-pictures
+in Italy, and transferred from one head into another. The <i>light</i>
+which another can give thee <i>shows</i>, but <i>constructs</i> not, the
+house-furniture of thy interior, and what the light really <i>creates</i>
+with some is meteorological appearance, optical illusion, but no
+substance.<a name="div2Ref_166" href="#div2_166"><sup>[166]</sup></a>&mdash;Hence all turns not upon the showing and seeing of a
+truth, i. e. of an object, but upon the effects which it works through
+thy whole inner being. For how is it that there are men who, as
+Socrates did Aristides, make us better merely by our being with
+them?&mdash;How do great authors bring it about, that their invisible
+spirit in their works seizes and holds us fast, without our being
+able to quote the words and passages whereby they do it, as a thickly
+leaved forest always murmurs, though not a single branch stirs?&mdash;Why
+did Emanuel overmaster his beloved Horion&mdash;more than by broad
+thesis-formulas, <i>rationes decidendi</i> and <i>sententiæ magistrales</i>&mdash;merely
+by the transfiguration in his countenance, by the low echo-tone of his
+voice, by the radiance of his look, and by the devotion in his breast,
+when he spoke solemnly truths which were old to speech and new to the
+heart, like the following?&mdash;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Man goes, like the earth, from <i>west</i> to <i>east</i>; but it seems to him
+as
+if he went, with it, from east to west, from life to the grave.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">What is highest and noblest in man conceals itself, and is without use
+for the practical world, (as the highest mountains bear no herbage,)
+and out of the chain of fine <i>thoughts</i> only some members can be
+detached as actions.<a name="div2Ref_167" href="#div2_167"><sup>[167]</sup></a></p>
+
+<p class="normal">Our aimless activity, our clutchings at the air, must appear to higher
+beings like the clutching of dying men at the bed-clothes.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">The spirit awakes and will awake when the light of the senses goes out,
+just as sleepers awake when the night-light is extinguished.</p>
+
+<p class="center" style="letter-spacing:-50px"> * * * * *</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Why did these thoughts linger like things of awe in the soul?&mdash;Because
+Horion felt something higher than language, which is invented only for
+every-day sensations, can ever represent; because, even in his
+childhood, he hated systems which thrust out of sight all that is
+inexplicable; and because the human spirit feels itself as much
+oppressed in the explicable and finite as it is in a mine, or in the
+thought of the heavenly space overhead being somewhere or other boarded
+up.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">How should he have had the heart or the occasion on such a day to ask
+Emanuel about his dying-day, or about Clotilda? Victor had that poetry
+of fellow-feeling which easily puts itself into the place of the most
+unlike persons, of women and philosophers. In the evening Dahore went
+to the abbey to teach astronomy, his most beloved science. During the
+astronomical school-hour the open face of Julius became an open heaven;
+he told his Victor everything, as if he were a second father. Now he
+related to him frankly that the year before an angel had again and
+again come to him, who grasped his hand, gave him flowers, spoke to him
+kindly, and at last vanished from him into heaven, but had left him a
+letter, which he was permitted to have read to him a year after, at
+Whitsuntide, by Clotilda,&mdash;yes, and that this good angel had yesterday
+flown by him with a kiss. Victor smiled with delight, but concealed his
+conjecture that <i>he</i> looked upon the angel to be a shy, loving maiden
+from the boarding-school.&mdash;&quot;But yesterday,&quot; said Victor, &quot;I only was
+the angel that kissed thee <i>thus</i>!&quot; and repeated it. Julius knew
+no fairer gift to make to those he loved than the picture of his
+father,&mdash;the portraiture of his exalted love, which forgot no human
+being, because it was based, not upon the superiorities, but upon the
+necessities, of men,&mdash;further, of his indulgence, of his
+disinterestedness, since a long virtue spared him the battle against
+his heart, and now he did nothing but what he wished to, and since the
+next world, hanging low down before him, preached a peculiar
+independence upon necessities. Five hundred thousand fixed stars of the
+first magnitude, according to Lambert, hardly give a light equal to
+that of the nearer full moon,&mdash;and so the present always outshines our
+inner world; but soar nearer to the fixed star of the next world, then
+does it grow to a sun, which transforms the moon of time and of the
+present into a petty nebula.&mdash;As to this Emanuel, all Maienthalers
+loved him (even the Parson, although he was a non-Catholic,
+non-Lutheran, and non-Calvinist); and he loved to be dependent on
+something, on others' love.<a name="div2Ref_168" href="#div2_168"><sup>[168]</sup></a>&mdash;During this description Victor
+yearned for him again with as much emotion as if they had been
+separated a year; accordingly, in the flush of evening he laid himself
+down under the birch-leaves opposite the school, in order immediately,
+with ardent arms, to take him prisoner.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">And as Victor lifted his soul on the tall, white columns of the park
+planned by his Lordship, on the sublime sculpture which wrote out a
+great thought that looked like a tempest, and just as he had carried a
+bee that had dropped down, his wings being glued up with honey, to the
+beehive sill,&mdash;just then Dahore, with a friendly manner, came up. The
+latter entered, himself,&mdash;for Victor would have held the covert
+starting of a subject as a sin,&mdash;on that of Clotilda, and said this
+used to be her favorite spot, and the resting-bench of her quiet soul.
+The place was not grand, but, what is more, it was opposite to
+something grand (even physical greatness, e. g. a mountain, needs
+distance as a pedestal); it lay in the deepest part of the dell,
+encircled with Emanuel's flower-chains, which he often laid out
+without enclosure, because all Maienthalers respected his little
+joys,&mdash;breathed upon by great clover-fields,&mdash;overspread by the moon,
+which in spring, only after reaching the mountain-top, beamed down this
+deep valley with a mournful medley of birch-shadows, water-glistenings,
+and bright spots,&mdash;and, finally, adorned with a grassy bench, which I
+should not have mentioned had it not been planted at both ends with
+great, drooping flowers, which, with a tender feeling, no one crushed
+who sat down between them. How was Victor surprised or enraptured when
+Emanuel asked about this Clotilda! Like jewels of dew, like tears of
+joy, all the words of his teacher fell into his languishing heart,
+because they were eulogies upon her tender soul, which leads its own
+tears only into those of <i>others</i>, and hides them before dry hearts;
+upon her fine ambition, which men's criticism misconstrues into
+<i>coldness</i> and women's into <i>pride</i>; and on her warmth of love, which
+one would not have looked for in a heart like hers, fast closed as a
+bud, which now confounds inanimate with animated nature, in order by
+the former to learn to love the latter. It touched Victor even to tears
+when Emanuel so warmly praised his pupil, now withdrawn from this Eden;
+and when he actually went on to beg, in all simplicity, that he would
+be the friend of <i>his</i> friend, and now especially because he was going
+to die, and because she would never come back again,&mdash;for she had been
+here the last time merely for the purpose&mdash;on Whitsuntide, where her
+parents could not smile at it&mdash;of publicly taking the sacrament with
+the boarding-school girls,&mdash;that he would now take <i>his</i> place towards
+this starward-soaring eye, this heart aspiring to eternity,&mdash;then could
+he have fallen at the feet of his friend and <i>his</i> maiden friend for
+emotion and love.... From such lips praise bestowed upon its object
+always gives to love an extraordinary growth, because that sentiment
+always seems a pretext,<a name="div2Ref_169" href="#div2_169"><sup>[169]</sup></a> and ripens at once, so soon as it has
+found it.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">If thy heart, my friend, does not beat quickly and intensely enough for
+another's,&mdash;although, in my opinion, it already pulsates at the
+fever-point, namely, a hundred and eleven times in a minute,&mdash;then just
+go, in order to transform thy cold fever into a warm one, thy quartan
+ague into a quotidian, to other particularly respected people, and
+let them praise her, the good soul, or only name her often before
+thee,&mdash;mortally sick, and provided with thy good hundred and forty
+pulsations to the minute, thou wilt go thy way, and have the desired
+fever.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">The innocent Emanuel, who did not guess Victor's warmth, thought he
+must do still more by way of giving him the sevenfold consecration as
+priest of friendship for Clotilda, and gave him a&mdash;letter from her.
+<i>Thou</i> couldst do it, East Indian, since thou art here a child that has
+been made into an angel in the <i>limbus infantum</i> (the children's
+heaven), since thou hast no mysteries, excepting the mystery of the
+three children (hence his Lordship did not make thee the reader of his
+letters), and since thou dost not at all dream that the giving away of
+another's letter is anything wrong. Still thy scholar should not have
+read it.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">But he did read it. He cannot defend himself by anything except by my
+reader, who here holds in his hand this very same letter of another who
+never wrote it for him, and nevertheless reads it through word for word
+in his chair. I, for my part, read nothing, but only copy off what the
+dog brings me.&mdash;It is a beautiful coincidence that this letter should
+have been written by her on that very same raining, melodious night of
+the garden-feast when he wrote his first to Emanuel.</p>
+<br>
+
+<p class="right">&quot;<span class="sc">St. Luna</span>, May 4, 179*.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;You will not, perhaps, expect any excuse from me, revered teacher,
+that, when I have hardly left Maienthal, I come back in the form of a
+letter. In fact, I meant to write it even while on the road, then the
+second day, and finally yesterday. This Maienthal will spoil for me
+many other valleys; all music will sound to me like an Alpine horn,
+making me sad, and bringing to my heart the remembrance of the Alpine
+life under the weeping-birch tree.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;In this mood I should not have been able to deny my heart the pleasure
+of opening itself and pouring itself out before yours in the warmest
+thanks for the most beautiful and instructive days of my life, had I
+not formed the resolve after some days to be in Maienthal again; after
+my second return home, my heart must have its will, and way.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;In our house I found nothing changed,<a name="div2Ref_170" href="#div2_170"><sup>[170]</sup></a> nor anything in our
+neighbor's; and I found in all souls the same old love with which we
+had parted from each other,&mdash;only my Agatha, to be sure, is merry, but
+yet less so than she used to be. The only change in Herr Eymann's house
+is a guest whom every one calls by a different name,&mdash;Victor, Horion,
+Sebastian, young Lord, Doctor. This last name he fully deserves by his
+first action and first joy in St. Luna, which was the healing of the
+blind Lord Horion. What a piece of happiness for the saved and for his
+saviour!&mdash;May this youth one day only pass through your Eden, and meet
+with your good Julius, so as to repeat upon him the beautiful art&mdash;Oh!
+as often as I think upon it, that the male sex is blest with the means
+of the greatest, godlike benefactions,&mdash;that they, like a god, can
+distribute eyes, life, justice, science,&mdash;whereas my sex must confine
+its heart, so yearning to do good, to lesser services,&mdash;to the drying
+away of a tear for another, to the concealing of its own, to the
+exercise of a secret patience with happy and unhappy;&mdash;then the wish
+rises, O that that sex which has the highest benefits in its hands
+would vouchsafe to us the greatest,&mdash;that of imitating itself, and
+getting into our hands good things which should bless us by our
+distribution of them!&mdash;-At present, a woman can have nothing in her
+soul to make her great, except only wishes.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;I have just come in out of the open air from a little garden-feast at
+my Agatha's; and never is any fair bit of deep-blue sky exactly right
+to me, if it does not stand over your weeping-birch, where your eye
+counts up all its treasures and suns, and shows my heart all the tokens
+of Infinite Power and Love. To-day, in the garden, I thought with
+almost too sad a longing on your Maienthal; Herr Sebastian reminded me
+of it still oftener, because he seems to have had a teacher who
+resembled mine.<a name="div2Ref_171" href="#div2_171"><sup>[171]</sup></a> He talked very well to-day, and seemed to be made
+up of two halves,&mdash;a British and a French. Some of his fine
+observations have not gone from me,&mdash;e. g., 'Sorrows are like
+thunder-clouds: in the distance they look black, over our heads hardly
+gray.&mdash;As sad dreams betoken a glad future, so may it be with the
+so-often-tormenting dream of life when it is over.&mdash;All our strong
+feelings, like ghosts, hold sway only up to a certain hour; and if a
+man would always say to himself, This passion, this grief, this
+rapture, will in three days certainly be gone from this soul,&mdash;then
+would he become more and more tranquil and composed.' I report all this
+to you so exactly, in order, as it were, to punish myself for a too
+hasty judgment which I passed some days since (though within myself) on
+his propensity to satire.&mdash;Satire, also, seems to be merely for the
+stronger sex; I have never yet found one of my own who had found in the
+works of Swift or Cervantes or Tristram anything to her taste.&mdash;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;<i>Two days later</i>.&mdash;I and my letter are still here; but to-day it
+starts four days in advance of me. I cannot help thinking, This last
+time every flower in Maienthal, and every word my best teacher says to
+me, will give me still greater and deeper joy than ever, because I
+journey thither right from the turmoil of visiting, and with such a
+melancholy heart. The morning after that lovely night of the
+church-going festival I sat alone in an arbor near the great pond, and
+made myself sadder with all that I saw and thought; for during that
+whole morning, by reason of a dream I had had, my faded friend<a name="div2Ref_172" href="#div2_172"><sup>[172]</sup></a>
+stood before my soul,&mdash;her grave lay transparent above her, and I looked
+down through it, and saw that lily of heaven lying within there pale and
+still,&mdash;I reflected, indeed, as the gardener buried flowers with their
+pots in the earth, that the body in which we are planted must, in like
+manner, go down into the earth for future blooming, but, nevertheless,
+I could no longer control my tears.&mdash;In vain did I look upon the
+sparkling spring, which draws every day new colors, new insects, new
+flowers out of the earth,&mdash;I only grew sadder, since it rejuvenates
+everything, but not man.<a name="div2Ref_173" href="#div2_173"><sup>[173]</sup></a>&mdash;And when I saw Herr von Schleunes with a
+frog-bow approaching the pond, I was obliged, as he could see my eyes
+at a great distance as he passed by, to make believe asleep, in order
+not to betray them.... But before my dearest teacher I would have
+opened them as now, because he forgives me my weaknesses.</p>
+
+<p class="right">&quot;<span class="sc">Clotilda</span> v. <span class="sc">L. B</span>.&quot;</p>
+<br>
+
+<p class="normal">Victor had kept his left hand, with which he held the letter, too near
+to his heart, and his arm and letter began to tremble with the thumping
+heart, and he could hardly read and comprehend it for emotion. &quot;Such a
+teacher! such a pupil!&quot;&mdash;beyond that his looks could say nothing more.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">There was a struggle within him whether he should tell his friend his
+love for Clotilda. In <i>favor</i> of the confession was Emanuel's request
+to seek her society,&mdash;that eye of his beholding, as if out of fixed
+stars, all trifles of earth,&mdash;Victor's grateful desire to repay one
+secret with another, and, most of all, oh! this love for his teacher,
+this love of his teacher for him.... And this, too, conquered, however
+much there was otherwise to be said <i>per contra</i>. For if Victor's whole
+nature glowed in the fire of friendship, so did his heart mount higher
+and higher, and burn to lay itself open,&mdash;he still wrestled with it,
+and still it was silent,&mdash;it loved boundlessly,&mdash;it lifted itself up as
+if by an invisible power,&mdash;at last it burst asunder,&mdash;his bosom opened
+wide as before God,&mdash;and now, beloved, look in, but forgive him all!</p>
+
+<p class="normal">He was still in this inward conflict, when the moon, which had gone up
+behind their backs, projected their two shadowy knee-pieces before
+them.&mdash;He was reminded, by Emanuel's outstretched shadow, of a passage
+in his letter,<a name="div2Ref_174" href="#div2_174"><sup>[174]</sup></a> and of his sickly life and early passing away....
+This clove open his inner being; he gently turned his Emanuel round
+toward the moon, now pouring down its radiance, and told him and showed
+him everything,&mdash;not merely his love, however, but his whole history,
+his whole soul, all his faults, all his follies,&mdash;everything; he was,
+at this moment, as eloquent as an angel, and full as great; his heart
+undulated in the melting glow of love; and the more he said, the more
+he wanted to have to say.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">No sublimer and more blessed hour strikes on this earth than that in
+which a man erects himself, exalted by virtue, softened by love, and
+despises all dangers, and shows a friend how it is with his heart. This
+trembling, this dissolving, this exaltation, is more precious than the
+itching of vanity to disguise itself in idle refinings. But perfect
+sincerity comports only with virtue. Let the man in whom suspicion and
+darkness dwell by all means apply to his bosom night-screws and
+night-bolts,&mdash;let the bad man spare us his opening of coffins,&mdash;and
+whoso has no heaven's door about him to open, let him keep the
+hell-gate shut!</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Emanuel felt the divine or motherly joy which a friend experiences at
+the virtue and improvement of a friend, and forgot in his joy the
+different occasions of it.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Reluctantly do I tear myself away for a night from this virtuous pair.
+May I get many more days of Maienthal to paint, and may Victor spend
+there many days more!</p>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<p class="center"><img border="0" src="images/hornstart.png" alt="hornstart"></p>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+
+<h2><a name="div1Ref_15" href="#div1_15">15. DOG-POST-DAY.</a></h2>
+<br>
+
+<p class="center"><span class="sc">The Parting.</span></p>
+
+
+<p class="normal">Ah, he goes this very day! The emotions and conversations which we have
+described had shattered too severely the tender casing which enclosed,
+as a tulip does the bee, Emanuel's fair spirit; he rose pale and
+languid; and the blind one was the happiest, who saw neither this
+paleness nor the white handkerchief which he, during the night, instead
+of staining with tears, had stained with blood. He himself had still
+the pale evening red of yesterday's joy on his face; but this very
+indifference to the gradual extinguishing of his days, this growing
+feebleness and faintness of tone in his conversation, caused Victor to
+turn away his eyes from him whenever they had for some time rested upon
+him. Emanuel looked down calm as an eternal sun on the autumn of his
+bodily life; nay, the more the sand fell from his life's hourglass, so
+much the more clearly did he look through the empty glass. And yet the
+earth was to him a beloved place, a fair meadow for our earliest plays
+of childhood; and he still hung upon this mother of our first life with
+the love wherewith the bride spends the evening full of childish
+remembrances on the bosom of her beloved mother, before on the morrow
+she goes to meet the bridegroom of her heart.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Victor reproached himself with every drop of blood shed by Emanuel, and
+resolved to go to-day, because this Psyche, with her great wings, could
+no longer stir herself in her web without tearing it. In Emanuel's eyes
+there shone an inexpressible love for his sympathizing scholar. He
+began of himself to speak of his dying-day, in order to comfort him,
+and represented to him that he could not go hence till after a year. He
+based his enthusiastic prediction on two grounds;&mdash;first, that most of
+his male relatives had died on the selfsame day and in the selfsame
+climacteric<a name="div2Ref_175" href="#div2_175"><sup>[175]</sup></a> of life; secondly, that several consumptive patients
+before him had read in their diseased breast, as in a magic mirror,
+their last day. Victor disputed him; he showed that the foretelling of
+one's last appearance, as if the hectic man could easily feel
+beforehand, from the regular and gradual failing of the vital energy,
+the last step or freezing-point, was false, because feelings of the
+future in the present were contradictions (<i>in adjecto</i>), and because
+in the midst of life we could as little have a presentiment of the
+arrival of death as in our waking hours we can (notwithstanding a
+parallel gradation of steps in this case also) that of sleep. Victor
+represented all this to him; and yet he did not fairly believe it
+himself; he was overmastered by the lofty man who could announce his
+entrance into the shadow of death as calmly and confidently as an
+entrance of the moon into the shadow of the earth.... We will forgive
+the sick man, and not hold ourselves wiser than he is, because he is
+more enthusiastic than we.&mdash;Victor was most consoled by Emanuel's
+notion that his deceased father would appear to him for the first time
+just before his death.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Victor lingered, and tried not to linger; forbade, as physician,
+Emanuel's talking, in order to make the excuse to himself of a harmless
+postponement, and became more and more troubled, for the very reason
+that he cared little to speak himself.&mdash;How canst thou, good Victor,
+this very day hurry away from him, from this angel, who will perhaps
+disappear over the next grave?&mdash;It must be a sore thing for thee, since
+it is already so hard to quit a Maienthal full of blossoms, a blind one
+full of soft tones; painful is here the last pressure of hands, Victor,
+and sweet every delay!</p>
+
+<p class="normal">He resolved to take leave at night, because a parting in the morning
+begets too long a sadness, and the place in the heart from which the
+beloved object was torn away continues bleeding all day long. Emanuel
+would of course, at evening, have betaken himself to the seminary, as
+he did yesterday; then would Victor, before the blind one, whom he
+would beg for the saddest melody in the world, be able to let his full
+eyelids, with which he always had to go out in order to relieve the
+anguish, stream down to his heart's content.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">When at evening he had eaten his last meal, and the evening-bell began,
+his heart felt as if the breast had been lifted away from it, and
+needle-points of ice were blown upon it.<a name="div2Ref_176" href="#div2_176"><sup>[176]</sup></a> Full of love, he clasped
+the blind youth, whom he was not permitted to recognize as the playmate
+of his childhood, and who with his tones had given more raptures than
+he had in this night of his blindness received in return; and he let
+tears have their way, whose twofold, perhaps threefold, source Emanuel
+did not guess; for the sight of these eyes, which were nevermore to be
+opened, awoke in him now, since Clotilda's wish for their healing, much
+more sorrow. Emanuel he still begged, with a voice that hurried away
+over the incidental meaning, to accompany him a short distance, till
+Maienthal should be out of sight.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Out in the darkling and still country, all his sorrows lingered in his
+breast beside their sighs. &quot;When the moon glimmers in upon this valley
+of blossoms,&quot; thought he, &quot;I shall have left it for a long time.&quot; Only
+the altar-lights, the stars, burned in the great temple. He proposed to
+himself to part with his teacher on the mountain where their union had
+taken place; but he went up by circuitous ways,&mdash;Emanuel gladly
+following whithersoever he led,&mdash;in order during the circuit to
+overmaster his taciturnity and his tears.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">But they arrived at the foot of the weeping-birch, and grief still held
+possession of his eye and his voice. &quot;Ah!&quot; thought he, &quot;how great and
+glad was the first night here, and how painful is this!&quot; They reclined
+on the earth beside each other on the grassy bank, solitary, silent,
+sad, before the darkly glimmering universe. Victor could hear the
+labored breathing of the diseased breast, and the future grave on this
+mountain seemed to open at his side. Oh! if it is bitter to stand by
+the bed wherein a loved and fading countenance lies with the hues of
+death, far more bitter is it, in the midst of the scenes of health,
+behind the erect form of the dear one, to hear the grave-digger Death
+softly at his work, and to think, as often as the loved face looks
+joyful, &quot;Ah, be still more joyful! in a short time he will have gnawed
+round the roots of thy life, and thou wilt have passed away with thy
+joys and with mine!&quot;&mdash;But ah! there is indeed no friend, man or woman,
+with whom we should not be obliged to think the same!&mdash;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">He knew not why Dahore was so long silent.&mdash;He foresaw not that the
+moon would illumine the mountain sooner than the valley. The moon, that
+Pharos on the coast of the second world, now encircled men with pale
+fields, taken from dreams, with wan, gleaming meadows born of a
+super-terrestrial perspective, and the Alps and woods it resolved into
+immovable mists; <i>above</i> the hemisphere of earth stood deep the
+Lethe-flood of slumber, <i>below</i> the green crust stood the dead sea, and
+two loving men lived between the wide domains of sleep and death.... At
+this moment Victor thought to himself, indeed, still more keenly,
+&quot;Here, beside this birch-tree, under this cold sod, will <i>his</i>
+crumbling breast be forever hidden, and his heart will bleed no more;
+but ah! it will beat no more.&quot; He thought, indeed, upon gloomy
+resemblances, as the <i>immovable</i> stars appeared to go <i>up</i> and <i>down</i>,
+merely because the playing <i>earth</i> turned itself about them, now
+<i>showing</i> and now <i>hiding</i> them; he turned, indeed, his melancholy
+glance away from the <i>ignes fatui</i>, that, gliding over valleys, danced
+only on the solemn darkness and on the graves, and which described
+round a solitary powder-house their deceptive circles.&mdash;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">But still he was silent, and thought, &quot;Ah, well! we have each other
+yet.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">But then it was too much for his bleeding heart when the flute-wails of
+the blind one stole out from the solitary house into the night, and
+passed over the mountain and over the future grave.&mdash;Then were voices
+given to the sighs and death-bells to the future, and his sadness grew
+too oppressive, as he thought, amidst the flute-murmurs, how this
+unique, this irreplaceable man, who cherished so much love for him in
+his great heart, was going hence never to reappear.&mdash;Ah! and when,
+besides, just at this moment, Emanuel, who had been lying beside him
+silently lost in gazing on the heavens and like a departed one, changed
+his position on account of his painful and oppressed breathing, but
+with a countenance whose serenity was undisturbed by the pains in his
+breast, then a cold hand glided into Victor's swollen heart and turned
+itself about therein, and his blood curdled on it, and he said, without
+the power of looking upon him, in faint, supplicating, broken accents,
+&quot;Do not die in a year, my dear Emanuel,&mdash;do not wish to die!&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">The genius of night had stood till now, invisibly, before Emanuel, and
+poured high raptures into his bosom, but no passions; and he said: &quot;We
+are not alone,&mdash;my soul feels the passing by of its kindred, and lifts
+itself up,&mdash;<i>under</i> the earth is sleep, <i>above</i> the earth is dream,
+but
+between sleep and dream I see luminous eyes move along like stars,&mdash;a
+cool breath comes from the sea of eternity over the glowing earth,&mdash;my
+heart mounts up, and will break away from life,&mdash;all around me is
+as great as if God passed through the night.&mdash;Spirits! grasp my
+spirit,&mdash;it climbs to your embrace,&mdash;and bear it up yonder....&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Victor turned round and looked imploringly into the beautiful, joyous,
+tearless countenance: &quot;Thou <i>wilt</i> die?&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Emanuel's ecstasy soared above life: &quot;The dark streak in the next
+world is only a meadow of flowers,<a name="div2Ref_177" href="#div2_177"><sup>[177]</sup></a>&mdash;suns shine to light us
+onward,&mdash;flying heavens come to meet us with spring-breezes. With only
+empty graves the earth flies round the sun; for her dead stand remote
+on brighter suns.&quot;&mdash;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Emanuel?&quot; said Victor, in a questioning tone, weeping aloud, and with
+a voice of the most fervent yearning,&mdash;and the flute-notes sank
+sorrowfully into the broad night,&mdash;&quot;Emanuel?&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Emanuel, returning to himself, looked on him, and said, calmly: &quot;Yes,
+my beloved!&mdash;I can no more accustom myself to the earth; the water-drop
+of life has become flat and shallow,&mdash;I can no longer move round
+therein,&mdash;and my heart yearns to be among the great men who have left
+this drop behind them.&mdash;O beloved, listen, I pray,&quot;&mdash;and here he
+pressed to soreness the heart of his Victor,&mdash;&quot;and hear this heavy
+breath going. See, I pray, this shattered body, this thick casing,&mdash;how
+it wraps round my spirit, and obstructs its passage.&mdash;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;See, here my spirit and thine cleave frozen to the ice-cake, and
+yonder the night opens all her heavens, reposing one behind the other;
+yonder in the blue, glimmering abyss dwells all the greatness which has
+disrobed itself on the earth, all the truth that we guess, all the
+goodness that we love.&mdash;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;See, how still is all up there in immensity,&mdash;how softly the worlds
+move, how silently the suns glow! The great Eternal reposes as a
+fountain, with his overflowing, infinite love, in the midst of them,
+refreshing and tranquillizing all; and around God lies no grave.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Here Emanuel, as if raised by an infinite blessedness, stood up and
+looked lovingly toward Arcturus, who still hung under the zenith of
+heaven, and said, directing his words toward the broad deep of
+brilliancy: &quot;Ah, how inexpressibly do I yearn to come up to you! Ah,
+break in pieces, old heart, and hold me not so long in these bonds!&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Die, then, great soul,&quot; said Victor, &quot;and take thy way up yonder; but
+break with thy death my little heart also, and keep by thee the poor
+one who cannot forsake thee nor do without thee.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">The flute had ceased; the two friends had sunk into each other's arms
+to end their farewell. &quot;Dear, beloved, never-to-be-forgotten one,&quot; said
+Emanuel, &quot;thou movest me too deeply; but when, a year hence, I go up
+from this mountain, then shalt thou stand by me, and see how man is
+released from his bonds. Thy tears will be my last earthly pangs; but I
+shall say, what I say now, We part by night, but we meet again by day.&quot;
+And so he went.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Victor had gently disengaged himself from the childlike lips,&mdash;he
+sought not to follow him on his night-track,&mdash;slowly he went along by
+one vast sleep.&mdash;Often he turned round and followed with eyes full of
+falling tears the falling stars over Maienthal; and at four of the
+morning he arrived with a heavenly soul at St. Luna, and entered the
+garden full of old scenes, and laid down in the familiar arbor his
+glowing head and his subdued heart in the dew of the morning for a
+cooling repose.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">O rest thou, rest thou!&mdash;ah! sleep only, either on the earth or under
+the earth, can still the ever-agitated bosom of man....<a name="div2Ref_178" href="#div2_178"><sup>[178]</sup></a></p>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<p class="center"><img border="0" src="images/shieldstart.png" alt="shieldstart"></p>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+
+<h2><a name="div1Ref_16" href="#div1_16">16. DOG-POST-DAY.</a></h2>
+<br>
+
+<p class="center"><span class="sc2">The Potato-form-Cutter.&mdash;Drag-chains in St. Luna.&mdash;Wax
+Embossments.&mdash;Chess according to the <i>Regula  Falsi</i>.&mdash;The Thistle
+of Hope.&mdash;Escort to Flachsenfingen.</span></p>
+<br>
+
+<p class="normal">One would certainly want to sleep in one's clothes, like old Fritz, so
+soon as ever one came to understand that in his shirt he is beset and
+attacked, as Victor and I sometimes are, by the vampires of midnight
+melancholy. They stay away when one sits up and has all his clothes on;
+especially do boots and hat retain for us the feeling of day in the
+greatest degree.&mdash;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">A warm hand lifted up Victor's bedewed head from the
+sleeping-board,<a name="div2Ref_179" href="#div2_179"><sup>[179]</sup></a> and directed it towards the whole surging flood of
+morning-light. His eyes opened (as always) with indescribable mildness,
+and without night-clouds, before Agatha, and beamed on her with full
+radiance. But she hurried him away with his radiance out of the leafy
+bedchamber; for he must look himself up a dressing-comb and a
+morning-blessing, and, secondly, the table-couch was to be a tea-table
+for Clotilda, who liked to take <i>warm</i> drinks in <i>cool</i> places.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&mdash;And so he stands out there between parsonage and palace in
+mid-morning. All seemed to him to have been just built and painted
+during his journey; for all that dwelt therein seemed to have changed
+and made him melancholy. &quot;The parents in there,&quot; he said to himself,
+&quot;have no son, my friend has no sweetheart, and I&mdash;no tranquil heart.&quot;
+And now, when at last he entered the house, and became once more a
+bright triumphal arch of the loving family-circle,&mdash;when he was
+compelled to contemplate with sympathetic and yet enlightened eyes the
+tender illusions of the parents, the groundless hopes of his friend,
+and the coming up of stormy days,&mdash;then stood one fixed tear for the
+future in his eye; and it grew not less when his adoptive mother would
+justify it by tender glances.... Partly, however, this veil was wafted
+over his soul merely from the preceding night, whose glimmering scenes
+were separated from him only by a short interval of sleep; for a night
+spent in the watches of emotion always ends with a melancholy forenoon.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">The Chaplain was just making butter-vignettes; I mean, he was cutting,
+with no other etching-tool than a penknife, and into no other
+copperplate except potatoes, printers' tail-pieces and quadrats, which
+were to be stamped on the July butter by way of ornament. One might
+have supposed that Victor would have helped himself out greatly by
+having wit enough to remark that the <i>old printed things</i> were, to be
+sure, quite worthy of long books upon them, and long universal German
+literary reviews of the books, but of no human thought, and were ten
+times more unenjoyable than these <i>newest</i> butter-<i>incunabula</i>;<a name="div2Ref_180" href="#div2_180"><sup>[180]</sup></a>
+for, if there could be anything wretcheder than the world's history
+(i. e. the history of rulers), whose contents consisted of wars, as the
+theatre-journal of <i>other</i> puppets does of cudgellings, it could only
+be the history of <i>littérateurs</i> and printers.<a name="div2Ref_181" href="#div2_181"><sup>[181]</sup></a> This, too, must
+have stood him in stead,&mdash;that he was, finally, philosophical, and
+demanded that man should be called neither a <i>laughing</i> nor a
+<i>reasoning</i>, but a <i>prinking</i> animal; to which remark the Chaplain's
+lady added nothing, except the application of it to her daughters.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">But in men of his sort, sadness, satire, and philosophy have place
+beside each other. To the potato-medal-coiner and the Chaplainess, who
+reckoned all women on earth among her daughters, and pronounced similar
+castigatory sermons against them all, he described his journey with as
+many satires and rasures as were needful for both parties; but when he
+heard the wishes of the family expressed that his Lordship might have a
+happy journey back with the beloved son of the Prince, and the
+intelligence that the Regency-Counsellor had already everything packed
+up to start for the city any hour that he might choose, then had Victor
+nothing to do but to take the secretive tear-ducts in his eye-sockets
+out of the way.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">But whither? Into the garden! That was not well-considered. Flamin
+followed, and they arrived together at the embowered closet in the
+presence of the tea-drinkers. Never did its branches overshadow a more
+embarrassed face, softer eyes, fuller looks, and livelier or lovelier
+dreams than Victor carried with him beneath them. He thought of
+Clotilda as now a wholly new being, and thought, therefore,&mdash;as he knew
+not whether she loved him,&mdash;very stupidly. Man, when he has climbed
+over the mountain, always regards the coming hill as nothing; Flamin
+had been his mountain, and Clotilda was his hill.&mdash;In all the shallows
+of conversation, where one is already half stranding or sinking, there
+is no grander ship's-pump than a story which one has to tell. Give me
+embarrassment, and the largest circle, and only <i>one</i> disaster,&mdash;that
+is, the anecdote of it, which no one knows but myself,&mdash;and I will soon
+save myself. Victor therefore brought out his, life-preserver,&mdash;that
+is, his log-book,&mdash;from which he made for the bower a practical
+extract. I confess, a newspaper-writer might have falsified more, might
+have been guilty of more sins of <i>commission</i>, but hardly of more sins
+of <i>omission</i>.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">He gave himself, I fancy, a lift again with the Chaplainess, and
+injured himself unquestionably with Clotilda,&mdash;however much, out of
+good-will towards his hearers, and too strong a hatred of the court, he
+offended against Clotilda's satire-embargo in her letter,&mdash;when,
+without reflecting, too, that maidens love only the jest, not the
+jesters, he represented the benefit-drama of the Princess, not on the
+sublime side, as I did, but on the comic side. Clotilda smiled, and
+Agatha laughed.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">But when he named the name of Emanuel, and his house, and his mountain,
+then did friendship and memory diffuse over the fairest eye above which
+an eyebrow-arch, drawn by a line of beauty, ever yet flowed, a soft
+glimmer which wanted, every moment, to grow to a tear of joy. But it
+had to become one of another nature, when, in answer to the question
+about his health which Clotilda hopefully put to him as an adept in
+science, Victor was compelled to give the (faintly paraphrased) history
+of his nocturnal bleeding. He could not conceal the pang of sympathy,
+nor could Clotilda conquer it. O ye two good souls! what sore wounds
+will your hearts yet receive from your great friend!</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Whither could she now turn her loving and sorrowing eye, but to her
+good brother Flamin, towards whom her demeanor, in consequence of the
+double constraint which her silence and his interpretations imposed
+upon her, had been hitherto so indescribably mild?&mdash;As, now, Victor saw
+all this with such wholly different eyes,&mdash;as he stood before his poor
+friend, who with his present happiness was perhaps accumulating the
+poisonous nourishment of his future jealousy, and gazed openly and
+fixedly into the firm countenance which some time bitter days might
+rend with agony,&mdash;and as, generally, <i>past</i> or <i>future</i> sorrows of
+another took a stronger hold of him than <i>present</i> ones, because fancy
+had him more in its power than the senses,&mdash;in this state of things, he
+could not for a moment assert the mastery over his eyes, but they bent
+their look, encircled with compassionate tears, tenderly on his friend.
+Clotilda was embarrassed about the resting-place of his look; so was he
+too, because man is less ashamed of the most vehement signs of hatred
+than of the smallest signs of love. Clotilda understood not the
+coquettish double art of throwing others into embarrassment or drawing
+them out of it; and the good Agatha always confounded the latter with
+the former.... &quot;Ask him what ails him, brother!&quot; said Agatha to
+Flamin....</p>
+
+<p class="normal">The latter led him out with like good intention behind the nearest
+gooseberry-bushes, and asked him in his firm way, which always held an
+assertion as a question,&mdash;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Something has happened to thee?&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Just come this way!&quot; said Victor, and pulled him along behind some
+higher Spanish walls<a name="div2Ref_182" href="#div2_182"><sup>[182]</sup></a> of foliage.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Nothing has happened to me,&quot; he began, at last, with brimming
+eye-sockets and smiling features,&mdash;&quot;nothing more than that I have been
+a fool for some twenty-six years&quot; (that was his age). &quot;I know thou art
+unfortunately a jurist, and perhaps a worse oculist than I myself am,
+and hast, perhaps, read very little in Herr Janin.<a name="div2Ref_183" href="#div2_183"><sup>[183]</sup></a>&mdash;Am I right?&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Flamin's shaking of his head meant something more than No.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Very naturally; but if thou hadst, thou couldst have it from himself,
+or from the translation by Selle, very finely shown, that not merely
+the lachrymal gland secretes our tear-drops, but also the crystalline
+body,<a name="div2Ref_184" href="#div2_184"><sup>[184]</sup></a> the Meibomian<a name="div2Ref_185" href="#div2_185"><sup>[185]</sup></a>
+glands, the lachrymal caruncle,<a name="div2Ref_186" href="#div2_186"><sup>[186]</sup></a>
+and&mdash;our afflicted heart, I add to the rest.&mdash;Nevertheless, of these
+aqueous globules, which are made for the sorrows of poor, poor mortals,
+not more than (if things go rightly) four ounces are filtered in
+twenty-four hours.... But, my dear one, the fact is just this,&mdash;that
+things do not go rightly, especially with me; and it vexes me to-day,
+not that thou hast never peeped into Herr Janin, but that thou dost not
+observe my confounded, cursed, stupid way.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;What one?&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Yes, indeed,&mdash;what one? but I mean this of to-day,&mdash;namely, that
+my eyes&mdash;thou mayst boldly ascribe it merely to a too feeble
+<i>tear-siphon</i>, under which head Petit comprehends all absorbing
+tear-ducts&mdash;run over, when, e. g., any one does me an injustice, or
+when I merely desire anything too strongly, or imagine to myself an
+approaching pleasure, or only, in fact, a strong sensation, or human
+life, or the mere weeping itself.&quot; ...</p>
+
+<p class="normal">His good-natured eye stood full of water as he said it, and justified
+all.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Dear Flamin, I wish I had been a lady, or a Moravian, or a
+player;&mdash;truly, if I wanted to make the spectators believe I was going
+about it (namely, weeping), it would be actually a fact, too, on the
+spot.&quot;&mdash;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">And here he fell softly and fondly, with tears which had an excuse for
+flowing, upon the beloved breast.... But for the viper-cure and
+iron-cure of his manliness he needed nothing but a &quot;Hm!&quot; and a shrug of
+the whole body; thereupon the youths went back as men to the arbor.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">There was nothing left there: the girls had stolen away to the meadows,
+where nothing was to be avoided, except high grass and bedewed shadows.
+The empty arbor was the best absorbing tear-siphon for his eyes; nay, I
+gather from reports of the epistolary Spitz that he was vexed. As the
+sister came back by-and-by alone, his companion was vexed too. In fact,
+if somehow or other my hero&mdash;which would be a misfortune for me and
+him&mdash;should in time fall in love with Clotilda, then will the heroine
+make us both warm enough,&mdash;him in acting, me in copying,&mdash;for the very
+reason that she herself will <i>not</i> be warm, because she has neither
+superfluous warmth nor superfluous coldness, but always the alternating
+temperature which changes with the subject of conversation, but not
+with the speaker; because she takes away from a tenderly disposed
+fellow-man all pleasure in praising her, as she pays out no tithe
+thereof, or at least in offending her, as she issues no letters of
+indulgence; and because one really, in his agony, assumes at last that
+one can commit no other sins against her except such as are sins
+against the Holy Ghost. Jean Paul, who has been in such cases, and has
+often stood for whole years in one spot before such mountain-fortresses
+with his storming-ladders and labarums and trumpeters, and, instead of
+the garrisons, taken <i>himself</i> off by an honorable retreat,&mdash;this Paul,
+I say, can form a conception of what an amount of parchment, time, and
+printer's ink may have to be used up in the case of Sebastian <i>contra</i>
+Clotilda, before we get things even to a <i>war-footing</i>. In fact, with a
+perfectly <i>rational</i> woman a man never feels himself quite well; and
+only with a merely fine, fanciful, ardent, capricious one is he truly
+at home. One like Clotilda can make the best man, from mere distress
+and respect, frosty, stupid, and enraptured; and in most cases there
+comes in the additional misfortune, that the poor, worn-out, fond fool,
+by whom such an earthly angel absolutely will not let herself be
+worshipped, as the Apocalyptic one would not by the disciple John, can
+still seldom muster courage to say to the angel,&mdash;somewhat as one might
+to an angel of an opposite nature with the kingdoms of the world,
+demanding to be worshipped,&mdash;&quot;Take thyself out of my sight!&quot; Paul
+always in such cases takes himself away.&mdash;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Victor did not do this; he absolutely now could not get away from the
+house, i. e. from the village. The summer days seemed to him to rest in
+St. Luna, softly breathing, fragrant, blissful; and he was going to be
+cast out of this softly straying gondola into the slave-ship of the
+Court,&mdash;out of the milk-house of the Parsonage into the princely
+arsenic-house,&mdash;out of the <i>kindergarten</i> of household love into the
+ice-field of court love. That was a sore thing to him here in the
+arbor,&mdash;and so sweet a thing in Tostato's shop!&mdash;When man's wishes and
+situations exchange places, he accuses the situations, not the wishes.
+He could laugh at himself for it, he said, but he had a hundred reasons
+for lingering in St. Luna from one day to another: he was so much
+disgusted now with his intention of pleasing a man (the Prince) from
+any other motive than love; it was still more improbable that he should
+himself please than that he should be pleased; he would rather humor
+his own whims than those of crownéd heads, and he knew for certain that
+in the first month he should tell the Minister von Schleunes satirical
+things to his very face, and in the second even the Prince; and, in
+fact, now in midsummer he should just be fit to act the complete
+court-knave, whereas in winter, &amp;c.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Beside these hundred reasons, he had still weaker ones which he did not
+at all mention,&mdash;for instance, some such as these: He would gladly be
+about Clotilda, because he must necessarily, as it were, to justify his
+conduct,&mdash;but which, then, my dear, thy past or thy future?&mdash;disclose
+to her his knowledge about her consanguinity to his friend. To this
+disclosure there was wanting, what in Paris is dearest, <i>place</i>,&mdash;and
+then, too, the exordium. Clotilda was nowhere to be met alone.
+Connoisseurs say that every secret one tells to one of the fair sex is
+a sticking-plaster which attaches him to her, and often begets a second
+secret: was it for some such reason that Victor was so eager to
+contrive a way of showing to Clotilda his acquaintance with her
+sisterly relation?&mdash;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">He stayed day after day, as, besides, the butter-week<a name="div2Ref_187" href="#div2_187"><sup>[187]</sup></a> of the
+marriage must go by first. He had already marriage-medals in his
+pocket. But he never could see Clotilda except a second at a time;
+and, according to Bonnet, one needs half a second for a clear
+idea,&mdash;according to Hooke, a whole one, in fact. Therefore, before he
+could form a complete conception of this still goddess, she was always
+gone.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">At last more serious arrangements were made, not for departure, but for
+forming the purpose of it.... The sweetest minutes of a visit are those
+which once more postpone its close; the sweetest of all, those in which
+one already has cane or fan in hand, and yet does not go. Such minutes
+now encircled our Fabius of love; softer eyes said to him, &quot;Hurry not!&quot;
+warmer hands drew him back, and the mother's tear asked him, &quot;Wilt thou
+rob me of my Flamin so soon as to-morrow?&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;By no means,&quot; he answered, and kept his seat. Did not, I ask, the
+Chaplainess thrust for his sake her lingual executioner's sword into
+its sheath, because there was nothing he so hated as loud or silent
+defamations of a sex which, more unhappy than ours, sees itself
+maltreated by two sexes at once? For he often took maidens by the hand,
+and said: &quot;Woman's faults, particularly <i>evil</i> reports, moodiness, and
+sensitiveness, are <i>knot-holes</i>, which in the <i>green</i> tree please us
+even into the honeymoon<a name="div2Ref_188" href="#div2_188"><sup>[188]</sup></a> as fine marble-veined <i>circles</i>, but
+which, in the <i>dry</i>, in the marriage-furniture, when the plug has
+shrunk and fallen out, gape open as ugly holes.&quot; Agatha now screwed her
+sewing-cushion to his writing-table and kissed him, whether he chose to
+look pleasant or sullen; Even the Chaplain sought to sweeten for him,
+if not the last days, which he dreamed away at his house, yet at least
+the last <i>nights</i>, for which purpose he needed nothing but a drum and a
+foot. The most fiery nocturnal witch-dances of the mice the Chaplain
+interdicted with his heel, that they might not wake up his guest; that
+is to say, he kept up against the foot-board of the bed from time to
+time a moderate cannonading, which knelled into the ear-trumpets of the
+dancers the more in proportion as it startled the ears of humanity.
+Against the Euler's knight's-moves of the rats he took the field with
+only a mallet, wherewith, breaking in like a day of judgment on their
+pleasure-parties and hunting-parties, he merely thumped once or twice
+on a drum, extemporized out of the bed-quilt.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Matthieu was invisible, and, as courtiers mimic princes in everything,
+was parodying the nuptial days of his prince at least by little nuptial
+<i>hours</i> of his own. The powder which issued out of cannons and the
+cornucopias of the firework-makers, the <i>vivat</i> which was prayed from
+pulpits and shouted from taverns, and the expenses one incurred for all
+this, were, I think, so considerable, that the greatest prince need not
+have been ashamed to illustrate therewith his marriage and his&mdash;ennui.
+Coldness has forever a <i>speaking-trumpet</i>, and sensitiveness an
+<i>ear-trumpet</i>. The arrival of an unloved princely corpse or bride is
+heard of at the polar circles; on the contrary, when we inferiors fill
+our graves or our arms with loved beings, there fall only a few,
+unheard tears, disconsolate or blissful.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Flamin pined for the session-table, whose labors were now soon to
+begin, and he could not comprehend this delay.... At last, for once,
+and with all seriousness, the day of departure was fixed, the 10th of
+August; and I am sure Victor would not have been on the 14th still in
+St. Luna, had not the Devil on the 8th brought along a Tyrolese.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">It is the same fellow who day before yesterday made his entry among us
+at Scheerau, with a wax retinue which he had got together, half from
+the imperial states and half from among the literati, and with the wax
+hands of these twin brothers of man took money from our purse. It is
+stupid, that Spitz did not bring me the present dog's-day the day
+before yesterday; I could myself have asked the churl, who embossed, in
+St. Luna, Victor and the Chaplain in wax, what was the real name of
+Victor, and of Eymann, and of St. Luna itself. The result is, that I am
+still, with an allowable and biographical curiosity about this
+carpenter of men, who surrounds us with awful reflections of our little
+being, following on his heels.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Victor must, therefore, again tarry; for he had himself and the
+Chaplain baked in wax, in order to give, in the first place, to the
+latter, who had a childish fondness for all casts, dolls, and puppets,
+and, secondly, to the family, who longed to quarter the waxen
+mock-Victor in his vacated chamber, a greater pleasure than to himself.
+For he had a horror of these flesh-colored shadows of himself. Even in
+childhood, among all ghost-stories, those of people who had seen
+themselves crept with the coldest hand over his heart. Often at
+evening, before going to bed, he surveyed his trembling body so long,
+that at last he detached it from himself, and saw it standing thus
+alone beside his self and gesticulating as a strange form; then he
+would lay himself down, quaking, with this strange form, in the grave
+of sleep, and the darkling soul felt itself like a Hamadryad, grown
+over by the pliant fleshy bark. Hence he felt deeply the difference and
+the long interval between his self and its bark, when he looked for
+some time on another's body, and still more deeply when he contemplated
+his own.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">He sat opposite the embossing-stool and the embossing-tools, but fixed
+his eyes on a book again, so as not to see the corporeal form, in which
+he carried himself round, distant and duplicated. The reason why he
+nevertheless could endure the reduplication of his face in the glass
+can only be, that he regarded the supernumerary in the glass either
+merely as a superficial portrait without cubic contents, or as the only
+archetype with which we compare other duplicates of our person.... Upon
+these points I can never speak, myself, without a certain tremor....</p>
+
+<p class="normal">The wax-copy of Victor, to express his majority, was arrayed in a <i>toga
+virilis</i>, an overcoat which the original had cast off; likewise the
+chamber which the living one vacated was cleared out. The Chaplain
+proposed to himself to place this cheap edition of Horion in the window
+when the better one was gone, in such a manner that all the school
+youth, who learned from the chorister manners and <i>mores</i>, should doff
+their hats to it when they came tearing out of the school-house.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Now at last!&mdash;For Mat came. The wrung-out cheeks of the latter, and his
+whole body, which had been under the lemon-squeezers of night-feasts,
+gave evidence that he did not lie when he said the princely bridegroom
+looked even eight times wretcheder, and was prostrate with the gout. He
+added in his bitter way, which Victor little liked, that these pale
+great people had in fact no blood except the little they cupped from
+their subjects or what stuck to their hands, as insects carry no red
+blood about with them, save what they have sucked from other creatures.
+This reminded Victor of his medical duties to this prince. Either Mat's
+wasted form,&mdash;for immoral night-life makes features and complexion
+still more repulsive than the longest confinement to the sick-bed,&mdash;or
+the recollection of his Lordship's warnings, or both, made him
+quite as odious to our court-physician as the latter through his
+court-doctorship had become to him: this secret poison of Matthieu's,
+however, manifested itself, not by an abated, but by an increased,
+almost ironical courteousness. On the contrary, Mat and Flamin seemed
+to be more familiar with one another than ever.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">In the forenoon, after shaving, Victor jumped up without washing
+himself again, and immediately packed up his boot-jack, and burst the
+suspenders of his pantaloons, and bespoke additional hands to discharge
+his life-ballast, (on account of his miserable packing,) and then stow
+it again. For he always gave over the whole trusteeship of the lumber
+of our petty life's furniture to strange hands, and that with such a
+contempt for the trumpery and such a recklessness of expenditure,&mdash;I
+never mean, indeed, to calumniate my hero, but, notwithstanding,
+it is proved by Spitz that he never collated the current money of a
+gold-piece when he changed it into silver, nor ever beat down in trade
+a Jew, Roman, or Moravian,&mdash;to such a degree, I say, did he carry this,
+that the whole female Hanse in St. Luna cried, &quot;What a fool!&quot; and that
+the Chaplainess always in the market-square slipped herself into his
+place. But he was incorrigible, because he made the journey of life,
+and therefore the luggage of the journey, look so diminutive through
+his philosophic eyes, and because nothing made him blush like the least
+appearance of self-interest: he ran off from all arrangements,
+outriders, and stage-rehearsals, when they appeared on his account; he
+was ashamed of every pleasure which was not to be divided, at least
+into two bites, one for a fellow-eater; he said, the forehead of a
+Hospodar<a name="div2Ref_189" href="#div2_189"><sup>[189]</sup></a> must have assumed the hardness of his crown, for
+otherwise such a man could not possibly endure what often, merely on
+his behalf, was done by a whole county,&mdash;the music, the triumphal
+arches, the odes, the cries of joy in prose, and the frightful
+cannonades.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">He had now nothing more to discharge in St. Luna than a mere flat
+civility; for thus much may I well assert without vanity, that
+a hero whom I have chosen for mine will have, I trust, sufficient
+good-breeding to go to the Chamberlain Le Baut and say, &quot;<i>Au revoir!</i>&quot;
+Besides, to such state visits he must now accustom himself.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Mat, too, was over there, that image of a Cupid with bristly, plucked,
+drooping wings, tossed to the Chamberlain's lady: the latter joked with
+him about those vacant looks, which betrayed the intermittent pulse of
+his love. Le Baut was playing chess with Mat,&mdash;Clotilda sat at her
+little work-table full of silk-flowers, in the midst of this noble
+trio.... Ye poor daughters! what people have you not often to welcome
+and hear through! To Clotilda, however, this family friend was nothing
+but a stuffed-out mummy, and she knew not whether he came or went.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Sebastian, as adoptive son of Fortune, as heir of the paternal post of
+favorite, was to-day received at the Chamberlain's with uncommon
+civility. Verily, if the courtier shuns unfortunates because sympathy
+for their sufferings comes over him too heavily, so does he gladly seek
+the society of the fortunate, because he loves to participate in their
+joy. The Chamberlain, who even continued to bow before one who, in his
+fall from a throne, hung midway in the air, naturally bent himself
+still lower before one who was in the act of making the opposite
+passage.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Victor joined the women, but with an eye that strayed away to the
+chess-board, in order, if he should be embarrassed, immediately to have
+at hand a pretext for changing his attention or taking his leave. It
+was ingenious: for every word which he or the women said was a move at
+chess; he was obliged to conceal his coldness toward the Le Baut, that
+is, toward the stepmother,&mdash;how much did she know that nothing graces a
+mother more than a perfect daughter?&mdash;and his <i>warmth</i> toward the
+stepdaughter. The reader must not ask: &quot;What warmth, then, could the
+old stepmother desire?&quot; For in the higher ranks claims are not altered
+by blood-relationship or age; merely in the lower is this the case;
+hence I always fear that what I address to the daughter may weary the
+mother, and I always cast about, and rightly, when she comes, for a
+better thread of discourse. Victor easily concealed his <i>coldness</i> by
+virtue of humanity, which, with him, so often degenerated into a
+good-natured flattery of immoral hopes; and when a woman wanted to have
+him fall in love with her, he would say: &quot;I cannot really tell the good
+little lamb, 'I would rather not.'&quot; His <i>warmth</i> toward Clotilda he
+concealed&mdash;badly, not because it was too strong, but precisely because
+it was not yet enough so. It is natural: a young man of education can,
+if he will, conceal and bury in silence his <i>reciprocated</i> love,
+without making a pulpit announcement, but an <i>unreturned</i> love, one
+which he himself calls nothing more than mere regard, he lets blaze out
+from him without cover. For the rest, I beg the world to sit down and
+consider, that my hero has not the Devil in his skin or sixteen years
+over his head, but that he cannot possibly feel a love for a person who
+hangs a Moses' veil over her sentiments and over her charms. Love
+begins and rises, throughout, only on reciprocal love, and with the
+lovers' mutual finding-out of each other. He has merely regard, but a
+very great, a growing and anxious regard; in short, his regard is that
+cold pulsating point in the yolk of the heart&mdash;the metaphor is drawn
+from an egg&mdash;to which the least outward warmth, often after years,
+imparts growing life and Cupid's wings.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">He now at the work-table investigated Clotilda's warmth with the
+pyrometer; but I cannot go beside myself for joy, that he found, on a
+scale subdivided into the minutest parts, her warmth to have risen
+1/111 of a line. For he is off the track: I would sooner rely on
+Lavater's forehead-measurer than on the heart- and warmth-measurer of a
+love-seeking man, who confounds his interpretations with his
+observations, and accidents with intentions. His pyrometer may,
+however, be right; for towards good men one is, when bad ones are by,
+(consider only Mat,) warmer than usual.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Let no one blame Herr Le Baut and Frau Le Baut for congratulating my
+hero on the good fortune of going to such a court, to see such a
+prince,&mdash;the greatest in Germany, said <i>he</i>,&mdash;to such a princess,&mdash;the
+loveliest in Germany, said <i>she</i>. Mat smiled between Yes and No. The
+old man went on with his chess, the old woman with her praise. Victor
+saw with contempt how little possible it would be, in the case of two
+such souls, who held the steps of the throne for a scale of being, and
+the glacier of the throne for an Olympus and an Empyræum, and knew not
+where, except on this eminence, to find their happiness,&mdash;to give them
+better ideas of happiness, and worse ones of the eminence.
+Nevertheless, he was obliged to confess to Clotilda, who had on her
+face more than a No to the <i>eulogy</i>, that he negatived the whole of it
+as nobly as she. He therefore kneaded praise and blame together,
+according to an Horatian mixture, in order to make neither satirical
+nor flattering allusions to two dismissed court-people.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;It is painful to me,&quot; said he, &quot;that there are only pleasures there,
+and no occupations,&mdash;mere baskets of confectionery, and not a single
+work-bag, not to say no work-table like this one.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Do you think,&quot; asked Clotilda, with striking earnestness, &quot;that all
+court-feasts pay for a single court-service?&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;No,&quot; said he, &quot;for one ought to be paid for the feasts themselves. I
+maintain there is nothing but drudgery there, and no enjoyment: all
+their amusements are only the illumination, the interlude, and the
+decorations, which please the player, who is thinking of his part, less
+than the spectator.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;It is, at all events, good <i>to have been there</i>,&quot; said the old woman.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Certainly,&quot; said he; &quot;for it is good not always to stay there.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;But there are persons,&quot; said Clotilda, &quot;who cannot make themselves
+happy there, simply because they do not love to be there.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">That was very fine and forbearing, but intelligible only to Victor's
+heart.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;I would advise a fine enthusiast&quot; (said he, and made no account, as
+usual, of the apparent contradiction between Victor's <i>life</i> and
+Victor's <i>opinions</i>) &quot;or a fiery poet to stay at home,&mdash;the <i>flights</i>
+of either, instead of <i>pas</i>, would be in court-life what an hexameter
+is in prose, which the critics cannot bear,&mdash;and to the soul with the
+softest sensibilities I would say, Be off with them! the <i>heart</i> is
+there treated as a superfluous member, as in the six-fingered family in
+Anjou the sixth <i>finger</i> is.&quot; ...</p>
+
+<p class="normal">The old woman shook her head quickly to the left.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;And yet,&quot; he continued, &quot;I would take all three for a month to court
+and make them unhappy, in order to make them wise.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">The Chamberlain's family could not accommodate themselves to Victor's
+style so well as my reader, who to my exceeding delight so cleverly
+distinguishes humor and the talent of looking at all sides of a thing
+from flattery and skepticism. Clotilda had slowly shaken her head at
+the last proposition. In fact, all battled to-day <i>for</i> and <i>against</i>
+him, in that partial tone which women and relatives always assume
+towards a stranger, when an hour before they had carried on the same
+suit, but with a practical application, with their own kin.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Victor, who had long been fearing: that he should become disconcerted,
+went off at last to where he had been so often looking,&mdash;to the
+chess-table, where they were playing with the greatest desire to&mdash;lose.
+The Chamberlain,&mdash;we all know how it was with him; he wrote nothing but
+commendatory letters for the whole world, and the sacramental cup would
+have been more to his taste, could he have drunk from it a <i>toast</i> to
+some important man's health,&mdash;that personage only promoted as well as
+he could with the dry chess-statues another's success at the expense of
+his own; he was glad to lose, provided only Matthieu won. And then,
+too, he resembled those shamefaced souls who love to bestow their
+benefits secretly, and he could not find it in his heart to tell his
+adversary that he was securing him the victory; he took almost greater
+pains to conceal himself as a courtier than to <i>conquer himself</i> as a
+Christian. Such a love ought, it would seem, to have been more warmly
+requited than by open malice; but Mat had the same object in view, and
+declined the victory which the other threw into his hands, like a real
+sharper. In vain did Le Baut devise the best moves for checkmating
+one's self. Mat matched him with still better ones, and threatened
+every minute to be checkmated too. And every one pities the poor
+Chamberlain, hunted about on the chess-board, and fearing, like a
+coquette, that he shall <i>not</i> be conquered. It became at length, for a
+soft-souled eye, which certainly forgives the weak one sooner than the
+wicked one, no longer endurable; Victor, with a thousand excuses to the
+weak one and full of malice toward the malicious one, entered into the
+steeple-chase, and obliged the Page to accept his advice and his
+charitable subsidies, and to lay hold of military operations which he
+proposed of such worth, that the man with the office of Chamberlain's
+key, at last, in spite of his fears and in spite of the worst
+prospects,&mdash;lost the game. All present saw through all present, as
+princes do through each other in their public&mdash;playbills.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">He got at last his farewell audience, but very small solace. The fair
+form, beneath which all his ideals of beauty stood only as heraldic
+bearers and caryatides, was even colder than at the reception, and
+persisted in being only the echo of the parental courtesy. The only
+thing which still kept him up was a&mdash;thistle: namely, an optical one
+which had been sowed on the mosaic floor. That is to say, he took
+notice that Clotilda during the farewell avoided with her foot this
+flower-piece (which she certainly must have known) as if it were the
+original. In the evening he drew his chains of inferences, as they are
+taught in the universities; he engrafted upon this mock-thistle all the
+roses of his destiny. &quot;She was certainly <i>distrait</i>, and why? I ask,&quot;
+he said, speaking into his pillow; &quot;for, besides, they have not yet
+detected my feelings over yonder,&quot; he asserted, as he laid himself on
+the second pillow. &quot;O thou sweet eye that went down on the thistle,
+rise again in my sleep, and be the moon of my dreams!&quot; said he, when he
+was already half-way into both. It was merely out of modesty that he
+thought he was not discovered, because he did not look on himself as
+remarkable enough to be observed.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">The 20th of August, 179-, was the great day when he took up his march
+to Flachsenfingen. Flamin had already trotted off at four o'clock in
+the afternoon, in order to avoid a leave-taking which he hated. But our
+Victor loved to bid farewell, and loved to tremble in the last silences
+of parting. &quot;O ye poor, egoistic mortals!&quot; he said,&mdash;&quot;besides; this
+polar life is but so bald and cold; besides, we stand weeks and years
+near each other without stirring with the heart anything better than
+our blood,&mdash;only two or three glowing moments hiss and go out on the
+glaciers of life,&mdash;why do you still avoid everything that draws you out
+of your commonplace, and that reminds you how man loves? No! and if I
+went to the bottom, and if I could thenceforward no longer console
+myself, I would still, with bare heart and with all my wounds bleeding,
+dissolved and sinking, I would still press to my bosom the beloved
+being who must leave me, and would still say, It does me good!&quot; Cold,
+self-seeking, comfortable persons avoid leave-taking, just as unpoetic
+ones of too intense sensibilities do; women, on the contrary, who
+alleviate all their sorrows by talking, and people of poetic
+temperament, who relieve all theirs by fantasying, court it.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">At six o'clock in the evening,&mdash;for it was only a skip to
+Flachsenfingen,&mdash;when the cattle came home, he sallied forth,
+accompanied by the whole family. On his more fortunate arm&mdash;mine has to
+bestir itself only for the good of science&mdash;hung the Britoness, and on
+his left Agatha; to the sister the poor house-poodle (Apollonia) had
+buckled herself, who thought, nevertheless, she might touch and enjoy,
+despite the sisterly interpolation and mediating spirit, the dear
+Doctor. So do the sparks of love, like the electric and magnetic
+element, dart through a medium of twenty interposed bodies. A
+philosopher, who sits down and considers that our fingers come not, in
+fact, a thumb nearer to the beloved soul, whether only the globe of the
+brain or that of the earth lie between them and it, will of course say,
+&quot;All very natural!&quot; Hence this sedentary philosopher explains why
+maidens half-love at the same time the male acquaintances of their
+beloved,&mdash;why the cane-chair of Shakspeare, the clothes-drawer
+of Frederick II., the bob-wig of Rousseau, content our yearning
+hearts.&mdash;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">But no one, except the queen-bee of this streaming swarm, wanted to go
+back again. &quot;Only just as far as the six trees,&quot; said Agatha. When they
+had arrived at these frontier posts and boundary-trees of to-day's
+pleasure, there were seven of them, and there was a general agreement
+that <i>they</i> were not meant, and they must go farther. The one who is
+escorted grows generally more and more nervous, and the escort more and
+more delighted, the longer it lasts. &quot;Do let us go as far as that
+ploughman!&quot; said the sharp-sighted Britoness. But at last our hero
+observed, that this Pillar of Hercules of their journey was itself a
+moving column, and that the ploughman was only a wayfarer. &quot;The best
+thing is,&quot; said he, and turned about, &quot;for me to go back, and not start
+till to-morrow.&quot; The Chaplain said: &quot;As far as the old palace&quot; (i. e.
+there was still <i>one</i> wall of it remaining); &quot;besides, I usually go
+there evenings!&quot; But beyond this frontier fort of the loveliest of
+evenings the chattering column deceptively extended its march, and the
+eyes were forgotten for the ears. As, consequently, in these boundary
+disputes, one main article after another was broken by separate
+articles, there was really nothing further to be done, except to make
+the following attempt. &quot;Only so far did I mean to have you go,&quot; said
+Victor;&mdash;&quot;now you must keep on with me and spend the night at the
+apothecary's.&quot; &quot;In fact,&quot; said the Chaplain's wife, coolly, &quot;we'll go
+along together till sundown; we surely are not going to turn our backs
+upon this lovely sun.&quot; And certainly the evening had kindled nothing
+but <i>feux-de-joie</i> in the sun, in the clouds, on the earth, and on the
+water.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">On the hill they saw already the spires of the city; the sun, that
+chosen turnstile of the escort, poured out of his deep hiding-place his
+gold-trailing purple streams over the beds of shadow. There, on the
+hill, as the sun vanished, Victor folded his arms round the married
+couple, and said, &quot;O, make yourselves as happy as you do me, and return
+to your home in gladness!&quot;&mdash;and then he took the sisters to his
+enraptured heart, and said, &quot;Good, good night! I love you!&quot;&mdash;and then
+he saw them all going back with their hidden sighs and tears; and then
+he called out, &quot;Truly, I shall soon come back; it is really only a jump
+from one place to the other&quot;; and then he cried after them, &quot;I shall be
+a poor devil, if we are separated!&quot;&mdash;and then his heavy eye followed
+them through all branches and hollows, and only when the loving company
+had sunk into the last valley, as into a grave, did he close his eyes
+and think on the ceaseless separations of man....</p>
+
+<p class="normal">At last he opened his eyes toward the outspread, obscured city, and
+thought: &quot;Amidst that raised-work, in which men nestle with their
+little life, thy little days, too, are shut in,&mdash;this is the veiled
+birthplace of thy future tears, thy future raptures;&mdash;ah! with what
+eyes shall I look down again, years hence, over this misty
+environment,&mdash;and ... I am a fool! are, then, 2,300 houses standing
+only on my account?&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal"><i>Postscript</i>. This sixteenth post-day the Mining-Superintendent has
+concluded in regular order at the end of June.</p>
+<br>
+
+<h3>FOURTH INTERCALARY DAY,</h3>
+<h5>AND</h5>
+<h4>PREFACE TO THE SECOND PART.</h4>
+<br>
+<p class="normal">I am going to weld Intercalary Day and Preface together. Therefore,
+unless there is to be mere trifling with the matter of the Preface, the
+Second Part must be here, in some measure at least, touched upon. It
+deserves to be noticed by critics, that an author who in the beginning
+has before him for his domain eight pages of white paper&mdash;just as,
+according to Strabo, the territory of Rome was eight leagues
+broad&mdash;gets on by degrees so far, and peoples the scribbled paper
+with so many Greek colonists,&mdash;for such our German characters
+are,<a name="div2Ref_190" href="#div2_190"><sup>[190]</sup></a>&mdash;that at last he has often marched through and settled a
+whole alphabet. This puts him into a condition to begin the Second
+Part. My second is, as I know for certain, much better than the first,
+although it is, to be sure, ten times worse than the third. I shall be
+amply rewarded, if my work is the occasion of one review more being
+made in the world; nor can I conceive of anything, unless it be this
+very thought, that books must be written, so that the learned notices
+of them may go on, which could keep an author up to the unspeakable
+labor of standing all day at the inkstand, and dyeing whole pounds
+of paper-rags <i>Berlin-blue</i>.... And now let this cool, serious,
+<i>hocus-pocus</i> of a Preface&mdash;an expression which Tillotson maintains to
+be an abridgment of the Catholic formula, <i>hoc est corpus</i>&mdash;suffice for
+good reviewers and universities.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">I return to that which I properly meant by this whole episode. I have
+conceived the idea, namely, of not only announcing my intention to give
+the extra leaflets and side-shoots wherewith the Intercalary Days are
+to be filled up, in alphabetical order,&mdash;for disorder is the death of
+me,&mdash;but also to make a beginning here on the spot, and continue as far
+as the letter I.</p>
+<br>
+
+<h3>INTERCALARY&mdash;AND SIDE-SHOOTS, ALPHABETICALLY ARRANGED.</h3>
+
+<h3>A.</h3>
+
+
+<p class="normal"><span class="sc">Age of Women</span>.&mdash;Lombardus (L. 4. Sent. dist. 4) and Saint Augustin (l.
+22. de Civit. c. 15) prove that we all rise from the dead at that age
+at which Christ rose, namely, in the thirty-second year and third
+month. Accordingly, as in the whole of heaven there is no
+quadragenarian to be found, a child will be as old there as Nestor,
+namely, thirty-two years and three months. Knowing this, any one will
+highly esteem the fine modesty of women, who after the thirtieth year
+give themselves out (like relics) to be older than they are; for it
+would be enough, if a quadragenarian, or one of eight-and-forty years,
+should make herself out as old as good Rhine wine, or, at most, as old
+as Methuselah; but she thinks it is being more modest, if she ascribes
+to herself at once, however much her face contradicts it, the extreme
+old age which she can have only when her face has lain some thousands
+of years in the earth, namely, thirty-two years and three months. The
+merest dunce can see that she means only her future resurrection-age,
+and not any earthly age,&mdash;because she does not deviate from that
+standing year, which in eternity, indeed, when no human being can grow
+an hour older, is a matter of course. This unity of time they introduce
+into the <i>Intrigue drama</i> of their life already in the thirtieth year,
+for the reason that after that time in Paris no woman can any longer
+dance in public, and (according to Helvetius) no genius can any longer
+write in a masterly style. This last fact they perhaps took into
+account in old times in Jerusalem, where any one after his thirtieth
+year, but no sooner, could get an office as teacher.</p>
+<br>
+<h3>B.</h3>
+
+
+<p class="normal"><span class="sc">Basedow's School System</span>.&mdash;Basedow proposes in his <i>Philalethia</i> to
+hedge up thirty uneducated children in a garden, to leave them to their
+own development, and to assign them only mute attendants, who should
+not even wear human clothing, and then to publish in a protocol the
+results of the experiment. Philosophers are so preoccupied with
+possibility that they do not see reality; otherwise Basedow must have
+observed that our country-schools are just such gardens, in which
+Philosophy would try the experiment of what will at last come of human
+creatures, if they are absolutely deprived of all culture. I confess,
+however, that all these attempts must continue uncertain and imperfect
+so long as the schoolmasters cannot refrain from imparting to these
+little probationers some instruction, though it were the least
+possible; and the thing would work better with wholly dumb teachers, as
+there are deaf and dumb pupils.</p>
+<br>
+<h3>C (<i>vide</i> K).</h3>
+
+<h3>D.</h3>
+
+
+<p class="normal"><span class="sc">Divine Poet</span>.&mdash;The Poet, although he paints the passions, nevertheless
+will hit them best at that period of life when his own, have
+slackened,&mdash;just as convex mirrors, precisely in those summers when the
+sun burned the faintest, have acted the most intensely, and in the hot
+ones the least so. The flowers of poesy are like other flowers, which
+(according to Ingenhouse) thrive best in a dim, hazy sunlight.</p>
+<br>
+<h3>E.</h3>
+
+
+<p class="normal"><span class="sc">Emotion</span> (<span class="sc">Sentimental</span>).&mdash;Sentimentality often imparts to the inner man,
+as apoplexy to the outer, greater sensibility and yet paralysis.</p>
+<br>
+<h3>F (<i>see</i> Ph)</h3>
+
+<h3>G.</h3>
+
+
+<p class="normal"><span class="sc">Goddess</span>.-As the Romans would rather recognize their monarchs as gods
+than as masters, so do men like to call the directress of their heart
+<i>goddess</i> rather than mistress,&mdash;because it is easier to adore than to
+obey.</p>
+<br>
+<h3>H.</h3>
+
+
+<p class="normal">H.&mdash;I have often seen people who had the wherewithal of living and knew
+how to live,&mdash;which are not two different things,&mdash;first, flutter about
+the best and most superior women and suck from the honey-cup of their
+hearts; and, secondly, I have seen them on the same day fold their
+wings and light on a miserable ninny, that the ninny might inherit
+their&mdash;heirs. But never have I compared these butterflies to anything
+but butterflies, which all day long visit and rifle flowers, and yet
+spawn their eggs on a dirty cabbage-stump.</p>
+<br>
+<h3>H.</h3>
+
+<p class="normal"><span class="sc">Holbein's Leg</span>.&mdash;I prefer repeating the H in the place of I, because
+under the Rubric of the I would come the <i>Invalides</i>, of whom I had
+meant to assert, that, as people who have had limbs taken off become
+full-blooded, so they have the less bread handed to them the more limbs
+they have had shot or cut off, and that this is called the Physiology
+and Dietetics of the military chest.&mdash;But I have pitied these (half)
+poor devils too much to do it.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">The famous legs of Holbein afford a better joke than legs that have
+been taken off. That is to say, this painter used his brush in Basle
+only upon Basle itself; and the self-same circumstance that drove his
+genius to this architectural dyeing-business compelled it often to hold
+recess-hours therein,&mdash;namely, he guzzled terribly. A house owner,
+whose name is wanting in history, often came to the house-door, and
+swore up at the scaffolding, when the house-stainer's legs&mdash;for that
+was all of the painter that could be seen&mdash;were standing or staggering
+in the neighboring wine-cellar. Then when Holbein by-and-by came
+stalking along with them across the street, a quarrel came to meet him
+and went with him up the scaffold. This irritated the painter, who made
+a study even of his cups, and he proposed to himself to reform the
+owner. That is to say, as he owed his misfortune wholly to his legs,
+whose festoons the man wanted to see under the scaffolding, he resolved
+to make a second edition of his legs, and paint them on the house in a
+hanging posture, so that the man, when he looked up from the house-door
+below, should get the idea that the two legs and their boots were
+painting away up there busily. And the owner took this idea, too; but,
+as he observed at last that the counterfeit foot-works hung all day in
+one spot and never moved along, he wanted to see what kept the master
+so long improving and retouching at one part, and so up he went. Up
+there in the vacuum he easily saw that the painter ceased where the
+knee-pieces began, at the knee, and that the trunk, which was wanting,
+was again guzzling in an <i>alibi</i>.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">I do not blame the owner for not at once on the scaffolding drawing a
+moral from the leg-works; he was too furious.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">I meant to have appended a further history of the princely portraits
+which hang there behind the President in the Session-Chambers instead
+of the originals, by way of casting-votes,&mdash;but I should disturb the
+connection; here, too, was formerly the end of the First Part.</p>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<p class="center"><img border="0" src="images/rivetstart.png" alt="rivetstart"></p>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+
+<h2><a name="div1Ref_17" href="#div1_17">17. DOG-POST-DAY.</a></h2>
+<br>
+
+<p class="center"><span class="sc2">The Cure.&mdash;The Prince's Palace.&mdash;Victor's Visits.&mdash;Joachime.&mdash;
+Copperplate Engraving of the Court.&mdash;Cudgellings.</span></p>
+<br>
+
+<p class="normal">When I was in Breslau, I said, &quot;I wish I were the Fetzpopel!&quot;<a name="div2Ref_191" href="#div2_191"><sup>[191]</sup></a> just
+as I was devouring the portrait of that personage. The Fetzpopel is a
+silly woman whose face is stamped on the Breslau ginger-cookies. I say
+what follows not merely on my own account, for the sake of getting my
+own head on to such gingerbread paste, but also for the sake of other
+literati, whom Germany honors with monuments as little as it does
+me,&mdash;for instance, Lessing and Leibnitz. As one must always feel so
+disagreeably in the German circles, until half a rod of stones, at
+least, are got together for the monument of a Lessing or other magnate,
+(the most that we have as yet is what few stones good reviewers throw
+at a literary man, as the ancients did upon graves,)&mdash;accordingly, I
+expressed myself freely in the Breslau market-place before I had bitten
+into the Fetzpopel: &quot;Either the temple of fame and the bed of honor for
+German authors are on this gingerbread here, or else there is no fame
+at all. When will it be the time, if it is not now, to expect of the
+Germans that they shall take the faces of their greatest men and emboss
+them upon eatables? because, certainly, the stomach is the most
+important German member. If the Greek lived only among statues of great
+men, and thereby became great himself, then surely would the Viennese,
+if he had the greatest heads always before his eyes and on his plate,
+fall into enthusiasm and an emulous desire to promote himself and his
+face also on to gingerbread, and other cakes, pies, and cracknels.
+Meusel's learned Germany might be copied in baker's-work,&mdash;one might
+emboss great heroes upon army-biscuit, in order to set on fire the
+common soldiery and make them hunger for glory,&mdash;great poets I would
+sketch on bridal-cakes in inlaid sculpture, and heraldic geniuses on
+oatmeal bread,&mdash;of authors for women sweet box-pictures might be
+designed for sugar-work. If this were done, then would heads like
+Hamann or Liskov meet more generally the German <i>taste</i> in such dress;
+and many a scholar who had not a loaf of bread to eat would at least
+ornament one; and we should have, beside the paper nobility, a baked
+one also.&quot; As regards myself, who up to this time never saw my face
+anywhere except in the shaving-glass, they shall mould me (for I am
+least known in Westphalia) on Westphalia rye-bread.</p>
+<br>
+
+<p class="normal">Now to the story again. A tall, curly-haired man stands in the night
+before the many-colored house of the apothecary Zeusel, peeps up at the
+lighted third story, which he is about to occupy, and at last opens,
+instead of the wooden door, the glass one of the apothecary's shop. O
+my good Sebastian! a blessing on thy entry! May a good angel give thee
+his hand, to lift thee over boggy roads and man-traps; and when thou
+hast fallen into a snare and been wounded, then may he fan the wound
+with his wing, and a kind man cover it with his heart!</p>
+
+<p class="normal">In the apothecary's shop, which blazed like a ballroom, one of the
+fattest court-lackeys was begging of one of the leanest dispensers a
+maniple more and a little pugillus<a name="div2Ref_192" href="#div2_192"><sup>[192]</sup></a> of moxa<a name="div2Ref_193" href="#div2_193"><sup>[193]</sup></a> for his Highness.
+But the lean man took behind his scales a half-open handful of moxa,
+and four finger-tipfuls more (for in fact a little pugillus amounts to
+only three finger-tips), and sent it all to the feet of the Prince.
+&quot;When we have burnt all this,&quot; said he, pointing to the moxa, &quot;his
+Highness will soon have a podagra as good as can be found in the
+country.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">The reason why the dispenser gave more than the recipe said was that he
+also wished to have his pew in the Temple of Fame; therefore he would
+first think over a recipe that was handed to him until he approved it,
+and then he always weighed out 1/11 or 1/17 of a scruple too much or
+too little, in order to take off from the doctor's head the civic crown
+of the recovery and put it on his own. &quot;Only with such gifts can I work
+my cures,&quot; said he. Victor did not begrudge him the illusion. &quot;A
+dispenser,&quot; said he, &quot;who leads the whole column of convalescents, and
+turns over to the doctor merely the rearguard of corpses, has already
+laurels enough for this short life <i>under</i> his brain-pan.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">The apothecary Zeusel has good breeding enough not to bore his tenant
+by forcing upon him a reception-dinner, and merely gave him <i>this</i>
+newspaper article from his oral <i>Morning Chronicle</i> of the city, that
+the Prince had not so much got the gout as that he was trying to get it
+and settle it. He also gave him the Italian servant whom his Lordship
+had hired for him, and his chamber.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&mdash;And therein Sebastian is now sitting alone on the window-seat, and
+seriously considering, without glancing at the beauties of the room or
+the prospect, what he properly shall have to do here to-morrow, and day
+after tomorrow, and longer. &quot;To-morrow, I blaze away at once,&quot; said he,
+and twirled the tassel of the curtain-cord; &quot;I and the gout must settle
+ourselves down with the Prince. It is hard when a man has to use the
+gouty matter of a Regent for water to turn his mill: a polypus in the
+<i>heart</i> or dropsy on the <i>brain</i> would annoy me less as a courtier;
+either would be respectable <i>means of grace</i> and fins for swimming
+upward. No, I will stand straight and firm, entirely upright; from the
+very first I will not yield an inch, so that they shall always find me
+the same. Not so much as quartering and anchoring in antechambers is to
+be thought of.&quot; (Indeed, his Lordship had already stipulated to the
+soliloquist an exemption from the annoyance of court etiquette.) &quot;Ah,
+ye fair spring-years! Ye are now flown away over my head, and with you
+peace and mirth and studies and sincerity, and none but good, genial
+hearts!&quot; (He suddenly twirled the curtain-tassel up shorter.) &quot;But,
+thou good father, thou hast not even had such good years,&mdash;thou roamest
+over the earth and givest up thy days to the welfare of men! No, thy
+son shall not spoil nor embitter for thee thy sacrifices,&mdash;he shall
+conduct himself here discreetly enough,&mdash;and then, when thou comest
+back again and findest here at court an obedient, favored, and yet
+uncorrupted son...&quot; When the son actually thought to himself, that, if
+he should thus culminate in a right ascension at court, he might win
+the heart of the Chaplaincy, the heart of Le Baut, that of his father,
+those of his whole kindred, and (provided he thought of <i>that</i>)
+even the heart of Clotilda,&mdash;by that time he had twisted off the
+curtain-tassel and held it like a tuberose in his hand, ... and so he
+thought best to lay himself quietly down in his bed.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&mdash;Get up, my hero! The morning sun already reddens thy balcony,&mdash;jump
+up amidst the ringing of the bells for the week-day sermon, and amidst
+the din of this market-day, and look round on thy bright chamber! Thy
+father, of whom thou hast been dreaming all night, has furnished it
+full of musical and artistic instruments and apparatus, and thou wilt
+think of him the whole morning; and yet the balcony offers thee still
+more,&mdash;the sight of a green strip of fields, and, toward the west, of
+the heights of Maienthal, the whole market-place, the private residence
+of the senior parson of the city opposite, into all the rooms of which,
+that he lets to thy Flamin, thou canst look!</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Flamin, however, is not in there just now: for it was he who had
+already laid hold of my hero, and accosted him in those words of mine,
+&quot;Get up!&quot; A new situation is a spring-cure for our hearts, and takes
+away from them the oppressive feeling of our transitoriness; and
+beneath such a cheerful sky of life my Victor to-day dances with
+everything and everybody,&mdash;with the forenoon hours,&mdash;with the
+Regency-Counsellor,&mdash;with the apothecary,&mdash;out through the apothecary's
+shop right before the dispenser, on his way up to the palace to make a
+few passages with the gouty Januarius.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&mdash;He has hardly been at the Prince's half an hour, when Zeusel sees him
+running back again into his medicinal warehouse.... &quot;Heigh! heigh!&quot;
+thinks the apothecary.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">But it was quite different from what he thought. Through an abatis of
+uniforms&mdash;for the entrances to princes' apartments are almost like
+lanes of tents, and rulers cause themselves to be guarded as anxiously
+as if they feared they might be the <i>first</i> or the <i>last</i>&mdash;Victor made
+his way into the sick-chamber. Before a patient who lies in a
+horizontal position one can keep a perpendicular one more easily. Great
+folk often confound the effect of their apartment and furniture with
+their own: if the <i>savant</i> could come upon them on a common, in a wood,
+in a cabbage-field, he would know how to deport himself. Victor,
+however, had himself been brought up in apartments that were
+embroidered, and furnished with gold corner-clips. So when he found his
+father's friend in pain and with his legs packed up, he exchanged his
+English composure for the professional, and, instead of awaiting
+haughty princely questions, began to propose medical ones. When the
+doctor's medical confessional session was at an end, he laid his hand,
+instead of on the head of the penitent, on the Bible which lay by it,
+and was going to swear, but gave that up because a better idea had
+occurred to him, and he opened&mdash;this was what had come into his
+head&mdash;the gospel of the paralytic: &quot;For the podagra in this case is not
+to be thought of,&quot; said he. He showed him that his whole complaint
+was&mdash;wind (figuratively and literally speaking),&mdash;that it lodged itself
+in the relaxed vessels of the system, and insinuated itself, like the
+Jesuits, under every different form, through all the members,&mdash;even his
+pain in the calf was nothing more than that displaced human or
+intestinal ether. The physician in ordinary, Culpepper, is to be
+excused for his error in regard to the Prince; for every physician must
+make his selection of some universal malady, into which he resolves all
+others, which he treats <i>con amore</i>, in which, as the theologue does in
+Adam's sin, or the philosopher in his first principle, he detects all
+the rest. It rested, therefore, with the free will of Culpepper,
+whether to pick out for himself as the radical malady, to be the
+nest-egg and mother-bulb of his pathology, the podagra in the case of
+men, with women the flux, or not. When he has once made his choice,
+then he is obliged to endeavor to fix it upon his Highness, like pastel
+or quicksilver. January had never, even from his chapel, heard anything
+more agreeable than Victor's assertion, which set him free from the
+prostration, dosing, and starving which he had had to go through.
+Victor, in his joy at the lightness of the malady, hurried away to give
+his recipe for it, after he had asserted, by way of consolation, that
+&quot;an <i>ethereal</i> body was still to be taken along with him, and would
+serve the soul, not indeed for a heavenly Graham's-bed,<a name="div2Ref_194" href="#div2_194"><sup>[194]</sup></a> but still
+for an air-bed, which made itself up. Only poor women's-souls&mdash;if one
+rightly regarded their bodies&mdash;might be said to lie on thorny straw
+sacks, smooth hussars'-saddles, and sharp sausage-sledges<a name="div2Ref_195" href="#div2_195"><sup>[195]</sup></a>; whereas
+shaven and tattooed spirits (monks and savages) wrapped themselves up
+with such fine bodies stuffed with whalebone shavings.&quot;<a name="div2Ref_196" href="#div2_196"><sup>[196]</sup></a></p>
+
+<p class="normal">Away he flew; and I have already reported that the apothecary presently
+thought to himself: &quot;Heigh! heigh!&quot; In the apothecary's shop Victor
+said to the dispenser, at whom he flew like saltpetre: &quot;Sir colleague,
+what think you about it, if we should have nothing to cure in the case
+of his Highness but wind? You must advise me. For my part, I should
+prescribe:&mdash;</p>
+<div style="margin-left:25%; margin-top:24pt; margin-bottom:24pt">
+<p class="continue"><i>Pulv. Rhei Orient</i>.<br>
+<i>Sem. Anisi Stellati</i><br>
+&mdash;<i>F&#339;niculi</i><br>
+<i>Cort. Aurant. immat</i>.<br>
+<i>Sal. Tart. &#257;&#257 dr. I</i>.<br>
+<i>Fol. Senn. Alexandr. sine Stipit. dr. II</i>.<br>
+<i>Sacchar. alb. unc. sem</i>.&mdash;</p>
+</div>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;If you agree with me, I have nothing more to say, except, <i>C. C. M. f.
+p. Subt. D. ad Scatulam, S</i>. Colic-powders, one teaspoonful as often as
+occasion requires.&quot;<a name="div2Ref_197" href="#div2_197"><sup>[197]</sup></a></p>
+
+<p class="normal">As the dispenser looked at him seriously, he looked at him still more
+seriously; and the medicine was prepared without a change in the dose.
+When he had gone, the dispenser said to his two startled pages: &quot;You
+couple of stupid epiglottises, don't you suppose he has sense enough to
+ask?&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">The biographer has no need whatever to justify the circumstance&mdash;since
+the powder and the hero justify it&mdash;that January got upon his legs the
+very same day.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">As princes feel no pressure of the atmosphere, except that of the air
+which is in their bodies, January's gratitude for his deliverance from
+this pressure, was so unbounded that for the whole day he would not let
+the Doctor go from his side. He must dine,&mdash;sup,&mdash;ride,&mdash;play with him.
+In the palace it was tolerable; it was not like Nero's, a city within a
+city, a Flachsenfingen in Flachsenfingen, but merely barracks and a
+kitchen full of soldiers and cooks. For before every mouldy archive,
+before every room where lay genuine diamonds, before every door-lock,
+and before every stairway a bayonet was planted, with the protector and
+patron who was attached to it. The numerous crew of kitchen-servants
+lived and fired up in the palace, because his Highness was continually
+eating. By this continual eating he would make his fasting easier for
+him; for at the three ritual mealtimes of men he touched&mdash;because
+Culpepper would so have it&mdash;desperately little, and could not wholly
+contradict the courtiers who praised his strict diet. A watchmaker from
+London had done the most to help him out in this moderation by
+contriving for him a servant's bell, and a spring-work whose index
+stood upon a great dial-plate in the servants' apartment; the margin of
+the dial-plate was encircled, instead of the hours and the days of the
+month, with the names of viands and wines. January had only to ring the
+bell and press the spring, and the household immediately knew whether
+the tongue and the victual-index pointed to pastry or to Burgundy. In
+this way, by tinkling like a mill when his inner man had nothing more
+to grind, he was most easily enabled to observe a stricter diet than
+physicians and moralists could well demand, and he shamed more than one
+grandee, whom, after eviscerating in death, they were obliged to lay
+out upon the bed of state with the hungry stomach under one arm and the
+thirsty liver under the other, as they give to capons also their two
+viscera as a body-guard between their two wings.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Victor was as much at home in the palace as in the parsonage; for the
+court proper, the proper courtly worms'-nest and frog-spawn, was
+resident merely in the palace of the actual minister, Von Schleunes,
+because he had to do the <i>honneurs</i> of the throne, to invite
+ambassadors, strangers, &amp;c. The Princess resided in the large old
+palace, which was called the Paullinum. Thus, then, did January spend
+his days without pomp, but with comfort and convenience, in the true
+solitude of a philosopher, and passed them away in eating, drinking,
+and sleeping; hence could the Flachsenfingen Prorector compare him,
+without flattery, to the greatest of the old Romans, in whom we admire
+a similar hatred of show and state. January had, in fact, no court, but
+went himself to the court of his actual minister; with extreme
+reluctance, however: he could not love anything there,&mdash;neither the
+Princess, who was always there, nor Schleunes's unmarried daughters,
+which would have been against his London vow.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">About twelve o'clock at night Zeusel would have been glad to find out
+how all was going on, and brought to the physician in ordinary his
+niece <i>Marie</i>, whom he offered to him as a female lackey. The
+physician, who could not play the fool with any fool in the world,
+especially under four eyes, thrust before the slender pike a crateful
+of the food of truth, which the latter greedily devoured as if it were
+pine-apple. Marie was a relative and a Catholic, impoverished by a
+lawsuit, and disappointed in love, who, in the cold, hollow family of
+the apothecary, received and expected nothing but thrust-wounds of
+words and shot-wounds of looks; her broken and crushed soul resembled
+the marsh-willow, of which one can strip down backward all the twigs
+with the mere hand. She felt no longer pained at any humiliation; she
+seemed before others to crawl, but in truth she lay continually
+prostrate on the ground. When the gentle Victor saw this meek, averted
+form, over which so many tears had flowed, and this once beautiful
+face, on which, not the sorrows of fancy had laid their charming
+painter's-touches, but physical pangs had emptied their poison-bags,
+then did the fate of mortals bring sadness to his heart, and, with the
+softest of courtesy towards Marie's station, sex, and sorrow, he
+declined her services. The apothecary would have despised himself if he
+had taken this politeness for anything else than fine raillery and good
+breeding. But Victor threw her off once more; and the poor girl
+withdrew in silence, and, like a maidservant, without spirit enough for
+courtesy.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Nevertheless, in the morning the rejected one brought him his breakfast
+with downcast eyes and painfully smiling lips; he had heard in his bed
+how the apothecary and his hard sprouts of daughters had twitted Marie
+with her &quot;doleful whining air,&quot; and therefrom inferred a &quot;<i>refusal</i>
+from the jesting gentleman&quot; overhead. His soul bled within him, and at
+last he accepted Marie;&mdash;he made his eye and his voice so soft and
+sympathetic that he could have lent either to the most tender maiden;
+but Marie took nothing of it to herself.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">January could hardly wait for him to come again.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">The third day also it was just so.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">And so, too, the next week.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&mdash;But I could wish my readers had all ridden in a body, at this time,
+through the Flachsenfingen gate, and that this learned company had
+scattered itself through the city in order to institute inquiries
+about our hero. The reading scouts sent by me to the coffee-houses
+would learn that the new English doctor had already unseated the
+old one,&mdash;helped the parson's son at St. Luna to the post of
+Regency-Counsellor,&mdash;and that great changes in all departments were at
+hand. The division which I distributed among the butlers, butchers,
+fishery-masters, castellans, and valets of the court, would bring me
+word that the Prince had patted the Doctor, not on the fingers, but on
+the shoulder,&mdash;that he had day before yesterday showed him with his own
+hand his picture-cabinet, and sent him the best piece out of it,&mdash;that
+in the theatre he had looked out with him from the stage-box,&mdash;that he
+had presented to him a snuff-box rich with jewels (the usual civic
+crown of rulers, and their calumet, as if we were Greenlanders, who
+never love to receive any other present so much as snuff),&mdash;and that
+they would travel together. Two of the very finest and most dignified
+readers whom I had detached from these columns, and of whom I had
+despatched the one to the Paullinum to the Princess, the other to the
+actual Minister, would at least report to me the news that Prince and
+Doctor had called together upon both, and that both had looked upon my
+hero as a singular, shy, taciturn Englishman, who owed everything to
+his father.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">But the last piece of news which the readers have related to me they
+cannot, I am sure, possibly know; and I will myself tell it to them.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&mdash;Before I deliver this, let me first simply explain in three words how
+it was that Victor rose so rapidly. There may be Evangelist-Matthieus
+among my readers who take this sudden rise, like that of the barometer,
+as the sign of a speedy fall,&mdash;who will say that laurels and salad,
+which have been forced to ripen in twenty-four hours by spirit on a
+cloth, wither again just as soon,&mdash;nay, who will even joke about the
+matter, and give out that the Prince's intestines, with their ether,
+are a fish's swimming-bladder to my hero, who only by its inflation
+mounts upward. Mining-superintendents laugh at such readers, and inform
+them that men, particularly the occupants of thrones, look upon a new
+physician as a new specific,&mdash;that they are always most ready to obey a
+new one,&mdash;that Sebastian always deported himself towards every one the
+first time in the finest manner, whereas with old acquaintances he
+never said unnecessarily anything witty,&mdash;that January loved every one
+whom he could see through, and that he fortunately recognized in my
+hero merely a gay fellow fond of life, and did not remark around his
+head any of Bose's Beatifications,<a name="div2Ref_198" href="#div2_198"><sup>[198]</sup></a> which smell of phosphorus and
+emit painful sparks,&mdash;that Victor was not, like Le Baut, a <i>pot-plant</i>
+in a crown, but a hyacinth hanging in the open air high above it,&mdash;that
+he was cheery, and made every one else so,&mdash;and that another
+mining-superintendent would not have made so much ceremony with his
+readers as I: <i>he</i> would merely have told them the main circumstance,
+that in Victor, in his waggery and behavior generally, the Prince had
+found and fallen in love with an enchanting resemblance to his fifth
+son, the <i>Monsieur</i> (lost on the Seven Islands), and that he had made
+this observation even in London, although Victor was five years younger
+than the latter.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">January chose, himself, to present his favorite to everybody, and
+so to the Princess too. The philosophers have it to explain why
+Sebastian never once remembered, until he sat beside the princely
+bridegroom on the coach-cushion, the mad, enamored little strip of
+paper which, in Kussewitz, he had pasted above the Imperator of the
+<i>montre-à-regulateur</i>, and thrown into the Princess's bargain. He
+started, and held it to be impossible that he should have been such a
+fool. But such a thing is easy for a man. His fancy flung back upon
+every scene, upon every idea, so many focus-lights from a thousand
+mirrors, and spread around the future, which stretched out beyond, so
+many colored shadows and so much blue mist, that he was really
+frightened when a foolish action came into his head; for he knew, that,
+when he should have rejected it ten times and then thought it over
+thirty times more, then, after all, he should go and do it.&mdash;When the
+two appeared before the Princess, Victor was in that agreeable frame,
+which is nothing new to tutors and young scholars, which stiffens the
+limbs to bone, and sends the heart up into the mouth, and petrifies the
+tongue;&mdash;it was not the certainty that <i>Agnola</i> (that was the name of
+the Princess) had read the aforesaid advertisement on the watch, which
+so disconcerted him, but the uncertainty whether she had or not. In his
+agony he never thought of <i>this</i>,&mdash;that she, of course, did not even
+know his handwriting or the authorship of the little slip; and even if
+one does think of that in his agony, still it does not leave him.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&mdash;But all was, at once, above, below, and contrary to his expectation.
+The Princess had laid aside the face of sensibility with her
+travelling-dress, and had put on instead a fine, firm gala-face. The
+crowned bridegroom January was received by her with as much warm
+decorum as if he were his own ambassador of the first rank. For
+January, the disk of whose heart charged itself full of sparks on the
+electrizing-cushion of a fair cheek or a bosom-handkerchief, had for
+that very reason towards Agnola, with whom merely from policy he had
+concluded the concordats of marriage, all the warmth of the month after
+which he was named. Towards Victor, the son of her hereditary foe, the
+successor to the house-thief of princely favor, she cherished, as is
+easy to guess, true tenderness. Our poor hero, surprised at January's
+coldness, which seemed to promise on the part of the wife no special
+warmth toward himself, demeaned himself as gravely as the elder and
+younger Cato at once. He thanked God (and so do I) that he came away.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">But all the way back he kept thinking: &quot;If I could only have got my
+missive out of the watch-case! Ah, then I would have done everything,
+poor Agnola, to reconcile thee to thy fate and thy husband!&mdash;Ah, St.
+Luna,&quot; he added, as they passed along before the city parson's house,
+&quot;thou peaceful spot, full of flowers and of love! The masters of the
+hunt send thy Bastian from one baiting-house to another!&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">For he must also, for politeness' sake, go at least to the actual
+Minister's, and January took him along with him. Thither he went with
+gusto, as if into a sea-fight, or into a quarantine hospital, or into
+the Russian ice-palace.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Furniture and persons in the house of Schleunes were in the finest
+taste. Victor found there, from the wabble-headed figures<a name="div2Ref_199" href="#div2_199"><sup>[199]</sup></a> and
+court-people, even to the basaltic busts of old philosophers, and to
+the dolls in the shape of Schleunes's daughters, from the polished
+floor to the polished faces, from the powdering cabinet to the reading
+cabinet,&mdash;both of which painted the head in the mere passage through
+them,&mdash;in short, everywhere he found all that the sumptuary laws have
+ever forbidden. His first embarrassment with the Princess gave him the
+pitch for a second. It was no longer the old Victor at all. I see
+beforehand that the worthy schoolmasters at the Marianum in Scheerau
+will be hard upon him for it,&mdash;especially the rector,&mdash;that he should
+have so little knowledge of the world as to be, while in this company,
+witty without vivacity, constrainedly free without complaisance, too
+constantly in motion with his eyes, too immovable in his other members.
+But one must suggest to these courtly and scholarly people, that he
+could not help it. The rector himself would have been embarrassed as
+well as Victor before the <i>bel-esprit</i> of a minister's lady, whom,
+though, to be sure, Meusel has not introduced her into his, the court
+has into <i>its</i> Learned Germany,&mdash;before her quizzing daughters,
+especially the handsomest, who was named Joachime,&mdash;before a number of
+strangers,&mdash;before so many people who hated him on his father's
+account, and who watched him in order to explain and verify his
+relations with the Prince,&mdash;before the Princess herself, whom the Devil
+had also brought hither,&mdash;before Matthieu, who here was in his element,
+and in his leading character and bravura air,&mdash;and before the
+Minister,&mdash;especially before this last. Victor found in him a man full
+of dignity, from whom business did not take away politeness, nor
+thinking wit; and whom a little irony and coldness only the more
+exalted, but who seemed to despise feeling, scholars, and mankind.
+Victor generally imagined to himself a minister&mdash;e. g. Pitt&mdash;as a Swiss
+glacier, on which the clouds and dew that nourish it freeze overhead,
+which oppresses the low places, and, in its alternation between melting
+and congealing, sends out great torrents down below, and out of whose
+clefts corpses are drifted.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">January himself was not quite comfortable among them: what availed him
+the finest dishes, if they were embittered by the finest conceits? The
+card-table was, therefore, especially upon the peaceful arrival of his
+spouse, his quiet place of anchorage; and his Victor was for this once
+also glad to anchor beside him. My correspondent thinks that the
+tuning-key to this over-fine, demi-semi-<i>tone</i> was turned by the
+Minister's lady merely, who had all sciences in her head, and to
+be sure at-her tongue's end, and for that reason held a weekly
+<i>bureau-d'esprit</i>. In this ridiculous position, Sebastian played away
+his evening and gobbled down his <i>souper</i>; he could tell a good story,
+but he had no story to tell,&mdash;in the few <i>contes</i> which stayed by him
+all was anonymous, and to the circle about him the names were precisely
+the things of the first importance; nor could he make use of his humor
+either, because a humor like his places the possessor himself in a mild
+comic light, and because, therefore, only among good friends whose
+respect one cannot lose, but not among bad friends whose respect
+one must hold by defiance, can it venture out in its sock and
+harlequin's-collar,&mdash;he did not even enjoy the happiness of inwardly
+laughing at them all, because he had no time for it, and because he
+never found people ridiculous till their backs were turned.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">He was confoundedly badly off. &quot;You'll not catch me here again very
+soon,&quot; he thought to himself; and when, through the two tall glass
+doors of the balcony, which looked out upon the garden, the moon stole
+in with its dreamy light, which out there fell upon stiller dwellings,
+fairer prospects, and calmer hearts,&mdash;then he stole out upon the
+balcony (as his partnership at the card-table was broken up by the
+Prince after supper), and the night that glistened on the earth and in
+the heavens exalted his bosom with greater scenes. With what love
+thought he then of his father, whose philosophic coldness was like the
+January snow, which covers the seed from the frost, whereas that of the
+court resembles the snow of March, which devours the buds! How sorely
+did he reproach himself for every discontented thought about his honest
+Flamin's slight want of refinement! O, how his inner man erected itself
+like a fallen and forgiven angel, when he imagined to himself Emanuel
+leading Clotilda by the hand, and rapturously asking him, &quot;Where hast
+thou found to-day an image of this my friend?&quot; At this moment he
+yearned inexpressibly to be back again in his St. Luna....</p>
+
+<p class="normal">His quickening heart-beats were all at once checked by <i>Joachime</i>, who
+came out with a burst of laughter directed toward the parlor. As it was
+a burden to her to sit for a single hour, (I wonder how she could lie
+in bed a whole night,) she extricated herself as often as she could
+from the curb-bit of the card-table. The Princess released her this
+time, who suspended this <i>night-work</i> of great people on account of the
+weakness of her eyes. Joachime was no Clotilda, but still she had two
+eyes polished like two rose-diamonds, two lips like painted ones, two
+hands like casts, and, in fact, all the duplicate members were very
+pretty.... And with these a court-physician can keep house well enough,
+though the single ones (heart, head, nose, forehead) are not those of a
+Clotilda. As now under the open heaven he recovered his spirits, and
+on the balcony, which for him was always a parlor, the use of his
+tongue,&mdash;as Joachime's tone attuned him again to his own,&mdash;as she
+assailed the taciturnity of the English, and he defended the
+exceptions,&mdash;as he could now run, like a spider, up and down along the
+thread of the conversation, and was no more to be disturbed by the
+Princess, who had followed after to cool off in the night-air her
+inflamed eyes,&mdash;and as one complains of feeling ennui only when one
+himself inflicts it,&mdash;and as I transcribe all this, I do enough (I
+think) for a reviewer, who stands up behind the coach-body of the
+Prince, and reflects and wonders what he shall have to hold on to
+(except the footmen's straps), in case Victor, sitting before him in
+the carriage, does not during the ride home wish the Minister's house
+at the Devil, but thinks more contentedly,&mdash;Well, it's tolerable
+enough!<a name="div2Ref_200" href="#div2_200"><sup>[200]</sup></a></p>
+
+<p class="normal">Victor's society agreed so well with the Prince, that he fancied he
+could as little do without him as a canoness out of the house can think
+of taking the badge of her order off her person. He always plunged into
+the sacred cup and welcome of the warm spring of a new friendship as
+immoderately as a guest at Carlsbad does into his. When he felt ennui,
+the Medicus was besought to come and drive it away; when he experienced
+an inward jubilee, that person was again entreated to appear, that he
+might participate in the jubilation. Only those times at which January
+felt neither ennui nor the contrary were left to his friend to spend
+entirely at his own pleasure. Victor had sworn beforehand to make an
+easy matter of refusing, and had broken out upon people of easy
+consent; now, however, he said, &quot;The Devil may say, No! Just let a man
+find <i>himself</i> in the same situation first!&quot; ... And so must our poor
+Victor describe nothing but empty, dizzying gyres in the court-circle
+of the throne, among people for whose tone he could more easily have an
+<i>ear</i> than a <i>tongue</i>, and whom he could read, but could not win.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">A youth in whose breast hang the night-pieces of Maienthal and St.
+Luna,&mdash;or one who has just arrived from a watering-village,&mdash;or one who
+has it in mind to fall in love,&mdash;or one who, in great cities or in
+their great circles, must be an <i>idle</i> spectator,&mdash;every such one is
+also, for that very reason, a <i>dissatisfied</i> spectator therein, and
+blows into his critical pipe against the trifling company, till he
+himself is drawn in. But when all these causes actually meet in one and
+the same man, then can he find no relief against his gall-bladder nor
+any biliary duct, except to take some fine paper and send off to the
+Eymanns in St. Luna a confounded satirical letter upon what he has
+seen.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">My hero despatched the following to the Parson:&mdash;</p>
+<br>
+
+<p class="continue">&quot;<span class="sc">My dear Sir and adopted Father</span>:&quot;&mdash;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;I have not had hitherto spare time enough to lift my eyes up and see
+what moon we have. Verily, a court wants time for virtue. The Prince
+carries me about with him everywhere, like a smelling-bottle, and shows
+up his foolish Doctor. Erelong they will not be able to endure me: not
+because I am good for anything,&mdash;on the contrary, I am convinced they
+could bear the most virtuous man in the world quite as well as the
+worst, and that merely because he would be an Anglicism, an <i>homme de
+fantaisie</i>,<a name="div2Ref_201" href="#div2_201"><sup>[201]</sup></a> a <i>lusus naturæ</i>,&mdash;but because I do not talk enough.
+Business-people never trouble themselves about any conversational or
+epistolary style; but with court-people the tongue is the artery of
+their withered life, the spiral-spring and flag-feather of their souls;
+they are all born critics, who look at nothing but fine turns,
+expression, fire, and speech. This comes of their having nothing to do;
+their good works are <i>bon mots</i>,<a name="div2Ref_202" href="#div2_202"><sup>[202]</sup></a> their exchange business consists
+in visiting-cards, their housekeeping is a card-party, and their
+agriculture a hunting-party, and the <i>minor service</i> a physiognomy.
+Hence they must have other people's faults all day long in their ears
+as an antidote to tedious leisure, as the physicians inoculate with the
+itch to counteract stupidity; a court-establishment is the regular
+penny post-office of the smallest items of news, even about you
+commoners, when you happen to have done anything really ridiculous. It
+were to be wished that we had festivals, or card-parties, or plays, or
+assemblies, or <i>soupers</i>, or something good to eat, or some amusement
+or other; but that is not to be thought of. We have, to be sure, all
+these things, but only their names; the President of the Exchequer
+would shrug his shoulders, if we should undertake to be, four times in
+a year, so brilliantly happy as you are four times a month. As our week
+consists of seven Sundays, it follows that our amusements are only
+signs in the calendar, epochs of time, to which no one pays heed; and a
+festival is nothing but a play-room for the plans which every one has
+in his head, the boards on which he is to act his leading part, and the
+season for continuing the intrigue against victims of love and of
+ambition. Here there is, every minute, a stinging mosquito, and the
+thistle-seed of beautifully painted trouble flies round far and wide.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;There are many women here who are good, and disciples of Linnæus, and
+their eyes classify men botanically, according to his fine and simple
+<i>sexual</i>-system; they make a great distinction between virtuous and
+vicious love,&mdash;namely, that of <i>degree</i>, or at least of time; and the
+<i>best</i> often speaks on the subject like the <i>worst</i>, and the worst
+like
+the best. Meanwhile we have here female virtue and manly fidelity, in
+their way,&mdash;but no idea of them can be communicated to a parson; for
+these two jellies are so soft and delicate, that, if I should undertake
+to carry them down over all the steps of the throne to the parsonage,
+they would arrive there in such a spoiled and ruined state, that one
+would give them down below there the two opposite names,&mdash;for which,
+however, we ourselves have up here our special and corresponding
+objects. Your commoners would find our elderly men ridiculous in
+matters of love, as <i>they</i> would your daughters. But what often
+embitters for me this happy court-life is the universal want of
+dissimulation. For no one believes here what he hears, and no one
+thinks how he looks; all must, according to the regular laws of the
+game, like cards, have the upper side uniform, and put on an external
+stillness of face as a cover to the internal fire, as the lightning
+destroys only the sword and not the scabbard. Consequently, as a
+universal dissimulation is none at all, and as every one gives every
+other credit for poison, no one can <i>deceive</i> another, but only
+<i>outwit</i> him; only the understanding, not the heart, is taken in.
+Meanwhile, to speak the truth, that is not truth; for every one has two
+masks,&mdash;the general and the individual. For the rest, the colors which
+are used upon the scientific, refined, and philanthropic painting of
+the outer man are necessarily scraped off from the inner man, but
+advantageously, since there is not much on the inner man, and the study
+of appearance lessens reality: so have I often seen hares lying in the
+woods that had not an ounce of flesh or a drop of fat on their bodies,
+because all had been absorbed by the monstrous fur which had continued
+to grow after their death.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;If one compares the substantial value of the throne and that of the
+low ground of the commonalty, the physical and moral exaltation of
+men appears to bear an inverse relation to that of their soil,
+just as the inhabitants of marshy lands are larger than mountaineers.
+But, nevertheless, those elevated people bear the state easily on
+butterfly-wings, survey its wheel-work with the hundred-eyed papilio's
+eye, and with a walking-cane defend the people from lions, or chase
+therewith the lions among the people, as in Africa the children of the
+herdsmen scare away with a whip the real lions of Natural History from
+the grazing cattle.... Dear Mr. Court-Chaplain, this satire began to
+pain me already on the former page; but here one is malicious, just as
+he is vain, without knowing when: the former, because one is obliged to
+take too much notice of others; the latter, because he is compelled to
+think too much of himself. No! Your garden, your sitting-room, are
+pleasanter; there, is no stony breast on which one <i>crucifies</i> the arms
+and veins of friendship like a tree trained on an espalier; there, one
+is not obliged, as I am, to be twice a day under the barber's hands,
+and three times a day under the hair-dresser's; there, one has leave
+at least to put on his polished boot. Write soon to your adopted son,
+for I still deny myself the festival of a visit to you. Are there
+many baptisms and burials? What is <i>Fox</i><a name="div2Ref_203" href="#div2_203"><sup>[203]</sup></a> doing, and the deaf
+bellows-blower? At this very moment I hear the mortar, instead of your
+rat-drum, pounding down below. Farewell.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;And now at last I greet you, beloved mother! My hand is warm, and in
+my heart a pair of souls are beating; for now your face, full of
+motherly warmth, shines on all my satirical ice-peaks, and melts them
+into warm blood, which will throb for you and for you flow. How good it
+feels to love again! Your second son, Flamin, is well, but too busy,
+and at present in St. Luna.<a name="div2Ref_204" href="#div2_204"><sup>[204]</sup></a> Greet my sisters and all that love
+you.</p>
+
+<p class="right">&quot;<span class="sc">Sebastian</span>.&quot;</p>
+<br>
+++++[326=361
+<p class="normal">He reserved the letter in order to despatch the Regency-Counsellor, who
+wanted to take his person along with him, with a freight at least.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Meanwhile his and January's joint visits, with their stage
+entanglements, grew to quite other ones, even a ganglion of friendship
+between January and himself,&mdash;and at the same time gave this friendship
+increased notoriety. In St. Luna, in Le Baut's house, three times as
+much was made out of it as there was in it,&mdash;in the parsonage, nine
+times. To this was added a trifle, namely, a scuffle,&mdash;properly, two. I
+have the incident from Spitz,&mdash;Victor got it from Flamin,&mdash;he from
+Matthieu,&mdash;in whose noble historical style it can here be handed
+over to posterity. The Evangelist was never ashamed of a commoner,
+provided he could make a fool of him. Therefore he visited the
+court-apothecary without scruple. To the latter, who cordially hated
+the barrack-physician, Culpepper, on account of his coarse arrogance,
+and on account of the reason given in the note<a name="div2Ref_205" href="#div2_205"><sup>[205]</sup></a> below, Matthieu had
+long since promised to upset the Doctor. As the latter and the podagra
+had actually been banished by Victor from January's feet, the
+Evangelist gave the apothecary to understand that he himself would,
+without <i>his</i> hint and wishes, have contributed far less to the fall of
+Culpepper than he had done. Zeusel, especially as he had the successor
+of the barrack-physician in his house, came after some days to the
+billiard-table with the certain conviction that he, from his
+apothecary's-shop, had thrust under Culpepper's posteriors the
+invisible leg, and hurled him down from the steps of the throne. There
+were present, unfortunately, the barrack-physician himself, and the
+noble Mat. Zeusel came upon this stage with the festoons of three
+watch-chains, with a pair of breeches on whose knees some Arabesques
+were printed, with a double waistcoat and double neck-tie, and with
+double signs of exclamation in his face at the barrack-physician;&mdash;his
+money-purse lay exactly under the <i>os sacrum</i>, because he, like some
+Englishmen, had caused his breeches-pocket to be concealed in the
+region of the breeches buckle. He had with him as his chamber-moor his
+long, lean dispenser, who in the adjoining drinking-room encountered
+the very short dispenser of the second apothecary's-shop, or shop of
+the <i>canaille</i>. The short dispenser, out of malice, followed the tall
+one about everywhere, merely to vex him; but this time he had just come
+back from the country with some hens'-eggs which he had collected as
+fees from convalescent patients.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Matthieu, after an exegetic hint to Zeusel, took the liberty of
+being of Culpepper's opinion in regard to the Prince's gout. Culpepper,
+who would fain be an old German,&mdash;such old Germans can never
+dissemble when they are angry, though they can very well do so from
+self-interest,&mdash;fired away and said the English doctor was a complete
+ignoramus. Zeusel displayed with a broad smile, as with a printer's
+vignette, his contempt for the coarse man. The Medicus looked like the
+Equator, the apothecary like Spitzbergen. Now the tourney went on
+merely upon the subject of the gout. The second and umpire, Matthieu,
+gave it to be understood, that &quot;Zeusel, to be sure, loved his prince
+and lord, but still he could wish that this love had had the best means
+and the wholesomest influences. &quot;In bawdy-houses,&quot; said Culpepper,
+&quot;<i>that fellow there may</i> have influence.&quot; When the apothecary, at these
+words, proudly and contemptuously straightened himself up, the Doctor
+slowly jammed him down on the chair and on his money-purse, and,
+bringing down his fist upon his shoulder, nailed the little coxcomb
+with his purse to the seat.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">This pinning-down vexed the tailor-bird most of all, and he replied,
+trying to get up, that &quot;he would this very day, if he were consulted,
+advise his Highness to adhere to his present better choice.&quot; The
+barrack-physician might perhaps have too hurriedly withdrawn his hand
+from the shoulder which it covered; for he grazed with it, as with a
+cannon, the nose of his adversary, whereupon the latter, like Saint
+Januarius, discharged some blood. The Evangelist was personally grieved
+&quot;that two such sensible men could not fall out and fight with each
+other without personal hatred and heat, since they <i>might</i>, like
+princes who go to war, attack each other without either,&mdash;but the
+bleeding too well attested Zeusel's ebullition.&quot; ... Zeusel cried out
+to the Doctor, &quot;You lout!&quot; The latter, in his fury, actually took
+Matthieu's opinion, that the former bled only from fury, and compared
+him to those corpses which in old times bled, indeed, at the approach
+of the murderer, but from none other than quite natural causes. The
+Medicus, therefore, looked for his cane, which like a prince was
+gold-headed, and took his leave with the crowned stick, drawing it a
+few times, as with magnetic passes, across Zeusel's fingers; but I
+would call the staff, if I were in the place of other people, neither
+an ear-trumpet for Zeusel, which the physician applied to him, as they
+often do to persons hard of hearing, that the latter might hear better,
+nor yet a door-knocker, which he stretched out before the truth, that
+it might the more easily get admission into the apothecary. What he
+wanted was merely to oblige him to let his handkerchief drop, in order
+that he might look him in the face as he bade farewell, which he
+clothed in the following forbearing and neatly turned remark: &quot;You tell
+your Doctor that he and you there are the two greatest blockheads in
+town.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Under these last words both dispensers kept themselves still enough in
+other respects, though not with their tongues, indeed; for the tall
+dispenser saluted, as second chorus, the short one with the same
+war-song, and was a genuine Anti-Podagrist. Whoso considers that the
+tall one loved my hero on account of his politeness, and could not bear
+the short one, because Culpepper sent all his prescriptions to <i>his</i>
+shop,&mdash;such a one cannot expect anything less of the couple than a
+reflection of the scene in the billiard-room; but the tall dispenser
+was composed, and never, like Portugal, propagated edifying truths with
+blood, but&mdash;the moment the barrack-doctor called the court-physician a
+blockhead&mdash;he quietly took the hat of the short dispenser, who had
+deposited his income of eggs therein to guard them from being broken,
+and coolly, without the least resentment, placed the aforesaid hatful
+of eggs on the head of the professional brother; and by a slight
+squeeze fitted the Doctor's hat, which sat half an ell too high, upon
+the head of his friend,&mdash;with all the more propriety, as Castor and
+Pollux also had on egg-shells,<a name="div2Ref_206" href="#div2_206"><sup>[206]</sup></a>&mdash;and having effected this
+promotion, he went his way, without exactly caring to have much thanks
+for the felt-stuffing and the streaming face-poultice.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Fisticuffs spread abroad lesser truths, as wars do great truths. The
+Court-Chaplain Eymann sent a long letter of congratulation to Victor,
+and called him &quot;January's kidney-keeper,&quot; and begged for his promised
+visit. A travelling<a name="div2Ref_207" href="#div2_207"><sup>[207]</sup></a>-advocate knocked at his door as at that of a
+superior court, and begged him for a princely injunction against the
+Regency-College. The apothecary, with his application about the
+<i>lavement</i>,<a name="div2Ref_208" href="#div2_208"><sup>[208]</sup></a> still holds back.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Victor still laid up for himself his first visit to St. Luna like a
+ripening fruit, and thereby vexed the Regency-Counsellor, who wanted to
+persuade him into it. But he said: &quot;Those who are left behind in a
+place long indescribably for him who has gone from it, until he has
+made his first visit; and so, too, with him. After the first, both
+parties wait quite coolly and composedly for the second.&quot;&mdash;What he
+neither said nor thought, but felt and feared, was this: that his
+demigoddess, Clotilda, who inhabited the most holy place in his breast,
+and who by her invisibleness had become dearer, more indispensable, and
+for that very reason more sure to his soul, would, perhaps, at her
+appearance, take away at once all hopes out of his heart.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">It was on the evening of the day when he received Eymann's letter, that
+he thus fantasied: &quot;Ah, if January would only continue so well! He must
+have exercise, but of an unusual kind,&mdash;the rider must walk, the
+pedestrian must drive. We ought to travel together on foot through the
+country, in disguise. Ah, I might, perhaps, be of service to many a
+poor devil! We would steal homeward through St. Luna,&mdash;No, no, no!&quot; ...</p>
+
+<p class="normal">He started back himself, affrighted at a certain idea,&mdash;for he feared
+he should, when he had once had it, even execute it; hence he said to
+it three times, No. The idea was this,&mdash;to persuade the Prince to visit
+Clotilda's parents. But it was of no use; he remembered that his father
+had held too strict a court of cognizance over the Chamberlain and the
+Minister. &quot;And yet, what harm can Le Baut do to me? If I should only
+draw three sun-glances from January upon the poor fool! The wisest
+thing for me is, not to think any more about it to-day.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">The dog will bring us the answer; I, for my part, make a bet&mdash;a fine
+connoisseur of human nature on my island bets the contrary&mdash;that he
+does not carry out this joke.</p>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<p class="center"><img border="0" src="images/flowerstart.png" alt="flowerstart"></p>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+
+<h2><a name="div1Ref_18" href="#div1_18">18. DOG-POST-DAY.</a></h2>
+<br>
+
+<p class="center"><span class="sc2">Clotilda's Promotion.&mdash;Incognito-Journey.&mdash;Petition of the Majors of
+the Chase.&mdash;Consistorial Messenger.&mdash;Caricature of the
+Flachsenfingeners.</span></p>
+<br>
+
+<p class="normal">To be sure he did&mdash;carry out the joke; but still at bottom I do not
+lose my bet. For it happened in this way. From the day when Doctor
+Culpepper had made that pass with his coarse hand, as with an
+electrical discharger, before the full-blooded nose of Zeusel, the man
+with three watches pressed his company upon my hero, who carried only
+one, and that, too, the clumsy one of the Bee-father. Zeusel always
+thanked God, if only a court-courier got drunk at his house, or the
+court-dentist over-ate himself. He always brought with him, when he
+came, certain secret items of intelligence, which were to be published.
+He kept nothing to himself, not though one had threatened to hang him
+in the cellar of his shop. He told our hero that the Minister was
+making interest in behalf of his Joachime for the place of second
+maid-of-honor to the Princess, who could select only the female part of
+her service for herself,&mdash;but that he could not fairly do it, because
+he, or his son Matthieu, had promised the Chamberlain Le Baut to
+procure the same place for Clotilda; he therefore begged my hero, who,
+as he saw, he said, was Matthieu's friend, to spare him the
+embarrassment, and induce the Prince (which would cost only <i>one</i> word)
+himself to intercede with the Princess in behalf of Joachime; the
+Princess, who, besides, patronized the Minister, would, on more than
+one ground, do it with pleasure, and then the Minister could not help
+it, if the Chamberlain, the enemy of his Lordship, went away empty.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">The simpleton, as one can see, had guessed out, merely from the two
+accounts, which he had got hold of, of the two office-seekers, the
+whole of the remaining case; and the very circumstance, which Matthieu
+disclosed to him, that the Minister was vacating a quarter of a wing of
+his palace, for a companion of his deceased daughter Giulia, had only
+strengthened his conviction. To such a degree does malice supply the
+place, not only of years, but also of information and insight!</p>
+
+<p class="normal">My hero could say nothing to him except that&mdash;he did not believe a word
+of it. But after three minutes of private reflection he believed it
+all: for that was the reason, he saw, why the dear Clotilda had to come
+back from the seminary just at the arrival of the Princess,&mdash;that was
+the reason why Le Baut built around the Minister's son so many altars
+of incense and thank-offerings,&mdash;that was the reason why the old
+lady (in the Sixteenth Dog-Post-Day) serenaded, and so loudly,
+court-life,&mdash;in fact, as he further saw, two such outlawed, captive
+Court-Jews in Babylon must have the live Devil in them, until they are
+reinstated in the old holy city, and if they happen to have a handsome
+daughter, they will use her as the relay of their journey, and the
+Montgolfier of their balloon-ascension....</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;O, only come, Clotilda!&quot; he cried, glowingly;&mdash;&quot;the court-pool will
+then be to me an Italian cellar, a flowery parterre. If thou art only
+once settled at the Minister's, then I shall have spirits enough and
+sparkle properly. What will my father say, when he sees us stand with
+two leading-strings, with one of which thou holdest the Princess, and
+I, with the other, the husband?&quot; ... At this moment, Clotilda's recent
+objections to court-life fell like ice-flakes into his boiling blood;
+but he thought to himself: &quot;Women, however, are a little mite more
+pleased with the court-residence of splendor than they themselves
+suspect or say, and far more than men are. Cannot he, too, bear, then,
+with a like soul-edifying position? She, as step-daughter of the
+Prince, is only half-miserable, compared with him,&mdash;and does she know,
+then, whether she may not some time be recalled from her <i>field-état</i>
+to the court-garrison by an accident?&quot; By this <i>accident</i> he meant a
+marriage with Sebastian. Finally, he tranquillized himself with
+something which I also believe,&mdash;namely, that she had at that time,
+merely out of politeness, made a show of a certain coldness towards her
+new separation from her parents, and therefore towards the new place
+also; and then, too, pleasure at such a prospect might have been
+taken for warmth toward <i>somebody</i> or other at court, e. g. toward
+her&mdash;<i>brother</i>, he thought to himself.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">And now yesterday's idea, upon which I have lost my wager, came forth
+again, having shot up astonishingly in <i>one</i> night,&mdash;namely, that, if
+he could persuade the Prince to make the journey and the visit to the
+Chamberlain, and while they were still on the road, could plead with
+him for a good word to the Princess in behalf of Clotilda,&mdash;then was
+it, in the first place, impossible for the stepfather to refuse a
+prayer for the most beautiful stepdaughter,&mdash;and, secondly, impossible
+for the Princess, when her spouse should exercise the privilege of the
+first petition, not to draw all possible advantage from the first
+opportunity of laying him under obligations to her.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&mdash;Eight days after, just at dusk,&mdash;in the autumn days night comes
+sooner,&mdash;the Court&mdash;Chaplain Eymann was standing on the observatory and
+peering at the sun, not for its own sake, but in reference to the
+evening-redness and the weather, because he wanted to sow the next
+morning,&mdash;when suddenly and with alarm he sprang down from the
+watch-tower into his house, and delivered the Job's tidings, that the
+Consistorial Messenger would be there in a moment, together with a
+French emigrant, and for the one there was not a farthing, and for the
+other not a bed in the house....</p>
+
+<p class="normal">No soul came.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">I can easily comprehend it; for the Consistorial Messenger reconnoitred
+around the parsonage, and so soon as he saw the court-physician,
+Victor, in wax, sitting up at the window, he marched instanter out of
+the village, straight back to Flachsenfingen. The emigrant had turned
+in at his professional cousin's, Le Baut's.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">The two travellers were named January and Victor, and were returning
+this very day from their facetious flying tour.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">That is to say, seven days ago, the Prince, who loved mask-dances and
+incognito-journeys and the ways of the commonalty, and who wished only
+the Minister's mental masks and incognito <i>further</i>, had started off on
+foot, with Victor, behind a fellow who had sallied forth in advance on
+horseback with the masquerade dresses and masquerade refreshments.
+January carried a sword in his hand, which was contained, not in any
+sheath, but in a walking-cane,&mdash;an emblem of court-weapons! He gave
+himself out in the market-town for the new Regency-Counsellor, Flamin.
+My hero, who at the outset had passed himself through the mint, and
+come out stamped as a travelling dentist, recoined himself in the third
+village into a Consistorial Messenger, simply because the couple met
+the true Messenger. This financial collector of the Consistory was made
+to hand over to the physician for this week&mdash;it cost the Prince only a
+princely resolution and an indulgence&mdash;his receipt-book and his
+ecclesiastical robe of office, together with the tin-plate sewed
+thereto. These plates are attached to Messengers, and the silver stars
+to coats of distinction, as the leaden ones are to bales of cloth, that
+one may know what the trumpery is worth.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">For Büsching such a Rekahn's journey would be a windfall,&mdash;to me it is
+a true torment; for my manuscript is, besides, so large already, that
+my sister sits on it when she plays the piano-forte, because the seat
+is not high enough without the addition of the Dog-Post-Days.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">What did January see, and what Victor? The Regency-Counsellor, January,
+saw among the public servants nothing but crooked backs, crooked ways,
+crooked fingers, crooked souls. &quot;But a bow is crooked, and the bow is a
+sector of the circle, that emblem of all perfection,&quot; said the
+Consistorial Messenger, Victor. But what vexed January most was, that
+the officials respected him so exceedingly, when after all he gave
+himself out only for a regency-counsellor, and not for a regent. Victor
+replied: &quot;Man knows only two neighbors: the neighbor at his head is his
+master, the one at his feet is his slave; what lies out beyond either
+of these two is to him God or beast.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">What did January see still further? Untaxed knaves he saw, who enriched
+themselves at the expense of taxed poor men,&mdash;honest advocates he
+heard, who did not, like his courtiers or the English highwaymen, steal
+under the mask of virtue, but without any mask, and to whom a certain
+remoteness from enlightenment and philosophy and taste will not after
+death be prejudicial, because they can then in their own defence set up
+against God the exception of their ignorance, and represent to Him,
+&quot;that no other laws but those of their own sovereign and of Rome can
+bind them, and that neither is God Justinian, nor is Kant
+Tribonian.&quot;<a name="div2Ref_209" href="#div2_209"><sup>[209]</sup></a> He saw hanging from the heads of his country-justices
+bread-baskets, and from those of their subjects muzzle-baskets; he saw,
+that, if (according to Howard) it takes two men to support one
+prisoner, here there must be given twenty incarcerated ones, that one
+city-magistrate may live.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">He saw cursed stuff. But, on the other hand, as an offset, he saw on
+pleasant nights the cattle in fair groups feeding in the fields,&mdash;I
+mean the republican ones, namely, stags and wild boars. The
+Consistorial Messenger, Victor, said to him, that he had to thank the
+masters of the chase for this romantic spectacle, whose tender hearts
+had been as little able to execute the princely order of shooting wild
+game as were the Egyptian midwives to execute that of slaughtering the
+Jewish male children. Nay, the Financial Messenger at an alehouse had
+some yellow ink and black paper brought to him, and there,&mdash;while the
+slater drummed away on the roof to get some more slates brought to him,
+and the guests knocked on the pitchers to get them replenished, and the
+tavern-boy <i>tooted</i> in at the window through a beer-siphon,&mdash;amidst
+this Babylonian din the Consistorial Tithingman drew up one of the best
+petitions that the noble gentlemen of the chase ever yet despatched to
+the Prince.</p>
+<br>
+<h3>A PLAIN RELATION, FROM THE PETITION OF THE
+CHIEF MASTERS OF THE CHASE.</h3>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;That, as the wild game could neither read nor write, it was the
+bounden duty of the masters of the chase, who could, to write for them,
+and on conscience report that all the wild game of Flachsenfingen was
+pining under the tyranny of the peasant, as well the red game as the
+black.<a name="div2Ref_210" href="#div2_210"><sup>[210]</sup></a> That it made a chief-forester's heart bleed, to stand out
+of doors at night and see how the country-folk, out of an incredible
+ill-will to the deer, all night long, in the coldest weather, kept up
+on the borders of the fields a noise and fire, whistling, singing,
+shooting, so that the poor game might not be able to eat. To such hard
+hearts it was not given to reflect, that, if one should station around
+their potato-tables, as they do around their potato-fields, just such
+shooters and pipers, who should shoot away every potatoe from their
+mouths, that then they would necessarily grow lean. From just this
+cause the game was so haggard, because it could but slowly accustom
+itself to such treatment, as cavalry-horses learn to eat their oats
+from a beaten drum. The deer had often to go miles away, like one who,
+in Paris, picks up his breakfast at the inns,&mdash;in order, at last, to
+dash into a cabbage-field, which was beset by no such coast-guards
+and adversaries of the wild game, and there get a good bellyful. The
+dog-boys, therefore, said justly, that they trampled down in <i>one</i>
+stag-hunt more grain than the game got to eat the whole week. These,
+and none other, were the reasons which had moved the chief masters of
+the chase to appear before his Highness with the humble prayer&mdash;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;That your Highness would be pleased to enjoin it upon the
+country-people to stay at night in their warm beds, as thousands of
+good Christians do, and as the game itself does by day.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Thereby&mdash;the majors of the chase were emboldened to promise&mdash;a lift
+would be given at once to the country-folk and the stags, the latter
+could then graze the fields in peace, like the day-cattle, and would
+certainly leave the countryman the gleanings, while they contented
+themselves with the first-fruits. The country-folk would be happily
+freed from the ailments which come of night-vigils, from chills and
+exhaustions. But the greatest advantage would be this,&mdash;that, whereas
+hitherto peasants had grumbled at the hunting-socages (and not wholly
+without justice), because they delayed the time of the harvest, that
+then the deer in their place would undertake the harvest in the night,
+as the young men in Switzerland took upon themselves to cut the grain
+over night in the place of their sweethearts, so that the latter, when
+they came to their work in the morning, should find none there,&mdash;and
+thus would the hunting-socages no longer disturb any one in the matter
+of the harvest, except at most&mdash;the game,&quot; &amp;c.</p>
+<br>
+
+<p class="normal">But what have we to tell of the Consistorial Fee-Messenger, Victor?
+That ecclesiastical collecting-servant astonished all parsons by his
+drollery, and all parsons' wives by his readiness, and nothing but his
+tin and his papers could adequately certify the genuineness of such a
+specimen of a Messenger. He collected all that the Consistorial
+Secretary had liquidated, and excused himself by the plea that it
+became neither him nor the Secretary in this case to be conscientious.
+In his brief administration, he bagged without shame all back-standing
+marriage-pledges of the smallest value, (&quot;We in the College,&quot; said he,
+&quot;are greedy for a half-bats,&quot;<a name="div2Ref_211" href="#div2_211"><sup>[211]</sup></a>)&mdash;moneys, when parties were
+divorced,&mdash;moneys, when marriages were concluded by councils, whether
+by indulgences for mourning-time, for blood-relationship, or for want
+of parental consent,&mdash;moneys, when the moneys were only once (<i>or
+twice</i>) paid, but not yet for the second (or third) time, although the
+Consistory always required this after-ring or resonance of the money in
+the single case where people had lost the receipt,&mdash;moneys which the
+parsons had to pay down merely for decrees wherein they were <i>exempted</i>
+from payment.&mdash;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Thereupon he emptied his bag before the Prince, and flattened down the
+billow of money, and began:&mdash;</p>
+<br>
+
+<p class="continue">&quot;<span class="sc">Your Highness</span>!</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;The Devil is in the Consistory: it might be a Lutheran <i>Penitentiaria</i>
+for all the Commandments, and is so only for the sixth. What an honest
+Consistorial administration has been able to scrape together lies there
+on the table. The pile might be as broad again, if the Consistory had
+sense enough to say, 'Who buys? fresh, new letters of indulgence for
+everything!'&mdash;It has shown, that, beyond certain degrees of
+relationship, it can grant bulls of dispensation as well as the Pope:
+why will it not, then, apply its indulgence to any nearer degrees? It
+would be able to dispense from great as well as from small, if it
+really set about it, and just as well from fast-day penances as from
+mourning, and thrice publishing, that erotic fast-time. By Heaven!
+if a single man, like the Pope, can be the spiritual washing-machine
+of whole continents, and can clean souls in bundles in the year
+of jubilee, then surely we all in the College may serve for the
+washing-machine of a single country. If that is not done, then we
+take&mdash;for we mean to live&mdash;sin-money and perquisites for the few things
+which we have graciously to wink at; and if in Sparta the <i>judges</i>
+worshipped the goddess of Fear, so with us the <i>parties</i> revere this
+fair <i>ens</i>.<a name="div2Ref_212" href="#div2_212"><sup>[212]</sup></a>&mdash;Had we only, at least, power to absolve from five or
+six great sins,&mdash;only, e. g., from a murder,&mdash;then could we allow
+divorces and expeditings of marriages, (these wholly opposite
+operations we perform successfully, just as the Karlsbad water at the
+same time dissolves the stone in the bladder and petrifies what is
+dipped into the well,) and do it for half the money.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Then, after a long pause,&mdash;&quot;Your Excellency, it is, after all,
+impracticable, because the Devil has the secular counsellors mixed in
+among the ghostly; a half-<i>profane session-table</i> cannot by any
+cabinet-making process be made over into a <i>holy chair</i>; there is,
+therefore, nothing to be wished&mdash;except a good digestion<a name="div2Ref_213" href="#div2_213"><sup>[213]</sup></a>&mdash;but a
+spirit of concord, that clerical and secular counsellors may properly
+feed upon the parties around which they sit, saving a couple of bones,
+that shall fall to us scribes and messengers. So have I often seen on
+the carcass of a dead horse starlings and ravens at once, in a motley
+row, sitting amicably together, and pecking away and devouring.&quot;&mdash;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">My correspondent assures me that by these addresses the Court-Physician
+effected more with January than the Court-Chaplain by his. Many parties
+got their money, and some judges a most gracious letter, from the
+Prince's own hand.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Before I arrive with our disguised span in the suburbs of St. Luna,
+one or two things are still to be mentioned. To January's soul more
+knee-pedals were attached than to a pianoforte, which the favorite's
+knee, while it seemed to bend itself, moved at its pleasure. He was
+always the son of the present moment, and the reflection of his
+company. If he read in Sully, then he did not neglect for a week at a
+time the Regency-College, and sent for the President of Finance. If he
+read in Frederick II., then he was for furnishing the imperial
+contingent and himself commanding it, and went forenoons to the parade.
+He contemplated with pleasure the ideal of a good government, whether
+in print or in a speech, and often attempted approximations to it,
+reformations, investigations, and compensations, for whole weeks,&mdash;with
+the exception of <i>retrenchments</i>, which, after all, are the only merit
+a prince can earn without the help of others. During the whole crusade
+he was a true Philosopher Antoninus, and stood ready everywhere to
+reward and to punish and to enact; he felt, too, that he could make it
+practicable, if one only did not absolutely require him to <i>labor</i> and
+to <i>abstain</i>; under <i>that</i> the other part also went to the Devil.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">In the beginning, he was pleased with the sentimental journey; when it
+was over, he was so again; but in the midst of it, all that was pressed
+out after the first runnings grew more and more bitter, and he wished
+for himself, instead of the country bill-of-fare, his dietetic
+dial-plate. Then, too, he had accustomed himself so much to valor,
+that, for want of it,&mdash;i. e. of his body-guard,&mdash;he was, so to speak,
+timid; hence, on one occasion, in the dark, at the tavern, he was while
+in bed, about to run through a young weaver with his cane-sword,
+because the weaver had confounded at night the princely bed with one of
+more peaceful contents. For the rest, all the rays of his favor now
+converged to a focus upon the single man of rank, the only courageous
+and confidential friend whom he had,&mdash;his Victor.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">But my hero had everywhere something to enjoy,&mdash;at least, the thought
+of St. Luna; everywhere something to eat,&mdash;at least, when they came to
+a fruit-tree; everywhere something to read,&mdash;and though it were only
+charms against fires on the house-doors, old calendars on the walls,
+exhortations to charity on the alms-boxes; everywhere something to
+think of,&mdash;of the travelling pair, of the four acts of Nature's
+seasons, which are annually given over again, of the thousand acts in
+man, which never return; and everywhere something to love and to dream
+of,&mdash;for this was the very road which Clotilda had so often gone over
+on her journeys between Maienthal and St. Luna, and the friend of her
+rich heart found on this classic avenue nothing but great remembrances,
+magic passages, and a long, quiet, homelike bliss....</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;St. Luna!&quot; cried January, delighted at the mere thought of seeing once
+more a man of the world,&mdash;Le Baut. The mask of an emigrant was a
+thought he had himself hit upon, the better to draw out the
+Chamberlain, with whom he meant finally to give himself out as an
+hereditary foe of the Prince. Had there been in Le Baut's soul a higher
+nobility than the heraldic, or had Victor but known that the
+Chamberlain would recognize the Prince at the first glance, and that he
+would be able to do so for the very reason that the genuine suspended
+Consistorial Messenger had probably before this whispered the whole
+secret in the ear of the city of Flachsenfingen, he would have
+dissuaded him from the <i>noble masque</i>.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Sebastian, as we have mentioned, stayed back and in the open air,
+probably out of shame at his part, and evidently from a longing to look
+upon Clotilda's sunny face, which for so long a time had not risen upon
+him, in a scene more convenient and congenial to his heart. &quot;And the
+parents will be glad to see me again,&quot; he thought beside, &quot;when they
+have something to thank me for,&quot;&mdash;namely, Clotilda's place at court.
+More than once did he start, as he stood watching there behind the
+blanket of the dark, to hear his name called out of the Parsonage, and,
+in fact, with such love and such longings for his answer that he could
+almost have given one. But it was only the people of the Parsonage
+talking with his little godson, and saying to him, &quot;Dearest good
+Sebastian! Just see here: what have I got for you?&quot; How the veiled
+paradise of to-day's spring lay in old relics around him! How he envied
+the shadowy heads in the palace, which he saw moving about the lights,
+and the old Parson's pug-dog, who would fain wag him in to the
+Parsonage-inmates, and who continued in there to perform his part on
+the stage of so sweet a past! But when some thistles round the palace
+reminded him of the mosaic ones on the floor within-doors, then was the
+envier to be envied, and, with the fairest dreams that were ever traced
+over the ground of his dark life, he went back to the Apothecary's.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">The next day January followed, delighted with the parents, enraptured
+with the daughter, because they were so fine and she so fair. It cost
+my hero nothing but a word to move the step-father to the intercession
+for the appointment of the step-daughter, which our hero and the father
+had so often longed to see; and it cost the step-father, too, only a
+word with the Princess to get his and their petition granted....
+Clotilda became maid-of-honor.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Immediately upon that, the Minister von Schleunes, in a congratulatory
+letter, pressed upon Clotilda's parents the quarter-wing of his house,
+and was happy, in the epistle, &quot;that a higher petition had <i>repeated</i>
+his own with such effect.&quot; I set up this nobleman as a model to all
+people of the world; although, at present, all writes itself <i>noble</i> in
+the <i>moral</i>, as the Viennese do in the <i>heraldic</i> sense.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Victor, who with his soul's eyes was peeping all day long into the
+Chamberlain's window, could hardly wait to see Clotilda, first in St.
+Luna, and next at court. He put off the visit from day to day, and
+night after night made it in dream. Not even his visiting-card&mdash;his
+letter to the Parson&mdash;had he sent off; he wanted, not only to carry it,
+but actually to supersede it, himself. But this, last thought&mdash;of
+suppressing the letter, for fear Clotilda might possibly get hold of
+this malicious conduct-list of courts, and therefrom contract a
+repugnance to the new office&mdash;he hurled forthwith out of his soul, as
+Paul did the viper from his hand. Woe to the heart that is not sincere
+towards a sincere one, is not great towards a great one, and warm
+towards a warm one, when it should be all this even towards one that is
+nothing of it all!</p>
+
+<p class="normal">For the rest, he needed such a visit, and such a reciprocal visit,
+every day more and more; for he was not happy; and for this there were,
+besides himself, to blame, first, the Prince, secondly, Flamin,
+thirdly, nine thousand and thirty-seven persons. The Prince could not
+well help it; he poured out the whole cornucopia of his love on the
+Doctor, and took away from him all the freedom which the latter had
+been minded in the beginning so sacredly to maintain. Victor shook his
+head as often as he wrote in his journal, or log-book of his voyage of
+life, (at his father's behest,) and saw by his chart that he had passed
+over quite other seas and degrees of latitude and longitude than he or
+his father had desired. &quot;However, I shall land right, at least,&quot; said
+he.&mdash;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">But his Flamin brought still more sadness to his soul, which everywhere
+at once sought and bestowed love. He wanted to impart to the
+Counsellor, with the news of Clotilda's appointment, a joy like
+his own; but his friend received it as coldly as he did its bearer.
+The dust of law-papers lay thick on the organ-pipes of his
+spirits.&mdash;Chained to the session- and writing-tables, he was now, like
+chained dogs, wilder than he had been before when unfettered.&mdash;The
+efforts of his colleagues to dislocate the body politic into an anagram
+did not get from him the approbation which they deserved.&mdash;Then, too,
+there lodged itself in his soul the leaven of the jealousy of
+friendship, which could not feel it right that his Victor should see
+him seldomer and others oftener.<a name="div2Ref_214" href="#div2_214"><sup>[214]</sup></a>&mdash;But most was he affronted by
+Victor's refusal, when he besought his company to St. Luna.... In a
+word, he was vexed.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">The nine thousand and thirty-seven men who were to my hero nine
+thousand and thirty-seven tormenting spirits are the gentlemen of
+Flachsenfingen jointly and severally, by means of their absurd
+character, which deserves not to be sketched here, but in an extra
+flyleaf.</p>
+<br>
+
+<h3>EXTRA FLY-LEAF,</h3>
+
+<p class="hang1"><i>Wherein is sketched the Ridiculous Character of the People of
+Flachsenfingen,&mdash;or Perspective Plan of the City of Little Vienna</i>.</p>
+<br>
+<p class="normal">Little Vienna is the name many give to my Flachsenfingen, just as we
+have a Little Leipsic, Little Paris,<a name="div2Ref_215" href="#div2_215"><sup>[215]</sup></a> &amp;c. There can hardly,
+however, be two cities wider apart in manners than Flachsenfingen,
+where one gluts and drowns his life and his soul, and Vienna, where
+one, perhaps, does not sufficiently shun the opposite fault of a
+Spartan asceticism. The Little-Viennese, or Flachsenfingeners, open
+their hearts to the enjoyment of Nature far less than the orifice of
+the stomach.&mdash;Pastures are the kitchen-pieces of their cattle, and
+gardens those of the owners thereof; the Milky Way does not chain and
+satisfy their spirits half so much (though it is longer) as the
+Königsberg sausage of 1583 would have done, which was five hundred and
+ninety-six ells long, and four times as heavy as the learned man
+himself who has portrayed it to posterity,&mdash;Herr Wagenseil.<a name="div2Ref_216" href="#div2_216"><sup>[216]</sup></a>&mdash;Are
+these the traits upon which carriers ground the name of Little Vienna?
+I have often been in Great Vienna, and am personally acquainted with
+the grand crosses, little crosses, and commanders of the Order of
+Temperance, which is there so common. I can certainly, therefore,
+represent a valid witness, and must be believed, when I say, that,
+while in Little Vienna they guzzle extraordinarily, of Great Vienna,
+and emphatically of its cloister-people, I can and must maintain
+something very different: they have not only all the time the greatest
+thirst,&mdash;which certainly must needs be gone, if they quenched it,&mdash;but
+they also make use, against drunkenness, of a fine method of Plato's.
+That ancient advises us, in case of drunkenness, to look into a glass,
+in order, by the distorted figure therein which reminds us of our
+desecration, to be forever warned away from the vice. Hence whole
+chapters, the dean, the sub-senior, the junior canons, &amp;c., often set
+vessels full of wine or beer before them, and lift them to their eyes,
+and in this <i>metamorphotic</i> or caricaturing glass, which, by shaking,
+distorts still more the distorted features, contemplate themselves,
+according to the philosopher's advice, a good long while. I ask whether
+people who peer so deeply into the glass can love drinking?&mdash;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">It does not, however, follow from this, that I deny the Great-Viennese
+a resemblance to the Flachsenfingeners, in such traits as do honor.
+Thus, for example, I must gladly allow a similarity of the former to
+the latter in this respect, that they, neither of them, are ever down
+with the disease of poetry or enthusiasm or sentimentalism,&mdash;which are
+all one. Victor would make this eulogy sound in his language somewhat
+thus: &quot;The Viennese authors (even the best of them, only Denis and
+hardly three others excepted) give the reader no wings to bear him up
+over the whole world of the actual by that nobility of soul, by that
+contempt of the earth, by that reverence for old virtue and freedom and
+the higher love, wherein other German geniuses shine as in holy
+rays.&quot;<a name="div2Ref_217" href="#div2_217"><sup>[217]</sup></a> And he would refer for proof to the &quot;Vienna Sketches,&quot; to
+&quot;Faustin,&quot;<a name="div2Ref_218" href="#div2_218"><sup>[218]</sup></a> to Blumauer,<a name="div2Ref_219" href="#div2_219"><sup>[219]</sup></a> and to the &quot;Vienna Almanac of the
+Muses.&quot; This reproach even a Viennese would accept and turn to
+his credit, by asking us whether we have to show (like him) a
+&quot;Musen-Almanach,&quot; with a sediment of filth, whereupon one might write,
+&quot;With approbation of the brothel.&quot;&mdash;This feeling of literary difference
+compelled even a Nicolai,&mdash;otherwise no special <i>amoroso</i> of the Vienna
+authors,&mdash;in his &quot;Universal German Library,&quot; to build up for them a
+separate side-box, although he throws writers of all other German
+circles together into <i>one parterre</i>, or pit. In like manner have I
+seen in Bavaria, on the gallows, beside the usual post for the three
+Christian fellow-confessors, a special schismatic cross-beam attached,
+to which only the Jew tribe were strung up.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">The Flachsenfingener knows that there is nothing in poets; and in
+books, where rills of verse run through the prose, he skips clean over
+the rills, just as certain people come late to church in order to
+escape the singing. He is a true servant of the state, who knows of
+what use the poetic golden vein is in the revision-, commission-,
+relation-, and enrolling-systems,&mdash;none at all; meanwhile, although he
+cannot appreciate a Klopstock or a Goethe, nevertheless he will not, in
+his leisure hours, despise a doggerel verse or crambo-rhyme. A soul of
+such a fortunate, robust nature, wherein one aims less to exalt his
+spirit than his income, makes it, to be sure, comprehensible how there
+may be a kine-pox, by means of which the Flachsenfingener has been
+able, like Socrates, to wander round alone in the plague of
+sentimentalism without being infected. The full moon produced with them
+full crabs, but no full hearts; and what they planted under it, that it
+might favor the growth, was not love, but&mdash;turnips. The genuine
+Little-Viennese shoots at much nearer targets than that white one over
+yonder. They marry there with true gusto, without having first shot
+themselves or sighed themselves to death,&mdash;they know no obstacles to
+love but ecclesiastical,&mdash;female virtue is a belt-buckle, which must
+hold as long as the surname of the daughter,&mdash;the hearts of daughters
+are there like letter-envelopes, which, when they have once been
+superscribed to one lord, can easily be turned so as to be addressed to
+another man,&mdash;the girls love there, not from coquetry, but from
+simplicity, any devil, except poor devils....</p>
+
+<p class="normal">In short, my correspondent, from whom I have all this, is almost
+prepossessed in favor of Little Vienna, and therefore contradicts
+vehemently the author of the &quot;Travelling Frenchman,&quot; who is said to
+have said somewhere&mdash;if I had him in the house, I should know how
+Little Vienna is properly named&mdash;that the Flachsenfingener has not
+energy enough to be at least a highwayman. Knef says, however, he will
+not give up the hope that they have been thieves, and backs himself by
+the cases of those that have been hung.</p>
+
+<p class="normal"><i>End of the Extra Fly-Leaf, wherein was sketched the Ridiculous
+Character of the People of Flachsenfingen,&mdash;or of the
+Perspective Plan of the City of Little Vienna</i>.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">But among such people my hero, with all his toleration, could not take
+any comfort whatever,&mdash;he who so hated all selfishness, especially in
+the sensual form, and who would gladly have attended Dr. Graham's
+lectures, wherein he taught men to live without eating,&mdash;he who so
+gladly opened his heart to the seed of truth winged by poesy,&mdash;who
+bore an Emanuel in his heart, and held the want of poetic feeling
+even as a sign that the <i>moral</i> man had not yet laid aside all
+caterpillar-skins,&mdash;he who looked upon this whole life and the whole
+body politic as the hull in which the kernel of the next life
+ripens,&mdash;O, whoever thinks this is too lonely among them that think
+otherwise!&mdash;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">So it stood with the world around him, when he got a line from the good
+wife of the Parson:&mdash;</p>
+<br>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;The general talk here is that you are dead. But I express my mind
+against people, that, as you let so little be heard from you, and have
+forgotten all the world, you must, for that very reason, be still
+alive. Do confirm my proposition! We all have a fond and foolish
+longing for you, and I should like to beg you to come on the
+twenty-first (if the wedding at the senior Parson's hinders you no more
+than it does my Flamin). We have nothing to offer you here, but the
+birthday of our Clotilda. O good my Lord, and my beloved Lordship, how
+has it been possible for you hitherto to remain so long mute and
+invisible? A true friend, who has nothing at all of the ladies of your
+court about her, not even their fickleness, wishes heartily to have you
+before her eyes and beside her ears,&mdash;and that lady is myself,&mdash;and
+when I see you come, I shall certainly weep for joy, let me laugh or
+pout the while as I will.</p>
+
+<p class="right">&quot;E.&quot;</p>
+<br>
+
+<p class="normal">When did he receive this letter, so full of soul? And what answer did
+his make to it?&mdash;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">It was on the loveliest evening, which announced the coming of the
+loveliest Sunday morning and of the magic after-summer,&mdash;he looked at
+the evening red under which lay Maienthal's mountains, and his heart
+beat heavily within him,&mdash;he looked toward the dawning red of the full
+moon which kindled over St. Luna, and his yearning thitherward became
+inexpressible,&mdash;he thought of Clotilda, whose birthday fell upon
+to-morrow,&mdash;and so, very naturally, as to-day closed, he went&mdash;to bed.</p>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<p class="center"><img border="0" src="images/barstart.png" alt="barstart"></p>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+
+<h2><a name="div1Ref_19" href="#div1_19">19. DOG&mdash;POST-DAY.</a></h2>
+<br>
+
+<p class="hang1"><span class="sc2">The Hair-Dresser with a (musical) Disease of the Lungs.&mdash;Clotilda in
+Victor's Dream.&mdash;Extra Lines on Church-Music.&mdash;Garden Concert by
+Stamitz.&mdash;Quarrel between Victor and Flamin.&mdash;The Heart without
+Solace.&mdash;Letter to Emanuel.</span></p>
+<br>
+
+<p class="normal">The October Sunday with which I fill up this Dog-Post-Day was,
+even at nine and a half o'clock in the morning, such a glad,
+glistening day in St. Luna, that the whole Parsonage thought of the
+Court-Physician.&mdash;&quot;Ah, he ought to come to the concert this evening!&quot;
+The <i>virtuoso</i> Stamitz was to give one in Le Baut's garden.&mdash;&quot;O, better
+earlier, even to dinner!&quot;&mdash;&quot;And to my forenoon sermon, if he will not
+come to the children's catechizing.&quot; Eymann, as he said this, had, more
+than anything else, his newly dressed peruke in his head, which Herr
+Meuseler had to-day placed <i>on</i> it. This clever peruke-maker visited
+those of his diocesans (the parsons) who wore no hair of their own,
+often and with greater benefit to their heads than the Superintendent
+himself, that <i>Commander of the Faithful</i>, to whom most chaplains said,
+Your Excellency! If he could only have weaned himself from singing,
+lying, and drinking too much,&mdash;the <i>friseur</i>,&mdash;most of the clergy would
+have ordered their toupees&mdash;those artistic cock's-combs&mdash;of him; but as
+it was, they did not.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">As the Chaplain loved to make the <i>confitures</i> of Fate, among which
+false hair is to be reckoned, bitter in some way, and to give them, as
+it were, an infusion of hops, he naturally sought to embitter to-day's
+peruke (for whose false curls he gave, in place of payment, genuine
+hair cut off from his people's heads) by the misgivings which he
+conjured up about the long staying away of Victor. He bethought
+himself: &quot;We must have affronted him in some way,&mdash;he does not even
+write,&mdash;he has, perhaps, fallen out with my son,&mdash;something has
+occurred,&mdash;and then, too; the old Lord no longer gives us a
+side-glance,&mdash;our rats, also, had a hand (or a foot) in helping drive
+him away.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">By such elegies he threw at first himself, and at last even his
+hearers, into agony. He was not to be refuted in any way, except by
+one's bringing out some new subject of distress. The breaking-away spot
+in his cloud, or his <i>little book for help in distress</i>, was this time
+a literal book, the &quot;Anecdotes for Preachers,&quot; by Teller, of Zeitz,
+which he to-day received through the peruke-maker from the clerical
+reading-circle. Clergymen, especially country clergymen, carry
+everything out with a minute, punctilious solicitude, into which they
+are partly scared by their reigning bugbear and dragon of a Consistory.
+Now in this book-club there was a law current&mdash;commentators and editors
+keep it&mdash;that every member who should find a grease-spot or ink-stain
+or rent in the book he was reading should enter it on the fly-leaf in
+an index and inventory of spots, together with the number of the page
+&quot;where.&quot; Very naturally, every one who was even half-way an honest
+Lutheran would deny the <i>immaculate re</i>-(or <i>con</i>-)<i>ception</i> of
+it, and
+the freckles were therefore all regularly registered, but nobody fined.
+Only the conscientious Court-Chaplain took upon himself, as scapegoat,
+the punishment of other people's sins; for he never could sleep a wink
+the whole night, when he found in a book more blots than in the
+sin-register, because he clearly saw that he should be made adoptive
+father of the anonymous smutch and buyer of the book.&mdash;Now Teller's
+Anecdotes for Black-Coats was a complete pile of linen for the wash,
+black with dirt. Was there not one dog's-ear upon another,&mdash;compound
+dog's-ears,&mdash;blot upon blot? were not the leaves regular
+<i>proof-sheets</i>,&mdash;and, in fact, speaking <i>without metaphor</i>? Eymann
+began, &quot;And if money should come flying in to me through the
+window&quot;....</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Just then Victor's letter flew in at the window, and its&mdash;author
+through the door.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">But, of course, the case was this:&mdash;Victor, before pleasant weather,
+had pleasant dreams; before bad weather, Satan and his kin appeared to
+him. The beautiful weather of Saturday, and the thought of Clotilda's
+birthday and of the after-summer, gave him a morning dream, which, in
+turn, gave him a stage on which only her sweet image played. A person
+whom he had seen behind the veil of dream stood before him all the next
+day in a magic reflection. With him dreams,&mdash;those night-moths of the
+spirit,&mdash;like the real moths, strayed out beyond the bounds of night
+and sleep; at least for the forenoon, he went on loving, awake, every
+person whom he had begun to love in dream. This time, by an exactly
+reverse process, waking love flowed on into dreaming love, and the
+actual Clotilda coincided with the ideal to form one saintly image, so
+radiant that any one who knows his dream will easily enter into the
+rest. Therefore must the dream be given to the readers, the poetic ones
+especially: for others I should be glad to prepare an expurgated
+edition of the Dog-Post-Days, in which it should be left out; for
+unpoetic souls that have no dreams themselves should not read any.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">But to you, ye good, seldom requited female souls,&mdash;ye who have
+a second conscience of your own, beside the first, for pure
+manners,&mdash;whose single virtue, when one looks at it nearly, is seen to
+bloom up into one wreath made of all the virtues, as nebulous stars,
+seen through glasses, fall into millions,&mdash;ye who, so changeable in all
+purposes, so unchangeable in the noblest one, go from the earth with
+unrecognized wishes, with forgotten worth, with eyes full of tears and
+love, with hearts full of virtue and grief,&mdash;to you, dear ones, I
+gladly tell the little dream and my long story!...</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;A hand which Horion did not see laid hold of him; lips which he saw
+not spake to him, 'Let thy heart now be clean and holy, for the genius
+of female virtue resides in this region.'&mdash;Lo! there stood Horion on a
+field clothed with forget-me-nots, over which the sky like a blue
+shadow fell; for all the stars had been withdrawn from it, only the
+<i>evening star</i> stood gleaming alone up in the place of the sun. White
+ice-pyramids, streaked with down-trickling lines of evening redness,
+closed in, as with a wall of gold and silver ore, the whole dark
+horizon.&mdash;Therein Clotilda passed by, sublime as one dead, serene as
+a human being in the next world, conducted now by winged children, now
+by a veiled nun, now by an earnest angel, but she passed forever by
+before Horion; she smiled upon him in blissful lovingness while thus
+passing, but she passed by.&mdash;Flowery hillocks, almost like graves, rose
+and sank, for every one was stirred by the breathing of a bosom
+slumbering beneath it; a white rose stood over the heart that lay
+veiled below; two red ones grew over the cheeks, where tender blushes
+hid themselves in the earth; and overhead in the night-blue of heaven
+the white and red reflections of the hill-flowers glided fitfully into
+each other as often as the roses of the heart and the cheeks swayed
+with the hillock.&mdash;Dying echoes, awakened, however, by unheard voices,
+gave answer to each other behind the mountains; each echo lifted the
+little hills of slumber still higher, as if a deep sigh or a bosom full
+of rapture heaved them; and Clotilda smiled more blissfully, sinking at
+every resonance more deeply into the flowery earth.&mdash;The tones were too
+full of ecstasy, and the dissolved heart of man was fain to die
+therein. Clotilda sank now into the graves up to her heart; only her
+silent head still smiled above the meadow; the forget-me-nots at last
+reached up to the sunken eyes that were full of blissful tears, and
+bloomed over them.&mdash;Then suddenly a hill of slumber crept over the
+saint, and from beneath the flowers her words came up, 'Rest thou, too,
+Horion!'&mdash;But the sounds, growing more distant, transformed themselves
+during the burial into dim harmonica-tones.... And lo! as they sank
+into silence, there came up a great shadow like Emanuel, and stood
+before him like a short night, and covered the unknown moment as with a
+hand from a higher world. But when the moment and the shadow had passed
+away, then had all the hills sunk.&mdash;Then the reflections of the
+flowers, flowing together, gilded over the undulating heavens.&mdash;Then
+were seen <i>white</i> butterflies, <i>white</i> doves, <i>white</i> swans,
+climbing
+up to the purple peaks of the ice-mountains with outstretched wings as
+with arms, and behind the mountains, as if by an uncontainable
+transport, blossoms were flung up, and stars and garlands.&mdash;And there
+on the highest ice-mountain, as it rose tranquil in clear radiance and
+purple blaze, stood Clotilda, glorified, consecrated, radiant with
+supernatural rapture, and on her heart fluttered a nebulous globe,
+which consisted of little vaporized tears, and on which Horion's pallid
+form was delineated, and Clotilda spread wide her arms.&quot;&mdash;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">But to embrace? or to soar away? or to pray?... Ah! he awoke too soon,
+and his eyes streamed down in greater tears than the nebulous ones, and
+a sinking voice cried incessantly all around him, &quot;Rest thou, too!&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">O thou soul of woman,&mdash;thou that goest, weary and unrewarded, wounded
+and bleeding, but great and unspotted, up from the smoking battle-field
+of life,&mdash;thou angel, whom the heart of man, reared by storms, soiled
+by the world's dealings, can respect and love, but cannot reward or
+reach,&mdash;how does my soul at this moment bow down before thee! how do I
+wish thee now the soothing balm of Heaven, the requiting goodness of
+the Eternal! And thou, Philippina, precious soul, glide away into a
+secret cell, and, amidst the tears which thou hast already so often
+shed, lay thy hand upon thy soft, rich heart, and swear, &quot;Forever shalt
+thou continue consecrated to God and virtue, even if not to repose!&quot; To
+thyself swear it,&mdash;not to me, for I believe it without an oath.&mdash;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">What a parade-night, full of stars and dreams, was that! and what a
+gala-day of Nature followed upon it! In Victor's brain stood nothing
+but St. Luna, veiled in blue, bespangled with silver dew-drops, and
+graced by the loveliest angel, who to-day raised moist, glad eyes to
+the friendly heaven, and thought, &quot;How beautiful art thou to-day, just
+upon my birthday festival!&quot;&mdash;Even the Senior Pastor and his daughter,
+who both made a wedding,&mdash;the former an anniversary second wedding with
+his Senioress, the latter a first one with the preacher of the Orphan
+Asylum,&mdash;slipped themselves into the procession of his joyous thoughts
+as two new couples.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">He did not mean to go to St. Luna, but he said; &quot;I will dress myself up
+just for a little walk.&quot;&mdash;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;It is all one where I go to-day,&quot; he said, when he was out of doors;
+and so he took the St. Luna road.&mdash;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;I can turn round at any time,&quot; he said, when he had gone half-way.&mdash;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;But it would be something still more ridiculously funny, if I should
+be at once correspondent and postman, and deliver my own letter,&quot; said
+he, and drew it out.&mdash;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;And answer my good mother's orally by the same opportunity,&quot; he
+continued, half in dream, and full of greater love towards her who had
+sent him the sweet nocturnal one by the intelligence of the birthday.&mdash;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&mdash;But when he heard the first bells of St. Luna ringing for church,
+then he sprang up, and said, &quot;Now I will no longer embitter the way by
+further scruples, but will march boldly and decidedly into the
+village.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">And so, taking the hand of Fortune, with all Nature smiling after him,
+with dreams in his heart, with innocent hope in his freshly blooming
+countenance, he entered into the Eden of his soul.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Flamin he had not asked to go with him, in order not to rob the Senior
+Pastor of his wedding-guest, and because he did not know, himself, that
+he should reach St. Luna, and perhaps, too, because he did not want to
+have his fantasying attention to the sparkling morning disturbed by any
+news about juristic cases. In fact, he would rather take a walk with a
+woman than with a man. Men are almost ashamed, beside one another, of
+any except silent emotions; but womanly souls love to unfold to each
+other their bashful sensibilities; for they cover up the naked heart
+with maternal warmth, that it may not become chilled during the
+unveiling.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">As Victor passed round the Parsonage below, he saw himself up at the
+window, in his <i>second edition for a few good friends</i>; but the wax
+Victor had forthwith to be banished behind a false partition, that it
+might not frighten the fleshly one. The reception of the latter, and
+the feast of jubilee thereupon, need not be described by me in a more
+lively manner than by my saying that the pug-dog was almost crushed
+underfoot, the bulfinch hopped round in vain for his breakfast, nor did
+the Parson's wife offer any to the guest, in her joy at staring at him,
+and church did not begin till after the double usance of half an hour;
+so that this time more parishioners went to church drunk than usual.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Victor, too, went thither intoxicated, but with joy. There is nothing
+more agreeable than to be a parson's wife, and to say to one's husband,
+while putting on his clerical bands, &quot;Make the service a little longer
+to-day, else the mutton will not be quite roasted through.&quot;&mdash;Domestic
+trifles gratified my hero full as much as courtly ones provoked him.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">He went with the Parson and with the Parson's wife, who abridged all
+the processes of kitchen and toilet in a summary and manlike way. His
+toleration for the faults of the clerical order had nothing in common
+with that of the distinguished people who are fit for high dignities
+and dinners, which arises from supreme contempt, and which can endure a
+Christian priest as easily as an Egyptian; but it grew out of his
+opinion that the churches are still the only Sunday-Schools and Spartan
+school-gates for the poor commoners, who cannot hear their <i>cours de
+morale</i> from the <i>state</i>. Besides, he loved, as a youth, the favorites
+of his childhood.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Many preachers try to combine the rule of Quintilian, who requires that
+<i>bad</i> arguments should be put forward in the earlier part of the
+discourse, with that of Cicero, who is for keeping them back till the
+latter part, by posting them in <i>both</i> places; but Eymann held good
+feelings to be better than bad reasons, and wound around the peasants
+chains, not of reasoning, but of flowers.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">The <i>friseur</i> above-mentioned, at first, would not go to church,
+because it was beneath his dignity, but afterward he could not do
+otherwise; for, on account of the court stranger present to-day,
+church-music was to be made.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">It is the only fault of the peruke-maker Meuseler, that he loves to
+sing too well, and is too fond of intruding his natural pipes into all
+church-music that is made in his perukial diocese, especially on Holy
+Whitsuntide. The St. Luna chorister could never bear this; but how to
+cheat him and feast a thousand ears? Simply thus: He frizzled out
+to-day what was still to be frizzled, (not to-day alone, but it was
+always so,) and merely glided up the choir-steps. Here he leaned and
+watched, till the chorister, seated on the musical sausage-sledge,
+struck with his finger the first note of the church-music. Then, like a
+sunbeam, he darted up into the choir, and filched away from the young
+counter-tenor his part, and sang it into the ears of the congregation,
+but with much whining and puffing, as if he were chanting his
+manuscript to the reviewers. For one must now, once for all, make it
+known to the world, that the enraged musician at the clavichord had,
+with a sharp-cornered triangle of elbows, furiously thrust back at the
+frizzling counter-tenor, in order to push the strange singing-bird out
+of the bird-house of the choir. But as the singer made his right arm
+the firm note-desk of his text, and the other a war-club,&mdash;like the
+Jews, who built up Jerusalem with one hand full of building-tools and
+the other full of weapons,&mdash;one sees that the peruke-maker, even
+amidst this continuance of fighting and fa-sol-la-ing, could do his
+very best, and execute somewhat during the musical truce of God. But
+so soon as the music had drawn its last breath, then the harmonious
+bird-of-passage and stormy-petrel skipped nimbly out across the choir,
+accompanied by the memory of a thousand ears and a single elbow. The
+chorister could not catch him, nor get scent of him.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">If, on the contrary, he had the good fortune to be passing with his
+bandboxes through a village just as parson and schoolmaster and
+pedagogic frog-spawn were quacking and croaking<a name="div2Ref_220" href="#div2_220"><sup>[220]</sup></a> round a deaf
+corpse,&mdash;all which many name, more concisely, a dirge,&mdash;then could the
+<i>virtuoso</i>, without the counter-prop of elbows, spring gayly with both
+feet into the motet,<a name="div2Ref_221" href="#div2_221"><sup>[221]</sup></a> work out the funeral serenade given to the
+dead man by his heirs, throw in gratis some final cadences to the
+funeral procession, and yet have time to offer in the village to the
+bailiff an entirely new bag-wig.&mdash;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">To our hero the music in country churches gave the greatest satirical
+pleasure. But little should we get by it, had I not the forethought to
+beg leave just for one poor little extra-syllable&mdash;one shall hardly see
+it&mdash;upon church-music.</p>
+<br>
+<h3>POOR LITTLE EXTRA-SYLLABLE ON CHURCH-MUSIC.</h3>
+
+<p class="normal">It always gives me pleasure to see the people keep their seats during
+church-music, because it is a proof that no one is bitten by the
+tarantula; for, if they should run out, one would see that they could
+not endure any discords, and so had been bitten. I, as profane
+music-master, compose for few churches,&mdash;that is to say, only
+the consecration-noise for new ones, or old ones that have been
+repaired,&mdash;and therefore, in truth, I understand nothing of the matter
+whereupon, in passing, I purpose to express myself; but thus much let
+me still be allowed to assert, that the Lutheran church-music is good
+for something,&mdash;in the country, not in the capitals, where, perhaps,
+the fewest discords are correctly delivered. Verily, a miserable,
+sottish, blue chorister, who in bravura-airs sings himself brown
+and beats others brown,&mdash;there are, therefore, two kinds of
+<i>bravura</i>-airs,&mdash;is able, with a few mechanics who on Sundays work at
+the fiddle, with a trumpeter who might blow down without an instrument
+the walls of Jericho, with a smith who lays about him with the sticks
+of the kettle-drums, with a few spasmodic youngsters that do not yet
+even understand singing, and still resemble a female singer, who
+labors, not, like the fine arts, for <i>ear</i> and <i>eye</i> alone, but also
+(only in a worse acceptation than the youngsters) for a third sense,
+and with the little wind which he draws from the lungs of the organ and
+his own lungs,&mdash;such a thumper, I say, is able, with so extraordinarily
+little musical rubbish, nevertheless, to get up a much louder
+thundering and fiddle-rosin-lightning around the pulpit Sinai&mdash;I mean,
+to draw a far more vehement and discordant church-music out of his
+choir&mdash;than many much better sustained theatre-orchestras and
+chapels, with whose harmonies temples are so often desecrated. Hence
+such a noisy man is pained afterward, when people misunderstand and
+falsely judge his church scraping and squeaking and groaning. Shall,
+then, the soft, low Moravian music steal into all our provincial
+churches?&mdash;Fortunately, however, there are still city choristers who
+are working against this, and who know wherein pure choral tone and
+discord are to be distinguished from court-tone.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">I expect, not readers, but organists, to know why mere dissonances&mdash;for
+consonances are to be endured only among the voices of the
+instruments&mdash;belong to the choir. Dissonances&mdash;according to Euler and
+Sulzer&mdash;are relations of tones which are expressed in high numbers;
+they displease us, therefore, not on account of their incongruity, but
+on account of our inability to reduce them rapidly to an equation.
+Higher minds would find the near relations of our harmonies too easy
+and monotonous,&mdash;the larger ones of our discords, on the contrary,
+charming and not above their comprehension. Now, as divine service is
+held more in honor of higher beings than for the profit of men, the
+church style must insist upon this, that a music shall be made,
+suitable for higher beings,&mdash;namely, of discords,&mdash;and that precisely
+that which is the most abominable to our ears shall be chosen as most
+appropriate for the temple.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">If we once open the church-doors to the instrumental music of the
+Moravians, then we shall at last be infected with their singing, and by
+degrees all that vocal bleating and bellowing will be lost which makes
+our churches so lively, and which to castrated ears is such a
+disagreeable hammer of the law, but for us so good a proof that we
+resemble the swine, which the Abbé de Baigne, at the command of Louis
+XI., arranged according to the scale, goaded with jacks, and set to
+squealing.&mdash;These are my thoughts on church-music, or modern German
+battle-song.</p>
+
+<p class="center"><i>End of the Extra-Syllable on Church-Music</i>.</p>
+<br>
+
+<p class="normal">I should not have let the hair-dresser sing and strut so long, if my
+hero had been available for anything else, all this Sunday, than
+a supernumerary; but he did nothing of consequence the whole day,
+except, that, out of a sort of humanity, by unpacking, himself; her
+chests-of-drawers and bandboxes, he compelled old Appel, who would
+rather dress hams than her person, to prepare the usual Sabbath edition
+of the latter, printed with typographic splendor, as early as three
+o'clock in the afternoon; otherwise she would not have delivered the
+same till after supper. The Jews believe that they get, on the Sabbath,
+a new Schabbes-<a name="div2Ref_222" href="#div2_222"><sup>[222]</sup></a> or Sabbath-Soul: into maidens there enters one at
+least; into the Appels, two or three.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">But why do I expect my hero to make any more active demonstration
+to-day,&mdash;him who, to-day, buried in that dream-night and in the coming
+evening, his emotions stirred by every kindly eye, and by the
+<i>rudera</i><a name="div2Ref_223" href="#div2_223"><sup>[223]</sup></a> and urns of a spring which he had dreamed away,&mdash;softly
+dissolved by the calm, bland summer, which still lay smiling and dying
+on the incense-altars of the mountains, on the crape-clad fields, and
+amidst the mute funeral escort of birds, and at the rising of the first
+cloud would pass away from the boughs,&mdash;Victor, I say, who to-day,
+greeted with a melancholy smile by nothing but tender remembrances,
+felt that he had hitherto been too mirthful? He could only look upon
+the good souls around him with glistening eyes of love, then turn them
+away, more intensely glistening, and go out. Over his heart and all
+its notes stood written, <i>Tremolando</i>. No one is more profoundly sad
+than he who laughs too much; for when this laughter ceases, everything
+has power over the exhausted soul, and a meaningless lullaby, a
+flute-concert,&mdash;whose D sharp and F sharp keys and mouthpieces are
+merely the two lips wherewith a young shepherd whistles,&mdash;opens the
+flood-gates of the old tears, as a whisper loosens the poised and
+trembling avalanche. He felt as if his dream of this morning absolutely
+did not allow him to address Clotilda; she seemed to him too holy, and
+still escorted by winged children, and placed upon icy thrones. As,
+upon the whole, he had to-day neither a tongue nor an ear for Le Baut's
+conversations in the realm of the morally dead, he preferred to listen
+unseen in the great leafy garden to this Stamitz concert, and at the
+farthest let himself be introduced to the company by accident. His
+second reason was, that his heart was made for a sounding-board of
+music, and gladly drank in the fleeting tones without disturbance, and
+loved to conceal their effects upon him from ordinary men, of the
+world, who can truly quite as little do without Goethe's, Raphael's,
+and Sacchini's things (and for not a whit inferior reasons) as without
+Löschenkohl's own. Emotion, it is true, raises one above being ashamed
+to show emotion; but while his emotions lasted, he hated and shunned
+all attention to another's attention, because the Devil smuggles in
+vanity among the best feelings, often one knows not how. In the night,
+in a shady nook, tears fall more gracefully, and by-and-by evaporate.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">In all this he was strengthened by the Parson's wife; for she had
+secretly sent to town and invited her son, and artistically prepared in
+the garden a surprise.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">The Parson's family repaired at last to the embowered concert-hall, and
+gave not a thought to the consideration how much they were despised by
+Le Baut's household, who held only noble metals and noble birth, never
+noble deeds, to be cards of admission, and who, highly valuing the
+people of the Parsonage as friends of his Lordship and of Matthieu,
+would, however, have valued them still higher as lap-dogs of either.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Victor kept back a little in the Parsonage garden, because it was
+still too light, and also because he pitied poor Apollonia, who was
+peering solitary and unseen, in full finery, from the window of the
+summer-house, out into the air, and dandling perpendicularly the little
+god-son, whom she hung now over her head, now under her stomach. After
+the manner of a cit, he did not put on his hat in the summer-house, in
+order to strengthen her spirit by courtesy. An infant is, as it were,
+prompter and bellows-blower to the nurse: the young Sebastian sent
+Appel timely and sufficient succor under the siege by the elder one,
+and she undertook at last to speak, and remark that the god-son was a
+dear, good, beautiful, little &quot;Basty.&quot; &quot;But,&quot; she added, &quot;the young
+leddy (Clotilda) must not hear that: she will have it that we should
+call him Victor, when she hears father call him Basty.&quot; Now she began
+to magnify how Clotilda loved his godchild, how often she would snatch
+the little monkey and smile on him and hug and kiss him; and the
+eulogist repeated on a small scale everything that she praised. Nay,
+the grown-up Sebastian did it after her, but he sought on the little
+lips only the kisses of <i>others</i>; and perhaps, in Appel's case, again,
+<i>his</i> were among the things which are sought. Made happier himself, he
+left one whom he had made happier; for Love despatched now one gayly
+attired hope after another as messengers to his heart, and all said,
+&quot;Truly, we do not deceive thee: trust us!&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">At last Stamitz began to tune up, about whom the stiff family of the
+Lord Chamberlain would certainly not have concerned themselves, because
+to-day there were no strangers present, had not Clotilda begged for
+this garden-concert as the only festival of her birth-night. Stamitz
+and his orchestra filled a lighted bower,&mdash;the noble audience sat in
+the next brightest niche, and wished the thing were already over,&mdash;the
+commonalty sat farther off, and the Chaplain, for fear of the
+catarrhal, dewy floor, twisted one leg round the other above the
+thighs,&mdash;Clotilda and her Agatha reclined in the darkest leafy box.
+Victor did not steal in, till the overture announced to him the seats
+and the seating of the company: in the remotest arbor, in a true
+aphelion, this comet took its place. The overture consisted of that
+musical scrawling and flourishing, of that harmonious phraseology, that
+crackling of fire-works produced by the mutual contact of sounding
+passages, which I so extol, when it is nowhere but in the overture.
+There it is in place; it is the sprinkling rain which softens the heart
+for the great drops of the simpler tones. All emotions in the world
+need <i>exordia</i>; and music paves the way, or the tear-ways, (lachrymal
+ducts,) for music.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Stamitz&mdash;after a dramatic plan which not every conductor marks out for
+himself&mdash;gradually descended from the ears into the heart, and from
+allegros to adagios: this great composer sweeps in ever-narrowing
+circles around every bosom in which there is a heart, until at last he
+reaches it and folds it in a rapturous embrace.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Horion trembled alone, without seeing his loved ones, in a gloomy
+arbor, upon which a single withered twig let in the light of the moon
+and of its pursuing clouds. Nothing ever stirred him more during music
+than to look at the chase of the clouds. When he accompanied with his
+eyes and with the tones these nebulous streams in their everlasting
+flight around our shadowy globe, and when he imparted to them all his
+joys and his wishes, then he thought, as in all his joys and sorrows,
+on other clouds, of another flight, of other shadows, than those above
+him,&mdash;then did his whole soul pine and languish; but the strings
+stilled the panting bosom, as the cold leaden bullet in, the mouth
+allays thirst, and the tones discharged the heavy tears from the full
+soul.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Dear Victor! there is in man a mighty wish which was never fulfilled:
+it has no name, it seeks its object, though all that thou namest it and
+all joys are not its reality; but it recurs, when in a summer night
+thou lookest to the north or towards distant mountains, or when
+moonlight is on the earth, or the heavens are studded with stars, or
+when thou art very happy. This great, vast wish lifts our soul aloft,
+but with sorrow: ah! here below we are thrown upward in a prostrate
+position like epileptics. But this wish, to which nothing can give a
+name,&mdash;our strings and tones name it to the human spirit; the yearning
+soul then weeps more profusely and can no longer comprehend itself, and
+calls inward in rapture of lamentation between the tones: &quot;Ay, all that
+ye name to me is what I want!&quot; ...</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Mortal man, the enigmatical creature, has also a nameless, monstrous
+dread, which has no object, which awakes at hearing of spiritual
+apparitions, and which one sometimes feels when one only speaks of
+it....</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Horion yielded up his bruised heart, with quiet tears which no one saw
+flow, to the high adagios which laid themselves with warm wings of
+eider-down over all his wounds. All that he loved entered now into
+his shady arbor,&mdash;his oldest friend and his youngest; he hears the
+thunder-storm-bells of life toll, but the hands of friendship stretch
+forth to meet each other, and they clasp each other, and even in the
+second life they hold each other fast in withering grasp. All tones
+seemed the unearthly echoes of his dream, sent back by beings whom one
+neither saw nor heard....</p>
+
+<p class="normal">He could not possibly stay longer in this dark inclosure with his
+burning fancies, at this too great distance from the Pianissimo. He
+went&mdash;almost too boldly and too closely&mdash;through a leafy avenue up to
+the tones, and pressed his face far through the leaves, in order at
+last to see Clotilda in the dim and distant green glimmer....</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Ah, and he saw her! But in too angelic, too paradisiacal a form! He saw
+not the thinking eye, the cold mouth, the calm person, that forbade so
+much and desired so little; but he saw for the first time her mouth
+encircled by a sweet harmonious sorrow, with an inexpressibly touching
+smile,&mdash;for the first time her eye weighed down under a brimming tear,
+as a forget-me-not bows itself beneath a tear-drop of rain. O, this
+good soul surely concealed her fairest feelings most of all! But the
+first tear in a beloved eye is too mighty for a soft heart.... Victor
+knelt down, overpowered by reverence and rapture, before the noble
+soul, and lost himself in the darkling, weeping form, and in the
+weeping tones. And when he saw at length her features turned to
+paleness, because the green foliage overspread her lips and cheeks with
+a deathly hue from the reflection of the lamps,&mdash;and when his dream
+came back to him, with Clotilda sunk under the flowery hill,&mdash;and when
+his soul, dissolved into dreams, into sorrows, into joys, and into
+wishes for her who consecrated her birthday festival with devout
+tears,&mdash;oh, was there then any need, for the completion of his
+euthanasia, that the violin should die away, and that the second
+harmonica, the <i>viole d'amour</i>, should send its music-of-the-spheres to
+his naked, enkindled, palpitating heart? O, the pang of bliss quieted
+him, and he thanked the Creator of this melodious Eden, that He, with
+the <i>highest</i> tones of His harmonica, which with unknown forces shiver
+the heart of man to tears, as high tones shatter glasses, had at last
+exhausted his bosom, his sighs, and his tears: amidst these tones,
+after these tones, there were no more sounds; the full soul was wrapped
+up in foliage and night and tears; the speechless swelling heart drank
+the tones into itself, and took the outer ones for inner ones; and at
+last the tones played like zephyrs around the head that was drowsy with
+bliss, and only in the innermost part of the dying soul still stammered
+the too happy wish: &quot;Ah, Clotilda, could I surrender to thee to-day
+this mute, glowing heart!&mdash;ah, that I might on this imperishable
+heavenly evening, with this trembling soul, sink dying at thy feet, and
+say the words, 'I love thee!'&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">And as he thought of her festive anniversary, and of her letter to
+Maienthal, which had given him the greatest praise, that of being a
+scholar of Emanuel, and of little tokens of her regard for him, and of
+the sweet fraternization of his heart with hers,&mdash;ay, then did the
+heavenly hope of winning this ennobled heart for the first time draw
+near to him amidst the music, and that hope caused the sounds of the
+harmonica, like dying echoes, to float far and wide over the whole
+future of his life....</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Victor!' said some one, in a slowly lengthened tone. He sprang up and
+turned his exalted features toward the&mdash;brother of his Clotilda, and
+embraced him with joy. Flamin, into whom all music flung war-flames and
+more open sincerity, looked at him wonderingly, inquiringly, and with
+an imperceptible suspicion, and with that friendliness which resembled
+scorn, but which was never anything but the smarting of injuries
+received.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Why didst thou not take me, too, with thee to-day?&quot; said Flamin, in a
+friendly tone.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Victor pressed his hand, and was silent.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;No! speak!&quot; said he.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Let it be for to-day, my Flamin; I'll tell thee some time,&quot; replied
+Victor.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;I will tell it to thee myself,&quot; Flamin began, more quickly and warmly.
+&quot;Thou thinkest, perhaps, I shall be jealous. And look thou, did I not
+know thee, I should be so: truly, another would be so, if he had thus
+lighted upon thee here, and put all things together,&mdash;thy late retreat
+from our summer-house out into the foliage, thy writing without a
+light, and thy singing of love&quot;&mdash;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;To Emanuel,&quot; said Victor, softly.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Thy sending off that leaf to her&quot;&mdash;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;It was another from her album,&quot; said he.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Still worse; <i>that</i> I did not even know. Thy lingering in St. Luna,
+and a thousand other signs, which do not immediately occur to me,&mdash;thy
+going off alone today&quot;&mdash;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;O my Flamin, this is going too far! thou seest with other eyes than
+those of friendship.&quot;&mdash;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Here Flamin, who never could dissemble without immediately becoming
+what he assumed, and who could never recount an offence without
+falling into the old anger, grew warmer, and said, in a less friendly
+manner,&mdash;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;And others, too, see it,&mdash;even the Chamberlain, and the Chamberlain's
+wife.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">This tore Victor's heart.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Thou dear old friend of my youth! so, then, we are to be drawn and
+torn asunder, bleed we ever so much; so, then, this Matthieu is to
+succeed (for all comes from him, not from thee, thou good soul!) in
+getting thee to torment thyself, and me to torment thee. No, he shall
+not succeed; thou shalt not be taken from me. See, by Heaven!&quot; (and
+here the feeling of his innocence stood in Victor erect and sublime,)
+&quot;and though thou shouldst for years misunderstand me, still the time
+will come when thou shalt start back, and say to me, 'I have done thee
+wrong!'&mdash;But I shall gladly forgive thee.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">This touched the jealous one, who to-day, indeed, (for a special
+reason,) was more composed.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;See,&quot; said he, &quot;I believe thee always: say, dost thou never do
+anything against me?&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Never, never, my dear fellow!&quot; answered Victor.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Now, then, forgive my heat,&quot; the other continued. &quot;Thus have I
+already, with my cursed jealousy, once tormented Clotilda herself in
+Maienthal. But wrong not Matthieu; it is he, rather, who tranquillized
+me. He told me, to be sure, what Clotilda's parents thought they
+observed; nay, still more,&mdash;see, I tell thee everything,&mdash;he said they
+had even, on account of thy presumed liking and thy present influence,
+which the Chamberlain would fain avail himself of for his
+reinstatement, spoken of a possible betrothal to their daughter, and
+had even spoken to her and sounded her on the subject; but (to thee,
+however, this is a matter of indifference) my beloved remained true to
+me, and said, No.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Now was the hitherto so happy heart of our friend broken: that hard No
+had never yet been uttered to him. With an inexpressible, crushing, but
+meek woe, he said, softly, to Flamin,&mdash;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Be thou, too, always true to me, for I have very little; and never
+torment me more as thou hast to-day.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">He could say no more; the stifled tears stormed surging up over his
+heart, and painfully collected themselves under the pupil; he must
+needs now have a still, dark place, where he could weep to his heart's
+content; and in his lacerated and smarting bosom there remained only
+one soft and balmy thought: &quot;Now, in the night, I can weep as much as I
+will, and no one can see my shattered face, my shattered soul, my
+shattered fortune.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">And when he thought, &quot;Ah, Emanuel, if thou shouldst see me as I am
+to-day!&quot; he could hardly any longer contain himself.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">He fled, with suppressed tears, unconcerned who saw it or did not see
+it, out of the garden, over which a dark angel let float a great
+funereal banner and the music of a dirge. He bruised himself against
+a stone garden-roller which was used to crush the <i>sprinkled</i>
+grass-blades and <i>flowerets</i>,&mdash;he wept not yet, but on the observatory
+there would he satisfy himself and steep himself in abundant
+sorrow,&mdash;he kept repeating, &quot;But she remained true, and said, No, no,
+no!&quot;&mdash;the concert-tones glided after, like fire after the conjurer,&mdash;he
+waded through moist, slumbering lawns, which concealed their flowers,
+and, swifter than he, swept over the earth the shadowy outlines of the
+clouds overhead chased by the wind,&mdash;he stood at the foot of the
+observatory, still held back every tear, and hurried up,&mdash;he threw
+himself on the bench where he had seen Clotilda for the first time afar
+off, in a white dress,&mdash;&quot;Rest thou, too, Horion!&quot; she had called to
+him out of his dream from under the flowery hill, and he heard it
+again.&mdash;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Here he tore open joyfully all his wounds, and let them bleed out
+freely in tears; they overspread with mournful streams the face which
+once had often smiled, but always good-naturedly, and which from other
+eyes had never wrung any, but only wiped them away; every flood was a
+load taken off, but the heart grew heavy again upon it, and poured out
+a fresh one.&mdash;At last he could hear the tones again; most of them sank
+and were lost before they were wafted to the tower; little ones arrived
+dying, and expired in his darkling heart; every tone was a falling
+tear, and made him lighter, and expressed his anguish. The garden
+seemed to consist of softly resounding, dark-green waves of shadow,
+veiled under a broken twilight. Stung by memory, he tore his eye away
+from it: &quot;What does it concern me any longer?&quot; he thought. But at last
+from this shadowy Eden and from the <i>viole d'amour</i> came up the song,
+&quot;Forget me not,&quot; to his weary heart, and gave him back the softer pang
+and the past love. &quot;No,&quot; said he, &quot;I never will forget thee, though
+thou hast not loved me! thy form will assuredly forever move me, and
+remind me of my dreams! ah, thou heavenly one, it is, indeed, now, the
+only thing that does not pain me, to think I forget thee not!&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">All was silent and extinguished; he was alone in the presence of night.
+At length, after remaining a long time in silence, he went down and
+back to Flachsenfingen, exhausted with weeping, and a poor man. And as,
+on the way, he cast a hurried glance up at the dark-blue heaven, in
+which floating clouds lay flung around the moon like <i>scoriæ</i>, and a
+hurried glance again over the half-annihilated shadowy landscape, over
+the shadow-hills and shadow-villages, all appeared to him dead, empty,
+and vain, and it seemed to him as if, in some brighter world, there
+were a magic-lantern, and through the lantern glasses moved on which
+earth and springs and human groups were painted, and we called the
+descending, dancing images of these glasses <i>us</i> and an earth and a
+life; and <i>after all that was bright and many-colored, a great shadow
+followed on</i>.&mdash;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Ah, I stir up, perhaps, once more, in many a breast, long-forgotten
+troubles! But it is good for us&mdash;since sorrows occupy so large a place
+in our memory&mdash;that this bitter winter-fruit should grow mild by lying,
+and that there is but a small difference between a past sorrow and a
+present bliss.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Poor Victor arrived after midnight, with a pale face and burning eyes,
+at the house of the Apothecary. He asked for nothing, that he might not
+betray his broken voice. When he saw his every-day overcoat hanging in
+the moonbeams, and when he imagined himself a strange person to whom
+the coat belonged, and who took it off so joyfully in the morning and
+now would put it on again so sorrowfully, then did a certain compassion
+which he had for himself seize again with too strong an impression his
+exhausted heart. Marie came, and he turned not away from her even the
+signs of this compassion. She stood surprised; he said to her with the
+softest voice, woven of sighs, that he wanted nothing; and the good
+soul went slowly out without courage to console or to weep, but all
+night long she shed invisible tears for those of another, and for a woe
+which had not been whispered in her ear.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Why did Fate to-day, of all days, open all the veins of his heart? Why
+must the Senior Pastor's silver wedding and the first marriage of his
+daughter to the preacher of the Orphan-House fall just on this day?
+Why, if indeed the two nuptial feasts had to coincide on this day, must
+they last till after midnight, when they gave poor Victor occasion to
+gaze into all the mouldering scenes of his burnt-up hopes, when he
+could see from his dark chamber, in a brilliantly lighted room, the
+love which linked hand in hand, pressed lips to lips, and mingled eyes
+and souls? At another time he would have smiled at the Orphan-House
+preacher and at two catechists of the poor; but tonight he could only
+sigh over them,&mdash;and it is a soft line of beauty on his inner man, that
+he did not grudge, but felicitated, the poor people's possession of
+what he was deprived of himself. &quot;Ah, you are happy!&quot; said he. &quot;O, love
+each other truly, press your throbbing, transitory hearts ardently to
+each other, ere the wing of Time shatters them, and glow on each
+other's bosoms during the short minute of life, and exchange your tears
+and kisses ere eyes and lips freeze in the grave! Ye are happier than
+I,&mdash;I, who can give my heart full of love to no one but the worms of
+the grave, and on whose coffin a joiner shall paint the inscription,
+which like myself shall be buried in the earth: 'Ye good children of
+men, you loved me not, and yet I loved you so well!'&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Every happy smile, every fleeting touch of the violin, every thought,
+became now, to his soft tear-bathed heart, a hard, sharp corner,&mdash;just
+as a hand which dips itself under the water feels everything hard to
+the touch.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">His unbounded sincerity, his unbounded tenderness, he could now satisfy
+in no other way than by a letter to Emanuel, into which he let his
+whole soul overflow.</p>
+<br>
+
+<p class="continue">&quot;<span class="sc">O Dearly Loved Friend</span>!</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Ought I to hide it from thee, when griefs or follies unman me? Ought I
+to show thee the faults I have repented of, and never my present ones?
+No, come hither, dear one, to my wounded breast! I will lay open to
+thee the heart therein, let it bleed and beat under the exposure as it
+will. Thou wilt, perhaps, still cover it up again with thy fatherly
+love, and say, 'I love thee still.'</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Thou, my Emanuel, reposest in thy lofty solitude, on the Ararat of the
+saved soul, on the Tabor of the shining One: there thou gazest, softly
+dazzled, into the sun of Deity, and seest calmly the cloud of death
+swim in over the sun; it veils the orb: thou growest blind under the
+cloud; it melts away, and again thou standest before God. Thou lovest
+men as children who cannot offend,&mdash;thou lovest earthly enjoyments as
+fruits, which one plucks for refreshment, but without hungering for
+them; the storms and earthquakes of life pass by thee unheard, because
+thou liest in a life-dream full of tones, full of songs, full of
+meadows,&mdash;and when death awakes thee, thou art still smiling over the
+bright dream.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;But, ah! more than one tempest thunders into the life's-dream of the
+rest of us, and makes it distressful. If a higher being could enter
+into the hurly-burly of ideas which encompasses our spirit, and from
+which it must draw its breath, as we breathe in an air composed of all
+kinds of gases poured together,&mdash;if he were to see what kinds of
+nutriment pass through our inner man, from which it has to extract its
+chyle: that medley of comic operas,&mdash;Bayle's Dictionaries,&mdash;concerts of
+Mozart,&mdash;Messiahs,&mdash;military operations,&mdash;Goethe's poems,&mdash;Kant's
+writings,&mdash;table-talks,&mdash;lunar observations,&mdash;vices and virtues,&mdash;men
+and sicknesses and sciences of all sorts:&mdash;if the Being should examine
+this <i>olla-podrida</i> of life, would he not be curious to know what
+heterogeneous and mutually repulsive juices thereby run together in the
+poor soul, and would he not wonder that anything settled and uniform is
+left as a residuum in man? Ah, Emanuel! if thy friend is now in a fine
+banquet-hall, now in a garden, now in an opera-box, now under the
+great night-heavens, now in the presence of a coquette, and now before
+thee,&mdash;surely, this ambiguous alternation of scenes must bring him
+sorrows, and perhaps leave stains....</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;No, I will not deceive my Emanuel&mdash;O, are, then, the trifles and
+the pebbles of this life worth our choosing crooked paths to avoid
+them, as the sapping-caterpillar submits to winding courses through the
+twig-work of its leaf? No, all that I have said is true; but I should
+not have said it, had not other sorrows led me to speak of these also;
+and yet, thou innocently, simple-heartedly, sublimely trusting teacher,
+thou wouldst have believed me! Ah, thou hast too good an opinion of
+me!... O, it is a long and weary step from admiration to imitation! But
+now look into my open heart!</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Since I have, here in the charnel-house of my childish joys, in the
+beds where my childhood's years bloomed and faded, been conversing with
+perhaps too many dreams of the past,&mdash;and, still more, from the day
+when thou gavest my heart the provocative to the fever-stroke which has
+shaken my whole life,&mdash;since thou disclosedst to me the life wherein
+man exfoliates, and the thin, sharp moment whereon he so painfully
+stands,&mdash;since that farewell-night when my soul was great and my tears
+inexhaustible,&mdash;an eternal wound has been running within me, and the
+sigh of a longing which nothing can name but dreams and tears and
+love has lain like a stagnant vein, oppressive and consuming in my
+breast.&mdash;Ah! I still smile as ever, I still philosophize as ever, but
+my innermost heart only the beloved friend sees to whom I now lay it
+bare.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;O Fate, why dost thou strike in man the spark of a love which must be
+smothered in his own heart's blood? Have we not all, abiding within us,
+the sweet image of a beloved, of a friend, before whom we weep, after
+whom we seek, for whom we hope,&mdash;ah, and so vainly, so vainly? Does not
+man stand before a human bosom, as the turtle-dove before a mirror,
+and, like her, coo himself hoarse before a dead, flat image therein,
+which he takes for the sister of his complaining soul? Why is it, then,
+that every fair spring-evening, every melting lay, every overflowing
+rapture, asks us, 'Where dost thou find the beloved soul to which
+thou wilt tell and impart thy bliss?' Why does music give the
+tempest-stricken heart, instead of peace, only greater waves,&mdash;as the
+tolling of bells, instead of dispelling, draws down the thunder-storms?
+And why is it, that out of doors, on a fair, still, bright day, when
+thou lookest over the whole unrolled picture of a landscape, over the
+seas of flowers that tremble upon it, over the shadows flung down by
+the clouds which fly from one hill to another, and over the mountains
+which stretch like shores and walls round our flowery circle,&mdash;why does
+then a voice within thee cry incessantly, 'Ah! behind the smoking<a name="div2Ref_224" href="#div2_224"><sup>[224]</sup></a>
+mountains, beyond the clouds that repose upon them, there rests a
+fairer land, there dwells the soul thou seekest, there heaven lies
+nearer to the earth'? But behind the mountain and behind the cloud
+there sighs also an unappreciated heart, that looks over towards this
+thy horizon, and thinks, 'Ah, in that far region I should doubtless be
+happier!'</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Are we <i>not</i>, then, all happy?&mdash;Do not assert it, nor say to me,
+Emanuel, that, in the winter of this life, the few warm sunbeams that
+interrupt it burst and destroy the better man like a vegetable; say not
+that every year steals away something from our heart, and that, like
+ice, it grows less and less, the farther it drifts down the stream of
+Time; only say not that the wandering Psyche, though she hears her
+second self in her prison, yet can never get into its arms.&mdash;But thou
+hast already somewhere said: 'All loving souls on earth dwell apart
+from each other in two bodies, as on two hills; a waste lies between
+them, as between solar systems; they see each other, speak across by
+distant signs; at last they hear each other's voices from hill to hill;
+but they never touch each other, and each embraces only its thought.
+And yet this poor love crumbles like an old corpse, when it is
+exhibited; and its flame flickers like a burial-lamp, when it is
+uncovered.'</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Are we, then, all not happy?&mdash;Do not say so!&mdash;Ah, man, who, even from
+childhood up, has been calling after an unknown soul that grew up in
+<i>one</i> heart with his own,&mdash;that entered into all the dreams of his
+years, and therein gleamed from afar, and, after his waking, started
+his tears,&mdash;that in spring sent him nightingales, that he might think
+of her and long for her,&mdash;that in every tender hour visited his soul,
+with so much virtue, so much love, that he would so gladly have offered
+in his heart, as in a sacrificial chalice, all his blood to the
+beloved,&mdash;but who, alas! never, appeared, and only sent her image in
+every fair form, but forever kept back her heart;&mdash;oh, if at last, oh,
+if suddenly, oh, if blissfully, her heart beats against his heart, and
+the two souls embrace each other forever, he can no longer say it, but
+we can: 'This man, indeed, is happy, and is loved.' ...</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Good Emanuel, thou forgivest me the pain of the fear that I may never
+be the happy man,&mdash;no, never!&mdash;Oh, even for this earth, broken up into
+graves, I should be perhaps too happy, I should be permitted to enjoy,
+perhaps, too great an Eden for so young a life, and one justified by
+such slight merits, if my too soft soul, which even now gives way under
+three happy minutes, which loves every human being, and hangs with the
+arms of a child on the heart of the whole creation,&mdash;oh, which is
+already made too blissful by this mere dream of love, and is
+overpowered by this description!&mdash;no, it were too blessed, such a soul,
+long since dissolved by melancholy and humanity, if it should once,
+after such a long, deathly yearning, at last, at last&mdash;O Emanuel, I
+tremble again for joy, and yet it can never, never be!&mdash;if it should
+find all its wishes, its whole heaven, so much love, accumulated in one
+dear, dear soul; if in the presence of great Nature, and before the
+face of Virtue, and before God himself, who gave love to her and to me,
+I could dare to say, weeping, to this only, this sweet, this beloved&mdash;O
+God, how shall I name her? this fore-loved one, whom in my frenzy I
+would now name: 'At last my heart has thee, thou good soul! to-day God
+gives us to each other, and we remain together through all eternity!'
+No, I would not say it; I should for ecstasy be dumb and die!</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;&mdash;Lo! it seemed to me just now as if a form passed across my chamber,
+and called, 'Victor!' I looked round, and beheld my empty room, and the
+Sunday clothes which I had taken off, and now, for the first time, I
+remembered that I was unhappy and not loved.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;But thou, irreplaceable friend, misunderstand me not. I swear to thee
+that I will give thee these sheets unaltered, though to-morrow, when
+the whirlpools of to-night flow stiller and smoother, I should find all
+sorts of alterations necessary. Thy foolish friend remains,
+nevertheless, thy friend forever.</p>
+
+<p class="right">&quot;S. V. H.&quot;</p>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<p class="center"><img border="0" src="images/hornstart.png" alt="hornstart"></p>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+
+<h2><a name="div1Ref_20" href="#div1_20">20. DOG-POST-DAY.</a></h2>
+<br>
+
+<p class="center"><span class="sc2">Letter from Emanuel.&mdash;Flamin's Fruit-Pieces on the Shoulders.&mdash;Walk
+to St. Luna.</span></p>
+<br>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Poor Sebastian!&quot; said I, as I opened to-day's letter-bag, &quot;before I get
+it open, I know already beforehand, that, after such a night, thou must
+have shut thyself up all day, to turn thy pale, exhausted face toward
+the garden of sorrow, that thou to-day lovest these poison-drops better
+than the vulnerary balsam, and that thou lookest into the glass to weep
+for this still, innocent form which it shows thee with its gashes, as
+if it were the form of a stranger.&mdash;Oh, when man has nothing more to
+love, he embraces the gravestone of his love, and sorrow becomes his
+loved one! Forgive one another the short delusion of mourning; for,
+among all the weaknesses of man, this is the most innocent, when,
+instead of soaring away like the bird of passage above winter, and
+flying to warmer zones, he sinks before it, and helplessly stiffens in
+his cold grief.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Victor coffined himself, so to speak, that day in his chamber, which he
+opened to no one but a next-door neighbor of sorrows,&mdash;Marie,&mdash;whose
+form affected him as softly as an evening sun. Every other female face
+on the street gave him stings; and the brother of the lost Clotilda,
+whom he saw at the window, and to-day would gladly have embraced, lent
+to the remembrance which tears had dimmed, new colors.... Reader!&mdash;my
+female reader will be, of herself, more reasonable,&mdash;laugh not at my
+good hero, who <i>is</i> none precisely where the strength of the soul
+becomes the strength of sorrow: at least, let me not hear it. Whoever
+has the sympathetic nerve of life&mdash;love&mdash;tied up or cut asunder, can
+well, if for no other reason, sigh and say, &quot;Anything on earth can man
+lose more patiently than fellow-men.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">And yet at evening an accident&mdash;namely, a letter&mdash;made all his
+sorrows pass once more through his weary heart. A short letter from
+Emanuel&mdash;not, however, an answer to the one just sent to him&mdash;arrived.</p>
+<br>
+
+<p class="continue">&quot;My ever-loved one!</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;I have learned the day of thy entrance upon a new scene of tumultuous
+life, and I have said, 'May my beloved still continue happy! may the
+tranquillity of virtue wall in his heart as with a breast against the
+frosts and storms of his new life! may neither his sorrows nor his
+raptures be loud! may he mourn softly and silently as a princess in
+soft white! may he enjoy softly and silently, and in the temple of his
+heart may Pleasure play only as a noiseless fluttering butterfly in a
+church! and may Virtue float before him in the higher heaven above our
+sun, and warm and irradiate and gradually attract to herself his
+heart!'</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;In thy affectionate anxiety for my parting life, thou wilt not have me
+write often: so little, dear one, dost thou believe my hope! Oh, the
+weights of my machine, as they run down, fall slowly and softly upon
+the grave; this earthly life arrays itself to my soul in ever fairer
+colors, and adorns itself for the farewell; this mock-summer around me,
+which stands beside the August summer like a mock-sun,&mdash;this and the
+coming spring take me beguilingly out of the arms of Nature.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;So does the All-Gracious overhang with foliage, overspread with
+flowers, the churchyard-wall of life, as we cover the wall of an
+English garden with ivy and evergreen, and gives the end of the garden
+the appearance of a new thicket.&mdash;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;So ascends the spirit even here in this <i>dark</i> life, as the barometer
+ascends even during thick weather, and feels the influence of the
+<i>brighter</i> life even under the clouds.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;But I obey thy love, and will write to thee no more, except once in
+winter, when I describe to thee the great night wherein I told my blind
+Julius, for the first time, that there is an Eternal One.&mdash;In that
+night, my beloved, rapture and devotion bore me too high, and came near
+to rending my thin life. I bled a long time. In winter, when the charms
+of heaven take the place of those of earth,<a name="div2Ref_225" href="#div2_225"><sup>[225]</sup></a> forbid me not to paint
+the summer picture.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;O my son!&mdash;I was compelled, indeed; to write to thee, because my
+friend Clotilda complains that the new year will draw her out of the
+green bower of solitude to the crowded market-place of the court; her
+soul is dark with sorrow, and stretches out its arms after the tranquil
+life which is being taken away from her. I know not what a court is;
+thou wilt know, and, I conjure thee, release my friend, and turn aside
+the hand that would draw her from St. Luna. If thou canst not do it,
+still forsake not at court the beloved soul; be her only, her most
+ardent friend; draw the bee-stings of earthly hours from her gentle
+heart. When cold words, like snow-flakes, fall upon this flower, then
+let the breath of love melt them to tears that shall flow before thy
+sight; when a tempest shall come up, over her life, then show her the
+angel who stands in the sun, and draws over our tempests the rainbow of
+hope. O thou whom <i>I</i> so love, my sister also will so love thee; and
+when my friend discovers to her his gentle heart, his tender eye, his
+virtue, his soul, the home of Nature and of the Eternal, then will he
+see my sister grow happy before him, and the exalted countenance which
+melts into tears and smiles and love before him will remain forever in
+his heart.</p>
+
+<p class="right">&quot;<span class="sc">Emanuel</span>.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="center" style="letter-spacing:30px">* * *</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Lo! in this glowing moment the exalted form which he had seen yesterday
+appeared again before his heart, with the sadly smiling lips and the
+eyes full of tears; and as the form continued floating before him, and
+gleamed and smiled, his soul rose up before her as before one dead, and
+during the uplifting of himself all his wounds began to bleed again,
+and he cried, &quot;Now, then, never do thou vanish from my heart, thou
+sublime shape, but rest forever on its wounds!&quot; Disconsolateness,
+exhaustion, and sleep overwhelmed his spirit, as well as his latest
+thought,&mdash;to go back shortly to St. Luna, and persuade her parents not
+to force her to court...</p>
+
+<p class="normal">The long sleep of death closes our <i>scars</i>, and the short sleep of life
+our <i>wounds</i>. Sleep is the half of time which heals us. On awaking,
+Victor, whose fever of love had yesterday been so aggravated by
+sleeplessness, saw today that his sorrow had been unmoderated
+because his hope had been immoderate. At first he had wished,&mdash;then
+observed,&mdash;then assumed,&mdash;then seen,&mdash;then interpreted,&mdash;then
+hoped,&mdash;then sworn to it. Every little circumstance, even his share in
+Clotilda's nomination as maid-of-honor, had poured mild oil of love
+into his flame. &quot;Oh, fool that I am!&quot; said he, with the three
+swearing-fingers placed upon his forehead; and, like all energetic men,
+he was so much the more spirited in proportion as he had been
+spiritless. Nay, he felt himself all at once too light; for a too
+sudden cure betokens, in the case of souls also, a relapse. A new
+consolation was his yesterday's resolve, that he would render Clotilda
+a service,&mdash;namely, save her from the court-service. He still reflected
+upon his determination to see her again.&mdash;Feelest thou, haply, Victor,
+that everything which Love does, in order to die, is only an expedient
+for rising again from the dead, and that its epilogues are only
+prologues to the Second Act?</p>
+
+<p class="normal">But a basket of apples in the market confirmed him again in his
+resolution. That is to say, Flamin came in. He began immediately with
+questions about the disappearance on Sunday, and with reports of the
+general uneasiness about the dear runaway. Victor, heated again
+by the whole recollection, and almost a little enraged against the
+image-breaker and government-attorney of a vain love, gave him the true
+answer:&mdash;&quot;Thou tookest away from me in part my pleasure; and why should
+I, at so late an hour, come upon the stage?&quot; The more vividly Flamin
+painted the affectionate concern of the Parson's wife and Clotilda
+about his disappearing, so much the more painful grew the maze of
+contending feelings within him. But for his conscience calling him
+back, it would now have been easier for him to confess the love that
+was hopeless, than formerly the love that was hopeful.&mdash;Accidentally
+Flamin wondered at the ripeness of the apples down below in the market,
+and desired some. A lightning beam now darted before Victor's eye at
+the inherited fruit-pieces on Flamin's shoulders, which always appeared
+in the after-summer at the time of the apples' ripening, but which, in
+the previous whirl of his feelings, he had forgotten. Heaven knows
+whether it has not escaped the reader himself, that Flamin bears this
+winter-fruitage (his maternal mole) on his back, which may become a
+Sodom-apple and Eve's-apple for him. Might not Matthieu, who until now
+could not examine upon Flamin this seal of his princely relationship,
+suddenly become convinced of all that which, with his thievish glances
+at his Lordship's letter, he had only been able to guess? And might he
+not afterward go to the Prince, and there mix for all our friends the
+most poisonous broths?&mdash;As, however, the magic image generally faded in
+one week, Victor needed for only so long a time to keep its wearer out
+of sight; he therefore laid before his friend, thus tattooed by Nature,
+the request to take for once a social walk to St. Luna, as they had day
+before yesterday missed each other.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;I can't do it,&quot; said Flamin, who had the lesser delicacy not to avail
+himself of the request for company on account of the reproaches in Le
+Baut's garden, and forgot in that the greater delicacy of not imputing
+such a reference to his Victor.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">The latter, in a passionate hurry to avert two such evils (Clotilda's
+court-office and Matthieu's inspection), seized upon the singular
+expedient of proposing to the page to share the journey with him.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;With pleasure!&quot; said the Evangelist; &quot;<i>this</i> week I have to do
+cabinet-service, but I can <i>next</i> week.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">And it was precisely this week that Victor wanted it to be done.&mdash;So
+many sudden miscarriages confounded him to such a degree, that he,
+whose careless and innocent heart was always an open letter with flying
+seal, dissembled now towards his dear, good friend Flamin.&mdash;He wanted
+at least to investigate the maternal mole and its distinctness for
+himself, He therefore went to him, and found him bent over his writing,
+and with a glowing work-face. He conjured him to consider that
+recreation and holidays were indispensable to him, and urged it upon
+him that he should work, like a compositor, standing. Then he came
+gradually upon the subject of Flamin's full-blooded chest, and upon the
+question whether it could bear his exertions without stingings and
+oppressions. Then he arrived at the point, and proposed that Flamin
+should, at all events, have a Burgundy-pitch plaster applied as
+lung-conductor to his shoulder-blades; yes, he would himself do it for
+him now, and show him how all was to be prepared. He hoped, besides, to
+draw thereby a curtain around the apple-piece. But he dissembled so
+wretchedly,&mdash;for he always succeeded in his innocent intrigues with
+maidens, and comic disguises for satirical purposes, while his
+serious ones always miscarried,&mdash;that even Flamin heard him out, and
+dryly replied, he had already had on such a plaster for two days,
+and&mdash;Matthieu had advised, and himself applied it.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">There was a fix.&mdash;Sebastian had nothing further left him than, with a
+singular <i>sangfroid</i>, which, on the St. Luna road, was mixed only with
+a few stings from the old thorny latelings of his withered Paradise, to
+go unaccompanied to the Chamberlain Le Baut, to say what was to be
+said, hardly to peep into the Parsonage, and quietly to trudge off
+again without a single&mdash;hope.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Dear Fortune! better beheaded than scalped,&mdash;better <i>one</i> disaster than
+ten miscarriages; I mean, break man upon thy wheel rather from above
+than from below upward!&mdash;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Victor, to be sure, knew as yet not a word of the turn he should give
+to the subject, in order to put two such court-emigrants as the Le
+Bauts, who knew nothing holier than the <i>Latreia</i> towards a prince, the
+<i>Douleia</i> towards his minister, and the <i>Hyperdouleia</i> towards his
+w&mdash;, out of humor with Clotilda's promotion; but he thought, &quot;I will do
+what I can.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Clotilda's parents received him with so much civility,&mdash;i. e. with so
+much courtesy of the body, with so much powdered sugar on every
+feature, with so much sirup of violets on every word,&mdash;in short, he
+found the report which Matthieu had rendered to Flamin of their amiable
+disposition towards him so well grounded,&mdash;that he could have selected
+no better opportunity than this to dissuade them from the transplanting
+of their daughter, had they not begun to thank him for having been
+himself the very transplanter. They had learned or guessed all, and
+thanked him for his intercession, to which they probably attached more
+self-interested views than the daughter did. It would have been
+ridiculous, in Clotilda's presence, to advise <i>her</i> against
+Flachsenfingen, and dissuade from that for which they thanked him;
+still, however, he attempted something. He told the Chamberlain &quot;his
+daughter deserved rather to <i>have</i> a court than to adorn one; nay, that
+<i>he</i> deserved at most in the whole matter&mdash;an excuse, as Clotilda would
+certainly prefer the society of her parents to the constraint of court;
+in that case, he would promise to put the index back again with the
+Prince, and rectify everything without disadvantage.&quot; The father took
+this expression for a strong deprecation of gratitude; the step-mother,
+for some piece of knavery or other; the daughter, for&mdash;words. She said,
+a little curtly, &quot;I think it was easy to choose between disobedience
+and absence.&quot; For, unbending as she was to her step-mother, she
+willingly followed the hints of her father, whom, with all his
+weaknesses, and as the only soul on the earth attached to him, she
+tenderly loved. Victor, at last, though reluctantly, was forced to give
+it up; but why does man find it harder to resign himself to the future
+than to the past?&mdash;The coldness of the daughter was naturally not less
+(but sincerer) than the warmth of the parents.... And this coldness was
+precisely what refreshed his glowing brain. This cold, indifferent form
+was wrapped as a veil about the sublime and loving one, as it ever
+floated before him with that melancholy look which he could not endure.
+Without the consciousness of anything wrong, satisfied with his
+obedience to Emanuel's request, he withdrew, with his feelings
+oppressed by decorum, returning coldness with greater coldness.&mdash;He
+would have been a poor lover, if he had known what he wanted; for
+otherwise he never could have desired of Clotilda, even in case of her
+love for him, any extraordinary warmth towards a medicus whom her
+parents forced upon her (which injures a man even more than ugliness),
+who so impolitely took himself out of the garden without a birthday
+<i>carmen</i>, and who pressed her into the seven gilded towers of
+court-service, despite her reluctance, despite every probability of her
+future <i>prison-fever</i>.&mdash;But for the <i>vacant freehold</i> of his heart
+this
+very vexation was wholesome....</p>
+
+<p class="normal">If my good reader ever has to take an eternal farewell of a too dear
+friend, let him take it <i>twice</i>.&mdash;The <i>first</i> we all understand, as a
+matter of course, when he sinks in the intoxication of sorrow, in the
+hemorrhage of heart and eyes, and when the beloved object burns itself
+with flames into the tender soul; but <i>then</i> he will never be able to
+forget the being thus torn from his heart. Therefore he must take a
+<i>second</i> farewell, which is colder even for the reason that passionate
+emotions admit no <i>dal segno</i><a name="div2Ref_226" href="#div2_226"><sup>[226]</sup></a> of repetition; nay, (if he will take
+the wisest course of all,) he must endeavor, after the first tragic
+leave-taking, to see her in a public place (e. g. at a coronation),
+where she must appear cold. Her frosty face will then snow over her
+glowing one in his brain; and my good reader has, undoubtedly,
+collected together again wits enough to know what he reads in the
+Dog-Post-Days....</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&mdash;Upon my word, if Jean Paul does not write industriously, then no one
+does; it has already struck one, and he took it for a quarter to
+twelve; my sister will already be folding her hands before the
+tucked-up smoking pike, which, like the serpent of eternity, has his
+tail in his mouth, and saying, incessantly, &quot;It is all growing
+cold!&quot;&mdash;&quot;It must be so, after such glowing chapters,&quot; say I, &quot;if thou
+meanest the reader and the author.&quot;&mdash;Already, while I still sit over
+the twentieth chapter, the post-dog is frisking round in the chamber
+with the twenty-first; and yet I will starve myself, unless I can still
+utter before dinner, like the seven wise men, seven golden sayings:&mdash;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">1. When one who is stung by a bee or by fate does not keep still, the
+sting tears out, and is left behind.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">2. Miserable earth, which three or four great or bold men can reform
+and agitate! Thou art a true stage: in the foreground are some fighting
+players and a few canvas-tents; the background swims with painted tents
+and soldiers!</p>
+
+<p class="normal">3. States and diamonds are in these days, when they have stains, cut up
+into little ones; and as</p>
+
+<p class="normal">4. Men in great states and bees in great hives suffer a loss of courage
+and warmth; accordingly now-a-days they join to small countries other
+small countries, as they do to beehives colony-hives.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">5. Man takes <i>his</i> suffering for that of <i>humanity</i>, as the bees take
+the dropping of their bee-stand, when the sun already shines out again,
+for rain, and stay in-doors.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">6. But he commits daily a <i>lesser</i> error: he regards as an <i>eternity</i>
+(that Aristotelian Unity of Time to the drama&mdash;of Existence) at first
+his present <i>hour</i>,&mdash;then his <i>youth</i>,&mdash;then his <i>life</i>,&mdash;then
+his
+<i>century</i>,&mdash;then the duration of the <i>globe</i>,&mdash;then that of the
+<i>sun</i>,&mdash;then that of the <i>heavens</i>,&mdash;then (this is the least error)
+<i>time</i> itself....</p>
+
+<p class="normal">7. There are in man, in the beginning and at the end, as in books, two
+blank bookbinder's leaves,&mdash;childhood and old age; and so, too, in the
+Dog-Post-Days: see the end of this day and the beginning of the next.</p>
+<br>
+
+<h3>FIFTH INTERCALARY DAY.</h3>
+
+<p class="center"><i>Continuation of the Register of Extra-Sheets</i>.</p>
+
+<h3>K.</h3>
+
+<p class="normal"><span class="sc">Cold</span>.<a name="div2Ref_227" href="#div2_227"><sup>[227]</sup></a>&mdash;In our age decrease of <i>stoicism</i> and increase of <i>egotism</i>
+are found side by side. The former covers its treasures and germs with
+ice; the latter is itself ice. So, in physics, <i>mountains</i> wear away,
+and <i>glaciers</i> increase.</p>
+
+<h3>L.</h3>
+
+<p class="normal"><span class="sc">Library (Circulating) for Reviewers and Young Ladies</span>.&mdash;I still always
+adhere to my purpose of having it inserted in the Intelligence-leaf of
+the Literary Gazette, that I shall not destroy the purchase-money which
+I raise upon my <i>evening star</i> [Hesperus], nor, like Musæus, fritter it
+away in the purchase of summer-houses, but shall lay out the whole
+capital upon a complete collection of all German <i>prefaces</i> and
+<i>titles</i> that appear from fair to fair. I can carry out the plan, if I
+give out a preface a week, on the payment of a penny, to reviewers, who
+do not care to read the book itself when they review it.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">That not even the surplus of the aforesaid mintage may lie as dead
+capital in my house, I shall employ it&mdash;if I do not change my mind&mdash;in
+getting the bookbinder to publish the <i>heavier</i> German masterpieces,&mdash;e. g.
+Frederick Jacobi's, Klinger's, Goethe's Tasso,&mdash;likewise the better
+satirical and philosophical ones, in a <i>lighter</i> ladies' edition, which
+shall consist wholly of so-called <i>puzzle-volumes</i>, which have no book
+slid into them. I shall thereby, methinks, be playing something pithy
+into the hands of my fair readers, which shall be as well bound and
+as well titled as the booksellers' edition, and in which&mdash;because the
+hard stone-fruit is already <i>shelled out</i>, and there is nothing
+inside&mdash;they can lay not only just as much of silk threads and silk
+snippings as in the printed edition, but six ounces more. <i>Allwill's</i>
+correspondence&mdash;a heavy, two-yolked ostrich's egg of the author's,
+which I have had <i>blown out</i> by the bookbinder in this manner, because
+most of the fair readers are too <i>cold</i> to hatch it&mdash;is now quite <i>light</i>.
+But of the German romances I shall never prepare such a work-box edition
+of empty state-carriages of the God of the Sun and the Muses, because I
+fear the trade would cry out about <i>piracy</i>.&mdash;A happy man were I, if
+the joint subscribers to my circulating-capsule-library had only been
+shown round as much as twice in some Italian and Portuguese bookeries:<a name="div2Ref_228" href="#div2_228"><sup>[228]</sup></a>
+they would there, where often only the titles of works&mdash;and of the
+stupidest, into the bargain&mdash;are daubed on the wall, be astonished to see
+what a miserable figure such useless libraries, beside my bookery of
+regular puzzle-books, which I select from so many departments and with
+some originality, cannot do otherwise than cut.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&mdash;Thus, of course, German capsule-readers among the ladies will never
+be overtaken by you Portuguese women! Much rather will the former
+follow in the footsteps even of the men, advocates and business people,
+who subscribe to similar capsule-journalistics, and jointly read and
+circulate the covers of the best German journals,&mdash;which latter are
+often annexed as <i>curiosa</i> even to the capsules, and fill them out....
+Such is my plan and sketch; but even sheep would presume I were merely
+playing off a joke here, unless I really carried it through.</p>
+
+<h3>M.</h3>
+
+<p class="normal"><span class="sc">Maidens</span>.&mdash;Young maidens are like young turkey-hens, that thrive poorly,
+if one touches them often; and mothers keep these soft creatures, made
+of floating pollen, like <i>pastel-pictures</i>, under window-glass&mdash;because
+everything is afraid of us princess-stealers and fruit-thieves&mdash;until
+they are fixed. Meanwhile the proper crown-guard around a female heart
+is neither solitude,&mdash;which leads only to an untried innocence,<a name="div2Ref_229" href="#div2_229"><sup>[229]</sup></a>
+that falls, to be sure, not before the debauchee, but yet before the
+hypocrite,&mdash;nor society, nor hard labor,&mdash;otherwise no country girl
+would ever fall,&mdash;nor good teachings,&mdash;for these are to be had in every
+mouth and in every circulating library; but these four first and last
+things do it all at once, and they are at once superseded, united, and
+replaced by a wise and virtuous mother.</p>
+
+<h3>N.</h3>
+
+<p class="normal"><span class="sc">Names of the Great</span>.<a name="div2Ref_230" href="#div2_230"><sup>[230]</sup></a>&mdash;When I see, as I do, how they scatter their
+productions for the Fair, occasional writings and fugitive pieces
+(children born out of wedlock) as anonymously as if they were reviews,
+then I say: &quot;Herein I recognize genuine modesty; for natural children
+are precisely their best and their own, and can, besides, be
+acknowledged by the Prince <i>as</i> genuine; whereas their supernatural [or
+extra-natural] ones born in wedlock have to do without the
+certification; and yet they will not let the world know the name of the
+benefactor, but quite as often (nay, oftener) get people <i>into it</i> as
+<i>out of it</i> secretly. What the child in other cases first learns to
+pronounce, such parents speak to him last,&mdash;their name. Methinks they
+follow herein Goethe's fine ear; for they hide themselves, while they
+fill the orchestra of the world with children's voices and with
+<i>vingt-quatre</i>,<a name="div2Ref_231" href="#div2_231"><sup>[231]</sup></a> and with alarm-works and repeating-works, (what a
+juxtaposition of unlike things!) just as Goethe demands of the playing
+musical artist that he shall work for the ears, but hide himself for
+the sake of sparing the eyes. Quite as beautifully do they do the thing
+when they finally adopt as children, and show to the world, their
+children by the thirtieth marriage (often after the five or twenty
+years' limitation), and thus imitate the greenfinches, which, it is
+said, make their nest and its inmates invisible by means of the
+so-called greenfinch-stone, till the latter are fledged.&quot;</p>
+<br>
+<h3>O.</h3>
+
+<p class="normal"><span class="sc">Ostracism</span>.&mdash;It was among the Greeks, as is well known, no punishment.
+Only people of great merits achieved it; and so soon as this banishment
+from the country was lavished upon bad men, it went entirely into
+disuse. An imperial citizen must lament that we, who have a similar
+public educational institution,&mdash;namely, banishment,&mdash;squander it often
+upon the very wretchedest rascals, and therefore&mdash;with the design of
+making one circle or country the spit-box and secreting-vessel of
+another&mdash;drive out of the country scoundrels who are hardly fit to stay
+in it. Thereby is this clearing of the country deprived for the most
+part of the honorable and distinguishing feature which it might have
+for the man of merit, and an honest man&mdash;e. g. a Bahrdt<a name="div2Ref_232" href="#div2_232"><sup>[232]</sup></a>&mdash;is almost
+ashamed to be invested with such an honor. There should, therefore, be
+an imperial police-regulation that only ministers, professors, and
+officers of decided worth, like important documents, should be
+dismissed and banished. To similar men I would also limit hanging. With
+the Romans, in truth, only great heads and lights were interred on the
+<i>way</i><a name="div2Ref_233" href="#div2_233"><sup>[233]</sup></a> at the expense of a whole state; but what shall I think of
+the Germans, with whom seldom serviceable subjects, but mostly finished
+rogues, are buried at public expense, which they call hangman's fees,
+having been previously hanged on the gallows by the roadside?&mdash;Not even
+in his lifetime can a man, unless he has extraordinary, and often
+<i>eccentric</i> merits,&mdash;although eccentric men fall back into the truth,
+as <i>comets</i> do into the <i>sun</i>, as fuel,&mdash;make his calculations upon
+being, in some manner, as the ancients duplicated their noble men in
+statues and pictures, hung up in <i>effigy</i> in a thick stone frame....
+Let me have an answer; I allow myself to be talked with.</p>
+
+<h3>P.</h3>
+
+<p class="normal"><span class="sc">Philosophy</span>.&mdash;Some critical philosophers have now borrowed from the
+algebra a mathematical method, without which one cannot for a single
+minute&mdash;not so much think as&mdash;write philosophically. The algebraist, by
+the transposition of mere <i>letters</i>, catches truths which no chain of
+reasoning could ever draw out of the deep. In this the critical
+philosopher has imitated him, but with greater advantage. As he
+cleverly mixes together, not letters, but whole <i>technical words</i>,
+there rises from the alliteration of the same a cream of truths which
+he could hardly have dreamed of. Such philosophers are forbidden, and
+rightly, like the preachers of Gotha (Goth. Public Ordinances, P. III.
+p. 16), to use allegories, or any flower of speech, which, as other
+flowers do for the drawing-hounds, would spoil the scent.&mdash;Properly,
+however, the picturesque style is more definite than the technical
+word-style, which finally, as all <i>abstract words are pictures</i>, is
+also itself a picturesque style, only one full of pictures that have
+run out and faded. Jacobi is not obscure in consequence of his
+<i>images</i>, but in consequence of the new <i>ideas</i> which through them he
+would communicate to us.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">I have lately been looking over the birth-lists of the learned and
+teaching republic, and counting up the young little Kants whom the old
+Kant&mdash;otherwise unmarried, like his cousin Newton&mdash;has for the last ten
+Fairs begotten. Demetrius Magnus, who wanted to make a book of authors
+of the same name, must have been very stupid, if he had undertaken to
+write in our times, and yet at the same time, though he nevertheless
+communicated that there had been sixteen Platos, twenty Socrateses,
+twenty-eight Pythagorases, thirty-two Aristotles, had very sinfully
+omitted to say that there are now as many philosophers and
+philosophists as those make when reckoned all together&mdash;namely,
+ninety-six&mdash;who could bear the name of Kant,&mdash;that is, if they chose
+to. Such mechanics&mdash;thus may I call the magisters, because formerly the
+mechanics, inversely, were called magisters, and the upper master
+arch-magister&mdash;one should take into account as the best propaganda
+which bulky books can have. They are, at best, competent to diffuse the
+system, because they know how to separate from it the incomprehensible,
+the spiritual, and to extract what is popular and palpable, i. e. the
+words for readers, who, otherwise simple, nevertheless would not die
+without a critical philosophy. The most miserable theological and
+æsthetic stone receives now a Kantian setting in words. Although every
+new system introduces a certain <i>one-sidedness</i> of view into all
+heads,&mdash;especially as every cold philosopher has so much the more
+<i>one-sidedness</i>, precisely as he has the more <i>insight</i>,&mdash;still that
+is
+no matter; for great bars of truth come forth through the joint digging
+of the whole thinking-works.<a name="div2Ref_234" href="#div2_234"><sup>[234]</sup></a> Whoever has seen Kant standing on his
+mountain among his learned fellow-laborers, is reminded with pleasure
+of a similar incident in Peru, which Buffon communicates. When
+Condamine and Bouger were measuring there the equatorial degrees of the
+earth (as Kant did of the intellectual world), whole troops of apes
+appeared as coadjutors, put on spectacles, looked at the stars and down
+at the clocks, and reduced one thing and another to writing, although
+without salary, which is their only distinction from the vicariate
+Kants.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Every man of genius is a philosopher, but not the reverse. A
+philosopher without fancy, without history, and without a <i>general
+knowledge</i> of the most important things, is more one-sided than a
+politician. Whoever has adopted, rather than discovered, a system;
+whoever has not had beforehand dark presentiments thereof; whoever has
+not at least pined for it beforehand; in short, whoever does not bring
+with him a soul like a full, warm, ground filled with germs, which
+waits only for its summer,&mdash;such a one may indeed be a teacher, but not
+a scholar of the philosophy which he degrades to a mercenary
+profession; and, briefly, it is all one what place one climbs as his
+philosophical observatory,&mdash;a throne, or a Pegasus, or an Alp, or a
+Cæsar's-couch, or a bier,&mdash;and they are almost all higher than the desk
+in a lecture-room and hall of disputation.</p>
+
+<h3>Q (<i>see</i> K).</h3>
+
+<h3>R.</h3>
+
+<p class="normal"><span class="sc">Reviewers</span>.&mdash;An editor of a review should have six tables. At the first
+should sit and eat the advertisers of the <i>existence</i> of a book; at the
+second, the wholesale appraisers of its <i>value</i>; at the third, the
+epitomists of it; at the fourth, the grammarians and philologists, who
+distribute to the public <i>catalogues raisonnés</i> of other men's
+grammatical blunders; at the fifth, the fighters, who refute a new
+book, not by a new book, but by a sheet; at the sixth should stand the
+critical, princely bench, on which might sit Herder, Goethe, Wieland,
+and perhaps yet another, who survey a book as a human life, who
+apprehend its <i>individuality</i>, indicate at once the spirit of the
+literary creation and creator, and separate that incarnation and
+embodiment of the divine beauty which takes the form of an individual
+<i>from</i> the beauty, and then disclose and pardon it.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">These six critical benches, which might edit six different literary
+periodicals, are now thrown over each other, and form <i>one</i>.&mdash;Frankly,
+however, as I come out against this jumbling together of learned (1)
+advertisements, (2) reviews, (3) extracts, (4) verbal and (5) real
+criticisms, and (6) artistic judgments, still I am ready and glad to
+admit that the critical <i>Fauna</i> and <i>Flora</i> of the first <i>five</i>
+tables
+root out, perhaps, full as many shoots of weeds as they put forth
+themselves from their own germs; and I therefore appeal to a private
+letter of my own, which is beyond the suspicion of flattery, and
+wherein I associate it with a toadstool, which, although it produces,
+itself, upon an affusion (in this case, of ink), whole hosts of
+insects, nevertheless eradicates the flies.&mdash;But as among the reviewers
+there are also authors, like myself; as among the Portuguese
+inquisitors there are Jews; and, in fact, as I should want to talk
+whole intercalary years on the subject,&mdash;why talk a whole intercalary
+day?</p>
+
+<h3>S.</h3>
+
+<p class="normal"><span class="sc">Stripes</span>.&mdash;&quot;He that knoweth his Lord's will, and doeth it not, shall
+receive double stripes.&quot;&mdash;Who, then, gets the single ones? Not he,
+surely, who knows not the will and does it not?&mdash;It follows, therefore,
+that greater knowledge, not <i>aggravates</i>, but itself <i>creates</i>, moral
+guilt; for in so far as I absolutely do not discern a moral obligation,
+my offence against it is surely not less, but none at all.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">I will be my own Academy of Sciences, and assign to myself the
+following prize-question, which I will myself answer in a prize essay:
+&quot;Since only such actions are virtuous as proceed from love for
+goodness, it follows that only those can be sinful which proceed from
+mere love of evil, and reference to self-interest must lessen the
+degree of a sin, as well as that of a virtue. But, on the other hand,
+what could there be but self-interest in our nature, which should impel
+us to what is bad? And if evil were done from a pure propensity to
+evil, then there would be a second, although opposite, autonomy<a name="div2Ref_235" href="#div2_235"><sup>[235]</sup></a> of
+the will.&quot;</p>
+
+<h3>T.</h3>
+
+<p class="normal"><span class="sc">Trouble, Tribulation</span>.&mdash;Now, as I write these distressful sounds, which
+announce to me that Nature makes only <i>thorn-hedges</i>, but men <i>crowns
+of thorns</i>, all pleasure in lashing about me with the thorns of satire
+dies away, and I would rather draw some thorns out of your hands or
+feet.</p>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<p class="center"><img border="0" src="images/shieldstart.png" alt="shieldstart"></p>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+
+<h2><a name="div1Ref_21" href="#div1_21">21. DOG-POST-DAY.</a></h2>
+<br>
+
+<p class="center"><span class="sc2">Victor's Professional Visits.&mdash;Concerning Houses full of
+Daughters.&mdash;The Two Fools.&mdash;The Carrousel.</span></p>
+<br>
+
+<p class="normal">The following remark comes not from the dog's knapsack, but from my own
+head: One needs not to be a panegyrist of our times, to see with
+pleasure that authors, princes, women, and others have now mostly laid
+aside the unnatural <i>false</i> masks of virtue (e. g. bigotry, pietism,
+ceremonial behavior), and have entirely assumed instead the <i>genuine</i>
+tasteful <i>show</i> of virtue. This improvement of our character-masks,
+whereby we hit more finely the exterior of virtue, is contemporaneous
+with a similar one on the stage, where they play their antics and their
+tragics no longer, as once, with <i>paper</i> clothes and badly imitated
+laces, but with the <i>true</i> ones.&mdash;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;The Princess wanted you yesterday,&quot; said the Prince to the
+Court-Physician, almost as soon as he had entered with his exhausted
+face. The inflammation of Agnola's eyes had, in consequence of the
+autumn weather, night-feasts, and Culpepper's bold practice and her
+own&mdash;for the red capital letters of beauty (namely, painted cheeks) she
+was always putting on afresh&mdash;very much increased. Properly, Victor was
+too proud to let himself be sent for as a mere physician; nay, he was
+too proud to let himself be in demand for anything else (and though it
+were philosophy or beauty) than his character; for his father, who had
+just as much delicate pride, had taught him that we must not serve any
+one who does not respect us, or whom we ourselves do not respect,&mdash;nay,
+that one must not accept a favor from any one to whom one can only
+return outward, but not inward thanks. But this tender sense of honor,
+which never came into an unequal conflict with his self-interest,
+though it might well with his humanity, could never bind the hands
+wherewith he might relieve an unhappy Princess&mdash;unhappy, like himself,
+from a famine of love&mdash;at least of the pains of her eyes; perhaps,
+also, of <i>younger</i> pangs; for his good-heartedness suggested to him
+nothing but reconciliations,&mdash;of the Prince with Le Baut, with the
+Princess, with the Minister. Nothing is more dangerous than to
+reconcile two persons,&mdash;unless, indeed, one is himself one of them; to
+set them at variance is much safer and easier.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">He found Agnola, even in the afternoon, still in her chamber, because
+its green tapestries flattered (not the face, to be sure, but) the hot
+eye. A thick veil over the face was her screen from daylight. When she,
+like a sun, lifted her veil, he could not comprehend how in Tostato's
+shop he could make, out of this Italian fire and these quick
+court-eyes, the face, red with weeping, of a blonde. A part of this
+fire belonged, to be sure, to her sickness. Her first word was a
+decided disobedience to his first; meanwhile she flew in the face of
+the Messrs. <i>Pringle</i> and <i>Schmucker</i>, as well as himself; for the
+whole triune College advised leeches round the eyes; but those were
+disgusting to her. The medicus then suggested cupping-glasses at the
+back of the head; but her hair was more precious to her than her eyes.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Must, then, everything be bought with blood?&quot; said she, with Italian
+vivacity.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Realms and religions ought not to be, but health should,&quot; said he,
+with English freedom of speech.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Once more he demanded her blood. She would not give it to him, however,
+until he changed the sacrificial knife, and proposed opening a vein in
+the eye. Persons of rank, like learned men, are often ignorant of the
+commonest things: she thought the Doctor would open the vein. And as
+she thought so, he did it, with a hand trained by the couching-needle.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Meanwhile, if (according to Pliny) a kiss on the eye is one on the
+soul, the opening of a vein in that organ is no joke; but one may,
+while he inflicts a wound, himself get one. The poor Court-Medicus
+must, with his swimming, friendly eye, from which only within a few
+days the tear of love has been dried away, boldly gaze into the sun
+pent up in an eye-socket, and, what is more, softly rest his finger on
+the warm face, and from the fountain of tears make bright blood spurt
+out.... One ought, before undertaking such an operation, to have a
+similar one performed on himself, for the sake of the cooling. But, in
+truth, fate had given him nothing this week but lancet-cuts into his
+heart's arteries. Let one, further, represent to himself how the whole
+female sex appeared to him like a magic, far-receded shape, which had
+once gleamed near to him in a dream, and as a paled moon by day, which
+he had worshipped in a bright night; and then will one have opened his
+good innocent heart to behold therein, beside a great ever-active
+sorrow, a thousand sympathetic wishes for the compassionated Princess.
+Despite her singular mixture of pride, liveliness, and refinement, he
+still thought he discovered a change in her, which he could explain
+partly by his to-day's assiduity and partly by his influence on the
+Prince, which had been thus far so favorable to her,&mdash;a change which
+would have given him greater courage, had he not insisted upon being
+threatened with special drafts upon his courage by the billet above the
+imperator of the compass-watch. At the former and first visit his
+courage was lamed, because he thought himself avoided, as the son of a
+father who seemed to fortify his influence by his care for natural
+children; for a man full of love beside one full of hatred is dumb and
+stupid.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">What put him most in heart to-day, next to the quarrels in which he was
+defeated (as the one about leeches, &amp;c.), was the last and following,
+in which he conquered (one grows more courageous and prosperous when
+one contradicts a proud woman than when one flatters her): He saw a
+mask lying there; now, as he knew that in Italy ladies wore them in
+bed, as ours do gloves, using them as a sort of glove to the face, he
+straightly forbade her the mask, as being tinder to the inflammation of
+her eyes. It was no flattery when he said to her that the mask might
+take from her more than it gave. In short, he insisted upon it.&mdash;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">He was, perhaps, too tolerant towards the doubt which only a woman
+could make <i>endurable</i> and <i>enduring</i>,&mdash;the doubt which one she
+mistook
+for the other, the Court-Physician or the favorite; for at last&mdash;though
+not without a fear of saying too much, which, with people of his fiery
+temperament, is a sign that the thing has already happened&mdash;he told
+her, what he had in the beginning kept back, that the sympathy
+(<i>empressement</i>) of the Prince had sent him to her; and he extolled the
+latter at his own expense, and so much the more, as he had nothing
+further of an extraordinary nature to adduce with regard to him, but
+only that he had&mdash;sent him to her.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Then he went. With the Prince he bestowed on her as many
+<i>beatifications</i> and as many <i>canonizations</i> (two contrarieties on
+this
+earth) as decorum and his humor (two still greater contrarieties) would
+allow. Singular! she had, for all her fire, no humor. He knew January
+succumbed, not merely to the slanderer, but also to the flatterer. The
+crowned theatre-managers of the earth have determinations put into
+their hearts, and decrees into their mouths; they know what they mean
+and what they say two or three days later than their throne-prompter. A
+favorite is a Shakespeare and poet, who, from behind the persons he
+makes act and speak, never peeps or coughs out himself, but is a
+ventriloquist, and gives <i>his</i> voice the sound of another's.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">When he visited his patient the next day, the eye-sockets were cooled
+down, though not the eyes. Agnola sat convalescent in a cabinet full of
+images of the saints. With the indisposition of her eyes had been taken
+away, at the same time, a source of conversation; and her pride blocked
+up the way at once to his sensibility and to his humor. Although he
+said to her a hundred times in his innermost heart, &quot;Torment not
+thyself, proud soul; I am no favorite; I will not rob thee of anything,
+least of all of thy pride or another's love,&mdash;oh, I know what it is to
+win none,&quot;&mdash;nevertheless he remained (in <i>his</i> opinion) cold before
+her, and retired with the annoying prospect that his successful cure
+had cut off his return; for the other court visits were, after all, no
+confidential visits to the sick. Of the plaguy compass-watch he stood
+daily less and less in terror, except just when he was happier than
+usual.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&mdash;Many people would sooner live without houses than without
+building-schemes; Victor, sooner without air to breathe than without
+castles in the air. He must always have on hand the lottery-chance and
+stocks of some plan or other for the future; and a woman was, in most
+cases, the partner in this grand-adventure trade. This time he was
+keenly bent upon the reconciliation of January and Agnola. He reasoned
+thus:&mdash;&quot;It is easy on both sides. January will now always seek Agnola's
+society, though merely out of cunning, for the sake of getting with
+more decency into that of her future maid-of-honor, Clotilda, whom, in
+her condition of singleness, he can, according to his <i>vow</i>, still love
+with impunity. As he can neither withstand a long praise nor a long
+intercourse, this will imperceptibly accustom him to Agnola. She, who
+is now left alone on the side of the Minister Schleunes, will not
+reject the united regards of Victor and January,&quot; &amp;c.... But whether
+only the beauty of the action, and not also the beauty of the Princess,
+incited him to this mediatorial office, that is what the Twenty-First
+Chapter cannot yet know; meanwhile, so far as I am concerned, let the
+following stand: his cold inner man, exhausted by bleeding, from which
+the harpsichord and the name of Clotilda and the awaking at morning
+still draw bloodless daggers, needs so much indeed the din of the world
+and everything that may benumb its wounds!</p>
+
+<p class="normal">With the design of such preliminaries to a peace, he excused his future
+disobedience to his father, who had counselled him against frequenting
+the house of Schleunes; for as the Princess always went there, it was
+the fittest neutral place for the peace-congress. Oh for only half
+an&mdash;</p>
+<br>
+
+<h3>EXTRA-LEAF ON HOUSES FULL OF DAUGHTERS!</h3>
+
+<p class="normal">The house of Schleunes was an open bookstore, whose works (the
+daughters) one could read there, but not carry home. Although the five
+other daughters stood in five private libraries as wives, and one,
+under the earth at Maienthal, was sleeping away the child's plays of
+life, there were, nevertheless, in this warehouse of daughters, three
+free copies left for sale to good friends. The Minister, at the
+drawings of the lottery of offices, loved to give his daughters as
+premiums for great winnings and prizes. To whom God gives an office, to
+him he gives, if not understanding, yet a wife. In a house rich in
+daughters, as in St. Peter's Church, there must be confession-pews for
+all nations, for all characters, for all faults, that the daughters may
+sit therein as mother-confessors, and absolve from everything, celibacy
+alone excepted. I have, as naturalist, often admired the wise
+arrangement of Nature for the propagation as well of daughters as of
+vegetables. Is it not a wise provision, I said to the natural historian
+Goetze, that Nature gives precisely to those maidens who need for their
+life a rich mineral fountain something <i>attaching</i>, by which they may
+fasten on to miserable nuptial finches, who shall carry them to fat
+places? Thus Linnæus<a name="div2Ref_236" href="#div2_236"><sup>[236]</sup></a> observes, as you know, that those kinds of
+seeds which only thrive in rich earth have little hooks on them, in
+order to hang the more easily on the cattle which carry them to the
+stable and manure-heap. Wonderfully does Nature scatter about by the
+wind&mdash;father and mother must make it&mdash;daughters and pine-seeds into the
+arable places of the forests. Who does not observe the final cause why
+many daughters receive from Nature certain charms in designated
+numbers, that some canon or other, a German Herr, a cardinal-deacon, an
+appanaged prince, or a mere country squire, may come along and take the
+aforesaid charmer, and, as groomsman or English bride's-father, hand
+her over, ready finished, to some blockhead or other, in a distant
+place, as a ready-made wife on sale? And do we find in the case of
+bilberries any less precaution on the part of Nature? Does not the same
+Linnæus observe, in the same treatise, that they are enveloped in a
+nutritious juice, that they may attract the fox to eat them, whereupon
+the knave&mdash;he cannot digest the berries&mdash;becomes, for all he knows, the
+sower of them?&mdash;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Oh, my innermost spirit is more serious than you think. I am vexed with
+those parents who are traders in souls; I pity the daughters who are
+negro slaves. Ah! is it any wonder, then, if the daughters who were
+obliged to dance, laugh, talk, and sing at the West Indian market, in
+order to be carried home by the master of a plantation, if they, I say,
+are treated just as much like slaves as if they were sold and bought?
+Ye poor lambs!&mdash;and yet ye are quite as hard as your sheep mothers and
+fathers. What shall one do with his enthusiasm for your sex, when one
+travels through German cities, where every richest or most
+distinguished man, and though he were a distant relation of the Devil
+himself, can point with his finger to thirty houses, and say: &quot;I don't
+know,&mdash;shall I pick out and marry one from the pearl-colored, or from
+the nut-colored, or perhaps from the steel-green house? The shops are
+all open for purchasers.&quot;&mdash;What, ye maidens! is, then your heart so
+little worth that you can cut it down, like old clothes, to suit any
+fashion, any breast? and is it, then, like a Chinese ball, now great,
+now tiny, in order to fit into the ball-form and wedding-ring case of a
+man's heart?&mdash;&quot;It must indeed be so, unless one will continue to sit
+alone, like the Holy Virgin over yonder,&quot; is the reply of those to whom
+I make no reply, because I turn away from them with contempt, in order
+to say to the so-called Holy Virgin: &quot;Forlorn, but patient one!
+Unappreciated and withered one! remember not the times when thou still
+didst hope for better ones than the present, and never repent the noble
+pride of thy heart! It is not always a duty to marry, but it is always
+a duty not to forgive one's self anything, never to be happy at the
+expense of honor, and not to avoid celibacy by infamy. Unadmired,
+solitary heroine! In thy last hour, when the whole of life and the
+former goods and scaffoldings of life, crushed into ruins, sink
+beforehand,&mdash;at that hour thou wilt look out over thy emptied life;
+thou wilt see there, it is true, no children, no husband, no wet eyes;
+but in the vast, void twilight a great, saintly form; angelically
+smiling, radiant, godlike, and soaring to the divine ones, will hover,
+and beckon to thee to ascend with her. Oh, ascend with her; that form
+is thy <i>virtue</i>.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="center"><i>End of the Extra-Leaf</i>.</p>
+<br>
+
+<p class="normal">Some days after the Princess gave the Prince an <i>eye en médaillon</i> with
+the fine conceit: she gave this <i>votive-tablet</i> to the saint (this was
+so much the more <i>apropos</i> as the Prince was named <i>Januarius</i>) who
+had
+sent her his wonder-worker, and who now received that which he had
+caused to be healed. January said to Victor, to whom he showed the eye,
+&quot;She confounds St. Januarius with you, with St. Ottilia,&quot;&mdash;who, as is
+well known, is the patroness of eyes.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Victor was glad that Matthieu came to him to go with him to St. Luna;
+for the latter begged him, because this was done without him, to go
+with him to his mother's, &quot;because to-day at the Princess's there was a
+great <i>souper</i>, but at his mother's not a soul,&quot;&mdash;that is, hardly more
+than nine persons. Victor therefore&mdash;it mattered not to-day that the
+distinguished and interesting eye-sufferer was absent&mdash;gladly followed
+into Schleunes's Nuremberg <i>Exchange Library</i> of daughters behind the
+tender Jonathan-Orestes-Mat, whom he, in fact, out of forbearance
+towards their mutual friend Flamin, treated now with more toleration.
+<i>Men</i>, like <i>ideas</i>, are associated together quite as often on the
+principle of <i>simultaneousness</i> as on that of <i>similarity</i>; and as
+little can be inferred from the choice of <i>acquaintances</i> as to the
+character of a youth, as in regard to that of a woman from her choice
+of a husband. Matthieu introduced him to his mother in the reading
+cabinet, just as she was hearing an English author read, with the
+words, &quot;I bring you here a real live Englishman.&quot; Joachime was
+reading in a catalogue,&mdash;it was not a catalogue of books, but of
+stock-gillyflowers,&mdash;in order to select some gillyflowers for herself,
+not for the purpose of planting, but of imitating them&mdash;in silk. She
+hated flowers that grew. Her brother said, ironically, &quot;She hated
+changeableness, even in a flower.&quot; For the truth was, she loved it even
+in lovers, and was quite different from April, which, like women, is in
+our climate far more steady than is pretended. In the cabinet there
+were also two fools, whom my correspondent does not so much as name to
+me, because he thinks they would be adequately designated and
+distinguished, if I should call the one the fragrant fool, and the
+other the fine one.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Both fools were buzzing round the beauty. In fact, whenever I have
+wanted to study fools at great parties, I have always looked round
+regularly for a great beauty; they gather round such a one like
+wasps around a fruit-woman. And if I had no other reason&mdash;I have,
+however&mdash;for marrying the handsomest woman, I would do it for this
+reason, if for no other, that I might always have the queen-bee sitting
+in the hollow of my hand, after whom the whole foolish bee-swarm would
+come buzzing. I and my wife would then be like the fellows in Lisbon,
+who, having in their hands a pole of parrots strung together, and at
+their feet a leash of <i>monkeys</i> skipping after them, trudge through the
+streets, and offer their crazy <i>personæ</i> for sale.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">The fragrant fool, who was to-day on the <i>sunny side</i> of Joachime, was
+reading to the mother; the fine one, who was on the <i>weather-side</i>,
+stood near Joachime, and seemed not to trouble himself about her
+<i>cooling of the temperature</i>. Victor stood there as transition from the
+torrid zone to the frigid, and represented the temperate; Joachime
+played three parts with one face. The fragrant fool shot, with his left
+hand, the swivel-gun of a silver <i>joujou</i>. This hanging seal of a fool
+he kept in motion, either, as the Greenlander does a block with his
+feet, for the sake of keeping himself warm,&mdash;or he did it, as the grand
+sultan for similar reasons must always be whittling with a jackknife,
+in order not to be always having somebody killed out of love,&mdash;or in
+order, as the stork always holds a stone in his claws, to have all the
+time an Ixion's-wheel in his hands, as a rowel on his heels,&mdash;or for
+the sake of health, in order to counteract the <i>globulus
+hystericus</i><a name="div2Ref_237" href="#div2_237"><sup>[237]</sup></a> by the motion of an external one,&mdash;or as rosary
+bead,&mdash;or because he didn't know why.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Each was satisfied with himself. When the mother begged our Englishman
+to read to her with his native accent, the <i>fine</i> fool said, &quot;The
+English, like certain sentiments, is easier to understand than to
+pronounce.&quot; That is to say, this fine sheep had universally the habit
+of being metaphorical. If a maiden said to him, &quot;I cannot keep myself
+from feeling cold to-day,&quot; he made out of it coldness of the heart. One
+could not say, &quot;It is cloudy, warm, the needle has pricked me,&quot; &amp;c.,
+without his taking this as a ball-drawer, to extract his heart from the
+fire-arm of his breast, and exhibit it. It was impossible in his
+hearing not to be fine, and from your good-morning he twisted a
+<i>bon-mot</i>. Had he read the Old Testament, he would not have been able
+to admire sufficiently the fine turns that occur there. On the other
+hand, the <i>fragrant</i> fool limited his whole wit to a lively face. He
+unfolded before you this bill of invoice and insurance-policy of a
+thousand bright conceits, and held it up to you, but nothing came. You
+could have sworn by the advertising-poster of wit in his fiery eye,
+&quot;Now he is going to blaze out,&quot;&mdash;but not in the least! He used the
+weapon of satire, as the grenadiers do hand-grenades, which they no
+longer throw, but only wear imitated on their caps.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">When the fine one had said his erotic <i>bon-mot</i>, Joachime looked at our
+hero, and said, with an ironical glance at the fine one, &quot;<i>J'aime les
+sages à la folie</i>.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">The pride of the fragrant one in his to-day's superiority, and the
+apparent indifference of the fine fool to his own neglect, proved that
+neither was often in to-day's ease, and that Joachime coquetted in a
+peculiar style. She always made fun of us stately male persons, when
+two were with her at once,&mdash;of one alone less so; her eyes left it to
+our self-love to ascribe the fire in them more to love than to wit; she
+seemed to blab out what came into her head, but many things seemed not
+to come into her head; she was full of contradictions and follies, but
+her <i>intentions</i> and her inclination nevertheless remained doubtful to
+every one; her answers were quick, but her questions still quicker.
+To-day, in the presence of the three gentlemen,&mdash;at other times she did
+it in the presence of the whole <i>bureau d'esprit</i>,&mdash;she stepped up to
+the looking-glass, took out her paint-box, and retouched the gay
+box-piece of her cheeks. One could not possibly think how she would
+look if she were embarrassed or ashamed.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">The virtue of many a lady is a thunder-house, which the electric spark
+of love shatters to pieces, and which they put together again for new
+experiments; to our hero, spoiled by the highest female perfection, it
+appeared as if Joachime must be classed among those thunder-houses.
+Coquetry is always answered with coquetry. Either this latter it was,
+or too feeble a respect for Joachime, which led Victor to make the two
+adorers ridiculous in the eyes of the goddess. His victory was as easy
+as it was great; he encamped on the foe's position,&mdash;in other words,
+Joachime took an increased liking to him. For women cannot bear him
+who, before their eyes, succumbs to another sex than their own. They
+<i>love</i> everything that they <i>admire</i>; and one would not have made such
+satirical explanations of their predilection for physical courage, if
+one had considered that they feel this predilection for everything that
+is distinguished,&mdash;for men distinguished by wealth, renown, learning.
+The dry and wrinkled Voltaire had so much fame and wit, that few
+Parisian hearts would have rejected his satirical one. Add to this,
+that my hero expressed his regard for the whole sex with a warmth which
+the individual appropriated to herself; then, too, his favorite
+universal-love, furthermore his eye swimming in sorrow over a lost
+heart, and finally his infectious human tenderness, secured him an
+attention from Joachime which excited his to the degree, that he
+proposed to himself the next time to investigate what it might
+signify.&mdash;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">The next time soon came. So soon as the advent of the Princess was
+predicted by the Apothecary,&mdash;for <i>he</i> was for the little future of the
+court his witch of Endor and of Cumæ, and his Delphic cave,&mdash;he went
+thither; for he did not drive. &quot;So long as there is still a shoe-black
+and a pavement,&quot; said he, &quot;I do not drive. But as to the more
+distinguished gentry, I wonder that they even travel on foot from one
+wing of the palace to the other. Could not one, just as they have a
+penny-post for a city, introduce a conveyance for the interior of the
+palace? Might not every chair be a sedan-chair, if a lady were less
+afraid of an Alpine tour from one apartment to another? And various
+circumnavigatresses of the world would even venture to make a
+pleasure-tour through a large garden in a close litter.&quot;&mdash;Victor's own
+journey lay straight through one,&mdash;namely, that of Schleunes. It was
+too bright and pleasant as yet to let him screw himself like a
+sewing-cushion to the card-table. He saw in the garden a gay little
+party strolling about, and Joachime among them. He joined them.
+Joachime expressed an artist's pleasure at the groupings of the clouds,
+and it was becoming to her beautiful eyes when she lifted them in that
+direction. As they had nothing clever to say, they sought to do
+something clever, so soon as they came to the <i>carrousel</i>.<a name="div2Ref_238" href="#div2_238"><sup>[238]</sup></a> They
+seated themselves in it, and caused it to be set agoing. Many of the
+ladies had absolutely not the courage to climb this potter's-wheel;
+some ventured into the seats; only Joachime, who was full as daring as
+she was timid, mounted the wooden tourney-steed, and took the lance in
+hand, to spear away the ring, with a grace which was worthy of finer
+rings. But in order not to expose herself to being thrown by the
+whirling Rosinante, Joachime had set my hero beside her as a banister,
+that she might hold on to him in time of need. The revolution of the
+axle grew more rapid, and her fear greater; she clung to him more and
+more firmly, and he clasped her more firmly in order to anticipate her
+effort. Victor, who understood very well the legerdemain and hocuspocus
+of women, easily saw through Joachime's Wiegleb's-natural-magic and
+&quot;Trunkus Plempsum Schallalei&quot;;<a name="div2Ref_239" href="#div2_239"><sup>[239]</sup></a> besides, the reciprocal pressure
+had passed to and fro so rapidly, that one could not tell whether it
+had an originator or an originatress....</p>
+
+<p class="normal">As they are now all within doors, and I stand alone in the garden by
+the horse-mill, I will reflect ingeniously on the subject, and remark
+that great people, like women and the French and the Greeks, are
+great&mdash;children. All great philosophers are the same, and, when they
+have almost destroyed themselves with thinking, revive themselves by
+child's fooleries, as, e. g., Malebranche did; even so do great people
+refresh themselves for their more serious, noble diversions by true
+childish ones; hence the hobby-horse chivalry, the swing, the
+card-houses (in Hamilton's <i>mémoires</i>), the cutting out of pictures,
+the <i>joujou</i>. With this passion for amusing themselves, they are in
+part infected by the custom of amusing their superiors, because the
+latter resemble the ancient gods, who, according to Moritz, were
+appeased, not by atonement, but by joyous festivals.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">As he was acquainted with the whole theatre-company of the Minister,
+and, secondly, as he was no longer a lover,&mdash;for such a one has a
+thousand eyes for <i>one</i> person, and a thousand eyelids for the
+rest,&mdash;he was not embarrassed at the Minister's, but actually enjoyed
+himself. For he had, to be sure, his plan to carry through there; and a
+plot makes a life entertaining, whether one <i>reads</i> or <i>executes</i> it.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">He was successful to-day in having a tolerably long talk with the
+Princess, and, to be sure, not about the Prince,&mdash;she avoided that
+subject,&mdash;but about her trouble of the eyes. That was all. He felt it
+was easier to play off an exaggerated regard than to express a real.
+The apprehension of appearing false <i>makes</i> one appear so. Hence a
+sincere man has the look, with a suspicious one, of being half false.
+Meanwhile, with Agnola, who, in spite of her temperament, was
+coy,&mdash;hence a peculiar, lowered tone reigned in her presence at
+Schleunes's,&mdash;every step sufficed which he did not take backward.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">But toward the sprightly Joachime he took half a step forward. Not so
+much she, as the house, seemed to him to be coquettish; and the
+daughters therein&mdash;they constitute the house&mdash;he found to resemble the
+old Litones,<a name="div2Ref_240" href="#div2_240"><sup>[240]</sup></a> or people of the Saxons, who were one third free and
+two thirds serf, and who therefore could mortgage a third of their
+estate. Each had still a third, a ninth, a segment, of her heart left
+to her own free disposal. In fact, whoso has ever seen codfishing can
+learn the thing here from metaphor,&mdash;the three daughters hold long
+fishing-rods over the water (father and mother splash, and drive the
+codfish along), and have their hooks baited with state-uniforms
+or their own faces,&mdash;with hearts,&mdash;with whole men (as luring
+rivals),&mdash;with hearts which have already been once taken out of the
+stomach of another captured codfish;&mdash;from this, I say, one can see in
+some sort how they catch the other cod in the sea, precisely as they do
+the stock-fish on land,&mdash;namely, besides what has been mentioned (now
+let one read back again), with bits of red rag, with glass-pearls, with
+birds' hearts, with salted herrings and bleeding fishes, with little
+cods themselves, with fishes which one has taken out, half digested,
+from stock-fish formerly caught.&mdash;Victor thought to himself,
+&quot;Joachime may be only lively or coquettish for all me; I can easily
+skip over marten-traps which I can see set right before my nose.&quot; Well,
+run, Victor; the <i>visible</i> steel shall lead thee precisely upon that
+which is <i>concealed</i>. One may observe in the same person coquetry
+towards every other, and yet overlook it toward himself, as the fair
+one believes the flatterer whom she sets down as a consummate flatterer
+of all others.&mdash;He observed that Joachime had somewhat oftenish looked
+up at the new ceiling this evening, and he could not rightly tell why
+it pleased her. At last he saw that she was only pleased with herself,
+and that raising her eyes was more becoming to them than looking down.
+He undertook presumptuously to investigate this, and said to her, &quot;It
+is a pity the painter of the Vatican had not made it, that you might
+look up at it oftener.&quot;&mdash;&quot;Oh,&quot; said she, in a tone of levity, &quot;I never
+would look up with others; I do not love admiration.&quot; By and by she
+said, &quot;Men dissemble, when they wish to, better than we; but I tell you
+just as few truths as I hear from you.&quot; She confessed outright that
+coquetry was the best remedy against love; and with the observation
+that his frankness pleased her, but hers must please him too, she ended
+the visit and the Post-Day.</p>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<p class="center"><img border="0" src="images/rivetstart.png" alt="rivetstart"></p>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+
+<h2><a name="div1Ref_22" href="#div1_22">22. DOG-POST-DAY.</a></h2>
+<br>
+
+<p class="center"><span class="sc2">Gun-Foundery of Love; e. g. Printed Gloves, Quarrels, Dwarf-Flasks,
+and Stabs.&mdash;A Title from the Digests of Love.&mdash;Marie.&mdash;Court-Day.&mdash;
+Giulia's dying Epistle.</span></p>
+<br>
+
+<p class="normal">The reader will be vexed with this Dog-Post-Day; I, for my part, have
+already been vexed about it. My hero is evidently becoming entangled in
+the meshes of two female trains, and even in the bonds of the princely
+friendship... Nothing more is wanting than that Clotilda should
+actually be joined to the hurly-burly.&mdash;And something of this kind it
+becomes necessary for a mining-superintendent, an islander, to
+communicate confidentially to the people on the mainland.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Besides, it must be done chronologically. I will dissect this
+Dog-Post-Day, which reaches from November to December, into weeks.
+Thereby more order will be observed. For I understand the Germans. They
+want, like the metaphysician, to know everything from the beginning
+onward, very exactly, in royal octavo, without excessive brevity, and
+with some <i>citata</i>. They furnish an epigram with a preface, and a
+love-madrigal with a table of contents; they determine the zephyr by
+compass and the heart of a maiden by conic sections; they mark
+everything, like merchants, in black-letter, and prove everything, like
+jurists; their cerebral membranes are living parchments, their legs
+private surveyors'-poles and pedometers; they cut up the veil
+of the Nine Muses, and apply to the hearts of these damsels
+turners'-compasses, and insert gauging-rods in their heads; poor Clio
+(the muse of history) looks, for all the world, like the Consistorial
+Counsellor Büsching, who trudges along slowly, bent up under a land
+freight of surveyors'-chains, clocks to calculate <i>thirds</i>, and
+Harrison's longitude-watches, and interleaved writing-almanacs, so that
+I specially weep for the poor Büsching as often as I see him striding
+along, since all Germany, (from which I should have expected something
+different,)&mdash;every magistrate, every stupid justice of the peace, (only
+we of Scheerau have never saddled him,)&mdash;has loaded down the good
+topographical carrier and Christopher (cross-bearer), like a statue
+hung with pledges, from knee to nostril, (so that the good man is
+hardly to be seen, and I wonder how he stays on his feet,)&mdash;has
+palisaded, I say, and built him in with all sorts of cursed devil's
+whisks, with village inventories, with advertising sheets, with
+heraldic works, with books of ground-plats and perspective plans of
+pigsties.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">They have even&mdash;that I may only <i>relate</i> an example out of my own
+history of the German statistic stupidity, although in the very
+doing of it I <i>give one</i>&mdash;infected Jean Paul. Is it not an old
+story that he has approximately assigned in degrees, by means of a
+Saussure's cyanometer,<a name="div2Ref_241" href="#div2_241"><sup>[241]</sup></a> the blueness of the fairest eyes into
+which an <i>amoroso</i> ever looked, and inspected the fairest drops that
+fell from them during the measurement, correctly enough, with a
+dew-measurer?&mdash;And has not his attempt to catch and prove female sighs
+by a Stegmann's measurer of the purity of the atmosphere found more
+than too many imitators among us?&mdash;</p>
+<br>
+
+<h3>WEEK OF THE <span class="sc2">22d</span> POST-TRINITATIS, OR FROM
+NOV. <span class="sc2">3d</span> to <span class="sc2">11th</span> (EXCLUSIVE).</h3>
+
+<p class="normal">Almost the whole of this week he sat out at the Minister's. Many
+people, when they have been only four times in a house, come again
+daily, like the quotidian fever,&mdash;in the beginning, like the spring
+sun, every day earlier; afterward, like the autumn sun, every day
+later. He saw, indeed, that he could not contribute anything at this
+court-and-ministerial party, either a mystery, or property, or a heart,
+because it would resemble honest courts of justice, which&mdash;just as
+the monks call their property a deposit, and say nothing belongs to
+them&mdash;inversely promote every deposit into a piece of property, and say
+all belongs to them. But he made no account of that. &quot;I come indeed
+only for fun,&quot; thought he, &quot;and no harm can be done to me.&quot;&mdash;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">The Minister, whom he met only over the table, had all the civility
+towards him which can be united with a face full of persiflage, and
+with a class of society in whose eyes all the world is divided into
+spies and thieves; but Sebastian perceived, nevertheless, that
+he looked upon him as a smatterer in medicine and the serious
+sciences,&mdash;as if they were not all serious,&mdash;and as an adept merely in
+wit and in the liberal arts. He was, however, too proud to turn to him
+any other than the empty new-moon-side, and concealed from him all that
+might convert him. Consequently, Victor must needs, in the eyes of the
+stupidest government-officer who had seen it, have deprived himself of
+all respect by the fact that, when the Minister started an interesting
+conversation with his brother, the Regency-President, about imposts,
+alliances, or the exchequer, he either did not attend, or ran off, or
+looked up the women.&mdash;Then, too, he loved in the Prince only the man;
+the Minister loved only the Prince. Victor could himself, when with
+January, deliver discourses on the advantages of republics, and the
+latter would often, in his enthusiasm, (if the supreme courts and his
+stomach had allowed it,) gladly have raised Flachsenfingen to a free
+state, and himself to the President of Congress therein. But the
+Minister hated all this with a mortal hatred, and fastened on all
+political free-thinkers&mdash;on a Rousseau, on all Girondists, all
+Feuillants, all Republicans, and all philosophers&mdash;the name of
+<i>Jacobin</i>, as the Turks call all foreigners, Britons, Germans,
+Frenchmen, etc., <i>Franks</i>. Meanwhile this was a reason why Victor now
+took a greater liking to Mat, who thought better on this subject, and
+why he fled from the father to the daughter.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">This week he got into Joachime's good graces. She gave to the fine and
+fragrant duo of fools, as we do to <i>virtue</i>, only the second prize, and
+to my hero, as we do to <i>inclination</i>, the prize-medal. But as he
+respected, at most, merely a certain sentimentalism in friendship and
+in love, he could, he thought, have ridden through the moon with this
+waggish girl, without sighing <i>for</i> her (though he might, indeed,
+<i>over</i> her). But these jolly ones, my Bastian, have seen the old Harry;
+for whenever they change to anything else, one changes with them to the
+same thing. She told him she wanted to give <i>pleasure</i>, like a Lutheran
+holy picture, but she would not be <i>adored</i>, like a Catholic one. She
+prepossessed him most by the gift peculiar to her sex, of understanding
+tender allusions,&mdash;women are so easy at guessing the meaning of others,
+because they always oblige others to guess their meaning, and
+<i>complete</i> and <i>conceal</i> each <i>half</i> with equal success. But
+among her
+attractions I reckon also her constraint before the Princess, and
+before those who listened with their&mdash;eyes. For the rest, his heart,
+which Clotilda had rejected, was now in the situation of children who
+have made a bet that they will receive blows upon their hands without
+crying, and who still continue to smile when the tears already flow.</p>
+<br>
+
+<h3>WEEK OF THE <span class="sc2">23d</span> POST-TRINITATIS, OR <span class="sc2">46th</span> OF
+THE YEAR <span class="sc2">179-</span>.</h3>
+
+<p class="normal">Now he is there even in the forenoon. It is worthy of notice, that
+on St. Martin's day he scraped her powdered forehead with the
+powder-knife, and that he applied to her for some court offices in
+connection with the toilet. &quot;I can be your rouge-box bearer, as the
+Great Mogul has tobacco-pipe and betel-bearers, or else your <i>cravatier
+ordinaire</i>, or your <i>sommier</i> (i. e. prayer-cushion-bearer).&mdash;I would,
+if you did not kneel yourself on the cushion, myself do it before
+you.&mdash;I knew in Hanover a handsome Englishman who had his left knee
+stuffed and padded, because he did not know whom he should to-day have
+to adore, and how long.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">It is something quite as important, that on St. Jonas's day he forced
+her to accept a pair of fine gloves, on which a very simple face was
+painted. &quot;It was his own,&quot; he said; &quot;she should have the face only by
+night, in bed, in, or on, her hand, that it might look as if he kissed
+her hand through the whole November night.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">I go on with my pragmatic extracts from this siege-journal, and find
+recorded on Leopold's day that, as early as in the forenoon, Joachime
+said she would have her parrot, if she kept a master of languages for
+him, repeat nothing out of the whole dictionary except the word
+<i>perfide</i>! &quot;Every lover,&quot; said she, &quot;should keep a poll for himself,
+which should incessantly cry out to him, <i>perfide</i>!&quot;&mdash;&quot;The ladies,&quot;
+said my hero, &quot;are alone to blame: they want to be loved too long;
+often whole weeks, whole months. The like of that is beyond our powers.
+Have not the Jesuits made even love to God periodical? Scotus limits it
+to Sunday, others to the festival days.&mdash;Coninch says, it is enough if
+one loves Him once every four years.&mdash;Henriquez adds a year more to
+it.&mdash;Suarez says, it is enough if it is only done before one's
+death.&mdash;To many ladies the intermediate times have hitherto fallen;
+but the hours of the day, the seasons of the year, the days of
+betrothal, of burial, form just as many different sects among the
+Jesuits of Love.&quot;&mdash;Joachime made a beginning of putting on an angry
+look. The court-physician loved nothing better with a fair one than a
+quarrel, and added: &quot;<i>C'est à force de se faire haïr qu'elles se font
+aimer&mdash;c'est aimer que de bouder&mdash;ah, que je vous prie de vous
+fâcher!</i>&quot;&mdash;His humor had carried him beyond the mark.&mdash;Joachime had
+reason enough to fulfil his prayer for her wrath.&mdash;He wanted to
+continue the quarrel in order to settle it, but as there are cases
+where the <i>aggravation</i> of an offence brings about forgiveness quite as
+little as the <i>taking of it back</i> step by step, he did wisely in coming
+away.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">He wondered that he should think of her all day long. The feeling of
+having done her wrong brought her face with a suffering expression
+before his softened soul, and all her features were at once ennobled.
+Tacitus says, we hate another when we have offended him; but good men
+often love another merely on that account.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">The day following, Ottomar's day,&mdash;<i>Ottomar</i>! great name, which makes
+the long funeral procession of a great past sweep by all at once before
+me in the dark,&mdash;he found her serious, neither seeking nor shunning
+him. The two fools remained in her eyes the two fools, and gained
+nothing in any way. As, therefore, he clearly perceived that out of a
+transient resentment there had grown true repentance for her previous
+openness,&mdash;of which he seemed to have made too free a use and too
+selfish an interpretation,&mdash;it was now his duty to do in earnest that
+which he had hitherto done in joke, namely, to seek her and get her to
+be reconciled.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">But she stood all the time by the Princess, and nothing was done.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">I have not said it myself, because I knew the reader would see
+it without me,&mdash;that my hero thinks Joachime regards him as the
+image-worshipper of her charms, and as the moon-man, or satellite
+attracted by her. My hero has, therefore, long since made up his mind
+to leave her in this error. As to removing such an error,&mdash;for <i>that</i> a
+man or a woman seldom has strength enough; but Victor had, besides,
+several reasons for indulging her with faith in his love (that is,
+himself, also, with faith in hers). In the first place, he wanted to
+conceal the reason of his coming; secondly, he knew that in the great
+world, and among the Joachimes, a lover is sought for only as third man
+in the game,&mdash;with them there is no dying of love, one does not even
+live on it; thirdly, he reserved for himself in all cases the
+sheet-anchor of making earnest out of jest; &quot;when the knife is at my
+throat,&quot; thought he, &quot;then I will set myself down and fall truly in
+love with her, and then all will be well&quot;; fourthly, a coquette makes a
+<i>coquet</i>.<a name="div2Ref_242" href="#div2_242"><sup>[242]</sup></a> ... Here I began already, as is well known, to be vexed
+about the 22d Post-Day, although I know as well as anybody why all
+mankind, even the most sincere, even the male kind, incline to little
+intrigues towards their beloved; that is to say, not merely because
+they are little and <i>reciprocated</i>, but because one thinks by his
+intrigues to give more than he steals. Only the highest and noblest
+love is without real trickery.</p>
+<br>
+
+<h3>WEEKS OF THE <span class="sc2">24th</span> AND <span class="sc2">25th</span> POST-TRINITATIS.</h3>
+
+<p class="normal">On Sunday there was a ball. &quot;Very naturally,&quot; said he, &quot;she will not
+look on me. In ball-dress the fair sex are more implacable than in
+morning dress.&quot; Hardly had she seen him when she came to meet him,
+like an agitated heaven, with her fixed stars of brilliants and her
+pearl-planets, and in this splendor begged of him the forgiveness of
+her freak. She had at first made believe angry, she said, then had
+actually become so; and not until the next day had seen that she did
+wrong to appear so and had a right to be so. This prayer for
+forgiveness made our Medicus more humble than was necessary. She begged
+him sportively to beg her pardon, and made him acquainted with her
+percussion-gold of sudden resentment.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">For a space of two days this Westphalian peace was kept.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">But one quarrel with a maiden, like one fool, makes ten; and
+unfortunately one only likes the angry one so much the better (at
+least, better than the indifferent), just as people run most after
+<i>those</i> Methodist preachers who damn them the most roundly. Joachime
+grew daily more susceptible of anger,&mdash;which he ascribed to an
+increasing love,&mdash;but so did he, too. Let them have spent the whole
+visit in the finest imperial and domestic peace, at the leave-taking
+all was put upon a war-footing again, ambassadors and furloughed ones
+(if I may be allowed these poetical expressions) recalled. Then with
+the angry sediments in his heart he withdrew, and could hardly wait for
+the moment of the next interview,&mdash;i. e. of his or her justification.
+Thus did they spend their hours in the writing of peace-instruments and
+manifestoes. The matter of dispute was as singular as the quarrel
+itself: it concerned their demands of friendship; each party proved
+that the other was the faulty one, and demanded too much. What most
+enraged our Medicus was, that she allowed the fine and the fragrant
+fools to kiss her hand, which she forbade him to do, and in truth
+without any reasons for the decision. &quot;If she would only lie to me, and
+say, such or such is the reason,&mdash;that at least would be something,&quot;
+said he; but she did him not the pleasure. To my sex, refusal without
+reasons, even conjecturable ones, is a pit of brimstone, a threefold
+death; upon Joachime, reasons and cabinet-sermons had equal influence.</p>
+<br>
+
+<h3>EXTRA-LEAF ON THE ABOVE.</h3>
+
+<p class="normal">I have a hundred times, with my legal burden of proof on my back,
+thought of women who are able, with a certain effort, to act as well as
+to believe without any reasons. For surely, in the end, everybody must
+(according to all philosophers) reconcile himself to actions and
+opinions for which reasons are entirely wanting; for, since every
+reason appeals to a new one, and this again rests upon one which refers
+us to one, which again must have its own reason, it follows that
+(unless we mean to be forever going and seeking) we must finally arrive
+at one which we accept without any reason whatever. Only the scholar
+fails in this, that precisely the most important truths&mdash;the highest
+principles of morals, of metaphysics, &amp;c.&mdash;are the ones which he
+believes without reasons, and which, in his agony,&mdash;thinking to help
+himself out thereby,&mdash;he names necessary truths. Woman, on the
+contrary, makes lesser truths&mdash;e. g. there must be drives, invitations,
+washing to-morrow, &amp;c.&mdash;the necessary truths, which must be accepted
+without the insurance and reinsurance of reasons;&mdash;and just this it is
+which gives her such an appearance of soundness. For them it is easy to
+distinguish themselves from the philosopher, who thinks, and into whose
+eyes the sun of truth flames so horizontally that he cannot see, for
+it, either road or landscape. The philosopher is obliged, in the
+weightiest actions,&mdash;the moral,&mdash;to be his own lawgiver and law-keeper,
+without having the reasons therefor given him by his conscience. With a
+woman, every inclination is a little conscience, and hates
+<i>Heteronomies</i>,<a name="div2Ref_243" href="#div2_243"><sup>[243]</sup></a> and beyond that pronounces no reasons, just as the
+great conscience does. And it is precisely this gift, of acting more
+from private sovereignty than from reasons, which makes women so very
+suitable for men; for the latter would rather give them ten commands
+than three reasons.</p>
+
+<p class="center"><i>End of the Extra-Leaf on the above</i>.</p>
+<br>
+
+<p class="normal">What was full as bad was, that Joachime at last, only for the sake of
+removing his documentary piles of complaints and imperial grievances,
+allowed him her fingers, without giving him the least reason for it. He
+could, therefore, show no title of possession, and, in case of need,
+would have had no one who could protect him therein.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">There is, however, a well-grounded rule of right or Brocardicon<a name="div2Ref_244" href="#div2_244"><sup>[244]</sup></a>
+for men: that everything grows firmer with women, when one builds upon
+it, and that a little stolen favor legitimately belongs to us, so soon
+as we sue for a greater. This rule of right bases itself upon the fact
+that maidens always abate with us, as one does to Jews in trade, the
+half, and give only a couple of fingers when we want the hand. But if
+one has the fingers, then arises, out of the Institutions, a new title,
+which adjudicates to us the hand: the hand gives a right to the arm,
+and the arm to everything that is appended to it, as <i>accessorium</i>.
+Thus must these things be managed, if right is to remain right. There
+will, in fact, have to be a little manual written by me, or some other
+honest man, wherein one shall expound and elucidate to the female sex
+with the torch of legal learning the <i>modos</i> (or ways) <i>acquirendi</i>
+(of
+winning) them. Otherwise many modi may go out of use. Thus, e. g.,
+according to civil law, I am rightful proprietor of a movable thing, if
+it was stolen thirty years ago (in fact, it should be further back, and
+I should not be made to suffer for it, that one began the stealing
+later); so, too, by prescription of thirty minutes (the time is
+relative) everything belonging to a fair one lawfully falls to me,
+which (of a movable nature&mdash;and everything about her is movable) I may
+have purloined from her, and therefore one cannot begin soon enough to
+steal, because before the theft the prescription cannot begin to take
+effect.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Specification is a good modus. Only one must be, like me, a
+Proculian,<a name="div2Ref_245" href="#div2_245"><sup>[245]</sup></a> and believe that a strange article belongs to him who
+has imparted to it a different form; e. g. to me, the hand which I have
+put into another shape by pressure.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">The late Siegwart said: <i>Confusio</i> (mingling of tears) is my modus. But
+<i>commixtio</i> (mixture of dry articles, e. g. the fingers, the hair) is
+now with almost all of us the <i>modus acquirendi</i>.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">I was going once to treat the whole thing according to the doctrine of
+the <i>Servitudes</i>,<a name="div2Ref_246" href="#div2_246"><sup>[246]</sup></a> where a woman has a thousand things to suffer
+(though all these servitudes are entirely extinguished by the
+consolidation<a name="div2Ref_247" href="#div2_247"><sup>[247]</sup></a> of marriage); but I do not myself any longer rightly
+retain the doctrine of the Servitudes, and would much rather examine
+any one in them than be examined myself.&mdash;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">I return to the Medicus. Since, then, he knew that a kissed hand is a
+warrant to the cheeks,&mdash;but the cheeks the sacrificial tables of the
+lips,&mdash;these of the eyes,&mdash;the eyes of the neck;&mdash;accordingly he would
+have proceeded exactly according to his text-book. But with Joachime,
+as with all antipodes of coquettes, <i>no favor paved the way for
+another, not even the great one for the small one</i>; you passed from one
+antechamber to another,&mdash;and what said my hero to this? Nothing but
+&quot;Thank God that for once there is one better than she seemed, who,
+under the appearance of being our plaything, plays with us, and makes
+her coquetry the veil of virtue!&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">He felt now, as often as her name was mentioned, a soft warmth breathe
+through his bosom.</p>
+<br>
+
+<h3>FROM THE END OF THE ECCLESIASTICAL YEAR
+(<span class="sc">Dec</span>. <span class="sc2">1</span>) TO THE END OF THE CIVIL (<span class="sc">Dec. </span><span class="sc2">31</span>).</h3>
+
+<p class="normal">Flamin, whose patriotic flames found no air in the session-chamber, and
+stifled himself first, grew shyer and wilder every day. It was
+something new to him, that it took whole boards and commissions to do
+what one person might have done,&mdash;that the limbs of the state (as is
+also the case, indeed, with the limbs of the body) are moved by the
+<i>short arm</i> of the lever, so as to do less with greater power, and a
+board, particularly, resembles the body, which, according to
+Borellus,<a name="div2Ref_248" href="#div2_248"><sup>[248]</sup></a> spends 2,900 times as much strength on a leap as the
+load which it has to lift requires. He hated all great people, and
+never went to see any: the page Mat did not even get visits from him.
+My Sebastian made his visits to <i>him</i> seldomer, because his leisure and
+his calms of dissipation fell exactly upon Flamin's working hours. This
+separation, and the eternal sitting at Schleunes's,&mdash;which Flamin, from
+not being acquainted with Joachime's influence, was obliged at all
+events to ascribe to Clotilda's, for future visits to whom Victor must
+be creating a pretext by his present ones,&mdash;and even the Prince's favor
+towards the latter, which in Flamin's eyes could not be any result of
+his spirit of freedom and his sincerity;&mdash;all this drew the intertwined
+bonds of their friendship, which had made life to them hitherto a
+four-handed piece of music, further and further asunder; the faults and
+the moral dust which Victor could once brush off from his darling he
+hardly dared to blow off; they behaved towards each other more
+delicately and attentively. But my Victor, to whose heart Fate applied
+so many tongues of vampyres, and who was compelled to shut up in <i>one</i>
+breast the bitterness of lost love and the woe of failing friendship,
+was made by it all&mdash;really merry. O, there is a certain gayety of
+stagnation and grief, which is a sign of the soul's exhaustion, a smile
+like that on men who die of wounds in the diaphragm, or that on the
+shrivelled, drawn-back lips of mummies! Victor plunged into the stream
+of amusements, in order, under it, not to hear his own sighs. But
+often, to be sure, when he had all day long been sprinkling over ruined
+follies comic salt, which full as often bites the hand of the sower and
+makes it ache, and when he had not been able all day long to refresh
+himself with any eye, to which he would have dared to show a tear in
+his own,&mdash;when, thus weary of the present, indifferent to the future,
+wounded by the past, he had just passed by the last fool, the
+Apothecary, and when from his bow-window he looked out into the
+night hanging full of worlds, and into the tranquillizing moon, and
+upon the eastern clouds over St. Luna,&mdash;then were his swollen heart
+and his swollen eyeball sure to burst, and the tears which night
+concealed to stream down from his balcony on the hard pavement. &quot;O,
+only <i>one</i> soul,&quot; cried his innermost being with all the tones of
+melancholy,&mdash;&quot;give but <i>one</i> soul, thou eternal, loving, creative
+nature, to this poor, languishing heart, which seems so hard and is so
+soft, which seems so joyous and yet is so sad, seems so cold and yet is
+so warm!&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">It was well that, on such an evening, no chamberlain, no man of the
+world, stood in the balcony, just as poor Marie&mdash;on whom her former
+life has been precipitated like a crushing avalanche&mdash;came to desire
+his breakfast-orders; for he would get up, without wiping away a drop,
+and advance kindly to meet her, and grasp her soft, but red and
+hard-worked hand, which from fear she did not draw back,&mdash;although from
+fear she did turn away her face, hardened into stone against hope,&mdash;and
+say, as he softly stroked her eyebrows horizontally, with a voice
+rising from a heart full of the deepest emotion, &quot;Thou poor Marie, tell
+me&mdash;I am sure thou hast little comfort&mdash;is it not so? There seldom
+comes any longer into thy gentle eyes anything that they love to see,
+unless it is thy own tears? Dear girl, why hast thou no courage before
+me? why dost thou not tell me thy woe? Thou good, tortured heart,&mdash;I
+will speak for thee, act for thee: tell me what weighs on thee, and if
+ever of an evening thy heart is too heavy, and thou mayest not venture
+to weep down below, then come up to me ... look at me now frankly ...
+truly I will shed tears with thee, let them say what they will and be
+hanged.&quot; Although she held it to be uncourteous to weep before so
+distinguished a gentleman, nevertheless, it was impossible for her, by
+a forcible bending away of her face, to thrust aside all the tears
+which his voice, full of love, drew in rivers from her eyes.... Take it
+not ill of his over-boiling soul, that he then pressed his hot mouth to
+her cold, despised, and unresistingly trembling lips, and said to her:
+&quot;Oh, why are we mortals so unhappy, when we are too soft-hearted?&quot;&mdash;In
+his chamber she seemed to take all as jest,&mdash;but all night long she
+heard the echo of the humane man;&mdash;even as jest, so much love would
+have been a comfort to her; then her past flowers once more
+crystallized in the window-frost of her present wintry-time; then she
+felt as if she were to-day, for the first time, unhappy.&mdash;In the
+morning she said nothing to any one, and towards Sebastian she was
+merely more devoted, but not more courageous; only, at times, she would
+concur with the dispenser down below, when he praised him, and say, but
+without further explanation, &quot;One should cut up one's own heart into
+little bits, and sacrifice it for the English gentleman.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Poor Marie! my own innermost heart repeats after the Doctor, and adds
+besides: Perhaps at this very moment, just such an unhappy woman, just
+such an unhappy man, is reading me. And I feel as if; now that I have
+struck the funeral bells of their past sad hours, I must also write
+them a word of consolation. But for one who has to be ever striding
+across new gaping ice-chasms of life, I know no resource but my own:
+the moment things grow bad, fling all <i>possible hopes</i> to the Devil,
+and with utter renunciation fall back upon thyself, and ask, How now,
+if even the worst should come, what then? Never reconcile thy fancy to
+the <i>next</i> misfortune, but to the greatest. Nothing relaxes one's
+spirits more than the alternation of warm hopes with cold anguish. If
+this method is too heroic for thee, then seek for thy tears an eye that
+shall imitate them, and a voice that shall ask thee why thou art thus.
+And reflect: the echo of the next life, the voice of our modest,
+fairer, holier soul, is audible only in a sorrow-darkened bosom, as the
+nightingales warble when one veils their cage.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Often did Sebastian worry himself about this, that he could here exert
+so little his noble powers in behalf of humanity; that his dreams of
+preventing evil and accomplishing good through the Prince remained
+fever-dreams, because, e. g., even the best men at the helm of the
+state filled offices entirely according to circumstances and
+recommendations merely, and held offices, whether those of others or
+their own, never as obligations, but as mining-curacies. He was
+troubled about his uselessness; but he consoled himself with its
+necessity: &quot;in a year, when my father comes, I set myself free and rise
+to something better,&quot; and his conscience added, that his own personal
+uselessness was serviceable to the virtue of his father, and that it
+was better to be, in a wheel, with all one's fitness for a pendulum, a
+tooth, without which the machinery would stop, than to be the pendulum
+of a toothless wheel.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">In such cases he always asked himself afresh: &quot;Is Joachime, perhaps,
+like me, better, tenderer, less coquettish than she seems? and why wilt
+thou condemn her on the strength of an outward appearance, which is, to
+be sure, the same as thine own?&quot; Her conduct seldom confirmed these
+favorable suppositions, nay, it often absolutely refuted them;
+nevertheless, he went on to expose himself to new refutations and to
+desire confirmation still. The necessity of loving drives one to
+greater follies than love itself; every week Victor let himself abate
+one perfection more from the female ideal, for which, as for the
+unknown god, he had already for years had the altar set up in his
+brain. During this haggling the whole of December would have slipped
+away, had it not been for the first day of Christmas.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">On that day, when he saw through every window laughing faces and
+gardens of Hesperides, he too would fain be joyful, and flew amidst the
+church-chorals to Joachime's toilet-chamber, in order there to make
+himself a Christmas pleasure. He had brought her for a present, he
+said, a bottle-case of liqueurs, a whole cellar of Rataffia, because he
+knew how ladies drank. When, at last, he drew his gantry full of
+bottles out of his&mdash;pocket: it was a miserable little box full
+of cotton-wool, in which stood imbedded neat little bottles of
+sweet-smelling waters, almost as long as wrens'-eggs. What is neat
+always pleases girls&mdash;as well as what is splendid. He delivered a long
+discourse to Joachime upon the temperance of her sex, who ate as little
+as humming-birds and drank as little as eagles: with a few show-dishes
+and a smelling-bottle he would feast an army of the female sex five
+thousand men strong, and there should still be something left. The
+physicians observed that they who had borne hunger longest had been
+women,&mdash;even in the middle classes the whole bee-flora on which these
+saints lived consisted of a colored ribbon, which they wore as sash or
+scarf, by way of a nourishing poultice and portable soup, and to which
+they attached nothing further, except at most a lover. Joachime, during
+the eulogy, drew out a bottle, because she thought it wax. Victor, by
+way of refuting her&mdash;or for some other reason&mdash;pressed it tightly
+into her hand, and fortunately crushed it. A mining-superintendent
+of my disposition would hardly introduce the crushing of a bottle,
+not big enough to cover one of Eymann's cucumbers with, into his
+Dog-Post-Days,&mdash;because he loves to serve up things of importance,&mdash;did
+not the bottle itself acquire an importance from the fact that it cut
+the softest hand upon which the hardest jewel ever yet threw lustre,
+till it ran blood. The Doctor was startled,&mdash;the patient smiled,&mdash;he
+kissed the wound, and these three drops fell like Jason's blood, or
+like a blood rectified by an alchemist, as three sparks into his
+inflammable veins, and the blood-coal of love assumed three glowing
+points;&mdash;nay, a little more, and he would have obeyed her, when she
+playfully commanded him (in order to spare him a greater embarrassment
+than he had) to revive the antiquated fashion of the Parisians, of
+writing to ladies with rose-colored ink, and here on the spot to
+despatch three lines to her in her own blood. Thus much is, at least,
+certain, that he told her he wished he were the Devil. To the
+last-named personage, as is well known, the warranty-deed or rather
+partition-treaty of the soul is despatched with the blood of the
+proprietor as fist-<a name="div2Ref_249" href="#div2_249"><sup>[249]</sup></a>pledge and consideration. Blood is the seed of
+the Church, the Catholic Church says; and here we are speaking of
+nothing less than the <i>temple</i> of the fair.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">So it was&mdash;and so it stood&mdash;when the Court of the Princess was
+announced for to-day. This was, in the first place, plaguily awkward
+for him, because this evening was spoiled; and, secondly, it was
+agreeable to him, because Joachime was obliged to-day to put away the
+hat which he and she so loved. Since, as is customary, ladies had the
+robes and frisures prescribed to them by the Princess, in which they
+must celebrate in her presence the court-day, i. e. the incendiary
+Sunday of their freedom: accordingly, she could not to-day keep on the
+crape-hat which she so loved, and Victor too, but not on her; for it
+was just the mate of that which Clotilda had worn when, during the
+concert, she covered her moist eyes with the black-lace veil, which
+from that time always hung down over his bereaved eyes.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">I will describe the Court-day.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">The main object of the Court in setting forth at six o'clock in the
+evening was, to drive home again at ten o'clock in a right sulky mood.
+I can, however, deliver this ten times as copiously:&mdash;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">At six o'clock Victor, with the rest of the communion of brethren and
+sisters under orders, drove to the Paullinum. He envied, or rather
+blessed, the weaver, the boot-polisher, the wood-cutter, who had at
+evening his jug of beer, his prayers, his Johnny-<a name="div2Ref_250" href="#div2_250"><sup>[250]</sup></a>cakes and his
+trumpeting children; likewise their wives, who already had foretaste of
+the morrow, namely, of the marbled, speckled dresses which were to
+array them for the second holiday. In the May-colored atmosphere and
+zodiac stood the Princess as a sun, full as unhappy as her unhappy
+planets; <i>only dream</i> (thought he) <i>can make a king happy or a poor man
+unhappy</i>. When he saw how they all, after a scanty frog-rain of words;
+and after refreshments, i. e. beatings and exhaustions, were harnessed,
+one post-team after another, according to the Court almanac and
+directory, to the card-tables,&mdash;to every board came the same motley set
+of old faces,&mdash;he wondered first of all at the universal patience; on a
+negro of the gold coast of the court (he swore to himself) if one only
+considers what he has to <i>hear</i> and to <i>endure</i>, the <i>ears</i> and
+the
+<i>skin</i> are certainly, as in the case of roasted sucking-pigs, the best
+parts. Here the lion must beg <i>that</i> animal to let him have his skin
+for a domino, which has usually borrowed his of him. Here among these
+forms bent up by small souls (as leaves also crook up when leaf-lice
+live on them) no great, no bold thought can be carried: like wheat
+which is <i>beaten down</i>, they can yield only <i>empty</i> grains.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Before the sitting down at table, that part or segment of
+the&mdash;halo<a name="div2Ref_251" href="#div2_251"><sup>[251]</sup></a> encircling the Italian <i>sun</i>, which was not invited,
+drove home, disgusted at the tediousness of play, and still more
+disgusted that certain persons in particular were honored with the
+tediousness of a seat at the table.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Joachime, in whom the retiring Agnola found little satisfaction, went
+away with them, but not the Doctor, nor her brother Mat either, who had
+the honor of making, behind the chair of the Princess, in the column of
+march formed by herself, her chamberlain, a page, and a court lackey,
+exactly the central point; he stood, as every one knows, immediately
+behind the chamberlain, and was the only one who looked like a legible
+lampoon upon the <i>tout ensemble</i>. About the table, during<a name="div2Ref_252" href="#div2_252"><sup>[252]</sup></a> which
+there was little said, at most in a very low tone by two neighbors,
+here also there shall be nothing said.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">After dinner the Prince came and disturbed the stiff ceremonial, which
+he hated from love of comfort, just as Victor despised it on
+philosophical grounds. &quot;Verily, an archangel,&quot; Victor would often say,
+&quot;who should remark the wisdom and virtue observed by mortals in all
+trifles at their session-tables, altars, receptions, must needs bet his
+heaven and his wings that we are worth a farthing&mdash;or at least
+something&mdash;in greater things; but we all know where the conclusion
+limps; and this very disgust at the stiff, pedantic, decent micrology
+and machinery of men is the humor of the satirist. Moral deterioration
+comes about, it is true, through trifles, but not improvement: Satan
+creeps into us through Venetian blinds and <i>sphincters</i><a name="div2Ref_253" href="#div2_253"><sup>[253]</sup></a>; the good
+angel enters through the front door.&quot;&mdash;Agnola rewarded our hero to-day
+for his previous so well meant assiduity with a warmer attention, which
+was made more beautiful in his eyes by her ornaments&mdash;she wore those of
+the former princess, her own, and those of her mother before her&mdash;and
+by her whole state-attire; for he loved finery on women and hated it on
+men. His esteem borrowed a tender warmth from the painful fact that she
+confounded January's selfish intentions in his visits (with reference
+to the future Clotilda) with fairer ones, and that nevertheless one
+could not say so to her. How came it that Agnola reminded him then of
+Joachime; that the latter was the <i>conductor</i> of regard for the former;
+and that all loving emotions with which the Princess inspired him
+turned out wishes that Joachime might deserve and receive them?</p>
+
+<p class="normal">With a soul full of such longing, he drove back this very day without
+ceremony to that Joachime on whose hand, as we know, he had left a
+slight wound. He said to her, &quot;He must, as murderer and Medicus, look
+once more to-day after the wound&quot;; but a charming new trouble on
+Joachime's face fell like sunshine with a warming influence into his
+soul. He was impatient to go out with her on the balcony, to talk about
+it. Out there, he in a few minutes made the gash and the December chill
+a pretext for taking the hand and the gash into his own to warm it.
+&quot;Cold is bad for wounds,&quot; he said; but the fine fool would here have
+had his own comment on the subject. The vacant evening, the
+remembrances of the childish joys of Christmas, the starry heaven,
+looking down from overhead, which magically illuminates all dark wishes
+of man, like flowers in the night,&mdash;these and the silence surcharged
+and burdened his forlorn soul, and he pressed the only hand which human
+kind at this moment extended to him. He put the question to her
+directly about her trouble. Joachime answered more softly than usual,
+&quot;I was going to ask you the same; but with me it is natural.&quot; For she
+had, she related, on her return found the luggage of Clotilda and the
+news of her arrival, and&mdash;which is the precise point&mdash;the clothes of
+her sister Giulia, which Clotilda had hitherto given a place among her
+own. This Giulia, it will be remembered, had expired on Clotilda's
+heart, a day before the latter removed from Maienthal to St. Luna.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">A chaos shot through his heart; but out of the chaos only the faded
+Giulia took shape,&mdash;for Clotilda daily receded into a duskier sanctuary
+of his soul; her pale Luna-like image caressed with rays of another
+world his sore nerves, and he willingly suffered himself to believe
+that Joachime had her form. In his poetic exaltation, so seldom
+intelligible to women, the dead threw the halo which Clotilda diffused
+over her back again upon her sister. Joachime had to-day read over
+again the letter which Giulia had dictated to her in her last hour
+through Clotilda, and she still had it with her. Probably a heart full
+of unrequited love had borne the fair enthusiast down under the earth.
+Victor with gleaming eyes begged her for the letter; he opened it in
+the moonlight, and when he saw the beloved handwriting of his lost
+Clotilda, his whole heart wept.</p>
+<br>
+
+<p style="text-indent:5%">&quot;Good sister!&mdash;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Forever farewell! Let me say that first, because I know not what
+moment may close my lips. The tempests of my life are going home.<a name="div2Ref_254" href="#div2_254"><sup>[254]</sup></a>
+I speak this farewell and my heartiest wish for thy welfare through my
+friend Clotilda's pen. Give the enclosed to my dear parents, and join
+thy prayer to mine, that they will leave me in my beautiful Maienthal,
+when I am gone. I see now through the window the rose-bush which stands
+by the sexton's little garden in the churchyard: there a place is given
+me, which like a scar shall testify that I once existed, and a black
+cross with the six white letters <i>Giulia</i>,&mdash;no more. Dear sister, do
+not, I beseech thee, allow them to confine my dust in a tomb!&mdash;O no! it
+shall flutter in the shape of Maienthal's roses, which I once so loved
+to sprinkle!&mdash;Let this heart, when it shall have dissolved into the
+pollen of a new eternal heart, play and hover in the beams of the moon,
+which has so often in my lifetime made my heart sad and soft. If thou
+ever drivest, dear sister, along by Maienthal, then will the cross peep
+out upon the road through the roses; and if it does not make thee too
+sad, then look over to me.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;It seemed to me just now, for some minutes, as if I drew breath in
+ether,&mdash;in little thin draughts. It will soon be over. But tell my
+playmates, if they ask for me, that I was glad to go, though I was
+young. Very glad. Our teacher says, the dying are flying clouds, the
+living stationary ones, beneath which the former glide away, but verily
+at evening both are gone. Ah, I thought I should have to yearn for
+death a long time yet, from one year of sorrow to another; ah! I feared
+these pale cheeks, these eyes sunk with weeping, would not prevail upon
+death, that he would let me grow superannuated, and not take away my
+withered heart until it had throbbed itself to exhaustion: but, lo! he
+comes sooner. In a few days, perhaps in a few hours, an angel will
+appear before me and smile, and I shall see that it is death, and I,
+too, shall smile and say most joyfully, Take my beating heart into thy
+hand, thou ambassador of eternity, and care for my soul.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;'But art thou not young?' the angel will say; 'hast thou not just
+stept upon this earth? Shall I recall thee so soon, even before it has
+its spring?'</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;But I shall answer: Look on these sunken cheeks, and these exhausted
+eyes, and only shut them to. O, lay the snake-stone<a name="div2Ref_255" href="#div2_255"><sup>[255]</sup></a> on my bosom,
+that it may suck out all the wounds, and not fall off till they are
+healed. Ah! I have haply done no good in the world, but also no evil.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Then will the angel say: 'If I touch thee, thou becomest
+stiff,&mdash;spring and mankind and the whole earth vanish, and I alone
+stand beside thee. Is, then, thy young soul already so weary and so
+sore? What sorrows, then, can there be thus early in thy breast?'</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Only touch me, good angel!&mdash;Now he says, 'If I touch thee, thou
+crumblest to dust, and all thy loved ones see nothing more of thee&mdash;'</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;O, touch me!...&quot;</p>
+<br>
+
+<p class="normal">Death touched the bleeding heart, and a human being had passed on....</p>
+
+<p class="normal">While Victor read the sorrowful sheet, the sister of the dead one had
+several times wiped her eyes, because she imagined to herself what he
+was reading, and when he looked up at her, there glimmered therein the
+seed-pearls of a tender soul. But he wished now that his face could be
+invisible, or that he could be in the balcony of his chamber, so as to
+give way to all sighs and emotions unseen. Had he been in a citizen's
+house, he might now have gone without being derided to the unpacked
+clothes, and into the future apartments of Clotilda; and he might have
+seen again, as it were, the green lawns of Maienthal, if he had seen
+the romantic dresses, wherein Giulia had roamed through them, locked up
+amidst the last kisses of a sister. But in such a house it was an
+impossibility.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">He could now, as he seldomer had the enjoyment of another's
+sensibility, easily pardon its even being carried to excess. That it
+shatters the body was to him the wretchedest objection, because,
+indeed, everything of a nobler sort, every effort, all thinking, wears
+it out; in fact, the body and life were only means, but not an end.
+&quot;Giulia's heart in Giulia's body,&quot; said he, &quot;is a pure dew-drop in a
+tender flower-cup, which everything crushes, chokes, dries up, and
+which yet has escaped the noonday sun; such souls, too pliable for a
+world full of storm, which have too many nerves and too few muscles,
+deserve for their sensibility's sake not the corroding salt of satire,
+which gnaws them like snails. Earth and we can give them few joys; why
+will we take from them the rest?&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">But the lines of sorrow which sympathy now drew through Joachime's
+smiles imprinted themselves distinctly in Victor's heart, and that
+which she would here conceal made her more charming than all that she
+had ever sought to show.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Nothing is more dangerous than&mdash;as he had done some weeks before&mdash;to
+make believe he was in love: one becomes so forthwith in reality. Thus,
+the voluptuary <i>Baron</i>, when he had played one of Corneille's heroes,
+himself was one for some days. Thus Moliere died of a <i>malade
+imaginaire</i>, and Charles V. of a rehearsal-burial. Thus the paper crown
+which Cromwell had worn in a school-drama made him covet a harder
+one.&mdash;The second lesson which is to be learned from this (this,
+however, to be sure, presupposes Joachime's being a coquette) is, that
+a hero may scent coquetry, and yet run into the trap; a poet, like the
+nightingale (which he resembles in plumage, throat, and simplicity)
+sits up on the tree, and sees the snare set, and skips down and&mdash;into
+it.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">After some days,&mdash;while the question about Joachime's worth and his own
+love was rising and falling like a wave in Victor's mind,&mdash;while he
+stood on bad terms with Flamin, good ones with the Princess, and
+better with the Prince, who kept asking every day when Clotilda was
+coming,&mdash;she came.</p>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<p class="center"><img border="0" src="images/flowerstart.png" alt="flowerstart"></p>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+
+<h2><a name="div1Ref_23" href="#div1_23">23. DOG-POST-DAY.</a></h2>
+<br>
+
+<p class="center"><span class="sc2">First Visit to Clotilda.&mdash;The Paleness.&mdash;The Redness.&mdash;The
+Race-Weeks.</span></p>
+<br>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Ay, I must confess,&quot; said Victor, as on the day after Clotilda's
+arrival he ran round in his chamber, &quot;I could look with more courage
+into a thunder-storm or a tempestuous sea than into that little
+face,&mdash;into a radiant heaven, three noses long.&quot; He got relief,
+however, by striking a detached fortissimo chord on the piano: then he
+could go to see Clotilda. Only on the way he said: &quot;Nowhere is there so
+much jangling as within a man. What a devilish uproar in this five-foot
+Disputatorium about the smallest trumpery, till a bill grows into an
+act! A portable national convention <i>in nuce</i>,<a name="div2Ref_256" href="#div2_256"><sup>[256]</sup></a> that is what I am;
+I cannot take a step, without the <i>right</i> and <i>left</i> first haranguing
+on the subject, and the <i>enragés</i> and the <i>noirs</i>,<a name="div2Ref_257" href="#div2_257"><sup>[257]</sup></a> and the Duke
+of
+Orleans and Marat. The most detestable thing about this interior
+Ratisbon diet of man is, that Virtue sits therein with ten seats and
+one voice, but the Devil with one rump and seven votes.&quot;&mdash;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">By these humorous soliloquies he sought to divert himself from the
+aspect of his confused, stubborn, cold-sore spirit, which was always
+lifting Joachime to the level of Clotilda. He was finally put in
+perfect tune again merely by the virtuous resolution not to conceal now
+his love for Joachime,&mdash;&quot;not to be ashamed of her,&quot; he had almost
+thought to himself. &quot;If I <i>feign</i> myself to be somewhat warmer toward
+Joachime and colder towards the other than I perhaps am, then the Devil
+must have his game in it, if I do not finally <i>become</i> so.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">But the Devil had his game, and in fact a true game of Ombre<a name="div2Ref_258" href="#div2_258"><sup>[258]</sup></a> for
+<i>four</i> persons,<a name="div2Ref_259" href="#div2_259"><sup>[259]</sup></a>
+with a dummy:<a name="div2Ref_260" href="#div2_260"><sup>[260]</sup></a> this croupier<a name="div2Ref_261" href="#div2_261"><sup>[261]</sup></a> had made the
+original vault of playing out the face<a name="div2Ref_262" href="#div2_262"><sup>[262]</sup></a> of Clotilda with a wholly
+different <i>color</i> from what he had given her in Le Baut's palace.
+Victor found her, on meeting her again at Schleunes's, infinitely more
+beautiful than he had left her,&mdash;that is to say, more <i>pale</i>. As she
+was no nervous patient, never avoided the cold, even on December
+evenings walked out alone in the village, her cheeks were usually more
+like dark rosebuds than opened and whitened rose-leaves. But now the
+sun had become a moon: she had, in some sorrow or other, like the
+sapphire in the fire, lost nothing but color; instead of the blood, the
+soul, grown more still, lovely, and tender, seemed itself to look more
+nearly through the white crape curtain. All the blood which had receded
+from her cheeks flowed over into his, and rose like a magic potion into
+his head; meanwhile he tried to get into the latter the thought,
+&quot;Probably it is more the quarrel with her parents, and less the
+affliction of being driven hither, that has made her sick.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">When one has once proposed to himself to make believe cold, one becomes
+still more so when one finds reasons for <i>not</i> being so: Victor was
+made still colder by Clotilda's parents, who had come with her, and
+from whose faults the mantle seemed to him to be at once removed. Upon
+persons whom, for the sake of a third, one has esteemed too highly, one
+avenges himself, when the third no longer exerts the constraining
+influence, by a so much the greater depreciation of them. Then, too, he
+said to himself: &quot;As she now seldom sees her brother Flamin, it would
+be a piece of simplicity to expose her to a minute's embarrassment by
+the announcement that I know the relationship.&quot; Poor Victor!
+Nevertheless, it was impossible for him even to charge his heart with
+so much electrical warmth&mdash;though he might rub it with cat-skins and
+beat it with fox-tails&mdash;as would be requisite in order that his pulse
+should beat full for Joachime, not to say feverishly; but <i>this very
+thing</i> decided him to conduct himself exactly as if heart and pulse
+were fuller. &quot;It were ignoble,&quot; thought he, &quot;if the good Joachime
+should be made to atone for it, that I once had other hopes and wishes
+than my hitherto newest ones.&quot; This sacrifice warmed him to a proper
+degree of regard; this regard gave him the manly pride, which defies
+with its love and its choice all the four quarters of the world; this
+pride, again, gave him freedom and joy,&mdash;and now he was in a condition
+to talk with Clotilda like a reasonable man.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">All this inner history occupied, of course, twelve times as great a
+space of time as Mohammed's journey through all the heavens,&mdash;almost
+a good hour. But an accident threw itself into the midst of all
+his ideas. Namely, as the Minister's lady was a true female
+philosopher,&mdash;she knew that a couple of quartz crystals with some
+preparations and a drowned f&#339;tus do not make a philosopher, but
+nothing short of a lecture-room full of natural curiosities, and a
+reading cabinet,&mdash;and as the Chamberlain Le Baut was a philosopher, for
+his cabinet was quite as large,&mdash;the collection was exhibited to the
+Chamberlain, which he had himself helped to enrich. One would suppose
+that they must have laughed at each other in their sleeves, and taken
+each other for fools; but they really held each other for philosophers;
+for with great folks the fruits of the tree of knowledge grow so into
+the window and into the mouth,&mdash;they have so much facility in gaining
+knowledge (and therefore a second in showing it),&mdash;they so seldom seek
+in the wells of truth anything else than their own knee-pieces made
+with water-colors, and to wade into the depths of this fountain would
+give them such a chill,&mdash;and yet, on the other hand, they converse with
+so many sorts of persons of information in all departments,&mdash;that they
+get a smattering of everything over the table, and by oral tradition,
+like the disciples of the ancients, become through the ears living
+cyclopædias. If, afterward, they actually know how to absolutely
+renounce that which they have never heard, what difference is there,
+then, between them and the poorest philosopher, except in
+consciousness?</p>
+
+<p class="normal">In the cabinet of books and natural curiosities lay the whole
+New-Year's freight of buzzing chafers, with golden wing-sheaths minus
+wings,&mdash;I mean the gilt Musen-Almanachs. Matthieu, that mimic of the
+actual nightingales, was the sworn foe of the human ones, namely, the
+poets. He said,&mdash;what would have suited better for a Review,&mdash;&quot;He was a
+great friend of verses, but only in winter,&mdash;for when he went roaming
+so through the flower-beds of an Annual, he became, like one who walks
+through a poppy-field, drowsy enough, and could go to sleep. And just
+as the nights grew longer, and one therefore needed a longer sleep, it
+was a fine thing that the Annuals should appear, exactly at the
+beginning of winter, and that these flowers should bloom at the same
+season of the year with the mosses; in this way one could at least be
+lulled to sleep beside the brook that murmured in the verses, when
+there was no more murmuring or sleeping on the frozen meadow.&quot;&mdash;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Our Victor was as satirical as the Evangelist; he had in Hanover
+laughed as well as this fellow here,&mdash;e. g. he had complained that most
+Annual-minstrels unfortunately labored more for <i>connoisseurs</i> than for
+dull readers, and were well contented if they only got the former to
+sleep,&mdash;that a man who could not write prose should try whether he
+might not make a popular bard, as only those birds can <i>sing</i> who do
+not learn to talk,&mdash;that he could get through a good Annual at the
+quickest and most agreeable rate, if he only ran over the rhymes,&mdash;and
+that flat heads, like flat diamonds, to which no facettes can be given,
+became <i>hearts</i>, and instead of thoughts gave us tears, in which there
+swam not so much as the infusorium of an idea....</p>
+
+<p class="normal">But he saw still one side more than Matthieu, namely, the noble side.
+It was his custom to turn this side forward precisely when another had
+been showing the bad side, and <i>vice versâ</i>. His opinion was, that the
+poets were nothing but intoxicated philosophers,&mdash;but whoever could not
+learn philosophizing from them, would learn it quite as little from the
+systematicians. That philosophy made only the <i>silver-wedding</i> between
+ideas, but poetry the first marriage; empty <i>words</i> there might be, but
+no empty <i>sensations</i>. That the poet, in order to move us, has only to
+take for his lever all of noble that there is on the earth,&mdash;Nature,
+Freedom, Virtue, and God; and the very magic-words, the magic-rings,
+the magic-lamps wherewith he sways us, react at last upon himself.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">He delivered this opinion&mdash;when Matthieu had given his and Joachime her
+own, namely, that there were three or four leaves, at least, in the
+Musen-Almanachs which pleased her, namely, the smooth parchment
+leaves&mdash;much more briefly than we have put it;&mdash;the Minister's lady was
+of his opinion (for she herself was a versifex);&mdash;the Chamberlain said,
+&quot;Every city and every prince did indeed adore the poets in appropriate
+temples,&mdash;namely, in the play-houses.&quot; Clotilda ventured now to join
+herself to the victors:<a name="div2Ref_263" href="#div2_263"><sup>[263]</sup></a> &quot;When one reads a poet in January, it is
+as lovely as when one goes to walk in June. I cannot read either
+philosophers or learned men; there would, therefore, be left to me&quot;
+(she meant to say, to her sex) &quot;quite too little, if one should take
+from me the dear poets.&quot; &quot;You would at most,&quot; said the Minister at
+last, &quot;find your disciples in them; poets, like the saints, concern
+themselves little about the world and its knowledge; they can sing of
+the state, but not instruct it.&quot; &quot;O thou grinning mummy!&quot; thought
+Victor, &quot;a precious stone which thou canst not work into the wall of
+the state-building is less to thee than a block of sandstone. If thou
+couldst only install every flaming soul sent into the world as a
+completion of the republican antiques, in the office of under-clerk,
+custom-house collector, or warden of the treasury (as the people of
+Grand Cairo transform their ruins into stables and horse-troughs)!&quot; The
+noble Mat merely subjoined: &quot;There was a painter in Rome who never
+talked with any one but by singing; and I knew a great poet who not
+even in common life could speak prose; but he could not do much beside,
+and had little of the world, but a great many worlds in his head. When
+he comes out in print, he will hardly play off more deception on
+his readers than any one has already played off on him, who chose
+to.&quot;&mdash;Victor saw, by Clotilda's downcast eye, that she observed, as
+well as he, that the Devil meant her Dahore: but he was silent; his
+soul was sad and embittered: he had, however, long since been hardened
+by court life to endure those whom he must needs hate.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">During this disputation the noble Mat had, unobserved, cut out the
+whole group in black paper. &quot;Ah!&quot; said Joachime, &quot;this is not the first
+time that he has given <i>blackened</i> likenesses of companies.&quot; But as
+Victor could never see silhouette-groups, without thinking of us
+fleeting shadows of mortals, of this dwindling and drying-up
+dwarf-life, of the night-pieces drawn upon life, and of the shadowy
+companies called peoples,&mdash;and as he was reminded of this not only by
+his melancholy, and not only by a wax-skeleton, by Madame Biheron,<a name="div2Ref_264" href="#div2_264"><sup>[264]</sup></a>
+which stood there among the natural curiosities, but still more by the
+pale form of Clotilda,&mdash;and as, casting a glance of comparison at the
+skeleton and the profile, she said softly to Victor, &quot;So many
+resemblances might at another time make me sad,&quot;&mdash;then was his full
+heart transpierced with a sharp pang at the thought of his eternal
+poverty, and at the certainty, &quot;This great, beautiful heart will never
+stir for thine, and when her friend Emanuel is dead, thou art left
+forever alone&quot;; and he stepped to the window, threw it open violently,
+drank in the north-wind, pressed his fist against his two eyeballs, and
+went back with his former expression of countenance to the rest of the
+company.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">But for to-day such agitations had torn deeply into his heart. And when
+Clotilda, at a solitary second, said to him that the Parson's wife and
+Agatha were angry at his staying away, then was he, to whom at these
+names the whole beclouded past opened like a heaven, in no condition to
+give an answer.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">When he returned home, Clotilda's voice, which he could of all her
+attractions least forget, kept incessantly speaking, and like the echo
+of a funeral-song, in his soul.... Reader, when that which thou lovedst
+has long vanished from the earth or from thy fancy, then will
+nevertheless the beloved <i>voice</i> come back and bring with it all thy
+old tears, and the disconsolate heart which has shed them!... But not
+merely her voice,&mdash;everything came thronging back in the darkness upon
+his fancy: her modest eye, which did not in court-like style sparkle
+and bid defiance and express desire, as did those of the others,&mdash;that
+watchful delicacy, which since his entrance on court-life no longer
+appeared to him, either in her or in his father, too great,&mdash;to this
+add the image of Joachime and his chaos of inconsistencies, and the
+remark that a man whom the most certain proofs have satisfied that he
+is not loved, still suffers afresh at a <i>new</i> one,&mdash;and then one can
+understand the commotions which sleep, that lull on life's ocean, had
+in his case to appease.&mdash;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;That was the last fever-shake,&quot; said he the next morning, relying upon
+his present heart, whose eruptions, like those of volcanoes, daily
+burnt out its crater more and more. He enjoined upon himself,
+therefore, a weekly flight from the too dear soul, with the design that
+the new resonance of his love might cease its vibrations in his heart,
+and all become still again within him.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">But after a week he saw her again: verily, there sat the Devil again at
+the card-table, and played another color against him,&mdash;the <i>red</i>.
+Clotilda looked, not pale, but, though only slightly, red. This redness
+made a great blot on his inner man, and adulterated his inner coloring,
+as black does every color of the painter. For when he found her well
+again; it was not so much <i>agreeable</i> to him,&mdash;for he saw how few
+claims he any longer had upon her tranquillity,&mdash;how she did not so
+much as distinguish him in this warehouse of human waste-paper, and how
+stupid he had been in letting himself dream so secretly, so very
+secretly, that her previous paleness proceeded actually from her vain
+longing after such a one as he;&mdash;at the same time it was not
+<i>disagreeable</i> to him,&mdash;for he would have poured out all his heart's
+blood, if he could thereby have brought a single artery in her to its
+old course;&mdash;I say it was not so much either agreeable or disagreeable
+to him, as it was both, as it was unexpected, as it was a hint to&mdash;give
+himself to the Devil. His heart, and the image which had been too long
+therein, were absolutely crushed in two. &quot;Be it so!&quot; said he, and bit
+the convulsive lip with which he said it. For some days he cared not
+even to see Joachime. &quot;Has <i>she</i> then an eye for nature and a heart for
+eternity?&quot; asked he, and he knew well the answer.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Now came on a time for him, which was the precise opposite of the
+Sabbatical weeks,<a name="div2Ref_265" href="#div2_265"><sup>[265]</sup></a>&mdash;one may call them the <i>race-weeks</i> or the
+<i>Tarantula-dancing-hours</i> of visiting. It is a cursed time; man knows
+not where he stands. With Victor it fell just upon the winter-months,
+when, besides, the honeymoons of city and court occur. I will now
+portray them regularly.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Victor sought, namely, to drown deeper his unhappy, discordant
+heart,&mdash;not with the drum-roll of amusements; under this it would only
+bleed the more, just as wounds flow more strongly under the sound of
+drumming; but with&mdash;people; these were the blood-stanching screws
+which he applied to his soul. His body was now, like the Catholic
+reliquiary body of an Apostle, in all places; he spent the whole day in
+running to and fro, now with the Prince and now without him.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">At last there was not a lady left in Flachsenfingen whose hand he had
+not kissed,&mdash;nor a toilet-table where he would have been satisfied.
+He made in the <i>racing-weeks</i> double-knots, French <i>pas</i>,&mdash;dotted
+sketches of patterns,&mdash;little plays,&mdash;charades,&mdash;receipts for
+canary-birds,&mdash;verses for fans,&mdash;a thousand visits,&mdash;and still more,
+morning notes....</p>
+
+<p class="normal">These last, which he received and sent, were written in French and
+folded French-wise,&mdash;namely, crushed into the shape of hair-rollers.
+&quot;They are,&quot; said he, &quot;the hair-rollers of the fibres of the female
+brain,&mdash;the cartridges full of Cupid's powder,&mdash;the cocoons of loving
+butterflies&quot;: he spoke of the rise and fall of these female notes, and
+called them still further the proof-sheets of the female heart, and the
+outer-title-pages of the coquettish Edicts of Nantes. &quot;I assert this,&quot;
+he added, &quot;to distinguish myself from the page Matthieu, who denies it,
+because he actually contends, that at first one presses letters upon
+the fair sex, then things of more cubic contents, e. g. fans, jewels,
+hands, then finally one's self; just as the mails at first only took
+letters, then packages, finally passengers.&quot;&mdash;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">He found those women daily more amusing who steal away from us people
+of understanding the heart out of the breast and the brain out of the
+head, and, to be sure, (as a certain nobleman did other stuff,) not
+from love for the stolen goods, but from love of robbery itself; the
+next morning, like the nobleman, they honestly send the goods back
+again to the owner. Their refinements,&mdash;his own,&mdash;his turns to
+escape theirs,&mdash;the attention which one had to bestow upon one's
+self,&mdash;the opportunity of bringing all emotions under the finest
+dissecting-knives, or solar and lunar microscopes,&mdash;the facility of
+taking away from the most sincere truths the sour taste and from the
+most agreeable the sickly-sweet,&mdash;all this made the toilet-tables of
+women, particularly of coquettes, to him <i>Lectisternia</i><a name="div2Ref_266" href="#div2_266"><sup>[266]</sup></a> and tables
+of the gods. &quot;By heaven,&quot; said the toilet-table-boarder or
+pensioner,<a name="div2Ref_267" href="#div2_267"><sup>[267]</sup></a> &quot;a man is merely a Dutchman, at most a German, but a
+woman is a native Frenchwoman, or in fact a Parisian: man conceals his
+moral as he does his physical breast: thoughts and flowers, which do
+not fall through the racks of the four faculties, emotions which cannot
+be described in the acts or in a physician's report, one must really
+say only to a woman, and not to a man, especially one of
+Flachsenfingen&quot;&mdash;or Scheerau.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">By way of excusing himself for associating with coquettes on the
+footing of a general lover, he appealed to his motive,&mdash;that of merely
+wishing to become acquainted with their ways,&mdash;and to the excellent
+Forster, who in Antwerp <i>knelt down</i>, as well as any born Catholic,
+before Rubens's altar-piece of the Virgin Mary ascending to heaven,
+merely to examine her more nearly.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">He had a still more dangerous excuse. &quot;Man,&quot; said he, &quot;should be
+everything, learn everything, try everything,&mdash;he should labor for the
+<i>union</i> of the two <i>churches</i><a name="div2Ref_268" href="#div2_268"><sup>[268]</sup></a> in his soul,&mdash;he should, if
+only for a couple of months, have been a city-musician,<a name="div2Ref_269" href="#div2_269"><sup>[269]</sup></a>
+grave-digger, gallows-<i>pater</i>,<a name="div2Ref_270" href="#div2_270"><sup>[270]</sup></a> an engineer, tragedy-manager,
+upper-court-marshal, an imperial vicar, deputy sheriff, a reviewer, a
+lady, in short, everything a man should have been for some days, in
+order that the hues of the prism might at last melt together into the
+perfect white.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">These principles are the more dangerous with one like him, who, strung
+with the tense strings of the most dissimilar powers, easily gave every
+one's note, not from dissimulation, but because his social poetic
+faculty could transport itself deeply into another's soul; hence he
+gained, tolerated, and copied the most unlike persons, notwithstanding
+his sincerity. But I pity him, that he has everywhere so much to
+suppress, his seeing through the Prince, his state of heart toward
+Clotilda, his conciliatory intrigues towards Agnola, his knowledge of
+Flamin's relations, &amp;c. Ah, reserve and dissimulation easily run
+together; and must not a constant dropping, when one stands directly
+under it, at last wear scars in the most solid character?</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Nothing chills the noblest parts of the inner man more than intercourse
+with persons in whom one cannot take any interest. This hotel-life at
+court, this daily seeing people who never even say &quot;I,&quot; whose relations
+one ignores as indifferently as their talents, unless some necessity
+seeks them,&mdash;this snatching only at the next moment, this racing by of
+the finest and most intellectual strangers and ant-swarms of visitors,
+who in three days are forgotten,&mdash;all this, which makes palaces like
+Russian ice-palaces, where even the stove full of naphtha flames is a
+lump of ice, and to which I need not at all add the <i>comic</i> salt,
+which, besides, chills all warm blood, as that of <i>Glauber</i> does hot
+water,&mdash;all this made his heart desolate, his days bald and burdensome,
+his nights distressful, his conduct too cold towards the good, too
+tolerant towards the bad.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">In addition to this, his Emanuel was silent, and, like nature, shut up
+his flowers within himself. He whom nature nourishes and builds up, is
+not in so good a mood in winter as in summer. The earth had on her
+powder-mantle of snow, and her night-gown on all day; the trees had
+wrapped up their buds in fleecy hair-papers, and the twigs looked like
+hair-pins. Victor's soul was like nature: O may Heaven soon warm in
+both the flowers of spring!</p>
+
+<p class="normal">As the pathological history of my Victor reminds me too painfully of
+the latent poisons in the human body, it shall soon come to an end. It
+pleased him that he became, by this fluttering round, more and more
+gallant and cold towards all women: the cord of love cuts less deeply
+into the bosom, when, plucked out into threads and floss, it flutters
+about everybody. He who, like his namesake, Saint Sebastian, looked
+like one stuck all full with (Cupid's) arrows, shot off arrows of
+another kind against the whole sex, though never against individuals.
+In this last circumstance his bitterness differed from Matthieu's, who
+could say of his own cousin, for example, who had lost her beauty by a
+late attack of small-pox: &quot;Her beauty held out right valiantly against
+the small-pox, and brought off from this victory the most glorious
+<i>scars</i>, and all of them indeed, like those of Pompey's knights;<a name="div2Ref_271" href="#div2_271"><sup>[271]</sup></a>
+in front and in the face.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">As assaf&#339;tida is used for <i>haut gout</i>, so does one season the
+finest <i>savoir vivre</i> by sundry bold incivilities. Bastian in the
+Tarantula-season was not to be embarrassed by anything: he went and
+came like a Parisian, without ceremony; he sought often bold, but
+advantageous postures of his body; during the play he made tours
+through the boxes as the Prince did through the coulisses; five times
+he carried matters so far (though with difficulty, and always only by
+means of setting before himself the example of the courtiers), that he
+listened indifferently, or absolutely looked away, when another was,
+telling him a story: all which things, if not essential, are
+nevertheless incidental to true politeness.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Nor will I let it be unnoticed in his praise, that he took to himself
+the regular <i>exotic</i> and <i>satirical</i> liberties of the <i>Gallican</i>
+Church
+toward several women at once, for in the presence of a single one he
+had still the old veneration of a noble heart. I will give at least one
+example of that. Once he was among five slanderesses (the company
+consisted of six females and a male person); the ugliest blackened all
+maidens, even those in print, e. g. the deceased Clarissa, whom she
+charged with not having in her intercourse with Lovelace been quite
+able to <i>sauver les dehors de la vertu</i>.<a name="div2Ref_272" href="#div2_272"><sup>[272]</sup></a> One can anticipate how
+the Königsberg school will receive it in their reviews, that he let
+himself down on one knee before the calumniatress, and said with some
+seriousness: &quot;<i>O Clarisse! voici votre Lovelace; retranchons quatre
+tomes, commençons comme les faiseurs d'Epopées par le reste</i>.&quot;<a name="div2Ref_273" href="#div2_273"><sup>[273]</sup></a></p>
+
+<p class="normal">To be sure, he frequently during the Tarantula-season reproached
+himself for the Tarantula-season; and when the Gentile-fore-court of
+his heart grew so full of women, while in the Holy of Holies there was
+nothing but mute darkness, and when his brain became an entomological
+cabinet of court trifles, then, of course, he often sighed in his
+balcony: &quot;O come soon, good father, that thy sinking son may soar out
+of this unclean March fog into a clearer life, before he has utterly
+stained himself, so as no longer even to frame this wish.&quot; And
+as often as he got sight, in Joachime's chamber, of the views of
+Maienthal,&mdash;which Giulia had had taken by the painter of Clotilda's
+portrait,&mdash;then in the midst of his jestings he turned his eye away
+from them with a sigh.&mdash;But he was not healed, until fate said, Now!
+Then all at once the theatre-key struck, which bids men come and act in
+the players' rehearsal of life;&mdash;the play itself is not given till the
+next life;&mdash;and then transpired something which I shall at once report
+in the following chapter, when I have done relating in this one how
+Victor stood with all the people about him.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">With many, properly speaking, badly,&mdash;in the first place, with
+Clotilda. She resided, to be sure, at the Minister's; as maid of honor,
+she would have belonged in the Paullinum, only the Prince had so
+contrived it for the greater facility of seeing her; but she was always
+about the Princess, with whom she was soon linked in intimacy by a
+similarity of seriousness and a similarity of reserve. Her indifference
+to one who had with her a common friend and teacher inspired this
+Victor with a still greater, especially as he knew she must feel that,
+in this cold mountain- and court-air, only a single, though faded,
+carnation slip of her fair soul bloomed, namely, himself. Then, too,
+the obligation of decorum, to look upon her coldly, must become a
+habit. The worst thing for him was that she was indifferent towards him
+without ill-feeling, and cold towards him with respect. Others were
+quite furious about the &quot;phlegmatic virtue of this Pygmalion's statue.&quot;
+The noble Mat called her often the <i>Holy</i> Virgin, or the Demoiselle
+Mother of God. It is made out very clearly by the Dog-documents, which
+I have opened, that some gentlemen of the Court, after various abortive
+attempts to explain to themselves a virtue irreconcilable with so much
+beauty, now on the ground of temperament, now of concealed love,
+and now of a coquettish coyness, ending at last, like the water
+at St. Clermont, in petrifying and becoming <i>its own bridge over
+itself</i>,&mdash;that these cunning gentlemen most felicitously fell upon the
+conjecture that Clotilda wore this mask over her face as a copy of the
+face of the Princess, for the sake of continuing in favor. Hence
+Clotilda's discreet virtue was judged by most with greater indulgence,
+while one could excuse it, as an intentional imitation of a similar
+fault in the Princess, even by the example of like imitations, as
+courtiers often aped the greatest external natural faults, nay, even
+the virtues of a prince. So thought at least the more reasonable
+portion of the Court.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Agnola was assiduous in testifying an ever increasing gratitude to our
+hero for January's visits, although, as I think, she could detect the
+faithless intentions of the Prince in the presence of Clotilda full as
+well as she might sometimes see into Victor's soul in the presence of
+Joachime.... In fact, I should have begged the reader long since to be
+on the look-out; I deliver the facts with excusable stupidity, though
+with historic fidelity; if, now, there are therein fine, knavish,
+significant, intriguing traits and hints, it is without my knowledge,
+and therefore I cannot point them out to the reader with an index-hand,
+or announce them with a fire-drum,<a name="div2Ref_274" href="#div2_274"><sup>[274]</sup></a> but he himself&mdash;as he
+understands court histories&mdash;must know what I mean by my hints,&mdash;not
+<i>I</i>.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">With Joachime Victor would have gone on very well,&mdash;as he set down all
+faults which he found in other women, and not in her, to her credit as
+virtues, and as he grew more intimate with her personally; for the
+faults of maidens, like chocolate and tobacco, appear at first the more
+odd to the palate the better they taste to it afterward: he would have
+got on very well, but for two sharp corner-stones; but they were there.
+The first was,&mdash;for I will not reckon his slight annoyance at the short
+duration of her Christmas sentimentality,&mdash;that she was always finding
+fault with Clotilda, particularly with her &quot;affected&quot; virtue. The
+second was, that Clotilda sought her society quite as little: Victor
+could love no one whom Clotilda did not love. And now the race-weeks
+and visiting-Tarantula-dance hours of one man are at an end; but, alas!
+all posterity must yet cross the same hot <i>line</i> of folly and of youth.</p>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<p class="center"><img border="0" src="images/barstart.png" alt="barstart"></p>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+
+<h2><a name="div1Ref_24" href="#div1_24">24. DOG-POST-DAY.</a></h2>
+<br>
+
+<p class="center"><span class="sc2">Rouge.&mdash;Clotilda's Sickness.&mdash;The Play Of Iphigenia.&mdash;Difference
+between Plebeian and Patrician<a name="div2Ref_275" href="#div2_275"><sup>[275]</sup></a> Love.</span></p>
+<br>
+
+<p class="normal">On the 26th of February Victor found in the morning at Joachime's&mdash;the
+proud Clotilda. I know not whether it was by accident that she was
+here, or from politeness, or for the purpose of meeting more nearly a
+person whom Victor treated with some interest. But, O heavens! the
+cheeks of this Clotilda were pallid, her eyes were as if breathed over
+by an eternal tear, her voice emotional, as it were broken, and the
+pale marble body seemed only the image standing on the monument of the
+departed soul. Victor forgot the whole past, and his innermost soul
+wept for longing to succor her and wipe out from her life all dark
+winter landscapes. &quot;I am as well as usual to-day,&quot; said she to his
+professional inquiry, and he knew not what to make of this unexpected
+paleness; he could not, in fact, to-day make anything, not so much as a
+joke or a piece of flattery; his soul, dissolved into sympathy, would
+not take any form; then, too, he was embarrassed. Clotilda soon took
+leave;&mdash;and it would not have been possible for him to-day, not for all
+Great Poland (that ice-floe beautifully ground down under the sledging
+of emigrating nations and crowns), after she was gone, to stay half an
+hour longer.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Besides, he would have been obliged to go; for the page Matthieu called
+him to the Princess. The time was unusual; he could not wait to see,
+nor could he guess what was the matter. The Evangelist smiled (that he
+did now somewhat often when the Princess was the subject), and said:
+&quot;To Princes and Princesses weighty things were trivial and trivial
+things weighty, as Leibnitz<a name="div2Ref_276" href="#div2_276"><sup>[276]</sup></a> said of himself. When the crown and a
+hair-pin fall from their heads together, they look first of all for the
+hair-pin.&quot;<a name="div2Ref_277" href="#div2_277"><sup>[277]</sup></a></p>
+
+<p class="normal">By the way! It would be malice on my part toward the noble Matthieu, if
+I should longer suppress, the fact, that for some time he has been much
+more tender and ardent towards my hero,&mdash;which on any other man than
+he, I mean on a lurking villain, would be a Cain's-mark, and would have
+somewhat of the same meaning as the wagging of a cat's tail.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Victor was astonished at the request of the Princess,&mdash;that he would
+cure Clotilda: that is to say, not at the fact of her making a
+request,&mdash;for she often did him that honor,&mdash;but at the intelligence
+that Clotilda, on whose cheeks he had hitherto seen the apple-blossoms
+of health at his soul's expense in the <i>race-weeks</i>, had worn only dead
+blossoms,&mdash;namely, rouge, which the Princess had been obliged to
+enforce upon her for the sake of having a uniformity of bloom with the
+remaining red copper-flowers<a name="div2Ref_278" href="#div2_278"><sup>[278]</sup></a> of the court. Agnola, who, like her
+rank, was quick, besought him further, when he was appointed to the
+medical upper-examining-commission, to enter on his office as soon as
+might be, this very day forthwith, at the play, where he would find the
+candidate for examination.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">And he found her. The play was a sparkling brilliant brought from
+Eldorado,&mdash;Goethe's <i>Iphigenia</i>. When he saw the patient again with the
+evening-red of the rouge, wherein she was to glow at another's behest
+even during her going down,&mdash;when he saw this still victim (marked
+red, as it were, for the altar), which he and others had driven away
+from its meadows, from its solitary flowers, to the midst of the
+sacrificial knives of the Court, mutely enduring, the extinction of its
+wishes, and when he compared with woman's dumb patience man's raging
+restlessness,&mdash;and when it seemed as if Clotilda had lent her sorrow to
+Iphigenia with the prayer, &quot;Take my heart, take my voice and mourn with
+it,&mdash;mourn with it over thy separation from the fields of youth, over
+thy separation from a beloved brother,&quot;&mdash;and when he saw how she tried
+to fasten her eyes more steadfastly on Iphigenia, when she pined for
+her lost brother, in order to control their overflow and their
+direction (towards her own brother in the Parterre, towards Flamin), O
+then did such great sorrows and their signs in his eyes and looks need
+a pretext like the omnipotence of genius, in order to be confounded
+with pangs growing out of poetic illusion!</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Never did a physician question his patient with greater sympathy and
+forbearance than did he Clotilda in the next interlude: he excused
+his importunity with the commands of the Princess. I must first
+state that the fair patient&mdash;although he had been hitherto a falling
+Peter, whom many a cock-crow had brought rather to tears than to
+repentance&mdash;nevertheless remained the <i>second person</i>, whom he never
+denied, ... i. e. whom, he never addressed with the frivolous,
+whimsical, bold, entrapping turns of conversation now so common with
+him. The <i>first person</i>&mdash;whom he esteemed too highly to write to him in
+the present state of his heart&mdash;was his Emanuel.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Clotilda answered him, that &quot;she was as well as ever; the only thing
+there was sickly about her,&quot; she said, smiling, &quot;namely, her color, was
+already under the hands of a female surgeon, who, against her
+inclination, healed her only outwardly.&quot; This playful allusion to the
+rouging decreed by the Princess had the double design of excusing her
+painting and of diverting the Doctor from his tender-hearted
+seriousness. But the first was unnecessary,&mdash;since in the theatre even
+ladies who never wore rouge put it on as they entered the box and wiped
+it off on going out, in order not to hang there as the only quinces on
+a tree full of glowing Stettin-apples, and as, in fact, mineral cheeks
+were required of the whole female court-retinue as facial court livery.
+The second was vain; much more likely were the wounds of his heart to
+be aggravated by two causes: by that cold, almost fanatical resignation
+to fading away,&mdash;and by something inexpressibly mild and tender which,
+in the female face, often betokens the breaking heart, the failing
+life, as fruit by <i>soft</i> yielding to <i>pressure</i> announces its
+ripeness.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">O ye good creatures, ye women, while joy already beautifies you, is the
+reason why sorrow makes you still more beautiful and too touching
+<i>this</i>, that it so often overtakes you, or is it because sorrow borrows
+the dress of joy? Why must I here confess so passingly my pleasure at
+your endurance and veiling of sorrows, when at this moment before my
+fancy so many hearts full of tears sweep by with open countenances full
+of smiles, and win for your sex the praise of opening its heart as
+gladly to sorrow as to joy, as flowers, although they *unclose only
+before the sun, yet also burst open when it is overcast by a cloudy
+heaven?</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Victor, without being led off his track by her answer, continued:
+&quot;Perhaps you cannot wean yourself from fair nature and from
+exercise,&mdash;these late hours, which I myself feel&quot;&mdash;She prevented his
+finishing the sentence, to remind him that she had, he must remember,
+brought her present complexion with her from home. One sees, however,
+in this reminder more forbearance than truth; for she would not
+complain of her court office before the very one who had helped her
+gain it.&mdash;Victor, who saw her sickliness so clearly, and yet knew not
+how to propound another question, stood there dumfounded. Their own
+silence loosens reserved people's tongues: Clotilda began of herself,
+&quot;As I do not know what harms me here, except the rouge, I beg my
+physician to prohibit me this dietetic fault,&quot; i. e. to persuade the
+Princess into a revocation of her rouge-edict. &quot;I should be glad,&quot; she
+continued, &quot;to gain some resemblance at least to two such good friends
+as Giulia and Emanuel,&quot;&mdash;i. e. a pale color, or else the notion of a
+speedy death. Victor threw out a hasty &quot;Yes,&quot; and turned his smarting
+eye toward the rising curtain.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Never, haply, were the scenes of players and hearers more like each
+other. Iphigenia was Clotilda; the wild Orestes, her brother, was her
+brother Flamin; the soft, radiant Pylades was his friend Victor. And as
+Flamin stood below in the pit with his cloudy face,&mdash;(he came only for
+the sake of seeing his sister more conveniently,)&mdash;then did it seem to
+our and his friend as if he were addressed by him, when Orestes said to
+Pylades:&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="poem">
+<p class="t4" style="text-indent:-8px">
+&quot;Remind me not of those enchanting days,<br>
+When a free room thy house afforded me:<br>
+Thy noble father wisely, tenderly,<br>
+Nursed the half-stiffened blossoms of my youth;<br>
+When thou, an ever-gay associate,<br>
+Even as a motley, light-winged butterfly<br>
+Plays round a dark-hued flower, day after day<br>
+Didst dance and hover round me with new life,<br>
+And win thy bliss a way into my soul.&quot;</p>
+</div>
+
+<p class="normal">Clotilda felt quite as painfully that they were playing her life on the
+stage, and struggled against her eyes.... But when Iphigenia said to
+her brother Orestes,&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="poem">
+<p class="t4" style="text-indent:-8px">
+&quot;O hear me! Look on me! See how my heart<br>
+Opens at last, after so long a time,<br>
+To the sweet bliss of kissing that dear brow,<br>
+Most precious treasure earth yet holds for me, ....<br>
+O let me,&mdash;let me&mdash;for in brighter waves<br>
+Not from Parnassus leaps the eternal stream<br>
+From rock to rock down to the golden vale,<br>
+Than from my bosom joy outgushing flows<br>
+And like a sea of bliss enclasps me round&quot;;&mdash;</p>
+</div>
+
+<p class="continue">and when Clotilda mournfully surveyed the greater interval of sorrows
+and days between herself and her brother; then gushed up the inner
+fountains and filled her large eyes, so often fixed upon the heavens,
+and a quick bending forward hid the sisterly tear from all eyes
+untouched by emotion. But it did not escape the feeling eyes with which
+her friend beside her imitated her.... And here a virtuous voice said
+within Victor: &quot;Disclose to her that thou knowest the secret of her
+relationship,&mdash;lift off from this sorely oppressed heart the load of
+silence: perhaps she is withering under a grief which a confidant may
+cool and take away!&quot; Ah, to listen to this voice was indeed the least
+with which he could content his infinite sympathy! He said in an
+extremely low tone, and which emotion rendered almost unintelligible to
+her: &quot;My father has long since disclosed to me, that Iphigenia knows
+the presence of her brother and of my friend.&quot; Clotilda turned suddenly
+and blushingly towards him; for a more minute explanation he let his
+eyes glide down to Flamin; turning pale; she looked away and said
+nothing; but during the whole play her heart seemed to be far more
+compressed, and she was compelled now to stifle still more tears and
+sighs than before. At last in the midst of her sadness she gave
+gratitude its rights, and whispered to him for his sympathy and his
+confidence, as if with a dying smile, her thanks. He laid upon the
+distaff of the conversation entirely new and foreign material, because
+he would fain, during the spinning, get a clearer and more certain
+light upon the sad impression which his confession seemed to have
+produced. He inquired after the latest letters from Emanuel. She
+replied: &quot;I only wrote to him yesterday all through the eclipse of the
+moon; he cannot answer me often, because writing pains his breast.&quot;
+Now, as the eclipse of the 25th of February began at twenty minutes
+after ten in the evening, at eleven o'clock and forty-one minutes was
+at its climax, and at one o'clock and two minutes was over: accordingly
+Victor, as physician, could fall upon the medical sinner with sermons
+and hammers of the law and pronounce the verdict; now, it was no
+wonder. Pass it by, Doctor! These dear creatures can more easily obey a
+man&mdash;the Ten Commandments,&mdash;books,&mdash;Virtue,&mdash;the Devil himself more
+easily, than the Dietician. Clotilda said: &quot;The midnight hours are
+simply my only free hours,&mdash;and Maienthal, indeed, I can never forget.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Ah, how could one?&quot; said he.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">The music before the last act, and the tragic tone, and the sorrows
+inspired her, and she continued: &quot;Did not one drink of <i>Lethe</i>, when
+one trod the shores of Elysium and when one left it?&quot; ... She paused.
+&quot;I would drink of no Lethe, not in the first case, still less in the
+<i>last</i>,&mdash;no!&quot; And never was &quot;No&quot; said in a lower, softer, more
+slow-drawn tone. In Victor's heart a three-edged compassion passed
+painfully to and fro, as he imagined to himself Clotilda mocked by
+fate, writing and weeping in the midnight under a moon dismembered and
+beclouded by earth's shadow; he said nothing, he stared rigidly into
+the mournful scenes of the stage, and still wept on when the joyous
+ones had, there, already evolved themselves in their place.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">At home he made his brain-fibres Ariadne's threads to extricate himself
+from the labyrinth of the causes of her trouble, and particularly of
+the <i>new</i> one which had seemed to come upon her at his disclosure. But
+he remained in the labyrinth; undoubtedly grief begat the sickness, but
+who begat the grief? It would be hard for these poor, tender
+butterflies, if there were more than one mortal affliction; in every
+lane, in every house, thou wilt find a wife or a daughter who has to go
+to church or to the Tragedy to sigh, and who must go up into the upper
+story to weep; but this aggregated trouble is worried away with smiles,
+and years increase for a long time side by side with the tears. On the
+contrary, there is a grief which breaks them off,&mdash;think of that, dear
+Victor, in the joyful hours of thy general love,<a name="div2Ref_279" href="#div2_279"><sup>[279]</sup></a> and think of it,
+all ye who with warm, loving hands draw the throbbing heart of such a
+delicate creature out of its breast, to take it into your own by the
+side of your own heart, and warm it forever! When you then throw
+away this hot heart, which you have torn out like a butterfly's
+honey-proboscis: still, like that, it continues to quiver, but then it
+grows cold, and erelong beats no more.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Unhappy love, then, was the gnawing honey-dew on this flower, Sebastian
+concluded. Naturally he thought of himself first; but all his nicest
+observations, his now so familiar <i>ricochet-glances</i> out of the <i>corner
+of his eye</i> had long since convinced him that he had to ascribe the
+distinction, which she did not deny him, more to her impartiality than
+to her inclination. Who else it could be at Court,&mdash;that was a thing
+which he in vain applied one electrometer after another to draw out.
+And he knew beforehand that he should experiment in vain, since
+Clotilda would baffle all auscultation of her inner state, if she had
+an unreciprocated inclination; reason was with her the wax, which they
+stick to one end of the magnetic needle, in order to obviate or conceal
+the sinking (<i>inclination</i>) of the other. Nevertheless, he made up his
+mind the next time to hold some divining-rods to her soul.&mdash;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">I must here utter a thought, which may discover some sense and my
+general speculation in the matter. My Dog-Post-Master Knef did not
+probably foresee that I should calculate the year and the duration of
+this whole story merely from the lunar eclipse of the 25th of February,
+which he announced, just as, in fact, great astronomers, by means of
+the moon's phases, found out so much about the earth's geographical
+longitude. 1793 was the year in which what is related in this chapter
+occurred: I am good for that; for as, at all events, the whole story,
+as is well known, takes place in the ninth decade of the eighteenth
+century, and as no lunar eclipse of a 25th of February is to be found
+there at all, except in the year 1793, i. e. the present year, my
+proposition is made out. To make assurance doubly sure, I have compared
+all the changes of moon and weather occurring in this book with those
+of 1792 and 1793; and all fitted together beautifully;&mdash;the reader
+should also reckon it after me. It is uncommonly gratifying to me,
+that, consequently, as I write in July, the history follows in a
+half-year from my description.&mdash;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Victor delayed not his visit to the Princess's, that he might there
+announce the reserved Clotilda as a complete nervous patient. He
+himself laughed inwardly at the expression,&mdash;and at the Doctors,&mdash;and
+at their nervous cures,&mdash;and said, that, as formerly the French kings
+in their treatment of the goitre had to say, &quot;The King touches thee,
+but God heals thee,&quot; so should physicians say, The city and country
+physician feels thy pulse, but God works the cure. Here, however, he
+had three good intentions in giving out that she was a nervous
+sufferer: first, that of gaining for her the abolition of her
+Court-vassalage,&mdash;at least her deliverance from the precise office of
+maid of honor, because the splinter of the reproach was continually
+festering in his heart, &quot;It is my fault that she is obliged to be
+here&quot;; further, of securing for her in advance permission to take the
+spring and country air, in case she should by and by sue for it;
+finally, of releasing her from her compulsory resemblance to those
+ladies on whose lead-colored faces, as on the leaden soldiers of
+children, the red daily wears off and is daily renewed. But as Agnola
+herself painted, he was obliged, out of courtesy, as physician, to
+forbid it to both at once. The Princess countersigned all his petitions
+very graciously: only as to the rouge-article she gave, in regard to
+herself, no resolution at all, and in regard to Clotilda the following:
+she had nothing to say against her appearing in her presence, except on
+court days and at the play, without rouge; and she would willingly
+grant her a dispensation from both, unless her health was restored.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">He could hardly wait for the moment of taking leave, so impatient was
+he to carry this imperial-recess or resolution to the beloved patient.
+He himself wondered at this complaisance of the Princess, with whom,
+generally, petitions were sins, and who refused nothing&mdash;except what
+was asked. His perplexity was now only this,&mdash;how to communicate to
+Clotilda the indulgences of the Princess, without the offensive
+confession of having made a plea of her illness. But out of this slight
+evil a great one extricated him: when he came into her presence, she
+looked ten times as sick as she had day before yesterday, at the
+disclosure of her relationship: her blossoms, heavy with cold dew,
+drooped to the earth.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Gait and posture were unchanged; there was the same external
+joyousness, but the glance was often too fluttering, often too fixed;
+across the lily-cheeks darted often a hectic flush, through the lower
+lip at one moment a subdued convulsion.... At this point sympathy
+frightened her friend out of the bounds of courtesy, and he told her
+outright the consent of the Princess. He summoned to the aid of his
+burdened heart his previous court-boldness, and commanded her to make
+the coming spring her apothecary's shop, and the flowers her medicinal
+herbs, and her&mdash;fancy her pharmacy. &quot;You seem,&quot; said she, smiling, &quot;to
+count me among the larks, who must always have <i>green turf</i> in their
+cage. However, that my Princess and you may not have had your kindness
+for nothing, I will, finally, do it. I confess to you, I am at least a
+<i>valide imaginaire</i>.<a name="div2Ref_280" href="#div2_280"><sup>[280]</sup></a> I feel myself well.&quot; ... She interrupted
+herself to question him, with the frankness of virtue and with an eye
+swimming in sisterly love, about her brother, whether he was happy and
+contented, how he worked, how he filled his position? She told him how
+sad a burden these questions, hitherto locked up so deeply in her soul,
+had been to her and she thanked him for the gift of his confidence with
+a warmth which he took as a delicate reproof of his previous silence.
+Of old she always loved to stand in a flower-garland of children;
+but in Flachsenfingen she had gathered still more of these little
+nebulous stars about her brightness, and indeed for a peculiar reason,
+namely, to cover the fact, that she drew to herself Giulia, a little
+five-years-old grandchild of the city Senior, with whom her brother
+resided, as his unwitting biographer and news-carrier. More than three
+times he felt as if he must fall at the feet of this lily-white angel,
+borne higher and higher by her cloud, and say with outspread arms:
+&quot;Clotilda, be my friend, before thy death,&mdash;my old love for thee is
+long since crushed out, for thou art too good for me and for all of us;
+but I will be thy friend; my heart will I conquer for thee; for thee
+will I resign my heaven. O, thou wilt, besides, not live to see the
+evening dew of age, thou wilt soon close thy eyes, and the morning dew
+still hangs therein!&quot; For he held her soul to be a pearl, whose
+mussel-body lies open in the dissolving sun, that the pearl may the
+earlier be dislodged. On leaving, he could with the frankness of the
+friend, which had taken the place of the lover's reserve, offer a
+repetition of his visits. Altogether he treated her now more warmly and
+unconstrainedly; first, because he had so utterly renounced her noble
+heart, that he wondered at his former bold claims to it; secondly,
+because the feeling of his disinterested, self-sacrificing honesty
+towards her poured balm on his previous stings of remorse.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">To this sickness was added an evening or an event, which the reader, I
+think, will not know how to understand. Victor was to take Joachime to
+the play, and her brother, was to come and fetch him first. I have
+already twice set it down, that for some weeks Matthieu had no longer
+been so repulsive to him as a mouse is to an elephant: he had, after
+all, found out a single good side, dug out some moral yellow mica
+attaching to him,&mdash;namely, the greatest attachment to his sister
+Joachime, who alone had the key to his whole heart, closed to his
+parents, the sole claim on his secrets and his services; secondly, he
+loved in Matthieu what the Minister condemned,&mdash;the spirit-of-salt of
+freedom; thirdly, it is so with us all: when he have heated our
+heart for some female one out of a family, we afterwards extend the
+stove-warmth to the whole kin and trenchership,&mdash;brothers, nephews,
+fathers; fourthly, Matthieu was continually praised and excused by his
+sister. When Victor arrived at Joachime's, she had with her headache
+and dressing-maids,&mdash;finery and pain were increasing; at last she sent
+off the live fitting-machines, and so soon as she was hardened into a
+Venus out of the foam of powder and jewel boxes, rouge-rags and
+<i>mouchoirs de Vénus</i>, <i>poudres d'odeur</i> and lip-pomades, then she sat
+down and said she should stay at home on account of headache. Victor
+stayed too, and very gladly. Whoso knows not the framework and cellular
+work of the human heart will wonder that Victor's friendship for
+Clotilda brought a whole honey-comb of love for Joachime into his
+cells; it was delightful to him when they visited and embraced each
+other; he sought not in the blessing-fingers of the Pope so much
+healing virtue as in Clotilda's; her friendship seemed to him an excuse
+for his, and to set Joachime on the pedestal of esteem, to which with
+all his windlasses he had not been able to raise her. Even the sense of
+his increasing worth gave him new right to love; and to-day even
+Clotilda's crape and princely hat would have asserted its helmet
+ornaments on Joachime's aching and more than commonly patient head. To
+her continued flirtation with the pair of fools he had long since
+adapted himself, because he knew very well <i>which one</i> among the three
+wise men from the East she had not for a fool, but for an adorer. But
+to return!</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Matthieu, who also stayed at home to please his sister,&mdash;he and Victor
+and she made the entire band of this <i>concert spirituel</i>. Joachime on
+the sofa leaned back her delicate, sick head against the wall and
+looked at the inlaid floor, and her drooping eyelids made her more
+beautiful. The Evangelist went out and came in. Victor, as he always
+did, dashed round the chamber. It was a very fine evening, and I wish
+this of mine were so. The conversation turned upon love; and Victor
+asserted the existence of two kinds,&mdash;the citizenly, and the
+<i>distingué</i> or French. He loved the French in books and as a general
+love, but he hated it the moment it was to be the only love; he
+described it to-day thus: &quot;Take a little ice,&mdash;a little heart,&mdash;a
+little wit,&mdash;a little paper,&mdash;a little time,&mdash;a little incense; pour
+together and put into two persons of rank; in that way you have a good,
+true French Fontenellian love.&quot; &quot;You forgot,&quot; added Mat, &quot;one
+ingredient,&mdash;a small amount of senses, at least a <i>fifth</i> or <i>sixth</i>
+part, which must be added to the medicine as <i>adjuvans</i> or
+<i>constituens</i>.<a name="div2Ref_281" href="#div2_281"><sup>[281]</sup></a> Meanwhile, it has at least the merit of shortness;
+love, like a tragedy, should be restricted to unity of time, namely, to
+the space of one day, that it may not take still more resemblance to
+the tragic. But describe now common love!&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal"><i>Victor</i>: &quot;That I prefer.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal"><i>Matthieu</i>: &quot;Not I. It is merely a longer madness than anger. <i>On y
+pleure, on y crie, on y soupire, on y ment, on y enrage, on y tue, on y
+meurt,&mdash;enfin, on se donne à tous les diables, pour avoir son
+ange</i>.<a name="div2Ref_282" href="#div2_282"><sup>[282]</sup></a> Our talks are to-day for once full of arabesques and <i>à la
+grecque</i>: I will make you a cookery-book receipt for a good citizenly
+love: take two young and large hearts,&mdash;wash them clean in baptismal
+water or printer's ink of German romances,&mdash;pour on them warm blood and
+tears,&mdash;set them on the fire and under the full moon, and let them
+boil,&mdash;stir them briskly with a dagger,&mdash;take them out and garnish
+them, like crabs, with forget-me-not or other wild-flowers, and serve
+them up warm: in that way you have a savory citizenly heart-soup.&quot;<a name="div2Ref_283" href="#div2_283"><sup>[283]</sup></a></p>
+
+<p class="normal">Matthieu further added, that &quot;in the ardent commonalty-love there was
+more agony than amusement; in it, as in Dante's poem, the Hell was
+worked out best, and the Heaven worst. The older a maiden or a pickled
+herring was, so much the darker was the eye in both, and the eye was
+made dark by love. Every lady in one of the higher circles ought to be
+glad that she needs to retain nothing of the man's to whom she is
+chained but his portrait in the ring, as Prometheus, when Jupiter had
+once sworn to leave him soldered for thirty thousand years to Caucasus,
+wore during the whole period only a small bit of this Bastille on his
+hand in the shape of a finger-ring.&quot; Whereupon Matthieu darted out, as
+he always did after witty explosions. Victor loved the bitterest and
+most unjust satire in another's mouth, as a work of art; he forgave
+all, and continued cheerful.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Joachime then said, jestingly: &quot;If, then, no style of love is good for
+anything, as you two have proved, there is nothing left for us but to
+hate.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Surely not,&quot; said he, &quot;your respected brother has simply not said a
+true word. Imagine to yourself, that I were the poor people's
+catechist<a name="div2Ref_284" href="#div2_284"><sup>[284]</sup></a> and in love. I am in love with the second daughter of
+the <i>pastor primarius</i>; her part is that of a listening-sister;<a name="div2Ref_285" href="#div2_285"><sup>[285]</sup></a>
+for maidens in citizenly life know not how to talk, at least they can
+do it better in hatred than in love. The poor's catechist has little
+<i>bel esprit</i>, but much <i>saint esprit</i>, much honesty, much truth, too
+much soft-heartedness, and infinite love. The catechist cannot spin out
+any gallant intrigue for several weeks or months, still less can he
+dispute the Pastor's second daughter into love, like a <i>roué</i>;&mdash;he
+holds his peace to keep up his hope, but with a heart full of eternal
+love, full of devoted wishes, trembling and silent, he follows every
+step of the loved and&mdash;loving one; but she guesses not his feelings,
+nor he hers. And then she dies.... But before she dies, comes the pale
+catechist disconsolate to the side of her dying bed, and presses her
+trembling hand ere it relaxes, and gives the cold eye one more tear of
+joy ere it stiffens, and breaks in even upon the pangs of the wrestling
+soul with the soft spring sound, 'I love thee.' When he has said it,
+she dies of the last joy, and then he loves no one on earth any more.&quot;
+...</p>
+
+<p class="normal">The past had come over his soul. Tears hung in his eyes, and confounded
+in a singular obscurity the image of the sick Clotilda with that of
+Joachime;&mdash;he saw and conceived a form which was not present;&mdash;he
+pressed the hand of the one that looked on him, and thought not that
+she might refer all to herself.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Suddenly Matthieu entered, smiling, and his sister smiled with him, in
+order to explain everything, and said, &quot;The court-physician has been
+taking the trouble to refute thee.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Victor, suddenly chilled, replied ambiguously and bitterly: &quot;You will
+comprehend, Herr von Schleunes, that it is easiest for me to put you to
+flight when you are not in the field.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Mat transfixed him with his eyes; but Victor cast his down and repented
+his bitterness. The sister continued indifferently: &quot;I think my brother
+is often in the condition of changing with the fashion.&quot; He received it
+with a sunny smile, and thought, as did Victor, that she alluded to his
+gallant adventures and sham-fights with women of all ranks that sit at
+the Diet. But when she had sent him off to inquire of her mother who
+was coming to the <i>cercle</i> this evening, she said to the Medicus: &quot;You
+do not know what I meant. We have at court a sick lady, who is the very
+incarnation of <i>your</i> Pastor's daughter,&mdash;and my brother has not so
+much nor so little spirit as to act the poor's catechist.&quot; Victor
+started back, broke off and took his leave.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Why? How so? On what account? But does not the reader perceive, then,
+that the sick lady must be Clotilda, who seeks to escape Mat's fine
+approaches within ear-shot and bow-shot of her heart? In fact, Victor
+had seen well enough that the Evangelist had been hitherto playing a
+more devoted part towards Clotilda than before her entrance into his
+Escurial and robber's castle he could carry on; but Victor had ascribed
+this politeness simply to the fact of her having there her quarters.
+But now the map of his plan lay open there: he had intentionally met a
+person who was indifferent towards him with the show of contempt
+(which, however, he finely directed more at her future small income
+than at her personal attractions), in order thereby to win her
+attention,&mdash;that next-door neighbor of love,&mdash;and afterward, by a
+sudden change to complaisance, to win something more than attention.
+&quot;O, thou canst win nothing!&quot; every sigh in Victor exclaimed. And yet it
+gave him pain, that this noble woman, this angel, must strike such an
+adversary with her wings. Now there were thirty things at once
+suspicious to him. Joachime's disclosure and coldness, Matthieu's
+smile, and&mdash;everything.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">So far this chapter, to which I have nothing more to append than some
+mature thoughts. Of course, one sees plainly, that poor Victor
+mutilates his soul to the size of every female one, as that tyrant did
+the bedfellows to the length of their bed.<a name="div2Ref_286" href="#div2_286"><sup>[286]</sup></a> To be sure, respect is
+the mother of love; but the daughter is often some years older than the
+mother. He takes back one hope of female worth after another. Latest of
+all, indeed, did he give up his demand or expectation of that sublime
+<i>Indian</i> sense of eternity, which imparts to us, shadowy figures
+hanging in the magic smoke of life, an inextinguishable luminous point
+for self-consciousness, and which lifts us above more than <i>one</i> earth;
+but as he saw that women, among all resemblances to Clotilda, acquired
+this last, and as he bethought himself that a worldly life grinds down
+all the greatness in man, as the weather gnaws away from statues and
+gravestones precisely the <i>relieved parts</i>, there wanted nothing to his
+handing over to Joachime the declaration of love which had long been
+fairly written out, nothing except, on her part, a misfortune,&mdash;a wet
+eye, a storm of the soul, a buskin. In more perspicuous words, he said
+to himself: &quot;I wish she were a sentimental ninny and absolutely
+intolerable. Then when, some time or other, she had her eyes right
+full, and her heart too, and then, when I could not tell, for emotion,
+where my head was standing,&mdash;then I could advance and take out my heart
+and reach it to her and say, It is poor Bastian's, only keep it.&quot; It
+seems to me as if I heard him in thought softly add, &quot;To whom else
+could I give it?&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">That he really had the first thought, we see from the fact that he
+inserted it in his diary, from which my correspondent draws everything,
+and which he, with the sincerity of the freest soul, made for his
+father, in order as it were to atone for his faults by protocolling
+them. His Italian lackey did hardly anything but engross it.&mdash;-Did it
+not depend on the dog and his news-box, his declaration of love should
+take place this very day: I would break an arm of Joachime's,&mdash;or lay
+her in the sick-bed,&mdash;or blow out the Minister's lamp of life, or bring
+on some disaster or other in her house,&mdash;and then I would conduct my
+hero to the suffering heroine, and say: &quot;When I have gone, kneel down
+and hand her thy heart.&quot; But in this way the chemical process of his
+love-making may last full as long as a process at law, and I am
+prepared for three quires.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">But here I will confess something which the reader's pride conceals:
+that he and I, at the entrance of every lady in these Dog-Post-Days,
+have made a <i>mis-shot</i> of <i>salute</i>,&mdash;every one of them we have taken
+for
+the heroine of the hero,&mdash;at first Agatha,&mdash;then Clotilda,&mdash;then, when
+he enclosed his declaration of love in the watch of the Princess, said,
+&quot;I see now beforehand through the whole business.&quot; Then we both said,
+&quot;After all, we were right about Clotilda.&quot; Then in distress I laid hold
+on Marie, and said, &quot;I shall not reveal anything further.&quot; At last
+it turns out to be one whom none of us had thought of (at least not
+I),&mdash;Joachime.&mdash;So it may fare with myself, when I marry....</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Before passing from the Post-Day to the intercalary day, the following
+additional minutes are to be passed: Clotilda put off her illegitimate
+cheeks, her <i>joues</i><a name="div2Ref_287" href="#div2_287"><sup>[287]</sup> </a><i>de Paris</i>, her rouge, and seldomer exposed
+now her withering heart to the shaping of the court napkin-press. The
+Prince, who for her sake had attended as a transient hearer in the
+lecture-hall of his consort, stayed away somewhat often, and then
+called at Schleunes's: nevertheless, the Princess had magnanimity
+enough not to make our Victor atone, by the taking back of her
+gratitude, for the withdrawal of January's favor.&mdash;In Victor there was
+a long war, whether he should impart to Clotilda's brother the new
+proofs of her sisterly love:&mdash;at last,&mdash;moved by Flamin's suffering,
+impoverished heart, stung by reports and rascals and suspicion, and by
+the thought that he had been able hitherto to give so little pleasure
+to this ingenuous friend,&mdash;he told him almost everything (<i>except</i> the
+relationship).</p>
+
+<p class="normal">P. S.&mdash;The undersigned testifies, by request, that the undersigned has
+completed his 24th Post-Day in due order on the last day of July, or
+Messidor. On the island of St. John's, 1793.</p>
+
+<p class="right" style="margin-right:25%"><span class="sc">Jean Paul</span>,</p>
+
+<p class="right"><i>Mining-Superintendent of Scheerau</i>.</p>
+<br>
+
+<h3>SIXTH INTERCALARY DAY.</h3>
+
+<h4><span class="sc">Concerning the Wilderness and the Promised Land of Humanity</span>.</h4>
+
+<p class="normal">There are vegetable men, animal men, and divine men.&mdash;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">When we were to be dreamed, an angel grew drowsy and fell asleep and
+dreamed. Then came <i>Phantasus</i>,<a name="div2Ref_288" href="#div2_288"><sup>[288]</sup></a> and swept broken meteorological,
+phenomena, things like nights, fragments of chaos, conglomerated
+plants, before him, and disappeared with them.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Then came <i>Phobetor</i>, who drove herds of beasts along before him, that
+murdered and grazed as they passed, and disappeared with them.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Then came <i>Morpheus</i> and played before him with happy children, with
+crowned mothers, with shapes that kissed each other, and with fleeting
+mortals, and when the angel awoke with ecstasy, Morpheus and the human
+race and the world's history had disappeared....</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&mdash;At present the angel still sleeps and dreams,&mdash;we are still in his
+dream,&mdash;only <i>Phobetor</i> is with him, and Morpheus still waits for
+Phobetor with his beasts to disappear....</p>
+
+<p class="normal">But let us, instead of dreaming, think and hope; and for the present
+ask: will <i>vegetable</i> men, <i>animal</i> men, at last be succeeded by
+<i>divine</i> men? Does the <i>going</i> of the world-clock betray as much
+design
+as the building of it, and has it a <i>dial-plate</i> wheel and an <i>index
+hand</i>?</p>
+
+<p class="normal">One cannot (with a well-known philosopher) reason directly from final
+causes in <i>Physics</i> to final causes in <i>History</i>, any more than I, in
+the individual, can deduce from the teleological (intentional)
+structure of a man a teleological biography of the same, or any more
+than, from the ingenious structure of animals, I call infer a
+continuous plan in their universal history. Nature is iron, always the
+same, and the wisdom shown in her framework is never obscured; the
+human race is free, and, like the infusorial animal, the multiform
+Vorticelle, assumes every moment, now regular, now anomalous shapes.
+Every physical disorder is only the hull of an order, every foul spring
+is the hull of a fair autumn; but are, then, our vices the buds of our
+virtues, and is the earthly fall of a continually sinking villain
+nothing but a disguised ascension of his to heaven?&mdash;And is there an
+object in the life of a Nero? Then I could just as well take back and
+reverse all and make out virtues to be the heart-leaves of disguised
+vices. But if, as many a one does, we carry the abuse of language so
+far as to reverse <i>moral</i> height and depth, like <i>geometrical</i>,
+according to the <i>point of view</i>, as <i>positive</i> and <i>negative</i>
+magnitudes; if, therefore, all gouty knobs, spotted fevers, and
+<i>lead</i>-<a name="div2Ref_289" href="#div2_289"><sup>[289]</sup></a> or <i>silver</i>-colics of the human race are nothing but a
+different kind of healthiness: then we certainly need not ask whether
+man will ever get well; in that case he could never in any possible
+maladies be anything but well.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">If a monk of the tenth century had shut himself up in a fit of
+melancholy, and meditated on the earth, not however on its end, but on
+its future: would not, in his dreams, the thirteenth century have been
+already a brighter one, and the eighteenth merely a glorified tenth?</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Our weather-prophesyings from <i>present</i> temperature are logically
+correct and historically false, because new casualties, an earthquake,
+a comet, reverse the currents of the whole atmosphere. Can the
+above-imagined monk correctly calculate, if he does not assume such
+future magnitudes as America, Gunpowder, and Printer's ink?&mdash;A new
+religion, a new Alexander, a new disease, a new Franklin, can break,
+swallow up, dam, turn back the forest stream whose course and contents
+we propose to reduce on our parchment. There lie still four quarters of
+the globe full of enchained savage races;&mdash;their chain daily grows
+thinner,&mdash;time unlooses it;&mdash;what desolation, at least what changes,
+must they not bring about on the little <i>bowling-green</i> of our
+cultivated countries? Nevertheless, all nations of the earth must one
+day be fused together and be purified in a common fermentation, if ever
+this atmosphere of life is to be cleared up.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Can we draw from some miniature earthquakes and volcanoes, which we
+ourselves have produced with iron-filings and aquafortis, (in this
+case, types and printer's ink,) conclusions as to the Ætna eruptions,
+i. e. from the revolutions of the few cultivated peoples as to those of
+the uncultivated? Since we may assume that the human race lives as many
+thousands of years as the individual does years, may we venture from
+the sixth year to set the horoscope of youth and manhood? Add to this
+that the biography of this childish period is precisely the most
+meagre, and that awakened nations&mdash;almost all quarters of the globe are
+as yet full of sleeping ones&mdash;in <i>one</i> year produce more historical
+material, and <i>consequently</i> more historians, than a sleep-buried
+Africa in a century. We shall, therefore, <i>then</i> be best able to
+prophesy from universal history, when the awaking nations shall have
+appended to it their million or two supplementary volumes.&mdash;All savage
+nations seem to have been under <i>one</i> stamp; on the contrary, the mint
+of culture coins each one differently. The North American and the old
+German resemble each other more strongly than Germans do Germans of
+neighboring centuries. Neither the Golden Bull, nor the <i>Magna Charta</i>,
+nor the <i>Code Noir</i>, could Aristotle inlay into his forms of government
+and obedience; else he would have extended them; but are we then
+confident of foreseeing any better the future national convention in
+Mongolia, or the Decretal Letters and Extravagants of the enlightened
+Dalai-Lama, or the Recesses of the Arab Imperial Bench of Knights?
+Since Nature coins no people with <i>one</i> mint-stamp or one hand alone,
+but with thousands at once,&mdash;hence on the German race is there a
+greater multitude of impressions than on the shield of Achilles,&mdash;how
+do we, who cannot even calculate the past, but simpler, revolutions of
+the globe, expect to look into the moral ones of its inhabitants?</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Of all that follows from these premises I believe the opposite,
+excepting the necessity of prophetic modesty. Scepticism, which makes
+us, instead of slow to believe, unbelieving, and instead of the <i>eyes</i>
+proposes to purge the <i>light</i>, becomes nonsense and the most fearful
+philosophical impotence and atony.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Man regards his century or his half-century as the culmination of
+light, as a festal-day, to which all other centuries lead only as
+week-days. He knows only two golden ages,&mdash;the one at the beginning of
+the world, and the one at the end of it,&mdash;by which he understands only
+his own; he finds history to be like great woods, in the middle of
+which are silence, night-birds, and birds of prey, and whose borders
+only are filled with light and song.&mdash;Certainly all things serve me;
+but I too serve all. As Nature, who in her eternity knows no loss of
+time, in her inexhaustibleness no loss of power, has no other law of
+frugality assigned her than that of prodigality,&mdash;as she, with <i>eggs</i>
+and <i>seed-corns</i>, ministers equally well to <i>nourishment</i> and to
+<i>propagation</i>,<a name="div2Ref_290" href="#div2_290"><sup>[290]</sup></a> and with an undeveloped germ-world sustains half a
+developed one,&mdash;as her way leads over no smooth bowling-alley, but over
+alps and seas;&mdash;our little heart must needs misunderstand her, whether
+in its hopes or in its fears; it must, as it becomes enlightened,
+reciprocally interchange <i>morning</i> and <i>evening red</i>; it must, in
+its contentment, now regard after-summer as <i>spring</i>, and now
+<i>after-winter</i> as <i>autumn</i>. <i>Moral</i> revolutions mislead us more
+than
+<i>physical</i>, because the former according to their nature occupy a
+<i>greater</i> play-room and space of time than the latter,&mdash;and yet the
+Dark Ages are nothing but a dipping into the shadow of <i>Saturn</i>, or an
+eclipse of the sun of short duration. A man who should be six thousand
+years old, would say to the six creation-days of the world's history,
+They are very good.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">But one should never set <i>moral</i> and <i>physical</i> revolutions and
+developments too near to each other. All Nature has no other motions
+than <i>former</i> ones; the circle is her path, she has no other years than
+Platonic,&mdash;but man alone is <i>changeable</i>, and the straight line or the
+zigzag describes his course. A sun has its eclipses as well as the
+moon, has its bloom and decay like a flower, but also its
+<i>palingenesia</i> and renovation. But there lies in the human race the
+necessity of an everlasting mutation; yet here there are only
+<i>ascending</i> and <i>descending</i> signs, no culmination; they do not
+necessarily draw one another after them, as in physics, and have no
+extreme limit. No people, no period returns; in physics, all must come
+back again. It is only accidental, not necessary, that nations, at a
+certain age and stage of progress, and on a certain rotten round of the
+ladder, fall again,&mdash;one only confounds the <i>last</i> step, from which
+nations fall, with the <i>highest</i>; the Romans, with whom not single
+rounds, but the whole ladder broke, were not necessitated to sink by a
+culture which does not equal even our own.<a name="div2Ref_291" href="#div2_291"><sup>[291]</sup></a> Nations have no age, or
+old age with them often precedes youth. Even with individuals the
+crab's-walk of the mind in old age is only accidental; still less has
+virtue in them a summer-solstice. Humanity has then the capacity of an
+endless improvement; but has it the hope also?&mdash;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">The disturbance of the <i>equipoise</i> of his own faculties makes the
+individual man miserable; the <i>inequality</i> of citizens, the
+<i>inequality</i> of nations, makes the earth miserable; just as lightnings
+arise from the neighborhood of the ebb and flow of the ether, and all
+storms from unequal distributions of air. But fortunately it lies in
+the nature of mountains to fill the valleys.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Not inequality of goods,&mdash;for the majority of voices and fists on the
+part of the poor balances in the scale the power of the rich,&mdash;but
+inequality of culture, does most to create and distribute the political
+fly-presses and forcing-pumps. The <i>Lex agraria</i> in the fields of
+science passes over at last into the physical fields. Since the tree of
+knowledge has thrust out its branches from the school windows of
+philosophy and the church windows of the priesthood into the common
+garden, all nations have become stronger.&mdash;Unequal cultivation chains
+the West Indies to the feet of Europe, Helots to Spartans, and the iron
+hollow-head<a name="div2Ref_292" href="#div2_292"><sup>[292]</sup></a> with the trigger on the negro's tongue presupposes a
+hollow-head of another kind.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">With such a frightful disparity among nations in power, wealth,
+culture, only a universal rush of storms from all points of the compass
+can terminate in a lasting calm. A perpetual balance of Europe
+presuppose a balance of the four remaining parts of the world, which
+one may, deducting small librations, promise our globe. In future men
+will quite as little discover a salvage as an island. One people must
+draw another out of pits blundering years. A more equal culture will
+conclude commercial treaties with more equal advantages. The longest
+rainy months of humanity&mdash;which always fell upon the time of national
+transplantations, just as one always sets out flowers on cloudy
+days&mdash;have spent themselves.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">One spectre still remains from the midnight, which reaches far into the
+hours of light,&mdash;War. But the claws and bill of the armorial eagle grow
+on, till, like the boar's tusks, they crook up and make themselves
+useless. As it was calculated in regard to Vesuvius, that it contained
+material for only forty-three eruptions more,&mdash;so might one also reckon
+the number of future wars. This long tempest, which already for six
+thousand years has been standing over our planet, will continue to
+storm till clouds and earth have charged each other full with an
+<i>equal</i> measure of electric matter.</p>
+
+<p class="normal"><i>All</i> nations become illuminated only in joint fermentation; and the
+precipitate is blood and dead men's bones. Were the earth narrowed
+to one half of its size, then would the time of its moral&mdash;and
+physical&mdash;development be shortened one half.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">With wars the strongest drag-chains of the sciences are cut off. Once
+war-machines were the sowing-machines of new knowledges, while they
+crushed old harvests; now it is the press which scatters the pollen
+more widely and gently. Instead of an Alexander, Greece would need now
+to send to Asia nothing but a&mdash;compositor; the conqueror grafts, the
+author sows.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">It is a characteristic of enlightenment that, although it still leaves
+to individuals the possibility of the illusion and weakening of vice,
+nevertheless it releases nations from company-vices and national
+deceptions,&mdash;e. g. from wrecking, piracy. The best and worst deeds we
+do in company; war is an example. The slave-trade must in our days,
+unless indeed the trade in subjects begins, come to an end.<a name="div2Ref_293" href="#div2_293"><sup>[293]</sup></a></p>
+
+<p class="normal">The highest and steepest thrones stand, like the highest mountains, in
+the warmest lands. The political mountains, like the physical, daily
+grow lower (especially when they spout fire), and must at last be with
+the valleys in a common plain.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">From all this follows:&mdash;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">There comes one day a golden age, which every wise and virtuous man
+even now enjoys, and when men will find it easier to live well because
+they will find it easier to live indeed,&mdash;when men will have, not more
+pleasure (for this honey they draw from every flower and leaf-louse),
+but more virtue,&mdash;when the people Will take part in thinking, and the
+thinker&mdash;in working,<a name="div2Ref_294" href="#div2_294"><sup>[294]</sup></a> in order that he may save himself the need of
+Helots,&mdash;when military and judicial murder shall be condemned, and only
+occasionally cannon-balls shall be turned up with the plough. When that
+time comes, then will a preponderance of good no more stop the machine
+by frictions. When it comes, then will the necessity no longer lie in
+human nature of degenerating again and again breeding tempests (for
+heretofore the noble element has merely kept up a flying fight with the
+overpowering evil), just as, according to Forster, even on the hot
+island of St. Helena<a name="div2Ref_295" href="#div2_295"><sup>[295]</sup></a> there are no storms.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">When this festal day comes, then will our children's children be&mdash;no
+more. We stand now in the evening and see at the close of our dark day
+the sun go down with a red-hot glory, and promise us behind the last
+cloud the still, serene sabbath-day of humanity; but our posterity have
+yet to travel through a night full of wind, and through a cloud full of
+poison, till at last over a happier earth an eternal morning-wind full
+of blossom-spirits, moving on before the sun, expelling all clouds,
+shall breathe on men without a sigh. Astronomy promises the earth an
+eternal vernal equinox;<a name="div2Ref_296" href="#div2_296"><sup>[296]</sup></a> and history promises it a higher one;
+perhaps the two eternal springs may coincide.&mdash;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Since man disappears among men, we downcast ones must erect ourselves
+before humanity. When I think of the Greeks, I see that our hopes move
+faster than fate.&mdash;As one travels by night with lights over the icy
+Alps, in order not to be terrified at the abysses and at the long road,
+so does fate spread night around us, and hands us only torches for the
+way immediately before us, that we may not worry ourselves about the
+chasms of the future, and the distance of the goal.&mdash;There were
+centuries when humanity was led with bandaged eyes&mdash;from one prison to
+another;&mdash;there were other centuries when spectres rattled and
+overturned all night long, and in the morning nothing was disturbed;
+there can be no other centuries except those in which individuals die,
+but nations rise, and in which nations decay, but mankind rises: when
+mankind itself sinks and falls to ruins, and ends with the scattering
+of the globe in a dust-cloud ... what shall console us?&mdash;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">A veiled eye behind the bounds of time, an infinite heart beyond
+the world. There is a higher order of things than we can
+demonstrate,&mdash;there is a Providence in the world's history and in every
+one's life which reason has the boldness to deny, and which the heart
+has the boldness to believe;&mdash;there must be a Providence, which,
+according to other rules than we have hitherto assumed, links this
+confused earth as daughter-land to a higher city of God,&mdash;there must be
+a God, a Virtue, and an Eternity.</p>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<h3>FOOTNOTES:</h3>
+
+<p class="hang1"><a name="div2_01" href="#div2Ref_01">Footnote 1</a>: His
+collected works, Vol. III. p. 68.</p>
+
+<p class="hang1"><a name="div2_02" href="#div2Ref_02">2</a>: In Faust,&mdash;Scene of the
+Easter Holidays.&mdash;<span class="sc2">Tr</span>.</p>
+
+<p class="hang1"><a name="div2_03" href="#div2Ref_03">3</a>: A Jew once separated
+from his wife when she appeared with
+bare arms; but it is difficult to ascribe the present frequent divorces
+in Paris to that cause.</p>
+
+<p class="hang1"><a name="div2_04" href="#div2Ref_04">4</a>: It is amusing to hear
+Jean Paul call it so, but the German
+diminutive, &quot;Werk<i>lein</i>,&quot; also expresses attachment to the thing in
+question. Thus children say <i>Väter-chen</i>, &quot;Little Papa; Daddy.&quot;&mdash;<span class="sc2">Tr</span>.</p>
+
+<p class="hang1"><a name="div2_05" href="#div2Ref_05">5</a>: Descriptive of Venus,
+or written under her
+influence.&mdash;<span class="sc2">Tr</span>.</p>
+
+<p class="hang1"><a name="div2_06" href="#div2Ref_06">6</a>: The stick on which a
+painter rests his arm.&mdash;<span class="sc2">Tr</span>.</p>
+
+<p class="hang1"><a name="div2_07" href="#div2Ref_07">7</a>: Similarity of the parts
+to the whole.&mdash;<span class="sc2">Tr</span>.</p>
+
+<p class="hang1"><a name="div2_08" href="#div2Ref_08">8</a>: <i>Fliegende Blätter</i>.&mdash;<span class="sc2">Tr</span>.</p>
+
+<p class="hang1"><a name="div2_09" href="#div2Ref_09">9</a>: Of course, &quot;Forgive us
+our debts.&quot;&mdash;<span class="sc2">Tr</span>.</p>
+
+<p class="hang1"><a name="div2_10" href="#div2Ref_10">10</a>: A city of the Tauric
+Chersonesus, the modern
+Crimea.&mdash;<span class="sc2">Tr</span>.</p>
+
+<p class="hang1"><a name="div2_11" href="#div2Ref_11">11</a>: A Jesuit astronomer,
+A. D. 1598-1671, who named the
+moon's spots Tycho, Plato, Hercules, St. Catharine, &amp;c.&mdash;<span class="sc2">Tr</span>.</p>
+
+<p class="hang1"><a name="div2_12" href="#div2Ref_12">12</a>: He alludes to the
+chimney-sweeper of his perukes.</p>
+
+<p class="hang1"><a name="div2_13" href="#div2Ref_13">13</a>: The name the Germans
+give to Death. <i>Hein</i> would seem to
+mean Hal.&mdash;<span class="sc2">Tr</span>.</p>
+
+<p class="hang1"><a name="div2_14" href="#div2Ref_14">14</a>: Probably peas, which
+the children, as now, blew through
+long tubes with great force.&mdash;<span class="sc2">Tr</span>.</p>
+
+<p class="hang1"><a name="div2_15" href="#div2Ref_15">15</a>: In Upper Alsace, where
+every three years only the best
+youth receives the crown and medal, and the jurisdiction of the
+pastures.</p>
+
+<p class="hang1"><a name="div2_16" href="#div2Ref_16">16</a>: A sort of fire-ball,
+which, as it goes, emits smoke to
+blind the enemy.&mdash;<span class="sc2">Tr</span>.</p>
+
+<p class="hang1"><a name="div2_17" href="#div2Ref_17">17</a>: Small balls invented
+by him to put into a horse's ear,
+and act as a spur.&mdash;<span class="sc2">Tr</span>.</p>
+
+<p class="hang1"><a name="div2_18" href="#div2Ref_18">18</a>: An island of the Malay
+Archipelago, wooded, volcanic, and
+spicy.&mdash;<span class="sc2">Tr</span>.</p>
+
+<p class="hang1"><a name="div2_19" href="#div2Ref_19">19</a>: It is notorious how
+little I know of mining operations;
+I therefore thought I had reason to apply to my superiors for a
+spur which might stimulate me to do something in such a weighty
+science,&mdash;and such a spur is certainly the office of mining-superintendent.</p>
+
+<p class="hang1"><a name="div2_20" href="#div2Ref_20">20</a>: Except the two
+emperors Silluck and Athnac, and the four
+kings Sgolta, Sakeph-Katon, etc., I never had intercourse with any; and
+that only as upper-class scholar, because we jurists, with the Devil's
+help, had to learn Hebrew, wherein just the above-mentioned six
+potentates appear as the names of the accents on words. Perhaps,
+however, my correspondent means the great, acute, crowned accents of
+nations. [<i>Sakeph-Katon</i> is the only one the translator has not been
+able to verify of these interesting names. <i>Kauton</i> is given among the
+Hebrew accents, but not Sakeph.&mdash;Tr.]</p>
+
+<p class="hang1"><a name="div2_21" href="#div2Ref_21">21</a>: Justus Möser, author
+of the &quot;Patriotic Fantasies,&quot; one of
+Germany's dearest memories, in many respects a Franklin.&mdash;<span class="sc2">Tr</span>.</p>
+
+<p class="hang1"><a name="div2_22" href="#div2Ref_22">22</a>: Lane of the
+mine.&mdash;<span class="sc2">Tr</span>.</p>
+
+<p class="hang1"><a name="div2_23" href="#div2Ref_23">23</a>: Ass's Post.&mdash;<span class="sc2">Tr</span>.</p>
+
+<p class="hang1"><a name="div2_24" href="#div2Ref_24">24</a>: Instrument for taking
+the distance of a star north or
+south from the equator.&mdash;<span class="sc2">Tr</span>.</p>
+
+<p class="hang1"><a name="div2_25" href="#div2Ref_25">25</a>: Instrument for
+reckoning the deviation of the hour-circle
+from the meridian.&mdash;<span class="sc2">Tr</span>.</p>
+
+<p class="hang1"><a name="div2_26" href="#div2Ref_26">26</a>: Jean Paul seems to
+indulge here in an hexameter himself:
+&quot;Welches sie auch mehr bedarf, als der harmonische Gessner.&quot;&mdash;<span class="sc2">Tr</span>.</p>
+
+<p class="hang1"><a name="div2_27" href="#div2Ref_27">27</a>: <i>Bewähren</i> and <i>
+bewahren</i> are the two German words.&mdash;<span class="sc2">Tr</span>.</p>
+
+<p class="hang1"><a name="div2_28" href="#div2Ref_28">28</a>: E. g. their honor
+suffers, if their carriage does not
+pass ahead of another carriage of rank.</p>
+
+<p class="hang1"><a name="div2_29" href="#div2Ref_29">29</a>: Such letters as David
+sent by Uriah to Joab. (See 2
+Samuel xi. 14, 15.)&mdash;<span class="sc2">Tr</span>.</p>
+
+<p class="hang1"><a name="div2_30" href="#div2Ref_30">30</a>: <i>Kleeblatt</i> (<i>trefoil</i>)
+in the German.&mdash;<span class="sc2">Tr</span>.</p>
+
+<p class="hang1"><a name="div2_31" href="#div2Ref_31">31</a>: After an operation for
+the cataract, the sensitive retina
+represents everything magnified.</p>
+
+<p class="hang1"><a name="div2_32" href="#div2Ref_32">32</a>: A piece of charred
+bone or horn used by natives of the
+East to absorb the blood from wounds made by the bite of a snake. See
+Tennent's Natural History of Ceylon, p. 312.&mdash;<span class="sc2">Tr</span>.</p>
+
+<p class="hang1"><a name="div2_33" href="#div2Ref_33">33</a>: The <i>Psalter</i> in
+the ox's stomach is the <i>Blättermagen</i>
+(lit. <i>leaf-stomach</i>), the third stomach of ruminant animals, the
+tripe. So we speak of the <i>leaves</i> of fat.&mdash;<span class="sc2">Tr</span>.</p>
+
+<p class="hang1"><a name="div2_34" href="#div2Ref_34">34</a>:
+<div class="poem">
+<p class="t4" style="text-indent:-8px">
+&quot;My spirit flew in feathers then,<br>
+That is so heavy now.&quot;&mdash;<span class="sc">Hood</span>.</p>
+
+</div>
+<p class="hang1"><a name="div2_35" href="#div2Ref_35">35</a>: Joint-reporter.&mdash;<span class="sc2">Tr</span>.</p>
+
+<p class="hang1"><a name="div2_36" href="#div2Ref_36">36</a>: A kind that heads in
+the form of a capuchin's hood.&mdash;<span class="sc2">Tr</span>.</p>
+
+<p class="hang1"><a name="div2_37" href="#div2Ref_37">37</a>: When one's five
+numbers are all drawn in their order, it
+is a quinterne.&mdash;<span class="sc2">Tr</span>.</p>
+
+<p class="hang1"><a name="div2_38" href="#div2Ref_38">38</a>: <i>Aufgebunden</i> may
+mean either tied up or untied.&mdash;<span class="sc2">Tr</span>.</p>
+
+<p class="hang1"><a name="div2_39" href="#div2Ref_39">39</a>: Burlesque and serious
+operas.&mdash;<span class="sc2">Tr</span>.</p>
+
+<p class="hang1"><a name="div2_40" href="#div2Ref_40">40</a>: Or, figure in
+history.&mdash;<span class="sc2">Tr</span>.</p>
+
+<p class="hang1"><a name="div2_41" href="#div2Ref_41">41</a>: The ideal of the
+beautiful.</p>
+
+<p class="hang1"><a name="div2_42" href="#div2Ref_42">42</a>: As the Rabbins
+believe, according to Eisenmenger's
+Judaism, Part II. 7.</p>
+
+<p class="hang1"><a name="div2_43" href="#div2Ref_43">43</a>: <i>Usance</i> means
+the month's grace allowed for the
+payment of a bill of exchange; double usance, of course, allows two
+months.&mdash;<span class="sc2">Tr</span>.</p>
+
+<p class="hang1"><a name="div2_44" href="#div2Ref_44">44</a>: Petrarch, like German
+reviewers, avoided nightingales,
+and sought frogs.</p>
+
+<p class="hang1"><a name="div2_45" href="#div2Ref_45">45</a>: &quot;Schatten<i>riss</i>
+oder Schatten<i>schnitt</i>&quot; is the
+German.&mdash;<span class="sc2">Tr</span>.</p>
+
+<p class="hang1"><a name="div2_46" href="#div2Ref_46">46</a>: The literal rendering
+would be &quot;<i>cut out of the eyes</i>,
+or, rather, out of the face.&quot; The phrase in Italics is a German idiom
+for expressing an exact likeness.&mdash;<span class="sc2">Tr</span>.</p>
+
+<p class="hang1"><a name="div2_47" href="#div2Ref_47">47</a>: The readers of
+Boswell's Johnson will remember that
+interesting native of the South-Sea Islands.&mdash;<span class="sc2">Tr</span>.</p>
+
+<p class="hang1"><a name="div2_48" href="#div2Ref_48">48</a>: Matthieu being the
+French for <i>Matthew</i>.&mdash;<span class="sc2">Tr</span>.</p>
+
+<p class="hang1"><a name="div2_49" href="#div2Ref_49">49</a>: <i>Zeusel</i> was a
+court-apothecary, mentioned on page 7, of
+whom we shall hear more.&mdash;<span class="sc2">Tr</span>.</p>
+
+<p class="hang1"><a name="div2_50" href="#div2Ref_50">50</a>: An Italian word,
+meaning literally gallant, applied to
+those Platonic lovers who, with the connivance of the husbands,
+attended married ladies, and were everywhere seen in confidential chat
+with them.&mdash;<span class="sc2">Tr</span>.</p>
+
+<p class="hang1"><a name="div2_51" href="#div2Ref_51">51</a>: La Mettrie was a noted
+medical man and materialist in his
+day, b. 1709.&mdash;<span class="sc2">Tr</span>.</p>
+
+<p class="hang1"><a name="div2_52" href="#div2Ref_52">52</a>: Remember the beautiful
+passage in Bede's History, where
+the Northumbrian prince compares man's life to the flight of the
+swallow through the lighted hall out of darkness into darkness.&mdash;<span class="sc2">Tr</span>.</p>
+
+<p class="hang1"><a name="div2_53" href="#div2Ref_53">53</a>: An allusion, perhaps,
+to the legend, so lovely to the
+fancy, that a crucifix in Naples, when Alphonso was besieged there, in
+1439, bowed its head before a cannon-ball, which consequently took off
+only the crown of thorns!&mdash;<i>Voyage d'un François</i>, Tom. VI. p. 303.</p>
+
+<p class="hang1"><a name="div2_54" href="#div2Ref_54">54</a>: This clover insures
+him who accidentally finds it against
+future deception. Hitherto it has been found only by&mdash;princes and
+philosophers.</p>
+
+<p class="hang1"><a name="div2_55" href="#div2Ref_55">55</a>: <i>Matz</i>, in
+German, means also both a starling and a
+blockhead.&mdash;<span class="sc2">Tr</span>.</p>
+
+<p class="hang1"><a name="div2_56" href="#div2Ref_56">56</a>: Elegant paper for the
+upper classes.&mdash;<span class="sc2">Tr</span>.</p>
+
+<p class="hang1"><a name="div2_57" href="#div2Ref_57">57</a>: In the original, &quot;hang
+hares' tails on us,&quot; i. e. &quot;make
+fools of us.&quot;&mdash;<span class="sc2">Tr</span>.</p>
+
+<p class="hang1"><a name="div2_58" href="#div2Ref_58">58</a>: Literally,
+spit-devils,&mdash;a sort of firework.&mdash;<span class="sc2">Tr</span>.</p>
+
+<p class="hang1"><a name="div2_59" href="#div2Ref_59">59</a>: I. e.
+Birthday-festival.&mdash;<span class="sc2">Tr</span>.</p>
+
+<p class="hang1"><a name="div2_60" href="#div2Ref_60">60</a>: Not one of the
+commonplace souls that jog steadily on
+like the hexameter.&mdash;<span class="sc2">Tr</span>.</p>
+
+<p class="hang1"><a name="div2_61" href="#div2Ref_61">61</a>: This was a common
+practice of our old New England Puritan
+parsons.&mdash;<span class="sc2">Tr</span>.</p>
+
+<p class="hang1"><a name="div2_62" href="#div2Ref_62">62</a>: Disciples of
+Kennicott, the well-known English verifier
+of the general accuracy of the Sacred Text.&mdash;<span class="sc2">Tr</span>.</p>
+
+<p class="hang1"><a name="div2_63" href="#div2Ref_63">63</a>: A trap extemporized by
+setting up a heavy book obliquely,
+with one end resting on a stick, and the cheese attached.&mdash;<span class="sc2">Tr</span>.</p>
+
+<p class="hang1"><a name="div2_64" href="#div2Ref_64">64</a>: Christina, daughter of
+Charles XII., abdicated in May,
+1654, at the age of twenty-eight.&mdash;<span class="sc2">Tr</span>.</p>
+
+<p class="hang1"><a name="div2_65" href="#div2Ref_65">65</a>: A famous and popular
+old volume delineating the world of
+nature and life in pictures, with numbers referring to the different
+parts of each picture.&mdash;<span class="sc2">Tr</span>.</p>
+
+<p class="hang1"><a name="div2_66" href="#div2Ref_66">66</a>: That is, threw into
+them, as into scrap-baskets, the bits
+of paper on which he had written his thoughts.&mdash;<span class="sc2">Tr</span>.</p>
+
+<p class="hang1"><a name="div2_67" href="#div2Ref_67">67</a>: Allusion to
+Ezekiel.&mdash;<span class="sc2">Tr</span>.</p>
+
+<p class="hang1"><a name="div2_68" href="#div2Ref_68">68</a>: Literally, <i>
+God's-box</i>.&mdash;<span class="sc2">Tr</span>.</p>
+
+<p class="hang1"><a name="div2_69" href="#div2Ref_69">69</a>: <i>Gesprungen</i>
+seems to mean both <i>vibrated</i> and
+<i>snapped</i>.</p>
+
+<p class="hang1"><a name="div2_70" href="#div2Ref_70">70</a>: <i>Haupt</i>- und <i>
+Staat-actionen</i>, the phrase used by Faust in
+his first dialogue with Wagner. Schlegel says the title was affixed to
+dramas designed for marionettes when they treated heroic and historical
+subjects.&mdash;<span class="sc2">Tr</span>.</p>
+
+<p class="hang1"><a name="div2_71" href="#div2Ref_71">71</a>: Epiglottis.&mdash;<span class="sc2">Tr</span>.</p>
+
+<p class="hang1"><a name="div2_72" href="#div2Ref_72">72</a>: What has come into the
+world feet foremost.&mdash;<span class="sc2">Tr</span>.</p>
+
+<p class="hang1"><a name="div2_73" href="#div2Ref_73">73</a>: Basselisse
+(French).&mdash;<span class="sc2">Tr</span>.</p>
+
+<p class="hang1"><a name="div2_74" href="#div2Ref_74">74</a>: <i>Ladenhüter</i>
+(shop-keeper) is the German word,
+meaning goods that keep the store as a sick man keeps his
+bed,&mdash;<i>shop-ridden</i>.&mdash;<span class="sc2">Tr</span>.</p>
+
+<p class="hang1"><a name="div2_75" href="#div2Ref_75">75</a>: A court that decided
+matters in dispute among the
+sovereigns of the German Confederation.&mdash;<span class="sc2">Tr</span>.</p>
+
+<p class="hang1"><a name="div2_76" href="#div2Ref_76">76</a>: A selection of choice
+learning.&mdash;<span class="sc2">Tr</span>.</p>
+
+<p class="hang1"><a name="div2_77" href="#div2Ref_77">77</a>: Midsummer-day.&mdash;<span class="sc2">Tr</span>.</p>
+
+<p class="hang1"><a name="div2_78" href="#div2Ref_78">78</a>: A name given by the
+Greeks to the Hebrew word Jehovah,
+which consists, in the original, of <i>four letters</i>.&mdash;<span class="sc2">Tr</span>.</p>
+
+<p class="hang1"><a name="div2_79" href="#div2Ref_79">79</a>: The thumb of a hanged
+thief was considered as a
+lucky-bone.&mdash;<span class="sc2">Tr</span>.</p>
+
+<p class="hang1"><a name="div2_80" href="#div2Ref_80">80</a>: Full.&mdash;<span class="sc2">Tr</span>.</p>
+
+<p class="hang1"><a name="div2_81" href="#div2Ref_81">81</a>: Or it <i>went a
+begging</i>, as we say.&mdash;<span class="sc2">Tr</span>.</p>
+
+<p class="hang1"><a name="div2_82" href="#div2Ref_82">82</a>: &quot;Rara avis.&quot;&mdash;<span class="sc2">Tr</span>.</p>
+
+<p class="hang1"><a name="div2_83" href="#div2Ref_83">83</a>: <a name="div2Ref_83a" href="#div2_83a">See page 67</a>.&mdash;<span class="sc2">Tr</span>.</p>
+
+<p class="hang1"><a name="div2_84" href="#div2Ref_84">84</a>: It is precisely the
+possession of <i>heterogeneous</i>
+faculties in <i>similar</i> degree that makes one inconsequent and
+inconsistent; men with one predominant faculty act by it with more
+equableness. In despotisms there is more quiet than in republics; at
+the hot equator there is a more even rate of the barometer than in the
+zones of four seasons.</p>
+
+<p class="hang1"><a name="div2_85" href="#div2Ref_85">85</a>: One of Burns's
+words.&mdash;<span class="sc2">Tr</span>.</p>
+
+<p class="hang1"><a name="div2_86" href="#div2Ref_86">86</a>: The bust of the
+Vatican Apollo, by which he would learn
+to model no other figure than his own.</p>
+
+<p class="hang1"><a name="div2_87" href="#div2Ref_87">87</a>: There is something in
+the use and application of the word
+<i>Wissenschaft</i> which requires for its appreciation an understanding of
+the peculiar genius of the German mind.&mdash;<span class="sc2">Tr</span>.</p>
+
+<p class="hang1"><a name="div2_88" href="#div2Ref_88">88</a>: Bacon's remark will
+recur to the reader.&mdash;<span class="sc2">Tr</span>.</p>
+
+<p class="hang1"><a name="div2_89" href="#div2Ref_89">89</a>: A solar system is only
+a dotted profile of the genius of
+the world, but a human eye is his miniature. The <i>mechanics</i> of the
+bodies of the universe the mathematical masters of reckoning may
+calculate, but the <i>dioptrics</i> of the eye, growing bright amidst
+nothing but dull moistures, transcends our algebraic audit-offices,
+which therefore cannot reckon away from the imitated eyes (the glasses)
+the space of diffusion and the narrow field.</p>
+
+<p class="hang1"><a name="div2_90" href="#div2Ref_90">90</a>: Jean Paul would
+probably have said Rubicon if he had not
+been going to say it elsewhere,&mdash;e. g. p. 199.</p>
+
+<p class="hang1"><a name="div2_91" href="#div2Ref_91">91</a>: Hieronym. cont. Jov. L
+2.</p>
+
+<p class="hang1"><a name="div2_92" href="#div2Ref_92">92</a>: <i>Hof</i> means in
+German <i>both</i> court&mdash;and yard.&mdash;<span class="sc2">Tr</span>.</p>
+
+<p class="hang1"><a name="div2_93" href="#div2Ref_93">93</a>: Bayle's Dictionary,
+Art. <i>François d'Assise</i>, Note C.</p>
+
+<p class="hang1"><a name="div2_94" href="#div2Ref_94">94</a>: A half-way
+house.&mdash;<span class="sc2">Tr</span>.</p>
+
+<p class="hang1"><a name="div2_95" href="#div2Ref_95">95</a>: Jean Paul probably
+means, that such noble hearts as
+Victor's Le Baut might shut up into silence, but could not with his
+Chamberlain's master-key open and find out their secrets.&mdash;<span class="sc2">Tr</span>.</p>
+
+<p class="hang1"><a name="div2_96" href="#div2Ref_96">96</a>: In a later edition
+Jean Paul substitutes for <i>Schein-tod</i>
+(sham death) a half French word, <i>Postiche-tod</i> (supposititious
+death).&mdash;<span class="sc2">Tr</span>.</p>
+
+<p class="hang1"><a name="div2_97" href="#div2Ref_97">97</a>: &quot;On whose board he had
+a <i>stone</i>,&quot; literally,&mdash;a proverb
+for being in one's good graces.&mdash;<span class="sc2">Tr</span>.</p>
+
+<p class="hang1"><a name="div2_98" href="#div2Ref_98">98</a>: There is an
+inconsistency in date of month here with p.
+135.&mdash;<span class="sc2">Tr</span>.</p>
+
+<p class="hang1"><a name="div2_99" href="#div2Ref_99">99</a>: The dog as well as
+myself know what island that is, but
+no more.</p>
+
+<p class="hang1"><a name="div2_100" href="#div2Ref_100">100</a>: &quot;Burning-chambers,&quot; a
+name originally given to the place
+for judging criminals of state belonging to illustrious families. The
+room was lined with black, and lighted with flambeaux. Originated with
+Francis I. in 1535, in his persecution of heretics.&mdash;<span class="sc2">Tr</span>.</p>
+
+<p class="hang1"><a name="div2_101" href="#div2Ref_101">101</a>: Plebeian.&mdash;<span class="sc2">Tr</span>.</p>
+
+<p class="hang1"><a name="div2_102" href="#div2Ref_102">102</a>: One at hearing from
+Emanuel, the other at seeing
+Clotilda.&mdash;<span class="sc2">Tr</span>.</p>
+
+<p class="hang1"><a name="div2_103" href="#div2Ref_103">103</a>: Red drops fall from
+butterflies in their last
+transformation, which they used to call bloody rain.</p>
+
+<p class="hang1"><a name="div2_104" href="#div2Ref_104">104</a>: When one looks a long
+time into the blue of heaven, it
+begins to undulate, and these waves in the air one imagines in
+childhood to be angels at play.</p>
+
+<p class="hang1"><a name="div2_105" href="#div2Ref_105">105</a>: This monologue is a
+fragment from an earlier dark hour,
+such as every heart of sensibility once suffers.</p>
+
+<p class="hang1"><a name="div2_106" href="#div2Ref_106">106</a>: <i>Noth-münzen</i>
+means originally coin containing alloy,
+struck off in hard times.&mdash;<span class="sc2">Tr</span>.</p>
+
+<p class="hang1"><a name="div2_107" href="#div2Ref_107">107</a>: The Hebrew language
+has but three vowels
+(&quot;vowel-points&quot;) which, from the assistance they gave in enunciating a
+vast variety of words, were called <i>matres lectionis</i>, or mothers of
+the reading.&mdash;<span class="sc2">Tr</span>.</p>
+
+<p class="hang1"><a name="div2_108" href="#div2Ref_108">108</a>: I. e. bowing so
+low.&mdash;<span class="sc2">Tr</span>.</p>
+
+<p class="hang1"><a name="div2_109" href="#div2Ref_109">109</a>: Herkommen, as a
+common noun, means <i>tradition</i> or
+<i>custom</i>.&mdash;<span class="sc2">Tr</span>.</p>
+
+<p class="hang1"><a name="div2_110" href="#div2Ref_110">110</a>: An infusorial or
+minute animal, called in natural
+history <i>rotifera</i> (wheel-bearer).&mdash;<span class="sc2">Tr</span>.</p>
+
+<p class="hang1"><a name="div2_111" href="#div2Ref_111">111</a>: <i>Famulus</i> is the
+Latin name in the German. Wagner was
+one in Faust.&mdash;<span class="sc2">Tr</span>.</p>
+
+<p class="hang1"><a name="div2_112" href="#div2Ref_112">112</a>: So called in allusion
+to the <i>shaking</i> they were giving
+it.&mdash;<span class="sc2">Tr</span>.</p>
+
+<p class="hang1"><a name="div2_113" href="#div2Ref_113">113</a>: <i>Kopfstück</i>
+(lit. <i>head-piece</i>), a coin bearing the head
+of the regent.&mdash;<span class="sc2">Tr</span>.</p>
+
+<p class="hang1"><a name="div2_114" href="#div2Ref_114">114</a>: The billiard-pockets
+(like the contribution-bags) used
+to have bells to them.&mdash;<span class="sc2">Tr</span>.</p>
+
+<p class="hang1"><a name="div2_115" href="#div2Ref_115">115</a>: Who felt himself to
+be &quot;a child picking up pebbles on
+the shore of the great ocean of truth.&quot;&mdash;<span class="sc2">Tr</span>.</p>
+
+<p class="hang1"><a name="div2_116" href="#div2Ref_116">116</a>: A conventual term,&mdash;a
+six.&mdash;<span class="sc2">Tr</span>.</p>
+
+<p class="hang1"><a name="div2_117" href="#div2Ref_117">117</a>: God bless you!&mdash;<span class="sc2">Tr</span>.</p>
+
+<p class="hang1"><a name="div2_118" href="#div2Ref_118">118</a>: Many thanks!&mdash;<span class="sc2">Tr</span>.</p>
+
+<p class="hang1"><a name="div2_119" href="#div2Ref_119">119</a>: Of course a parody on
+&quot;Verbum sat <i>sapienti</i>,&quot;&mdash;&quot;A word
+for the <i>fool</i>,&quot; &amp;c.&mdash;<span class="sc2">Tr</span>.</p>
+
+<p class="hang1"><a name="div2_120" href="#div2Ref_120">120</a>: Or reading-<i>easel</i>
+(the latter word seeming to be an
+English corruption of the German <i>Esel</i>, ass),&mdash;any book-rest.
+<i>Maler-esel</i> means a painter's easel.&mdash;<span class="sc2">Tr</span>.</p>
+
+<p class="hang1"><a name="div2_121" href="#div2Ref_121">121</a>: When they occur in
+actual life.&mdash;<span class="sc2">Tr</span>.</p>
+
+<p class="hang1"><a name="div2_122" href="#div2Ref_122">122</a>: Eclectic or
+miscellaneous science, not confined to one
+department.&mdash;<span class="sc2">Tr</span>.</p>
+
+<p class="hang1"><a name="div2_123" href="#div2Ref_123">123</a>: A King of France once
+sent a vassal <i>illum baculum,
+quo se sustentabat, in symbolum traditionis</i>. (Du Fresne's
+Glossary.) So far as I know, there has never been made a good and
+serviceable&mdash;abridgment of this <i>glossarium</i> for ladies.</p>
+
+<p class="hang1"><a name="div2_124" href="#div2Ref_124">124</a>: Just as there are <i>
+listening sisters</i> (<i>les Tourières</i>
+or <i>S&#339;urs écoutés</i>) who go with the nuns into the conversing room,
+to overhear their talk.</p>
+
+<p class="hang1"><a name="div2_125" href="#div2Ref_125">125</a>: Or
+absentee-curates.&mdash;<span class="sc2">Tr</span>.</p>
+
+<p class="hang1"><a name="div2_126" href="#div2Ref_126">126</a>: Literally <i>
+looker-on</i>,&mdash;one admitted to behold the
+secret ceremonies in the Eleusinian mysteries.&mdash;<span class="sc2">Tr</span>.</p>
+
+<p class="hang1"><a name="div2_127" href="#div2Ref_127">127</a>: To know how to obey
+is a glory equal to that of
+commanding.&mdash;<span class="sc2">Tr</span>.</p>
+
+<p class="hang1"><a name="div2_128" href="#div2Ref_128">128</a>: &quot;Slaves are accounted
+nobodies.&quot;&mdash;<span class="sc2">Tr</span>.</p>
+
+<p class="hang1"><a name="div2_129" href="#div2Ref_129">129</a>: In real life.&mdash;<span class="sc2">Tr</span>.</p>
+
+<p class="hang1"><a name="div2_130" href="#div2Ref_130">130</a>: <i>To make one a
+queue</i> is a proverb for imposing on him
+(like pinning a rag to one's coat-tail?).&mdash;<span class="sc2">Tr</span>.</p>
+
+<p class="hang1"><a name="div2_131" href="#div2Ref_131">131</a>: <i>Diet</i> (from <i>
+dies</i>) <i>implies</i> the idea of <i>day</i>,
+but the German &quot;Reichs<i>tag</i>&quot; makes the pun more palpable in the
+original.&mdash;<span class="sc2">Tr</span>.</p>
+
+<p class="hang1"><a name="div2_132" href="#div2Ref_132">132</a>: A lady's watch, as is
+well known, shaped like a heart,
+provided on the back with a dial-gnomon and magnetic needle. The latter
+points out to the ladies (who hate <i>cold</i>) the <i>south</i> also, in fact,
+and the sun-dial-index serves as a moon-dial-index.</p>
+
+<p class="hang1"><a name="div2_133" href="#div2Ref_133">133</a>: &quot;Rome concealed the
+name of her god, and she was wrong;
+I conceal the name of my goddess, and I am right.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="hang1"><a name="div2_134" href="#div2Ref_134">134</a>: Or <i>Tensa</i>, the
+carriage on which they bore the images
+of the gods in the Circensian games.&mdash;<span class="sc2">Tr</span>.</p>
+
+<p class="hang1"><a name="div2_135" href="#div2Ref_135">135</a>: A shrine.&mdash;<span class="sc2">Tr</span>.</p>
+
+<p class="hang1"><a name="div2_136" href="#div2Ref_136">136</a>: Properly, a pitcher,
+or urn.&mdash;<span class="sc2">Tr</span>.</p>
+
+<p class="hang1"><a name="div2_137" href="#div2Ref_137">137</a>: Here Jean Paul
+inserts, after &quot;in die Federn,&quot; &quot;(<i>nicht
+in die Feder</i>),&quot;&mdash;i. e. <i>not into the pen</i> (a German phrase for
+<i>dictating</i>). The pun could not be kept.&mdash;<span class="sc2">Tr</span>.</p>
+
+<p class="hang1"><a name="div2_138" href="#div2Ref_138">138</a>: A watch that tells
+only the hours.&mdash;<span class="sc2">Tr</span>.</p>
+
+<p class="hang1"><a name="div2_139" href="#div2Ref_139">139</a>: The reference is to
+Laurence Sterne, and the snuff-box
+he mentions in the early part of the &quot;Sentimental Journey,&quot; as given
+him by a monk, and carried ever after as an amulet.&mdash;<span class="sc2">Tr</span>.</p>
+
+<p class="hang1"><a name="div2_140" href="#div2Ref_140">140</a>: Ignatius's-plate
+means probably a breastplate, or
+medallion, consecrated by Ignatius Loyola.&mdash;<span class="sc2">Tr</span>.</p>
+
+<p class="hang1"><a name="div2_141" href="#div2Ref_141">141</a>: I. e. to throw light
+upon it.&mdash;<span class="sc2">Tr</span>.</p>
+
+<p class="hang1"><a name="div2_142" href="#div2Ref_142">142</a>: Like John Buncle, who
+went round, as was said, to
+propagate his faith and his species.&mdash;<span class="sc2">Tr</span>.</p>
+
+<p class="hang1"><a name="div2_143" href="#div2Ref_143">143</a>: A fourth reason would
+be, that now, every time be loves
+another than Clotilda, he seems to earn a new claim to the gratitude of
+his friend.</p>
+
+<p class="hang1"><a name="div2_144" href="#div2Ref_144">144</a>: Italian for
+everybody.&mdash;<span class="sc2">Tr</span>.</p>
+
+<p class="hang1"><a name="div2_145" href="#div2Ref_145">145</a>: May there be a sly
+allusion&mdash;here to the possibility of
+their putting their hair up in papers torn from the leaves of Jean
+Paul's works?&mdash;<span class="sc2">Tr</span>.</p>
+
+<p class="hang1"><a name="div2_146" href="#div2Ref_146">146</a>: Schickaneder was the
+Director of a Theatre in Vienna in
+the time of Mozart, and wrote the text for the <i>Magic Flute</i>.&mdash;<span class="sc2">Tr</span>.</p>
+
+<p class="hang1"><a name="div2_147" href="#div2Ref_147">147</a>: A wreath given in
+derision to brides who before marriage
+had been unchaste.&mdash;<span class="sc2">Tr</span>.</p>
+
+<p class="hang1"><a name="div2_148" href="#div2Ref_148">148</a>: And then are ready to
+verify the proverb: <i>Curses, like
+chickens, come home to roost</i>.&mdash;<span class="sc2">Tr</span>.</p>
+
+<p class="hang1"><a name="div2_149" href="#div2Ref_149">149</a>: Musical
+interval.&mdash;<span class="sc2">Tr</span>.</p>
+
+<p class="hang1"><a name="div2_150" href="#div2Ref_150">150</a>: Old scholastic term
+for a <i>past</i> eternity, in
+contradiction to a coming eternity, <i>a parte post</i>.&mdash;<span class="sc2">Tr</span>.</p>
+
+<p class="hang1"><a name="div2_151" href="#div2Ref_151">151</a>: The Invisible Lodge;
+a Biography in Two Parts. [A work
+of Jean Paul's.&mdash;Tr.]</p>
+
+<p class="hang1"><a name="div2_152" href="#div2Ref_152">152</a>: Such was the name of
+his Lordship's wife, who in her
+twenty-third year sank to rest in the eternal arms.</p>
+
+<p class="hang1"><a name="div2_153" href="#div2Ref_153">153</a>: In the original, <i>
+Semper-freie</i> (always free,&mdash;eligible
+to office).&mdash;<span class="sc2">Tr</span>.</p>
+
+<p class="hang1"><a name="div2_154" href="#div2Ref_154">154</a>: Hence too it was,
+that, so long as Victor was at the
+Parsonage, she avoided Flamin's society.</p>
+
+<p class="hang1"><a name="div2_155" href="#div2Ref_155">155</a>: The reader will
+remember this same remark, in so many
+words, on p. 223.&mdash;<span class="sc2">Tr</span>.</p>
+
+<p class="hang1"><a name="div2_156" href="#div2Ref_156">156</a>: It turned out more
+fortunately, and without loss of the
+stones, and I had the satisfaction to find that no woman who read the
+first edition of this work has, in her womanlike <i>castling</i> or
+<i>rotation in office</i>, at all interchanged the two <i>thats</i>. Nay, even
+the female readers of the second edition have remained consistent with
+themselves.</p>
+
+<p class="hang1"><a name="div2_157" href="#div2Ref_157">157</a>: Demoralization.&mdash;<span class="sc2">Tr</span>.</p>
+
+<p class="hang1"><a name="div2_158" href="#div2Ref_158">158</a>: The German word <i>
+kleiden</i>; it has a corresponding double
+meaning of <i>dressing</i>, and also of <i>suiting</i>.&mdash;<span class="sc2">Tr</span>.</p>
+
+<p class="hang1"><a name="div2_159" href="#div2Ref_159">159</a>:
+Science,&mdash;Mathematics.&mdash;<span class="sc2">Tr</span>.</p>
+
+<p class="hang1"><a name="div2_160" href="#div2Ref_160">160</a>: Step-measurers.&mdash;<span class="sc2">Tr</span>.</p>
+
+<p class="hang1"><a name="div2_161" href="#div2Ref_161">161</a>: Men entitled to
+lecture in three branches.&mdash;<span class="sc2">Tr</span>.</p>
+
+<p class="hang1"><a name="div2_162" href="#div2Ref_162">162</a>: Or disciple of the
+indifferential calculus.&mdash;<span class="sc2">Tr</span>.</p>
+
+<p class="hang1"><a name="div2_163" href="#div2Ref_163">163</a>: Or, in prose, fiery
+water-wheel.&mdash;<span class="sc2">Tr</span>.</p>
+
+<p class="hang1"><a name="div2_164" href="#div2Ref_164">164</a>:</p>
+<div class="poem">
+<p class="t4" style="text-indent:-8px">
+&quot;And what if all of animated nature<br>
+Be but organic harps diversely framed,<br>
+That tremble into thought, as o'er them sweeps,<br>
+Plastic and vast, one intellectual breeze,<br>
+At once the soul of each and God of all?&quot;</p>
+<p class="right"><span class="sc">Coleridge</span>, <i>The Æolian Harp</i>.</p>
+</div>
+<br>
+<p class="hang1"><a name="div2_165" href="#div2Ref_165">165</a>: <i>Fromm</i> is the
+German. It is time the words <i>religious</i>
+and <i>pious</i> were redeemed from the base uses of sectarianism and
+bigotry.&mdash;<span class="sc2">Tr</span>.</p>
+
+<p class="hang1"><a name="div2_166" href="#div2Ref_166">166</a>: <i>Enlightenment</i>
+in an <i>empty</i> heart is mere memory-work,
+let it strain the faculty of acumen ever so much. Most men of our day
+resemble the new houses in Potsdam, in which (according to Reichard)
+Frederick the Second caused <i>lights</i> to be placed at night, that every
+one, including Reichard himself, might think they were&mdash;<i>occupied</i>.</p>
+
+<p class="hang1"><a name="div2_167" href="#div2Ref_167">167</a>: Most men have,
+perhaps, only an equal number of good
+<i>thoughts</i> and <i>actions</i>; but it is still an open question how long
+the
+virtuous man may interrupt his good thoughts (which have less need than
+good actions of the outer world) by indifferent ones.</p>
+
+<p class="hang1"><a name="div2_168" href="#div2Ref_168">168</a>: For the noblest leans
+just the most on loving souls, or
+at least on his ideals of them, with which, however, he is only in so
+far satisfied as he regards them as pledges of future prototypes. I do
+not except either the Stoic (that Epicurean God) or the Mystic: both
+love in the Creator only the sum total of his creatures; we the former
+in the latter.</p>
+
+<p class="hang1"><a name="div2_169" href="#div2Ref_169">169</a>: The German <i>Vorwand</i>
+means literally front wall (not far
+from the etymological meaning of <i>pretext</i>); so that there may be a
+figurative element here beyond what appears to the casual reader.&mdash;<span class="sc2">Tr</span>.</p>
+
+<p class="hang1"><a name="div2_170" href="#div2Ref_170">170</a>: The reader of this
+letter will readily presuppose that
+Clotilda, as she does not know into whose hands it may fall,&mdash;in fact,
+it is actually in ours,&mdash;will have to hurry over her relations and
+mysteries (e. g. respecting Flamin, Victor, &amp;c.) with an obscurity
+which to her proper reader was clear enough.</p>
+
+<p class="hang1"><a name="div2_171" href="#div2Ref_171">171</a>: Let the reader
+remember that she is master of as much of
+this biography as he, if not more.</p>
+
+<p class="hang1"><a name="div2_172" href="#div2Ref_172">172</a>: She means Giulia,
+from whose corpse grief had hurried
+her away.</p>
+
+<p class="hang1"><a name="div2_173" href="#div2Ref_173">173</a>:</p>
+<div class="poem">
+<p class="t4" style="text-indent:-8px">
+&quot;Now spring returns, but not to me returns<br>
+The vernal joy my better years have known,&quot; &amp;c.</p>
+<p class="right"><span class="sc">Michael Bruce</span>.</p>
+</div>
+<p class="hang1"><a name="div2_174" href="#div2Ref_174">174</a>: &quot;Fly not from me,
+because I am always encompassed by a
+great shadow, which increases till at last it shall wall me up.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="hang1"><a name="div2_175" href="#div2Ref_175">175</a>: Every seven years of
+human life.&mdash;<span class="sc2">Tr</span>.</p>
+
+<p class="hang1"><a name="div2_176" href="#div2Ref_176">176</a>:
+<div class="poem">
+<p class="t4" style="text-indent:-8px">
+&quot;Or had it drizzled <i>needle-points of ice</i><br>
+Upon a feverish head made suddenly bald.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="right"><span class="sc">Coleridge's </span><i>Remorse</i>.</p>
+</div>
+<p class="hang1"><a name="div2_177" href="#div2Ref_177">177</a>: As the spots in the
+moon are fields of flowers and
+plants.</p>
+
+<p class="hang1"><a name="div2_178" href="#div2Ref_178">178</a>: Here ended (in the
+original) the first volume.&mdash;<span class="sc2">Tr</span>.</p>
+
+<p class="hang1"><a name="div2_179" href="#div2Ref_179">179</a>: So called, as it was
+made to answer for both bed and
+board. See the next sentence but one.&mdash;<span class="sc2">Tr</span>.</p>
+
+<p class="hang1"><a name="div2_180" href="#div2Ref_180">180</a>: The rudiments of
+printing.&mdash;<span class="sc2">Tr</span>.</p>
+
+<p class="hang1"><a name="div2_181" href="#div2Ref_181">181</a>: He is indignant, it
+is true, only at the <i>typographical</i>
+history of learned works, and despises only the anxious search after
+the birthdays, &amp;c., of deceased and stupid books in the midst of a
+world full of wonders; but here, too, he must needs consider that
+brains which can let nothing <i>press</i> upon them more than operations of
+the <i>press</i> still do better this little something, which saves and
+accumulates most for the better ones, than nothing at all, or anything
+beyond their ability.</p>
+
+<p class="hang1"><a name="div2_182" href="#div2Ref_182">182</a>: A name given to
+screens used for partitions.&mdash;<span class="sc2">Tr</span>.</p>
+
+<p class="hang1"><a name="div2_183" href="#div2Ref_183">183</a>: A well-known good
+writer on the eyes.</p>
+
+<p class="hang1"><a name="div2_184" href="#div2Ref_184">184</a>: Or crystalline
+lens?&mdash;<span class="sc2">Tr</span>.</p>
+
+<p class="hang1"><a name="div2_185" href="#div2Ref_185">185</a>: Glands in the
+eyelids, discovered by Meibom in
+1673.&mdash;<span class="sc2">Tr</span>.</p>
+
+<p class="hang1"><a name="div2_186" href="#div2Ref_186">186</a>: A glandule at the
+corner of the eye, which secretes
+moisture.&mdash;<span class="sc2">Tr</span>.</p>
+
+<p class="hang1"><a name="div2_187" href="#div2Ref_187">187</a>: Honeymoon. One of
+Jean Paul's variations on the
+phrase.&mdash;<span class="sc2">Tr</span>.</p>
+
+<p class="hang1"><a name="div2_188" href="#div2Ref_188">188</a>: The Germans are
+peculiarly rich in synonymes for the
+honeymoon. The word used here is <i>Flitterwochen</i> (Spangle-weeks).&mdash;<span class="sc2">Tr</span>.</p>
+
+<p class="hang1"><a name="div2_189" href="#div2Ref_189">189</a>: Moldavian or
+Wallachian governor.&mdash;<span class="sc2">Tr</span>.</p>
+
+<p class="hang1"><a name="div2_190" href="#div2Ref_190">190</a>: Some of the German
+written letters are like the Greek.
+<i>Alphabet</i> (at the end of the sentence) is a printer's term for 23
+sheets.&mdash;<span class="sc2">Tr</span>.</p>
+
+<p class="hang1"><a name="div2_191" href="#div2Ref_191">191</a>: The Fetzpopel, or <i>
+ragged ninny</i>, was a sort of
+scarecrow or bugbear.&mdash;<span class="sc2">Tr</span>.</p>
+
+<p class="hang1"><a name="div2_192" href="#div2Ref_192">192</a>: A fistful.&mdash;<span class="sc2">Tr</span>.</p>
+
+<p class="hang1"><a name="div2_193" href="#div2Ref_193">193</a>: An Indian moss used
+for the gout.&mdash;<span class="sc2">Tr</span>.</p>
+
+<p class="hang1"><a name="div2_194" href="#div2Ref_194">194</a>: An allusion to a
+scandalous Scotch imposture of
+1780.&mdash;<span class="sc2">Tr</span>.</p>
+
+<p class="hang1"><a name="div2_195" href="#div2Ref_195">195</a>: Sledges for riding
+astraddle.&mdash;<span class="sc2">Tr</span>.</p>
+
+<p class="hang1"><a name="div2_196" href="#div2Ref_196">196</a>: The Britons found out
+that whalebone shavings made the
+softest kind of bed.</p>
+
+<p class="hang1"><a name="div2_197" href="#div2Ref_197">197</a>: The English of this
+seems to be:&mdash;</p>
+<div class="poem">
+<p class="t4" style="text-indent:-8px">
+&quot;Turkey rhubarb powdered.<br>
+Starred anise-seed.<br>
+Fennel do.<br>
+Peel of green orange.<br>
+Carbonate of potash,&mdash;equal parts,&mdash;1 drachm.<br>
+Leaves of Alexandrian senna without stalks,&mdash;2 drachms.<br>
+Half an ounce of white sugar.&quot;</p>
+</div>
+<p class="hang2">And the final direction may read, &quot;Of which let him take a mixture,
+finely pulverized, given in sufficient quantity to produce ejection.
+Mark [i. e. on the paper], Wind-powders,&quot; &amp;c.&mdash;<span class="sc2">Tr</span>.</p>
+
+<p class="hang1"><a name="div2_198" href="#div2Ref_198">198</a>: The name given to the
+halo about the head, when one is
+electrized.</p>
+
+<p class="hang1"><a name="div2_199" href="#div2Ref_199">199</a>: An allusion, perhaps,
+to the pasteboard images carried
+about on the heads of Italian peddlers, in which the loose-hung head
+bobs right and left to the spectators.&mdash;<span class="sc2">Tr</span>.</p>
+
+<p class="hang1"><a name="div2_200" href="#div2Ref_200">200</a>: The German expression
+for all this is too elliptical to
+be literally rendered. It is simply &quot;Meinetwegen!&quot; (For all me!)&mdash;<span class="sc2">Tr</span>.</p>
+
+<p class="hang1"><a name="div2_201" href="#div2Ref_201">201</a>: Fancy-man.&mdash;<span class="sc2">Tr</span>.</p>
+
+<p class="hang1"><a name="div2_202" href="#div2Ref_202">202</a>: Their good works are
+good words.&mdash;<span class="sc2">Tr</span>.</p>
+
+<p class="hang1"><a name="div2_203" href="#div2Ref_203">203</a>: The horse referred to
+on page 91.&mdash;<span class="sc2">Tr</span>.</p>
+
+<p class="hang1"><a name="div2_204" href="#div2Ref_204">204</a>: That is, he would be,
+when this letter arrived, for he
+was going to carry it.&mdash;<span class="sc2">Tr</span>.</p>
+
+<p class="hang1"><a name="div2_205" href="#div2Ref_205">205</a>: Culpepper never did
+him the pleasure, for which he had
+so often begged him, of prescribing for the Prince a clyster, which
+then the apothecary himself would have administered, in order just for
+once to <i>get at</i> the ruler, and transform <i>his</i> weak side into his own
+sunny side.</p>
+
+<p class="hang1"><a name="div2_206" href="#div2Ref_206">206</a>: When those twins
+chipped the shell of Leda's egg, out of
+which they were born.&mdash;<span class="sc2">Tr</span>.</p>
+
+<p class="hang1"><a name="div2_207" href="#div2Ref_207">207</a>: Literally,
+&quot;Knapsack.&quot;&mdash;<span class="sc2">Tr</span>.</p>
+
+<p class="hang1"><a name="div2_208" href="#div2Ref_208">208</a>: French for
+clyster.&mdash;<span class="sc2">Tr</span>.</p>
+
+<p class="hang1"><a name="div2_209" href="#div2Ref_209">209</a>: A Greek jurist,
+compared by Gibbon to Bacon, of great
+influence in the first half of the sixth century,&mdash;dishonest, but
+able.&mdash;<span class="sc2">Tr</span>.</p>
+
+<p class="hang1"><a name="div2_210" href="#div2Ref_210">210</a>: The red-deer, and the
+wild-boar, bear, badger, &amp;c.&mdash;<span class="sc2">Tr</span>.</p>
+
+<p class="hang1"><a name="div2_211" href="#div2Ref_211">211</a>: i. e. about two
+kreutzers.&mdash;<span class="sc2">Tr</span>.</p>
+
+<p class="hang1"><a name="div2_212" href="#div2Ref_212">212</a>: Entity.&mdash;<span class="sc2">Tr</span>.</p>
+
+<p class="hang1"><a name="div2_213" href="#div2Ref_213">213</a>: &quot;<i>Gesegnete
+Mahlzeit</i>&quot; is the familiar phrase Richter
+uses; it was formerly common, at the close of dinner, to shake hands
+and wish &quot;a blessing on the meal.&quot;&mdash;<span class="sc2">Tr</span>.</p>
+
+<p class="hang1"><a name="div2_214" href="#div2Ref_214">214</a>:</p>
+<div class="poem">
+<p class="t4" style="text-indent:-8px">
+&quot;Hast thou a friend, take care to keep him,<br>
+And often to his threshold wend:<br>
+Briers and thorns o'ergrow the path<br>
+On which a man neglects to walk.&quot;&mdash;<i>Old Saying</i>.</p>
+<p class="right"><span class="sc2">Tr</span>.</p>
+</div>
+<br>
+<p class="hang1"><a name="div2_215" href="#div2Ref_215">215</a>; Little Britain.&mdash;<span class="sc2">Tr</span>.</p>
+
+<p class="hang1"><a name="div2_216" href="#div2Ref_216">216</a>: He with the long
+shoes, in his &quot;Education of a Young
+Prince, 1705.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="hang1"><a name="div2_217" href="#div2Ref_217">217</a>: Thus did merely the
+first edition, in 1797, speak of the
+Viennese; a third, improved one, in 1819, acknowledges also an improved
+edition of them, although it retains lively <i>shadows</i> of their former
+times.</p>
+
+<p class="hang1"><a name="div2_218" href="#div2Ref_218">218</a>: A coarse writer no
+longer known.&mdash;<span class="sc2">Tr</span>.</p>
+
+<p class="hang1"><a name="div2_219" href="#div2Ref_219">219</a>: Author of the
+Burlesque Virgil.&mdash;<span class="sc2">Tr</span>.</p>
+
+<p class="hang1"><a name="div2_220" href="#div2Ref_220">220</a>: The author appears to
+have had in his mind a
+reminiscence of a passage in Bürger's &quot;Lenore&quot;:&mdash;</p>
+<div class="poem">
+<p class="t4" style="text-indent:-8px">
+&quot;Like croak of frogs in marshy plain,<br>
+Swelled on the breeze that dismal strain,&quot; &amp;c.&mdash;<span class="sc2">Tr</span>.</p>
+</div>
+<p class="hang1"><a name="div2_221" href="#div2Ref_221">221</a>: Sacred musical
+composition of a stylish character.&mdash;<span class="sc2">Tr</span>.</p>
+
+<p class="hang1"><a name="div2_222" href="#div2Ref_222">222</a>: The Jewish name for
+Sabbath in the Middle Ages. See
+Auerbach's Spinoza.&mdash;<span class="sc2">Tr</span>.</p>
+
+<p class="hang1"><a name="div2_223" href="#div2Ref_223">223</a>: Latin for ruins,
+fragments of old buildings, &amp;c.&mdash;<span class="sc2">Tr</span>.</p>
+
+<p class="hang1"><a name="div2_224" href="#div2Ref_224">224</a>: &quot;He toucheth the
+hills, and they smoke.&quot;&mdash;<span class="sc2">Tr</span>.</p>
+
+<p class="hang1"><a name="div2_225" href="#div2Ref_225">225</a>: December is most
+favorable to astronomical
+observations.</p>
+
+<p class="hang1"><a name="div2_226" href="#div2Ref_226">226</a>: A musical direction:
+Go back to the sign; Begin
+again.&mdash;<span class="sc2">Tr</span>.</p>
+
+<p class="hang1"><a name="div2_227" href="#div2Ref_227">227</a>: The German word is <i>
+Kälte</i>, which explains the
+incongruity of our English heading.&mdash;<span class="sc2">Tr</span>.</p>
+
+<p class="hang1"><a name="div2_228" href="#div2Ref_228">228</a>: A word copied exactly
+from the German, and well enough
+justified by the analogy of <i>rookery</i>, for instance.&mdash;<span class="sc2">Tr</span>.</p>
+
+<p class="hang1"><a name="div2_229" href="#div2Ref_229">229</a>: See that noble
+passage of Milton, beginning</p>
+
+<p class="center">&quot;I cannot praise a fugitive and cloistered virtue.&quot;&mdash;<span class="sc2">Tr</span>.</p>
+
+<p class="hang1"><a name="div2_230" href="#div2Ref_230">230</a>: I have wholly recast
+the letter N, because in the first
+edition I unfortunately had a good idea, which, without recollecting
+its first publication, I gave the world a second time, as a learned
+thief of my own property, in the commentary on the woodcuts. [Probably
+the ones illustrating the Ten Commandments, in the <i>Campaner Thal</i>,
+Jean Paul's work on Immortality.&mdash;Tr.]</p>
+
+<p class="hang1"><a name="div2_231" href="#div2Ref_231">231</a>: The royal band (of
+twenty-four).&mdash;<span class="sc2">Tr</span>.</p>
+
+<p class="hang1"><a name="div2_232" href="#div2Ref_232">232</a>: A freethinker and
+Freemason, in the latter half of the
+eighteenth century imprisoned, for a certain comedy, in Magdeburg
+fortress.&mdash;<span class="sc2">Tr</span>.</p>
+
+<p class="hang1"><a name="div2_233" href="#div2Ref_233">233</a>: The highway.&mdash;<span class="sc2">Tr</span>.</p>
+
+<p class="hang1"><a name="div2_234" href="#div2Ref_234">234</a>: As an example, we
+have now the First Principle of
+Morals, and that of the Forms of Government.</p>
+
+<p class="hang1"><a name="div2_235" href="#div2Ref_235">235</a>:
+Self-government.&mdash;<span class="sc2">Tr</span>.</p>
+
+<p class="hang1"><a name="div2_236" href="#div2Ref_236">236</a>: See his <i>Am&#339;n.
+Acad</i>., the treatise on the habitable
+globe.</p>
+
+<p class="hang1"><a name="div2_237" href="#div2Ref_237">237</a>: The hysterical ball,
+i. e. the hysteric morbid feeling,
+as if a ball were rolling up into the throat.</p>
+
+<p class="hang1"><a name="div2_238" href="#div2Ref_238">238</a>: Used here by Jean
+Paul evidently, with figurative
+freedom, for a Russian swing, but meaning originally a <i>chariot-race</i>
+(afterward tournament), and derived from <i>currus solis</i> (chariot of the
+sun).&mdash;<span class="sc2">Tr</span>.</p>
+
+<p class="hang1"><a name="div2_239" href="#div2Ref_239">239</a>: Conjurer's
+jargon.&mdash;<span class="sc2">Tr</span>.</p>
+
+<p class="hang1"><a name="div2_240" href="#div2Ref_240">240</a>: &quot;The <i>Litones</i>
+were slaves among the old Saxons, who
+still possessed a third of their property, and could make contracts for
+it.&quot; <i>Flegeljahre</i>, No. 8.&mdash;<span class="sc2">Tr</span>.</p>
+
+<p class="hang1"><a name="div2_241" href="#div2Ref_241">241</a>: An instrument for
+determining the blueness of the sky.</p>
+
+<p class="hang1"><a name="div2_242" href="#div2Ref_242">242</a>: French for a male
+flirt.&mdash;<span class="sc2">Tr</span>.</p>
+
+<p class="hang1"><a name="div2_243" href="#div2Ref_243">243</a>: Differing laws.&mdash;<span class="sc2">Tr</span>.</p>
+
+<p class="hang1"><a name="div2_244" href="#div2Ref_244">244</a>: Axiom in law; named
+from Brocard, a Bishop of Worms, who
+made a collection of canons called &quot;Brocardica Juris.&quot;&mdash;<span class="sc2">Tr</span>.</p>
+
+<p class="hang1"><a name="div2_245" href="#div2Ref_245">245</a>: Proculus and Sabinus
+were the founders of two rival
+schools of jurisprudence in Rome (Proculians and Sabinians) in the
+first century of our era.&mdash;<span class="sc2">Tr</span>.</p>
+
+<p class="hang1"><a name="div2_246" href="#div2Ref_246">246</a>: A term from the
+Pandects of Justinian, meaning
+liabilities to burdens or duties.&mdash;<span class="sc2">Tr</span>.</p>
+
+<p class="hang1"><a name="div2_247" href="#div2Ref_247">247</a>: Alluding to the
+consolidating of stocks, debts,
+&amp;c.&mdash;<span class="sc2">Tr</span>.</p>
+
+<p class="hang1"><a name="div2_248" href="#div2Ref_248">248</a>: An Italian astronomer
+and anatomist, born in 1602.&mdash;<span class="sc2">Tr</span>.</p>
+
+<p class="hang1"><a name="div2_249" href="#div2Ref_249">249</a>: Faust (meaning both
+fist and the Faust of story) is the
+word in the original.&mdash;<span class="sc2">Tr</span>.</p>
+
+<p class="hang1"><a name="div2_250" href="#div2Ref_250">250</a>: Or journey.&mdash;<span class="sc2">Tr</span>.</p>
+
+<p class="hang1"><a name="div2_251" href="#div2Ref_251">251</a>: There is a play on
+words in the original, <i>Hof</i> meaning
+<i>court</i>, and also, when applied to the sun or moon, a <i>circle</i> round
+the luminary.&mdash;<span class="sc2">Tr</span>.</p>
+
+<p class="hang1"><a name="div2_252" href="#div2Ref_252">252</a>: The original has a
+slight pun; <i>über die Tafel</i> meaning
+both <i>on the subject</i> of the table and <i>during</i> the table (or
+dinner).&mdash;<span class="sc2">Tr</span>.</p>
+
+<p class="hang1"><a name="div2_253" href="#div2Ref_253">253</a>: A name given to
+different groups of delicate muscles in
+certain sensitive parts of the human body.&mdash;<span class="sc2">Tr</span>.</p>
+
+<p class="hang1"><a name="div2_254" href="#div2Ref_254">254</a>:</p>
+<div class="poem">
+<p class="t4" style="text-indent:-8px">
+&quot;But where of ye, O tempests, is the goal!<br>
+Are ye like those within the human breast,<br>
+Or do ye find, like eagles, some high nest?&quot;</p>
+<p class="right"><i>Childe Harold</i>.</p>
+</div>
+<p class="hang1"><a name="div2_255" href="#div2Ref_255">255</a>: The snake-stone sucks
+at the wound till it has sucked
+out all the poison.</p>
+
+<p class="hang1"><a name="div2_256" href="#div2Ref_256">256</a>: In a nutshell.&mdash;<span class="sc2">Tr</span>.</p>
+
+<p class="hang1"><a name="div2_257" href="#div2Ref_257">257</a>: The conservative or
+court party in the French Revolution
+were called the <i>noirs</i> (blacks), from the fact of the emigrant nobles
+wearing black velvet. The <i>Ensragés</i> was the name of a radical
+club.&mdash;<span class="sc2">Tr</span>.</p>
+
+<p class="hang1"><a name="div2_258" href="#div2Ref_258">258</a>: Literally, the game
+of <i>man</i> (<i>ombre</i>, Spanish).&mdash;<span class="sc2">Tr</span>.</p>
+
+<p class="hang1"><a name="div2_259" href="#div2Ref_259">259</a>: Joachime, Clotilda,
+Victor, and the Devil.</p>
+
+<p class="hang1"><a name="div2_260" href="#div2Ref_260">260</a>: <i>Mort</i> (French)
+in the original.&mdash;<span class="sc2">Tr</span>.</p>
+
+<p class="hang1"><a name="div2_261" href="#div2Ref_261">261</a>: Manager of the
+game.&mdash;<span class="sc2">Tr</span>.</p>
+
+<p class="hang1"><a name="div2_262" href="#div2Ref_262">262</a>: Or face-card.&mdash;<span class="sc2">Tr</span>.</p>
+
+<p class="hang1"><a name="div2_263" href="#div2Ref_263">263</a>: No pun in the
+original.&mdash;Tr.]
+<p class="hang1"><a name="div2_264" href="#div2Ref_264">264</a>: A Parisian anatomiste
+(b. 1719) persecuted by the
+profession to London, where she exhibited her wax-skeleton with
+success.&mdash;<span class="sc2">Tr</span>.</p>
+
+<p class="hang1"><a name="div2_265" href="#div2Ref_265">265</a>: Described on pages
+127-134.&mdash;<span class="sc2">Tr</span>.</p>
+
+<p class="hang1"><a name="div2_266" href="#div2Ref_266">266</a>: Entertainments for
+the gods, at which their images
+were laid on couches (<i>lecti</i>), and food was served up to them in
+public.&mdash;<span class="sc2">Tr</span>.</p>
+
+<p class="hang1"><a name="div2_267" href="#div2Ref_267">267</a>: <i>Panist</i> from
+the Latin <i>panis</i>,&mdash;an allusion to an old
+class of charity scholars. It might be rendered, <i>loafer</i>.&mdash;<span class="sc2">Tr</span>.</p>
+
+<p class="hang1"><a name="div2_268" href="#div2Ref_268">268</a>: Alluding to the long
+attempts in Germany to fuse the
+Calvinistie and Lutheran Churches.&mdash;<span class="sc2">Tr</span>.</p>
+
+<p class="hang1"><a name="div2_269" href="#div2Ref_269">269</a>: <i>Musicus</i> here,
+not <i>musicant</i>, which latter means the
+more common performer, fiddler, or whatever else.&mdash;<span class="sc2">Tr</span>.</p>
+
+<p class="hang1"><a name="div2_270" href="#div2Ref_270">270</a>: Father
+confessor.&mdash;<span class="sc2">Tr</span>.</p>
+
+<p class="hang1"><a name="div2_271" href="#div2Ref_271">271</a>: Plutarch mentions how
+vain Pompey's cavaliers were of
+their personal appearance, and that Cæsar accordingly directed his
+soldiers to aim at their faces; &quot;for Cæsar hoped that those young
+cavaliers who had not been used to wars and wounds, and who set
+a great value on their beauty, would avoid above all things a stroke
+in that part, and immediately give way, as well on account of the
+present danger as the future deformity. The event answered his
+expectation.&quot;&mdash;<span class="sc2">Tr</span>.</p>
+
+<p class="hang1"><a name="div2_272" href="#div2Ref_272">272</a>: To save the external
+decencies of virtue.&mdash;<span class="sc2">Tr</span>.</p>
+
+<p class="hang1"><a name="div2_273" href="#div2Ref_273">273</a>: I. e., O Clarissa!
+behold your Lovelace; let us skip the
+first four volumes, and, like the makers of Epics, begin with the
+rest!</p>
+
+<p class="hang1"><a name="div2_274" href="#div2Ref_274">274</a>: A kind of
+fire-alarm.&mdash;<span class="sc2">Tr</span>.</p>
+
+<p class="hang1"><a name="div2_275" href="#div2Ref_275">275</a>: These terms are
+adopted as the shortest correspondents
+of the German <i>bürgerlich</i> and <i>stiftfähig</i>.&mdash;<span class="sc2">Tr</span>.</p>
+
+<p class="hang1"><a name="div2_276" href="#div2Ref_276">276</a>: He mistakes; Leibnitz
+only said, everything difficult
+was light to him, and everything light difficult.</p>
+
+<p class="hang1"><a name="div2_277" href="#div2Ref_277">277</a>: As the old fellow who
+carried his pipe in his boot, when
+his leg was shot off at the battle of Prague, grabbed at his pipe first
+and then at his leg. (See Old Song.)&mdash;<span class="sc2">Tr</span>.</p>
+
+<p class="hang1"><a name="div2_278" href="#div2Ref_278">278</a>: &quot;Colors produced on
+ores by the action of the
+air.&quot;&mdash;Adler.</p>
+
+<p class="hang1"><a name="div2_279" href="#div2Ref_279">279</a>: <i>Viel-Liebe</i> is
+Jean Paul's word, to match which, after
+the analogy of Polygamy (marriage to many), we might coin the word
+<i>Polyagapy</i> (love to many).&mdash;<span class="sc2">Tr</span>.</p>
+
+<p class="hang1"><a name="div2_280" href="#div2Ref_280">280</a>: Instead of <i>malade
+imaginaire</i>, an imaginary invalid,
+she was an imaginary <i>convalescent</i>.&mdash;<span class="sc2">Tr</span>.</p>
+
+<p class="hang1"><a name="div2_281" href="#div2Ref_281">281</a>: <i>Adjuvans</i> is
+the ingredient which strengthens the
+powers of the main ingredients; <i>constituens</i> is what gives the
+medicine the form of pill, electuary or mixture.</p>
+
+<p class="hang1"><a name="div2_282" href="#div2Ref_282">282</a>: One weeps, one cries,
+one sighs, one lies, one raves,
+one kills, one dies,&mdash;in fine, one gives himself to all the devils, in
+order to have his angel.&mdash;<span class="sc2">Tr</span>.</p>
+
+<p class="hang1"><a name="div2_283" href="#div2Ref_283">283</a>: As we say <i>pea-soup</i>, <i>
+vermicelli-soup</i>.</p>
+
+<p class="hang1"><a name="div2_284" href="#div2Ref_284">284</a>: Referring to the one
+whose marriage to the Senior
+Parson's daughter Victor witnessed that night from his window.&mdash;<span class="sc2">Tr</span>.</p>
+
+<p class="hang1"><a name="div2_285" href="#div2Ref_285">285</a>: See note to page
+194.&mdash;<span class="sc2">Tr</span>.</p>
+
+<p class="hang1"><a name="div2_286" href="#div2Ref_286">286</a>: Of course,
+Procrustes.&mdash;<span class="sc2">Tr</span>.</p>
+
+<p class="hang1"><a name="div2_287" href="#div2Ref_287">287</a>: Cheeks.&mdash;<span class="sc2">Tr</span>.</p>
+
+<p class="hang1"><a name="div2_288" href="#div2Ref_288">288</a>: The God of sleep was
+attended by three beings:
+<i>Phantasus</i>, who could change himself only into lifeless things;
+<i>Phobetor</i>, who could assume and conjure up all animal forms; and
+<i>Moropheus</i>, who could, all human forms. Metamorph. Lib. II. Fab. 10.</p>
+
+<p class="hang1"><a name="div2_289" href="#div2Ref_289">289</a>: Painter's
+colics.&mdash;<span class="sc2">Tr</span>.</p>
+
+<p class="hang1"><a name="div2_290" href="#div2Ref_290">290</a>: &quot;Seed to the sower
+and bread to the eater.&quot;
+(Isaiah.)&mdash;<span class="sc2">Tr</span>.</p>
+
+<p class="hang1"><a name="div2_291" href="#div2Ref_291">291</a>: Nor yet by a luxury,
+whose magnitude one exaggerates in
+comparing their outlays with our income, and which injured them only in
+this way, that they inherited the nations like East Indian cousins. It
+was that of a cobbler who has won the highest prize in the lottery; it
+was the squandering of a soldier after the plundering. Hence they had
+luxury without refinement. It could maintain its greatness only by
+growing greater. Had one thrown to them America with its gold bars,
+they might, with greater luxury, have gone on this crutch some
+centuries longer.</p>
+
+<p class="hang1"><a name="div2_292" href="#div2Ref_292">292</a>: It is well known that
+the head of the poor negro is shut
+up in a hollow one of iron, which presses down his tongue.</p>
+
+<p class="hang1"><a name="div2_293" href="#div2Ref_293">293</a>: Written in the year
+1792.</p>
+
+<p class="hang1"><a name="div2_294" href="#div2Ref_294">294</a>: The millionnaire
+presupposes the beggar, the scholar,
+the Helot; the higher culture of individuals is purchased by the
+degradation of the mass.</p>
+
+<p class="hang1"><a name="div2_295" href="#div2Ref_295">295</a>: Written in 1792. At
+present the tempest which once stood
+in the heavens over all Europe lies out there in the level earth.</p>
+
+<p class="hang1"><a name="div2_296" href="#div2Ref_296">296</a>: For after 400,000
+years the earth's axis, as Jupiter's
+is now, will be perpendicular to the plane of its orbit.</p>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<h3>END OF VOL. I.</h3>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+
+<hr class="W50">
+<h5>Cambridge: Stereotyped and Printed by Welch, Bigelow, &amp; Co.</h5>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+<pre>
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Hesperus or Forty-Five Dog-Post-Days
+Vol. I., by Jean Paul Friedrich Richter
+
+*** END OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK HESPERUS OR FORTY-FIVE ***
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+</body>
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+Project Gutenberg (https://www.gutenberg.org) public repository for
+eBook #36071 (https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/36071)
diff --git a/old/36071-8.txt b/old/36071-8.txt
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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of Hesperus or Forty-Five Dog-Post-Days Vol. I., by 
+Jean Paul Friedrich Richter
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: Hesperus or Forty-Five Dog-Post-Days Vol. I.
+       A Biography
+
+Author: Jean Paul Friedrich Richter
+
+Translator: Charles T. Brooks
+
+Release Date: May 9, 2011 [EBook #36071]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK HESPERUS OR FORTY-FIVE ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Charles Bowen, from page scans provided by the Web Archive
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+Transcriber's Notes:
+
+   1. Page scan source: Making of America
+      http://www.archive.org/details/hesperusorforty01paulgoog
+
+   2. Greek words are transliterated within brackets, e.g. [Greek:
+      naos].
+
+   3. The diphthong oe is represented by [oe].
+
+   4. [=a] represents a macron above the letter a.
+
+
+
+
+
+                         JEAN PAUL'S WRITINGS.
+
+                                _TITAN_.
+                             2 vols. 16mo.
+
+
+                   _FLOWER, FRUIT, AND THORN PIECES_.
+                             2 vols. 16mo.
+
+
+                _LEVANA, OR THE DOCTRINE OF EDUCATION_.
+                              1 vol. 16mo.
+
+
+                _THE CAMPANER THAL, AND OTHER WRITINGS_.
+                              1 vol. 16mo.
+
+
+                              _HESPERUS_.
+                             2 vols. 16mo.
+
+
+                          _LIFE OF JEAN PAUL_.
+           By Mrs. E. B. Lee. Preceded by his Autobiography.
+                              1 vol. 16mo.
+
+
+                           *   *   *   *   *
+The above are published in uniform volumes by
+                                       TICKNOR AND FIELDS, Boston.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+                                HESPERUS
+
+                                   OR
+
+                       _Forty-Five Dog-Post-Days_
+
+
+                              A BIOGRAPHY
+
+                           FROM THE GERMAN OF
+
+                     _JEAN PAUL FRIEDRICH RICHTER_
+
+
+                             TRANSLATED BY
+                           CHARLES T. BROOKS
+
+
+"The Earth is the _cul-de-sac_ in the great city of God,--the
+camera obscura full of inverted and contracted images from a fairer
+world,--the coast of God's creation,--a vaporous halo around a better
+sun,--the numerator to a still invisible denominator,--in fact, it is
+almost nothing at all."
+
+                        _Selections from the Papers of the Devil_.
+
+
+                            IN TWO VOLUMES.
+                                VOL. I.
+
+
+
+
+                                BOSTON:
+                          TICKNOR AND FIELDS.
+                                 1865.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+       Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 1864, by
+                          TICKNOR AND FIELDS,
+     In the Clerk's Office of the District Court of the District of
+                             Massachusetts.
+
+
+
+
+
+                           University Press:
+                      Welch, Bigelow, And Company,
+                               Cambridge.
+
+
+
+
+                         TRANSLATOR'S PREFACE.
+
+
+A work which has three prefaces by its author may be thought by some to
+need, and by others not to permit, a very long one from its translator.
+This is the first of Richter's romances which took hold of the German
+public. After he had long tried in vain, by a variety of literary
+devices, to entice or provoke the people's attention, and win or force
+a way to their hearts for his wit and his wisdom, his odd fancies and
+his noble sentiments, on the appearance of Hesperus, the siege, as
+Carlyle says, ("the ten-years'-siege of a poverty-stricken existence"
+Jean Paul himself calls it,) may be said to have terminated by storm.
+
+It was the Hesperus that brought Richter to Weimar. It was in Hesperus,
+and as Hesperus, that this singular genius rose on the horizon of
+Goethe and Schiller,--the latter of whom (as will be well remembered)
+tells his great friend that he has met "Hesperus," a strange being,
+like a man who has dropped from the moon. English readers may have
+different opinions on the question whether he "came down too soon" or
+too late. The Translator seems to see signs that Jean Paul is to be
+better and better understood and appreciated among us in this free and
+forming Western world, and he concludes his introduction of this second
+great labor to the public with the benediction upon the book which, in
+the closing paragraph of _his_ second Preface, the author so touchingly
+pronounces on this evening and morning star of his heart.
+
+The Translator is exceedingly indebted to his friend, Professor Knorr
+of Philadelphia, and to his former teacher, Dr. Beck of Cambridge, for
+their kind and patient assistance in correcting the proof-sheets of his
+work; and from the keen and practised eye of Mr. George Nichols he also
+received for some time valuable aid.
+
+Newport, R. I.
+
+
+
+
+                                PREFACE
+                         TO THE THIRD EDITION.
+
+
+Two long Prefaces follow on the heels of this third,--the first that of
+the second edition, and the next that of the first. Now, if I make this
+third again a long one,--and perhaps also, in fact, the many remaining
+ones of future editions,--I do not see how a reader of these latter can
+get through the lane of antechambers to the historical picture-gallery:
+he will die on his way to the book.
+
+I report, then, briefly. In this edition such amendments have been made
+as were most needed and easiest. In the first place, I have frequently
+translated myself into German out of the Greek, Latin, French, and
+Italian, and in fact in every instance where the speech-cleanser, with
+proper respect for the subject itself, demanded it. Once for all, we
+writers must all accommodate ourselves to the verbal-alien-bill, or
+decree for exiling foreigners, of Campe, Kolbe, and others; and even
+our beloved Goethe, however much he too "emergiert" and "eminiert,"
+will at last, in some future edition or other, have, for example, to
+throw both of these very words, which in the latest[1] he brings
+forward in the same line, out of the book. Is it not time, now that we
+have ejected the foreign peoples which had been long enough encamped in
+Germany, that we should send after them what has still longer remained
+behind,--their echo, or words?
+
+Only let Kolbe, or any other Purist, be a reasonable man, and not
+exhort us to change the technical words which are the common property
+of cultivated Europe--e. g. of music, of philosophy--into vernacular
+ones which will not be understood, especially in cases where the hand
+of the interpreter would snatch and pluck away the butterfly-dust of
+variegated allusions. For example, the name Purist itself may serve as
+an example. Supposing one should call Arndt a _political Purist_ of
+Germany, and Kolbe should substitute political _speech-purifier_, or
+pure of speech, this small conceit would give up in the translation the
+little bit of ghost that it haply possessed.
+
+Even if the author, however, has not turned out such things,--as some
+philological anchorites do, who, like the windpipe, eject all foreign
+matter with disagreeable coughing and spitting, and only retain their
+native air,--still he has at least sought to imitate the glaciers,
+which from year to year gradually shove down foreign bodies, such as
+stone and wood, from their sides. How diligently I have done this in
+the present edition of Hesperus, on every side, may be seen by the old
+printed copy interlined with the new emendations, and I could well wish
+Herr Kolbe would just travel to Berlin and inspect the copy. At least I
+will beseech the German Society there, which some years ago made me a
+member, to go to the bookstore and see for themselves what their
+colleague has done, what erasions and substitutions he has made.
+
+The ones who have properly sinned the most against the German language,
+and against those who understand no other, are the natural-historians,
+who--e. g. Alexander von Humboldt--import thee whole Latin Linnæus into
+the midst of our language, without any other German signs of
+distinction than the final flourishes of German terminations, or
+tail-feathers, wherewith, however, they are as little intelligible to
+the mere speaker of German as a man would be to a stranger behind him
+through his mere queue. Has not our inexhaustible language already
+shown its capability of creating a German Linnæus when we read a
+Wilhelmi, and still more that true German in heart and speech, Oken?
+
+For the rest, the German language will, in general, never shrink up and
+grow impoverished, even by the greatest hospitality towards strangers.
+For it steadily produces (as all dictionaries show) out of its ever
+fresh stems a hundred times as many children and grandchildren and
+great-grandchildren as the foreign birth it adopts in the place of
+children; so that after centuries the thicket that has sprung from our
+prolific radical words must overshadow and choke up the strange words
+which have shot up only as flying seed, and finally rear itself into
+a true banian forest, whose twigs grow down to roots, and whose
+upward-planted roots strike out into summits. How entangled and wild
+with foreign growth will, on the contrary, after some centuries, the
+English language be, for instance, with its native but powerless stem
+full of engrafted word-shrubbery, capable only of inoculation, and
+fetching back from its duplicate, America, more new words than wares!
+
+The second, but easier thing which has been done for this third,
+improved edition of Hesperus, of course is, that I have gone slowly
+through the whole Evening Star with weeder in hand, and carefully
+eradicated all the fungous weeds of genitives, or _Es_'s, in compound
+words, wherever I found them, which on the very title-page of the
+_Dog's_-Post-days was unfortunately the case. I had, however, much to
+endure in this work. Of the old actions of our over-rich language
+against itself, too many are attachments upon its real estate, and I
+was compelled, therefore, to leave many a nested crew of Es's where it
+had too long been settled, and appealed to witnesses and ear-witnesses
+for right of possession.
+
+Even up to the hour of this Preface, the author of the "_Morgen-Blatt_
+letters on compound words" has been waiting, not so much for a
+thorough-going _examination_, (it were, perhaps, too soon for that,)
+but first of all for a comprehensive _reading_ of them, which, to be
+sure, the scattering archipelago of sheets, like islands lying apart
+from one another, will make difficult so long as the periodical has not
+yet run through its circle of numbers. But then I shall hope from the
+speech-investigator, when he has them complete in his house and hands
+before his judgment-seat, a thorough refutation or approbation.
+
+Finally, in the third place, after the double amendment of two
+editions, (for the first received great improvements, and in fact
+_before_ it was printed,) a third was undertaken which had for its
+object to let fly at harshnesses, obscurities, mistakes, and other
+over-lengthenings and overshortenings of dress.
+
+But, heavens! how often must not a writing-man have to improve upon
+himself, who is hardly over half a century old! Were he to live, in
+fact, into a Methusalem's millennium, and continue to write, the
+Methusalem would have to append so many volumes of emendations that the
+work itself would have to be annexed to them as mere preliminary
+matter, appendix, or supplementary sheet.
+
+For several years the author has found in his earlier works, in a high
+degree, a fault which he has met with in Ernst Wagner, Fouqué, and
+others, frequently repeated or imitated, namely, the passion for
+enacting, in his authorial person, the trumpeter, or usher, of the
+emotions, which the subject himself should have and show, but not the
+poet. E. g. "With sublime calmness Dahore replied." Why add _sublime_,
+when it is superfluous, presumptuous, and premature, provided the
+answer really exalts, or, if it does not so, the result is still more
+pitiful? The poet who, in this way, is the _fore-echo_ of his
+personages, takes for his model certain modern tragic poets, like
+Werner, Müllner, &c., who prefix to every speech for the actor the
+bookbinder's directions: "With touching emotion,"--"with a sigh of
+painful remembrance out of the depths of sorrow,"--mere sentences of
+intensity, or rather of impotence, which only a pantomimic dance needs
+or can follow, but which no piece of Shakespeare's, of Schiller's, or
+of Goethe's needs, because, indeed, the speech itself teaches how to
+speak it.
+
+For the rest, I have not the courage, now that I am a quarter of a
+century older and more aged, to give the first youthful outstreamings
+of the heart a different channel, and a weaker fall and course. Man in
+later life too easily regards every change in his junior as an
+improvement; but as no man can take the place of another, so, too,
+cannot the same man act as his own substitute in his different periods
+of life, least of all the poet.
+
+The best _wedded_ love is not what the _maidenly_ was; and so, too, is
+there in inspiration and delineation a maiden muse. Ah, all first
+things in poesy, as in life, whatever else may be wanting to them, are
+so innocent and good; and all _blossoms_ come so _pure-white_ into the
+world, in which by and by,--as Goethe says,[2] even of material colors,
+"The sun tolerates no white." Therefore shall all the ardent words of
+my inspiration for Emanuel's dying and Victor's loving and weeping, and
+for Clotilda's sorrow and silence, stand evermore in Hesperus uncooled
+and unchanged. Even the Now shall take nothing from the Once. For
+although during these twenty-five years I have been made, by some
+imitations and echoes of the book, actually sick of myself,
+nevertheless I overcome the disgust of this self-surfeit by the hope
+that the youth who wrote will again, by and by, find young men and
+young women to read him, and that hereafter, even for older readers,
+more will survive of the thing imitated than of the imitations.
+
+And so, then, may this Evening Star--which was once the morning star of
+my whole soul--run its _third_ circuit around the reading world in the
+fuller light of a better position toward the sun and the earth!
+
+                                            JEAN PAUL FR. RICHTER.
+
+Baireuth, January 1, 1819.
+
+
+
+
+                                PREFACE
+                         TO THE SECOND EDITION.
+
+
+I have as yet completed nothing of this Preface beyond a tolerable
+sketch, which shall here be given to the leader unadorned. I may
+perhaps, by the gift of this sketch, also raise the curtain which
+continues to hang down before my literary workshop, and which hides
+from posterity how I labor therein as my own serving brother and as
+master of the Scottish chair. A plan is with me, however, no outline of
+a sermon in Hamburg, which the head pastor gives out on Saturday and
+fills out on Sunday. It is no automaton, no lay figure, no canon, after
+which I work; it is no skeleton for future flesh, but a plan is a leaf
+or sheet on which I make myself more comfortable and move more at ease,
+while I shake out upon it my whole brain-tree, in order afterwards to
+pick over and plant the windfalls, and cover--the paper with organic
+globules and layers of ph[oe]nix ashes, that whole brilliant
+pheasantries may rise out of it. In such a sketch I keep the most
+unlike and antagonistic things apart by mere dashes. In such sketches I
+address myself, and _thou_ myself like a Quaker, and order myself about
+a great deal; nay, I frequently introduce therein conceits which I do
+not have printed at all, either because no connection can be contrived
+for them, or because they are of themselves good for nothing.
+
+And now it will be time that I should really present the reader such a
+sketch, which happens to be this time the plan of the present Preface.
+It is headed:--
+
+
+ARCHITECTURAL PLAN AND BUILDING MATERIAL FOR THE PREFACE TO THE SECOND
+EDITION OF HESPERUS.
+
+"But make it short, because, as it is, the world will find it a
+long way through two antechambers into the passengers'-room of the
+Book.--Joke in the beginning.--Seldom does a man bowl all the Nine
+Muses on the literary ninepin-alley.--The conclusion from the
+reflection.--Bring out many resemblances between the title Hesperus and
+the Evening Star, or Venus, of which the following must be specimens:
+That mine, like the latter, is full of high, sharp mountains, and that
+both owe their greater splendor to their unevenness; further, that the
+one as well as the other, in its transit across the sun (of Apollo),
+appears only as a black spot.--(In your copy-book of letters you must
+have made numbers of such allusions.)--The world expects that the
+Evening Star in the second edition will come up from below, as Lucifer,
+or Morning Star, and that the glorified body of the paper will
+tabernacle a glorified soul: let it pass, and bring the world to its
+right bearings.--Regard pedants, who sustain and fodder themselves on
+words, not on things, as like the after-moths, which devour and digest
+wax cakes, but no honeycomb.--No one so very much resembles as pedants
+do the magpies, which are at once thievish and _garrulous_: they dilute
+and filch.--Into the critical hell precisely those classes of persons
+are not cast, which the Talmud also exempts from the Jewish, namely,
+the poor, those who cannot count, and those who are carried off by the
+diarrh[oe]a.--Be a fox, and cajole the critical billiard-markers who
+announce loss and gain."----
+
+This last I do not understand myself, because this sketch was written
+as long ago as the winter. I can rather confess, without irony, that
+the critical quarter-judges, or country-judges, have spared my life,
+and have not thrown over me either a Spanish mantle, or a cloak of
+humility, or a bloody shirt and hair-shirt. This indulgence of the
+critics for a writer of books, who, like a Catholic, performs more good
+works than he needs for salvation, is certainly not their worst
+characteristic, as they thereby exert such a beneficial influence on
+our empty days. For one must now be very glad if only four or five new
+similes are sent to the Easter fair, and if at Michaelmas only a few
+flowers, which are novelties, are offered for sale. Our literary
+kitchen-servants know how to play off on the table-cloth and into our
+mouths the same _goutée_ over and over again, under the appearance of
+six different dishes, and entertain us twice a year with an imitation
+of the celebrated potato-banquet in Paris. At first came on merely a
+potato-soup; then potatoes again in another preparation; the third
+course, on the contrary, consisted of potatoes rehashed; so, too, the
+fourth. For the fifth, now, one could serve up potatoes again, when one
+had only announced for the sixth, potatoes cut into the novel form of
+brilliants,--and so it went on through fourteen dishes, of which,
+fortunately, one could still say, that at least bread, confectionery,
+and liquor comforted the stomach, and consisted of potatoes.----
+
+Censure is an agreeable lemon-juice in praise; hence both are always
+bestowed by the world together, as if in the form of an oxymel; just
+as, according to the Talmud, a few fingerfuls of assaf[oe]tida were
+thrown with the other things upon the altar of burnt-offerings. The
+only thing, accordingly, which I will expose about the reviewers after
+the foregoing praise, and with which they really offend, is this, that
+they seldom (their heart is good) understand much of the subject or
+writing on which they pass judgment; and even this blame applies only
+to the greater part of them.----
+
+"Weave it in (the sketch goes on) that you cannot make out what the
+unveiling and unshelling of women's arms,[3] bosoms, and backs at the
+present day can mean, just as, formerly, peacocks were served up on the
+game-dish with precisely the corresponding parts, necks, wings, and
+heads, unpicked.--It will be well, therefore, if you conjecture that
+the shell-less ladies are female Jesuits and Freemasons in disguise,
+because in both orders the mysteries and veilings begin with
+denudation; or lay these unfeathered limbs at the door of some
+starvation or other, as a chicken creeps forth from an egg, out of
+which one has only drawn off a few drops of the white, with featherless
+spots.--Threaten, at least, that ladies and crabs are best when caught
+and boiled in the moulting-season."----
+
+This is one of the cases of which I said above, that in them I was
+obliged to give up and throw away conceits of the sketch, for want of
+connection with the main subject: for really the whole matter of the
+moulting of the limbs has nothing in common with the Preface, except
+the year of birth.
+
+"You must deviate from other authors," the plan goes on, "and glide
+silently over the approbation you have reaped, so that the world may
+see just what you are.--One expects from the Preface to a second
+edition a little map of products, or a harvest register of all the
+after-bloom which exalts the second above the first: give them the
+register!--
+
+With pleasure!--First, I have corrected all typographical
+errors,--then all slips of the pen,--then many cacophonies of
+language,--moreover, verbal and real blunders enough; but the conceits
+and the poetical tulips I have seldom rooted out. I saw that if I did
+so there would be left in the world not much more of the book (because
+I should strike out the whole style) than the binding and the list of
+errata. The theologian hates juristic allusions,--the jurist,
+theological ones,--the physician, both,--the mathematician, all of
+them. I love them all. What shall one leave out or retain?--The woman
+is displeased with satire, the man with softening warmth, (for
+_coldness_ in _books_, as in _cakes of chocolate_, he holds to be proof
+of excellence,) and the public itself has forty-five opinions upon a
+chapter, as Cromwell dictated four contradictory letters to the same
+correspondent, merely for the sake of concealing from his scribes the
+purport of the one which he really despatched.----To which opinion
+shall an author adhere in such a disagreement?--Most properly to his
+own, as the world to its own.--
+
+For the rest, my little[4] work can hardly see so many _printed_
+editions as I have arranged of _written_ and improved ones in
+my study; and therefore great alterations in it are, if not less
+indispensable, at least more difficult. In the plan of the story
+itself, therefore,--even supposing I had forgotten that it is a
+true one,--there is little to change for the better, because the work
+is like my breeches, which were not made by a tailor, but by a
+stocking-loom, and in which the breaking of a single stitch of the
+right shank unravels the whole fabric of the left. For it is an
+essential, but undeniable, fault of the book,--which I easily explain
+by the want of episodes,--that the moment I take out from the first
+story (or volume) any defective stone whatever, immediately in the
+third all totters, and at last comes down. Of course I thereby fall far
+in the rear of the best new romances, where one can break out or build
+in considerable pieces without the least injury to the composition and
+fire-proof quality, simply because they resemble, not, like my book, a
+mere house, but a whole toy-city from Nuremberg, whose loose, unhitched
+houses the child piles away in his play-house, and whose mosaic of huts
+the dear little one easily puts together for his amusement, streetwise,
+just as he fancies. A true story always has the annoying thing about
+it, that in its case this cannot be done.
+
+However, I sufficiently excuse my work on the score of artistic
+_changes_ and _improvements_ by true _enlargements_ of it through
+historical additions. As I fortunately have for some years myself lived
+and been housed among the persons whom I have portrayed, accordingly I
+am perfectly in a position, as fly-wheel of this fair family circle, to
+supply, from the depositions of living witnesses, a thousand
+corrections and explanations which otherwise no man could learn, which
+however throw light on the somewhat dark history. Let the critic simply
+turn over the two nearest chapters of the book, or the remotest, or any
+others.
+
+My critics would complacently persuade me that I should have avoided in
+the additions what they call superfluous wit, and skilfully watered the
+gleaming naphtha-soil of my Evening Star, which was neither to be
+quenched nor sunk, with fresh history.----Heaven grant it! I have slim
+hope of it; but I should be glad if the reviewers would assure me that
+I had--although not sold at auction or covered up the crowded images in
+my Pantheon-Pandemonium--still, however, at least hung them farther
+apart.
+
+"On the whole," continues the sketch, "take in hand the historical
+_grafting-knife_ rather than the _weeder_!"
+
+I just said that I have done so.
+
+"But as touching those dried-up, withered men, in whose eyes nothing is
+great but their own image, and whose stomach at the sight of a fairer
+movement of the exalted heart is taken with a _reverse_ movement,--in
+short, whom everything nauseates (except what is nauseous),--make
+believe as if you did not perceive them; and so much more as they
+resemble patients who are gnawed by the tape-worm, and who, according
+to medical observations, sicken and vomit at all music, especially
+organs, think rather of the good souls whom thou knowest and lovest,
+and of the good ones whom thou only lovest,----and therefore at the end
+of the Preface be earnest and grateful and rejoice!"----
+
+Verily that I should have done, even without the sketch!--How could I
+remain insensible to the indulgence with which, on the whole, the world
+has appropriated the Aphrodito-graphic[5] fragments of my Evening Star,
+which runs around the sun with such remarkable aberrations, or
+deflections, and in so little of a planetary ellipse, that it may
+easily, as often happens to the Hesperus in the sky, be taken for a
+hairy, bearded, and tailed comet?--And how hard and cold must the soul
+be which could remain without emotion and without joy at the thought of
+the shortest happy day, nay, even happy second, or _third_, into which
+it had been able to introduce suffering men; and at the wide-spread
+relationship of lofty wishes and holy hopes, and friendly feelings,
+and at the gracious concordat wherein the brawlers and wranglers in
+this first world of the prosaic life give each other their hands
+in the _second_ world of poetry, in mutual recognitions, and become
+brothers?--
+
+Once more, good Asterisk and secondary planet of the soft evening-star
+above me, I follow thee on thy way with the wishes of three years ago
+for every soul which thou canst gladden. Only never rise upon any eye
+as a rainy star,--only never lead one astray, so that it shall take the
+_moonlight_ of poesy for the _morning_ of truth, and dismiss too early
+its morning dreams!--But into the torture-chambers and through the
+prison-gratings of forsaken souls throw a cheering radiance; and for
+him whose blessed island has sunk away from him to the bottom of the
+sea of eternity, transfigure thou the low, dark region; and whoever
+looks round and looks up in vain in a dismantled Paradise, to him may a
+little ray from thee show, down on the ground, under the yellow leaves,
+some hidden sweet fruit or other of a former time; and if there is any
+eye to which thou canst show nothing, draw it softly upward to thy
+brother, and to the heaven in which he shines.--Nay, and if I ever grow
+too old, then comfort me also!
+
+Hof, May 16, 1797.
+
+
+
+
+                PREFACE, SEVEN REQUESTS, AND CONCLUSION.
+
+
+                                PREFACE.
+
+I Was going to be indignant, in the beginning, at some hosts of readers
+with whom I know not what to do in this book, and I was about to
+station myself at the gate of Hesperus as porter, and with the greatest
+incivility send off particularly people who are good for nothing, for
+whom, as for a prosector, the heart is nothing but the thickest muscle,
+and who carry a brain and heart and interior parts generally as moulds
+of plaster statues do their stuffing of wood, hay, and clay, merely in
+order to turn out _hollow_ from the casting. I was on the point, even,
+of scolding at honest business-people who, like Antoninus the Great,
+thank the gods that they never did much at poetry; and at those to whom
+the chapel-leader, Apollo, must discourse on a rebeck, or straw fiddle,
+and his nine soprano girls with the ale-house fiddle and corn-stalk
+bass-viol. Nay, even at the reading sisterhood of the Romances of
+Chivalry, who read as they marry, and who among books, as among
+gentlemen's faces, pick out, not the fair, feminine ones, but the wild,
+masculine ones.----
+
+But an author should not be a child, and embitter for himself his
+Preface, when it is not every day that he has to make one. Why did I
+not rather in the first line address _those_ readers, and take them by
+the hand, to whom I joyfully give my Hesperus, and whom I would present
+with a free copy of it if I knew where they lived?--Come, dear, weary
+soul, thou that hast anything to forget, either a sad day or a clouded
+year, or a human being that afflicts thee, or one that loves thee, or a
+dismantled youth, or a whole life of heaviness; and thou, crushed
+spirit, for whom the present is a wound and the past a scar, come into
+my _Evening-Star_ and refresh thyself with its little glimmer; but, if
+the poetic illusion gives thee sweet, fugitive pains, be this thy
+conclusion from it: perhaps that, too, is an illusion which causes me
+the longer and deeper ones.--And as to thee, loftier man, who findest
+our life, which is passed only in a _glass_, darkly, less than thyself
+and death, and whose heart a veiled great spirit grinds brighter and
+purer in the dead dust of other mouldered human hearts, as one polishes
+the diamond with the dust of a diamond, I may call thee, too, down into
+my evening and night star to such eminence as I am able to throw up,
+that, when thou seest gliding around it at the foot, as around
+Vesuvius, _morganic fays_ and mist groupings and dreamy worlds and
+shadowy lands, thou shalt perhaps say to thyself, "And so is all dream
+and shadow around me; but dreams imply spirits, and clouds countries,
+and the shadow of the earth a sun and a universe?"--
+
+But to thee, noble spirit, who art weary of the age and of the
+after-winter of humanity, to whom sometimes, but not always, the human
+race, like the moon, seems to go backward, because thou mistakest the
+procession of clouds flying by below it for the course of the heavenly
+body, and who, full of exalted sighs, full of exalted wishes, and with
+silent resignation, hearest indeed beside thee a destroying hand and
+the falling of thy brothers, but yet castest not down thy eye, upraised
+to the ever serene, sunny face of Providence, and whom misfortune, as
+lightning does man, destroys, but not _disfigures_; to thee, noble
+spirit, I have, to be sure, not the courage to say, "Deign to look upon
+my play of shadows, that the Evening-Star which I usher before thee may
+make thee forget the earth on which thou standest, and which now with a
+thousand graves lays itself, like a vampyre, upon the human race, and
+sucks the blood of victims!"--And yet I have thought of thee all
+through the book, and the hope of bringing my little night and evening
+piece before wet, upraised, and steadfast eyes has been the sustaining
+maul-stick[6] of my weary hand.
+
+As I have now written too seriously, I must, out of the seven promised
+petitions, among which only four are such, omit three. I therefore
+present only the
+
+First Request. That the reader will pardon the title, "Dog-Post-Days,"
+until the first chapter has explained and excused it; and the
+
+Second. Always to read a whole chapter, and never half a one, because
+the great whole consists of little wholes, as, according to the
+Homoiomereia[7] of Anaxagoras, the human body consists of innumerable
+little human bodies; and the
+
+Seventh Request, which flows partly from the second, but concerns the
+critics only, not to anticipate me in their _fugitive leaves_,[8] which
+they call Reviews, by the publication of my leading incidents, but to
+leave the reader some few surprises, which, to be sure, he can have
+only once. And finally the
+
+Fifth Petition, which one knows already from the Lord's Prayer.[9]
+
+
+                              CONCLUSION.
+
+And now, then, become visible, little peaceful Hesperus--Thou needest a
+little cloud to veil thee, and a little year, in order to have
+completed thy orbit!-Mayest thou stand nearer to Truth and Virtue, as
+thy image in heaven does to the sun, than the earth into which thou
+shinest does to either of the three; and mayest thou, like that star,
+never withdraw thyself from the sight of men, except by hiding thyself
+in the sun! May thy influence be fairer, warmer, and surer than that of
+the Almanac-Hesperus, which superstition places on the misty throne of
+_this_ year!--Thou wouldst make me happy a second time if thou shouldst
+be an _Evening-Star_ to some withered mortal, and to some blooming one
+a _morning star_. Sink with the former and rise with the latter; glow
+in the evening sky of the first between his clouds, and overspread his
+past life-road up the mountain with a soft lustre, that he may
+recognize again the far-off flowers of youth; and rejuvenate his
+antiquated recollections into hopes!--Cool off the fresh youth in the
+early hours of life, as a tranquillizing morning star, ere the sun
+falls hot upon him and the whirl of day sets in!--But for me, Hesperus,
+thou art now well set; thou hast hitherto journeyed an beside the
+earth, as my companion-planet, as my second world, on which my soul
+disembarked as it left the body to the buffetings of earth; but to day
+my eye falls sadly and slowly off from thee and thy white flower-bed,
+which I planted around thy coasts, down upon the damp, cold ground
+where I stand, and I see how we are all encompassed with coolness and
+evening, torn far away from the stars, amused with glowworms,
+disquieted with _ignes fatui_, all veiled from each other, every one
+alone, and feeling his own life only through the warm, throbbing hand
+of a friend, which he holds in the dark.----
+
+Yes, there will indeed come another age, when it will be light, and
+when man will awake out of sublime dreams and find--the dreams again,
+because he has lost nothing but sleep.--
+
+The stones and rocks, which two veiled shapes, Necessity and Sin, like
+Deucalion and Pyrrha, throw behind them at the good, shall become new
+men.--
+
+And on the western gate of this century stands written: Here is the
+road to Virtue and Wisdom; just as on the western gate of Cherson[10]
+stood the sublime inscription: Here leads the way to Byzantium.----
+
+Infinite Providence, thou wilt make the day dawn.--
+
+But still struggles the twelfth hour of the night; nocturnal birds of
+prey shoot through the darkness; spectres rattle; the dead play their
+antics; the living dream.
+
+                                                        JEAN PAUL.
+In the _Vernal Equinox_, 1794.
+
+
+
+
+                           CONTENTS OF VOL. I.
+
+
+                            1. DOG-POST-DAY.
+
+   Difference between the 1st and 4th of May.--Rat-Battle-Pieces.--
+     Nocturne.--Three Regiments in future Breeches.--Couching-Needle.--
+     Overture and Secret Instructions of the Book.
+
+
+                            2. DOG-POST-DAY.
+
+   Antediluvian History.--Victor's Plan of Life.
+
+
+                            3. DOG-POST-DAY.
+
+   Sowing-Day of Joys.--Watch-Tower.--Fraternization of the Heart.
+
+
+                            4. DOG-POST-DAY.
+
+   Profile-Cutter.--Clotilda's Historic Figure.--Courtiers, and a Noble
+     Man.
+
+
+                            5. DOG-POST-DAY.
+
+   The Third of May.--The Nightingale.--The Abbate sitting on Music.
+
+
+                            6. DOG-POST-DAY.
+
+   The Threefold Deception of Love.--Lost Bible and Powder-Puff.--
+     Churching.--New Concordats with the Reader.
+
+
+                            7. DOG-POST-DAY.
+
+   The Great Parsonage-Park.--Orangery.--Flamin's Promotion.--Festal
+     Afternoon of Domestic Love.--Rain of Fire.--Letter to Emanuel.
+
+
+                            8. DOG-POST-DAY.
+
+   Examinatorium And Dehortatorium Of Conscience.--The Studious
+     Honeymoon of a Scholar.--The Cabinet of Natural History.--Answer
+     From Emanuel.--The Packed-up Chin.--Arrival of the Prince.--First
+     Intercalary Day.
+
+
+                            9. DOG-POST-DAY.
+
+   A heavenly Morning; a heavenly Afternoon.--A House without Walls; a
+     Bed without a House.
+
+
+                           10. DOG-POST-DAY.
+
+   The Bee-Master.--Zeusel's Oscillation.--Arrival of the Princess.
+
+
+                           11. DOG-POST-DAY.
+
+   Transfer of the Princess.--Smuggling of a Kiss.--Montre à
+     Regulateur.--Simultaneous Love.
+
+
+                           12. DOG-POST-DAY.
+
+   Polar Fantasies.--The Singular Isle of Union.--One more Bit from
+     previous History.--The Stettin-Apple as Coat-of-Arms.--Third
+     Intercalary Day.
+
+
+                           13. DOG-POST-DAY.
+
+   Concerning his Lordship's Character.--An Evening of Eden.--
+     Maienthal.--The Mountain and Emanuel.
+
+
+                           14. DOG-POST-DAY.
+
+   The Philosophical Arcadia.--Clotilda's Letter.--Victor's
+     Confessions.
+
+
+                           15. DOG-POST-DAY.
+
+   The Parting.
+
+
+                           16. DOG-POST-DAY.
+
+   The Potato-Form-Cutter.--Drag-chains in St. Luna.--Wax
+     Embossments.--Chess according to the _Regula Falsi_.--The
+     Thistle of Hope.--Escort to Flachsenfingen.--Fourth Intercalary
+     Day.
+
+
+                           17. DOG-POST-DAY.
+
+   The Cure.--The Prince's Palace.--Victor's Visits.--Joachime.--
+     Copperplate Engraving of the Court.--Cudgellings.
+
+
+                           18. DOG-POST-DAY.
+
+   Clotilda's Promotion.--Incognito-Journey.--Petition of the Majors
+     of the Chase.--Consistorial Messenger.--Caricature of the
+     Flachsenfingeners.
+
+
+                           19. DOG-POST-DAY.
+
+   The Hair-Dresser with a (musical) Disease of the Lungs.--Clotilda in
+     Victor's Dream.--Extra Lines on Church-Music.--Garden Concert by
+     Stamitz.--Quarrel between Victor and Flamin.--The Heart without
+     Solace.--Letter to Emanuel.
+
+
+                           20. DOG-POST-DAY.
+
+   Letter from Emanuel.--Flamin's Fruit-Pieces on Shoulders.--Walk to
+     St. Luna.--Fifth Intercalary Day.
+
+
+                           21. DOG-POST-DAY.
+
+   Victor's Professional Visits.--Concerning Houses full of
+     Daughters.--The Two Fools.--The Carrousel.
+
+
+                           22. DOG-POST-DAY.
+
+   Gun-Foundery of Love; e. g. Printed Gloves, Quarrels, Dwarf-Flasks,
+     and Stabs.-A Title from the Digests of Love.--Marie.--Court-Day.--
+     Giulia's dying Epistle.
+
+
+                           23. DOG-POST-DAY.
+
+   First Visit to Clotilda.--The Paleness.--The Redness.--The
+     Race-Weeks.
+
+
+                           24. DOG-POST-DAY.
+
+   Rouge.--Clotilda's Sickness.--The Play of Iphigenia.--Difference
+     between Plebeian and Patrician Love.--Sixth Intercalary Day.
+
+
+
+
+
+                               HESPERUS,
+
+                                   OR
+
+                           45 DOG-POST-DAYS.
+
+
+
+
+                            1. DOG-POST-DAY.
+
+   Difference between the 1st and 4th of May.--Rat-Battle-Pieces.--
+     Nocturne.--Three Regiments in future Breeches.--Couching-Needle.--
+     Overture and Secret Instructions of the Book.
+
+
+In the house of the Court-Chaplain Eymann, in the bathing-village of
+St. Luna, there were two parties: the one was glad on the 30th of April
+that our hero, the young Englishman, Horion, would return from
+Göttingen the 1st of May to stay at the parsonage,--the other disliked
+it; they did not want him to arrive till the 4th of May.
+
+The party of the 1st of May, or Tuesday, consisted of the Chaplain's
+son, Flamin, who had been educated with the Englishman till his twelfth
+year in London, and till his eighteenth in St. Luna, and whose heart
+with all its venous ramifications had grown into the Briton's, and in
+whose ardent breast during the long Göttingen separation there had been
+_one_ heart too few; next, of the Chaplain's wife, a native
+Englishwoman, who loved in my hero a countryman, because the magnetic
+vortex of nationality reached her soul over land and sea; and, finally,
+of their eldest daughter, Agatha, who all day long laughed out at
+everything and doted on everything without knowing why, and who, with
+her polypus-arms, drew every one to herself who did not live quite too
+many houses off from her, as food for her heart.
+
+The sect of the 4th of May could measure itself with its rival, for it
+also made out a college of three members. Its adherents were Appel
+(Apollonia, the youngest daughter), who acted as cook, and whose
+culinary reputation and certificate of good bakery would suffer by it,
+if the guest should come before the bread rose; she could well
+conceive what a soul must feel who should stand before a guest with
+her hands full of skewers and needles, beside the flat-iron of the
+window-curtains, and without having even the _frisure_ of her hat, or
+of the head which was to be under it, so much as half ready. The second
+adherent of this sect, who ought to have had most to say against
+Tuesday,--although he said least, because he could not talk and
+had only recently been baptized,--was to be carried to church on
+Friday for the first time; this adherent was the godchild of the
+guest. The Chaplain knew, to be sure, that the moon sent round her
+godfather-bidder, Father Riccioli,[11] among the _savans_ of earth, and
+got them into the church-book of heaven as godfathers to her spots; but
+he thought it was better for him to take a godfather within a
+circumference of not more than fifty miles. The Apostles'-day of the
+churching and the Festival-day of the arrival of the distinguished
+godfather would then have beautifully coincided; but now the plaguy
+fine weather was bringing godfather along four days too soon!
+
+The third disciple of Friday was, at bottom, the heresiarch of this
+party, the Court-Chaplain himself: the parsonage wherein Horion was to
+have his temporary court residence was all full of rats,--a regular
+ball-room and _plaza de armas_ of the same,--and of these the Chaplain
+wanted first of all to clear his house. Few court-chaplains, with
+hectic in their bodies and rats in their houses, ever made so much
+stench on that account as did this one in St. Luna against the beasts.
+It would have taken very few clouds of it to smoke all the court-dames
+out of Europe. Did not our hectic patient burn as much of the hoof of
+his nag as he had sawed off from it? Didn't he even take one of the
+sharp-toothed creatures themselves prisoner, and smear him with
+gudgeon-grease and train-oil, and then let the arrested subject go,
+that he might as a pariah trot up and down through the holes, and
+constrain by his ointment rats of higher caste to emigrate? Did he not
+go to work by the wholesale, and actually take a buck to board, of
+which he wanted nothing except that he should stink and displease the
+tailed monks? And were not all these remedies as good as useless?...
+For the deuse take rats and Jesuits! Meanwhile, I will at least offer
+people here on the very third page the moral, that against both of
+these pests, as against toothache, mental troubles, and fleas, there
+are a thousand excellent recipes which have no effect.
+
+We will now, in a body, make our way farther into the parsonage, and
+concern ourselves as minutely about the family history of the Eymanns
+as if we lived only three houses distant from them. Horion,--the accent
+must fall on the first syllable,--or Sebastian, by abbreviation
+_Bastian_, as the Eymanns called him,--or Victor, as Lord Horion, his
+father, called him, (for I give him now one name and now another, just
+as my prose-prosody requires,)--Horion had, through the Italian
+Tostato, who was a peripatetic Auerbach's court for that whole region,
+and was hurrying on to St. Luna, caused the little oral lie to be
+palmed upon his dear friends at the parsonage, that he was coming on
+Friday: he wanted, first, to give them a real surprise; and, secondly,
+he wanted modestly to tie the hands, which on his account _would_ be
+scouring, brushing up and serving up; and, thirdly, he regarded an oral
+lie as at least more trivial than a written one. To his father,
+however, he wrote the truth, and fixed his entrance into the parsonage
+for the 1st of May, or Tuesday. His Lordship had his abode in the
+residence city of Flachsenfingen, where he applied to the Prince at
+once moral blinders and _eye-glasses_, and _guided_ his vision while he
+_sharpened_ it; but he was himself blind, though only physically. For
+that reason his son had to bring an oculist with him from Göttingen,
+who should operate upon him in the Chaplain's house on Tuesday. When he
+caused his Victor to be made Doctor of Medicine, many Göttingen people,
+to my knowledge, wondered that so high-born a youth should put on the
+Doctor's head-piece,--that _Pluto's helmet_, which makes, not, like the
+mythological one, the wearer, but others indeed invisible,--and thrust
+on his finger the Doctor's ring,--that _ring-of--Gyges_, which only to
+others imparts invisibility: but was, then, the condition of his
+father's eyes unknown or an insufficient apology to the people of
+Göttingen?
+
+His Lordship wrote to the Court-Chaplain that he and his son would
+come to-morrow. The Chaplain read over the Job's-post silently three
+times in succession, and thrust it back with comic resignation into
+the envelope, saying: "We have now ample hope that to-morrow our
+Doctor will certainly arrive with the rest;--fine tournaments and
+watering-place amusements do I anticipate, wife! when to-morrow comes
+in, and my rats in a body dance like children before him;--besides, we
+have nothing to eat; and then, too, I have nothing to put on, for not
+before Thursday can I extort from that Flachsenfingen wind-bag[12] a
+hair-bag,--and you laugh at it? Is not one of us in the very middle of
+April made an April-fool of?" But the Chaplain's lady fell on his
+shoulder with redoubled exclamations of delight, and ran right off to
+gather to this rose festival of her good soul the little brethren and
+sisters of the church of the children. The whole family circle now
+resolved itself into three terrified and three delighted faces.
+
+We will seat ourselves only among the joyous ones, and listen
+while they, during the afternoon, work away as portrait-painters,
+drapery-painters, and gallery-inspectors, at the picture of the beloved
+Briton. All remembrances are made into hopes, and Victor is to bring
+nothing with him that is changed except his stature. Flamin, wild as an
+English garden, but more fruitful, refreshed himself and others with
+his delineation of Victor's gentle truthfulness and honesty, and of his
+head, and praised even his poetic fire, which he generally did not rate
+very high. Agatha called to mind his humorous knight's-leaps,--how he
+once took the drum of a passing dentist and drummed the village
+together for nothing before his theatre, because he had previously
+bought out the whole travelling apothecary's shop of this honest and
+true friend Hain,[13]--how he would often, after a child's baptism,
+post himself in the pulpit, and there be-preach two or three devout
+spectators in their work-day sward, till they laughed more than they
+wept,--and many another piece of waggery, whereby he would make no one
+ridiculous but himself, and set no one laughing but other people.
+
+But women will never approve of it (only men can) when one, like
+Victor, belongs to the British subdivision of humorists;--for with them
+and courtiers wit itself is caprice;--they cannot approve that Victor
+should love to _descend_ to carriers, clowns, and sailors, whereas a
+Frenchman would rather _creep upward_ to people of _ton_. For women,
+who always respect the citizen more than the man, do not see that the
+humorist makes believe that all which these plebeians say he prompts
+them to, and that he intentionally exalts the involuntarily comic to
+what is artistically so,--folly to wisdom, the earth's madhouse to a
+national theatre. Quite as little does an official comprehend, or a
+cit, or a metropolitan, why Horion should so often make such a wretched
+choice of reading from among old prefaces, programmes, advertisements
+of travelling artists, all which he would peruse with indescribable
+gusto,--merely because he made believe to himself that all this
+intellectual sack of fodder, which belonged properly only to the
+rag-picker, he had himself prepared and filled, with satirical design.
+In fact, as the Germans seldom appreciate irony and seldom write it,
+one is forced to foist fictitiously a malicious irony upon many serious
+books and reviews, in order to get any of it at all. And that, indeed,
+is no more nor less than what I myself aim at, when in court-session I
+elevate in thought the court-house to a play-house, the advocate to a
+juristic Le Cain and Casperl, and the whole assembly to an old Greek
+comedy; for I never rest till I have made myself believe that I have
+caused the good people just to study out the whole case as a star-part,
+and am therefore really theatre poet and manager. Thus, in fact, do I
+merrily carry my dumb head as a comic pocket-theatre of the Germans
+through their most august institutions (e. g. the university, the
+administration), and exalt, in perfect silence--behind the dropped
+curtain of my face-skin--the comic of Nature to the comic of Art.
+
+To return: the Chaplain's wife now related as much about Victor as all
+knew before. But this repetition of the old story is just the fairest
+charm of domestic discourse. If we can often repeat to _ourselves_
+sweet thoughts without _ennui_, why shall not another be suffered to
+awaken them within us still oftener? The good lady pictured to her
+children how gentle and tender, how delicate and womanly, her dear son
+was (for Victor always called her his mother),--how he relied upon her
+in all things,--how he was always sporting without ever teasing
+anybody, and always loved all human beings, even the greatest
+strangers,--and how she could open before him better than to any
+matron her oppressed heart, and how fondly he wept with her. A
+court-apothecary, with a heart of pumice-stone,--_Zeusel_ he writes
+himself,--once even regarded this melting of the warmest soul as a case
+of _lachrymal fistula_, because he thought that no eyes could weep but
+diseased ones.... Dear reader, do you not feel now just as the
+biographer does, who can hardly wait for the entrance of this good
+Victor into the parsonage and the biography? Will you not offer to him
+the friendly hand, and say: "Welcome, unknown one! Lo, thy soft heart
+opens ours here on the very threshold! O thou man with eyes full of
+tears, dost thou, then, feel with us, that in a life whose banks are
+lined with affrighted ones clinging to the _twigs_, and despairing ones
+clinging to the _leaves_, that, in such a life, where not only follies,
+but woes also hedge us round, man must keep a wet eye for red ones, an
+aching heart for every bleeding one, and a gentle hand that shall, in
+sad sympathy, hold the thick, heavy chalice of sorrow for the poor man
+who must drain it, and shall slowly raise it to his lips? And if thou
+art such a one, then speak and laugh as thou wilt, for no one should
+laugh at men but he who right heartily loves them."
+
+In the afternoon the Chief Chamberlain, Le Baut,--a fragrant
+leaf-skeleton,--sent his page, Seebass, to the Chaplain to beg that
+he would--for the palace lay near the parsonage across the way--remove
+the buck for a while, only until the wind should change, because
+his daughter was coming. "Esteemed Mr. Seebass!" answered the
+rat-controvertist, with emotion, "carry back my submissive compliments,
+and you see my distress. Tomorrow the Lord and his son and his oculist
+will gladden me with their presence, and the cataract is to be couched
+here. Now, at present, the whole house stinks, and the rats still carry
+on composedly their night-dance in the midst of the perfume; I assure
+you, Mr. Seebass, we can take assaf[oe]tida and stuff the parsonage
+with it up to the ridge-pole, not a tail shall we expel thereby; nay,
+it pleases them the more. I, for my part, am already preparing myself
+to see them to-morrow, during the operation, spring up on the very
+oculist and patient. Thus it fares with us all, please announce at the
+palace, but say that I was going to-day also to try an excellent
+rosewood-oil."
+
+He fetched, therefore, a great sack of hops and dragged it up under the
+roof, in order there, in a literal sense, to lead the rats by the nose
+into the bag. Rats are notoriously as dead-set upon rosewood-oil as men
+are on anointing-oil, which, so soon as only six drops fall on the
+skull, makes one a king or bishop on the spot, which I see by the fact,
+that in the first case a golden hoop shoots round the hair, and in the
+second it actually falls off. The militia, that is, the Chaplain,
+sprinkled the sack with some oil, and laid it with its mouth stretched
+and fastened wide open to receive the enemy;--he himself stood in the
+background, concealed behind a similarly oiled stove-screen. His plan
+was, to start out when the beasts were once in the sack, and carry off
+the whole crew like bees in a swarming-bag. The few chamber-hunters who
+read me must have frequently used this kind of trap. But they may not
+have stumbled over it as the Chaplain did, who was caught with the
+fragrant stove-screen between his legs, and who lay unable to stir,
+while the enemy ran off. In such a situation a man is refreshed by the
+trill of a curse. So after the Chaplain had struck a few such trills
+and thrills, had betaken himself to the family, and said to them, _en
+passant_: If there were in the temperate zone a fellow who from his
+swaddling-clothes rode a mourning-steed, who was lodged in a second
+mouse-tower of Hatto, and in an Amsterdam house of correction, and in
+limbo,--if there were any such correctioner, in regard to whom the only
+wonder was how he continued alive,--he alone was the one, and no devil
+beside him ... after he had relieved himself of this, he left the rats
+in peace,--and was himself very much so.
+
+In the night nothing memorable occurred, except that he kept awake and
+listened in every direction to hear if something with a tail might not
+be stirring, because he was minded to vex himself to his heart's
+content. As there was no sign of the beasts to be detected, not so
+much as a side-leap, he got out and sat on the floor, and pressed his
+spy's-ear to that. As good luck would have it, just then the movements
+of the enemy with their ballets and gallopades burst upon his ear. He
+started up, armed himself with a child's drum, and woke his wife up
+with the whisper: "Sweet! go to sleep again, and don't be frightened in
+your sleep; I'm only drumming a little against the rats; for the
+Zwickau Collection of Useful Observations for Housekeepers in Town and
+Country, 1785, recommends this course."
+
+His first thunder-stroke gave his hereditary foes the repose which it
+snatched from his blood relations.... But as I have now put everybody
+into a condition to imagine the Chaplain in his shirt and with the
+cymbal of the soldiery, let us rather go to the bed of his son Flamin,
+and see what _he_ is doing therein. Nothing,--but out of it he is at
+this moment taking a ride at this late hour, and that, too, without
+saddle or waistcoat. He, whose bosom was a cave of Æolus, full of
+pent-up storms--(any discreet prothonotary in Wetzlar would have
+scraped his fish-head or partridge's-wing cleaner or brushed his
+velvet-knee cleaner than he)--could not possibly lie longer on his
+pillow,--he to whom a drum came so near to-night, and to-morrow a
+friend. Anybody else, of course (at least the reader and myself), in
+the midst of the transparent night wherewith April was closing, the
+wide stillness on which the drum-sticks fell, the longing for a loved
+one with whom to-morrow would again make whole a desolate heart and a
+dismembered life, would have been filled by all this with tender
+emotions and dreams;--its only effect on the Chaplain's son was to
+fling him on his nag and out into the night: his inward earthquakes
+could only be allayed by a bodily gallop. He flew up and down the hill,
+on which he would to-morrow reunite himself to his Horion, ten times.
+He cursed and thundered at all his passions--to be sure _with_
+passion--which had hitherto laid the bone-saw to their hands linked in
+friendship. "Oh! when I once have thee again, Sebastian," he said, and
+twitched his nag round, "I will be so gentle, as gentle as thou, and
+never misconstrue thee; if I do, may the thunder--" Ashamed at his
+self-contradictory impetuosity, he rode merely at an ambling-pace home.
+
+His longing for his returning friend he expressed in the stable by
+plucking out some hairs from the top of the horse's head, drawing the
+cue-hair like the fourth string of a fiddle, and twisting off the bit
+of the key to the fodder-chest. Only a man who languishes for a friend
+_exactly_ as for a loved woman-deserves either. But there are men who
+go out of the world without ever having been troubled or concerned at
+the fact that no one in it had loved them. He who knows nothing higher
+than the _commercial treaty_ of self-interest, the _social contract_
+of civility, or even than the _boundary_ and _barter agreement_ of
+love, such a one,--but I wish he had never ordered me from the
+publisher!--whose withered heart knows nothing of the _Unitas Fratrum_
+of men joined in friendship, of the intertwining of their nobler
+vascular system, and of their sworn confederacy in strife and
+sorrow--But I see not why I should talk so long of this ninny, as he
+knows not how to enter into the least feeling of Flamin's yearning, who
+desired a loving, appreciative eye, because his faults and his virtues
+stood out in equal relief; for with other men, either at least the
+spots balance the rays, or the rays the spots.
+
+Only in princely stables is there an earlier and louder din than there
+was in the parsonage on the blessed 1st of May. I ask any female reader
+at random, whether there can ever be more to polish and to boil than on
+a morning when a lord with a cataract is expected, and his son, too,
+and an eye-doctor? Men's resting-days always fall upon women's
+rasping-days; father and son went composedly to meet the doctor and the
+coucher.
+
+The 1st of May began, like man and human history, with a mist. Spring,
+the Raphael of the northern earth, stood already out of doors and
+covered all apartments of our Vatican with his pictures. I love a mist
+whenever it glides off like a veil from the face of a fair day, and
+whenever it is created, not by the "four _faculties_," but by greater
+ones. When (as this one did on the 1st of May) it webs-over summits and
+streams like a drag-net,--when the clouds, pressed down by their
+weight, crawl along on our lawns and through wet bushes,--when in one
+quarter it soils the heavens with a pitchy vapor and lines the wood
+with a heavy, unclean fog-bank, while in the other, wiped off from the
+moist sapphire of the sky, it gilds with minute drops the flowers, and
+when this blue splendor and that dirty night pass over close by each
+other and exchange places,--who does not feel, then, as if he saw lands
+and nations lying before him, on which poisonous and mephitic mists
+move round in groups, now coming and now going? And when, further, this
+white night encompasses my melancholy eye with flying streams of vapor,
+with floating, fluttering particles of perfume-dust, then do I sadly
+see in the vapor human life pictured, with its two great clouds on our
+rising and setting, with its seemingly light space around us, and its
+blue opening over our heads....
+
+The Doctor may have thought so too, but not father and son, who are
+going to meet him. Flamin is more powerfully affected by distant than
+by near nature, by the gross than by the detail, just as he has more
+feeling for the state than for the family room, and his inner man loves
+best to twine upward on pyramids, tempests, Alps. The Chaplain enjoys
+nothing about the whole thing except--May-butter, and from his mouth,
+amidst all this moral apparatus, issues nothing but--spittle, and both,
+because he is afraid of the damp's preying upon him and gnawing at his
+throat and stomach.
+
+As they strode down from the hill which was the scene of the nocturnal
+gallop into a valley confused with patches of mist; there marched out
+from it to meet them three garrison regiments on the double-quick. Each
+regiment was four men strong and as many deep, without powder or shoes,
+but provided with fine openwork high-ruffles,--that is to say, with
+porous pantaloons, and with superfluous officers, because there were no
+privates for them at all. When I now go on in my description to add,
+that both staffs, as well the regimental as the general staff, had over
+six hundred cannon in their pockets, and in fact a whole siege-train of
+artillery, and that the first platoon had wholly new _yellow_
+balls,[14] unusual in war, which germinated sooner than the gunpowder
+sowed by the savages, and which they thrust with the tongue into the
+muskets,--I should (I fear) make my readers, especially my lady
+readers, a little too distressed (and the more as I have not yet hinted
+whether these were soldier-parents or soldier-children) if I were to
+dip my pen again, and actually append the annoying circumstance that
+the troops began to fire at the befogged Court-Chaplain,--unless I
+leaped forward instanter with the information beforehand that a man's
+voice from behind the army cried, "Halt!"
+
+Forth came out of the rear ranks the general field-marshal, who was
+just as tall again as his lieutenant of artillery;--with a round hat,
+with flying arms and hair, he rushed impetuously upon Flamin, and
+attacked him with intent to destroy,--less from hatred than from love.
+It was the Doctor! The two friends hung trembling in each other's arms,
+face buried in face, breast pushed back from breast, with souls that
+had no words, but only tears of joy: the first embrace ended in a
+second,--the first utterances were their two names.
+
+The Chaplain had volunteered as a private along with the army, and
+stood with tried feelings on his insulating-stool, with a bare neck,
+around which nothing clung. "Just hug each other a moment longer," said
+he, and turned half-way round: "I must station myself only just a
+minute or two at the hazel-bush yonder, but I will be back again
+directly, and then I, in my turn, will embrace Mr. Doctor with a
+thousand pleasures." But Horion understood the natural recoil of love;
+he flew from the son's arms into those of the father, and lingered long
+therein, and made all good again.
+
+With appeased love, with dancing hearts, with overflowing eyes, under
+the full bloom of heaven and over the garniture of earth,--for Spring
+had opened her casket of brilliants, and flung blooming jewels into all
+the vales, and over all the hills, and even far up the mountains,--the
+two friends sauntered blissfully along, the British hand clasping the
+German. Sebastian Horion could not say anything to Flamin, but he
+talked with the father, and every indifferent sound made his bosom,
+laden with blood and love, breathe more freely.
+
+The three regiments had gone out of every one's head; but they had
+themselves marched obediently after the general field-marshal.
+Sebastian, too humane to forget any one, turned round toward the escort
+of little Sansculottes, who came, however, not from Paris, but from
+Flachsenfingen, and had attended him as begging soldier-children. "My
+children," said he, and looked at nothing but his standing army,
+"to-day is for your generalissimo and you, the memorable day on which
+he does three things. In the first place, I discharge you; but my
+retrenchment shall not hinder you any more than a prince's would from
+begging; secondly, I pay each of you arrearage for three years; namely,
+to each officer an allowance of three seventeen-kreutzer-pieces,
+because we have in these days raised the wages; thirdly, run back again
+to-morrow, and I will have all the regiments measured for breeches."
+
+He turned toward the Chaplain, and said: "It is much better to make
+presents in articles than in money, because gratitude for the latter is
+spent as soon as that is; but in a pair of presented pantaloons,
+gratitude lasts as long as the overhauls themselves."
+
+The only bad thing about it will be, that the Prince of Flachsenfingen
+and his war-ministry will at last interfere in the matter of the
+trousers, since neither can possibly allow regular troops to have more
+_on_ their bodies than _in_ them, namely, anything at all. In our
+days it should at last enter the heads of the stupidest commissary
+of equipment and provisioning,--but in fact there are discreet
+ones,--first, that, of two soldiers, the hungry is always to be
+preferred to the well-fed one, because it is already known, by the case
+of whole peoples, that the less they have, so much the braver they are;
+secondly, that just as, in Blotzheim,[15] of two equally virtuous
+youths, the poorer is crowned, even so the poor subject is preferred to
+the rich, though they may be equally courageous, and is alone enlisted,
+because the poor devil is better acquainted with hunger and frost; and,
+thirdly, that now, when on all the steps of the throne, as on walls,
+cannon are placed (as the sun receives its brilliancy from thousands of
+vomiting volcanoes), and, as in a well-conditioned state, the rod of
+up-shooting manhood is forced into ramrods,--the people advantageously
+fall into two classes of paupers,--the protected and their protectors;
+and, fourthly, the Devil take him who grumbles!
+
+When my three beloved _personæ_ at length arrived in front of the
+parsonage, the whole disbanded army had secretly marched after them and
+demanded the breeches. But something still greater had travelled after
+them from Flachsenfingen,--the blind lord. Hardly had the Britoness
+smiled-in her young guest, not politely, but delightedly, hardly had
+Agatha, for the first time, seriously, hid herself behind her mother,
+and old Appel behind the pots and kettles, when Eymann, who was in the
+midst of his cleaning, made a long leap from the window at which four
+Englanders--not foreigners, but horses--came trotting up. Now for the
+first time the question occurred to every one, where the oculist was;
+and Sebastian had hardly time to reply, that there was no one else to
+come, for he himself was to operate on his father. Into the short
+interval which the father occupied in passing from the carriage-door to
+the room-door the son had to squeeze in the fib, or rather the entreaty
+_for_ the fib, which the family was to put upon his Lordship, that his
+son had not yet arrived, but only the oculist, whom a recent apoplectic
+attack had deprived of his speech.
+
+I and the reader stand amidst such a throng of people, that I have not
+yet been able even to tell him that Dr. Culpepper had as good as
+punched out the lord's left eye with the blunt couching-needle; in
+order, therefore, to save the right eye of his beloved father,
+Sebastian had applied himself to the cure of those impoverished beings,
+who, as regards their sight, already grope round in Orcus, and only
+with four of their senses stand any longer outside the grave.
+
+When the son beheld the dear form veiled in such a long night, for whom
+there was no longer child or sunlight, he slid his hand, whose pulse
+trembled with pity, joy, and hope, under Eymann's, and hurriedly
+extended it, and pressed the father's under a strange name. But he had
+to go out of the house door again, till the trembling of his hand under
+the weight of the salvation it was bringing should subside, and he
+restrained out there his heart beating with hope by the thought that
+the operation might be unsuccessful; he looked with a smile up and down
+along the twelve-horse-team of the corps of cadets, that the emotion
+and yearning might pass from his excited breast. In-doors, meanwhile,
+the Chaplain's wife had made the blind man a still blinder one, and
+lied to him _quantum satis_; whenever a lie, a pious fraud, a _dolum
+bonum_, a poetic and legal fiction is to be gotten up, women offer
+themselves readily as business secretaries and court-printers, and help
+out their honest man. "I very much wish," said the father, as the son
+entered, "that the operation might at once proceed before my son
+arrives." The Chaplain's wife brought back the anxious son and
+disclosed to him the paternal wish. He stepped lightly forward amidst
+the embarrassed company. The room was shaded, the couching-lancet
+brought forth, and the diseased eye steadied. All stood with anxious
+attention around the composed patient. The Chaplain peered with a
+ludicrous anxiety and agony at the sleeping infant, prepared, at the
+least cry, to run with it immediately out of the couching-chamber.
+Agatha and Flamin kept themselves far from the patient, and both were
+equally serious. Flamin's noble mother drew near with her heart seized
+at once by joy and anxiety and love, and with her overflowing eyes,
+which obeyed her agitated heart. Victor wept for fear and for joy
+beside his dumb father, but he passionately smothered every drop that
+might disturb him. Thus does every operation, by the climax of
+preparation, communicate to the spectator heart-beating and trembling.
+Only the veiled Briton,--a man who lifted his head coldly and serenely,
+like a high mountain over a torrid zone,--he offered to the filial hand
+a face silent and motionless; he kept composed and mute before the fate
+which was now to decide whether his dreary night should reach even to
+the grave or no farther than this minute....
+
+Fate said, Let there be light, and there was. The invisible destiny
+took a son's anxious hand and opened therewith an eye, which was worthy
+of a finer night than this starless one. Victor pressed the mature lens
+of the cataract--that smoke-ball[16] and cloud cast over creation--down
+into the bottom of the pupil; and so, when an atom had been sunk three
+lines deep, a man possessed immensity again, and a father his son.
+Oppressed mortal! thou that art at once a _son_ and a _slave_ of the
+dust, how slight is the thought, the moment, the drop of blood or
+tear-drop, that is required to overflow thy wide brain, thy wide heart!
+And if a couple of blood-globules can become, now thy Montgolfier's
+globes and now thy Belidor's percussion-balls,[17] ah, how little earth
+it takes to exalt or to crush thee!
+
+"Victor! thou? Is it thou who hast cured me, my son?" said the
+delivered man, taking the hand that was still armed with the surgical
+instrument. "Lay it aside and bandage me again! I rejoice that I saw
+thee first of all." The son could not stir for emotion. "Bandage me,
+the light is painful! _Was_ it thou? speak!" He bandaged in silence the
+open eye amidst the glad tears of his own. But when the bandage hid
+from that noble stoical soul everything, his blushing and his weeping,
+then was it impossible for the happy son to contain himself any
+longer;--he gave himself up to his heart, and clung with his tears upon
+the veiled countenance to which he had given back brighter days; and
+when he felt on his trembling breast the _quicker_ beatings of his
+father's heart, and the _tighter_ embrace of his gratitude,--then was
+the best child the happiest,--and all rejoiced at his joy, and
+congratulated the son more than the father....
+
+Twelve cannon went off from that number of door-keys. They shot this
+History dead.
+
+For now it is actually gone,--not a word, not a syllable of it do I
+know any longer. In fact I have never in my life seen or heard or
+dreamed of, or romantically invented, any Horion or any St. Luna;--the
+Devil and I know how it is; and I, on my part, have, besides, better
+things to do and to lay open now, namely,
+
+
+                 THE OVERTURE AND SECRET INSTRUCTIONS.
+
+Another would have been stupid enough to begin at the very beginning;
+but I thought to myself, I can at any time tell where I live,--in fact,
+at the Equator, for I reside on the island of _St. John's_, which lies,
+as is well known, in the East Indian waters, which are entirely
+surrounded by the principality of _Scheerau_. For nothing can be less
+unknown to good houses, which keep their regular literary waste-book
+(the Fair-Catalogue) and their regular stock-book (the Literary Times),
+than my latest home product, the _Invisible Lodge_,--a work, the
+reading of which my sovereign should make still more obligatory on his
+children, and even on his vassals, (it would not expressly contradict
+the Recesses,) than the attending the national university. In this
+Lodge, now, I have placed the extraordinary pond better known by the
+name of the East Indian Ocean, and into which we, of Scheerau, have
+steered and moored the few Moluccas and other islands on which our
+productive business lies. While the invisible lodge was being
+transformed by the press into a visible one, we again prepared an
+island,--namely, the isle of _St. John's_, on which I now live and
+write.
+
+The following digression ought to be attractive, because it discloses
+to the reader why I prefixed to this book the crazy title,
+Dog-post-days.
+
+It was day before yesterday, on the 29th of April, that I was walking
+in the evening up and down my island. The evening had already spun
+itself into haze and shadow. I could hardly see over to Tidore
+Island,[18] that monument of fair, sunken spring-times, and my eye
+glanced round only on the near buddings of twig and blossom, those
+wing-casings of growing Spring,--the plain and coast around me looked
+like a tiring-room of the flower-goddess, and her finery lay scattered
+and hid in vales and bushes round about,--the moon lay as yet behind
+the earth, but the well-spring of her rays shot up already along the
+whole rim of heaven,--the blue sky was at length pierced with silver
+spangles, but the earth was still painted black by the night. I was
+looking only at the heavens,--when something plashed on the earth....
+
+It was a little Pomeranian dog, who had leaped into the Indian Ocean,
+and was now heading full for St. John's. He crawled up on my coast and
+rained a shower of drops as he waggled near me. With a dog who is an
+utter stranger, it is still more disagreeable undertaking to spin a
+conversation than with an Englishman, because one knows neither the
+character nor the name of the animal. The dog had some business with
+me, and seemed to be a plenipotentiary. At last the moon opened her
+sluices of radiance, and brought me and the dog into full light.
+
+
+                          "_To his Well-Born_,
+            _Superintendent of Mines_,[19] _Mr. Jean Paul_,
+                                  _on_
+_Free_.                                              _St. John's_."
+
+
+This address to me hung down from the neck of the animal, and was
+pasted to a gourd-bottle which was tied to his collar. The dog
+consented to my taking off his iron collar, as the Alpine dogs do their
+portable refectory-table. I extracted from the bottle, which in
+sutlers' tents had often been filled with spirit, something which
+intoxicated me still better,--a package of letters. _Savans_, lovers,
+people of leisure, and maidens are passionately sharp-set upon letters;
+business-people, not at all.
+
+The whole package (name and hand were strange to me) turned upon the
+one point, to wit, that I was a famous man, and had intercourse with
+kings and emperors;[20] and that there were few mining intendants of my
+stamp, etc. But enough! For I must needs not have an ounce of modesty
+left in me if, with the impudence which some really possess, I should
+go on excerpting and extracting from the letters, that I was the Gibbon
+and the Möser[21] of Scheerau, (to be sure only in the biographical
+department, but then what flattery!)--that every one who possessed a
+life, and would see it biographically delineated by me, should set
+about the matter at once, before I was pressed away by some royal house
+as its historiographer, and could absolutely no longer be had,--that
+it might occur in my case as in that of other mine-intendants, before
+whom often the deluded public never took off its hat, until they had
+already passed into another lane,[22] i. e. world, etc. Who apprehends
+this last more than myself? But even this apprehension does not
+bring a modest man to the point of lowering himself down to be the
+bellows-blower to the man that shall sound his eulogy; as I to be sure
+should have done, if I had gone on to lay myself entirely bare. To my
+feeling even those authors are odious, who, in their shamelessness,
+only _then_ bring up the rear with the final flourish, that _modesty
+forbids them to say more_, when they have already said everything that
+modesty _can_ forbid.
+
+At length my correspondent ventures out with his design, namely, to
+make me the compiler of an unnamed family history. He begs, he
+intrigues, he defies. "He is able,"--he writes more copiously, but I
+abridge all, and in fact I deliver this epistolary extract with
+uncommonly little understanding; for I have been this half-hour
+scratched and gnawed in an unusually exasperating manner by a cursed
+beast of a rat,--"to establish everything for me by documentary
+evidence, but is not allowed to communicate to me any other names of
+the personages in this history than fictitious ones, because I am not
+wholly to be trusted,--in time he will explain everything to me,--for
+this is a history upon which and its development destiny itself is
+still working, and what he hands over to me is only the snout thereof,
+but he will duly make over to me one member after another, just as it
+falls off from the lathe of time, until we get the tail;--accordingly
+the epistolary _Spitz_ will regularly swim back and forth as a _poste
+aux ânes_,[23] but I must not on any account sail after the postman;
+and thus," concludes the correspondent, who signs himself _Knef_,
+"shall the dog, as a Pegasus, bring me so much nutritious sap, that,
+instead of the thin Forget-me-not of an annual, I may rear a thick
+cabbage-head or cauliflower of folios."
+
+How successfully he has accomplished his purpose the reader knows, who
+is fresh from the first chapter of this story, which, from Eymann's
+rats to the cannonade complete, was all in Spitz's bottle.
+
+I wrote back to Mr. Knef in the gourd only so much as this: "Anything
+nonsensical I seldom decline. Your flatteries would make me proud if I
+were not so already; hence, flatteries harm me little. I find the best
+world to be contained in the mere microcosm, and my Arcadia stretches
+not beyond the four chambers of my brain; the Present is made for
+nothing but the maw of man; the Past consists of history, which,
+again, is an aggregate present peopled by the dead, and a mere
+_Declinatorium_[24] of our perpetual _horizontal_ deviations from the
+cold pole of truth, and an _Inclinatorium_[25] of our _vertical_ ones
+from the sun of virtue. There is left, therefore, to man, who wants to
+be happier in than out of himself, nothing but the Future, or fancy,
+that is, romance. Now, as a biography is easily exalted into a romance
+by skilful hands, as we see by Voltaire's 'Charles' and his 'Peter,'
+and by autobiographies, I undertake the biographical work, on condition
+that in it the truth shall be only my maid of honor, but not my guide.
+
+"In visiting-parlors one makes one's self odious by general satires,
+because every one can take them to himself; personal ones they set down
+as among the duties of _medisance_, and so pardon them, because they
+hope the satirist is attacking the person rather than the vice. In
+books, however, it is exactly the reverse, and to me, in case several
+or more knaves, as I hope, play parts in our biography, their
+_incognito_ is a quite pleasing feature. A satirist is not so
+unfortunate herein as a physician. A lively medical author can describe
+few maladies which some lively reader shall not think he himself has;
+he inoculates the hypochondriac by his historical patients with their
+pains as thoroughly as if he put him to bed with a real attack of them;
+and I am firmly convinced that few people of rank can read living
+descriptions of the unclean disease without imagining they have it, so
+weak are their nerves and so strong their fancies, whereas a satirist
+can cherish the hope that a reader will seldom apply to himself his
+pictures of moral maladies, his anatomical tables of spiritual
+abortions; he can freely and cheerily depict despotism, imbecility,
+pride, and folly, without the least apprehension that any one will
+fancy himself to have anything of the kind; nay, I can charge the whole
+public, or all Germans, with an æsthetic lethargy, a political
+enervation, a politico-economical phlegma towards everything which does
+not go into the stomach or the purse; but I rely upon every one who
+reads me, that he at least will not reckon himself in the number, and
+if this letter were printed, I would appeal to every one's inner
+witness. The only performer whose true name I must have in this
+historical drama--especially as he plays only the prompter--is
+the--Dog.                     JEAN PAUL."
+
+
+I have, as yet, got no answer, nor any second chapter; so now it
+depends wholly on the Dog whether he will present the sequel of this
+History to the learned world or not.
+
+But is it possible that a biographical mining intendant, merely for the
+sake of a cursed rat, who, besides, is not working at any journal, but
+only in my house, must just run away from the public and thunder
+through all rooms, to worry the carrion to death?...
+
+... _Spitzius Hofmann_ is the name of the dog; _he_ was the rat, and
+was scratching at the door with the second chapter in the flask. A
+whole crammed provisionship, which the learned world may nibble at
+have I taken off from Hofmann's neck; and now the reader, who loves to
+read wise things as well as stupid ones, shall have opened to him
+to-day--for henceforth it is certain that I shall go on with my
+writing--glad prospects which, from a certain feeling of modesty,
+I do not designate.... The reader sits now on his sofa, the
+fairest reading-Hours dance round him and hide from him his
+repeating-watch,--the Graces hold my book for him and hand to him the
+sheets,--the Muses turn over the leaves for him, or in fact read it all
+to him;--he has nothing to disturb him, but the Swiss or the children
+must say, "Papa is out." As life has on one foot a sock and on the
+other a buskin, he loves to have a biography laugh and weep in one
+breath; and as the fine writers always understand how to combine with
+the useful moral of their writings a something immoral which poisons,
+but charms,--like the apothecaries, who draw at once _medicines_ and
+_aqua vitæ_,--so does he willingly forgive me, in consideration of the
+immoral which is prominent, the religious quality which I sometimes
+have, and _vice versâ_; and as this biography is set to music, because
+Ramler sets it beforehand into hexameter (which it certainly needs far
+more than Gessner's harmonious prose[26]), he can, when he has done
+reading, stand up and play or sing it.... I, too, am almost as happy as
+if I read the work;--the Indian Ocean flings up the peacock-wheels of
+its illuminated circle of waves before my island,--I stand on the best
+footing with all, the Reader, the Reviewer, and the Dog;--everything is
+ready to hand with each Dog-post-day: a recipe for ink from an
+alchemist; the gooseherd with quills was here day before yesterday; the
+bookbinder with gay writing-books only to-day: nature buds, my body
+blooms, my mind produces,--and so I hang my blossoms over the tan-bed
+and forcing-bed (i. e. over the island), send my root-fibres through
+the soil, unable (Hamadryad that I am) to guess from my foliage how
+much moss years may collect on my bark, how many woodchafers the future
+may gather upon the pith of my heart, and how many tree-lifters Death
+may lay under my roots,--nothing of all this do I surmise, but swing
+joyfully--thou good destiny!--my boughs in the wind, lay my suckling
+leaves to the bosom of a Nature filled with light and dew, and, with
+the breath of universal life fluttering through me, stir up as much
+articulate noise as is necessary, that one or another sad human heart,
+while contemplating these _leaves_, may forget, in short, gentle
+dreams, its stings, its throbbings, its stiflings----O, why is a man
+sometimes so happy?
+
+For this reason: because he is sometimes a _littérateur_. As often as
+Fate, under its veil, dots off from the great world atlas to a special
+map the little life-stream of a _literatus_, which runs over some
+lecture-halls and bookshelves, it may possibly think and say thus:
+"Surely there is no cheaper or rarer way of making a creature
+happy than by making him a literary one: his goblet of joy is an
+inkhorn,--his feast of trumpets and carnival is (if he is a reviewer)
+the Easter-fair,--his whole Paphian grove is compressed into a
+bookcase,--and what else do his blue Mondays consist of than (written
+or read) Dog-post-days?" And so Fate itself leads me over to the
+
+
+
+
+                            2. DOG-POST-DAY.
+
+             Antediluvian History.--Victor's Plan of Life.
+
+
+At the gate of the First Chapter, the readers ask the incomers: "What
+is your name?--your character?--your business?"
+
+The Dog answers for all: H. Januarius--i. e. Herr Januarius, not Holy
+Januarius; but the Prince of Flachsenfingen bore that name--had, in his
+younger years, made the grand tour or journey round the beautiful and
+the great world. He everywhere distributed gifts to strangers, which
+cost him but a single _don gratuit_ from his subjects, and he succored
+and pitied many oppressed peasants in France, who fared as badly as his
+own did in Flachsenfingen. For the defenceless female sex, like all
+travelling princes, he did, if possible, still more; one may say of the
+greater number of them, that, like Titus, or like one sailing westward
+round the world, they, to be sure, sometimes lose a _day_, but seldom a
+_night_, without making others, and consequently being themselves,
+happy. In fact, the Regent must have foreseen the present depopulation
+of France; for he took measures betimes against it, and left behind him
+in three Gallic seaboard cities three sons, and on the so-called Seven
+Islands only one. The first was called the Welshman, the second the
+Brazilian, the third the Calabrian; the one on the Seven Islands, the
+Monsieur, or _Mosye_: these names were probably meant to allude to
+Princes of Wales, Brazil, and Asturias. He let his children grow up in
+no worse ignorance than ignorance of their rank: they were to be formed
+for future co-workers in his administration. Januarius was, to be sure,
+sensual and somewhat feeble, but--except where he _feared_--extremely
+philanthropic.
+
+Lord Horion met Prince January twice on his journeys: the first time he
+cut across the princely planetary orbit as a comet, in the sense of a
+hairy star; the second, as a comet with a tail when in its perihelion.
+What I mean is this: it was just when Horion was in love with a scion
+of January's house, who lived in London, that he saw the Prince for the
+second time, and at his house in London entertained him and his court.
+Upon this very distant relative of the Prince my papers--from an
+excessive deference to political and domestic relations--throw an
+unseasonable veil. She was, at the time of marrying his Lordship,
+twenty-two years old, and her whole person was (if I may venture to
+adopt the bold expression of a London eulogist) nothing but a single,
+tender, still blue eye. That is all which is vouchsafed to the public.
+
+The Prince willingly let himself be mastered and managed--by the lord,
+whom a singular mixture of coldness and genius constituted an unlimited
+monarch and commander of souls. The lord had, moreover, a beautiful
+niece in his house, whose charms in princes' eyes made such a spiritual
+Old Man of the Mountain as he at once _younger_ and more _smooth_.
+
+But the death-bell threw its discords into these harmonies of life. The
+beloved of his Lordship fled from the rough earth, and left behind her
+his first-born son as a memorial, and pledge of love; she died in her
+twenty-third year, as it were of the life of her child, some days after
+its birth, and the thin, tender twig broke down under the ripe fruit.
+Lord Horion bowed silently to fate. He had loved her terribly, without
+showing it: he mourned her in the same manner, without moistening his
+deep black eye.
+
+The Prince found in the niece, i. e. in a true Englishwoman, something
+to his taste, for the reason that he _had_ found what was still more so
+in the Frenchwomen; and on this ground he would, inversely, have loved
+them, had he previously known her. The subsequent Chief Chamberlain, Le
+Baut, had the same sentiments, and, what is still more, toward the same
+person; and as Indian courtiers imitate all wounds of their sovereign,
+so did Le Baut with an arrow of Cupid copy those of his master, and
+transferred to himself therewith one of the severest.
+
+These London histories cannot last much longer, and then we shall
+happily get back again to our St. Luna.
+
+A burning fever seized the Regent, which his physician, Dr. Culpepper,
+held to be merely zigzag dartings of fitful, gouty matter. I have been
+unable, hitherto, to ascertain whether this Culpepper has any tolerably
+near relationship to his well-known namesake and professional co-master
+in London. The fever hunted January so hard, and the Father Confessor
+instituted with his conscience, instead of extinguishing processes, so
+many incendiary ones, that in the agony of death he took a solemn oath
+never again at the sight of a maiden to think of Depopulation and
+Revolution. The same weakness which strengthened his superstition and
+childlike credulity ministered to his sensuality; when he was up again,
+he absolutely knew not what to do. The niece and his oath were
+next-door neighbors in the chambers of his brain. A clever ex-Jesuit
+from Ireland, who lived only for doubts of conscience, and had himself
+a _conscientia dubia_, flew to the help of the doubter, and gave him to
+understand that "his vow, especially before getting absolution from it,
+he must conscientiously keep, excepting the sinful and impossible point
+therein, that, namely, which, without the consent of his spouse, he had
+neither the right to promise nor the power to fulfil." In other words,
+the Jesuit failed not to show him, that he had in his fever sworn off
+only from the _unmarried_ sex, and limited his celibacy merely to nuns,
+that accordingly his vow did not, to be sire, forbid him compound
+adultery, (which confession would do away) but it did with extreme
+strictness the simple kind. January was too religious not to refrain
+wholly from the simple form.
+
+It is hard to investigate the relation in which his now _increased_
+love for his four grand dukes or _little_ dukes in Gaul stood to the
+fulfilment of his vow; in short, he gave his Lordship the commission
+and full power to fetch the four little persons from Gaul to London,
+because he wanted to take his beloved anonymous little posterity with
+him to Germany. It was uncertain whether he loved the mothers so
+heartily for the children's sake, or the children for the sake of the
+mothers. His Lordship went gladly, like Kotzebue (but differently),
+after the death of his beloved, to France. At last there came, not from
+him, but from the tutors of the Welshman, the Brazilian, the Calabrian,
+the sad intelligence, that in one night, probably according to a
+concerted plan of conspired prince-stealers, the three children had
+been abducted; and not long after that the sorrowful post was not only
+confirmed by his Lordship, but aggravated by the new one, that the
+Monsieur or Mosye on the Seven Islands was no more--to be found there.
+
+Fate often gives man the balsam before the wound: January received his
+fifth son, whom I shall never call anything but the Infante, still
+earlier than the tidings of his forfeited blessing of children. The
+chief Chamberlain, Von Le Baut, had wedded the mother of the Infante
+(his Lordship's niece); but he dated his marriage three quarter-days
+back, instead of announcing it one later. I have never been able to see
+the connection of this anachronism or misreckoning of time with the
+Prince's vow. For the rest, dangerous as January's _votum_ made him to
+the _husbands_ of his court, and harmless to the _fathers_,
+nevertheless, the virtuous confidence which the husbands reposed in the
+female virtue which they had appropriated to themselves by marriage was
+so unlimited, that they, without hesitation, led that virtue into the
+midst of his unbridled flames. Nay, they even disdained the fear of
+being suspected of doing so in order that, when he laid down his crown
+on the toilet-table of their spouses, they might play with the shining
+wall-crown (_corona muralis_) as with a _joujou_, and with its
+brilliancy throw a dazzling light into people's windows: for a courtier
+cares more to own his wife than to watch over her.[27]
+
+It will come on presently, cry the puppet-players; it will be over
+presently, say I.
+
+When, at length, his Lordship returned empty-handed, he was
+greatly surprised, not at the presence of the Infante, but at his
+adoption,--namely, at the marriage of Le Baut. But this High
+Chamberlain was--and no one minded it less than Horion--an ardent
+friend of the Prince; this rendered him capable of doing for him
+(as Cicero requires) even that which he would never have done for
+himself,--namely, a dishonorable action. In fact, it is an uncommon
+piece of good fortune for a courtier or a world's man, whose honor his
+high position exposes often to the worst of weather, that this honor,
+however sensitive to slight contusions,[28] easily gets over great
+ones, and can, if not by words, yet by deeds, be assailed without
+injury. Something similar is remarked by physicians in regard to
+madmen, or rather their skin, which to be sure feels the lightest
+touch, but on which no blister will draw. The Prince was knit to Le
+Baut by a threefold ligament,--by gratitude, son, and wife; his
+Lordship plucked the ligament asunder; that is to say, he laid bare
+to his niece the Chamberlain's heart, and discovered to her the
+poison-bag therein, and a dramatically carried out _plan_, which she
+had hitherto regarded as an _indulgent confidence_. All the nobility
+and pride of her nature flamed up in her with shame and wrath, and,
+pursued by crashing recollections, she flew with her child, and with
+the prospect of a second, out of the city to a country-seat of his
+Lordship's.
+
+Now the Prince with his Lordship and his court (including even Dr.
+Culpepper) returned to Germany. Le Baut tarried awhile longer to
+appease the niece and persuade her to take the journey. But it was not
+only impossible to draw all her deeply sunk roots out of the land of
+freedom and go with the party to Germany, but she even separated
+herself, not only by seas, but by a bill of divorce, from the filthy
+favorite. She was obliged to leave with the Chamberlain her second
+child, his real daughter; but the first, the Infante, she clasped to
+her maternal breast. Le Baut was glad enough to let it be so, and
+thought that after the building-oration the scaffolding of the building
+should also go into the house-stove. But when he appeared under the
+German throne-canopy, his sun (January) stood at the summer solstice,
+which from decreasing warmth gradually passed over to cold storms.
+January's love could more easily rise and fall than stay still, and the
+greatest crime with him was absence. Le Baut, stripped of both wife and
+child, must needs lose now in comparison with his Lordship, because the
+latter came upon the stage, and under January's throne-canopy as
+treasurer and coast-warden of two treasures left behind in London. But
+there were deeper reasons. His Lordship easily governed the Regent,
+because he held him in neither by his own nor other people's vices, but
+by his own virtues. In the first place, he required nothing of him, not
+so much as diet and chastity. Secondly, he lifted no cousins into the
+saddle, but tipped bad men out of it; he bore him like a hawk on his
+gloved fist, but the falconer did it not for the purpose of darting the
+Prince upon doves and hares, but in order to make him at once
+_watchful_ and _tame_. Thirdly, his firmness and his fineness mutually
+compensated each other: the best one to rule over changeable men is the
+unchangeable. Fourthly, he was not the favorite, but the associate,
+remained always a Briton and a lord and the country's beneficent
+bee-father (apiary), whereas January was the queen-bee and in the
+queen-bee's prison. Fifthly, he was one of the few men to whom one must
+be _equal_ in order to resist their will; and any one who would play
+the juggler's trick of throwing a padlock on his mouth slyly, soon had
+one to fetters and manacles on his own soul. Sixthly, he had a good
+cheese. This last point needs no copious explanation. In Chester he had
+a farmer, who produced a cheese, the like of which was not to be found
+in Europe; but to princes generally an extraordinary cheese is more
+gratifying than an extraordinary address of thanks from the provincial
+syndic.
+
+With such a conjunction of ill stars, of course our Chamberlain found
+the bill of divorce, which at first was written with sympathetic ink in
+January's face, gradually more and more legible. Still he read it
+through several times every week, in order to read it correctly; he
+could now no longer procure any lapdog a place, that is, a lap,--his
+letters of recommendation were Uriah's-letters,[29]--and now, when he
+actually succeeded in getting, through his Lordship, the charge of
+chief Chamberlain, he thought it high time to try, against the gout in
+his knee, bathing at his knightly seat of St. Luna year in and year
+out, and so he set off, having first been obliged to solemnly promise
+the whole court that he should come back well.
+
+Properly, now, the preliminary history would be, according to promise,
+ended, so that I might get well on in the later history this work
+contains, were I not absolutely obliged on the Court-Chaplain's account
+to add this much more:--
+
+The only place of which Le Baut had the presentation at court was
+the parish of St. Luna. He invested therewith, as its patron, the
+Rat-contradictor Eymann, who had begged from him in London the oral
+vocation to the Court-Chaplaincy, and who could no longer obtain it.
+Hence the Dog-post-days always call him the Court-Chaplain, although in
+fact he is only a country pastor.
+
+From the slight circumstance that Eymann, as travelling preacher,
+accompanied January's retinue, a great deal grew out. Eymann, at his
+Lordship's country-seat, offered to his present wife the neck- and
+breast-pendant of a heart hollowed with consumption, as a slight gift,
+which was accepted. To the couple while still in England their Flamin
+was born. Her Ladyship loved in the person of the Court-Chaplain's wife
+a worthy sister of her sex, and a worthy fellow-citizen of her native
+land; she urged her with fervent prayers to stay in England, and when
+all were refused, she begged and prevailed upon her at least to let her
+Flamin--in order to be at all events half a Briton--stay behind in the
+society of Victor and the Infante, till the friendly trio[30] should be
+transplanted simultaneously into German soil.
+
+The Parson's wife was strong enough to sacrifice for the sake of her
+Flamin's finer education the enjoyment of his presence, and left him
+behind under the eyes of love and in the little arms of childish
+friendship. The same training hand--_Dahore_ was the name of the
+teacher--reared and watered the three noble flowers, which sucked from
+one kind of bed and ether three kinds of color, and developed unlike
+stamens and honeycups. Dahore had the hearts of all children in his
+tender hand, simply because his own never boiled and blustered, and
+because an ideal beauty sat upon his youthful form and an ideal love
+dwelt in his pure breast. The three children loved and embraced each
+more warmly in his presence, as the Graces enfold each other before
+Venus Urania: they even bore all the same name, as the Otaheitans
+exchange names with those they love. When they had attained some
+ripeness of years, his Lordship came to put them all with Dahore on
+board ship for Germany. But before the embarkation the Infante caught
+the small-pox and was made blind, and Dahore was obliged to return with
+him to the distressed and weeping lady. Victor had long and
+speechlessly hung on the neck of his sick friend and clung around
+Dahore's knee, refusing to part from his two loved ones; but his
+Lordship parted them: Flamin and Victor were, from that time, educated
+in Flachsenfingen, the former for a jurist, the latter for a physician.
+
+There are some improbabilities in Spitzius Hofmann's gourd-flask; but
+the Dog must be held responsible for what he delivers. Now the story
+goes straight forward again.
+
+His Lordship, during the cannonading of the tattered or riddled
+garrison, withdrew with Victor into another apartment; and his first
+word was, "Unbandage me a moment, and leave thy hand in mine, that I
+may be sure of thy attention, for I have much to say to thee." Good
+man! we all remark that thou art more tender than thou art willing to
+appear, and we all praise it. Not _coldness_, but _cooling-off_, is the
+greater wisdom; and our inner man should, like a hot metal-casting in
+its mould, cool but slowly, in order that it may round itself out to a
+smoother form: for that very reason has Nature--just as they _warm_ the
+mould for statuary metal--poured his soul into an _ardent_ body.
+
+He continued: "I have, my dear boy, in my blindness been able to
+dictate to thee only empty letters; I meant to save my secrets for thy
+arrival. I am watched by a small gunpowder-conspiracy." Victor
+interrupted him with the question, how he had so suddenly become blind.
+His Lordship answered, reluctantly, "One eye was probably so already
+before thy departure for Göttingen, but I did not know it."
+
+"But the other?" said Victor.
+
+Over his Lordship's face glanced the cold shadow of a buried pang; he
+looked on his son a long time, and answered, as if abstractedly and
+hurriedly, "Also! as I look on thee, thou seemest to me much taller and
+larger."
+
+"That is, perhaps," replied he, for he guessed his thought, "an ocular
+illusion of the sensitive retina.[31] You spoke of a gunpowder-plot."
+
+"They have found out," his Lordship continued, "that the Prince's son
+is not in London: they even assume that the disease was given to him at
+that time designedly; and the Prince daily speaks of the moment when I
+shall bring his son back to him. Perhaps he knows these suspicions. I
+was obliged to postpone my departure for London till my cure. Now I
+shall shortly start for England, where the son is not, to bring his
+mother; him I shall bring from otherwheres, and with just as good eyes
+as thou hast given me."
+
+"Then," Victor broke out, "not the best of men, but his enemies, will
+be hurled down."
+
+"No, I am to be _hurled down_ first (to express myself in thy
+fashion),--but thou hast interrupted me: I have never had the courage
+to interrupt other people like fools,--for my absence is just what they
+want."
+
+I, as installed historiographer, ask no leave of any one, and interrupt
+whom I will. One who is interrupted may jest, indeed, but he can no
+longer argue. The Socrates grafted upon Plato, who never let a sophist
+have his talk out, was therefore one himself. In England, where they
+tolerate systems even among the wine-cups, a man can spread himself
+out like a royal folio: in France, where the spectacles of wisdom
+are splintered into sharp, shiny bits, one must be as curt as a
+visiting-card. A hundred times is the wise man silent before the
+coxcomb, because he needs twenty-three sheets to express his opinion.
+Coxcombs need only lines; their opinions are upstarting islands, held
+together by nothing but emptiness.... I add the remark, that between
+the lord and his son a fine, courteous wariness reigned, which in the
+case of so near a relationship is to be justified only by their rank,
+their mental structure, and their frequent separation.--
+
+"But my presence is, perhaps, still worse. The Princess--"
+
+(The Prince's bride, since his first wife died early and without
+children, as Spitz says.)
+
+"The Princess brings along with her a stream of diversions, in which he
+will no longer hear any voice but that which lures to pleasure. An
+interrupted influence is as good as lost. And then, too, I am, up to a
+certain point, so tired of this game, that I gladly flee from the new
+engagements in which this new arrival would involve me. Should she, as
+they say, not love him, she might so much the more easily govern him;
+and then my absence would be, again, not good. But, setting me aside,
+what dost thou propose to do during my absence?"
+
+After a crotchet-rest, he answered himself, "Thou wilt be his
+Physician-in-ordinary, Victor." Victor's hand twitched in his father's.
+"Thou hast already been promised to him; and he longs for thee, simply
+because I have often named thee. He is impatient to see for himself how
+any one looks whose father he knows so well. As Physician-in-ordinary,
+thou canst, with thy art and thy fancy, keep him clear of strange
+fetters until I come again; then will I impose still softer ones on
+him, and go back forever. My engagement has had hitherto the design
+merely of averting strange ones, particularly a certain--" Then, with
+full heart and changed voice, "My beloved! it is hard in this world to
+win Virtue, Freedom, and Happiness, but still harder to diffuse them.
+The wise man gets everything from himself; the fool, from others. The
+freeman must release the slave, the philosopher think for the fool, the
+happy man labor for the unhappy."
+
+He rose, and presupposed Victor's Yes. The latter had therefore to
+dribble out his rhetorical flood during the leave-taking. He began
+with compressed breath: "I detest most cordially the simoom of the
+court-atmosphere ..." (his Lordship has to answer for it with me, that
+the son leaves out here the concessive conjunction, "to be sure":
+whoever lets it be seen that he expects obedience, gets it at least in
+a prouder shape) "which sweeps over nothing but prostrate men, and
+turns him to powder who remains upright! I wish I could be in an
+antechamber on a court-day; I would say to all in my thoughts: 'How I
+hate you and your sour honey of pleasure- and plague-parties; the
+cursed watchman's- and rower's-bench of your card-tables; the gifts of
+full dishes of slaughtered provinces (I mean your gaming-plates and
+your meat-plates)!' But I know very well I can never express myself
+strongly enough upon the servile, tide-waiting court-oysters, who know
+not how to stir or open anything--not excepting their hearts--but only
+their shell, to draw something in ..."
+
+"I have not _interrupted_ thee yet," said his Lordship, and stood still
+for a moment.
+
+"Meanwhile," the son continued, "I wade with the greatest pleasure down
+to the oyster-bank ... O, my dear father! how could I help going? Why
+have I not hitherto left your diseased eye unbandaged, that you might
+see in my face the absence of a single objection to your wishes? Ah!
+around every throne hang a thousand wet eyes, upturned by maimed men
+without hands; above sits iron Fate in the form of a prince, and
+stretches out no hand. Why shall not some tender-hearted man go up, and
+guide Fate's rigid hand, and with one hand dry, down below, a thousand
+eyes?"
+
+Horion smiled, as one who should say, Young man!
+
+"But I beg only for some legal postponements and delays, in order that
+I may get time to be more stoical and foolish,--foolish,--that is, I
+mean--contented. I should be glad to laugh and go on foot for two
+months longer among the good people around us, and by the side of my
+Flamin, particularly just now in the almanac spring and in that of my
+years, and before the ship of life freezes into the harbor of old age.
+Stoical I must be at any rate. Verily, did I not lay Epictetus's manual
+as a serpent-stone[32] to myself and my wounds, in order that the stone
+might suck out the moral poison; were I to go out of the house with a
+breast full of cancer-sores; what would the court think of me?... Ah!
+but I mean it seriously. The poor inner man--dried up by the
+intermittent fever of the passions, exhausted by the heart-palpitation
+of pleasure, burning with the wound-fever of love needs, like any other
+sick man, solitude and stillness and tranquillity, in order to get
+well."
+
+Though he named the word "tranquillity," his inner being was agitated
+even to the dissolving-point, so much had the passions already stirred
+his blood and shaken his heart.
+
+And now the two went back in a deepening silence of harmony to Eymann.
+
+"I have a request for my Flamin."
+
+"What is it?" said his Lordship.
+
+"I do not yet know, but he wrote me he would soon name it."
+
+"Mine to him is," said his Lordship, "that, if he will get a place, he
+must love the Pandects better than tactics, and, instead of the rapier,
+take the pen."
+
+The son had been treated too politely by the father to have courage
+enough to ask for his secrets, especially that relating to the
+whereabouts of January's son. I treat the reader with the same
+delicacy, and hope he will have just as little courage; for, when any
+one explains himself guardedly, nothing is more uncivil than to put a
+new question.
+
+His Lordship now travelled back, a cured man, to the Prince.
+
+
+
+
+                            3. DOG-POST-DAY.
+
+   Sowing-Day of Joys.--Watch-Tower.--Fraternization of the Heart!
+
+
+The departure of his Lordship was the removal of the dam which had
+hitherto stood in the way of the flood of narrations, questions, and
+pleasures. The first investigation upon which the Parsonage entered
+was, to see whether it was really the old Bastian. And he it was, hide
+and hair; even the left side-lock he had still, as of old, shorter than
+the right. When the butcher's boy comes home from Hungary, he wonders
+that his kin are the same old pennies; they, however, wonder that he is
+no longer so. But in the present case there was mutual delight at the
+unchangedness on both sides. On every face lay the halo of joy, but
+on each composed of different rays. On a soft face, like Victor's,
+rapture looks like virtue. Old Appel, who had never, in all her life,
+turned over any leaves but those of David's Psalter and that in an
+ox's stomach,[33] expressed her pleasure all day long to the brass
+kettles by scouring them with unusual zest. The Vienna hospital for
+animals--consisting of an old pug and puss, who no longer hated
+each other, just as in the old man the good and bad souls are
+reconciled--and the bird-collection under the stove, which was one
+rusty-black bulfinch strong, took their full share of interest in the
+general uproar, and introduced themselves, and--which no ambassador
+would have done--waived the right of the first visit. Agatha expressed
+her joy only with her lips, by keeping silence with them, and pressing
+them to her brother's. To the Court-Chaplain's credit, it is reported
+that he took the invalid pug, who had the podagra in his hind-feet and
+the chiragra in his fore-paws, and shoved him quietly in his basket
+keeping-room and chamber under the stove again; restored the
+architectural order of the chairs without scolding; and rocked the
+little Bastian amidst the joyful confusion of tongues, that he might
+not wake up and aggravate it. But in the highly refined heart of
+Victor's countrywoman, the Chaplain's wife, the rays of joy from the
+whole family came to a focus, and diffused through her whole bosom the
+living glow of love. She smiled right into Victor's face to such a
+degree that she knew no way of escape but by bethinking herself of his
+destined chamber, which she directed to be opened and shown to him.
+Agatha flew forward with the jingling bunch of keys; and the guest, as
+he entered, was followed by only so many people as there were in the
+house, all eager to see what he would say to it.
+
+He surrendered himself to all this friendly handling, not with the vain
+egotism of a cultivated stranger, but with a delighted, docile, almost
+child-like confusion; it gave him not the least concern that he looked
+like a child, so gentle, so glad, and so unpretending. In such hours it
+is hard to sit down, or to listen to a story, or to tell one....
+Everybody began one, but the Chaplain interposed: "We have quite other
+things to talk about." But no _quite other things_ came. Everybody
+wanted to enjoy the stranger where there were only four ears, but the
+six remaining ears could not be kept away. My description of his
+confusion is itself confused, but so it is with me always; for
+instance, when I describe haste, I do it, unconsciously, with the
+greatest. To a heart like his, that hung rocking in the feathers[34]
+of love, was there any need that it should see in every notched
+window-sill, in every smooth pavement-pebble, in every round hole
+drilled by the rain in the door-step, his boyhood's years mosaically
+pictured, and that he should enjoy in the same objects age and novelty?
+Those boyish years, which appeared to him out of a shadow, abiding on
+the lawns of St. Luna, between happy Sundays and among beloved
+faces,--those _boyish years_ held a dark mirror in their hands, in
+which the glimmering perspective of his _childish years_ ran backward;
+and in that remote magic-night stood, dimly gleaming, the form of
+_Dahore_, his never-to-be-forgotten teacher in London, who had so
+loved, so indulged, so improved him. "Ah!" thought he, "thou unrequited
+heart, too warm for this earth, where beatest thou now? why can I not
+unite my sighs with thine, and say to thee, Teacher, Beloved? O, man
+often perceives but late how much he was loved, how forgetful and
+ungrateful he was, and how great the heart he misunderstood." What
+nourished his still pleasure the most was the thought that he had
+earned it by his filial obedience to his father, and by his resolve to
+undertake the future labors-of-Hercules at court; for into every great
+joy of his the doubt would fall, like a bitter stomach-drop, whether he
+deserved it,--a doubt which reigning houses, palatines, patriarchs, and
+grand-masters have skilfully taken from them in childhood. The better
+sort of men find pleasure sweetest only after a good action,--the
+Easter-Festival after a Passion-Week.
+
+My lady-readers will now want to hear what was cooked for dinner;
+but the documents of this Post-day, which reach me half by wheel and
+half by water, state, in the first place, that no one had any
+appetite,--which joy takes away more than grief,--except the three
+regiments, which slashed like veterans into the enemy,--that is, into
+the leavings of the table; secondly, that the meal was still leaner
+than the guest himself. We will, however, hereby invite all the
+reading-societies in a body to the _immovable_ feast of the 4th of May,
+the Friday when, for the first time, Victor's arrival and his godson's
+churchgoing are suitably celebrated.
+
+The Parson's wife extricated the beset darling in the afternoon from
+the musical circle of so many tones, and smuggled him away from under
+the eyes of her husband, whose Directress and Lady Mayoress she was,
+and led him to his chamber, that she might there, before him alone,
+distress and delight herself, and speak out her heart, like a mother.
+Long-suppressed sighs and antiquated tears now forced their way out of
+the opened motherly heart into another and tender one, which was,
+indeed, her son's best friend. She complained to him of Flamin's
+excitability, which Victor used always to allay; of his love for
+military life, while, after all, he was a scholar; and, finally, of the
+company he kept,--namely, he went roving round with a young page, one
+_Matthieu_, son of the Minister _Von Schleunes_, a dissolute,
+universally-beloved, universally-spoiled, bold, artful young scoffer,
+who, when his service allowed it, would spend his time either over
+yonder with the Chamberlain's people, or here with her son: "Heaven
+only knew what designs he had in his visits at a citizen's house." She
+rejoiced that Victor would bear off his old friend out of the traps and
+fangs of this rake. Victor pressed her hand with emotion, and said: "I
+could hardly think of sharing his heart with the best bond-fellow.
+Not so much as fall in love should he dare to, if it depended on me.
+Only me must he love, and one other person, who depicts him quite
+wrongly,--namely, yourself." He greatly mistrusted, also, her drawing
+of the sun-spots of Matthieu, because women seldom comprehend eccentric
+men, and because maidens, indeed, often love wild youths, but matrons
+(enlightened by marriage) always prefer gentle ones.
+
+He easily drew the hearts of married women into his drag-net by a
+certain kindly gallantry towards them which a German saves for
+unmarried ones. Old ladies and old tobacco-pipes, however, easily
+cleave to men's lips. The younger pigeons he enticed to himself by his
+_comic salt_, as they catch turtle-doves by another kind. A _bon-mot_
+is to them a _dictum probans_; a _pasquin_, a _magister sententiarum_;
+and the critical calendar of scandal is to them a Kant's Critique of
+the Pure Reason, in an improved edition. With his medical doctor's
+ring, also, he fastened to himself female souls; as physician, he laid
+claim to corporeal mysteries, and then the spiritual easily follow
+these.
+
+In the evening, when the woodland stream of the first jubilation had
+run out, three sober words were at length possible. The Parson, too, by
+this time, scolded less; for joy had made him rabid in the forenoon.
+Anger and the body are strengthened together, and therefore by
+pleasure. Hence in January and February, when dogs get the longer
+madness, men have the short one of wrath; hence convalescents grumble
+more at all about them, just as people do under strong mental
+excitements,--e. g. Dog-post scribes; hence, too, in the exhaustion
+following sick-headache, or a fit of intoxication, one is gentler than
+a lamb.
+
+Towards evening, there already transpired something of consequence.
+Apollonia swept and dusted her blood-relationship and her guest with
+her whisks even sooner than the spiders and the dust. On the 4th of May
+was this day's arrival of the long-absent fugitive to be right properly
+celebrated. Flamin and Victor led the way through the Parsonage garden,
+whose _memorabilia_ and _curiosa_ are so edifying that the
+correferent[35]  of these acts wishes he could, by the Dog-express,
+portray the garden to me more clearly. The Chaplain had stamped off
+many beds, not into rectangles, but had curved and twisted them into
+the shape of Latin characters, in double black-letter, to represent the
+initials of his family. His own (E) he had sowed with radishes;
+Apollonia's (A), with capuchin-lettuce;[36] Flamin's (F), with
+rape-cole; Sebastian's (S), with sweet-root, or _Glycyrrhiza vulgaris_
+(liquorice). Whoever was not present had left for him, at all events, a
+vacant place and _almanac royal_ among squashes and Stettin-apples,
+round which was wrapped a perforated paper with the name cut out,
+which, after the peeling off of this wrappage, would appear green or
+red on the pale fruit. Victor, as he passed along by a C made of
+tulips, asked his Flamin the meaning of it. "Why dost thou ask?" he
+inquired; and the loquacious Parsonage-people, following after, drove
+away the answer.
+
+Beyond the Parsonage-meadow stood--one had only to leap the brook--a
+hill, and thereon an old watchtower, in which there was nothing but a
+wooden staircase, and overhead nothing but a board covering instead of
+the Italian roof, both of which the Chamberlain had had made, that the
+people--not himself, for the unfeelingness of magnates labors for the
+feeling of minorites--might up there look round them a little. One
+could see from there the columnar architecture of the Creator, the
+Swiss mountains, standing, and the Rhine moving along with his ships.
+On the tower two linden-trees had grown aloft, twined together by
+nature, so as, sometimes, with their foliage, which had been hollowed
+out into a green niche and underlaid with a grassy bench, to fan, up
+there, a fevered islander. The loving party climbed the battlement, and
+carried up with them in their rural breasts a tranquillity which softly
+copied therein the still outer heaven that encircled these good hearts
+with its veiled suns. One lingering cloud gave a farewell glow, but it
+melted away before it burned out.
+
+Now could the supplementary volumes of the Universal History of St.
+Luna be conveniently issued. Eymann could deliver his folio volumes of
+_gravamina_ (grievances) upon the consistorial councils and the rats.
+All at once, Agatha, like her saintly namesake, was invoked down below
+by the organ-blower _loci_, who was _valet-de-place_ of the village,
+and Parsonage-coachman. When certain authors say, "The coachman was
+blind, and the horse was deaf," they exactly reverse the case. The
+churl was deaf. He had in his _mouchoir de Vénus_--the handkerchief is,
+with the common people, at once letter-bag and envelope, because a
+letter is as important and rare a thing to them as a good one is to a
+reviewer--to-day discovered and unwrapped an epistle to Agatha, which
+he should have delivered yesterday with his Lordship's: but coachmen
+consider a master only as the mock-sun and second party to the horse,
+and the lady absolutely as no more than a parasite-growth of the
+stable; hence "immediately" means with them one or two or three days;
+and "to-morrow forenoon" meant, on the Ratisbon notification-programme
+of matters to be voted on, one or two or three years. Agatha, with more
+eagerness, hurried down, held the letter towards the lighter quarter of
+the west, and deciphered something, which, with sparkling eyes, she
+carried in a gallop up the stairs. "She is coming to-morrow!" she cried
+out to Flamin; for she seemed almost, in the person of every one of her
+friends, to love only the companion and friend of her other friends.
+The case was this: _Clotilda_, Le Baut's only daughter by his first
+wife (his Lordship's niece), was coming from the Girls' Institute in
+Maienthal, where she had been educated, back to her father.
+
+"Do _you_ take good care!" said the Chaplain's wife; "she is very
+beautiful."
+
+"Then," said he, "I shall much rather take care _not_ to take care."
+
+"In fact," she continued, "all that is beautiful is now gathering
+around you" (here he tried to confuse and chastise her by a flattering
+look, but in vain). "The Italian Princess comes, too, on St. John's
+Day; and she is said to be as charming as if she were no princess at
+all, but only an Italian woman." There she did most princesses wrong;
+but a certain irony upon her own sex was the only fault of the
+Chaplain's wife, to whom, as to many other mothers, there were almost
+no step-sons and hardly anything but step-daughters.
+
+He hoped, he replied, that very few princesses, even in America, had
+yet been married, in whose affections he could not have become
+completely entangled, and that merely from pity for such a poor, tender
+creature or heraldic beast, pressed under the seal-stamp and then on
+the contracts, which were often the only children of these marriages.
+"The young Mothers of the Country are really, like bee-mothers, set up
+for sale in their queen's prison, and wait to see into what hive the
+bee-father, or Father of the Country, will this year trade them off
+again."
+
+A woman cannot possibly comprehend how a man whom she esteems can
+fall in love, except with her; and she can hardly wait to get sight of
+his beloved. Quite as curious is she about this man's style in his
+love,--that is, whether it is of the Flemish or French or Italian
+school. The Chaplain's wife questioned her confidential guest on this
+point also.
+
+"My harem," he began, "reaches from this watchtower to the Cape, and
+away round the globe: Solomon is but a yellow straw-widower compared
+with me. I have in it even his wives; and, from Eve with her Sodom's
+Borsdorf-apple down to the latest Eve with an Imperial apple, and even
+to a marchioness with a mere fruit-piece, they are all in my hold and
+breast."
+
+A lady excuses esteem for her sex on the ground that she is included
+therein. Women themselves have not so much as an idea of the
+peculiarities of their sex.
+
+"But what says the favorite Sultana to this?" asked the Grand
+Inquisitress.
+
+"She--" He paused, less from embarrassment than as one sunk in the
+fulness of glowing dreams. "_She_, of course--" he continued. "I pledge
+my head, meanwhile, that every youth has two periods, or, at least,
+moments. In the first, he stakes his head that he would sooner let his
+heart mould in his thorax or chest, and his _poples_ or knee-joint grow
+lame, than that either should stir for any other woman than the very
+best of her sex,--for a real angel, a decided Quinterne.[37] He
+absolutely insists on the highest prize in the marriage Loto,--that is,
+in the first period; for the second comes, and cheats him out of so
+much. The female Quinterne would naturally require a _male_ one; and,
+in case he were _that_,...
+
+"I am a stupid drawing, an _ambe_, a double number, I say, and
+absolutely refuse to let the period have its talk out; but I shall
+still be on the look-out for the _Quinterne_.... And here let me ask,
+What would be the use of being a man if one were not a fool? Well, now,
+if I should draw the above-mentioned Quinterne,--which, to be sure,
+without any extravagant hope, I may well presuppose,--I should not be
+indifferent on the subject, but in raptures. Good heavens! I must
+instanter be frizzled, and have my profile taken. I should make verses
+and _pas_, and both with their traditional _pedes_ (or feet); I should
+bend myself oftener than a devout monk, to make bows and (where there
+was anything to gather) bouquets; body, soul, and spirit I should have
+consist with me of so many finger-tips and feelers, that I should
+perceive at once (the Quinterne would perceive it still quicker) if our
+two shadows should come in collision. The touch of the smallest little
+end of a ribbon would be a good conductor to the electrical ether,
+which would shoot out from me in lightnings, as she would be charged
+negatively and I positively; and as to touching her hair, that could
+not create any less explosion than if a world should fall into the
+dishevelled[38] hair of a bearded comet....
+
+"And yet what does it all amount to, if I have sense, and consider what
+she deserves, this good creature, this faithful, this undeserved one?
+What, in fact, were dull verses, sighs, shoes (boots I should put
+away), one or two hands pressed, a sacrificing heart, but a slight
+_gratial_ and _don gratuit_, if thereby a creature was to be obtained
+who, as I see more and more, has everything belonging to the fairest
+angel that conducts man through life (invisibleness perhaps excepted);
+who has all virtues, and arrays them all in beauties; who gleams and
+gladdens like this spring evening, and yet, like it, conceals her
+flowers and all her stars, except the star of love; into whose
+all-powerful and yet gentle harmonica of the heart I would fain be so
+absorbed in listening; in whose eyes I would behold with such
+extraordinary delight the tear-drops of the tenderer soul, and the
+beamings of the loftier one; by whose side I could so fondly remain
+standing through the whole flying _opera buffa_ and _seria_[39] of
+life,--so fondly, I say, that so the poor Sebastian might at least,
+when, in life's holy evening, his shadow grew longer and longer, and
+the landscape around--him melted away to a broad shadow, and he
+himself, too, that I might at least behold _both_ shadowy hands," (one
+of them Flamin was just then holding,) "and exclaim--" (Checking
+himself:) "Here comes the-old bellows-blower, too, with something in
+one of his!"
+
+As he could no longer either hide his emotion behind jest, nor the
+signs of it in his eyes behind some low-hanging linden-leaves, it was a
+real piece of good luck, that, just at the second when his voice was
+about to give way to it, he looked over the watch-tower, and saw the
+coachman come racing over again. The man cried from below, "he had got
+it from Seebass, but not till this moment." Agatha flew down
+passionately, and, after reading a billet below, darted off across the
+meadow. The bellows-blower ascended slowly, like a barometer before
+settled weather, and lifted himself and the billet he had brought back
+with him,--not a minute the sooner for all the beckoning overhead
+there,--with his levers, to the top of the tower. In the billet was
+written, in Clotilda's hand, "Come to thy bower, beloved friend!"
+
+All eyes now ran after the runner, and fluttered with her through the
+clear-obscure of evening into the Parsonage, around whose arbor,
+however, no one could yet be seen. Hardly had Agatha caught sight of
+the opening of the latter, when her hurrying became flying; and when
+she was almost up to it, a white form flew out with widespread arms and
+into hers, but the arbor concealed the end of the embrace, and the eyes
+of all lingered long in vain expectation up in the cloister of love.
+
+The Chaplain's wife, who generally would allow maidens only
+degradations and not elevations of rank, now imparted to Clotilda all
+the seven consecrations, and praised her so much--perhaps also because
+she was a countrywoman of hers on the mother's side--that Victor could
+have embraced the eulogist and her subject at once. The Chaplain added,
+as his mite to her praise, that he had printed the initial of her name
+(C) with tulips in red, like a title, and that the letter would shine
+out, when the bed bloomed, far and wide.
+
+The husband and husbandman began now to break in more and more upon the
+sphere-music of night with the reed-stops of his cough; at last, he
+made off with Victor's enthusiastic female friend, and left the two
+friends alone, in the lovely night, with the two full hearts that
+panted to pour themselves out into each other.
+
+Flamin had, during this whole day, shown a deepening silence of
+touching tenderness, which seldom found its way into his being,
+and which seemed to say, "I have something on my heart." When the
+watch-tower was comparatively deserted, Victor, who had become full of
+loving and softening dreams, could no longer conceal his tear-swimming
+eyes: he opened them freely before the oldest darling of his days, and
+showed him that open eye which says, "Look right through, if thou wilt,
+down to my very heart; there is nothing therein but clear love." ...
+Silently the vortices of love swept round the two, and drew them nearer
+together; they opened their arms for each other, and sank into each
+other's without a sound, and between the brother-hearts lay only two
+mortal bodies. Covered deep by the stream of love and ecstasy, they
+closed for a moment their enraptured eyes; and when they opened again,
+there stood the night sublimely before them, with its suns withdrawn
+into eternal depths; the milky-way ran, like the ring of eternity,
+around the immensity of space; the sharp sickle of the earthly moon
+glided, cutting, across the short days and joys of men.
+
+But in that which stood under the suns, which the ring encircled, which
+the sickle smote, there was something higher, clearer, and more lasting
+than they: it was the imperishable friendship lodged in these
+perishable integuments.
+
+Flamin, instead of being satisfied by this exhausting expression of our
+speechless love, became now a living, flying flame. "Victor! in this
+night give me thy friendship forever, and swear to me that thou wilt
+never disturb me in my love to thee."
+
+"O thou good soul! I have given thee my heart long since, but I will
+gladly swear to thee again to-day."
+
+"And swear to me that thou wilt never plunge me into misfortune and
+despair."
+
+"Flamin! that distresses me too much."
+
+"O, I beseech thee, swear it! and lift thy hand and promise me, even if
+thou hast made me unhappy, nevertheless that thou wilt not forsake me
+nor hate me." ... Victor pressed him to his bosom. "But we will come up
+hither when we can no longer be reconciled,--O, it pains me, too,
+Victor!--up hither, and embrace each other, and throw ourselves down
+and die!"
+
+"Ay!" said Victor, in a low and exhausted voice. "O God! has anything
+happened, then?"
+
+"I will tell thee all. Now let us live and die together."
+
+"O Flamin! how inexpressibly I love thee to-day!"
+
+"Now will I let thee see into my whole heart, Victor, and reveal to
+thee all."
+
+But, before he could do it, he had to man himself by holding his peace;
+and they remained a long time silent, lost in the depths of the inner
+and outer heavens.
+
+At last he was able to begin, and to tell him that that Clotilda, about
+whom he had jested to-day, had written herself in ineffaceable
+characters on his heart; that he could neither forget nor possess her;
+that the creeping fever of a frightful, frenzied jealousy burned,
+galling, within him; that he could not, to be sure, say a word to her
+about his love, according to her prohibition, until her brother (the
+Infante) should come back and be present; but that she, to judge by her
+demeanor, and according to Matthieu's assurances, had perhaps some
+regard for him; that her position must be an eternal wall of separation
+between them, so long as he took the _juristic_ instead of the
+_military_ road to promotion; and that on this last, if his Lordship
+would lend him a hand in the matter, he would attain to Clotilda more
+swiftly on similar steps; and that the request of which he had spoken
+in his letters to Victor was just this,--that he would repeat all to
+his Lordship, and beg his assistance. In fact, his wild arm could hold
+the sword better than the balance of justice. A frightful
+predisposition to jealousy, which even from future possibilities
+catches palpitations, was the chief reason.--Victor rejoiced that he
+could give his feelings the best language,--namely, action, and
+assented to all he required, with delight at his confidence, and at the
+absence from his communication of dreaded news; and so, newly attached
+to each other, they went to rest. And the Twins--that ever-burning,
+intertwined name of friendship--glimmered in the west, beckoning upward
+out of an _earthly_ eternity; and the heart of the Lion blazed on their
+right....
+
+There are men laid upon this earth, and bound to the soil, who never
+erect themselves to the contemplation of a friendship which winds
+around two souls, not earthy, metallic, and unclean bonds, but the
+spiritual ones that interweave this world itself with another and man
+with God. Such ones, degraded to the dust, it is, that, like
+travellers, regard from below the temple that hangs round the Alpine
+peaks as baseless and airy, because they do not themselves stand on
+the heights, and on the great floor of the temple,--because they know
+not that in friendship we revere and love something higher than self
+(which latter cannot at once be the _source_ and the _object_ of
+love),--something higher, namely, the embodiment and reflection of the
+virtue which in ourselves we only _approve_, and not till we see it in
+others can _love_.
+
+Ah! can, then, higher beings judge severely the weaknesses of the
+shadowy groups that seek to hold fast to one another, driven apart as
+they are by north winds,--who would fain press to their bosoms the
+noble, invisible form of each other over which the thick and heavy
+earthly mask hangs,--and who fall, one after another, into graves into
+which the mourned draw their mourners?
+
+
+
+
+                            4. DOG-POST-DAY.
+
+      Profile-Cutter.--Clotilda's Historic Figure.[40]--Courtiers,
+                            and a Noble Man.
+
+
+Clotilda, as Sebastian learned the next morning, had originally meant
+to stay at the seminary till after St. John's; but, as her best friend
+and schoolmate _Giulia_ had gone beforehand, not to her parents, but to
+the long home, her distressed eyes must needs draw themselves away by a
+speedier departure from the grave-mound which lay like a ruin over her
+forlorn heart. Without packing up, she had fled from the flowerless
+Golgotha of her wounded soul; and a second contemplation of it, and a
+second departure, and a renewal of the old tears, still awaited her.
+
+Never was a great beauty praised in a more unembarrassed manner by a
+little one than Clotilda was by Agatha. Generally, the only thing
+maidens appreciate about maidens is the heart; the evanescent charms of
+another's face have so little worth in their eyes, that they hardly
+care to mention them. Young men are justly reproached with selecting by
+preference beautiful youths for their friends. In the case of girls, on
+the contrary, their eulogists make much of the fact that they entirely
+despise female beauty, as a too loose and base cement-and-mortar of
+friendship, and that, therefore, to a beautiful woman, the _heart_ of
+the very ugliest is more precious than the face of the handsomest on
+the five zones and scarfs of the earth. Agatha was otherwise: she ran
+over, the first thing in the morning, to the palace, to dress her
+friend.
+
+Flamin behaved still worse. He could not wait for the reality itself to
+hang up Clotilda's Madonna-image in the chambers of Victor's brain: he
+anticipated it with the pen-and-ink sketch of a painter, which is, at
+least, not cold; for painters, in the _æsthetic_ and in the
+_calligraphic sense_, seldom write well. The painter had, merely for
+the sake of seeing and sketching Clotilda, stretched himself, almost
+every Sunday morning, on a hill of Maienthal, where he transferred to
+his note-book the glittering landscape round the seminary; and the
+beautiful head which looked out of the eighth window he transferred
+into his heart. Even Flamin, who generally set even the vignettes of
+prose above the living oil-paintings of poetry, found, in the following
+Madonna or Clotilda of the artist, something to his taste:--
+
+"When my conscious being is a single thought, and burns; and when, with
+the flames waving around me, I dip my hand into colors, to cool myself
+therein;--then, when the lofty beauty[41] that forever beams within me
+lets fall its image on the waves which tremulously picture heaven and
+earth, and sets on fire the clear stream; and then, when an image of
+Pallas, descending from heaven, rests upon the stream, a lily-casing
+and cast-off wing-wrappage of an up-flown angel,--a form whose
+unstained soul no body, but only the snow which lies around the throne
+of God, and out of which the angels weave their fleeting vehicular
+bodies,[42] encloses; and when the most delicate drapery is too coarse
+and hard, and becomes a wooden frame around that divine breath on the
+countenance, around that trembling flowered-velvet of flesh, around
+that skin of white roses transfused with a glow of red ones; when this
+reflection of my shining soul falls upon the colored surface,--then
+every one will turn round, and think Clotilda is lying asleep on the
+bank.... And here my art is over; for, ah! when she awakes, and when,
+for the first time, the soul shall move these charms like wings; when
+the fast-closed bud of the lips shall break into a smile, and the bosom
+breathes in half a sigh, and, from modesty, breathes it not out again;
+when the sighs, veiled in songs, steal from those lips,--which, like
+two souls, hover over without touching each other--as bees steal out of
+roses; when the eye stirs between gleams and tears;--then, when at
+length the goddess of heavenly love approaches her daughter, and
+electrically touches her still heart, and says, 'Do thou, too, love';
+and now, when all charms tremble and bloom out, shrink and languish,
+hope and shudder, and the dreaming heart shuts itself up more deeply
+into its blossoms, and hides itself, trembling, behind a tear, from the
+happy one who has divined and deserves it;--then the happy one is mute,
+the happy one and the artist."
+
+Victor saw beside him the happy one, who was his friend, looked upon
+him with moist eyes, and said, "Of that thou wast worthy!" But now
+twenty rowels spurred him to follow Agatha to the palace;--the
+pen-and-ink drawing of the artist; the arrangement of dresses; the
+relationship; the desire which every man has to see the Grace and
+Infanta of his friend; the desire which _not_ every one has, but he
+had, to speak with any one for the first time (rather than for the
+eighth time); and, most of all, the evening of yesterday. Flamin's fire
+had yesterday burned Victor's bosom to a heap of tinder, through which
+nothing but sparks were running. He should have set all before him
+indifferently, because the contest _against_ love differs in nothing
+from the contest _for_ it, except in order of precedence. But let not
+the reader by any means imagine that now (as in one of your emasculated
+and emasculating romances) the Devil is to break loose in our
+biography, and the hero is to march into the palace and there fall down
+before Clotilda, and beg, on bended knee, "Be the heroine!" and go
+about to wrangle with her, out of love, and with the former _pastor
+fido_ out of hatred, and actually play nothing else than the æsthetic,
+self-seeking, sensitive--scamp. If I should wish this last, I could
+excuse myself only on the ground that then I might perhaps come to some
+biographical murders and duels. I hope, however, I may still, without
+injury to morals or honesty, in the course of these pages make out a
+murder or homicide or two, at least in the last volume, where every
+æsthetic reaper thins out his characters, and throws half of them into
+the _oubliette_ or family-vault of the inkstand.
+
+Victor had too many years and acquaintances to allow himself, with so
+little regard to days of grace and double usance,[43] on the spot,
+before supper,--_cito citissime_,--what hast thou, what canst thou?--to
+fall in love. His optic nerve daily unravelled itself into finer and
+more delicate fibres, and touched all points of a new form, but the
+sore feelers curled back again more readily; every month the sight of a
+new face, like new music, made a _stronger_ and _shorter_ impression.
+He could only talk his way into love, not see it. Only words winged by
+virtue and sensibility are the bees which, in such cases, carry the
+pollen of love from one soul into another. But such a love, of the
+better kind, is annihilated by the least immoral alloy. How could it
+form and filter up in a defiled heart, filled with high-treason against
+a friend?
+
+Victor would have gone to the palace as early as half past nine, but
+the Lady Chamberlain had not yet combed out her eyebrows and the King
+Charles's spaniel.
+
+Seebass brought a billet to Flamin:--
+
+
+"I cannot see you, my dearest, to-day. Three Graces hold me fast, and
+the third you yourself have sent. Tell your British friend he must love
+me because I love you. Surgery may do without sympathy, but friendship
+cannot.
+
+                             "Your        Matthieu."
+
+
+An absurd billet! When Victor heard that Agatha was the third Grace,
+there was a great hole torn in the curtain of the theatre in which
+Matthieu played Flamin's friend and Agatha's--first lover. Nothing is
+more annoying than a nest in which there sit none but brothers or none
+but sisters: the nest must be shaken up into a mixed and motley
+gradation,--that is to say, of brothers and sisters, packed in layers,
+so that an honest _pastor fido_ can come and ask after the brother when
+he is only on the look-out for the sister; and so, too, must the girl
+who loves a brother absolutely and by stronger necessity have a sister
+whose friend she is, and who may be hook and handle to the brother. Our
+_Turkish_ decorum required, therefore, that Matthieu should point his
+opera-glass at Flamin to see Agatha; and that Clotilda should visit the
+latter, since Flamin, as a man without ancestors, but of honor, could
+not possibly force his citizen's-visits upon the house of a
+chamberlain. Clotilda came often, and thereby involved herself in a
+contradiction, which I have till now been unable to solve, with the
+womanly refinement of her character.
+
+Flamin dipped Matthieu's likeness into a quite different dyeing-copper
+from that the mother used: he was a jolly genius, and nothing worse. He
+personated everything in the world, and no one could personate him. He
+could imitate and travesty all the players of the Flachsenfingen
+troupe, and the boxes too. He understood more sciences than the whole
+court; yes, and more languages, even to the voices of the nightingale
+and the cockerel, which he mimicked so perfectly that Petrarch[44] and
+Peter would have run away. He could do with women what he chose, and
+every court dame excused herself by the example of her neighbor; for it
+used to be part of the _ton_ in Flachsenfingen to have one's fidelity
+once put to the proof. They say love for him began to be knit, like a
+stocking, at the calf, but it is utterly false. It is therefore no
+wonder that, with such uninterrupted moderation in courtly pleasures,
+he grew stronger and _healthier_ than the whole burnt-out, evaporated
+court, only he was too caustic, and too philosophic, and almost too
+roguish.
+
+Victor and the reader and I have still, after all, only an indistinct,
+blurred crayon-drawing of Matthieu in our heads. My hero was somewhat
+pleased with him, as every eccentric man is with an eccentric one; it
+was a fault of his, that he pardoned too easily those of energy, even
+moral ones. With redoubled curiosity did he now take his way to the
+palace, or rather to its great garden, which joined thereto its
+semicircle of green beauties. He put in at the harbor of an embowered
+alley, and was delighted at the way in which the pierced shadow of the
+arbor, around whose iron skeleton tender twigs wound-like soft hair
+around hair-needles, glided dazzlingly over his body. Side by side with
+his arbor another parallel one passed along. He followed some scattered
+black paper snippings as way-marks. The fluttering of the morning wind
+tossed down from a twig a little leaf of fine paper, which he picked up
+to read. He was still on the first line, "Man has two minutes and a
+half, one in which to smile once, ..." when he ran against an almost
+horizontal queue, which was a black club of Hercules, compared with
+mine or the reader's plaited capillary tube. The queue was projected by
+a head crooked downward, which, peering in a listening attitude out of
+a niche in the arbor, was cutting a female profile, the original of
+which in a by-avenue was talking with Agatha. At the rustle of Victor's
+approach, the person, whose half-face was being stolen through the
+niche, turned round with surprise, and saw the proprietor of the
+Cyclops-queue with the profile-scissors, and also the hero of the
+Dog-post-days. The proprietor, without saying a word, thrust his
+artistic hand through the bush-work, and reached out to her her shadow
+or shadow-cutting.[45] Agatha took it, smiling; but the nameless one
+seemed to assume toward the cutter of forms and faces that seriousness
+which, on female faces, is nowise distinguished from contempt but in
+its ambiguousness, because his scissors awoke too strong a suspicion of
+his having been listening. Victor could perceive nothing of the
+nameless one yet except her stature, which, although bent forward a
+little, still surpassed the ordinary height. The face-cutter turned
+about with two flashing black eyes toward Victor, received him very
+politely, knew his name, told his own,--Matthieu,--and had, at his
+eighth pace, already had four good ideas. The fifth was, that he,
+unsolicited, introduced my hero to the couple in the side-arbor. The
+leafy nunnery-grating came to an end; a female form stepped forth, and
+Victor was so struck by it, that he, who knew little about
+embarrassments, or was made only more quick-witted by them, began his
+introductory sermon without the exordium, and that was--Clotilda. When
+she had said three words, he listened so to the melody instead of the
+text, that he understood not a word of what she was saying....
+
+I have here, lying beside me, on the snow-white ground of vellum, the
+very _silhouette_ which Matthieu had taken of her with the scissors. My
+correspondent will have me depict Clotilda as uncommonly beautiful.
+Otherwise, he says, a hundred things in this history are
+incomprehensible; and therefore he sends me (because he cannot trust my
+fancy) at least her profile. And that is to be, even during my writing,
+steadily looked at all the time,--so much the more, as it might seem
+actually to have been cut from the very face[46] of another loveliest
+female angel that ever flew out of an unknown paradise down to this
+earth: I mean the Fräulein von * * *, at present maid-of-honor in
+Scheerau; I am not sure whether all my readers know her.
+
+Victor felt as if his blood had been driven outward, and with warm
+touches described its circles on the external skin. At last Clotilda's
+cold eye, of which not the intoxicated pride of beauty, but the sober,
+retiring pride of innocence belonging only to the female sex, was
+mistress, and her nose, which betrayed too much reflectiveness, brought
+his new Adam to his legs again, upon which the old Adam had already set
+himself up. He congratulated himself that he was Flamin's friend, and
+consequently had some claims upon her attention and her society.
+Nevertheless he continued to feel all the time as if everything she did
+occurred now for the first time in the world; and he watched her as one
+does a man who has been operated on for blindness from his birth, or an
+Omai,[47] or a Li-Bu. He kept thinking, "How could sitting down ever
+become her,--or the handing of a fruit-dish, or the eating of a cherry,
+or stooping down to read a note?" I am a still worse ninny beside the
+above-mentioned court dame.
+
+At last came Le Baut into the garden, after the first toilet, and his
+wife after the second. The Chamberlain--a short, supple, bedizened
+thing, that will pull off its hat before the Devil in hell when it
+enters there--received the son of his hereditary enemy in an uncommonly
+complimentary manner, and yet with a dignity, for which, however, not
+his heart, but his rank, gave him strength. Victor, for the mere reason
+that he imagined him an injured person, cherished a predisposition of
+good-will towards him. Although Le Baut's tongue was almost, like his
+teeth, false and inserted, and consequently the words were so, too,
+which were made up of dentals and linguals, still his neither coarse
+nor uncourteous flatteries--among which his attitudes and intentions
+also are to be counted--pleased our honest Victor, who could not hate
+fine flatterers, as being weak persons. The Chamberlain's lady--who was
+already in the years which a coquette seeks to conceal, although she
+had still more reason to conceal the preceding ones--received our
+well-disposed hero with the sincerest voice that ever yet issued from a
+false Judas's bosom, and with the most artful face, on which it seemed
+impossible that the deceptions of love could ever have found room for a
+glance.
+
+The new company took away Victor's embarrassment at once. He soon
+remarked, indeed, the peculiar fighting- and dancing-positions of the
+circle towards each other. Clotilda seemed reserved and indifferent
+towards all, except her father. The step-mother was refined towards the
+Chamberlain, haughty towards her step-daughter, obliging towards
+Victor, and bore herself with an easy and subservient coquetry towards
+Matthieu, who, on his part, was, toward the wedded pair, alternately
+complimentary and ironical; towards Clotilda, cold as ice; and towards
+my hero, as courteous as Le Baut was to all. Nevertheless Victor was
+more joyous and free than any of them, not merely because he was under
+the free heavens,--for a room always lay upon him like a blockhouse,
+and a chair was like the stocks,--but because he was among _fine_
+people, who, despite the most angular relations, give to conversation
+four butterflies'-wings, that it may--in contrast to the clinging
+caterpillar, who impales himself on every thorn--fly without noise and
+in little curves over all prickles, and alight only on blossoms. He was
+the greatest friend of fine people and fine turns of expression; hence
+it was that he took so much pleasure in the society of a Fontenelle, a
+Crébillon, a Marivaux,--of the entire female sex, and particularly of
+the decently coquettish portion of it. Do not mistake me. Ah! upon his
+Flamin, upon his Dahore, on all great men who were exalted above the
+refined, cowardly, vacant microcosmologists of the great world, his
+whole soul hung glowing; but for that very reason did he seek out,
+with a view to greater completeness, the smaller men, as fringe and
+corner-trimmings, with so much zeal.
+
+Four persons had at this moment four telescopes pointed at once at his
+soul: for himself, he took nothing of the kind into his hand, because
+he was too good-natured and too happy to be the spy of a heart; and
+only after the lapse of some days did he observe the image which any
+one with whom he had been in company left behind in his brain. He did
+not conceal himself, and yet he was seen in a false light: good men can
+more easily see into bad ones than the latter can into the former. He
+guessed others better than they guessed him. Only Clotilda deserves a
+word of defence for having, even until after dinner,--during which Le
+Baut, the greatest story-teller of this story-telling century, carried
+through his part,--regarded him as too malicious and satirical. But she
+could hardly do otherwise: a woman easily discerns the human, but
+hardly the divine (or devilish), nature in a man, with difficulty his
+worth, but easily his intentions, and his inner complexion more so than
+his contour. Matthieu gave occasion for her error, but also (as I shall
+presently report) for its retraction. This Evangelist,[48] who was a
+much greater satirist than his namesake in the New Testament, placed
+almost all Flachsenfingen on his private pillory, from Prince and Court
+down to Zeusel;[49] only the Minister (his father) and his many sisters
+he was compelled, unfortunately, to leave out, and likewise those
+persons with whom he happened at the moment to be talking. What was
+called calumny in him was at bottom an exaggerated Moravianism. For, as
+St. Macarius commands that one shall, out of humility, add twenty
+ounces of evil when one has five, but with regard to good, the
+reverse,--accordingly ingenuous, courtly souls, seeing that no one will
+use this modest language, endeavor to speak it in every one's name, and
+always ascribe to him whose humility they wish to represent fifteen
+ounces more of evil and less of good than he really has. On the
+contrary, in the case of present company, they find this mediatorial
+system of satisfaction unnecessary: hence the life of such court-nobles
+is wholly dramatic; for as, according to Aristotle, comedy paints men
+as worse, and tragedy as better, than they are, so do the nobles
+referred to bring forward in the former only _absent_, in the latter
+only _present_ persons. I do not know whether this perfection will go
+to the length of atoning for a real fault of the Evangelist,--namely,
+that, like the Romans on the Lupercalia, he--too often made thrusts at
+the female sex. Thus, for instance, he said to-day, maidens and
+raspberries were wormy before they were ripe; female virtue was the
+red-hot iron which a woman (as was also the case in the old ordeals)
+had to carry from the font (the baptismal-day) to the altar (the
+wedding-day), in order to maintain her innocence, &c. Nothing fell upon
+Clotilda--and the same I have always found the case with the best of
+her sex--more keenly than satire upon her whole sex; but Victor was
+astonished at her art--very peculiar to her sex and to worldly
+experience at once--of concealing the fact, that she both--endured and
+despised.
+
+The Evangelist's example brought it about that Victor, too, began to
+phosphoresce at all points of his soul; the spark of wit ran round the
+whole circle of his ideas, which, like Graces, clasped each other by
+the hand, and his electrical chime of bells outdid the Page's
+discharges, which were lightnings, and stank of brimstone. Clotilda,
+who was very observing, mistrusted Sebastian's lips and heart.
+
+The young nobleman held him to be one of his feather, and in love
+with Clotilda; and that, on the ground that "the gayer or more earnest
+tone into which a man fell in company was a sign that a female
+electrical-eel had struck at his bosom." I must confess it,--Victor's
+effervescent soul never allowed him to hit that expression of respect
+for women which does not run into untimely tenderness, and for which he
+often envied cultivated people of the world; his regard unfortunately
+always looked like a declaration of love. The Chamberlain's lady
+accounted him as false as her Cicisbeo.[50] People like her cannot
+comprehend any other kind attentions than polite or artful ones.
+
+They kept our hero over there all day and half the evening.
+
+Not once in the whole day was he able,--although the invisible eyes of
+his inner man stood full of tears at Clotilda's noble figure, at her
+secret grief for her cold, buried friend, at her thrilling voice when
+she merely spoke to Agatha,--for all that, he never found himself able
+to say so much as an earnest word: toward strangers his nature always
+impelled him in the beginning to make sundry satirical leaps and other
+caprioles. But in the evening, when they were in the festal garden,
+where his usual shudder at the emptiness of life was made more intense
+by merriment, as it always was,--whereas serious, sad, passionate
+conversations diminished it,--and when Clotilda granted him only a very
+cold civility, as if shown to him at a father's dictation, and did not
+divine in its full extent the difference between him and Matthieu, who
+assumed no second world, nor any inner man organically adapted to it:
+then was there a stifled feeling about his yearning heart; too many
+tears seemed to fill his whole breast and press for a passage; and as
+often as he looked up to the great, deep heavens, something whispered
+in his soul: Take not the least thought for the fine circle, but speak
+out!
+
+But there was only _one_ soul for him, to which Nature had attached
+those treadles, as to pedal-harps, which impart to every thought a
+higher tone of the spheres, to life a holy worth, and to the heart an
+echo from Eden: that soul was not his once so-loved Flamin, but his
+teacher, Dahore, in England, whom he had long ago lost from sight, but
+never from his dreams. The shadow of this great man stood, as it were,
+projected upon the night, hovering and erect before him, and saying,
+"Dear one, I see thy inward weeping, thy sacred longing, thy desolate
+heart, and thy outstretched, trembling arms; but all is in vain; thou
+wilt never find me, nor I thee." He gazed at the stars, whose exalting
+science his teacher had even then instilled into his youthful soul; he
+said to Clotilda: "The topography of the heavens should be a piece of
+our religion; a woman ought to learn the catechism and Fontenelle by
+heart." And then he described the astronomical lessons of his Dahore
+and the teacher himself.
+
+From Clotilda's face there broke forth a great transfiguration, and she
+depicted with words and looks her own astronomical teacher at the
+Seminary,--how he was just as noble and just as quiet,--that he called
+himself _Emanuel_, and bore no surname, because he said, "With
+transitory man, with one whose genealogical tree so speedily sank into
+nothingness, the difference between family names and baptismal names
+was too slight";--that, unhappily, his noble soul inhabited a shattered
+body, which already bent low toward the grave,--that he was, according
+to the assurance of her Abbess, the gentlest and greatest man who had
+yet come from the East Indies (his native country), although there were
+some singularities of his way of life in Maienthal, which one had to
+overlook....
+
+Matthieu, whose wit borrowed from the snake his line of beauty, his
+poisonous tooth, his leap, and his coldness, said, softly and
+composedly: "It is well for his withered body that he was not made
+astronomer and night-watchman here at once; he applied, several years
+ago, for a telescope and a horn."
+
+Clotilda was, for the first time, suffused with a flush of angry
+redness, like the morning before the rain: "If," said she, quickly,
+"you know him merely from my portraiture, you cannot possibly seek this
+characteristic among his." But the Chamberlain came to the Page's
+assistance, and said that Emanuel had actually, five years before, been
+refused that application. Clotilda looked, as if for help, to the only
+one whose attentiveness was not ironical,--our Victor, on whom the
+reflection of her transfiguration threw its beauty,--and asked, more in
+the tone of hope than of assertion, "Should one expect anything like
+that of such a mind?" "Of mine sooner," he replied, by way of evasion;
+for he, who could have contradicted the Pope to his face, found it
+often impossible to gainsay fair lips, especially when they propounded
+a question with so much reliance on his negative. "As often as I walk
+through towns by night, I listen to the bodily night-watch with more
+pleasure than to the spiritual. In the silent, listening night, under
+the outspread starry heaven, there is something so sublime in the
+homiletic owl's-song or hoot of the night-watch, that I have a hundred
+times wished me a horn and six verses."
+
+The Chamberlain and his _associé_ took this for clumsy persiflage; the
+latter--perhaps for the sake of displeasing Clotilda, to the advantage
+of his heart's czarina, armed with false bosom and false rump--went on
+unshamed with his, and asserted that the best method of making the
+aforenamed anonymous person sad was a very merry one, a comedy;--to be
+sure, a farce moved him still more strongly, as he himself witnessed in
+him at Goethe's moral puppet-play or fair.
+
+Then flashed upon the surprised Victor a new face and a new relation;
+for he was exactly like Emanuel. A fair, with its human streams running
+up and down,--with its flitting of figures to and fro, as in a clock
+with images,--with its perpetually buzzing air, in which fiddle-squeak
+and human janglings and lowing of cattle conspire in one deafening
+roar,--and with the booths, crammed with commodities, offering a mosaic
+picture of our little life, patched up of varied necessities.... a
+village-fair, by all these reminiscences of the great, frosty
+_New-Year's fair_ of Life, made Victor's noble bosom at once heavy and
+full; he sank away, sweetly overpowered, into the din, and the human
+ranks around him absorbed his soul into its stiller fantasies. That was
+the reason why Goethe's Hogarthian _tail-piece_ of a village-fair (like
+Shakespeare) always left him melancholy; just as he was most fond,
+indeed, of finding in the low-comic the highest earnest (women are
+capable only of a reverse discovery), and a comic book, without any
+nobler trait or hint (e. g. Blumauer's Æneid), he could endure as
+little as La Mettrie's[51] disgustingly laughing face, or the faces on
+the frontispieces of the Vade Mecum.
+
+Like a true youth, he forgot himself and all around him, half-stretched
+out his arms, and said, with an eye in which one saw a soul longingly
+laboring at a portrait of Emanuel: "Now I know thee, thou nameless one!
+thou art the lofty man, who is so rare.... I assure you, Herr Von
+Schleunes, this Mr. Emanuel has something in him ... No, amidst this
+life on the wing, a thing which darts so _prestissimo_ out of one
+rain-shower into another,[52] and from cloud to cloud, should not keep
+its bill open on the stretch for one continued peal of laughter.... I
+have read today somewhere: Man has only two and a half minutes, and
+only one for a smile...." He had quite lost himself in the thicket of
+his feelings, else he would have kept back more than he did, especially
+the last line of the leaf found in the garden. Clotilda was startled at
+something or other. He would now gladly have read the leaf through. She
+related to him now those characteristics of her teacher into which she
+knew better how to enter; that he was a Pythagorean, went only in white
+robes, had himself put to sleep and waked with flute-music, ate no
+leguminous fruits or animal food, and often walked half the night under
+the stars.
+
+Lost in mute rapture over the teacher, he hung with enthusiastic eyes
+upon the friendly lips of the pupil, who was ennobled by her interest
+in a sublime and singular genius. She found here the first man whom she
+had ever put into an unfeigned enthusiasm for her Pythagorean favorite;
+and all her chasms turned themselves, blooming, towards Emanuel's
+image, like flowers toward the sun. Two fair souls discover their
+affinity first of all by the like love which binds them to a third. The
+full, inspired heart loves to hush and hide itself in a finery-room,
+which holds only heterogeneous persons, but when it finds therein
+its second, then in its joy at that its silence and secrecy and the
+finery-room are all forgotten.
+
+The quicksilver of Victor's morning gayety had fallen ten degrees. In
+the twilight of his soul nothing peered forth but the paper which he
+wanted to read, and in fact presently read out in the avenue; and so he
+took an early leave.
+
+The leaf had blown out of Clotilda's loose Album, and was written
+by--Emanuel.
+
+"Man has here two and a half minutes,--one to smile, one to sigh, and
+half a one to love; for in the midst of this minute he dies.
+
+"But the grave is not deep, it is the gleaming footmark of an angel who
+seeks us. When the unknown hand sends the last arrow at the head of
+man, he bends his head in anticipation, and the arrow merely takes off
+the crown of thorns from his wounds.[53]
+
+"And with this hope, go forth from Maienthal, noble soul! but neither
+continents nor graves nor the second world can sunder or bind together
+two human beings: but only thoughts part or marry hearts.
+
+"O, may thy life hang full of blossoms! From thy first Paradise may a
+second, as from the midst of one rose a second, be destined to bloom!
+May the Earth glow in thy sight, as if thou stoodest above it, and
+followedst with thine eye its path in heaven! And as Moses died because
+God kissed him, so be thy life a long kiss of the Eternal! And may thy
+death be mine!... EMANUEL."
+
+"O thou good, good soul!" cried Victor, "I can now no more forget thee.
+Thou must--thou wilt--take an interest in my weak heart!" From his
+inner strings the drops of vapor that choked their music had now fallen
+off. His brain became a radiant landscape, in which there stood nothing
+but Emanuel's shining form. He arrived late at the parsonage, with a
+face expressive of blissful emotion; and in this glow he arrayed before
+his spectators the image of Clotilda, to whom he gave everything an
+angel has, even the wings that threatened a short stay. His friendship
+raised him so far above the suspicion of a suspicion, that he thought
+he could give his friend no warmer or tenderer proof of the same, than
+by the strongest sympathetic praise of Clotilda; Flamin's love for her
+passed over through this friendship into his soul. The feeling for the
+beloved of a friend carries with it an unspeakable sweetness and moral
+tenderness. For Victor I answer, in this matter, that he understood,
+indeed, how a friend can sacrifice his love to another, but not how the
+other can accept the offering; but for Flamin I cannot stand security
+that he is cool enough, and a sufficient connoisseur of men, to regard
+the prize-medals which Victor stamps upon Clotilda, and upon which he
+sets her beautiful face and his coat of arms, as only just so many
+coins _de confiance_, and as pledges of brotherly fidelity. He was too
+impetuous and too ambitious to see, or even to listen to, the truth;
+for his open-hearted friend had to suppress many a tender reproach,
+which would have tried him too much, because he had too much love of
+praise and fieriness of spirit, and too little self-confidence. Hence a
+flatterer like Matthieu fastened himself so much the more firmly with
+his ivy-hooks into the fissures of this rock. When he a little harshly
+called the nameless Emanuel an enthusiast, Victor said little more
+about him that day. Flamin--either because he was a Jurist, or because
+he was a Hotspur, or both--could endure anything better than poets,
+philosophers, courtiers, and enthusiasts,--one excepted, who was all
+these at once, namely, his Sebastian Victor.
+
+
+
+
+                            5. DOG-POST-DAY.
+
+   The Third of May.--The Nightingale.--The Abbate Sitting on Music.
+
+
+I must here--premise, once for all, that I should be very stupid if I
+did not notice the multitude of improbabilities in this history: I am
+well aware of them all; nay, I have observed some of them--e. g. in
+Clotilda's behavior, or those in my hero's medical doctorship--even
+sooner than the reader, because I have--read everything before he has.
+I therefore delayed no longer, but entreated my correspondent by
+to-day's Hofmann-mail to write me by the dog the next time, in his
+portrait-box, what we were all about. I told him flatly, that the devil
+a bit did he know, though I did, however, of the readers and their
+tyranny. I must tell him (I said) that they were people of sense, whom
+a Biographer, nay, even a Romance-architect, dared not approach with
+poetic deception, but they would say, like the Areopagus, "Give us the
+naked historical fact here, without any superfluous poetic dressing
+up." And in fact it was a marvel to me, I went on to say, that he
+should not yet know that they had so much, partly understanding and
+partly four-leaved clover[54] in them, that, if the greatest authors
+and tragic poets should undertake to be fine, and by æsthetic
+juggleries to excite in them fear, like cuppers, or pity, like beggars,
+they would cold-bloodedly let these men work till they were tired, and
+say, "We are not to be caught." That the Reviewers, however, were still
+more crazy and clever, and were perhaps the best _Skotometers_
+(measurers of darkness), at the same time that they were the
+wretchedest _Photometers_ (light measurers) going. And finally, I said
+right out to my historical adjutant, that it was no injury to him, but
+very much to me, that I should be translated into several languages,
+and therein, for every improbability in the text, be dragged down into
+the scourging-cellar of a note, and there sorely lashed, without daring
+to open my mouth, if the interpreting scoundrel who translated (or
+transported) my gourd-bottle-case like a cask of wine, from one country
+to another, should, on the way, as all carriers do, outwardly
+besprinkle and inwardly fill up the wine with water.--He must, at
+least, (I entreated him) give me an answer, that I might show it to the
+readers, as an evidence that I had written to him.
+
+By the next Dog-post-day, therefore, at all events, great things may be
+expected.--
+
+Besides, the 4th of May comes into that also, with what should
+seem its two important Thanksgiving festivals for the arrival of the
+two Sebastians,--the little one into the world, the elder at the
+bathing-town.--Even Clotilda is to be there to-morrow, and Victor is
+very eager (and so am I) to see her in the sunshine of love beside
+Flamin; for over yonder all her charms seemed to bloom round a heart
+not yet smitten and ripened by love's ray, as flower-leaves hide the
+_white heart-leaves_ from the sun.... Matthieu came to-day to take
+leave, because he was going back to-morrow to the city. Our hero was
+less and less pleased with him, and a Page's history, which he related
+of himself, renewed Victor's resolve to fulfil soon the entreaty of the
+Parson's wife by ridding himself of such a fellow.
+
+Matthieu, as Page, rendered service to the chief Tutor's lady, I
+believe both the greater and the lesser service. Nevertheless, he had
+once to smuggle an Abbate and conscience-keeper into one of her
+cabinets, which was destined to be the confessional and holy place to a
+degree of which, to be sure, her stupid, jealous husband had no notion.
+Now there was in the next room a musical armchair, upon which, in fact,
+one played with no other instrument than the rump; so soon as one sat
+down in it, it began its overtures, and I myself once sat in such
+a one at Prince Esterhazy's. Our Mat,[55] as all the citizens of
+Flachsenfingen called him,--some government people called him even the
+Evangelist,--appointed the Abbate two hours too soon; but, lest the man
+with the shorn peruke should be tired of waiting, he first carried in
+the music-making chair as resting-bench and anchoring-ground for weary
+expectants. Toward three of the night, when the company was gone,
+except the chief Tutor, the counsellor of conscience, weary of
+standing, let his rump sink at last into the easy-chair stuffed out
+with favorite arias, and woke up with his breeches the whole wailing
+music therein with its thrilling passages, without the least
+possibility of stilling the cabinet-serenade of this alarmer. At last
+the husband darted like a herring at the final cadences (or falls), and
+dragged from his organ-stool the sedentary conscience-man in the midst
+of counterpoint and shakes, and spoiled his quail-call for him, I
+believe, by an administered cudgelling. The chief Tutor's lady easily
+guessed the master of the chair, Mat; but so very much a matter of
+course is pardon at court,--not merely _past_ offences, but _future_
+ones being forgiven there by good, easy female souls,--that the chief
+Tutor's lady did not avenge herself upon Mat, although he _served_ her
+two weeks and a half longer, till after just two weeks and a half....
+
+Victor was indignant at Flamin's laughter; he loved drollery, but not
+bantering. His sweetened blood began gradually with this _mother of
+vinegar_ to grow sour towards this Mat, whose cold, ironical gallantry
+toward the honest Agatha of itself exasperated him, though her
+phlegmatic, and, as it were, married pulse, beat in his absence and in
+his presence at the same rate. Still more heart-burning matter and acid
+collected in Victor's bosom, from the fact that he, who tolerated
+everything,--vain men, proud ones, atheists, enthusiasts,--could
+nevertheless not endure men who regard virtue as a kind of refined
+provision-bakery, wantonness as allowed, the spirit as an almsgatherer
+for the flesh, the heart as a blood-syringe, and our soul as a new
+shoot of the body. But this was what Matthieu did, who besides had a
+passion for philosophizing, and threatened to infect Victor's friend,
+who, in fact, was as cold toward the whole world of poets and spirits
+as a statesman, with his philosophical cancer-poison.
+
+In the evening he endeavored to sound, a little nearer to Flamin's
+ear, a blast upon a second Trumpet of Fame against the departed
+pseudo-Evangelist. It was in the garden that he blew it. He took the
+hand of which Matthieu's was not worthy into his better one, and began,
+with the finest and heartiest forbearance.--which one must grant even
+to true friendship for a hollow friend,--his iconoclastic attack. For
+while he charged it upon the lady of the Chamberlain, that she threw
+down at Agatha from her high post looks nowise cleaner than what
+monkeys used to throw down from their high roosts at passers-by; and
+while he blamed the young Page, that, like many of the nobility, only
+among the nobility could he scent best (perhaps by the help of
+contrast) the heretical odor of one belonging to the burgher-class, and
+that his words and looks at the palace flew like icicles at the good,
+warm heart of Agatha; at the same time the reproach of this May-frost
+toward the sister was only a pretext behind which he veiled the
+observation, that the Page would not be Flamin's friend, if he were not
+Agatha's lover.
+
+Flamin's silence (the sign of his indignation) gave the stream of his
+eloquence a new and swifter descent; in addition to this a nightingale,
+poetizing in Le Baut's garden, woke up all the echoes of love in his
+soul.--He therefore grasped, of course, both of Flamin's hands in that
+effervescence which always transformed his steps toward an object into
+springs, and thereby overshot the mark. Many plans miscarry, because
+the heart toils after the head, and because at the end of the execution
+one applies less caution than at its beginning. He looked upon his
+beloved, the fluting throat of the nightingale set the text of his love
+to music, and with indescribable emotion he said: "Best one, thy heart
+is too good not to be outwitted by those who cannot reach thee. O if,
+some day, the sharp edge of court _ton_ should pass bloodily across the
+veins of thy breast (Flamin's looks seemed to ask, Art thou not then
+even satirical?)--O if he, who has no faith in virtue and
+disinterestedness, should one day himself cease to show any; if he
+should sorely betray thee; should the hand, which court-life had
+hardened, like a lemon-squeezer, wring blood and tears from thy heart,
+then, I beseech thee, despair not, only not of friendship,--for thy
+mother and I love thee far otherwise. O verily, at the time when thou
+art forced to say, Why did I not hearken to my friend who so warned me,
+and to my mother who so loved me?--then mayest thou come to me, to one
+who never changes, and who prizes thy error higher than self-interested
+vigilance; then would I lead thee weeping to thy mother, and say to
+her, take him wholly, thou only art worthy to love him." To all this
+Flamin said not a word. "Art thou sad, my Flamin?" "Tired! "I am sad;
+the plaints of the nightingale strike upon my soul like echoes of
+_future_ ones," said Victor. "Are you pleased with this nightingale,
+Victor?" "Indescribably, as if she were a friend of my innermost soul."
+"Thus are people imposed on; it is _Matthieu singing_," Flamin quickly
+answered. For the Evangelist differed from a nightingale in nothing
+except size. And then Flamin, somewhat irritated, and yet with a
+pressure of his friend's hand, took his departure.
+
+
+
+
+                            6. DOG-POST-DAY.
+
+   The Threefold Deception of Love.--Lost Bible and Powder-puff.--
+     Churching.--New Concordats with the Reader.
+
+
+Knef's answer is wretched: "By your well-born's favor, dated the 6th
+instant, I see that the public has taste and some refinement, which
+does not surprise me, since the same is treated like gold-leaves, which
+are beaten out thin and fine, first within a book of parchment, and
+then between two of sheep-skin leaves, and thus, in like manner, by
+being passed from one book to another, and therein through the force of
+the press-bar, is made as fine as cavalier-paper.[56] If the public
+keeps on reading in this way a year or two, it may at last be more
+clever than Germany itself. Touching the improbabilities in our
+work, several such are of course desirable, because without them a
+biography or a romance gives miserable satisfaction, since it wants the
+charm by which the German hospital-ship and ship of fools, full of
+original romances, proves so attractive to us, ... which ship, as
+secretive-gland of disagreeable works, may justly be called the liver
+of the Republic of Letters, and the bookstore the gall-duct. But in
+reference to improbabilities, I am myself only too apprehensive that
+even the few on which we rely may in the end disappear. I am, &c."
+
+The wag, as one may easily see, would fain pull the wool[57] over my
+eyes and those of the reader. For me, however, it is a magnificent
+document in evidence that I have done my part by writing to the rogue.
+
+There are certain persons who, if in the evening they were very warm
+and friendly, the next morning are very gloomy and cold,--like
+Maupertuis's half-suns, which burn only on one side and disappear
+from us when they turn towards us the earthly half,--and if they were
+cold, the next time they are warm. Flamin forgot the next morning both
+the warm evening and the night-chill. Today is the festival of
+churching! Over there with Sebastian he launched out like a German
+police-puritan and purist, with fire-devils[58] and musketry against
+churching,--against infant-baptismal festivals,--against felling trees
+for Christmases and Whitsuntides,--against holidays, and against all
+the merry-makings of mankind.
+
+Nothing in our century so enraged Victor as its haughty
+crusade-preachings against unfashionable follies, whereas with
+unfashionable vices it makes contracts of subsidy. He took a long
+breath to start with, and then showed that the good of a state, as of a
+man, consisted not in riches, but in the use of riches, not in its
+commercial, but in its moral worth, that the sweeping out of the
+ancient leaven and most of our institutions and pandects and edicts had
+for their object only to enhance princely incomes, not morality, and
+that one wanted to have vices and subjects, like the old Jews, bring
+their offerings only in one city, namely, the residence city,--that
+humanity, from time immemorial, had cut its nails only on its bare
+_hands_, not on its covered _feet_, which often themselves decayed on
+that account,--that economical and sumptuary laws were still more
+needful to princes themselves, at least to the highest classes, than to
+the lowest,--that Rome owed to her many holidays much of her
+patriotism.... Flamin had no eye for the little pearl-print of domestic
+joy, for infusory-flowerets of pleasure; on the contrary, his soul kept
+step with a Brutus when he strode majestically up to Pompey's statue,
+and with a sigh over fate drove the scissors of the Parcæ into the
+greatest heart of earth, which confounded its worth with its right.
+Victor had room in his heart for the most unlike feelings.
+
+I cannot repeat often enough, that to-day is the churching. I will
+sketch it for posterity; not, however, with that curtness with which a
+newspaper-writer condenses the funeral of a king into three sheets, but
+a little more circumstantially. For the stately initial letters of this
+day the Parsonage had quite other reasons _in petto_ than one has ever
+yet, to my knowledge, been pleased to disclose to our age: three
+interested parties wished to deceive each other,--at least, two did a
+third.
+
+In the first place, the Lady of the Parsonage wished to deceive our
+hero, who did not know that to-day was the birthday of his father, and
+that that personage--whom she had taken the liberty of inviting--was
+coming today for the space of five minutes. In the morning, she set her
+two daughters to boiling yarn, in order that they might confess nothing
+to Victor,--at least, not the truth; for it is a well-known
+superstition that yarn boils whitest when one lies soundly over the
+operation. Hence we should be the more watchful when women lie, and
+inquire whether they mean, by their poetical deceptions, to _burn
+anything else white_ except yarn. Her beloved Victor--that was her
+plan--should to-day present to her husband, whose cradle-festival[59]
+also fell on to-day, the usual congratulation, and afterward halve it,
+and carry it on to his Lordship, who was to arrive with his own
+birthday.
+
+Secondly, Sebastian and she wished to deceive the old Chaplain, who had
+forgotten that he had been born, which absence of mind had already
+occurred to him at his first birthday. Mankind keep the run of
+another's life better than of their own; truly we make altogether too
+little account of a history which once was ours, and which is the shell
+of hours that have flown away, and yet the drops of time through which
+we swim do only in the distance of memory form the rainbow of
+enjoyment. Men know when all emperors were born and all philosophers
+died; women know, by reckoning time, only this, when their husbands,
+who are _their_ regents and classic authors, underwent both. Victor,
+whose delicate feeling was seared by too great attentions to himself,
+was glad that Eymann's shoulders must bear half of to-day's honor.
+
+Thirdly, the Lord of the Parsonage wanted to play his deception as well
+as any one else, and in fact upon everybody. As this Festival-day was
+to him--like the three High Festivals of the Cloisters--at the same
+time shaving-day, on which the wisest heads make the foolishest faces,
+the barber must needs cut with the razor-lancet upon the skin of the
+soul-keeper, as upon the bark of a birch-tree, a memorial of himself;
+but the little blood that flowed out suggested to the Parson a cleverer
+thought than what the cupper left therein, which, however, secreted the
+nervous sap, that, according to the merest sciolists, is the grease of
+our mental motions, the gold solution of our most significant ideas,
+and the spirit of our spirit. This cleverer thought which I so much
+praise was, to have a vein opened in his left arm, to conceal it from
+the whole household, in the evening to congratulate his Lordship and
+everybody, and, at last, to strip up his sleeve and show the wound,
+like a Roman, and say, "Congratulate me, I pray, on the bleeding!" He
+executed his idea, and the shaver was obliged, to his amazement, to
+hack something else beside the chin. The wounded man escorted him even
+to the outer door, not so much from politeness, as in order that he
+might not hold forth to the whole domestic company on the subject, but
+keep the occurrence absolutely to himself, except in houses where
+there was a beard and an ear. For let an historian be ever so much the
+_month-hand_ of the age, and consequently the newspaper-compositor its
+_hour-hand_, and accordingly a woman its _second-hand_, still, after
+all, the beard-trimmer is both, woman and _second-hand_.
+
+As Flamin and Victor passed down into the sitting-prinking-summer and
+winter-room, from amidst none but glad faces protruded one sullen one,
+which belonged to the Parson, who was plunging about like one
+possessed: there were two things which he could not possibly nose
+out,--his Bible and his powder-puff. Three minutes before he had thus
+lamented: "Am not I and my wretched life then singled out for a true
+Passion-history? Let an urn of fortune be given me, from which anybody
+else would claw out, as if he were crabbing, whole kingdoms. So soon as
+the Archfiend sees it to be me, he drops his dung in; and I claw that
+out instead of crabs and kingdoms, and nothing more. It would have gone
+finely to-day, the Devil saw,--we should have had until four o'clock in
+the afternoon no fun, but dog's-work; but then we should have broken
+loose; then would have come the dinner in the summer-house, the
+congratulation and salutation and real jollity.... And for you all
+this is still waiting; but to me, if the puff and the Bible do not
+appear, just send some of the soot and ashes (the leavings of the
+evening-feast) that I may brush therewith Fox's [his horse's] bit, and
+in the evening I can weed radishes by the summer-house."
+
+At this moment, he had to salute, with the dipped flag of his poll, his
+tasselled cap, the Briton just entering,--when the gesture shook out of
+the cap a hair-tuft, which, to be sure, was not the long-sought Bible,
+but was the puff, which had been given up for lost. That is to say, the
+thinking and reading world, to which one does not often disclose the
+weightier facts, must at least come at this one,--that the Court
+Chaplain, just as men are snatched from among men to overtop and master
+the rest, precisely so bound up the hairs which his comb plucked out,
+into a skin-fascicle or hair-union, in order to powder therewith the
+others that were left standing,--which now could not, of course, by
+this most exalted spirit and pentameter,[60] be well christened
+anything else than a hair-puff. Nevertheless, Eymann's face was longer
+than his cap; he let this syringe of the coloring powder of his head
+lie and cool there, and said, "If I don't ferret out the Bible, then I
+don't see how this tuft alone is to get me out of the scrape."
+
+As the Bible was sought before Luther's time, so now was the Canstein
+Bible, with its black beetle's-wing-shells. If anything could make this
+hard blow still more bitter, it was this,--that Eymann's band, like his
+reason, lay between the lost canonical leaves[61] as in a napkin-press;
+for the clergy, especially the Pope, love to make the Bible commentary
+a smoothing-press and finery-box to their outer man. Although he had
+eight other Bibles, even the simple Biblical Chrestomathy of Seiler, in
+the house, and to-day, at week-day church, did not need any at
+all, still it was certainly better and more human--that is, more
+foolish--that he should whistle the head of his vestry-beadle, the
+schoolmaster, to the window, and postpone divine service, like a
+reformation, by a quarter of an hour's interim, than that, instead of
+simply the hour of tolling, he should change nothing less than Bible
+and bands. Good heavens! how like exegetists and Kennicottists[62] they
+searched and smiled! "This hunting for the Bible," said Sebastian,
+"redounds to a clergyman's honor, especially as he seeks the truths in
+the Bible only by _daylight_, not by _funeral-torches_."
+
+The monks, like the lighters of the street-lamps, have a _ladder_ and
+much oil, but with the oil they _extinguish_ the lamps and their own
+thirst, and with the ladder they conduct those who light them again up
+to the gallows.
+
+As the Chaplain passed along before the quiet head of the six-weeks'
+child, which to-day's lace-cap already oppressed, he went back, from
+vexation at its indifference, lifted its bedizened head with his right
+hand, and thrust the left through the stratum of the cradle-straw,
+thinking there to exhume the Bible, which is usually the pillow and the
+supporting amulet of children (particularly of _Dauphins_), saying,
+meanwhile: "The miserable little brat would lie there through all our
+misery, perfectly cool, seeming to say, 'What's that to me?' if I
+didn't stir him up." And just at this moment something fell, not like a
+shot, but like a book, although it can be heard through my quill, even
+to the thirtieth century. Eymann flew, thoughtfully, into the second
+story, and found at his feet a smashed--mouse under his long-sought
+Bible. The Protestant imperial circles can never have been ignorant of
+the students' or Dr. Luther's mousetraps,[63] for which one needs only
+a book, and which are to mice what symbolical books were to candidates.
+Sebastian drew forth the corpse by the tail from under the Biblical
+vellum-mould, and Seiler's Bible-arrangement, swung the cadaver toward
+the light, and delivered extempore this funeral sermon: "Poor
+schismatic! the Old and New Testaments were the death of thee, but
+neither thou nor the Testaments are to blame! Only be glad that the
+Bible did not absolutely singe thee to ashes, like a Portuguese
+Israelite; but thy lines fell in enlightened times, where it takes away
+nothing but livings. It is genuine wit, if I ask, As the Bible used to
+extinguish conflagrations into which it was thrown, why not, then,
+_auto-da-fés_ also?"
+
+I have long been watching for an opportunity here to force the world to
+ask why the case of a mouse's death should interest it more than the
+shooting down of an army in general history,--the loss of another's
+hair-puff more than Christina's abdicated crown.[64] ... This interest
+arises from the source whence it comes with those Oto whom the case
+really occurs: because I relate it copiously, i. e. because the
+readers, like the heroes concerned in it, painfully live over one
+moment of childish history after another. Many little blows riddle the
+firmest man as surely as one great one; and it is all one whether fate
+does it or an author. And thus it comes that the modern man is placed
+so near to the index-finger of time, that he can see it move; hence a
+trifle, when it takes up _many_ moments, becomes so great to us, and
+this short life, which, like the picture of our soul in the _Orbis
+Pictus_,[65] consists of points--of black and golden ones--seems so
+long. And hence, too, everywhere, as on this page, does our serious
+mood stand so near to our mirthful.
+
+Except Flamin, all moved to church, godfather and godchild. It was a
+so-called week-day prayer-hour, such as will be set apart in every
+rational duchy and margravedom, where one still sees to it that the
+parson shall freeze once or twice a week, and that, as novices do for
+the exercise of obedience, they may be obliged to sprinkle dry sticks,
+to scatter the seed of the Divine word into empty pews, as Melancthon
+did into empty pots.[66] In German countries, mine and a few others
+excepted, it takes two centuries thoroughly to do away a folly,--one to
+recognize it, and one more to do it away. The _views_ of a consistory
+always become rational a hundred years sooner than its orders
+(_circularia_) do.
+
+In the latticed pew of the Eymanns, whose door made nearly a right
+angle with that of the vestry, Sebastian found all the flowers again,
+or at least the flower-skeletons, which had bloomed around his fair
+childhood's days,--figurative and literal ones; and the literal ones,
+which had crept away all soiled under the footstool of the choir-pew,
+opened out again into flowers of memory. He thought of his childish
+sorrows here,--among them the length of the sermon,--and of his
+childish pleasures, among which were to be reckoned the length of the
+voluntary and Eymann's kneeling on the middle of the pulpit-stairs. He
+pushed back the wooden lattice-window, and found in its wooden groove
+his initials, V. S. H., notched by his own hands. So far is it from the
+child to the youth! And man wonders at the distance. "Ah! then," said
+Horion,--and we will say it with him,--"all was to thee as yet
+infinite, and nothing little but thy heart. Ah! in that warm,
+quickening time, when a father is still God the Father, and a mother
+the mother of God, not yet did the bosom, oppressed with spirits,
+graves, and storms, press itself for comfort to a human one. All the
+four quarters of the world were installed in this church; all rivers
+were named Rhine, and all princes January. Ah! this tranquil and lovely
+day was set in a golden horizon of infinite hope and a ring of
+morning-red. Now the day is gone, and the horizon sunk, and only the
+skeleton remains there,--the latticed pew."
+
+But if we now, even in the noonday hours of life, think and sigh thus,
+how much more at evening, when man folds up his flower-leaves, and
+becomes undistinguishable like other flowers,--at evening, when we
+stand low in the western horizon and go out,--then, when we turn round,
+and survey the short road strewed with trampled-out hopes,--oh! then,
+how much more sweetly will it not look upon us,--the garden of
+childhood, lying in the east, low down near the place of our rising,
+and still suffused with an old, pale redness,--how much more magically
+will it gleam on us, and yet how much more will it affect us to
+tenderness! And thereupon man lays himself down on the earth not far
+from the grave, and hopes here below no more.
+
+To Eymann it must be a touching thought, that he, as he had for years
+given the benediction in this church to newly-delivered mothers only
+parishionally related to him, could, for once, give his wishes to a
+nearer one. Victor crept back into all his boyish Sundays and their
+illusions by this simple act, that he to-day, as in his tenth year,
+went, while the whole congregation were singing, into the vestry, to
+the Parson, and asked him for the page of the hymn. He enjoyed it with
+a real childish gusto to think that there were four _moving_
+creatures[67] in the temple,--the Parson, the Schoolmaster, the
+Exchequer-master of the poor's-box,[68] and himself. Is there anything
+more sublime, thought he, than a jingling alms-bag-father with a long,
+horizontal balance-pole, walking to and fro alone, among nothing but
+stiffened statues?
+
+After church the festival began with mere preliminaries, as a treaty of
+peace does with articles about the neutral ground, about rank, &c. Only
+the world must not suppose that anything came on sooner than five
+o'clock in the afternoon, or that any one could earlier than that slip
+out of his prosaic week-day clothes into the poetic festal ones, or
+quietly settle down beside a neighbor; but, according to the order and
+programme of pleasure, all must now run up and down, obedient to
+Apollonia, that _majoress-domo_,--must carry away bean-poles and
+seed-cornucopias out of the summer-house,--fan out therefrom
+butterflies that had burst the cocoons and waked up bottle-flies,--tie
+back the twigs which had grown over the windows,--lug down the
+orangery, which consisted of a hundred blossoms of a pomegranate-tree,
+out of the parsonage into the garden alley, in like manner an invalid
+harpsichord, whose sounding-board had not sprung[69] so often as its
+strings.... The serious Flamin was compelled by the bustling Sebastian
+to take part in these puppet-plays,[70] and between them, in this
+preparatory chase of pleasure, the tormented visage of Eymann had to
+labor, to which Victor delivered the most essential exhortations:
+"Master Godfather, we cannot be earnest and busy enough,--this festival
+may yet be talked of in places where it will have influence; but a
+middle course between princely pomp and Belgian stinginess will, I
+think, throw upon us the most favorable light." All went well,--even
+the clouds dispersed,--Clotilda would come. The primate of the
+festival, in whose honor the church-going took place,--the little
+six-weeks'-man,--memorized his part aloud, which he had to perform
+after five o'clock, and which, as in the case of more than one hero of
+festivities, was to consist of nothing but going to sleep.
+
+The memorizing consisted of his waking and screaming in one steady
+scream for the bosom in which the Creator had stored up for him the
+first manna in life's wilderness. But not till five o'clock did the
+mother still him with the maternal sleep-potion, and enable the little
+speaker to close his throat-lid[71] and eyelids at once. At first I had
+come near suppressing--from respect for the Parson's lady--the fact
+that she suckled, and so, like a whale as it were, still reckoned among
+the mammalia, nourished at her bosom another child than Cupid; but I
+flattered myself, upon reflection, that a person who is neither a
+theatre-princess nor a crown-princess would not be so strictly judged
+as others, if she _had_ children or milk....
+
+Before I say that Clotilda came, I will, inasmuch as she has eight
+residences,--although many a magnate who owns sixteen noble residences
+still seeks a seventeenth with walls in which he may sleep,--offer a
+slight excuse for her going into the house of a common citizen; but she
+needs after all no other justification than the fact that she was in
+the country, where often the oldest blood can avail itself of no better
+intercourse than that of citizens, unless perhaps it is that of cattle,
+which even some not uncultured cavaliers really prefer....
+
+It strikes five o'clock,--the matchless beauty enters,--the moon hangs
+down towards her out of heaven like a white leaf newly budded,--the
+gay, innocent blood in St. Luna rises under her influence like the
+tide,--all is rehabilitated.
+
+But the sixth chapter is run out.... And as Spitz is not yet on hand
+with the seventh, the reader and I can exchange with each other a
+rational word. I confess, he has long appreciated me and my doings; he
+sees clearly that all goes on in the finest biographical train,--the
+dog, my littleness, and the heroes of these dog-days. Nor have I ever
+denied that he will continue to be more and more dazzled by the
+splendor and sparkle of this foot-birth,[72] since I am so very busy,
+waxing, rubbing, and polishing at it,--more so than if it were a man's
+boot or a military horse's-hoof in Berlin. Nay, I need not wait to have
+it foretold to me from any cup of coffee-grounds (for I see it already
+from my knowledge of human nature and from the coffee which I drink)
+that this is saying the very least, and that the proper reading-rage
+will then, and not till then, come over the poor dear fellow, when, in
+the course of this work, at which, as in the low-warp tapestry,[73] two
+workmen weave sitting in one chair, the historic figures of this
+tapestry, together with their grouping, shall come forth from the ball
+of the foot to the seam of the skull. At present there is hardly a
+heel, a shin-bone, a stocking finished....
+
+But when twenty or thirty ells of the work have been run off, then can
+I and my by-sitter expect what I will here portray: the reader will
+hurry as if the Devil were after him; to get through one Dog-post-day
+he will let six courses grow cold and the dessert warm. But what am I
+saying? An incarnate Romish king shall ride through the streets and a
+cannon-thunder bring up the rear,--he shall not hear it; his better
+half shall give in his library the best of suppers to a connubial
+excrescence,--he shall not see it; the excrescence itself shall hold
+assaf[oe]tida under his nose, shall give him in sport light blows with
+a woodman's axe,--he shall not feel it, so beside himself shall he be
+on my account, regularly out of his senses.
+
+Now that is a misfortune, the certainty of which I seek vainly to
+hide from myself. When it once comes on, and I have unhappily brought
+him into that historical clairvoyance where he no longer hears or
+sees anything except my characters, which are put in _rapport_ with
+him,--neither father nor cousin,--then I may be sure that he will hear
+a mining-superintendent still less,--for story is what he wants, and of
+_me_ he knows absolutely nothing more,--nay, I will suppose, I should
+let off the motliest fire-works of wit, yes, that chains of
+philosophical conclusions should hang down in skeins out of my mouth,
+like ribbons from a juggler's,--what would it avail me?
+
+Nevertheless, ribbons must hang down and fire-works play; but it shall
+be in this way: As from each year so many hours are left off that the
+remainder of four years makes out an intercalary day,--and as with me
+after four Dog-post-days there will always be so many Postscripts, so
+much wit and acuteness lying quite idle, as so much unsalable
+stuff,[74] that a regular _intercalary day_ could well be made,--it
+shall be made as often as four dog-dynasties have gone by; only this is
+still requisite, that I first conclude and ratify with the reader the
+following boundary agreement and domestic contract, in form and manner
+to wit:--
+
+I. On the part of the reader it is allowed and granted to the
+mining-superintendent on St. John's, him and his heirs and assigns,
+from this time forward, after every fourth Dog-post-day, to prepare and
+print a witty and learned intercalary day, in which there is no
+narrative.
+
+II. On the part of the mining-superintendent permission is given the
+reader to skip over every intercalary day and read only the historical
+days, in consideration whereof both powers waive all _beneficia
+juris_--_restitutionem in integrum_--_exceptionem læsionis enormis et
+enormissimæ_---_dispensationem_--_absolutionem_, _etc_. At the Congress
+of St. John's, May 4, 1793.
+
+Thus reads the genuine instrument of the so-called Dog-contract between
+the mining-superintendent and the reader, and this Act of Renunciation
+may and must, in future misunderstandings between the two powers, be
+laid before an umpire or a confederate court,[75] as the single ground
+of decision.
+
+
+
+
+                            7. DOG-POST-DAY.
+
+   The Great Parsonage-Park.--Orangery.--Flamin's Promotion.--Festal
+     Afternoon of Domestic Love.--Rain of Fire.--Letter to Emanuel.
+
+
+His Lordship excepted, all are now sitting and waiting for me in the
+parsonage-garden; but the garden itself not a mortal soul is yet
+acquainted with. It is a Chrestomathy[76] of all gardens, and yet no
+larger than the church. Many gardens resemble it in being at once
+kitchen-gardens, flower-gardens, and orchards; but it is also a _jardin
+des animaux_, as it contains in fact the whole Fauna of St. Luna, and a
+botanical garden, too; it is overgrown with the entire Flora of the
+village; and it is a garden of honey-bees and humble-bees also, as
+often as they happen to fly into it. Meanwhile such minor merits are
+really hardly worth naming, when a garden once has, like this, the
+merit of being the greatest English garden through which a man ever
+strode. It hides not only its end,--as every park, like every purse,
+must do,--but even its beginning, and seems to be merely the terrace
+from which one can see into that which one cannot see over, but, like
+Cook, may well circumnavigate. In the English parsonage-garden there
+are not single ruins, but whole broken-up cities, and the greatest
+princes have rivalled each other in their passion for furnishing it
+with romantic wildernesses and battle-fields and gallows-trees, to
+which (and that carries the illusion still higher) real rogues are
+tied, into the bargain, as fruit-pendants. The buildings and shrubs of
+different parts of the world are there, not huddled together into an
+absurd neighborhood, but neatly kept apart from each other by regular
+seas or water-scapes, which its size easily makes possible, since it
+contains over nine million square miles; and with what taste, in fact,
+these masses are brought together, the reader may estimate from the
+fact that all lords and all reviewers in the literary periodicals, and
+the readers themselves, are drawn into the garden and often stay
+therein sixty years.--
+
+The Parson thinks also to get some credit from it as a Dutch garden,
+particularly by a peruke made of water, which hangs not on a wig-stand,
+but on a tin pipe, and which leaps so in curls that already several
+city-parsons have wished they could wear it. Butterfly-show-glasses
+kept off the night-chills from precocious roses of silk and early
+cucumbers of wax. Cucumbers which consisted of real cucumbers, he was
+the first among all pastors to put in, in order to worry himself with
+the fear that they might freeze; for this fear he must have, in order
+to rejoice whenever a glass bottle was broken in his house: he could
+then carry this ice- or glass-mountain (which, in the case of wines,
+unfortunately heightens every year as our thirst does) into the garden,
+and with this manure-bell cover the heart-leaves. Round more important
+beds he ran a motley, mosaic border of crockery; his family was his
+verge-tool,--I mean, they had to break for him the few porcelain cups
+which he needed, in order with this motley powdered sugar to set off
+the more considerable patches, as a prince enchases and berings himself
+with the variegated order-ribbons drawn through the button-holes of his
+antechambers. As he could not set _whole_ cups round the beds, but must
+first analyze them by his chemists, a reviewer who eats with him must
+avail himself of my hint to understand how it happens, if such a
+consumptive patient is not beside himself for rage, when some very
+valuable vessel is broken; for only when it happens to worthless ones
+is he no longer master of himself. Every housewife should set off such
+a bed as an Arndt's garden of Paradise, as a Golgotha for porcelain
+whereof the _fashion is changed_, for the good of her soul, in order
+that she may not lose her senses when a cup falls. "Dearest!" I would
+say, "bear up under this misfortune like a Christian woman; it, will
+turn out for thy advantage either in eternity yonder, or here in the
+garden."
+
+Near a house, Dutch garden-ornaments, with their homely minuteness,
+make a better figure than thrilling Nature, with her eternal majesty.
+Eymann's clipped and carved parsonage-garden was in fact merely a
+continued family-room without roof or partition.
+
+As the Parson twitched our Victor round through the garden, the guest
+almost forgot to praise the garden as a magazine of ideas, simply
+because he was looking forward too curiously and warmly to the arrival
+of Clotilda, and her demeanor towards his friend. Fortunately it
+occurred to him that the Parson counted upon incense-offerings and
+censers; he was so unwilling to defraud a laurel-hoping heart, that he
+for that very reason loved to attach himself to people of some merit,
+that so he might indulge his humane disposition to praise, without
+expense to the truth. Victor rejoiced at the prospect of Flamin's and
+Clotilda's meeting: how beautifully, he thought, will the moonlight of
+soft love fall upon his and her proud faces! And he held in store a
+rich tolerance and love for their love. For he not only had so much
+insight into the fleeting nature of our pleasures, that he could hardly
+be angry over the maddest, but he could even be present at the
+journeyman's greeting (or methodology) of--two lovers with real
+pleasure. "It is very foolish,"--he said in Göttingen,--"every
+good-hearted man opens his arms in sympathy, when he sees friends,
+brothers and sisters, or parents embrace each other; but if a couple of
+monkeys in love dance round before us at the end of Cupid's string, and
+though it were on the stage, not a devil of us will take any interest
+in them, unless they dance in a romance. But why? Certainly not from
+selfishness, otherwise the wooden heart in the human block would also
+in the presence of friendship between others, or filial love, remain
+nailed fast; but, because the love of lovers is selfish, we are so too;
+and because in a romance it is not so, we are not so either. I, for my
+part, go on in my thinking, and make believe to myself in regard to
+every span of lovers I meet, that they were printed and bound, and I
+had them from the circulating library for paltry reading money. It
+belongs to the higher disinterestedness to sympathize even with its
+opposite. And by all means with you, poor women! Would you or I, then,
+oftentimes, with this life of yours so frittered away in sewing,
+cooking, washing, know that you had a soul, unless it fell in love?
+Many of you through long tearful years have never lifted your head
+except in the short, sunny day of love, and after it your bereft heart
+sank back again into the cool depths; so water-plants lie all the year
+drowned in water, only at the time of their bloom and love do their
+ascending leaves sit upon the water and sun themselves gloriously,
+and--then fall down again."
+
+At last Clotilda entered, in conversation with the Parson's wife. She
+had on a crape hat, with a black lace portcullis, which at once
+beautified, divided, and concealed with a pierced shadow her beautiful
+face. But her eye avoided Flamin's eye, and only at times stole
+thoughtfully after it. He proved that precisely people of the greatest
+courage have the least with regard to beauty; he advanced not towards
+her one step. She asked our Victor eagerly about the arrival and the
+health of his Lordship. She then proposed to him, with the usual
+medical uncertainty of her sex, whether such an operation often
+transpired so easily, and whether he had already restored to many so
+much as he had to his father: he answered both questions in the
+negative, and she sighed openly. His respectful distance towards her
+would have increased by that at which his friend kept himself from her,
+had he not had something to hand her,--Emanuel's note. He could not
+steal it, as he had already repeated to her the first line; secondly,
+he must present it _under four eyes_ (he could not through Agatha, for
+example), because he knew how she carried discretion to the extreme
+limits. Clotilda was one of those persons--troublesome to this
+biographer and his hero--who love to conceal all trifles: e. g. what
+they eat, where they are going to-morrow; who are furious with a friend
+if he blabs out how on St. Thomas's day last year they had a slight
+headache. With Clotilda it arose not from fear, but from a dark
+presentiment that he who babbled indifferent mysteries might at last
+tell weighty ones. He felt towards her, notwithstanding her pride, a
+mighty drawing to sincerity. He led her aside to the pomegranate-tree,
+and there--sparing her by his open-hearted lightness of manner the
+burdensome obligation she might feel with regard to a secret--handed
+her back the leaf. She was astonished, but said at once, her surprise
+related merely to her own negligence; i. e. she trusted him, but had
+some suspicion or other of her house-mates, and of the manner in which
+it got into the arbor. She took advantage of the orangery, and bent her
+inspired face close to the pomegranate blossoms. Victor could not
+possibly stand there alone so stupid; he, still a little struck with
+her astonishment, and at last with her almost too great pride, felt
+also a hankering after the pomegranate incense, and held his face down
+in it toward hers. He should have known, however, that any one who
+smells of anything does not look at the thing, but straight before him.
+Hardly, then, had he applied his olfactory nerves to the blossoms, when
+he opened his eyes, and Clotilda's large eyes stood opened full upon
+him; they were just at the highest and most effective elevation, of
+45°, whether you speak of eyes or bow-shots. He turned his pupils
+forcibly down toward the leaves; she, still more prudently, stepped
+back from the bewildering orangery.
+
+However, she was not embarrassed. He thought it unjust toward Flamin to
+observe her sentiments towards himself; but still he remarked this
+much,--that the observatory on which one would watch the occultations
+of her heart must be higher than is necessary in regard to other women.
+The custom of being admired had made her proof against that showing up,
+as in a glass, the impression of her charms with which men so often win
+to themselves the attention of woman's vanity. She was, as I have said,
+not embarrassed, but went on to tell her listener something further of
+Emanuel's character, which she lately, out of respect for her teacher,
+had not been willing to lay before such unholy ears,--namely, that he
+firmly believed he should die a year hence in the midnight of St.
+John's day.[77] Victor could easily guess that she herself believed it;
+but what he did not guess was, that this proud one, from pure
+tenderness of heart, had hastened her purpose of leaving Maienthal on
+St. John's day, in order not to meet the beloved man on the anniversary
+of the future day of his death. According to her account, this Emanuel
+had had a painfully exalted position among men; he was alone; he had
+had great friends on his bosom, but all had passed into the grave, and
+therefore he would also hide there his own head. Years give to stormy,
+over-vigorous men a finer harmony of the heart, but from refined, cold
+natures they take more than they give. Those strong hearts resemble
+English gardens, which age always makes greener, fuller, more leafy;
+whereas the man of the world, like a French one, is covered by years
+with dried-up and disfigured boughs.
+
+Victor grew more troubled; every word which he won from her he regarded
+as a sacrilege upon his friend, the more so as the latter did not
+understand so well as he the art of opening a conversation with a lady.
+He had not the heart to shine, because he feared thereby to be a rival
+of his friend for her good graces. His Flamin seemed to him to-day
+taller, more beautiful, and better than ever, and he himself shorter
+and more stupid. He wished a thousand times his father had already
+come, that he might deliver to him with the greatest ardor Flamin's
+prayer for his aid in obtaining Clotilda.
+
+At last he came, and Victor drew a full breath again. The good youth
+often seeks, by acts of sacrifice, to reconcile his conscience again
+with his _thoughts_. With heart-beatings of enthusiasm he awaited the
+moment of solitude. A garden detaches and draws together people in the
+easiest manner, and only in such a place should one impart secrets;
+Victor could soon, in an arbor which wove itself on four chestnut-trees
+with its blooming vein-work nest-wise over their heads, embrace his
+father with trembling emotion, and speak and glow for his friend with
+tongue and heart. His Lordship's surprise was greater than _his_
+emotion. "Here," said he, "is something which has long since fulfilled
+thy prayer in a different way; but I wished to reserve for thee the joy
+of bearing the message";--and therewith he gave him a most gracious
+autograph, wherein the Prince called the practising Advocate Flamin
+into the Administrative Council.
+
+A most gracious autograph is the _Tetragrammaton_[78] and means of
+grace, which works supernatural effects and state-miracles; and the
+illustrious writing-thumb is the magic thief's-thumb,[79] as it were,
+by which the different wheels of the state-repeating-watch--the
+lever-wheel, the face-wheel, often merely the hand--is shoved forward
+or backward, according as it desires an hour earlier or later.
+Hence ministers often climb up and cut off for themselves such a
+thief's-thumb to carry in their pockets.
+
+Sebastian is seized by joy, as by Habakkuk's angel, by the hair of the
+head, and carried through the garden, and driven with his news to the
+first he might meet, and that proved to be the Chaplain, who, with a
+comic face, swore it was all a fib of Victor's; but his restrained
+jubilation almost burst his compressed veins. Victor had no time for
+refutation, but hurried off with such a message to the heart to which
+it rightly belonged,--the mother's. The mother could not shape her
+mouth to anything but a blessed smile, into which the drops of joy
+overflowed from her eyes. No joy in nature is so sublimely affecting as
+the joy of a mother at the good fortune of a child. But the son, in
+whose soul, such as it was to-day, this sunbeam of fate was really
+needed, could not, in the surprise, be immediately found.
+
+His Lordship, meanwhile, talked with Clotilda as with a daughter, and
+gave her a letter from her mother and the intelligence of his
+approaching departure. His manly kindness, guided by respect and graced
+by refinement, ennobled her attentiveness to his looks; and as she came
+forth from the affectionate and low-toned conversation with sparkling
+eyes, her tall form, which usually stooped a little, was raised by a
+certain inspiration to a noble stature, and she stood in the temple of
+Nature, as a priestess of the temple, infinitely beautiful. His
+Lordship separated from her. She found Flamin near the tulip-formed
+letter C, and the Goddess of Fortune appeared to him in the sweetest
+human incarnation, to deliver to him her gift. We need not say that the
+news and the news-bearer threw him into equal ecstasy.
+
+Joy had shaken up the whole bee-garden in a swarming-bag and turned it
+into chaos. The foaming wine-fermentation could not work itself off
+till it ended in clear, tranquil rapture. His Lordship took himself out
+of the way of a gratitude swelled by so many ripieno[80] voices and off
+to his carriage, when the mother with her dumb heart-fulness overtook
+him; but nothing could she get from her blissfully burdened heart to
+her lips, save the modest words, that "to-day was his birthday, and his
+son did not know it, and ought _also_ to have been surprised with a
+rapture." He tried to escape from her with a grateful smile, and said
+that he must hasten back to the Prince, who perhaps had taken as kind
+an interest in this very day as she; but Sebastian, with his friend
+whom he had found, overtook him at the garden-gate, and the hurrying
+lord was delayed a little longer by a swift embrace of his son. Not
+until he was off did the mother, who longed to unburden her love, clasp
+tenderly Victor's hand, and, forgetting the agreement, asked: "O
+dearest, why, then, did you not congratulate him on his birthday? For,
+indeed, _I_ could not." Now for the first time he understood and felt
+the sudden embrace of his father, and stretched out his arms after him
+and would fain reciprocate it.
+
+Here the old Parson, also coming out of the garden, struck in and said,
+as if talking nonsense, "I wish he were Administrative Councillor"; but
+his wife, without making any reply to that, said to him with
+overflowing voice and love, "Such a cradle-festival thou hast never yet
+lived to see as to-day's, Peter!" Agatha looked at her inquiringly and
+admonishingly. "Just out with it," said she, and enfolded the children
+and drew them both into the paternal embrace, "and wish your good
+father length of days and three more blessed children."
+
+The father could not say anything, but stretched his hand toward the
+mother, to round the group of the loving Eden. Victor's sympathetic
+blood swelled up in his heart, to dissolve it in love, and he thought
+the silent prayer: "Never may any misfortune, All-gracious One, tear
+these entwined arms asunder!" But Flamin soon drew himself out of the
+concatenation, and said to Victor with a most grateful pressure of the
+hand, "Thou knowest not how I am always wronging thee." The Chaplain
+thought he should hide his emotion from all by saying: "I wish I had
+not deceived you. I have let myself be bled, but it was a stupid thing;
+if I had only known! only known! It is true; there, see for
+yourselves!" And finding that this mask was not adequate to cover the
+whole emotion of his soul, he called, in an overloud tone, to the poor
+forgotten Apollonia, who was rocking at the house door the awakened
+Bastian, to "come here!" But the poor girl, whose merely distant
+participation in the general mingling of hearts touched our Victor's
+tenderest feelings, shyly hesitated, till the mother came and
+indemnified her against any loss by all that for which mothers are
+never repaid. But not until the Parson's wife held her child in her
+arms and on her lips, did she feel that the imprisoned flames of her
+affections found vent, and her heart its alleviation.
+
+Ah, that man should receive the fairest love precisely at the time when
+he does not yet understand it!--alas that not until late in life's
+year, as he contemplates with a sigh the love of other parents and
+children, he should say hopefully to himself, "Ah, thus did mine
+certainly love me too!"--alas that then the bosom to which thou wouldst
+hasten with thy thanks for half of a life, for a thousand unappreciated
+anxieties, for an inexpressible, never returning love, is already lying
+crushed under an old grave, and has lost the warm heart which so long
+loved thee!...
+
+In domestic happiness the calm, cosey pleasures driven in between four
+narrow walls are only the most accidental constituent; its nervous and
+vital fluid is the blazing fire-fountains of love which spring out of
+kindred hearts into each other. The involuntary surprise had
+disconcerted the intentional ones. But the flood of joy had swept all
+parties together; and they still remained in the same confidential
+closeness to each other, when it had abated again. They sat down to the
+entertainment in the summer-house. Seldom are banquets spiced as this
+one was, by two extraordinary advantages,--want of food and want of
+room. Nothing whets the appetite so much as the fear of its not finding
+enough to satisfy it. It had been contrived by Sebastian, that for each
+guest only his favorite dish should be provided; for the Parson,
+stuffed crabs and potato cheese; for Flamin, ham; for the Hero, good
+Harry's beans. But in this case every one wanted another's favorite
+dish, and set his own up at auction.[81] Even the ladies, who generally
+eat and do not eat, like fishes, nibbled a little. The second
+intoxicating ingredient which they had, thrown into their cup of joy,
+was the table, together with the garden-house, of which the former
+would not hold the food nor the latter the feeders. Sebastian had
+betaken himself, with Agatha, to an affiliated table which had been
+adjoined outside to the window of the banquet-hall, merely for the
+purpose of screaming in from out there and whining, more than eating.
+This caprice was, at bottom, a covered modesty which feared being
+honored inside at the expense of the other guests, on his Lordship's
+account. His own solitude--perhaps in a painful sense--pictured to him
+the shy Appel, who, as vestal of the hearth, ate only the drawback toll
+of returning dishes, merely to try how they had tasted to others. He
+could not longer endure the thought of this separation, but took wine
+and the best of the dessert, and carried it in to her in her kitchen
+winter quarters. As, in doing so, he displayed upon his face, instead
+of his gayety towards girls, of which she might have made a too humble
+interpretation, the greatest seriousness of courtesy; he was so happy
+as to have given to a soul pinched up by nature itself--with no other
+flower-pot here to send its roots round in than a cooking-pot, and only
+the kitchen for its concert-hall and the spit for its music of the
+spheres--a golden evening and a long memory of pleasure. Let no one
+maliciously thrust his fist in the way of such a good snail-soul, and
+laugh to see how she wriggles over it; and let him who stands upright
+willingly stoop and gently lift her along over her little stone.
+
+As to Clotilda, before dinner things went very well, but after dinner
+very ill. I speak of Sebastian, who, after the handing in of the
+petition to his Lordship, was happier and more light-hearted, and
+actually talked as frankly with Clotilda as if she were--a bride. For
+he had already said in Hanover, that "there was not a more tedious and
+holy thing than a bride, particularly if it were a friend's; sooner
+would he fritter away his time about the musty Pandects in Florence, or
+a holy body in a glass shrine at Vienna, than about her." In fact, it
+was hard to fall in love with Clotilda; I know the reader would not
+have done it, but would have gone coldly away again. "Her Grecian lose
+under the almost manly breadth of forehead," he would have said, "this
+sister-nose to all Madonnas and this frontier wild-game[82] so rare on
+German faces, her still but bright eyes, which seek nothing beyond
+themselves, this British gravity, this harmonious thoughtful soul,
+raise her above the rights of love. And even if this majestic form
+should incline to love, who could ever be so selfish as to pocket the
+present of a whole heaven, or so proud as to shoot his heart into hers
+like a smoke-ball, and becloud thereby this still, pensive serenity?"
+The reader will be glad to read his own words.
+
+But after dinner things went differently. Under Victor's cerebral
+membrane, some hobgoblin had so thrown into pi all the letters of his
+ideas in the inner letter-case, that he was up to this time gay, but
+unsatisfied. He had tried to tie and untie Agatha's hair, to separate
+her double-bows into unequal, and for that very reason into equal
+halves again; but the operation had not pleased him as usual,--to-day's
+interludes of domestic love had put his mirthful spirit wholly out of
+joint,--and it seemed to him as if, withdrawn from the present joy, he
+should be happier, at least for a few minutes, in some quiet corner,
+and he particularly longed to see the sun set.
+
+Add to all this the sight of Clotilda's increased love towards
+Agatha,--the sight of his friend, who, by the deepening silence of his
+tenderness, his mildening voice, and by a devotedness so irresistible
+in impassioned natures, commanded every heart, "Love me,"--and,
+finally, the spectacle of night....
+
+He had already been long sad, when he seemed still gay. Now the mother
+took the little hero of the forenoon out under the bland evening heaven.
+They all stood outside of the garden-tabernacle-of-the-covenant, in the
+first temple of man's devotion. The evening-blood of the sinking sun
+flowed into the clouds, as into the sea sinks the blood of its giants
+dying in its depths. The porous cloud did not avail to hide the heavens;
+it swam round about the moon, and let her pale silver glisten from
+amidst the slags.
+
+The red clouds painted the infant. Every one took lightly his soft
+hands, which had already burst from the bud of pillows and the
+chrysalis of swaddling-bands. Clotilda--instead of lavishing on the
+little one carnally coquettish caresses, as many girls do _before_ or
+_for_ men--poured down a steadily streaming look full of hearty love on
+the new man, untied his too tight and cutting shirt-sleeve, screened
+from him the moon at which he was squinting, and said, playfully,
+"Smile this way and love me, _Sebastian_!" She could not possibly have
+meant to charge this line with metaphorical _ricochet_-shots; besides,
+the elder, unswaddled Sebastian knew full well that she could have
+anticipated no double sense; nay, he knew the rule, that the very
+anxiety wherewith some people banish certain subjects from their talk
+betrays the presence of the same in their thoughts. And yet, for all
+that, he had not the courage to smile like the rest, or to take the
+little hand which she had touched in his. She turned to him, and said,
+"But how does the child learn _our language, unless it has already a
+language it can master_?"
+
+... I have, out of mere regard to the philosophers, had this printed in
+italics.
+
+"Then it follows," he answered, "that the language of pantomime must
+signify just as much as articulate speech. As often as I see a deaf and
+dumb man go to sacrament, I think of this,--that all the instruction
+you can give imports nothing into man, but only indicates and arranges
+what is already there. The child's soul is its own drawing-master, the
+teacher is simply its colorist."
+
+"What if this lovely evening," she continued, "should one day come up
+again to the memory of this little one? Why does the sixth year look
+more beautiful in remembrance than the twelfth, and the third still
+more beautiful?" A beautiful woman one cannot interrupt so easily as an
+ex-Dean; and so she was permitted to recur to this reminiscence: "Herr
+Emanuel once said, one should relate to children every year the story
+of their past years, in order that they might one day look back through
+all their years, even into the haze of the second." It is as if I heard
+the above-mentioned maid of honor[83] personally speaking, under whose
+thin lace cap there lay more philosophy than under many a doctor's
+beaver, as quicksilver sticks in crape, and runs through leather.
+
+Victor answered, with the usual sympathy of his good heart: "Emanuel
+stands near to man, and knows him. Two scene-painters lead man, beset
+by magic, through the whole stage,--_Memory_ and _Hope_; in the present
+he is uncomfortable; enjoyment is poured out for him, as for Gulliver,
+only into a thousand Liliputian moments; how shall that intoxicate or
+satisfy? When we picture to ourselves a happy day, we compress it into
+a single happy thought; when we come upon it, this thought is diluted
+through: the twenty-four hours."
+
+"I think of that," she replied, "as often as I walk through meadows; in
+the distance are flowers upon flowers, but, near at hand, they are all
+scattered apart, and separated by the grass. But yet, after all,
+_memory is enjoyed only in the present_."
+
+Victor continued to think only of the flowers, and said, abstractedly,
+"And in the _night_ the flowers themselves look like grass,"--when it
+began suddenly to sprinkle.
+
+They all stepped, in solemn mood, into the summerhouse, on whose
+roof the rain pattered down, while through the open windows the
+alternately shutting and opening moon's eye threw in like a glacier its
+snow-glances,--the tepid blossom-breath of the whole glistening
+landscape stole with healing balm on every human sigh, every burdened
+bosom. In this confined circle, separated from nature by the
+alternation of night and moonshine, one must needs take refuge in
+something near and familiar, in the old harpsichord. Clotilda's voice
+might make a flute-accompaniment to the whispering rain without. The
+Parson's wife begged--her to favor them, and with her favorite _aria_
+from Benda's Romeo,--"Perchance, my lost repose! perchance one day in
+the grave I may find thee!" &c.,--a song whose tones like fine
+dissolving perfumes penetrate the heart through a thousand entrances,
+and tremble there, and tremble more and more intensely, till at last
+they shiver it to atoms, and leave nothing of it behind in the
+harmonious annihilation but tears.
+
+Clotilda without any hesitating vanity consented to sing. But for
+Sebastian, in whom all tones came in contact with naked, quivering
+feelers, and who could work himself into sadness at the very songs of
+the herdsmen in the fields--this, on such an evening, was too much for
+his heart; under cover of the general musical attentiveness, he had to
+steal out of the door....
+
+But here, under the great night-heaven, amidst higher drops, his own
+can fall unseen. What a night! Here a splendor overwhelms him, which
+links night and sky and earth all together; magic Nature rushes with
+streams into his heart, and forcibly enlarges it. Overhead, Luna
+fills the floating cloud-fleeces with liquid silver, and the soaked
+silver-wool quivers downward, and glittering pearls trickle over smooth
+foliage, and are caught in blossoms, and the heavenly field pearls
+and glimmers. Through this Eden, over which a double snow-shower of
+sparks and of drops played and whirled through a misty rain of
+blossom-fragrances, and wherein Clotilda's tones, like angels that had
+got lost, went flying about, now sinking and now soaring through this
+magic-maze, Victor staggered, dazzled, overwhelmed, trembling and
+weeping, and sank down exhausted into the arbor where he had to-day
+fallen on his father's heart. He thought over the wintry life of that
+good father amidst mere strangers to the heart, and his solitary, sad
+celebration of today's festival, and the cold, empty room in the
+paternal bosom, which once the lost form of the beloved one had
+inhabited, and he yearned painfully for the heart of his invisible
+mother. He lifted his leaning head into the rain, and from the large
+open eyes fell not strange drops alone. He glowed through his whole
+being, and night-clouds must cool it. His finger-tips hung down,
+lightly folded in one another. Clotilda's tones dropped now like molten
+silver-points on his bosom, now they flowed like stray echoes from
+distant groves into this still garden. He spoke no name, he thought no
+thought, he neither acquitted himself nor accused himself; he saw it
+all as in a dream, when now a thick night glided across the garden, and
+now a sea of light swept after it.
+
+But it seemed to him as if his bosom would burst, as if he should be
+blest could he at this moment embrace beloved persons, and crush in the
+closeness of that embrace in a blissful frenzy his bosom and his heart.
+It was to him as if he should be over-blessed, could he now before some
+being, before a mere shadow of the mind, pour out all his blood, his
+life, his being. It was to him as if he must scream into the midst of
+Clotilda's tones, and fold his arms around a rock, only to stifle the
+painful yearning.
+
+He heard the leaves drip, and took it for a continuing rain. But the
+_Staub-bach_ of the heavens had scattered itself in spray, and only
+Luna's fall of light any longer besprinkled the landscape. The sky was
+deep-blue. Agatha had been seeking him during the rain, and had only
+just found him. He woke up, obediently and silently went out with her,
+and met only cleared-up heavenly faces,--then all his nerves quivered,
+and he was compelled with a mute obeisance to take his painful and
+friendly leave. Each one had his own thoughts on the subject. But the
+Parson's wife told the company, he loved to hear music at a distance,
+only it always made him too melancholy.
+
+Ah, when he reached his chamber, a happy and consoling thought embraced
+his soul. Clotilda's dirge, and all, fixed before his sight the form of
+the exalted Emanuel,--and it seemed to say: "In a year I shall be
+already under the ground, only come to me, poor child, I will love thee
+till I die!" Without desiring a light, he wrote with streaming eyes,
+which no light could have helped, this letter to Emanuel:--
+
+
+"EMANUEL!
+
+"Say not to me, I know thee not! How can man, on this little grain of
+sun-dust called the earth, on which he warms himself, and during the
+swift moments which he counts off on his pulse between the flash of
+life and the stroke of death, still make a distinction between
+acquaintances and non-acquaintances? Why do not these little creatures,
+who have wounds of the same kind, and for whose coffins Time takes the
+same measure, fall without hesitation into each other's arms, and sigh,
+'Ah, we are doubtless like each other and acquainted!' Why must first
+these fleshly statues into which our spirits are chained move towards
+and touch each other, before the beings disguised therein can imagine
+and love each other? And yet it is so human and so true a thought: what
+then does Death take from us except fleshly statues, what from our eyes
+but the loved countenance, what from our ears but the dear voice, and
+the warm bosom from our own? Ah, Emanuel! be to me no dead man! Accept
+me! Give me thy heart! I will love it!
+
+"I am not very happy, my Emanuel! When my great teacher, Dahore,--that
+shining Swan of heaven, who, fastened to life by his broken wing-joint,
+looked up wistfully at other Swans, as they winged their way toward the
+warmer latitudes of the second life,--ceased to write to me, he did it
+in these words: 'Seek my duplicate! Thy breast will continue to bleed,
+until thou coverest its scar with another, and the earth will agitate
+thee more and more violently, if thou standest alone,--and only around
+the solitary do ghosts creep.'
+
+"Emanuel, art thou not tranquil and gentle and indulgent? Does not thy
+soul yearn to love all men, and is not a single heart too narrow for it
+to shut itself up therein with its love, as a bee is shut up in a tulip
+when it folds itself to sleep? Hast thou not had enough of the
+repeating-work of our merry bells and mourning-bells, and art thou not
+weary of the family likeness of all evenings and times? Dost thou not
+look, out from this fleeting earth over the long way above thee, that
+thou mayst not grow nauseous and giddy, as one for the same reason
+looks out of a carriage into the road? Believest thou not in men around
+whom floats the mountain air of a higher position, and who up on their
+height stand in the midst of a still heaven, and look down into the
+thunders and rainbows near the earth? Believest thou not in a God, and
+seekest thou not his thoughts in the lineaments of nature, and his
+eternal love in thy breast? If thou art and thinkest all this, then
+thou art mine; for thou art better than I, and my soul would fain lift
+itself to a higher friend. Tree of the higher life, I embrace thee, I
+twine around thee with a thousand faculties and tendrils, that I may
+mount up out of the trampled mire around me! Ah, a great man might
+heal, tranquillize, quicken, exalt me,--me, poor creature, only rich in
+wishes, distracted by the war between my dreams and my senses,--flung
+sorely to and fro between systems, tears, and follies,--disgusted at
+the earth, which I cannot replace for myself, laughing merely from
+anguish at the tearful comedy, the most contradictory, saddest, and
+merriest shadow among all the shadows in the wide night.... O fair,
+good soul, love me!
+
+                                               "HORION."
+
+
+Leaning his head on his hand, he let his tears flow, without thinking
+or looking, till nature was spent. Then he went to the harpsichord, and
+sang over to its accompaniment the most passionate passages of his
+letter; what strongly moved him always impelled him to singing,
+especially the emotion of longing. What can it matter to us that it was
+prose?
+
+At the last line of his epistolary song the door slowly opened.
+
+"Is it thou?" said a voice.
+
+"Ah, come in, Flamin!" he answered.
+
+"I only wanted to see whether you had come back," said Flamin, and went
+away.
+
+I think it is necessary that I should here insert at least the
+following, namely, that Victor possessed too much fancy, humor, and
+thoughtfulness not to give out, when these three strings were violently
+struck at once, pure dissonances, which, with more harmonious intervals
+between these faculties,[84] would not have appeared; that he had,
+therefore, more _leaning_ to enthusiasms and enthusiasts than
+_disposition_ that way; that his negative-electrical philosophy had
+always to contend with his positive-electrical enthusiasm for the
+balance of power, and that from the effervescing of these two spirits
+came nothing but humor; that he wanted to have all his carnations of
+joy on the same bed, although one adulterated the colors of the rest
+(e. g. refinement and enthusiasm, exaltation above the world and
+familiarity with the tone of the world); that from all this, beside
+irony and the highest tolerance, must also result a heavy, immovable
+feeling of the nothingness of our inner moods, so fleeting and sketched
+with such a contrariety of colors; and that he, whom the bad man
+regards as two-sided and the well-disposed one as changeable, needs
+nothing, for the gracing and rounding off of his Adam or Palladium
+buried up in so much wood, but the scythe of Time. Time then be it.
+
+
+
+
+                            8. DOG-POST-DAY.
+
+   Examinatorium and Dehortatorium of Conscience.--The Studious
+     Honeymoon of a Scholar.--The Cabinet of Natural History.--Answer
+     from Emanuel.--The Packed-up Chin.--Arrival of the Prince.--First
+     Intercalary Day.
+
+
+I wish the story were done, so that I might get it printed; for I have
+already too many subscribers to it among the common folk. An author
+in our days accepts advance payment for his book from the lowest
+fellow,--the tailor makes his pre-payment in clothes, the hair-dresser
+in powder, the landlord in rooms.
+
+Every morning Victor gave himself a curtain lecture under the bed-quilt
+for the evening previous; the bed is a good confessional and
+audience-hall of conscience. He wished that yesterday's garden-club
+would take him for a veritable fool instead of a lover. "Ah, if Flamin
+himself should torment himself with jealousy, and if our hearts, once
+so long parted, should already come to be so again!" Here the bed-box,
+from a confessional, grew to be a fiery oven. But an angel laid himself
+in beside him, and blew away the blaze. "But what, then, have I done?
+Have I not with a thousand-fold pleasure spoken, acted, kept silence
+for his sake? Not a look, not a word, can be charged against me,--what
+else then?" The angel of light or fire had now to blow terribly against
+the shooting flame. "What else? Thoughts, perhaps, which however, like
+field-mice of the soul, leap under the feet, and stick like adders. But
+could the disciples of Kant impute to me then, that I took the little
+image of the loveliest and best form, which I hitherto vainly summoned
+up in the lands of three lords, and threw such a Raphael's head, such
+an antique of Paradise, out of the window of the _villa_ of my brain,
+like apple-parings and plum-stones? I should wonder at the Kantians, if
+they did. And if it must stay there, am I to be an ox, ye Catechists,
+and coldly glower[85] at it? Not I. Nay, I will trust myself, and
+demand of the fairest heart even friendship, and yet leave to it its
+love!" Dear reader, during this whole summary process before the
+judicial commission of conscience, I have said to myself, over thirty
+times, "Neither of you, you nor the reader, is a hair more honest with
+your conscience!"
+
+He drew himself slowly by the bed-cord out of the bed, which he used to
+quit with a spring; some wheel of his ideas stuck within him. He read
+his yesterday's letter, and found it too stormy. "That is just our
+insignificance," said he, "that everything which man holds to be
+eternal freezes over night; not across our face do the most vehement
+gales pass more swift and traceless than across our heart. Why then am
+I not to-day what I was yesterday, and perhaps shall be to-morrow? What
+does man gain by this boiling up and down? And what has he then within
+himself to build upon?"
+
+Meanwhile, the fire-wheel of our earthly time, the sun, had whirled up
+its revolving streams, and burned on the shore of the earth. He flung.
+up the window, and was fain to bathe his naked breast in the fresh
+morning wind, and his hot eye in the Red Sea of Aurora; but something
+within him interposed itself like an after-taste between him and the
+enjoyment of the morning-land. The remorse of conscience for _future_
+actions spoils a good man utterly for enjoyment.
+
+There rose slowly within him an overmastering emotion,--the former
+night passed by again before him with its flashing rain, and brought
+back to him his passionate heart and Emanuel's shadow,--he ran more and
+more vehemently, and in fact transversely, through the chamber,--tied
+his night-gown tighter, shook something from his eye, gave a
+perpendicular jump, jerked out a "No!" and said, with an inexpressibly
+serene smile, "No! I will not cheat my Flamin! I will neither seek nor
+shun her, nor will I desire her friendship till the time of his highest
+happiness. As I look upon thee[86] yonder, so will I upon her glorious,
+heavenly bust, without desiring that it take on warmth, and turn on me
+its cold plaster eye. But thou, my friend, be happy and all blessed,
+and never mayst thou once remark my conflict!"
+
+Now, for the first time, did the church-attire of morning gladden him,
+and the morning air flowed like a cool necklace over his hot bosom, and
+threw back the playing hair and shirt-frill. He felt that now he was
+worthy to have written to Emanuel, and to have looked up at the
+heavens....
+
+Flamin entered with some coldness, which was increased by the sight of
+the letter. Victor was not to be made cold; only when, down below, no
+one reminded him by a word of his yesterday's Dithyrambics, then did
+he, from fear of being betrayed, make an angry, covert oath, if _she_
+came, not to come,--which could be kept, too, for she did not come. She
+had still to bring away luggage from Maienthal, to besprinkle her
+friendships, and once more to set foot in the magic circle of her
+beloved teacher; and had, therefore, gone off.
+
+The following weeks danced now like just so many hours in Anglaises and
+Cotillons before Sebastian. His forenoons hung full of fruits, his
+afternoons full of flowers; for in the morning his soul with its
+exertions lived in his head, towards evening in his heart. In the
+evening one loves cards, poems, confidential talk, woman, music, very
+much; in the morning, very little; in the spirit-hour is that love at
+its highest strength.
+
+Except two other doubts that troubled him,--the first was, whether
+his Emanuel would write to him soon enough to enable him to visit
+him before he should be harnessed to the pole of the court and
+state-carriage; the second was the fear of being so too soon,--now he
+had hardly anything to do except to be happy or to make others so; for
+precisely in these weeks fell his holy or Sabbatical weeks...
+
+I know not whether the reader is yet acquainted with them; they are not
+found in the improved almanac; but they occur regularly (with some men)
+either immediately after the vernal equinox or in the after-summer.
+
+With Victor the first alternative was the one,--exactly in the middle
+of spring. I need not inquire whether it is the body, the weather, or
+who or what, that rings in this truce of God in our breast; but I must
+describe how they look, the Sabbatical weeks. Their form is precisely
+this: in a holy or Sabbatical week, many--e. g. I--are put off with
+mere Sabbatical days or hours. At first, one slumbers lightly, as on
+balanced clouds,--one awakes like a serene day. At evening one had made
+a firm resolve beforehand, and had therefore written it down in ciphers
+on the door, to grow better, and to apply the weeding-knife every day
+to one bed of weeds at least,--on awaking one is still so minded, and
+in fact carries it out. The gall, that excitable spirit, which usually,
+when it is poured, instead of into the duodenum, into the heart or
+heart's blood, sends up boiling and hissing clouds, is now in a few
+seconds absorbed or precipitated, and the exalted mind _feels calmly
+the bodily effervescence_ without any of its own. In this lull of the
+wings of our lungs, one utters only soft, low words, one clasps
+lovingly the hand of every one with whom he speaks, and one thinks,
+with melting heart, "Ah! I could not begrudge it to one of you, if you
+were still happier than I." On the clean, healthy, tranquil heart, as
+on the Homeric gods, light wounds immediately close. "No!" thou keepest
+saying in the Sabbatical week, "I must for some days to come maintain
+this tranquillity." Thou requirest, as material for joy, hardly
+anything but existence; nay, the sun-sting of a rapture would condense
+this cool, magical, transparent morning haze into a tempest. Thou
+lookest up steadily into the blue, as if thou wouldst fain give thanks
+and weep, and around upon the earth as if thou wouldst say, "Wherever I
+might be to-day, there I should be happy!" and a heart full of sleeping
+storms thou carriest, as a mother does her child sunk into slumber,
+shyly and watchfully over the soft flowers of joy.... But the storms
+start up, nevertheless, and assail the heart!...
+
+Ah, what must we not all already have lost, if the pictures of blissful
+days win from us nothing but sighs! O tranquillity, tranquillity, thou
+evening of the soul, thou still Hesper of the weary heart, which always
+abides beside the sun of virtue, if at thy very name our inner being is
+dissolved into tears, ah, is not that a sign that we seek thee, but
+have thee not?
+
+Victor owed the _siesta_ of his heart to the sciences,[87] particularly
+_Poetry_ and _Philosophy_, which two move, as do _comets_ and
+_planets_, around the _same sun_ (that of Truth), and differ only in
+the _shape_ of their orbits, as comets and poets have the _greater
+ellipse_. His training and talents had accustomed him to the vital air
+and oxygen of the study, which is also the only dormitory of our
+passions, and that only cloister and haven of bliss for men who would
+escape the broad whirlpool of the senses and fashions. The sciences
+are, more than virtue, their own reward, and they make one a partaker
+of happiness,--she only makes him worthy of it; and the prize-medals,
+pensions, and positive rewards, and the _patent_ which many scholars
+would fain get for their studying, belong at most to the literary
+apprentice-brethren, who make it a penance and a torture, but not to
+the masters of the chair, who make it a pleasure and a delight. A
+scholar has no _ennui_; only a throne-incumbent has to prescribe for
+himself, against this nervous consumption, a hundred court-festivals,
+cavaliers of honor, whole countries, and human blood!
+
+Good heavens! a reader who, in Victor's Sabbatical weeks, should have
+taken a ladder and climbed up to his window,--would he have espied
+anything there but a jubilant thing, that went gliding about over the
+fields of learning as among islands of the blest?--a thing which, in
+its ecstasy, knew not whether it should think or compose or read, and
+particularly _what_ or _whom_, out of the whole _high_ nobility of
+books ranged before it. In this bridal chamber of the mind (such are
+our study-chambers), in this concert-hall of the finest voices gathered
+from all times and places, the æsthetic and philosophical enjoyments
+almost overpowered his faculty of choice. Reading hurried him into
+writing, writing to reading, thinking to sentiment, and the latter to
+the former.
+
+I could go on with more satisfaction in this description, if I had
+previously written how he studied; namely, that he never wrote without
+having read himself full[88] on the subject, and the reverse, that he
+never read without having first _thought_ himself _hungry_. One should,
+he said, without an intense occasion and impulse from without, i. e.
+from within, not only not make verses, but even a philosophical
+paragraph; nor should any one set himself down and say: "Now, at three
+o'clock on this Bartholomew's day, I will go at it, and cleverly prove
+the following proposition." I can now proceed.
+
+Now when, in this mental laboratory, which served less for analytic
+chemistry than for synthetic science, he ascended from the turmaline
+which attracts grains of ashes to the sun which attracts worlds, and
+even to the unknown sun toward which solar systems fly; or when the
+anatomical charts were to him the perspective sketch of a divine
+architecture, and the dissecting-knife became the gnomon of his
+favorite truth: that, in order to believe in a God, there was need of
+nothing more than two men, of whom the one might be dead, too, that the
+living one could study him, and turn over his leaves[89]; or when
+Poetry, as a second nature, as a second music, wafted him upward softly
+on her invisible ether, and he chose undecidedly between the pen and
+the keys, when he wanted to communicate aloft; ... when, in short, in
+his heavenly sphere, supported on a human cervical-vertebra, the nebula
+of ideas gradually resolved itself into bright and dark parts, and
+beneath an unseen sun filled itself more and more with ether,--when one
+cloud became conductor to another,--when at last the gleaming mass of
+cloud came together,--then did the inner heaven (as the outer one often
+does), by eleven o'clock in the forenoon, grow from all the flashes
+into one sun, from all the drops into one flood, and the whole heaven
+of the upper faculties came down to the earth of the lower ones, and
+... some blue patches of the second world were for a flying moment
+open.
+
+We cannot delineate our inner states more philosophically and clearly
+than by metaphors, i. e. by the colors of related states. The narrow
+defamers of metaphors, who, instead of the brush, would rather give us
+the black-lead, ascribe to the _coloring_ the unrecognizableness
+of the _drawing_; but they ought to charge it merely on their
+non-acquaintance with the original subject. Verily, nonsense plays
+hide-and-seek more easily in the roomy, abstract, artificial words of
+the philosophers--since words, like Chinese shadows, increase with
+their circumference at once the obscurity and the emptiness of their
+contents--than in the narrow green hulls of the poets. From the Stoa
+and the Portico of thought one must have an outlook into the Epicurean
+gardens of poetry.
+
+In three minutes I shall come back to my story. Victor said, he must
+have mountain-, garden-, and swamp-meadows, because he possessed
+_three_ different whimsical souls, which he must drive to pasture on
+three sorts of grounds. He meant by that, not, as the scholastics do,
+the vegetative, animal, and intellectual souls, nor, as the fanatics
+do, the three parts of man, but something very like,--his _humorous_,
+_sentimental_, and _philosophical_ souls. Whoever should take away from
+him one of these, he said, might as well strip him of the remaining
+ones. Nay, sometimes, when the humorous soul happened at the moment to
+be sitting uppermost on the revolving cross-bench, he carried his
+levity so far as to express the wish that a joke might be made even in
+Abraham's bosom, and that he might with his three souls sit down at
+once on the twelve thrones.
+
+His afternoons he gave up now to a streaming humor which did not even
+find its proper hearers,--now to the people of the parsonage,--now to
+all the school-going youth of St. Luna, whose stomachs (to the vexation
+of every good schoolmaster) he provisioned more than their heads,
+because he thought that, in the short years when the bib expands to a
+napkin, enjoyment must find its way over the children's _serviette_,
+and had no other entrance than the mouth. He never went out without a
+whole military-chest full of small change in his waistcoat pocket. "I
+scatter it without thinking," said he; "but if from this metallic seed
+sowed broadcast whole evenings of joy spring up for the poor devils,
+and if just the innocent ones so seldom have them, why shall not one do
+something for the saved virtue and for pleasure at once?"
+
+He said he had heard moral lectures, and desired for his extra-judicial
+donations and merciful endowments nothing but forgiveness. His Flamin,
+who pronounced him a careless sowing-machine on rocks, spent his little
+holidays before approaching the session-table in ardent hopes of being
+serviceable there, and in preparations for being able to be so; often,
+when the higher patriotism, with saintly halo and Moses'-glory, broke
+out on the beloved Flamin's face, tears of friendly gladness stood in
+Victor's eyes, and in the moment of a lyric philanthropy both swore on
+their hearts for the future a mutual support in well-doing and joint
+sacrifices for mankind. The difference between them was merely
+reciprocal exaggeration,--Flamin treated vice too intolerantly, Victor
+too tolerantly; the former, as administrative counsellor, rejected,
+like the Anabaptists, all festivals, and, like the first Christians,
+all flowers (in every sense); the latter, like the Greeks, loved both
+too much;--the former would have sacrificed to honor human victims; the
+latter knew no robber of honor but his own heart: he overleaped at the
+tea-table the paper half-nobility of our miserable points of honor,
+and, mocking at mockery, submitted himself only to the high nobility of
+virtue....
+
+Victor sucked, with the feet of a green-frog, on every flower-leaf of
+joy,--at children, animals, village-Lupercalia, lessons; but dearest of
+all to him was Saturday. Then he made excursions through the glad
+unrest of the village, along by servant-men, hammering at their
+scythes, not to magnetize, but to sharpen them, and before the
+shop-door of the schoolmaster, at which his eye, like a Swiss, often
+stood for half an hour. For he could very well study the state of St.
+Luna's commerce in the little great-adventure-trade of the
+schoolmaster, who knew no smaller merchants' exchange than the one in
+his breeches' pocket. From this East India House he saw at a late hour
+people procuring the cheap pleasures of Sunday,--the wholesale dealer
+(the schoolmaster is meant), supported by his negro slaves, made the
+Sunday morning of St. Luna sweet with his syrup and hot with his
+coffee; and as well by the tobacco-culture of Germany was this
+tradesman enabled with spiral cables of pigtail to furnish the heads of
+the pipes, as through the silk culture the daughter's heads with
+Sabbath-streamers out of his Auerbach's court.... Our hero all knew.
+From every kennel a dog came wagging his tail to meet him to whom he
+had thrown in bread; from every window children screamed after him,
+whom he had bantered; and many boys, whom he passed, counted themselves
+happy if they had a cap on,--for then they could take it off before
+their master. For his first growing up in St. Luna was the history of
+St. Luna, which must have been drawn from the oral blue-books of the
+historic persons, and from the Imperial Postilion, the Parson's wife.
+This last, as a Mrs. Plutarch, always held up two characters, like
+pieces of cloth, side by side; and her husband read to him according to
+the best of his science and conscience upon the Church- and
+Reformation-history of his diocese. Victor devoted himself to this
+microcosmic world-history from two motives: first, in order--which is
+the object of professional students with the larger history--to dismiss
+it again clean from memory; secondly, in order to be as much at home in
+the village as the constable or the midwife, whence he hoped to derive
+the advantage of being grieved if a St. Lunite should die, and glad if
+he had previously married.
+
+Now the story strides forward again, from one day to another, as if on
+the stones of the stream of time.
+
+So sweetly then had the spring passed along before him with Sabbatical
+weeks, with Whitsuntides, with white blossoms, which fell gradually,
+like butterflies' wings, from the flying season. Victor had postponed
+the visit to Le Baut, thinking, "I shall have, at all events, to budge
+soon enough down out of the soft lap of Nature, and up to the court
+wire-bench and the object-holder (the throne) of the court-microscope";--he
+had, to be sure, daily exhorted himself, now, soon, before Clotilda's
+arrival, to start so as not to draw any suspicion upon his intentions,
+but always in vain, ... when suddenly (for the day before it was the
+13th of July) the 14th appeared, and with it Clotilda's luggage without
+her. Now he actually (according to the official dog-reports) crossed on
+the 15th the Brook of St. Luna,[90] passed the Alps of the Chamberlain's
+steps, and pitched his Cæsar's tent on Le Baut's sofa. He knew that
+to-day no one was there, not even Mat.
+
+"Heaven keep our politeness safe and sound," said he; "without it there
+were not only no holding out among a set of knaves, but it pays also
+minute-tributes of pleasure, whereas benevolence pays only quarterly
+assessments and exchequer-instalments, and charitable contributions."
+Mr. and Mrs. Le Baut were as courteous as never before (I could swear,
+they had nosed out something of Victor's court-doctor's hat and
+Doctor's crown); only they knew not what sort of a mouth-piece they
+should screw on to such a whimsically twisted instrument as Victor was.
+Like all study-inhabiting crustacea, he would rather talk of things
+than of persons; Flamin, however, the reverse. For the married pair,
+there was nothing in any Messiad more sublime than that now, on St.
+John's day, the Italian Princess would be coming: of that no mortal
+could talk enough, especially in the village. I know not to what slip
+of Victor's it was owing, that he led most women into the notion that
+he loved them. Suffice it, the Chamberlain's wife, who at her years
+demanded no longer _love_, but the _show_ of love, thought, "Perhaps!"
+Let no one mistake her, she, to be sure, always spent the first hour
+with a man on the _watch-tower_ of observation; but the second, then,
+only on the _hunting-screen_, if the first had been fortunate, and she
+was cool enough not to hope more than she saw: she even made a jest of
+every one who, in view of her vanity--a womanly vanity, however--of too
+easily presuming upon conquests, should think to flatter her otherwise
+than openly. Suffice it, she judged our Victor to-day too favorably, in
+her sense, or too unfavorably in ours; as, in general, mere courtiers
+can see through only mere courtiers. Of Clotilda not a word was said,
+not even of the time of her return.
+
+In fact, the Le Baut had a monstrous pride in herself to contend with
+towards her step-daughter,--of which my correspondent should have
+informed me what it rested upon, whether on relations or on merits; for
+of both there was an ample supply, inasmuch as the Chamberlain's wife
+had been the w----, that is, the mistress, of the present Prince's
+deceased father. I and a clever man have considered the question _pro_
+and _con_, whether she resembled Cæsar in love or in ambition. The
+clever man says, "In love," because a woman never forgets love, when a
+prince has been her teacher therein. The illustrious deceased father's
+heart had adored two beauties in her particularly, which aforetime the
+Scots[91] used to be so fond of eating, namely, the bosom and the rump.
+The great have their peculiar _grossièretés_, which the little dream
+not of. I would not print it, but it was known to the whole court, and
+therefore to many of my readers also. Well, the Devil brought along
+Time, who whetted his scythe and mowed away all of each of these charms
+which _hung over_ in his territory. Now with women at courts--or in the
+courtyard[92] of a school, or a warehouse, or in a cow-yard--vanity, so
+soon as old Saturn (i. e. Time) attacks it with his scythe-chariot and
+with the small shot from his hour-glass, makes one of the most skilful
+retreats that I know of. Vanity lets itself be driven from one work or
+member after another; but at last it throws itself out of the weak
+parts into _strongholds_, e. g. into finger-nails, foreheads, feet,
+&c., and from there the Devil himself cannot dislodge it. The
+Chamberlain's wife had first to make herself such a part, namely, a
+_gorge de Paris_ and a _cul de Paris_; these four _boundary hills_ of
+her kingdom had daily to be restored, and raised, out of respect for
+property, against the shifting of boundaries produced by years. From
+this, now, my clever man concludes that her soul is always writing
+letters of marque to her body.
+
+I am precisely the antipode of the clever man, and contend that Cupid
+is only her serving-brother, not the master of the lodge,--her
+adjutant, not her generalissimo; and this for the reason that she is
+still always applying either her own or Le Baut's hand to the
+restoration of the Solomon's Temple wherein she used to be adored as a
+goddess, side by side with the god,--because in marrying him she
+married nothing but the Chamberlain's key and his _assemblées_ and his
+hopes of future influence,--because her hostility to Clotilda relates
+not to the face, but to the brain,--because her love is now without
+jealousy. That is to say, she stood in a certain amatory relation with
+the Evangelist Matthieu, which (according to our feeling as common
+citizens) differs from hatred in nothing but--duration. Persiflages of
+love were their declarations of love; their glances were epigrams; his
+hours of assignation he seasoned with comic accounts of his
+corresponding hours in other places; and at the time of day when a holy
+man usually prays off his psalm,[93] both were ironical. Such an
+_erotic_ connection is nothing but the subdivision of a _political_....
+But to return to the story.
+
+The Chamberlain proposed now to show his guest something of more
+interest to a doctor and a scholar. To the chamber wherein the
+something was, they passed through the Chamberlain's wife's, and
+through Clotilda's. As they made a day of rest[94] in the former,
+Victor's eyes were fixed dreamily on Clotilda's profile, which Matthieu
+had lately cut out of nothing, and which the Chamberlain's wife, out of
+flattery to the profile-cutter, had hung up here under glass.
+Singularly--i. e. accidentally--the glass at this moment flew to pieces
+over the fair face, and Victor and the father were startled; for the
+latter was, like most great folk, for want of time, at once
+superstitious and sceptical; and it is well known that superstition
+regards the flying to pieces of a portrait-glass as a forerunner of the
+death of the original. The distressed father reproached himself with
+the permission he had given Clotilda to stay so long in Maienthal,
+since she would certainly injure her health there by unprofitable,
+youthful enthusiasms. He meant her mourning for her buried Giulia; for
+it was merely from sorrow for her, that, on the first of May, she had
+hurried hither without any baggage; and even the clothes of the beloved
+friend she had to-day sent among her own. He broke off in a cheerful
+tone, for Matthieu came, the brother of this Giulia, who only wanted to
+show and excuse himself, because, like several of the court church of
+half-brothers, he was going to meet the Princess.
+
+Victor grew stiller and sadder; his bosom became at once a swelling
+flood of invisible tears, whose source he could not trace to his heart.
+And when next they had to pass through Clotilda's still and vacant
+chamber, where order and simplicity too intensely reminded him of the
+fair soul of the proprietor, his sudden and touching dumbness struck
+others also. He tore his eyes hurriedly away from some flower-drawings
+by her own hand, from her white inkstand, and from the beautiful
+landscape of the oil-tapestry, and stepped up hastily to that which Le
+Baut was unlocking. It was not any noble heart which the latter, with
+his golden key, although bored like a cannon, could fasten,[95]--the
+Titular Chamberlains in Vienna apply only an hermetically sealed
+one,--but what he opened was his _Cabinet d'histoire naturelle_. The
+cabinet contained rare copies and some _curiosa_;--a calculus taken
+from the bladder of a child, two seventeenths of an inch long and two
+seventeenths of an inch broad, or the reverse; the hardened _vena cava_
+of an old Minister; a pair of American feather-trousers; tolerable
+Fungites, and better specimens of _Strombi_ (e. g. a staircase-shell,
+_not genuine_); the model of a midwife's chair and of a sowing-machine;
+species of gray marble from Hof in Voigtland; and a petrified
+bird's-nest,--duplicates not included.... Meanwhile I and the reader
+prefer to all this dead trumpery the living ape who was the cabinet's
+sole ornament and--owner. Camper should cut off from this living
+specimen the Chamberlain's head, and dissect it, if only to see how
+near the monkey borders upon man.
+
+A great person has always some branch or other of science which he
+cares nothing about, and to which, therefore, he particularly devotes
+himself. To Le Baut's soul, hungering for knowledge, it was all one
+whether it were set in a cabinet of seals or of gems or of pistoles.
+Were I a great person, I would with the greatest zeal make buttons--or
+deliveries--or books--or Nuremberg wares--or wars--or right good
+institutions, merely from cursed ennui, that _mother of vinegar_ to all
+vices and virtues which peep forth under ermine and stars of orders.
+Nothing is a greater proof of the general growth of refinement than the
+general growth of ennui. Even the ladies, out of mere flat ennui, a
+hundred times contrive pastimes for themselves; and the cleverest man
+utters his greatest number of platitudes, and the best his greatest
+number of slanders, merely to a circle that knows how to adequately
+bore him.
+
+The court-page was the cicerone of the cabinet, perhaps for the sake of
+going about. Victor wronged him by the medical supposition that he
+affected a certain loose, unsteady, slouchy gait common to debauchees
+in high life; for he really had it, and for the reason that he, on
+quite other grounds than Victor's fine ones, never loved to--sit. But
+to proceed: Unless the Chamberlain's wife meant to tear aside the
+curtain from before Victor's soul, and spy out therein his sentiments
+toward herself and Clotilda by the fright which I am about to relate,
+then it can have been nothing but a very bad spirit which led the hand
+of the said Chamberlain's wife to a silver ingot. Behind the ingot lay,
+perhaps killed by crumbs of arsenic, a mouse. A female reader, who in
+similar dangers has suffered as a patient, can imagine how the
+Chamberlain's wife felt when she grasped, with the hard substance,
+something soft, and drew it forth, and then saw what it was. A _real_
+fainting-fit was inevitable. I confess I should myself hold her swoon
+merely as a feint, were the occasion less; e. g. had it been, not her
+senses, but her honor, that was assailed: but a mouse is a very
+different matter. In fact, before such malicious spectators as her
+husband and her Cicisbeo, she must long since have banished from her
+stage, as the French from theirs, this Fifth Act Murder; nay, I do not
+believe she could in any way have rendered herself so ridiculous in the
+eyes of a triumphant enemy of her virtue (except by a real swoon) as by
+a fictitious one. Terror at the trance[96] deprived the Evangelist of
+the use of his reason, and left him only the use of his wickedness and
+his hands, with which he instantly tore open the whole blind- and
+fence-work of her bosom, in short, the whole optical breast, to get air
+enough for the true one, on whose board he had a piece,[97] namely, her
+heart. But Victor pushed him away, and, sprinkling her with a few drops
+of ice-water, out of tender respect for her charms and her life, soon
+raised her up again. However, she forgave the page all that she
+guessed, and thanked the court-physician for all in which she was
+mistaken....
+
+... Let me look away a moment from this black cobweb, and refresh
+myself with surveying the fairer world around me on my island, where
+there is no enemy,--and the flashing play of fishes and children on the
+shore,--and the playing mother who flings to them flowers and watchful
+glances,--and the great maple-trees which, softly murmuring with a
+thousand leaves and flies, bend downward to meet the foliage that
+glimmers in mimic dance under the waves,--and how the warm earth and
+the warm sky rest on each other in slumbering love, and bear one
+century after another....
+
+Victor, before the end of his rural day, went sadly home. Saturday (the
+16th of June[98]) sped softly by, and in its flight shook out a whole
+flower-head of winged seed for new flowers of joy.
+
+The stars glided lightly over its night. A friendly, blue Sunday
+morning hung floating over the village in its finery, and held its
+breath lest it should snatch off a ripe, linden-blossom, or the down of
+a marsh-marigold. Victor could hear the forte-pianissimo sounding down
+from the palace over the reposing village, and must needs sigh with the
+asthma of blissful longing, "Ah, when shall I have to cease swimming
+upon this still, shining sea, over this fair anchorage of life?" ...
+When Fate answered, "To-day!" For this very day, on Sunday, there came
+from the residence-city of Flachsenfingen a light-headed fool (in fact,
+two) in a no less light-bodied Berlin, and took out of his package a
+letter to him from his Lordship.
+
+
+"On the 21st of June (Thursday), the Italian Princess makes her entry
+into Kussewitz. On Wednesday, I leave here, and present thee in St.
+Luna to the Prince, who accompanies me to that place. I pray thee,
+however, to repair on the Saturday following to the _Island of
+Union_,[99] because the little which, for want of opportunity, I cannot
+say to thee in St. Luna, I shall reserve for the island. Thou wilt find
+me there. The bearer of this is our respected court-apothecary
+_Zeusel_, in whose house thou wilt, as court-physician, have thy future
+residence. Farewell!"                     H.
+
+
+"Zeusel?" asks the reader, and ponders the matter. "I know not the
+Zeusels." No more do I; but I say to myself, Is not this carrying
+things too far? And is it not a regular imposition, that the
+correspondent of this work cannot, by all the representations made to
+him by me through the dog, be induced even to arrange things in this
+history in as orderly a manner as they are, indeed, in every wretched
+romance, and even in--a house of correction, where every new
+correctioner rehearses neatly to the old ones, in the very first hour,
+his total _Fata_, even to the introductory cudgelling on entering, from
+which the historian has freshly arrived. By Heaven! people actually
+rush and leap into my work, as into a passengers' room, and neither
+reader nor Devil knows who their dogs and cats are.
+
+"I wish..." said Victor, and made six circumflexes upon it as
+apostrophes of the same number of omitted curses. For he was now to
+pass over from the Idyl of country life into the travestied Æneid of
+city life, and no road is surely more wretchedly paved than that from
+the study into the court smelting-houses and _chambres ardentes_,[100]
+from peace to turmoil. Besides, Emanuel had not yet written. Clotilda,
+the _Hesper_ of those two fair evenings, was like the Hesperus in the
+sky, not to be seen over St. Luna. As we said, it was a wretched state
+for him. And now, in addition to all this, that Zeusel, his future
+landlord, the Court Apothecary, was, so to speak, a fool, full as
+light as his Berlin, or as the court-fourier, with whom he came, but
+fifty-three years older than the carriage, that is to say, fifty-four
+years old, and, taken for all in all, a human diminutive and
+vinegar-eel in body and soul, _peaked_ in all respects, in chin, nose,
+wit, head, lips, and shoulder. This fine vinegar-eel--for the eel
+contends that he understands a certain refinement, which never could
+belong to any Roturier,[101] and he does not deny that his great
+ancestors wrote themselves, not Zeusels, but _Von Swobodas_--was
+travelling with the court-fourier, who administered the
+quartermastership in Kussewitz for the princely bride, toward that
+place, in order to remain there just so long as he was not wanted.
+Zeusel meant absolutely to have influence on the Flachsenfingen court
+by something beside his clyster-hydraulics, and to work upon the court
+household with something more than senna-leaves; therefore he bought up
+at a high price all private intelligence (he improved it forthwith into
+public) which he could collect of new meteorological phenomena in the
+court-atmosphere, and then, when certain people turned somersets down
+from the steps of the throne, he smiled finely enough, and remarked
+that he hoped such persons had regarded him as their friend, and not
+noticed the leg which he had thrust out of his shop-door by way of
+giving them a sly lift. He was, in spite of some good-heartedness, a
+liar from the beginning, not because he wanted to be malicious, but
+refined; and he evaporated his sound understanding, that it might drop
+in wit.
+
+Towards Victor, as future courtier and patron, he knew not, for all
+that, how to assume the upright court-dignity which respects at once
+itself and others; but towards the people of the parsonage he amply
+observed the regular courtly contempt, and showed them well enough how
+little, without designs upon the Lord's son, he should have thought of
+even _looking_ over their garden-wall or window-sill, to say nothing of
+_coming_ over. Victor never hated anything else in his neighbor but
+hatred of other neighbors; and his respect for all classes, his
+contempt for all _eminent_ fools, his disgust at ceremonies, and his
+inclination as a humorist for the little theatres of life, formed the
+greatest contrast to the pharmaceutic infusorium, and to its disgust
+with men and deference for grandees.
+
+Victor gave his landlord thirty greetings to carry with him to the
+Italian _Tostato_ in Kussewitz, who had travelled with him, laughing
+and dancing, a day and a half out of Göttingen. The Apothecary, at his
+departure, left behind in Victor an annoying, sour sediment; even at
+the organ-blower, who brought up the coffee every Sunday, he could not
+laugh as usual. I will explain why he used to laugh at him.
+
+On that day the coachman was shaved, and, in fact, at first
+hand,--namely, by his own. Now the chin of this lazy box-incumbent had
+thrown up more mole-hills--so I euphoniously name warts--than are
+necessary for shaving and mowing. Among these the old man hacked and
+planed on Sunday morning,--for then it is that the common people put
+off at once the old Adam and the old shirt, and leave sins and beard to
+grow only on working-days,--boldly slipping his knife up and down among
+the warty _chagrin_ and cutting away. Now the man would have looked
+pitifully, with his ploughed-up facial foreground,--so that one must
+needs have wept blood at that which ran in red lines down over the chin
+of this stone river-god,--if the Prosector, like a Roman, had, out of
+stupidity, exhibited his wounds. But he showed nothing,--he had more
+sense than that; he picked tobacco-spunk into small caps, and put the
+headpieces upon the sore warts, and so made his appearance.
+
+"Let a Spener, a Cato the younger," said Victor, "just come into my
+study, and not laugh when a bellows-blower follows with coffee-cups,
+and with sixteen scalped warts and his chin bound up in spunk, looking
+like a garden-rockery overgrown with beautifully distributed moss,--let
+a Spener, I say, help laughing, if he can."
+
+To-day he could help it himself. Weary of the day, he went out into the
+peaceful evening, and laid himself on his back on the summit of a steep
+hill; and when the sun, dissolved into a cloud of gold, tremulously
+flowed away over the liquid gloss of the flowers, and swam down on the
+grassy sea of the mountains, and as he lay nearer to the warm,
+throbbing heart of Nature, sunk down upon the soft earth as if in the
+repose of death, drawing down the clouds into him with sighs, fanned by
+winds coming from afar, lulled by bees and larks,--then did
+remembrance, that after-summer of human joy, steal into his soul, and a
+tear into his eye, and longing into his breast, and he wished that
+Emanuel might not reject him.--Suddenly slight steps drew nigh to his
+reclining ears; he started up, alarmed and causing alarm. A heavy
+travelling carriage came staggering lazily up the hill; behind, instead
+of servants, three pale foot-soldiers had thrust their hands into the
+footmen's straps, who had only a single leg among them which was of
+flesh, while they footed it on five wooden stilt-legs or boot-makers'
+signs, which, with something still longer, made of wood,--namely, three
+well-wrought beggar's staffs,--they had taken from the enemy; a
+coachman walked beside the carriage, and a gentlewoman, and close by
+Victor, as he sprang up, stood--Clotilda.
+
+She came from Maienthal. This sudden illumination eclipsed all the
+tables of the law hung up in his soul, and he could not at once read
+the tables. She looked upon him with softer rays than ever, and the sun
+lent some too. With a smile, as if she anticipated his first questions,
+she gave him a--letter from Emanuel. A shrinking "Ah!" was his answer;
+and before he could accommodate himself to two ecstasies,[102] the
+carriage was already at the top of the hill, and she in it, and all had
+gone off.
+
+He hesitated with trembling to gaze, absorbed, into the still, blue
+paradise of the fairest soul that ever overflowed. At last he looked
+upon the traces of a beloved human hand which he had not as yet
+touched, and read:--
+
+
+"Horion!
+
+"Man climbs a mountain, as the child does a chair, in order to stand
+nearer the face of the infinite Mother, and to reach her with his puny
+embrace. Around my height the earth lies sleeping, with all its eyes of
+flowers under the soft mist; but the heavens already lift themselves up
+with the sun under the eyelid; under the paled Arcturus mists begin to
+glow, and colors extricate themselves from colors; the globe of earth
+rolls, vast and full, to rapture, of blossoms and living creatures,
+into the burning lap of morning.
+
+"So soon as the sun comes, I look into it, and my heart lifts itself up
+and swears to thee that it loves thee, Horion!... Glow, Aurora, through
+the human heart as through thy field of cloud, illuminate the human eye
+like thy dew-drops, and send up into the dark breast, as into thy
+heaven, a sun!...
+
+"I have now sworn to thee, I give thee my whole soul and my little
+life, and the sun is the seal on the bond betwixt me and thee.
+
+"I know thee, beloved; but knowest thou whose hand thou hast taken into
+thine? Lo, this hand has closed in Asia eight noble eyes,--no friend
+survives me,--in Europe I veil myself,--my sad history lies near the
+ashes of my parents, in the waters of the Ganges, and on the 24th of
+June of the coming year I go out of the world.... O Eternal One, I go;
+on the longest day the happy spirit wings its way out of this temple of
+the sun, and the green earth opens and closes with its flowers over my
+sinking chrysalis, and covers the heart that is gone with roses....
+
+"Waft greater waves upon me, morning-air! Draw me into thy broad floods
+that stand over our lawns and woods, and bear me in clouds of blossoms
+over sparkling gardens and over glimmering streams; and dizzied between
+flying blossoms and butterflies, melting away under the sun with
+outspread arms, faintly floating over the earth, let me die, and let
+the bloody garment, dissolved into a red morning-vapor, like the ichor
+of the butterfly[103] just released, fall into the flowers, and let a
+hot sunbeam absorb the azure-bright spirit out of the rose-chalice of
+the heart up into the next world.... Ah, ye beloved, ye departed, are
+ye indeed departed? are ye, then, moving along as dark waves[104] in
+the quivering blue of heaven? even, now, in that abyss, full of veiled
+worlds, do your ethereal garments billow around the hidden suns? Ah,
+come back, sweep hitherward; in a year I melt and flow into your heart!
+
+"--And thou, my friend, seek me soon! No one on earth can love thee so
+truly as a man who must soon die. Thou good heart, which these mild
+days press into my hands, even at this last moment, for a farewell, I
+will love and warm thee inexpressibly. During this year in which I am
+not yet taken away, I will stay with thee entirely; and when Death
+comes and demands my heart, he shall find it only on thy breast.
+
+"I know my friend, his life and his future. In thy coming years stand
+open dark chambers of martyrdom; and when I die, and thou art with me,
+I shall sigh, Why can I not take him with me, before he sheds his
+tears?
+
+"Ah, Horion! there lies in man a black Dead Sea, out of which only when
+it is agitated the blessed island of the next world lifts itself up
+with its clouds. But my lips will already lie under the earthly clod
+when the cold hour comes to thee in which thou wilt no longer see any
+God,--in which Death shall lie on his throne, and mow around him, and
+fling even to the domain of nothingness his frosty shadows and the
+lightnings of his scythe. O beloved, my grave-mound will then be
+already standing when thy _inner_ midnight comes on; with anguish thou
+wilt mount upon it, and look sternly into the soft wreaths of the
+constellations, and cry:[105] 'Where is he whose heart crumbles beneath
+me? Where is eternity, the mask of time? Where is the Infinite One? The
+veiled self grasps after itself on all sides, and strikes against its
+cold form.... Gleam not upon me, broad starry field; thou art only the
+conglomerate _picture_, formed of colored earths, on an infinite
+_churchyard-gate_, that stands before the desert of a life buried under
+space.... Laugh me not to scorn, ye shapes on higher stars, for, if I
+melt away, ye melt away also. One, one thing, which man cannot name,
+glows forever in the immeasurable smoke, and a centre without limit
+calcines a circumference without limit.--Still I exist; the Vesuvius of
+death yet smokes above me, and its ashes envelop me; its flying rocks
+bore through suns, its lava-torrents move dissolved worlds, and in its
+crater the former world lies stretched out, and it sends up nothing but
+graves.... O Hope, where abidest thou?' ...
+
+"Float enraptured around me, animated gold-dust, with thy thin
+wings,--I will not crush thy short flower-life; swell upward, giddy
+zephyr, and waft me down into thy blossom-cups. O thou immeasurable
+flood of radiance, fall from the sun over this narrow earth, and bear
+up on thy waves of splendor the heavy heart before the highest throne,
+that the eternal and infinite Heart may take the little ones which are
+nigh to ashes, and heal and warm them!
+
+"Is, then, a poor son of this earth so unhappy that he can quail in the
+midst of the splendor of morning, so near to God on the hot steps of
+his throne?
+
+"Fly not from me, my dear one, because a shadow always encompasses me,
+which daily grows darker, until at last it shall wall me in as a little
+night. I see the heavens and thee through the shadow, in the midnight I
+smile, and in the night-wind my breath goes forth full and warm. For, O
+man, my soul has stood erect toward the stars; man is an asthmatic, who
+suffocates if he lies down and does not lift up his breast.--But darest
+thou despise the earth, that forecourt of heaven, which the Eternal has
+thought worthy to move along as one in the bright host of his worlds?
+The great, the godlike, which thou hast in thy soul and lovest in
+another's,--seek it not in any sun-crater, on any planet-floor; the
+whole next world, the whole of Elysium, God himself, appear to thee in
+no other place than in the midst of thee. Be great enough to despise
+the earth; be greater, so as to respect it. To the mouth which is bent
+down to it, it seems a rich, flowery plain; to man in his _perigee_, a
+dark world; to man in his _apogee_, a glimmering moon. Then, and not
+till then, will the holy element, which from unknown heights is sent
+down into man, flow from the soul, mix itself with the earthly life,
+and quicken all that surrounds thee. So must the water, shed from
+heaven and its clouds, first run under the earth, and well up from it
+again, before it is purified into a fresh, clear draught. The whole
+earth is trembling now for rapture, till all rings and sings and
+shouts, as bells sound of themselves during an earthquake. And the soul
+of man is made greater and greater by its nearness to the Invisible....
+
+"I love thee exceedingly!
+
+                                         "EMANUEL."
+
+
+Horion read through swimming eyes. "Ah," he wished, "were I only, this
+very day, near thee, with my disordered heart, thou glorified one!" and
+now, for the first time, occurred to him the nearness of St. John's
+day, and he proposed to himself on that day to see him. The sun had
+already vanished; the evening red fell like a ripe apple-blossom; he
+felt not the hot drops on his face, nor the icy dew of twilight on his
+hands; and with a bosom illuminated by dreams, and a heart
+tranquillized and reconciled to earth, he wandered back....
+
+--By the way! is it, then, necessary that I should elaborate an apology
+for Emanuel as stylist and as _stylite_ (in the higher sense)? And if
+such is necessary, need I therein bring forward anything more than
+this,--that his soul is still the echo of his Indian palms and the
+River Ganges; that the walk of the better sort of unfettered men, just
+as in dream, is always a flight; that he does not manure his life, like
+Europeans, with the blood of other animals, nor hatch it out of dead
+flesh, and this abstinence in eating (quite another effect than that of
+excess in drinking) makes the wings of fancy lighter and broader; that
+a few ideas, to which he guides with partial hand all the mental sap
+and nutriment (and this distinguishes not only madmen, but also
+extraordinary men; from ordinary ones), must in him obtain a
+disproportionate weight, because the fruits of a tree become so much
+thicker and sweeter when the rest have been plucked; and more of the
+same sort? For, to speak candidly, those readers who desire an apology,
+themselves need one, and Emanuel deserves something better than
+a--criminal defence.--
+
+At this moment the consolation leaped up within my hero like a
+fountain, that he was to begin on Thursday his metempsychosis through
+nature,--his journey. "Deuse take it!" said he, skipping up; "what
+needs a Christian to coin money for the present distress,[106] and put
+on mourning-cloaks, when he can journey on Thursday to Kussewitz to see
+the handing-over of the Italian Princess, and on Saturday to the _Isle
+of Union_, and, what is more, on the same day, which is _one_ day
+before St. John's, to Maienthal, to his dear one, his angel?"
+
+O Heavens! I would that he and I were already about the
+journey,--really it may perhaps, unless all hopes deceive me, be quite
+tolerable!--
+
+During the week-day prayer-hour of Wednesday, two carriages rolled
+along. Out of the full one stepped his Lordship and the Prince; out of
+the empty one, nobody. Old Appel had dressed herself up splendidly, and
+locked herself into the pantry. The Chaplain was happier,--he taught in
+the Temple. Seldom does one make a clever face when one is presented,
+or a stupid one when one presents. His Lordship led his son to the
+Prince's hand and heart, as a collateral security for his future
+loyalty, but with a dignity which won as much reverence as it showed.
+My good hero behaved himself like a--fool; he had far more wit than our
+deference for higher persons, or theirs towards us, allows. A talent
+which expresses itself outside the limits of feudal service may be
+regarded as high-treason.
+
+His wit was only a covered embarrassment, into which he was thrown by
+two faces and a third cause. First, the Prince's....
+
+--If the reading world complains that so gradually, as they observe,
+one new name and actor after another steals into this star Venus, and
+makes it so full, that, at last, the historical picture-gallery becomes
+a regular gallery of vocables, in which they must wander round with a
+directory in their hands, they have really only too much ground for the
+complaint, and I have myself already complained the most bitterly of
+the same thing; for, after all, the greatest load remains on my
+shoulders, inasmuch as every fresh ninny is a new organ-stop drawn out,
+which I have to take into my performance, and which makes the pressing
+down upon the keys more disagreeable to me; but my correspondent
+forwards to me in the gourd-flask, without leave asked, all these
+people to be quartered on me, and the rogue actually writes me I have
+only to tell the world, _There are still more people coming_.--
+
+The Prince's face threw our hero into embarrassment, not from anything
+imposing about it, but because everything of that kind was discharged
+from it. It was a week-day and _current_ face, that belonged on coins,
+but not on prize-medals,--with arabesque lines, which mean neither good
+nor evil,--tinged with a little dead gold of court-life,--anointed with
+a soft oil, which might stifle the strongest waves,--a sort of sweet
+wine, more drinkable for women than men. Of the finest turns, which
+Victor had intended to reciprocate, there was nothing to be heard or
+seen; but of apt and easy ones so much the more. Victor was embarrassed
+by the conflict and interchange of politeness and truth. Social
+embarrassments arise not from the uncertainty and impracticableness of
+the path, but from the crossways of choice and the perplexity of the
+scholastic ass between his two bundles of hay. Victor, whose politeness
+always sprang from philanthropy, must to-day let it spring from
+self-interest; but this was precisely what he could not get into him.
+Beside the paternal face, before which, with most children, the whole
+wheelwork of a free behavior grates and sticks, a third cause made him
+disconcerted and witty,--namely, that he was after something. I can
+tell by the look of every one,--except a courtier, whose life, like a
+Christian's, is a constant prayer for something,--the moment he enters
+the door, whether he calls as an alms-beggar and saint-by-works, or as
+merely a member of the joy-club.
+
+Long before the people left the church, Victor already conceived a
+hearty love for the Prince,--the reason was, he was determined to love
+him, though the Devil himself stood before him there incarnate. He
+often said, Give me two days, or _one_ night, and I will fall in love
+with whomsoever you propose. He was delighted to find on January's face
+no second-hands, no minute-hands, of those assignation-hours with which
+a good Cæsar generally seeks gladly to interleave, as with honeymoons,
+the tedious years of wedlock; but on his face nothing was displayed but
+continence, and Victor would rather swear by the face than by the
+reputation. He misses the mark; for on the male face--although it is
+made of mere printed characters of physiognomy, as certain pictures are
+of written letters--Nature has, nevertheless, written the _matres
+lectionis_[107] and signs of sensuality very small, but upon the female
+larger, which is really lucky for the former and stronger and less
+chaste sex. In fact, adultery is, with princes of the January stamp,
+nothing but a milder sort of ruling and conquering. And yet honest
+regents always return--with pleasure the wives, so soon as they have
+conquered them, to their former lords. This, however, is only the same
+greatness which led the Romans to deprive the greatest kings of their
+realms, in order afterward to present them with them again.
+
+As princes are not, like jurists, bad Christians, but prefer to be none
+at all, January prepossessed our Victor by sundry sparks of religion,
+and by some hatred of the French Encyclopedists; although he saw that
+for a prince religion has indeed its good, but also its bad side, since
+only a crowned Atheist, but no Theist, possesses the invaluable
+_privilegium de non appellando_, which consists in this, that the
+accused party is not permitted (_per saltus_ or by a _salto mortale_)
+to appeal to the highest jurisdiction beyond the pale of earth.
+
+The conversation was indifferent and empty, as in such cases it always
+is. In fact, men deserve, for their conversation, to be dumb; their
+thoughts are always better than their talk; and it is a pity that one
+could not apply to good heads some barometrograph, or compositor's
+harpsichord, which should write off outwardly what is thought within. I
+would bet that every great head goes to the grave with a whole library
+of unprinted thoughts, and lets only some few book-shelves of printed
+ones go out to the world.
+
+Victor submitted to the Prince the usual medical interrogatories, not
+merely as physician-in-ordinary, but also as a man, for the sake of
+loving him. Although people from the great world and the greatest have,
+like the sub-man, the orang-outang, lived out and died out in
+their twenty-fifth year,--for which reason, perhaps, in many
+countries kings are placed under guardianship as early as their
+fourteenth,--nevertheless January had not ante-dated his life so far,
+and was really older than many a youth. The Prince won the good, warm
+heart of Sebastian most by the unpretending simplicity which served
+neither vanity nor pride, and whose ingenuousness differed from the
+usual sort only in refinement. Victor had seen vassals stand in such a
+manner beside the mouth[108] of their liege-lord; that the latter
+looked like a shark carrying a man crosswise in his jaws; but January
+resembled a Peter-fish, which holds forth in _its_ jaws a fine
+_stater_.
+
+The Court-Chaplain, when he arrived, in his astonishment at a crowned
+guest, found it impossible to stir lip or foot; he remained immovable
+in the broad water-spout of the priestly frock, which was thrown around
+him like a sheet of royal paper round marchpane. The only thing in
+which he indulged, and on which he ventured, was--not to put away the
+Bible (the mouse-trap), but--to send his eyes secretly round the room,
+to spy out whether _it_ had been properly stitched, folded, and
+superscribed by the registresses of rooms.
+
+The Prince proceeded at once on his journey with his Lordship, who had
+to reserve his leave-taking of his son and his farewell sermons till
+the solitary day they were to spend on the Isle of Union. The son
+contracted a liking for the company of the Prince, when he thought over
+his demeanor towards his father; he had a double joy, a filial and a
+human, as that father transformed his own happiness into the happiness
+of the poor country, and only for the sake of doing good made
+foot-tracks for himself in the rock of the throne, as in Italy the
+footsteps of angels who have appeared and left a blessing are shown
+in the rocks. Other favorites resemble the executioner who hollows
+out for himself foot-holes in the sand, so as to stand steadier when
+he--beheads.
+
+When the room was emptied, the first of Eymann's members to wake
+up--he still stood in the sentry-box of the priest's frock--was the
+index-finger, which stretched itself out, and pointed out to the
+family-circle the bed. "It would have been more satisfactory and
+serviceable to me," said he, "to have been strangled to death with that
+rag, than to have had his _Serenissimus_ spy it out." He meant,
+however, his own soiled cravat, which he himself had thrown upon the
+nuptial bed,--that art-chamber and wareroom of his linen. Whenever one
+contradicted any tormenting notion of his, he argued it so long that at
+last he believed it himself; but if one admitted it, then he conjured
+up certain scruples, and adopted a different opinion. "His Highness
+must inevitably have seen the tattered thing through the bed-curtains,"
+he replied. Finally he travelled over all the places where January had
+stood, and took observations at the torn neck-tie, and investigated its
+parallax. "We must adhere to the _blinding_ of the windows, if we want
+to have any _peace_," he concluded, and--
+
+So do I.
+
+P. S. I shall always remark after an eighth chapter (because I get
+ready exactly two Dog-post-days in a week), that I have again worked
+for the space of a month. I therefore report that to-morrow June comes
+on.
+
+
+
+
+                         FIRST INTERCALARY DAY.
+
+       Must Treaties be kept, or is it enough that they are made?
+
+
+The latter.--To-day the mining-superintendent exercises, for the first
+time, on the reader's ground and soil the right (_servitus oneris
+ferendi_, or I may say _servitus projiciendi_) which, according to the
+contract of May 4, he actually possesses. The main question now is,
+whether a dog-contract between two such great powers--inasmuch as the
+reader has all the quarters of the world, and I, in turn, have the
+reader--must, after being concluded, also be kept.
+
+Frederick, the Antimachiavellist, answers us, and backs himself by
+Machiavelli: Certainly every one of us must keep his word so long as
+it--is for his advantage. So true is this, that such treaties would
+never be broken, if they were not once--concluded; and the Swiss, who,
+as late as 1715, swore one with France, might quite as well in all the
+Cantons have lifted their fingers and taken an oath they would every
+day regularly--make water.
+
+But so soon as the advantage of contracts ceases, then is a regent
+entitled to break them in two cases,--those which he makes with
+other regents, and those he makes with his own step-children of the
+country,--his subjects.
+
+While I was already at work in the cabinet, (not later than six
+o'clock, with the goose-wing, dusting the session-table, not with the
+pen,) I had under the latter a clever fugitive paper, wherein I
+proposed to show that the _ouverture_ of treaties (_au nom de la Sainte
+Trinité_ or _in nomine Sanctissimæ et individuæ Trinitatis_) was the
+cipher which ambassadors sometimes place over their reports, meaning
+that the opposite is to be understood. Nothing, however, came of the
+fugitive paper but a--manuscript. In this I was simple enough, and
+proposed first to advise princes, that, in regard to lies of necessity
+and truths of necessity, they must have, for every latitude and
+hour, _declinations_ and _inclinations_. I proposed to whistle the
+state-chanceries to myself into a corner, and whisper in their ears, I
+would never suffer it, and, though I had only nine regiments in pay and
+starvation, that my hands and feet should be glued together with the
+sealing-wax of contracts, and my wings clogged with ink. That
+would I for the first time introduce into state-praxis; but the
+state-chanceries laughed at me, afar off in my foolish corner, and
+said, The whistler may believe, himself,--we do the thing otherwise.
+
+In the works of Herr _Herkommen_[109]--the best German publicist, who,
+however, writes no _acta sanctorum_ it is proved that a reigning prince
+need not observe at all any treaties, privileges, and concessions
+granted by his predecessor to his subjects; hence it follows that he is
+far less bound to keep his _own_ covenants with them, since the
+enjoyment of the benefit of these covenants, which consists in nothing
+but the keeping or breaking, manifestly vests in him as proprietor. Mr.
+Herkommen says the same on every page, and absolutely swears to it.
+Nay, can there be a dean or rector magnificus who exercises so little
+reason--considering that, according to a general assumption, a king
+never dies, and consequently predecessors and successors grow together
+into one man--as not to draw from this the conclusion that the
+successor may regard his own covenants as those of his predecessor, and
+accordingly, since the two make only one man, may break them just as
+much as if they were transmitted ones?
+
+Whoso chose to discourse philosophically about this might prove that,
+in fact, _no man whatever_ needs keep his word, not merely no prince.
+According to physiology, the old body of a king (a reader, a
+superintendent of mines) in _three_ years makes way for a new one. Hume
+carries it still farther with the soul, inasmuch as he considers that
+as a fleeting (not frozen) stream of phenomena. How much soever, then,
+the king (reader, author) may, at the moment of making a promise, be
+bound to keep it, still he cannot possibly be held thereto the next
+minute after, when he has already become his own successor and heir; so
+that, in fact, of us two contracting parties of the 4th of May, nothing
+more is extant than our mere _posthumi_ and successors,--namely,
+ourselves. As now, fortunately, promising and fulfilling never enter
+into one and the same moment, herefrom may follow the conclusion,
+pleasant to all of us, that, in fact, no one at all is bound to keep
+his word, whether he is the top of a throne or only a chip thereof. Nor
+will courtiers (the corner-clips of the throne) oppose this
+proposition.
+
+The public is requested to consider the Preface as the Second
+Intercalary Day, for the sake of symmetry.
+
+
+
+
+                            9. DOG-POST-DAY.
+
+           A Heavenly Morning; a Heavenly Afternoon.--A House
+                 without Walls; a Bed without a House.
+
+
+Ah, the poor miner, the delver in rock-salt pits, and the island-negro
+have in their calendar no such day as is here described or repeated!
+Sebastian stood on Thursday, as early as three o'clock, on the
+flying-board of his bee-hive, in order in one day to land in _Great
+Kussewitz_ and be off again before people were up. A reader who
+has an atlas on the floor at his feet cannot possibly confound this
+market-town, where the presentation of the Princess takes place, with a
+namesake of a town, which the city of Rostock has annexed to its
+immovable property. Unfortunately, the whole house loved him so that it
+had already, for half an hour earlier, been out of the morning feathers
+of which the greatest wings of dream are made. Amidst the din of
+carriage-chains, dogs, and cockerels, he tore his tender heart away
+from eyes that were all love, and, as the beating of the former and the
+melting of the latter annoyed him, all grew still worse; for external
+noise stills the inner tumult of the soul.
+
+Out of doors all the grass-pastures and grain-fields were bathing
+in the _shower-bath_ of the dew and in the cold _air-bath_ of the
+morning-wind. He hardened in it, like hot iron; a morning-land full of
+immeasurable hopes encircled him; he stripped his breast, threw himself
+all aglow into the dripping grass, washed (but not with any higher
+purpose than girls have) his firm face with liquid June-snow, and;
+strung with tenser fibres, stepped back from the shower-bath to his
+toilet,--only hair and breast he confined in no imprisonment.
+
+He would certainly have started earlier, but he wanted to avoid the
+moon, whom he could no more marry to the sun than he could their
+respective children to each other,--namely, night-thoughts and
+morning-thoughts. For when the morning-clouds envelop man in their dew,
+when the loving birds dart noisily through the gleaming mist, when the
+sun looms forth out of the hazy glow, then does man, quickened in
+spirit, press his foot more deeply into the earth, and cling with new
+ivy-twigs of life more firmly to his planet.
+
+Slowly he waded through a low avenue of hazel-bushes, and reluctantly
+swept off their chilled chafers; he held himself in, and stopped at
+last, in order to make himself late, that he might not reach the
+neighboring thicket just when the sun was entering his theatre. Already
+he heard the musical _mêlée_ in the thicket; rosy clouds were spread
+like flowers in the sun's pathway; the watch-tower of the parsonage and
+village, that high altar whereon his first lovely evening had glowed,
+kindled again; the singing world of the air hung exulting in the hues
+of morning and the heavenly blue; sparks of clouds darted up from gold
+bars along the horizon; at last the flames of the sun streamed in over
+the earth....
+
+Truly, were I every evening to depict sunrise, and every morning to see
+it, still I should cry, like the children, Once more, once more!
+
+With benumbed nerves of vision, and with flakes of color swimming
+before him, he passed on slowly into the wood, as into a dark minster,
+and his heart swelled even to devotion....
+
+--I will not assume that my reader has such a prosaic feeling in regard
+to morning as to deem this poetic one irreconcilable with Victor's
+character; nay, I venture to presume that his knowledge of human nature
+will find little trouble in discovering the _key-note_ between two such
+distant tones in Victor as humor and sensibility. I will therefore
+commit myself unconcernedly to the happy contemplations of his feeling
+soul, and to my assurance of having all hearts in unison with mine.
+
+The planet Venus and a grove show most beautifully in the morning and
+the evening; on both, at these hours, more rays of the sun fall than at
+any other. Hence our Victor felt, in the thicket, as if he went through
+the gate of a new life, as on this fiery morning he sauntered onward
+with the sun, which darted beside him from twig to twig, through the
+murmuring wood, away along under symphonious branches, which were so
+many music-barrels set in motion, over moss that lay in green sun-fire,
+and under evergreen bathed in heavenly blue. And this morning renewed
+in his heart the painful likeness of _four_ things,--life, a day, a
+year, a journey, which resemble each other in their fresh, exultant
+beginning, in the oppressive interlude, in the weary, sated close.--
+
+Outside in the copse, in the background of the woodland, Nature
+unrolled before him her altar-piece, miles long, with its chains of
+hills, with its dazzling country-houses, which had decked themselves
+with gardens as with festoons, and with the miniature-colors of the
+flowerets which played on the silver line of beauty traced by the
+brooks. And a cloud of enraptured, sporting, buzzing little creatures
+of silk-dust swept or hovered over the undulating picture.--What way
+should Victor take in the labyrinth of beauty?--All the sixty-four
+radii of the compass stretched themselves out as so many fingerposts,
+and he had sense enough not to propose to himself any particular hour
+of arriving. He therefore slipped off everywhere, to the right and to
+the left; he climbed over into every vale that hid itself behind a
+hill; he visited the pierced shadow-projection of every row of trees;
+he laid himself down at the feet of a more than commonly beautiful
+flower, and refreshed himself with pure love by its spirit, without
+breaking its body; he was the travelling-companion of the powdered
+butterfly, and observed his burying himself in his flower, and the
+hedge-sparrow he followed through the bushes to her brooding-cell and
+nursery; he let himself be spell-bound in the circle which a bee drew
+around him, and quietly suffered himself to be immured in the shaft of
+his own nosegay; he exercised upon every village which the motley
+landscape held up to him the right of way, and loved best to meet the
+children, whose days played even like his hours--
+
+But men he avoided....
+
+And yet there leaped from his heart a high fountain of love, which
+penetrated even to the remotest brother; and yet was he so entirely
+free from egotism, from that _sensitive_ intolerance, which has its
+degree and source in common with the _Moravian_.---The reason, however,
+was this: the first day of a journey was wholly different from the
+second, third, eightieth; for on the second, third, eightieth, he was
+prosaic, humoristic, social,--i. e. his heart adhered everywhere like
+hooked seed, and sent the roots of its happiness into every other
+being's lot. But on the first day came veiled spirits from all hours
+into his soul, who vanished if a third spoke,--a soft intoxication,
+which the atmosphere of nature, like that of a wine-store, communicated
+to him, spread itself, like an enchanted solitude, around his soul....
+But why shall I depict the first day before I depict him?
+
+In the first hours of the journey, he was to-day fresh, glad, happy,
+but not blissful; he drank as yet, only he was not drunken. But when he
+had thus for some hours wandered on, with drinking eye and absorbing
+heart, through pearl-strings of bedewed web-work, through humming
+vales, over singing hills, and when the violet-blue sky peacefully
+joined itself to the smoking heights and to the dark woods, rising like
+garden-walls behind each other,--when Nature opened all the pipes of
+the stream of life, and when all her fountains leaped up, and,
+flashing, played into each other, painted over by the sun,--then was
+Victor, who went through these flying streams with a rising and thirsty
+heart, lifted and softened by them; then did his heart swim, trembling
+like the sun's image in the infinite ocean, as the salient point of the
+wheel-animal[110] swims in the fluttering water-globule of the mountain
+stream.--
+
+Then did flower, meadow, and grove dissolve into a dim immensity, and
+the color-grains of Nature melted away into a single broad flood, and
+_over_ the glimmering flood stood the Infinite One as a sun, and _in_
+it, as a reflected sun, the human heart.--
+
+All was one; all hearts grew to one greatest heart; a single life
+throbbed; the blooming pictures, the growing statues, the dusty clod of
+earth, and the infinite blue vault became the beholding face of an
+immeasurable soul.--
+
+He might shut his eyes as much as he pleased, still there lingered in
+his dark breast this blooming immensity.
+
+Ah, if he could have plunged up into the clouds, so as to sweep thereon
+through the undulating heavens over the boundless earth!--ah, if he
+could have floated with the flower-fragrance over the flowers,--could
+have streamed with the wind over the summits, through the woods!--O now
+would he rather have fallen on the heart of a great man, and sunk,
+enraptured and weeping, into his bosom, to stammer out, "How happy is
+man!"
+
+He must needs weep, without knowing why; he sang words without sense,
+but their tone went to his heart--he ran, he stopped--he dipped his
+glowing face into the cloud of blossoming bushes, and would fain lose
+himself in the humming world between the leaves; he pressed the
+scratched face into the deep, cooling grass, and hung delirious on the
+breast of the immortal mother of Spring.
+
+Whoever saw him from a distance took him for a madman; perhaps many a
+one does so still, who has never himself experienced how, through the
+cleared-up, blissful breast, as through the serenest sky, storm-winds
+may sweep, which in both dissolve in rain.
+
+In this hour of his regeneration-day, his genius gave his heart the
+fiery baptism of a love, which clasped all men and all creatures into
+its flames. There are certain precious minutes of rapture--ah, why not
+years?--when an inexpressible love towards all human creatures flows
+through thy whole life, and opens thy arms softly to every brother. The
+least that Victor could do, whose heart was on the sunny side of love,
+was, if any one met him near a mountain, to turn out for him toward the
+steep side,--not to pass by any one who was fishing, for fear of
+throwing a frightening shadow on the water,--to wander slowly through a
+flock of sheep, and, if a child was shy of him, to make a long circuit
+aside. Nothing could surpass the soft voice with which he wished every
+pilgrim more than _this_ good morning; nothing the look of anticipating
+emotion with which in every village he sought to spy out any poor body
+whose calluses and scars and gashes required a sponge or pain-killing
+drops. "Ah, I know as well as an amanuensis[111] to a Professor of
+Morals," he said to himself, "that it is no virtue, but only a luxury,
+to take away the crown of thorns from a lacerated brow, the prickly
+girdle from sore nerves; but this innocent pleasure will still be
+begrudged me, and when on so many roads mangled men are lying, why on
+mine does no one stretch out his hand that I might place in it some
+compensation for this undeserved heaven in my breast?"
+
+He would fain carry his joy to another's heart to be tasted, as the bee
+delivers its mouthful of honey to the lips of another bee. At length
+two children came puffing along, one of whom was tackled as pulling
+beast of burden to a wheelbarrow, and the other harnessed on in front
+as pushing driver. The barrow was freighted with six porous bags full
+of pine-cones which the poor span were hauling to feed a consumptive
+fire. The two frequently exchanged places, so as to hold out; and the
+driver always wanted presently to be the horse again. "My good
+children! can't your father push, then?"--"The tree has broken
+both his legs short off."--"Then certainly your big brother could go to
+the wood?"--"He has to plough over yonder."--Victor stood on the
+fallow-field beside a waistcoat with full as many colors as holes, and
+near a dirty bread-sack, both which belonged to the brother, who at a
+distance was ploughing on the stage of this scene with half a post-team
+of lean cows. The emptying of a full hand into the lap of misery
+lightened Victor's heavy soul, as did the outgushing, which followed,
+of the full eye; his conscience, not his selfishness, was his objector
+to the _greatness_ of his gift--he gave it, however, but in coins of
+small denominations--the children left their merchandise, and while one
+of them ran across the field to the plough, the other ran down to the
+village to his mother. The ploughman in the distance pulled off his
+hat--would fain have uttered loud thanks, but could only blow his
+nose--went on ploughing without his hat; but when at length he called
+out his thanks after the youth, the latter had already escaped far
+beyond earshot....
+
+Do not, clear reader, wish this or the succeeding interlude of human
+sorrow left out of the great scenes of happy nature; and may thy heart,
+like Victor, by giving deserve to receive!
+
+In his good-hearted haste he soon overtook a journeyman blacksmith sick
+with fever, whose travelling-trunk or portmanteau was a filled
+handkerchief; he also carried on a stick a wretched, faded pair of
+boots, which he had to spare, because the other which he dragged along
+on other sticks, namely, on his legs, was still wretcheder and less
+without color than without soles. When he had tenderly greeted the
+feverish man and made him a present, he looked into his pale, livid
+face, and he could not deny him some smart-money.... Ah, the whole
+smart-money for this life is not paid out till we reach a higher! When
+he had civilly questioned him and informed himself about his hungry
+journeyings, about his correction-house fare, about his flights from
+one country to another, and about his thin viaticum which the mistress
+denied him when the master was out,--then was he ashamed, before the
+All-gracious One, of his flower-field of rapture, which he no more
+deserved "than that poor devil there," and he made him an additional
+present; and when he again waited for him to speak, and learned that he
+was fifty years old without any prospects, and when the distress
+overmastered him which he always felt at the sight of _old_ but
+_undeveloped_ men, gray apprentices, old clerks, old dispensers, old
+amanuenses, then was he somewhat excusable for running back again and
+silently giving the astonished old man the new signs of his
+overflowing, benignant soul; and when, at this renewed parting, he felt
+his heart, which was dissolved into love, and only floated, as it were,
+round his soul, thirst more and more for doing good, and felt an
+incomprehensible inclination for fresh giving, and a longing to pour
+out upon somebody to-day everything, everything, then for the first
+time did he perceive that he was now too tender and too happy and too
+giddy and too weak.
+
+So soon as the people in the village had in hand the certain
+intelligence of this transit-toll of generosity, in the afternoon about
+fifteen children stationed themselves on different posts along the way,
+manned the narrow passes, and distributed sentries and _enfans perdus_
+to prevent evasion of the revenue-laws....
+
+A man who, like Victor, construed three straight leagues into seven
+crooked ones, is often hungry, but certainly more so than he;--he took
+merely a Leibnitz's monad-meal out of his pocket, biscuit and wine, and
+appeased therewith the stomach which hung and drew upon his spirit, in
+order not to darken and foul, by throwing in any pieces of flesh, the
+clear lake of his inner being, with its reflected arch of heavenly blue
+and heavenly red. In fact, he hated gormandizers as men of too gross
+selfishness, as well as all living larders, where layers of fat crush
+in the spirit, as masses of snow do a house. The soul, he said, takes
+an odor from the contents of the body, just as wine does from the fruit
+which is near it in the cellar, and in the mephitic vapor in which the
+souls of the Flachsenfingenites bob up and down over the brew-kettles
+which seethe their potatoes and beer, the poor birds must surely fall
+down tipsy and stifled into this dead sea.
+
+He broke his biscuit not in any house, but in the skeleton, i. e.
+framework of a house, which had just come from the hands and axes of
+the carpenters into the sight of the village. As he looked through all
+the divisions and subdivisions of this architectural skeleton, and saw
+at once through sitting-room, kitchen, stable, and loft, he thought to
+himself: "Another play-house for a poor, little human troupe, who are
+here to play out their benefit comedy, their Gay's Beggars'-opera, with
+no voice to cry from the stage-box, _Encore!_ Ah! before these beams
+have blackened to ebony by the winter smoke, many an eye-socket will
+have grown red with grief; many a northwester of life will blow through
+the window upon trembling hearts, and into these nooks, which are yet
+to be darkly walled up, will many a back, sore with bruises from the
+warfare of common life, creep away to wipe off sweat or blood. But joy
+(he went on soliloquizing as he looked at the place for stove and
+table) will also set a gilliflower-tree or two before the window for
+your inmates, and drive up before your house-door, which is yet to be
+hung, and unload its freight of the three holy feasts, and the church
+fair, and the child's baptism.--Heavens! how foolish that I should
+prefer thinking all this in the mere ribs of a house to seeing it
+yonder in the walled-up houses of the village!"
+
+During this table-talk and house-warming-oration, whereat, however, no
+drinking-glass was shivered, the white breast of a swallow swooped low
+across the road, and her bill took up a load of slacked lime for her
+little garret. The wasp shaved off from the joist-work paper-shavings
+for the layers of her bulbous sphere. The spider had already knit her
+spider's house into the larger one. All creatures played the carpenter
+and mason in building up for themselves their little islands in the
+infinite sea; but grovelling man looks not over his shoulder, and sees
+not that all is like him.
+
+Sebastian quitted his wooden inn, his skeleton of a Frankfort Red
+House, more intoxicated with happiness than he could have gone from a
+fully-built one. In certain men a dark melancholy diffuses itself,--a
+shadow of the soul all the greater when the shadows around them are the
+smallest: I mean about one o'clock of a summer afternoon. When in the
+afternoon the lawns lie more intensely perfumed, and the woods with
+drooping leaves stand, more softly sighing and sleeping beneath the
+brooding sun, and the birds sit on the trees as dumb figurants or
+supernumeraries,--then in the Eden that lay sweltering under the cloud
+of blossoms an oppressive yearning seized upon his heart,--then was he
+wafted by his fancies under the eternally blue sky of the East, and
+under the wine-palms of Hindustan,--then did he rest himself in those
+still lands, where, without stinging necessities or scorching passions,
+he sank dissolved into the dreamy tranquillity of the Brahmin, and
+where the soul in its elevation holds itself steady and no longer
+trembles with the trembling earth, like the fixed stars whose gleam
+trembles not, seen on mountains,--then was he too happy for a German
+colonist, too poetic for a European, too luxurious for a neighbor of
+the North Pole.... Every summer morning he feared that in the summer
+afternoon he should fantasy too effeminately.
+
+Fasting, wine, heaven, and earth had to-day so lavishly filled the
+chambers of his heart with the sleep-potion of rapture, that they must
+needs, when anything more was poured in, overflow through the eyes.
+These now gushed forth; and behind his dimmed eyes, in the overshadowed
+inner chamber, lined with the green of nature, and darkened, as it
+were, with curtains of evening redness, a colored night came on,
+wherein all the little shapes of his childhood rose cloudily before
+him,--the earliest playthings of life were laid out,--his first May
+months played like little angels on an evening cloud, and they could
+not in their wing-clothes fly round the great cloud, and the sun did
+not scorch them.
+
+Ah! what he had long forgotten,--long lost,--long loved,--songs without
+sense and tones without words, nameless plays,--buried nurses,--dead
+servants,--all these came to life again; but before all, and greatest
+of all, moved the form of his first, his dearest teacher, Dahore, in
+England, who said to his melted soul, "We were once side by side."--O
+this eternally loved spirit, who even then saw in our Victor the wings
+that lift themselves toward the next world,--who even then was more the
+friend than the master of his so tender, tempestuous, loving, aspiring
+heart,--this never-to-be-forgotten spirit would not leave him; his form
+pushed aside the shroud, began to shine and to say, "Horion, my Horion,
+did I not hold thee by the hand, wast thou not in my heart? But it is
+long since we loved each other, and my voice is no longer recognizable
+to thee, scarcely my face; ah, the seasons of life roll not back, but
+onward, downward, forever." He leaned against a tree and kept drying
+his eye, which could no longer find the road, and his sight was fixed
+calmly on the woods which stretch toward St. Luna, and on the hazy
+hills that separate him from Maienthal and from his second teacher....
+
+Kussewitz burst upon him. But too soon; his soul in its emotion was not
+ready to go among strangers. He was glad to come upon an overturned
+trough, out of which sheep were licking salt, and a hedge-pen, which
+folded them at night, and the hut on two wheels wherein their keeper
+slept. He had a peculiar curiosity and predilection for little copies
+of houses; he always walked into or up to every collier's hut, every
+hunter's and fowler's house, for the sake of saddening and comforting
+himself with his own confinement, and with the parodies of our little
+life and with the ground-floor of poverty. He never went blindly by
+anything small, over which the world's man and business man stalk so
+scornfully; just as, on the other hand, he never stopped before any
+pomp of citizenly life. He opened, therefore, a little door to the
+travelling bed of the shepherd: it looked so poverty-stricken in
+there, and the straw, which took the place of eider-down and silk
+pillow-cases, was so lowly and rumpled, that he felt an indescribable
+longing to enter; he needed now a diving-bell that should separate him
+from the rushing, crushing, sublime sea around him. I wish one could
+conceal the fact from the European cabinets, the Imperial Diet, and the
+Chief Commissary, that he actually laid himself down therein. But now
+the excitement of his senses, into which the door of his bedchamber
+admitted only a small section of the blue sky, soon passed over into
+the exhaustion of slumber, and over the hot eye the lid closed.
+
+
+
+
+                           10. DOG-POST-DAY.
+
+    The Bee-Master.--Zeusel's Oscillation.--Arrival of the Princess.
+
+
+Since the last Post-day our hero has been sleeping. The German
+_Reviewers_ should do me the favor to start him up.
+
+But they are knaves, these headsmen and partners of the censors; they
+wake up neither readers nor princes, but only Homeric sleepers. The sun
+already hangs low, and peers horizontally into his Dr. Graham's-bed,
+and he still lies there glowing in the face of it....
+
+The sheep had to do it with their bleating and bells. When the
+belfry-bell of Great Kussewitz, with the accompaniment of sheep-bells,
+wafted into his opening ears an evening prayer set to music,--when into
+his opening eyes the red outline of the departed sun which had
+illuminated his to-day's paradises entered, and the evening glow, whose
+gold leaves the evening wind breathed upon the clouds,--when the air,
+bedewed like his nosegay, refreshed his bosom,--then was to-day's
+sultry afternoon rolled back a whole week; Victor had dropped upon a
+new island of the blest; new-born and rejoicing, he crept back out of
+his piece of travelling property. "O mad me!" he said; "but I do not
+rejoice extraordinarily in the fact that half an ounce of grains of
+sleep can eat away clean out of man a whole glowing world, and that the
+turning over of the body is the sinking of his paradise and his hell."
+
+On the high road two sedan-bearers went jogging off at a short gallop
+between the supporting poles of their leather die.[112] He made after
+them,--their load, he thought, must be far lighter to them than a whole
+country and its sceptre, both which, however, a regent knows how to
+balance, as a juggler does a sword, dancing, on the nose, on the teeth,
+everywhere. They bore, however, the heaviest thing in the world,
+beneath which cities, thrones, and continents have often broken down.
+
+"What are you moving round with at such a rate?" he asked. "With our
+most gracious Lord!" It was January,--it is, however, quite in
+accordance with the æsthetic and artistic tricks wherewith an author so
+extraordinarily excites the expectation of his readers, that I do not
+divulge what it was of January that sat in the bounding litter, until I
+utter the next word.
+
+It was his image. The bust always travelled ahead before the bride, in
+order to arrive in season at her bedchamber, and hang itself up by a
+nail to the wall. On the whole _sentimental journey_ the _cubic
+contents_ of the bride had slept only in chambers, on which the
+_superficial area_ of the bridegroom hung down like a garden-spider all
+night long....
+
+As I do not mean in any manner to cut myself of, by the barrier-treaty
+which I have concluded with my cousin the reader, from the right of
+making, beside the Intercalary Days, extra-leaves, extra-leaflets, and
+pseudo-extra-leaves, inasmuch as I have, the rather, by certain secret
+and separate articles, which I have made merely in my own head, as the
+Pope does certain cardinals, reserved to myself the privilege, I will
+now exercise the right which my self-made By-Recess offers me on the
+spot.
+
+
+               EXTRA LEAFLET UPON THE ABOVE BUST-PIECES.
+
+"I maintain," said I, in the billiard-room at Scheerau, at a moment
+when I was not striking, "that dukes, margraves, and other graves, and
+many of high nobility, would be stupid, if in our day,--or, in fact,
+in future days,--when the crown grows bald before the chin gets a
+beard,--when many a face wants no requisite for spectacles except the
+bridge,--when particularly the man of rank is glad to be, instead of a
+_cast_, at least an _outline_, of a man,--they would not be wise, I
+recapitulate, if they celebrated no better marriage than a true
+one,--that is, no pictured--one; if their busts were stamped on
+nothing better--that is, on no breast--than on the pewter covers of
+beer-pitchers, so that they could _intoxicate_ people in no other way
+than this latter; and if they, who uniformly act by plenipotentiaries,
+on imperial benches, in session-chairs, in bridal beds (marrying by
+ambassadors), should conceive that in the last-mentioned case there
+were any truer and more innocent chief commissary than their own
+picture on an ell of canvas." ... As we just then played in mass, and I
+happened to be king, and in my fiery state went on to say, "What the
+Devil! we kings understand how to substitute skilfully enough, for the
+_plastic_ arts in virtue and in marriage, the _delineative_ arts; and
+_not merely_ in billiards does a king stand quite idle with his
+sceptre-cue!"--then the fire of my speech might well seem far from
+strange.
+
+          _End of the Extra Leaflet on the above Bust-pieces_.
+
+
+At the house of the Count of O---- (so was called also a famous officer
+in the Seven Years' War, and by Shakespeare the world, and the whole
+territory of an old lady; and, according to Bruce, with the Hebrews
+this vowel was a particular favorite; but this is, after all,
+unprofitable learning here) the Princess and the painted bridegroom
+alighted. Victor would not, with his to-day's dress and his to-day's
+heart, mingle in the tumult of the world; and yet he would gladly have
+seen all.
+
+As he approached Kussewitz, a little red and white house peered forth
+to meet him,--red as a squirrel-cage, and smiling as a summer-house. He
+stepped up to it and to its gleaming windows, but immediately stepped
+back again; he would not hinder an old human couple, for whom the bell
+had been the organ, from finishing their prayer. When he entered, with
+his face exalted by the reflection of to-day's transfiguration, an old
+man turned a silver head, which stood like a mild moon over the evening
+of his life, and a face of smiling wrinkles, toward the guest. Only a
+hypocrite--that stockjobber of virtue--is not, after praying, more
+gentle and complacent. The old woman was the first to lay aside the
+look of devotion. Victor, with his victorious simplicity, asked a
+night's lodging. To grant it to him was what only such contented people
+as these could do; to request it was what none could do, except one
+who, like him, shunned landlords, because their cold, selfish sympathy
+and love, coming and going with every guest, was too repulsive to his
+warm soul. Secondly, he was attracted by the cleanliness which even the
+slut loves in _strangers'_ houses, and which, in them, is a proof of
+contentment and of--childlessness. Thirdly, he wanted to remain to-day
+incognito, and out of the thronged streets, with his soul so
+consecrated by Nature.
+
+He soon felt himself at home; even before the supper was washed and
+picked and ready, he found out, or, rather, took it in, that the gentle
+old man, named _Lind_, was a bee-keeper. The latter I believe; for
+otherwise he would not have been so mild, as, in fact, in most cases,
+animal society is less corrupting than human. Hence Plato assigns the
+Lange's colloquies of man with the animals as the best thing left of
+Saturn's golden reign. It is not all one whether one is a dog-keeper, a
+lion-keeper, or a bee-keeper; for our menagerie in the lower viscera,
+according to the Platonic allegory, barks and bleats in unison with the
+external one.--When Victor actually went with the old man round the
+house and among the bee-hives, then he came back into the supper-room
+with the face of a man who claimed already a seat in the Kussewitz
+Church and a page in the church-book. Did he not already know that the
+bee-father had followed three parsons and five squires in Kussewitz to
+the grave; that he had celebrated his first marriage with his "mother"
+(so he called his wife) at the age in which the silver wedding usually
+falls; that his head had still memory and hair; that he expected to
+carry black eyebrows under the coffin-lid; that he, Lind, had not the
+least need, like old _Gobel_ and even the beadle _Stenz_, for the
+sake of his eyes, to take his place near the church-window, but
+could read his verse anywhere; and that he once every year went to
+Maienthal to church, and thrust a sovereign[113] into the church
+billiard-pocket,[114] because the churchyard there covered all his
+relations on the father's side?
+
+
+O, this contentment with the evening-clouds of life refreshes the
+hypochondriacal hearer and spectator, whose melancholy strings in an
+old man's presence begin so easily to tremble like a death-watch; and
+an ardent old man seems to us an immortal being, hardened against the
+scythe of death, and a finger-post pointing to the next world! Victor
+especially saw, with heavy thoughts, in an old man, an organized past,
+a bent incarnation of years, the plaster cast of his own mummy standing
+before him. Every childish, forgetful, petrified old man reminded him
+of the masters of forges, who in their old age, like the human soul,
+have to undergo a crab-like promotion, and on account of their usual
+loss of sight become casters again,--then head smiths,--then foundery
+apprentices. The good Newton,[115] Linnæus, Swift, went back to be
+foundery-apprentices of learning. But so singularly timid is man, that,
+while he regards his soul, in its greatest _advantageous_ dependence
+upon his organs, still as a _vowel_,--and justly,--nevertheless, in the
+case of an _injurious_ dependence upon the same, fears it may be merely
+a _consonant_ of the body,--and _that_ unjustly.
+
+As a walk about a strange place gives a traveller the best
+naturalization act, and as Victor was incapable of being anywhere a
+stranger, he went--out a little way. There are many nights when it is
+not night. He saw outside, not far from the garden-fence of the senior
+(not the seignior of nobility, but the senior parson), a very beautiful
+girl sitting, buried in a Latin Whitsuntide programme, and praying from
+it with folded hands. A case of beauty and craziness united he never
+could resist; he greeted her, and would not let her roll up and put up
+her Latin prayer-book. The good soul, having lost her prayer-book and
+paternoster, had easily despatched her devotions out of the Whitsuntide
+programme _De Chalifis literarum studiosis_, as she neither understood
+Latin nor how to read, and looked upon the folding of the hands as a
+Masonic finger-speech, which would be readily understood in the _higher
+places_. She unrolled from a paper a sixth finger which had been cut
+off, and said the cloister of Mary in Flachsenfingen, on whose mother
+of God her father had wished to hang it as a thank-offering, would not
+accept it, because it was not made of silver. As Buffon ascribes to
+man's fingers the clearness of his ideas, so that the thoughts may be
+dissected at the same time with the hand, it follows that one who has a
+_sext_[116] of fingers, must think 1/6 or 1/11 the more clearly; and
+such a one, with such a supernumerary writing-finger, could do more in
+the sciences than we with the whole hand.
+
+She related that her father would not marry her till after two years,
+and that his son could get her sister, if she were not only just
+six years old,--and they two had been adopted as children by the
+six-finger,--and that he had his bijouterie shop wherewith he wandered
+from one ducal palace to another; just now in that of the Count of
+O----, together with board and lodging, and that he was an Italian,
+named _Tostato_. Heavens! Victor knew him full well. Without further
+question--for he loved besides to go a Sabbath-day's journey or two
+with any girl or any Pomeranian dog, and used to say he never would
+make the least distinction between a new face and a pretty one, even if
+he were obliged to--he marched off with her straight toward the Count's
+to see her father. He peeled off more and more of the hull of his
+little maid of honor: she was not only uncommonly beautiful, but
+equally--stupid.
+
+But now she ran away from him; the Flachsenfingen Court came travelling
+along, and she must needs see the ladies alight. He kept close to the
+tail of the whole corps, which was still trailing along the street,
+while half the rump was already in the palace. The draggling tail was
+somewhat short and thin, consisting of the Court-apothecary Zeusel, who
+from vanity was on hand with his fifty-four years and his youthful
+clothes and his bumping coach to take part in the affair. The smallest
+man in the world, in the biggest carriage in the world, could so little
+be looked upon as an _entity_, that I count his coach as an empty
+ceremonial coach, in which the coachman shook him about like a dry
+kernel in a walnut.
+
+I will describe more copiously how the coachman winnowed and bolted
+him, and will make it up by being shorter in matters of less
+consequence.
+
+Of course, if I should lay such an imputation upon the coachman as to
+say that he knew how by speed and stones to give the coach-body that
+hard pulsation, which made Zeusel sit more on the air than on the
+coach-cushion,--then would Kästner in Göttingen reply to me, and prove
+that the apothecary himself, by the counteraction which he produced
+upon the cushion by his posteriors, was to blame for the repulsion of
+the homologous pole; but we have, I trust, less to do here with the
+truth than with the apothecary. Victor, as Court-doctor, took a
+_distant_ interest in the apothecary; nay, he would gladly have begged
+the favor of being allowed to get in and sit by his side, that he might
+see more distinctly how the skilful Vetturino sent the ball, Zeusel,
+into the air. But to the weak nerves of Victor comic scenes, by the
+physical suffering which they in reality brought with them, were too
+hard and sharp,--and he contented himself with following behind the
+bouncing box, and merely conceiving how the thing inside rose like a
+barometer to indicate the pleasant weather of the drunken coachman,--he
+merely pictured it out to himself (therefore I need not) how the good
+little courtier at a climax, to which the fellow brought him (who ended
+every lift with a higher one), would thrust his left hand, not into his
+waistcoat pocket, but merely into the coach-strap, while in his right
+he would be obliged to warm and squeeze for an hour a pinch of snuff,
+which for want of a quiet moment he could not raise to his empty nose
+till the rascal of a coachman cried, Brrr!
+
+Come along! said the stupid girl to Victor, and drew him to her
+father's. The Italian made his windmill gesture, and placed himself
+against Victor's ear and whispered into it, _Dio vi salvi!_[117] and
+the latter thanked him in a still lower voice in Italian, _Gran
+mercè!_[118] Thereupon Tostato breathed three or four uncommonly
+soft-voiced curses into Victor's ear-cell. He had not lost his wits,
+but only his voice, and that only by a cold. He cursed and condoled
+about it, that to-morrow, of all days, he should have to be dumb as a
+haddock, precisely when so much was to be cut. Victor congratulated
+him sincerely on that very account, and begged him to accept him till
+to-morrow, not only as Doctor, but also as partner and spokesman; he
+would talk for him in the shop to-morrow, in order the better and
+incognito to see all that went on. "If you will tell me to-day,"
+replied Tostato, "one more funny story." And now when he actually
+produced the adventure of Zeusel with an Italian systole and diastole
+of the hands, and when Tostato grew foolish with laughing at the
+joke,--(the Italian and Frenchman laugh with the whole body, the
+Englishman only in the brain,)--then was it no wonder that he took him
+into partnership at once. His doctorship he began by pulling off the
+patient's stocking and binding it round the untuned throat, for a warm
+stocking is worn with equal medicinal benefit on foot and neck; with a
+garter it would be different.
+
+Now the beauty and stupidity of the programme-pray-er appeared greater
+than ever in his eyes; he would gladly have kissed her, but it was
+impracticable: the Bijoutier followed him about everywhere, eager for
+his witty overflowings, and held both ears under to catch the drops.
+
+He took this occasion, as he thought of the German indifference
+to wit and the fine arts, to lay down the fundamentally false
+proposition,--The Englishman, the Frenchman, and the Italian are _men_;
+the Germans are _citizens_. The latter _earn_ life; the former _enjoy_
+it. And the Dutch are a cheaper edition of the Germans on mere printing
+paper and without engravings.
+
+He was on the point of going back to bee-keeper Lind's: when at this
+late hour of the night--so late that the Court-courier had set down the
+appearance of this comet a whole hour too soon in his astronomical
+tables--the Princess with her attendant atmosphere arrived. As he had
+talked of her so long, he needed nothing more to make him love her,
+than to hear the rolling of her chariot and the silk-rustle of her
+walk. "A princely bride," he said, "can be much better endured than
+another; show me any other difference between a Crown-princess, a
+crowned bride, and a crowned wife, than that which the state-almanac
+assigns." Whoever shall further consider, that he knew her personal
+disinclination towards the Prince, who at his first marriage had
+postponed her for her sister,--and whoever reads now what I here
+mention that Tostato told him she had a handkerchief in her hand on
+alighting from her carriage,--such a one will already be wise enough
+not to be angry at his saying: "I would that these crown-beasts, who
+are suffered to snap off the fair white hands of such a beautiful
+child, as swine eat off the tender ones of children--I would... but my
+wares, of course, will be near enough to her to-morrow to admit my
+seeing the handkerchief, Mr. Partner."
+
+At the Bee-father's, to whom he went home again, there was a more
+tranquil world, and his house stood in the green, silent as a cloister
+of sleep around a holy place of dreams. Victor pushed his little bed on
+the attic floor towards an opening through which the moon streamed in,
+and thus, overhung with hushed swallows' and wasps' nests, he saw peace
+in the form of Luna float down to his own nest; but she smiled upon him
+so potently that at length he sank away dissolved into guileless
+dreams. Good man! thou deservest the bright flower-pieces of dreams,
+and a fresh nosegay of head and breast on waking; thou hast never yet
+tormented any man, never yet supplanted any one, overcome no female
+honor, nor ever bartered away thy own; and thou art merely a little too
+volatile, too effeminate, too gay, too human.
+
+
+
+
+                           11. DOG-POST-DAY.
+
+        Transfer of the Princess.--Smuggling of a Kiss.--Montre
+                   à Regulateur.--Simultaneous Love.
+
+
+Voltaire, who never could write a good comedy, would not have been
+competent to create this Eleventh Dog-post-day.
+
+In regard to the Eleventh Dog-post-day I remark, to be sure, that
+Nature has created plants with all variety of numbers of stamens, only
+none with eleven, and seldom also men with eleven fingers.
+
+Meanwhile life, like shell-fish, tastes best in the months without R.
+
+In reply to this, some say that the pen of an author goes, like a
+watch, the faster, the longer it has been going; but I reverse it, and
+say rather, men who write much make fast writers.
+
+And yet people cannot well bear men who are the fifth wheel of a coach;
+but every baggage-wagon has a fifth wheel strapped on behind it, and in
+case of accident this is a true _wheel of fortune_. Reinhold read
+Kant's Critique through _five times_ before he understood it. I pledge
+myself to be more intelligible to him, and require to be read only half
+as often.
+
+To speak out freely, I cherish some contempt for a head full of elastic
+ideas, which jump with their spring-feet from one cerebral chamber to
+another; for I find no difference between them and the elastic worms in
+the intestines, which Götze saw, before a light, leap to the height of
+three inches.
+
+Of course the following thought does not rightly hang together with the
+foregoing chain of conclusions and flowers; namely, that I am afraid of
+finding imitators, and so much the more as I am, here, myself, one of a
+certain class of witty authors. In Germany no great author can light a
+new torch, and hold it out into the world till he is tired and throws
+away the fag-end of it, without the little ones immediately pouncing
+upon it, and running round and shining round for half-years longer with
+the little end of a light. Thus have I (and others) in Ratisbon been
+run after a thousand times by the boys, who held in their hands
+remnants of wax-torches which the ambassadorial retinue had thrown
+away, and offered to light me to my landlord's for a few kreutzers ...
+_Stultis sat!_[119]
+
+In the morning Victor hastened to the palace. He got a tradesman's
+dress and the shop. At ten o'clock came on the "transfer" of the
+Princess. The three apartments in which it was to take place stood,
+with their folding doors, opposite to his shop. He had never yet seen
+the Princess--except all night in his dreams, and he can hardly wait
+for it all....
+
+Nor the reader either: does he not even now snuff his candle and his
+nose,--fill up pipe and glass,--change his position, if he rides
+upon a so-called _reading-ass_,[120]--press the book smoothly open, and
+say with uncommon delight, "I am somewhat sharp-set for that
+description!"--I verily, am not at all; I feel as if I were to be shot
+with arquebuses. Positively! an infantry-soldier who in midwinter
+storms a hostile wall of the thickest paper, in the opera, has his
+heaven on earth, compared with a mining-superintendent of my stamp.
+
+For one who drinks coffee and sets out to make a description of any
+school-act of the Court,--e. g. of a Court-day, of a marriage, (in
+fact, of the preliminaries thereof,) of a Transfer,--such a drinker
+pledges himself to reproduce scenes, whose dignity is so extremely fine
+and fugitive that the smallest false by-stroke and half-shadow makes
+them perfectly ridiculous,--hence even spectators, on account of such
+accidental touches, laugh at them _in naturâ_;[121]--he pledges
+himself, I say, so to reproduce such scenes, bordering on the comic,
+that the reader shall remark the dignity, and be as little able to
+laugh at them as if he himself were one of the performers. It is true I
+may presume to count upon myself somewhat, or rather upon the fact,
+that I myself have been at Courts and acted the part of master of the
+Harpsichord (whether this was a mask of higher honors or not, I leave
+here undecided); from a privilege, then, which has fallen to me alone
+of almost the whole scribbling Hansa, and to which I actually and
+gladly own my indebtedness for that preponderance which has (by some)
+been detected in me over the so inferior crew of authors in the
+_Scientiâ media_[122] of courts,--therefrom, I say, one should promise
+one's self almost extraordinary things. I fear, however, we shall come
+off slimly; for I was not even able to rehearse to my pupil Gustav the
+crown-suit in Frankfort seriously enough to make him leave off
+laughing. So, too, Yorick never could scold in such a way as to drive
+his people off, but they always took it as a joke.
+
+It would have been my misfortune if I had depicted the transfer of the
+Princess (I thought at first, to be sure, there would then be more
+dignity in it) under the figure of the transfer of a house to creditors
+sealed with a chip of the door, or as a transfer of a fief by
+_investitura per zonam_, or _per annulum_, or _per baculum
+secularem_.[123] But I have luckily hit upon the thought of portraying
+the transfer, under the poetic garb of a historical benefit-comedy,
+with that dignity which theatres give. I have, for that purpose,
+as much and more unity of place--(three chambers)--of time--(a
+forenoon)--and of interest--(the whole joke)--in my hands, as I need.
+And if an author reads through beforehand, into the bargain, as I do,
+the saddest serious works, Young's Night Thoughts, the uncatholic
+_gravamina_ of the Lutherans, the third volume of Siegwart, and his own
+love-letters; if, further, he has never yet trusted himself, without
+first laying before him and running through Home's and Beattie's
+excellent observations on the source of the comic, in order to know at
+once what comic sources he was to avoid;--such an author can safely,
+without fear of vainglory, make and fulfil the promise to his readers,
+that, thus comically guarding himself against the comic, he may perhaps
+be able, not wholly without touches of sublimity, to deliver and depict
+the following
+
+
+       HISTORICAL BENEFIT-COMEDY OF THE TRANSFER OF THE PRINCESS.
+
+                             IN FIVE ACTS.
+
+The half-word Benefit signifies merely the profit which I myself gain
+from it.
+
+Act First.--Of three chambers, the middle one is the scene of the play,
+the trading-mart where they exhibit, the hall of _correlation_
+(Ratisbonically speaking) where all matters of importance are referred
+and matured. On the other hand, in the first adjoining chamber is
+stowed the Italian, and in the second the Flachsenfingen court, each
+calmly awaiting the beginning of a part for which Nature has formed it.
+These two apartments I regard only as the sacristies of the central
+one.
+
+The middle chamber, i. e. its curtain, which consists of two
+folding-doors, at last rises and shows to partner Sebastian, who is
+peeping out from his shop beside the catarrhal half of the firm, a
+great deal. There appears at the door of coulisse No. 1 a red-velvet
+chair; again, at the door of coulisse No. 2, another, a brother and
+relative of the first; these duplicates are the seats whereon the
+Princess sits in the course of the action, not because weariness, but
+because her rank, expressly desires it. One discovers now (caught in
+the Act it may be said to be) a long fringed table, dividing the middle
+chamber (which is itself a hyphen to the two coulisses) into two
+halves. One would not expect that this session-table, in its turn,
+would be again halved by something which a stupid person hardly sees.
+But let a man step into Victor's shop; then will he have a view of a
+strip of silk-cord, which, beginning under the pier-table, streaming
+across the agate floor and under the partition-table, ends in front
+on the threshold; and thus a mere silk-band easily divides the
+dividing-table and thereby the dividing-chamber, and finally
+the divided company of performers, into two of the most equal
+halves,--whence let us learn that at court everything is cut up, and
+even the prorector, in his time and turn, is stretched out on the
+dissecting-table. Of this silk-lace, wherewith the grand seignior
+divides his favorites from above downwards, but into fractions, we
+cannot and must not say any more in the First Act, because--it is
+over....
+
+I found it uncommonly easy to draw up this scene in a serious manner;
+for as, according to Plattner, the ridiculous attaches only to man, the
+sublime, which in my performance assumes the place of the comic, was
+easy to be had in an act where nothing living played, not even cattle.
+
+Act Second.--The stage grows now more alive, and upon it enters now the
+Princess, handed in by the Italian Minister from coulisse No. 1; both
+act at first, like nature, silently on this parade-ground, which on
+paper is already two pages long....
+
+Just one look from the stage into the stage-box! Victor is playing also
+on his own account, in the fact that he picks out from the lorgnettes
+which he has to sell the most concave, and gets therewith a view
+of the heroine of my benefit-comedy.... He saw the confession- and
+praying-stool on which she had to-day already knelt. "I wish," he said
+to Tostato, "I had been her father confessor to-day; I would have
+pardoned her her sins, but not her virtues." She had, in fact, that
+regular statuesque and Madonna's-face, which covers quite as often
+hollow as well-filled female heads; her courtly _début_ concealed, it
+is true, every wave and every gleam of wit and expression under the icy
+crust of decorum; but a soft, childlike eye, which makes us eager for
+her voice, a patience, which remembers rather her sex than her rank, a
+weary soul which yearned for a twofold repose, perhaps for her maternal
+fields, even an unnoticeable line around the eyes, drawn by pain in
+those organs, or perhaps by still deeper ones,--all these charms, which
+grew into sparks, cast into the dry tinder of the partner behind the
+eye-glass, made him in his box regularly half-crazy at the fate of such
+charms. And how could it do otherwise than make one's head hot,
+especially when the heart is already so, to think that these innocent
+victims, like the Moravian women, must see alps and oceans rise between
+their cradle and bridal-bed, and that cabinets export them like
+silkworm-seed in the cornucopia of despatches?... We turn again to our
+Second Act, wherein one proposes nothing more than to--arrive.
+
+Coulisses Nos. 1 and 2 are still choke-full of actors and actresses,
+who must now come out. This is the day on which two courts, like two
+armies, are halted over against each other in two rooms, composedly
+preparing themselves for the minute when they are to march out and
+stand face to face, until at last it actually comes to that point, to
+which after such preparations and in such nearness to each other it
+very naturally must come, that of going away. The cubic contents of No.
+1 stream after the Princess, consisting of Italians;--at the same
+moment, also, the court-retinue from coulisse No. 2 takes up its line
+of march towards head-quarters; it consists of Flachsenfingenites. At
+this moment two countries--properly only their abstracted and
+evaporated spirits--stand quite near each other, and now all depends
+upon the silken strings beginning to operate which I stretched
+across the room in the first Act; for the boundary shiftings and
+population-mixings of two so contiguous lands as Germany and
+Italy would be in one room almost as inevitable as in a _Papal
+brain-chamber_, had we not the string; but _that_ we have, and this
+keeps two populations, threatening to run into each other, so
+effectually apart, that it is only a pity and a shame--honesty feels
+the greatest--that the German Cabinets have not drawn some such cordon
+between themselves and the Italian; and did it not, then, depend upon
+them, where they would apply the cord,--to the floor, or to Italian
+hands or to Italian necks?
+
+When the English General History of the world and its German abridgment
+shall once have so nearly come up with the times as to take in hand and
+relate the year of this transfer, and among other things are able to
+remark that the Princess, after her entrance, seated herself in the
+velvet chair,--then should the Universal History quote the author from
+whom it borrows, namely, myself.... That was the second Act, and it was
+a very good one, and not so much comic as sublime.
+
+Third Act.--In this there is nothing but talking. A court is the
+parlor or talking-room of the country; the ministers and envoys are
+_listening-brethren_.[124] The Flachsenfingen Secretary read at a
+distance an Instrument, or the emption-bill of her marriage. Thereupon
+speeches were whispered,--two by the Italian minister,--two, also, by
+the Flachsenfingen minister (Schleunes),--none by the bride, which was
+a shorter way of saying nothing than that of the ministers was.
+
+Since, now, this sublime Act were verily ended, if _I_ should say
+nothing: it will, I trust, be allowed me for once, after many weeks, to
+obtain by begging and to append a little _extra-leaf_, and therein to
+say something.
+
+            AN EXTRA-LEAF (BY GRACIOUS PERMISSION) UPON THE
+                 GREATER FREEDOM ENJOYED IN DESPOTISMS.
+
+Not only in Gymnasia and republics, but even (as may be seen on the
+former page) in monarchies, speeches enough are made,--not to the
+people, but still to their _curatores absentes_.[125] Even so is there
+in monarchies freedom enough, although in despotisms there may be still
+more of it than in them or in republics. A true despotic state has,
+like a frozen cask of wine, not lost its _spirit_ (of freedom), but
+only compressed it from the watery circumference into a fiery point; in
+such a happy state freedom is distributed merely among the few who are
+_ripe_ for it, the Sultan and his Bashaws, and that goddess (who is
+pictured still oftener than the bird Ph[oe]nix) holds herself
+indemnified, and more and better than that, for the reduced _number_ of
+her worshippers, by their _worth_ and _ardor_, since her few
+_epopts_[126] or _initiates_--the Bashaws--enjoy her influence in a
+measure of which a whole people is never capable. Freedom, like an
+inheritance, is lessened by the multitude of heirs; and I am convinced
+that he would be most free who should be free alone. A democracy and an
+oil-painting are to be put only on a canvas without _knots_
+(inequalities), but a despotism is a piece of _relieved_ work,--or
+something still more rare: despotic freedom lives, like canary-birds,
+only in _high_ cages; republican liberty, like yellow-hammers, only in
+_long_ ones.
+
+A despot is the _practical reason_ of a whole country; the subjects are
+just so many impulses contending therewith, which must be overcome. The
+legislative power, therefore, belongs to him alone (the executive to
+his favorites);--even mere talented men (like Solon and Lycurgus) held
+the law-giving power in themselves alone, and were the _magnetic
+needle_ which _guided_ the ship of state; a despot consists, as their
+throne-successor, of almost nothing but laws, his own and others at
+once, and is the magnetic mountain, which draws the ship of state to
+itself. "To be one's own slave is the hardest slavery," said an old
+man, at least an ancient and a Latin; but the despot demands of others
+only the easier kind, and takes upon himself the harder. Another says
+_Parere scire, par imperio gloria est_;[127] a negro slave, therefore,
+wins glory and honor as much as a negro king. _Servi pro nullis
+habentur_;[128] hence it is that political nullities feel so little the
+pressure of the court atmosphere; whereas despotic realities earn their
+freedom by the very fact that they know so well how to feel and prize
+its worth. A republican in the nobler sense, e. g. the Emperor of
+Persia, whose liberty-cap is a turban and his liberty-tree a throne,
+fights for freedom behind his military Propaganda and behind his
+Sans-culottes with an ardor such as the ancient authors demand and
+depict in the Gymnasia. Nay, we are never justified in denying such
+enthroned republicans a Brutus's greatness of soul, before we have put
+them to the proof; and if in history good were delineated more than
+evil, one would have even now the means of showing, among so many
+Shahs, Khans, Rajahs, and Califs, many a Harmodius, Aristogeiton,
+Brutus, &c. who was able to pay for _his_ freedom (slaves contend for
+another's) even with the death of otherwise _good_ men and friends.
+
+   _End of the graciously allowed Extra-leaf upon the greater Freedom
+                        enjoyed in Despotisms_.
+
+
+The extra-leaf and the Third Act are ended, but the latter was shorter
+and more serious than the former has been.
+
+Fourth Act.--By the act of dropping the curtain and raising it again, I
+have carried the world over from the shortest Act into the longest. To
+the Princess who now, as the German Imperial History announces, is
+sitting--came her compatriots in a body, who neither looked very
+honest nor very stupid, the chief-governess, the Court-confessor, the
+Court-Æsculapius, ladies and servants and all. This court-train does
+not say its farewell,--that has already been said privately,--but
+merely recapitulates it by a silent bow. The next step of the united
+Italians was from the middle chamber to--Italy.
+
+The Italians passed along before Sebastian's warehouse, and wiped off
+from their faces, whose hard parts were _en haut-relief_,--the German
+were _en bas-relief_, a nobler glimmer than that which courts
+communicate: Victor saw among so many accentuated eye-sockets the
+multiplied signs of the melancholy with which he himself was oppressed
+as he thought of the willing stranger-heart which remained behind alone
+under the frosty canopy of the German throne and clouds, torn away from
+her loved ways and scenes, brought before microscopic eyes, whose focal
+point scorches into tender feelings, and bound to a breast of ice....
+
+When he thought of all this, and saw the compatriots, how they pocketed
+their feelings and packed themselves off, because they were not
+permitted to exchange another word with the Princess; and when he
+looked upon the mute, submissive form within there, who was not allowed
+to show any other _pearls_ than Oriental ones, (although the dream and
+the possession of the latter signifies Western ones, or of the evening
+land,--tears, I mean,) then did he wish, "Ah, that I could only, thou
+good creature, draw a treble veil over thy eye long enough for it to
+shed a tear!--might I only kiss that hand, so rudely set up at auction,
+as thy court-ladies are now doing, so as to inscribe with my tears upon
+the sold hand the nearness of a sympathizing heart." ...
+
+Be tender and expand not your hatred of princes into hatred of
+princesses! Shall a bowed-down female head not touch our hearts with
+pity, because it leans on a mahogany table? and shall great tears not
+move us, because they fall upon silk? "It is too hard," Victor said,
+when in Hanover, "that poets and _magistri legentes_, when they pass by
+a chateau, make, with an envious, malicious pleasure, the remark, In
+there as much bread of sorrow is baked, perhaps, as in fishermen's
+huts. O yes, doubtless greater and harder loaves! But is the eye, out
+of which in the badger's kennel of a Scotchman nothing extorts a tear
+but the smoke of the room, worthy of a greater compassion than the
+tender one which, like that of an Albino, smarts at the very rays of
+joy, and which the spirit fills with spiritual tears? Ah, down in the
+valleys only the skin is punctured, but up on the high places of rank,
+the heart; and the index-hand of the village clock moves merely around
+the hours of hunger and sweat, but the second-hand, set with
+brilliants, flies round dreary, despairing, bloody minutes."
+
+But fortunately never is rehearsed to us the passion-history of those
+womanly victims, whose hearts are tossed to the mint, and, like other
+jewels, cast among the throne-insignia,--who, as flowers with souls,
+hung upon an ermine-clad dead man's heart, fall to pieces, unenjoyed,
+on the bed of state, mourned by no one, save by a distant, tender soul,
+which finds no place in the Court-almanac....
+
+This Act consists of nothing but _goings_: in fact, this whole comedy
+resembles the life of a child. In the first Act, there was _providing
+of household furniture_ for the coming existence; in the second, the
+_arrival_; in the third, _talking_; in the fourth, _learning to walk_,
+&c.
+
+When Germany had delivered discourses enough to Italy, and Italy to
+Germany, then Germany, or rather Flachsenfingen, or properly a piece of
+it, the Minister Schleunes, took the Princess by the hand and led her
+out of the torrid zone into the frigid; I mean, not from the bridal bed
+to the wedded bed, but--from the Italian territory of the apartment
+into the Flachsenfingenite, away over the silken Rubicon. The
+Flachsenfingen court stands over yonder as right wing, and has not yet
+gone into the fight. So soon as she had passed the silken line, then it
+was well that the first thing she did in her new land should be
+something memorable; and in fact she did, before the eyes of her new
+court, take 4½ paces and--sit down in the Flachsenfingen chair, which I
+set out vacant for that purpose in the very first Act. Now, at last,
+the right wing marched into fire, for the kissing of hands and sleeves.
+Each one in the right wing--the left not at all--felt the dignity of
+what he entered upon, and this feeling which melted into one with
+personal pride came--as according to Plattner pride is akin to the
+sublime--quite _apropos_ to my Benefit-farce, in which I cannot succeed
+in being sublime enough. Great and silent, embarked in silken bow-nets,
+buried in a gulf of robes, the court-dames sail up with their lips to
+the still hand which is fastened with conjugal manacles to a
+stranger's. Less stately, but still stately, is urged on, also, the
+Adamitish portion of the _Dramatis Personæ_, among whom, unfortunately,
+I see the apothecary Zeusel.
+
+We know no one among them but the minister, his son Mat, who does not
+observe anything whatever of our hero, the Physician in ordinary to the
+Princess, Culpepper, who, transformed by fat and his doctor's beaver
+into a heavy Lot's-pillar-of-salt, pushes himself like a turtle into
+the presence of the Regent and Patient.
+
+No mortal knows how Zeusel torments me. Contrary to all order of
+precedence, I prefer to present, sooner than I do him, the fat
+livery-servants, swollen into knavish stupidity, whose coats consist
+less of threads than of laces, and who bend themselves like yellow
+ribbon-preparations before weary eyes, wont to look on fairer forms.
+Victor regarded, through his English opera-glass, the Italian glazed
+court-faces as at least picturesquely beautiful; on the contrary, he
+found the German parade-masks so worn out and yet so starched, so
+languid and yet so on the stretch, their looks so evaporated and
+yet so brimstone-smoked!... I still keep Zeusel back by means of some
+Easter-lambs or _agnus Dei's_ of pages' faces, soft and white as mites;
+a nurse would like to lay them with their nipple-glass-mouths to her
+breast.
+
+Zeusel was no longer to be restrained; he has broken through and has
+the Princess by the wing--the whole joke of this play, I mean the whole
+serious meaning of it, is now once for all spoiled. This gray fool has
+in his old days--his nights are still older--buttoned himself into a
+complete historical copper-plate, that is to say, into a zoölogical
+fashionable waistcoat, wherein, with his four variegated rings, too, he
+looks for all the world like a green game-wagon, on which the animal
+pieces of the whole chase are painted, and four rings for the ringing
+of the swine's snouts are there _in naturâ_.[129] I must now see and
+suffer it,--as he does everything in the past,--while he, fuddled with
+vanity and hardly able to distinguish watch-chains from gala-coats,
+runs up and catches at some silken stuff to kiss it. It was easy to
+foresee that the man would spoil my whole altar-piece with his
+historical figure; I would absolutely have suppressed the ninny and
+covered him up behind the frame of the picture, had he not with his
+flappers and skippers stood out too prominently and made too much of a
+chattering; and then, too, my correspondent has expressly introduced
+and designated him among the benefit-confederates. It hardly pays for
+the trouble to write--
+
+Act Fifth; since all is now thrown into pickle and the reading world is
+in a grin. In the Fifth Act, which I make without any gusto, there
+still continued to be nothing done,--whereas Tragedy-makers and
+Christians turn over the conversion and all important matter into the
+last Act, as, according to Bacon, a courtier thrust his petitions into
+the Postscript,--nothing, I say, except that the Princess let her new
+maids of honor do their first example in arithmetic and subtraction;
+namely, the problem of disrobing.... And as undressing concludes the
+fifth Acts of Tragedies, where Death does it,--and of Comedies, where
+Love does it,--so, too, would this Benefit-Comedy, which, like our
+life, wavers between Comedy and Tragedy, wearily end with an
+undressing.
+
+                      _End of the Benefit-Comedy_.
+
+
+I was too much excited yesterday. To be sure the Apothecary is the Dog
+and Cat, in my picture, biting each other under the table of the Holy
+Supper; but, upon the whole, the very farce is sublime. Let one just
+consider that all is carried on in a monarchical form of government,
+which, according to Beattie, more than the republican form, helps out
+the comic,--that, according to Addison and Sulzer, precisely the most
+waggish men are the gravest, and that, consequently, the same thing
+must hold in regard to the stuff they work;--one must then see at once,
+from the comic element which my Acts contain, that they are serious....
+
+My hero delivered in the shop a vehement Father Merz's controversial
+sermon _against_ something which imperial cities and towns preach in
+favor of: "That men can act so without brains, the white or the gray,
+and without a particle of taste, as not to be ashamed sinfully and like
+dogs to fritter away the two or three years in which Pain has them not
+yet in his game-ticket, nor Death on his night-list,--not in doing
+absolutely nothing, or in the half bar-rests of chancery-holidays or
+the whole bar-rests of comitial holidays, or with the whimsicalities of
+joy,--what were more laudable?--but with the whimsicalities of torture,
+with twelve Herculean labors to do nothing, in the correction-houses of
+antechambers, on the _tratto di corda_ of tight-strung ceremonials....
+My dear seneschal, my fairest chief-governess, I approve all; but
+life is so _short_ that it does not repay the trouble to make one's
+self a _long_ queue[130] therein.--Could we not shake out our hair,
+and leap over all entrance-halls (or -hells), over all ushers and
+dancing-masters, away into the very midst of the May-flowers of our
+days, and into their flower-cups?... I will not express myself
+abstractly and scholastically; if I did, I should have to say, Like
+dogs, ceremonies grow mad with age; like dancing-gloves, each serves
+only for once, and must then be thrown away; but man is such a curséd
+ceremonious creature, that one must swear he knows no greater or longer
+day than the diet[131] of Ratisbon."
+
+While Victor was at his meal, Tostato was not present, but in the shop.
+Now he had already, the evening before, been unable to get out of his
+head a design of kissing the pretty dunce. "If I can kiss a saint who
+is stupid as a cow but _once_, then I have peace for the rest of my
+life." But, unluckily, the so-called _smallest_ (the sister), whose
+understanding and nose were too great, had to float round the dunce, as
+bob to the angle; and the bob would instantly have twitched, had he so
+much as put a lip to the bait. However, he was cunning, at least: he
+took our _smallest_ on his knee, and danced her up as Zeusel's coachman
+did him, and called this _clever_ one sweet names over her head, all of
+which he dedicated with his eyes to the _stupid_ one (at court he will
+dedicate with reversed dissimulation). He covered up twice in joke the
+spying eyes of the _smallest_, merely in order to do it a third time in
+earnest, when he drew the dunce to himself, and with his right hand
+brought her into a position, where he could,--especially as she allowed
+it, because girls do not like to refuse a trick, often from the mere
+pleasure of guessing it,--amidst his court-services to the blind one,
+offer the other the hasty kiss, for which he had already contrived so
+many _avant-propos_ and lines of march. Now was he satisfied and well;
+if he had been compelled to lie in wait two evenings longer for the
+kiss, he would have fallen deeply in love.
+
+He was again sitting at his masthead when the Princess dined. It took
+place with open doors. She stirred up his wild-fire of love with the
+gold spoon as often as she pressed it to her small lips; she scattered
+the fire apart again with the two toothpicks (sweet and sour) as often
+as she resorted to them. Tostato & Co. disposed to-day of the most
+costly articles. No man knew the _& Co_.,--only Zeusel looked more
+sharply into Victor's face, and thought, "I must have seen you before."
+Towards half past two in the afternoon, good luck would have it that
+the Princess herself came to the shop, to look up Italian flowers for a
+little girl with whom she had fallen in love. In all masquerades, as
+every one knows, one takes masquerade liberties, and in every journey
+the freedom of a fair. Victor, who in disguises and on journeys was
+almost too bold, undertook to speak in the mother-tongue of the
+Princess, and, in fact, with wit. "The Devil," thought he, "cannot
+surely catch me for that." He remarked, therefore, with the tenderest
+complacency toward this fair child in Moloch's arms, simply this in
+regard to the silk-flowers: "The flowers of joy, too, are unhappily,
+for the most part, made of velvet and iron wire, and with the
+_shaping-iron_." It was only a miracle that he was polite enough to
+leave out the circumstance that it was just the Italian nobility who
+elaborated the Italian Flora. She looked, however, at his goods, and
+bought, instead of flowers, a _montre à régulateur_,[132] which she
+requested to have brought over to her.
+
+He delivered the watch to her with his own hand; but, unfortunately, no
+less with his own hand--the reader will be frightened, but at first he
+himself was frightened, and yet thought over the conceit till at last
+he approved it--had he previously stuck on, above the _Imperator_ of
+the watch, a delicate strip of paper, wherein, with his own hand, he
+had written, in pearl type: "_Rome cacha le nom de son dieu et elle eut
+tort; moi je cache celui de ma déesse et j'ai raison_."[133]
+
+"I know this people well enough," thought he; "they never open or wind
+up a watch in their life!" Ha, Sebastian! what will my reader or _thy_
+lady reader think?
+
+She started this very evening for the country she had obtained by
+marriage, the future string-floor of her sceptre. Our Victor felt
+almost as if he had transferred another heart than the metal one with
+the billet, and thought with pleasure of the Flachsenfingen court.
+Before her ran her copied bridegroom or his litter, from which he
+alighted on the wall of the bedchamber. As he was her god, I can
+compare him or his image with the images of the ancient gods, who were
+carried round on a peculiar _vis-à-vis_, called a _thensa_,[134]--or in
+a portrait-box, called [Greek: naos],[135]--or in a cage, called
+[Greek: kadiskon].[136]
+
+Thereupon Victor went with his commercial consul round behind the
+coulisses of the benefit theatre. He untied the silken demarcation-line
+and barring-chain,--drew it up like a disgusting hair,--felt of
+it,--held it first far from his eye, then near to it,--and pulled it
+apart, before he said: "The power may lie where it will,--a silk ribbon
+may insulate bodies politic as well as electrical, or it may be with
+princes as with cocks, who never can get a step farther, if one takes
+chalk and draws therewith a straight line from their bill to the
+ground,--nevertheless this much you see, partner,--if an Alexander
+should displace the boundary-stones, such a string would be, in
+opposition thereto, the best epitome of the natural law and a
+_barrière-alliance_ of the same nature." He went into her bedroom, to
+the empty sepulchre,--that is, to the bed of the risen bride,--into
+which the _sponsus_ could look down as he lay at anchor on the wall.
+Whole divisions of conceits marched mutely through his head, which,
+thus full, he pressed sidewise with his cheek against a silken pillow,
+as large as a lap-dog's, or the side-cushion of a carriage. Thus
+reclining and kneeling, he said, speaking half into the feathers:[137]
+"Would that on the other pillow also there lay a face looking into
+mine! Dear Heaven! two human faces opposite each other,--each drawing
+the other into its eyes,--listening to each other's sighs,--breathing
+away from each other the soft, transparent words,--that were what you
+and I absolutely could not stand, partner!"--He sprang up, gently
+patted down his hare's form smooth again, and said, "Lay thyself softly
+around the heavy head which sinks upon thee; smother not its dreams;
+betray not its tears." Had even the Count of O----, with his fine,
+ironical look, come in at this moment, he would not have minded this.
+It is unfortunate for us Germans that we alone--while to the Englishman
+even a world's-man sets down his hare's leaps, caprioles, and gambols
+as so many elegant _pas_, _forward capers_ and _backward capers_ and
+_side-capers_--cannot possibly march along with sufficient gravity and
+composure.
+
+At evening he ran in again to the harbor of his beekeeper; and his
+tossing heart threw out its anchor into the tranquil, blooming nature
+around him. The old man had meanwhile mustered up all his old papers,
+baptismal and marriage-certificates, and private documents of reference
+for the Nuremberg Bee-father's case, and said, "Let the gentleman read
+them!" He wanted himself to hear it all over again. He showed also his
+"Trinity-ring" from Nuremberg, in which was inscribed:
+
+
+                 "Here, by this ring, you see,
+                  Father, Son, Spirit, three,
+                  Make one sole Deity."
+
+
+The Bee-father went on to make no secret of it, that he formerly,
+before he procured this ring in Nuremberg on a court-day, had not been
+able to believe in the Trinity; "but now one must be a beast, if he
+could not comprehend it."--The morning before his departure, Victor
+was in a double embarrassment,--he was very desirous of having a
+present; secondly, of making one. What he wanted to have was a plump
+hour-watch,[138] won at a raffle where the ticket was twenty kreutzers.
+This piece of work, whose thick hand had measured off the thread of the
+old man's life on the dirty dial-plate in nothing but gay, joyous
+bee-hours, he wanted as a Laurence's-box,[139] an amulet, an
+Ignatius's-plate,[140] against hours of Saul. "A manual laborer," said
+he, "needs really only a little sun, to go warmly and contentedly
+through life; but we, with our fantasy, are often as badly off on the
+sunny side as on the stormy side,--man stands more firmly in mud than
+on ether and morning-redness." He wanted to press upon the acceptance
+of the happy veteran of life, as purchase-money for the hour-watch and
+prize-medal for his lodgings, his own watch that told the seconds.
+Lind had not the heart for it, but grew red. At last Victor represented
+to him that the second-watch was a good fire-ball[141] for the
+Trinity-ring, a thesis-image of that article of faith, for the
+_threefold_ hands made, after all, only _one_ hour.--Lind _swapped_.
+
+Victor could neither be the mocker nor the Bunclish[142] reformer of
+such an erring soul, and his sympathetic whimsicality is nothing but a
+doubting sigh over the human brain, which has its seventy _normal
+years_, and over life, which is an interim of faith, and over the
+theological doctors'-rings, which are just such Trinity-rings, and over
+the theological lecture-rooms and recitation-rooms, wherein just such
+second-telling watches indicate and strike.
+
+--At last he leaves Kussewitz at six o'clock in the morning. A very
+beautiful daughter of the Count of O---- did not come back until seven
+o'clock; that is fortunate for us all, for otherwise he would be still
+sitting there.
+
+The Dog-post-day is run out. I know not whether I should make an
+extra-leaf or not. The Intercalary Day is at the door; I will therefore
+let it be, and only insert a Pseudo-extra-leaf, which, as is well
+known, differs from a canonical merely in this,--that in the apocryphal
+I do not give notice by any superscription, but only slip off from the
+history in an underhand way to mere irrelevant things.
+
+I take up my historical thread again, and ask the reader what he
+thinks of Sebastian's flirtations. And how does he explain them to
+himself?--He replies, and philosophically indeed: "Through Clotilda;
+she, by her magnetizing, has put him _en rapport_ with the whole female
+world; she has knocked at this swarm of bees, and now there is no more
+peace.--A man may sit for twenty-six years cold and sighless in his
+book-dust; but when he has once breathed the ether of love, then is the
+oval hole of the heart forever shut, and he must go forth into the air
+of heaven and be continually gasping at it, as I see by the coming
+dog-post-days plainly enough." The reader has accustomed himself to a
+quaint philosophical style, but what he says is true; hence a maiden
+never sues so eagerly for a second lover for her stage as after
+the decease of the first, and after her vows to throw away her
+recruiting-license.
+
+But how could the reader fail to hit upon still weightier
+reasons,[143]--1. General love, and 2. Victor's maternal marks?
+
+1. General love is too little understood. There is as yet no
+description of it extant but mine,--namely, in our days,
+reading-cabinets, dancing-halls, concert-halls, vineyards,
+coffee-tables, and tea-tables are the forcing-houses of our hearts and
+the wire-mills of our nerves; the former are too big, the latter too
+fine. Now when, in these marriage-seeking and marriageless times, a
+young man, who still watches like a Jew for his female Messiah, and
+still is without the highest object of the heart, accidentally reads
+with a dancing-partner, with a lady member of his club, or an
+_associée_, or sister in office, or other collaboratress, a hundred
+pages in the "Elective Affinities" or in the Dog-post-days,--or
+exchanges from three to four letters with her upon the culture of silk
+or clover, or on Kant's _Prolegomena_,--or scrapes the powder from her
+forehead some five times with the powder-knife,--or with her, and by
+her side, ties up the intensely fragrant kidney-beans,--or actually at
+the ghostly hour (which becomes full as often the sentimental hour)
+quarrels with her on the first principle of morals;--then is this much
+certain,--that the aforesaid youth (provided _refinement_, _feeling_,
+and _reflection_ hold a mutual balance within him) must needs behave a
+little madly, and feel towards the aforesaid collaboratress (that is,
+if she does not by some higglings of head or heart offend against his
+feelers) something which is too warm for friendship and too _unripe_
+for love,--which borders on the former, because it includes several
+objects, and on the latter, because of this it dies. And this is, in
+fact, neither more nor less than my general love, which I have
+otherwise called simultaneous and Tutti-[144]love. Examples are odious;
+else I would adduce mine. This universal love is a glove without
+fingers (or mitten), into which, because no partitions separate the
+four fingers, any hand easily slips; into the partial love, or the
+glove proper, only a single and particular hand can squeeze itself. As
+I was the first to discover this fact and island, I can give it the
+name wherewith others will have to name and call it. It shall be
+christened henceforward collective or simultaneous love, though
+I might also, if I and Kolbe chose, let it be named preluding
+love,--confederate-tenderness,--general warmth,--the fidelity of
+adopted childhood.
+
+To please the theologians and humor their fiddle-faddle about final
+causes, I throw in here the following fixed principle: I should like to
+see the man who, without this general love, could in our times, when
+paired love is, by the demands of a greater _metallic_ and _moral_
+capital, made more rare, hold out three years.
+
+2. The second cause of Victor's so easily falling in love with women
+was his maternal mark,--i. e. a resemblance to his own and every
+mother. Besides, he asserted that his ideas had exactly the pace--that
+is, the leap--of woman's, and that he had, in fact, a great deal of
+woman in him; at least, women resemble him in this,--that their love
+springs up through talking and intercourse. Their love, it may safely
+be said, has not much oftener begun than ended in hatred and coldness.
+An imposed and hated bridegroom makes often a loved husband. "I will,"
+he used to say in Hanover, "get into her heart's ears, if not into her
+heart. Could Nature, then, have built into the female bosom two such
+spacious heart-chambers--one can turn round therein--and two such neat
+heart's-alcoves--the heart's treasure-bag I have not yet touched
+upon--merely for this purpose, that a man's soul should hire these four
+apartments all alone without a mother's son beside, as a female soul
+inhabits the four cerebral chambers of the head's female suite? Quite
+impossible! and in fact they do no such thing: but (but whoever is
+afraid of immoderate wit, let him now step out of my track) in the two
+wings of this rotunda and in the side-buildings everything takes up its
+quarters that goes in, i. e. more than comes out--as in a toll-house or
+pigeon-house there is a constant coming and going--one cannot count, if
+one is there to see--it is a beautiful _temple_ in which there is
+_right of thoroughfare_.--Such regard not the few who so shut
+themselves up as to give the chief box of the heart to only a single
+lover, and merely the two side boxes to a thousand friends."
+
+Nevertheless Jean Paul never could succeed--though there might be ever
+so much surplus room--even so far as to get into the heart's ears,
+which, to be sure, is the very least thing. Because his face looks too
+meagre, his complexion too sallow, his head is much fuller than his
+pocket, and his income that of a titular-mining-superintendency: so
+they quarter the good rogue merely in the _coldest_ place away up under
+the eaves of the _head_ not far from the hair-pins,[145]--and there he
+is still sitting now and laughing out (in writing) his Eleventh
+Chapter....
+
+
+
+
+                           12. DOG-POST-DAY.
+
+   Polar Fantasies.--The singular Isle of Union.--One more Bit from
+     previous History.--The Stettin-Apple as Coat-of-Arms.
+
+
+We are living now in the dark middle-ages of this Biography, and
+reading on toward the enlightened eighteenth century or Dog's-day.
+Still, even in this twelfth, as in the night before a fair day, great
+sparks fly. "Spitz," said I, "eat me out of what thou wilt, only
+enlighten the world."
+
+Sebastian hastened on Saturday with joyful soul under an overclouded
+heaven to the island of Union. He could arrive there, if he did not
+delay, before the cloudiness was absorbed. Under a blue heaven, like
+Schickaneder[146] he brought out the Tragedies, but under an ashen-gray
+one the comedies, of his inner man. When it rained, he absolutely
+laughed out. Rousseau built up in his brain an _emotional_ stage,
+because he cared neither to go out of the coulisse nor into a box of
+actual life; but Victor had in his pay between the bony walls of his
+head a _comic_ theatre of the Germans, merely for the sake of not
+ridiculing _actual_ men; his humor was as ideal as the virtue and
+sensibility of other people. In this mood he delivered (like a
+ventriloquist) purely internal discourses to all Potentates;--he posted
+himself on the bench of Knights with church-visitation-discourses,--on
+the bench of the cities with funeral-discourses,--in the Papal chair he
+held forth in straw-wreath[147]-discourses to the _virgin_ Europe and
+the Ecclesiastical _bride_. The potentates had all, to answer him
+again, but one may imagine _how_--when he, like a minister from his
+prompter's hole put everything into their mouths;--and then, to be
+sure, he went his way and made fun of every one of them.
+
+Mandeville says in his Travels, that at the North Pole in the
+winter-half of the year every word freezes, but in the summer-half
+thaws out again and is audible. This intelligence Victor pictured out
+to himself on the way to the island; we will lay our ears to his head
+and listen to the inner buzzing.
+
+"Mandeville and I are not at all obliged to explain why at the North
+Pole words, as well as spittle, turn to ice as they fall, just as
+quicksilver does there; but we are obliged to reason from the
+phenomenon. If a laughing heir wishes there long years to his testator:
+the good man does not hear the wish sooner than the following spring,
+which may already have laid him dead. The best Christmas sermons do not
+edify good souls before haying-time. Vainly does the Polar court lay
+its New-Year's wishes before _Serenissimo_; he hears them not, till
+warm weather, and by that time half of them have already miscarried.
+They ought, however, to place a _circular stove_ as speaking-trumpet in
+the antechamber, so that one might hear in the _warmth_ the court
+speaker. An oratorical brother, without a stove-heater, would there be
+a defeated man. The faro-player, to be sure, vents his curses on St.
+Thomas's day; but not until St. John's day, when he has already won
+again, do they begin to travel;[148] and one might make summer-concerts
+out of the winter ones without any instruments: all one has to do is to
+seat one's self in the hall. From what other cause can it arise that
+the Polar wars are often carried on half-years before the declaration
+of war, except from this, that the declaration issued in winter does
+not make itself heard till _good weather_?--And so, too, one cannot
+hear anything of the winter-campaigns of the Polar armies till during
+the summer-campaigns. I, for my part, should prefer to travel to the
+Pole so as to be there only in winter, merely for the sake of uttering
+real insults to the people's, particularly the court-retinue's, face;
+by the time they came at last to hear them, the defamer would be snugly
+ensconced again at Flachsenfingen.--Their winter-amusements are not to
+blame for it, if the Northern administration fails to propose and
+decide a multitude of the weightiest things: but only during the
+canicular holidays is the voting to be heard; and then, too, can the
+decisions of the chamber upon matters of grace and _forest-law_ take
+shape in speech. But, O ye saints, if I at the Pole--while the sun was
+in Capricorn and my heart in the sign of the Crab--should fall down
+before the fairest woman, and in the longest night make to her
+declarations of love all night long, which, however, in a third of
+a third[149] assumed the form of ice and reached her in a frozen
+state,--i. e. did not reach her ears at all,--what should I do in
+summer, when I had already grown cold and already possessed her, if at
+the very hour in which I was hoping to have a good quarrel with her,
+now, in the midst of the scolding, my Capricorn-love-declarations
+should begin to thaw out and to utter themselves? I could do nothing
+with any composure, but to make the rule, Let any one be tender at the
+Pole, but only in Aries or Cancer. And if, finally, the transfer of a
+Princess should take place at the Pole, and, in fact, at that point
+where the earth does not move, which is best suited to the twofold
+inactivity of a Princess and a lady, and if the transfer should
+actually occur in a hall, where every one, particularly Zeusel, had in
+the long winter evenings slandered her; then, when the air in the hall
+began to repeat the slanders, and Zeusel in his distress sought to
+escape,--then would I pat his shoulder in a friendly manner and say,
+Whither away, my friend?"--
+
+"To Grosskussewitz, I help in the catching department," replied the
+veritable beadle of St. Luna, who behind some masonry had with one hand
+unclasped a book and with the other buttoned up a wallet. Victor felt a
+happy pressure upon his heart at an antique from St. Luna. He asked him
+about everything with an eagerness that seemed as if he had been away
+for an eternity _a parte ante_.[150] The reader who buttoned up his
+wallet became an author, and drew up at sight for the gentleman the
+year-books, i. e. hour-books of what had since occurred in the village.
+Into twenty questions Victor involved the one he had to put about
+Clotilda, and learned that she had been hitherto every day at the
+Parson's. This vexed him. "As if," thought he, "I had not strength of
+soul enough to look upon a friend's love,--and then too, as if----." In
+fact, he thought, at such a distance, he was the more at liberty to
+think of her.
+
+The reading constable was a reader under my jurisdiction: the book
+which he carried about on his poaching-expeditions after thieves was
+the _Invisible Lodge_.[151] Victor requested the First Part to be
+handed to him: the Beadle was in the Second, just at the Pyramid, at
+the moment of the first kiss. Our hero made more and more rapid strides
+in reading and in walking, and ended book and walk together.
+
+The island stood before him!--Here, on this island, my reader, open
+both eyes and ears!... Not that any memorable things presented
+themselves,--for these would of themselves make their way into
+half-open ears and pupils,--but for the very reason that only everyday
+matters are to be recorded.
+
+His Lordship stood alone on the shore of the sea which flowed round the
+island, and awaited and received him with a seriousness which veiled
+his friendliness, and with an emotion which still wrestled with his
+wonted coldness. He was going now to cross over to the island, and yet
+Victor saw no means of transportation. There was no boat there; nor
+would it have been practicable to get one off, because iron spikes
+stood under the water in such numbers and direction that no boat could
+move. The guard that had hitherto been stationed on the shore to
+protect the island against the destructive curiosity of the populace
+was to-day removed. The father went with his son slowly around the
+shore, and dislodged out of their beds, one after another, twenty-seven
+stones which lay at equal distances from each other. The island had
+been constructed _before_ his Lordship's blindness, and _then_ was
+not yet prohibited to strangers; but during that affliction he
+had caused its interior to be completed and concealed by unknown
+nocturnal workmen. During the tour round the island Victor saw its
+fruit-espaliers of high tree-stems, which seemed to direct their
+shadows and voices toward the interior of the island, and whose
+foliage-work the tossing waves sprinkled with their broken suns and
+stars; bean-trefoils clasped the pine-trees, and round the cones
+ringlets of purple blossoms played their antics; the silver-poplar
+bowed down under the enthroned oak; fiery bushes of Arabian beans
+blazed from farther in out of leafy curtains; trees, grafted by
+approach, on double stems latticed up the avenues from the eye; and by
+the side of a fir, which overtopped all the summits, was a taller one,
+which had been bent down by storms half over the water, and which
+rocked itself above its grave. White columns lifted up in the middle of
+the island a Grecian temple, immovable above all the wavering
+treetops.--Sometimes a stray tone seemed to run through the green Holy
+of Holies. A tall, black gate reached to the tops of the pines, and,
+painted with a white sun-disk, looked toward the east, and seemed to
+say to man, Pass through me; not only thy Creator, but thy brother, has
+worked, here!--
+
+Opposite to this gate lay the twenty-seventh stone. Victor's father
+displaced it, took out a magnet, bent down, and held its _south_ pole
+to the gap. Suddenly machines began to gnar, and the waves to whirl,
+and an iron bridge rose out of the water. Victor's soul was overfilled
+with dreams and expectations. Shuddering, he followed his father, and
+set foot upon the magic island. Here his father touched a thin stone
+with the _north_ end of the magnet, and the iron bridge sank down
+again. Before they stepped up to the elevated gate a key turned itself
+from within, and unlocked, and the gate flew open. His Lordship was
+silent. On his face a higher soul had risen like a sun: one no longer
+knew him; he seemed to be transformed into the genius of this magic
+island.
+
+What a scene! So soon as the gate was opened there ran to and fro
+through all twigs an harmonious murmur; breezes flew in through the
+gate, and absorbed the sounds into themselves, and floated on with
+them, trembling, and reposed only on bended blossoms.--Every step
+opened farther a great, sombre stage.--Round about the scene lay marble
+fragments, on which the blacksmiths' coals had drawn forms of
+Raphael's, sunken Sphinxes, map-stones, whereon dim Nature had etched
+little ruins and effaced cities, and deep openings in the earth, which
+were not so much graves as moulds for bells that had been cast therein.
+Thirty poisonous trees stood twined round with roses, as if they were
+signs of the thirty years of man's passionate madness. Three-and-twenty
+weeping birches had bent themselves down to form a low bush-work, and
+were crowded into each other; into this bush ran all the paths of the
+island. Behind the bushes ninefold crape-veils, in waves that mutually
+swallowed each other, obscured the sight of the high temple; through
+the veils five lightning-rods rose into the heavens, and a rainbow,
+formed of two shoots of water that leaped up and arched over into each
+other, hovered glittering over the twigs, and evermore the two streams
+arched themselves aloft, and evermore they shivered each other to
+pieces overhead by their contact.
+
+As Horion led his son, whose heart was grasped, affrighted, oppressed,
+kindled, chilled, by invisible hands, into the low birch thicket, the
+stammering dead-man's-tongue of an organ-trill began to speak, through
+the lone silence, to the sigh of man, and the tremulous tone sank too
+deeply into a soft heart.--There stood the two on a grave darkly built
+over with bush-work; on the grave lay a black marble, on which were
+chiselled a bloodless white heart, with a veil over it, and the pale
+words, "_It is at rest_." "Here," said his Lordship, "my second eye
+became blind; _Mary's_[152] coffin lies in this grave; when that
+arrived at the island from England, the diseased eye was too severely
+inflamed, and never saw again."--Never did Victor shudder so; never did
+he see on a face such a chaotic, shifting world of flying, coming,
+conflicting, vanishing emotions; never did such an ice of brow and
+eyes congeal upon convulsive lips;--and so a father looked, and a son
+felt every sensation repeated in himself.
+
+"I am unhappy," said his father, slowly; a more bitter, biting tear
+burned on the pupil of his eye; he hesitated a little, and placed his
+five open fingers upon his heart, as if he would grasp and pluck it
+out, and looked upon the pale stone one as if he would say, Why is not
+mine resting too? The good, dying Victor, crushed with the anguish of
+affection, melting into pity, longed to--fall upon the dear, desolated
+bosom, and to say more than the sigh, "O God, my good father!" But his
+Lordship gently repelled him, and the tear of gall, unshed, was stifled
+by the eyelids. His Lordship resumed, but more coldly: "Think not that
+I am specially affected; think not that I desire a joy or deprecate a
+sorrow: I live now without hope, and without hope I die."
+
+His voice came cutting over ice-fields; his glance was made sharp by
+frost.
+
+He continued: "When I have, perhaps, made _seven_ human beings happy,
+then must it be inscribed on _my_ black marble, _It rests_.... Why dost
+thou wonder so? Art thou even _now_ at peace?"--The father stared at
+the white heart, and then stared more fixedly straight before him, as
+if a shape had risen out of the grave,--the freezing eye laid and
+turned itself about on a rising tear, as if to smother it. Suddenly he
+drew back a veil from a mirror, and said, "Look in, but embrace me
+immediately after!" ... Victor gazed into the mirror, and saw, with a
+shudder, an eternally loved face appear therein,--the face of his
+teacher _Dahore_; his knees smote together, but still he did not look
+over, his shoulder, and embraced that father who was without hope.
+
+"Thou tremblest far too violently," said his Lordship; "but ask me not,
+my dear boy, why all is so. At a certain stage of years one opens no
+more the old breast, full as it may be."
+
+Ah, I pity thee! For _those_ wounds which can be disclosed are not
+deep; _that_ grief which a humane eye can discover, a soft hand
+alleviate, is but small; but the woe which a friend must not see,
+because he cannot take it away,--that woe which sometimes rises into
+the eye in the midst of blessedness in the form of a sudden trickle
+which the averted' face smothers,--_this_ hangs in secret more and more
+heavily on the heart, and at last breaks it, and goes down with it
+under the healing sod. So are iron balls tied to man when he dies on
+the sea, and they sink with him more quickly into his vast grave.--
+
+He continued: "I am going to tell thee something; but swear, here upon
+these precious ashes, never to divulge it. It concerns thy Flamin, and
+from him thou must conceal it."
+
+Victor, so hurled from one wave to another, started at this. He
+remembered that Flamin had wrung from him on the watch-tower the
+promise, that, if ever they should have offended each other too sorely,
+they would die together. He hesitated to take the oath; at last he
+said, "But shortly before my death may I tell it to him?"
+
+"Canst thou know when that will be?" said his father.
+
+"But in case--?"
+
+"Then!" said his father, coldly and curtly.--
+
+Victor swore, and trembled at the future import of the oath.
+
+He also had to promise not to visit this dark island before his
+Lordship's return.
+
+They passed out of the leafy mausoleum, and sat down on an overturned
+stalactite. At times, during the conversation, a strange harmonica-tone
+fell from leaf to leaf, and, at a great distance, the four rivers of
+Paradise seemed to go sounding away under a zephyr that trembled with
+it.
+
+The father began: "Flamin is Clotilda's brother, and the Prince's
+son."--
+
+Only such a lightning-flash of thought could now have penetrated into
+Victor's already dazzled soul; a new world now started up within him,
+and snatched him away from the great one before his senses.--
+
+"Furthermore," continued Horion, "January's three other children still
+live in England,--only the fourth, on the Seven Islands, is invisible."
+Victor comprehended nothing; his Lordship rent away all veils from the
+past, and introduced him to a new outlook into the life immediately
+before him, and into that which had flown away. I shall, in the sequel,
+communicate all his Lordship's disclosures and secrets to the reader;
+at present I will first relate the leave-taking of father and son.
+
+While his Lordship accompanied his son into the dusky, subterranean
+passages of former times, and told him all that he concealed from the
+world, tears started from Victor's eyes at many a trifle which could
+not deserve any; but the stream of these soft eyes,--it was not the
+narrative, but the returning contemplation of his unhappy father
+and the neighborhood of the buried and mouldering fair form and of
+the funereal marble, that wrung it out of the incessantly weeping
+heart.--At last all tones on the island ceased,--the black gate seemed
+to shut to,--all was still,--his Lordship came to an end with his
+revelations, and said, "Fulfil thy purpose of going to-day to
+Maienthal, and be cautious and happy!"--But although he took his leave
+with that refined reserve which in his rank guides and governs the
+hands and arms of even parents and children, still Victor pressed his
+childish bosom, so big with sighs and emotions, to his father's, with
+such an intensity as if he would fain crush in two his impoverished
+heart for the sake of the tears which he was compelled to let rise to
+sight ever hotter and larger. Ah, the forsaken one! When the bridge
+which clove asunder the father's and the son's days had risen up,
+Victor went over it alone, staggering and speechless; and when it had
+sunk into the water again, and the father had disappeared into the
+island, pity weighed him down to the ground; and when he had drawn all
+his tears, like arrows, out of his suffering heart, slowly and dreamily
+he quitted the still region of riddles and sorrows, and the dark
+funeral garden of a dead mother and a gloomy father, and his whole
+agitated soul cried incessantly, "Ah, good father! hope at least, and
+come back again, and forsake me not!"--
+
+And now all that in the foregoing part of the story has created
+obscurities, all that his Lordship exposed to his son, we will explain
+to ourselves also. It will still be remembered that, at the time when
+he set out for France to fetch away the Prince's children,--the
+so-called Welshman, Brazilian, and Asturian, and the _Monsieur_,--the
+dark intelligence of their abduction came to hand. This abduction,
+however, he had (as he now confessed) himself arranged,--only the
+disappearance of the _Monsieur_ on the Seven Islands had occurred
+without his knowledge, and he could therefore with his untruth mix some
+truth, as mouth-glue. These three children he caused secretly to be
+taken to England, and educated at Eton for scholars, and in London
+for civilians,[153] in order to give them back to their father as
+blood-related assistants of his tottering administration. Hence he had
+helped the so-called Infante (Flamin) become an administrative
+councillor. So soon as he once gets the whole infant colony together,
+he means to surprise and bless the father with the delightful
+apparition. The (at present) invisible son of the Chaplain, who before
+the embarkation took the small-pox and blindness, he therefore keeps in
+the dark, because otherwise it would be too easily guessed to whom
+Flamin properly belonged.
+
+Victor asked him how he would convince the Prince of a relationship to
+four or five strangers. "By my word," was Horion's first reply; then he
+subjoined the remaining evidences,--in Flamin's case, the testimony of
+his mother (the niece), who would come with him; in the case of the
+others; their resemblance to their pictures, which he still possessed,
+and finally the maternal mark of a Stettin apple.
+
+Victor had already often heard from the Parson's wife that all
+January's sons had a certain mother's or father's mark on the left
+shoulder-blade, which looked like nothing, except in autumn, when the
+Stettins ripen; then it also grew red, and resembled the original. The
+reader himself must remember, in the annals of the curious and learned
+societies, whole fruit-basketfuls of cherries, whose red pencilling was
+only faint on children, and heightened in redness not until the
+ripening of the prototypes on the twigs. If I could believe a
+fellow-bather of mine, I myself should have such a Stettin fruit-piece
+hanging on my shoulder; the thing is not probable nor important;
+meanwhile next autumn,--for I have proposed it to myself several
+autumns, but now Knef, through his dog, reminds me of it,--so soon as
+the Stettins mature, I might, to be sure, take a looking-glass and
+examine myself behind.--And on the same ground this Stettin festoon
+puts off the return of his Lordship, at least the transfer and
+recognition of the children, till the autumnal season of its
+reddening.--
+
+I make no scruple of communicating here a satirical note from my
+correspondent. "Make believe," he writes, "in regard to this
+intelligence, as if you did it at my behest, and, when you have once
+related his Lordship's _exposé_ and revelation, very quietly relate it
+over to your reader a second time; so that he may not forget, or get it
+confused. One cannot cheat readers enough, and a clever author will be
+fond of leading them into marten-traps, wolf-pits, and deer-nets." I
+confess, for such tricks I always had a poor talent; and, in fact, will
+it not be more creditable, both to me and to the reader, if he fixes it
+at once in his mind, at first hearing, that Flamin is January's natural
+and Le Baut's assumed son,--that the Parson's is blind, and not yet
+apparent,--that three or four other children of January's, from the
+Gallic seaboard towns, are still to follow;--more creditable, I say,
+than if I should now have to chew it over for him a second time, (in
+fact, it would be a third time,) that Flamin is January's natural and
+Le Baut's assumed son,--that the Parson's is blind, and not yet
+apparent,--and that three or four other children of January's, from the
+Gallic seaboard towns, are still to follow?
+
+The reason why his Lordship required of his son the oath of silence
+towards Flamin was, that the latter, by his native honesty, kept all
+secrets, but in a heat of passion betrayed all; because in such a case
+he would make his birth tell, merely for the sake of backing himself in
+a quarrel with an adversary; because he might the very next day, on
+account of this revelation, become, instead of a fencing-master with
+the sword of Themis, a fencing-scholar with the war-blade; and because,
+in fact, a secret, like love, fares still better between two partners
+than among three. His Lordship thought, too, that out of a man to whom
+you gave money in order that he might become something, more would be
+made than out of one who should be something because he had money, and
+who looked upon the coins as his hereditary arms, and not as the
+prize-medals laid out for his future redemption of them.
+
+After all these developments, his Lordship made to our Victor still one
+more, and a weighty one, upon which he was always to look back on the
+icy career of his future court-life as to a warning-tablet.
+
+When his Lordship was struck blind before the house that held the ashes
+of his beloved, his whole correspondence with England, with the niece
+and with the tutors of the princely children, was embarrassed, or at
+least changed. He was obliged to have the letters received by him read
+to him by a friend whom he could trust: but he could trust no one. Only
+one female friend he found out who deserved the distinguished
+preference of his confidence, and that was none else than Clotilda. He
+who did not, like a youth, squander his secrets, could nevertheless
+venture to put Clotilda in possession of his greatest, and to make
+her book-keeper and reader to him of the letters of her mother, the
+so-called niece. In fact, he held women's power of keeping a secret to
+be greater than ours,--at least in weighty matters and in the concerns
+of men whom they love.--But just hear what the Devil did last winter:
+to me it is memorable.
+
+His Lordship received a letter from Flamin's mother, in which she
+renewed her old entreaties for a speedier promotion of the beloved
+child, and her inquiries after his fortunes at the Parsonage. Luckily
+just then Clotilda was making a visit at St. Luna, and saved him the
+journey to Maienthal. He visited the Chamberlain, to hear the letter
+from the mouth of his reader. He had great difficulty in securing in
+Clotilda's chamber an hour free from eavesdroppers. When he at last got
+it, and Clotilda began to read to him the letter, the latter was called
+away from the reading by her step-mother. He hears her immediately come
+back again, read the letter over in a sort of darkly murmuring tone,
+and say softly that she was going away again, but would come back in a
+moment. After some minutes Clotilda appears, and when his Lordship asks
+why she went out the second time, she denies a second leaving,--his
+Lordship insists,--she likewise persists,--finally Clotilda falls upon
+the bitter conjecture whether Matthieu may not have been there, and
+with his theatrical art and throat, which contained all human voices,
+himself have mocked and travestied her, in order under her credentials
+to read the important letter. Ah, there was too much in favor of the
+conjecture and too little against it! To be sure Matthieu could not now
+undertake upon Flamin, whose academic career had just expired, the
+October-test of the shoulder-device; but he stuck (so it afterward
+seemed to Clotilda and his Lordship) with his green-frog-feet to that
+good soul, and, under the cloak of love for Agatha and for his friend,
+hung out his threads, let the wind swing and stretch them across
+between the princely palace and the Parsonage-house,--kept on spinning
+one after another, until at last his father, the minister Schleunes,
+should have woven the right web for the entangling of the prey.... I
+confess, this conjecture throws light for me on a thousand things.--
+
+Victor was even more astounded than we are, and proposed to his
+Lordship whether he might not, without injury to his oath, reveal to
+Clotilda his induction into these mysteries, as he had two reasons for
+it: first, her delicacy would be spared embarrassment at the appearance
+which her sisterly love must otherwise, in her opinion, have in his
+eyes;[154] secondly, one keeps a secret better, if only _one_ more
+person helps him hold his tongue about it, as is well known from the
+case of Midas's barber and the reeds; the third reason was, that he had
+several reasons. His Lordship naturally did not refuse.
+
+For the rest, he introduced his Victor with no pedantic rules of march
+to the ice-course and tilt-yard of the court. He merely advised him
+neither intentionally to seek nor to shun any one, particularly the
+house of Schleunes,--to unbridle his friend Flamin, who was in
+Matthieu's leading-strings, and to guide him, instead of by the bit,
+rather with a friendly hand,--and himself to covet the rank of a
+doctor, and nothing more. He said, rules before experience were like
+geometry before the operation for the cataract. Even after the harvest
+of experience Gratian's _homme de cour_ and Rochefoucauld's Maxims were
+not so good as the memoirs and history of courts, i. e. the experiences
+of others. Finally he appealed to his own example, and said, it was
+only within a few years that he had understood the following rules of
+_his_ father's.
+
+The greatest hatred, like the greatest virtue and the worst dogs, is
+quiet.--Women have more _flow_, and fewer _overflows_, of emotion than
+we.--There is nothing one hates so much in another as a _new_ fault,
+which he does not show till after some years.--One commits the most
+follies among people who are of no account.--It is the most common and
+pernicious delusion, that one always takes one's self to be the only
+one who remarks certain things.--Women and soft-hearted people are
+timid only in their own dangers, and courageous in those of others,
+where they have to save them.--Trust no one (and though it were a
+saint) who in the smallest trifle leaves his honor in the lurch; and a
+woman of that kind still less.--Most persons confound their vanity with
+their sense of honor, and allege wounds inflicted on the one as wounds
+inflicted on the other, and the reverse.--What we undertake from
+humanity, we should always accomplish, if we mixed in no selfishness
+with our motive.--The warmth of a man is by nothing more easily
+misunderstood than by the warmth of a young man.
+
+The last observation, which perhaps had a nearer reference, he had made
+while he was already on the shore of the island in the attitude of
+leave-taking, which he did with that considerate courtesy which in his
+rank guides the hands and arms of even parents and children.[155]
+
+
+                         THIRD INTERCALARY DAY.
+
+                 Meteorological Observations upon Man.
+
+When, in the former chapter, I wrote down his Lordship's pithy sayings,
+I found that some came into my own head, which might be serviceable for
+the Intercalary Day. I have never made one observation alone, but
+always twenty, thirty, in succession, and this very first one is a
+proof of it!
+
+                                   *
+
+When any one remains modest, not after praise, but after censure, then
+he is really so.
+
+                                   *
+
+The talk of the people, and still more the letters of maidens, have a
+peculiar euphony, arising from a constant interchange of long and short
+syllables (Trochees or Iambuses).
+
+                                   *
+
+The two things which a maiden most easily forgets are, first, how she
+looks (hence mirrors were invented); and, secondly, wherein the pronoun
+_that_ differs from the conjunction _that_. I fear, however, that they
+will from to-day forward observe the distinction, merely for the sake
+of upsetting my assertion. And _then_ one of my two touchstones is
+lost[156] with which I have hitherto tested learned ladies; the second,
+which I retain, is the left thumb-nail, which the penknife has
+sometimes notched full of red marks, but seldom, however, because they
+drive the quill more easily than they make the pen.
+
+                                   *
+
+One who has received many benefits ceases to _count_, and begins to
+_weigh_ them, as if they were votes.
+
+                                   *
+
+The transporting one's self into good characters does more harm to a
+poet or player, who retains his own, than entering into bad ones. A
+clergyman who, besides, is free to take only the first of these steps,
+is more exposed to moral _atony_[157] than the maker of verses and
+parts, who is able to make up again for a holy part by an unholy one.
+
+                                   *
+
+Passion makes the best observations and the wretchedest conclusions. It
+is a telescope whose field is so much the brighter, as it is narrower.
+
+                                   *
+
+Men require of a new Prince, Bishop, Domestic Tutor, Nursery Tutor,
+Capon-Stuffer, Town-Musician, or Town-Recorder _only in the first week_
+very special merits which were wanting in his predecessor; for in the
+second they have forgotten what they required and what they missed.
+
+                                   *
+
+Such sentences please women most and stay by them longest.
+
+                                   *
+
+Therefore, by way of reward, I will manufacture more than one upon
+themselves.--They regard others only as younger, not as fairer, than
+themselves.
+
+                                   *
+
+They are even ten times more artful and false towards each other than
+towards us; but we are almost more honest to each other than to them.
+
+                                   *
+
+They look to it only that one _does_ justify himself with them, no
+matter _how_.
+
+                                   *
+
+They forgive a loved man more stains than we do a loved woman. Hence
+the romance-writers let the heroes of their quill guzzle, storm, duel,
+and stay overnight anywhere and everywhere, without the least prejudice
+to the hero.--The heroine, on the contrary, must sit at home by her
+mother and be a little angel.
+
+                                   *
+
+On the whole, they are so delicate, so mild, so sympathetic, so
+refined, so loving and love-thirsty, that I cannot get it into my head
+why it is that they cannot really like each other, unless it is for
+some such reason as this, that they are too courteous to each other to
+be formally reconciled or formally at variance with each other. You
+dear ones! you sometimes love a man because he has a friend and is one.
+O how beautifully would a friend of your own sex _fit_[158] you!
+
+                                   *
+
+One learns taciturnity best among people who have none, and loquacity
+among the taciturn.
+
+                                   *
+
+If self-knowledge is the road to virtue, so is virtue still more the
+road to self-knowledge. An amended and purified soul is darkened by the
+least moral poison, as certain precious stones are by every other, and
+now after the amendment one observes for the first time how many
+impurities still lurk in all corners.
+
+                                   *
+
+I will close with some rules for improvement. Never, when the bosom has
+to fear that thorn in the side, anger, eloquently represent to any one
+his faults; for in the very act of convincing him of his guilt thou
+persuadest thyself of it, and so becomest exasperated. Picture to
+thyself every morning the possible situations and passions into which
+during the day thou mayst fall; then thou wilt deport thyself better,
+for one seldom behaves badly, in a repeated case, the second time.--Is
+thy friend angry with thee, then provide him an opportunity of showing
+thee a great favor. Over that his heart must needs melt, and he will
+love thee again.--No resolves are great save those which one has more
+than once to execute. Hence _forbearing_ is harder than _undertaking_;
+for the former has to be kept up longer, and the latter is also linked
+with the sense of a double expression of power, a psychological and a
+moral.--Only despair not at a single failing; and let thy whole
+repentance be--a nobler action.--Only make thyself (by stoicism, or in
+ally way thou canst) _tranquil_, then wilt thou have little trouble in
+making thyself _virtuous_ also.--Begin the culture of thy heart, not
+with the rearing of noble motives, but with the extirpation of bad
+ones. When the weeds are once withered or uprooted, then will the
+nobler flowerage spontaneously and vigorously spring up.--The virtuous
+heart, like the body, grows sound and strong more by _work_ than by
+good _food_.
+
+Therefore I can stop.
+
+
+
+
+                           13. DOG-POST-DAY.
+
+          Concerning his Lordship's Character.--An Evening of
+              Eden.--Maienthal.--The Mountain and Emanuel.
+
+
+In regard to his Lordship I have three words to say, that is, three
+opinions to state.
+
+The first is wholly improbable; it is, that, like all men of the
+world and of business, he regards mankind as an apparatus for
+experiments, as so much hunting-gear, war-material, knitting-work:
+such men look upon heaven only as the key-board to earth, and the soul
+as orderly-sergeant of the body; they carry on wars, not for the sake
+of winning crowns of oak-leaves, but to secure the oak soil and acorns;
+they prefer the successful man to the deserving one; they break oaths
+and hearts to serve the state; they respect poetry, philosophy, and
+religion, but as means; they respect riches, statistics of national
+prosperity, and health, as objects; all they honor about pure
+Mathesis[159] and pure female virtue is the transmutation of each into
+impure for manufactures and armies; in the higher astronomy all they
+care for is the transformation of suns into odometers[160] and
+way-marks for pepper-fleets, and in the most exalted _magister
+legens_[161] they seek only an alluring tavern-sign for poor
+universities.
+
+The second opinion is at least the opposite of the first, and an
+improvement upon it: it is, that to his Lordship, as to other
+great men, the race-course is the goal and the steps taken the
+garlands.--Fortune and misfortune differ, with him, not in _worth_, but
+in _manner_; both are, in his view, two converging race-tracks toward
+the eternity's ring of inner promotion; all accidents of this life are
+to him mere arithmetical examples in _unknown_ terms, which he solves,
+not however as a merchant, but as an indifferentialist[162] and
+algebraist, to whom products and multiplicands are of equal interest,
+and to whom it is all one whether he reckons by letters or by
+hundredweights.
+
+Verily, a man has almost as much to reproach himself with, if he is
+discontented, as if he had committed a crime; and inasmuch as it
+depends upon his ocean of thoughts, whether he will raise out of it as
+an island an Otaheite-Arcadia or the lowest hell, he deserves all that
+he creates....
+
+Nevertheless, the third opinion is the true one, and at the same time
+it is mine: his Lordship, how much soever he may seem to be an
+indeclinable man, who has no object, but is a verb in _mi_, has
+nevertheless the following paradigm (and so inversely we find in the
+most ordinary man a short plan for the most singular one): he is one of
+the unhappy great ones who have too much genius, too much wealth, and
+too little repose and knowledge, to be habitually happy; they hunt
+pleasure instead of virtue, and miss both, and cry out at last
+over every bitter drop which is given them in a sugar-loaf; like
+silver-plate, precisely at the point of melting in the fire of pleasure
+are they the most inclined to overspread themselves with a dark skin;
+their ambition; which otherwise hides with plans the emptiness of high
+life, is not strong enough for their heart, which in this emptiness
+withers; they do good from pride, but without the love of doing it;
+they play with the empty shell of life as with a ringlet, and deem it
+not even worth the while to shorten it; and yet they do deem it worth
+the while, when they, who stand through this night-frost of the soul,
+outwardly smiling and cold, inwardly all in a fever, without hope,
+fear, or faith, renouncing all, making light of everything, and shut up
+in themselves,--when they feel a stroke of death, a great sorrow clutch
+at their unhappy hearts.----Ah the poor lord! can thy heart then find
+no rest till it finds it under the lid of black marble?
+
+"Ah the poor lord!" his son incessantly repeated, as with oppressed
+soul he went toward Maienthal. The outward heaven around him was still;
+a great cloud completely overspread it, but rested on a blue rim along
+the whole circle of the horizon. In Victor's breast, on the contrary,
+streams of air rushed against each other and whirled together into a
+hurricane, drinking up brooks and tearing up trees. His father's image
+hung pale in this tempest. Victor's future days were hurled to and
+fro.--His future life was compressed into a narrow, veiled image, and
+it distressed him just as much to think that he _must_ live it as _how_
+he must.
+
+What saddened him most was the mere external and trifling circumstance
+that his father had remained alone and concealed in the depths of the
+island. Once the conjecture came over him, whether the greater part of
+what he had witnessed had not been mere dramatic machinery which his
+father (who in his youth had been a tragic poet) had employed to give
+more firmness to his vow of silence; but he was immediately disgusted
+at his own heart. Why are the purest souls tormented with a multitude
+of disgusting, poisonous thoughts, which like spiders crawl up on the
+shining walls, and which they only have the trouble of crushing to
+death? Ah, our _victories_ are not wholly distinguishable from our
+_defeats_!
+
+It is singular that the _perspective_ thought of Clotilda's
+blood-relationship to Flamin was the one which he followed out least of
+all.
+
+When man can obtain from reason no balsamic relief, he begs it at the
+hands of Hope and Illusion; and they two then willingly share his
+sorrow. Just as the blue sky of to-day by little and little peered
+through light seams in the clouds, and the sea of mist collected into
+hanging lakes, so also did the dark thoughts break asunder in Victor's
+soul.--And when the swollen masses of cloud in the broad blue passed
+into fleece, till at last the blue sea swallowed up all banks of vapor,
+and bore nothing on its infinite expanse but the blazing sun, then did
+Victor's soul also cleanse itself from vapors, and the sun-image of
+Emanuel, whom he was to-day to reach, shone soft and warm and cloudless
+into all his wounds.... The form of his loved Dahore, the form of his
+loved father, the form of his hidden mother, and all beloved images,
+reposed like moons in a mournful group over his head; and this sadness,
+and the sacred oath to keep himself virtuous and obey all his father's
+wishes, breathed upon his inflamed bosom some solace in regard to his
+father's fate.
+
+He could even to-day see the sun go down behind the church-tower of
+Maienthal.
+
+The broad cleared-up sky made him more tender, the thought of falling
+to-day upon the heart of a noble man, whose soul dwelt above this blue
+atmosphere, made him more exalted, the hope of being consoled by this
+man for his whole life made him more tranquil.--
+
+He hastened, and, his haste drew out the saddest lute-stop of his soul.
+For he seemed not to be going over the summer fields, but they seemed
+rather to be hurrying along before him; landscape after landscape,
+theatres of woods, theatres of grain-fields, flew by; new hills rose
+with other lights, and lifted up their woods, and others with theirs
+dropped down; long, shadowy steppes ran backward before the flood of
+yellow sunlight; now valleys full of flowers billowed around him, now
+bare, hot hill-shores carried him upward; the stream murmured close to
+his ear, and suddenly its windings glistened from far away across
+poppy-fields; white roads and green paths met him, and fled from him,
+and led round the broad earth; full villages, with gleaming windows,
+swept by, and gardens with undressed children; the declining sun was
+now lifted up, now lost again, and now withdrawn to the summits of the
+hills.--
+
+This fleeting of Nature's dissolving views bedimmed his moistened eye,
+and brightened the inner world; but the steady abiding of an incessant
+music, the constant choir of larks above him, whose contending cries
+melted to one in his soul, this distant hum from air and woods and
+bushes, this harmonica of Nature, moved him to say to himself: "Why do
+I in this solitude hold back every drop that would fall? No; besides, I
+am too sensitive to-day, and I will exhaust myself before I see the
+beloved man."
+
+At last he ascended the broad mountain that stations itself with its
+scattered columns of trees and gray cubes of rock before Maienthal,
+which lies in greenness at its foot.... Then the earth, tuned by the
+Creator, rang with a thousand strings; the same harmony stirred the
+stream, divided into gold and gloom, the humming flower-cup, the
+peopled air, and the waving bush; the reddened east and the reddened
+west stood stretched out like the two rose-taffeta wings of a
+harpsichord, and a tremulous sea gushed from the open heavens and the
+open earth....
+
+He burst into a mingling flood of tears at once of joy and sorrow, and
+the past and the future simultaneously stirred his heart. The sun with
+ever-increasing swiftness dropped down the heavens, and the more
+swiftly did he climb the mountain, the quicker to follow its flight
+with his eye. And there he looked down into the village of Maienthal,
+that glimmered among moist shadows....
+
+At his feet, and on this mountain, lay, stretched like a crowned giant,
+like a transplanted spring-island, an English park. This mountain
+toward the south and one toward the north met and formed a cradle in
+which the peaceful village rested, and over which the morning and the
+evening sun spun and spread out their golden veil. In five gleaming
+ponds trembled five duskier evening heavens, and every wave that leaped
+up painted itself to a ruby in the hovering fire of the sun. Two brooks
+waded, in shifting distances, darkened by roses and willows, over the
+long meadow-land, and a watering fire-wheel,[163] like a pulsating
+heart, forced the sunset-reddened water through all the green
+flower-vases. Everywhere nodded flowers, those butterflies of the
+vegetable world, on every moss-grown brook-stone, from every tender
+stalk, round every window, a flower rocked in its fragrance, and
+scarlet lupines traced their blue and red veins over a garden without a
+hedge. A transparent wood of gold-green birches climbed, in the high
+grass over there, the sides of the northern mountain, on whose summit
+five tall fir-trees, as ruins of a prostrated forest, held their eyrie.
+
+Emanuel's small house stood at the end of the village, in a tangled
+growth of honeysuckle, and in the embrace of a linden-tree which grew
+through it.--His heart gushed up within him: "Blessings on thee, quiet
+haven! hallowed by a soul which here looks up to heaven, and waits to
+launch into the sea of eternity!"--Suddenly the windows of the
+abbey where Clotilda had been educated flung upon him the flames
+of the evening-redness,--and the sun went, softly as a Penn, toward
+America,--and the thin night spread itself over nature,--and the green
+hermitage of Emanuel wrapped itself in obscurity.... Then he knelt
+there alone on the mountain, on that throne-step, and looked into the
+glowing west, and over the whole still earth, and into the heavens,
+and expanded his spirit to think on God.... As he knelt, all was so
+sublime and so mild,--worlds and suns came up from the east, and the
+little insect, with his play of colors, nestled down into his mealy
+flower-cup,--the evening-wind flapped its immeasurable wing, and the
+little naked lark rested warmly under the soft-feathered breast of the
+mother,--a man stood on the mountain-ridge, and a golden-chafer on the
+stamens; ... and the Eternal loved his whole world.
+
+His spirit was now made up to take in a great man, and he yearned for
+the voice of a brother.
+
+He staggered, without following any path, down into the village, with
+the pewit in its great circles, and the may-chafer in its little ones,
+sweeping around him. At the foot of the mountain the hybrid day grew
+darker,--in the starry heaven the curtain rose,--the vapor of evening,
+which had gone up hot, fell cold, as men do, back to the earth: one
+more loud lark went circling upward, as the last echo of day, over the
+mountain.
+
+At last he neared Emanuel's linden. He would rather have embraced him
+under the great heavens than under the close ceiling of a room. Through
+the window he saw an uncommonly beautiful youth standing and playing on
+a flute. The player drew out of its heavenly gates a fugitive and
+floating elysium. Victor listened to him for a long time, in order to
+still his beating heart; at last, with tearful eyes, he went round the
+house, and would fain have fallen speechlessly and blindly on the necks
+of the youth and of Emanuel. As he passed along before the window, the
+youth did not return his greeting; as he opened the house-door, a soft
+chime of bells began to make music. Then the youth came out
+immediately, and asked him, in a friendly tone, who was there; for he
+was blind. Victor stepped into a Holy of Holies when he entered the
+apartment lined with linden-leaves, which was the nest of the winged
+man, who at this moment was out of it, under the great night of God.
+Emanuel was to return toward midnight. The room was open and clean;
+some leaves of fruits which had been eaten lay on the table; flowers
+glowed around all the windows; a telescope leaned against the wall;
+remains of an Oriental wardrobe bespoke the East Indian....
+
+The voice of the beautiful youth had in his ear something inexpressibly
+touching, because it seemed like one he knew; it went deep into his
+heart, like the melody of a song that sounds up from childhood. He
+could rest freely with the steady gaze of love upon that face, that
+looked out into an eternal night; he wanted to kiss those childish lips
+full of melodies, and still he hesitated. But as he went out of the
+house again in quest of Emanuel, and when the bells began to chime
+again,--for they sounded whenever the door opened, to announce to the
+blind one every arrival,--then he could no longer restrain himself
+amidst the lovely music, but he touched the mouth of the blind one, as
+he leaned at the open window, with a kiss as soft as a breath. "Ah,
+angel! art thou, then, come down again from heaven?" said the blind
+one, confounding him with some well-known being or other.
+
+How good was it to be out of doors! The evening-bell of the village
+sounded its call over the slumbering fields, and a distant soul was
+inclining its ear, perhaps, to catch the dying echoes of its broken
+tones. The evening wind, rustling through twigs full of green fruits,
+joined in. The evening star--the moon of our twilight--rested kindly on
+the road of the sun and of the moon, and sent its solace in the
+interval during the absence of both.--"Where mayst thou be at this
+moment, my Emanuel? Art thou resting, perhaps, in the sight of the
+evening-red,--or gazing into the starry sea?--art thou in the ecstasy
+we call a prayer,--or ..."
+
+At this moment, all at once the thought flashed up in him, that, as
+to-night St. John's day began, his Emanuel might have expired in the
+enjoyment of the evening.... The more eagerly did he seek after him
+with his eyes under every tree, in every deeper shadow; he looked up to
+the hills, as if he might see him there, and to the stars, as if even
+there he might venture to seek him.--He went round the village, whose
+circular wall was a festoon of cherry-trees which silvered the green
+circumference with a milky-way of blossoms long since fallen, and
+hurried over the ruins of the houses which the children had built
+during the day, towards the fading windows of the abbey, which rose on
+the southern mountain down whose slope he had entered the village; for
+the blind one had told him that this mountain was Emanuel's
+observatory, and that he went thither every night. The green stairway,
+which made its successive landings of terraces and moss-banks, and on
+which a balustrade of bush-work ran upward, led him to a mountain which
+terminated sublimely in the ether with a tall weeping-birch. With every
+grass-plot, as from a bath, new limbs of dark Nature lifted themselves;
+he went on, as if from one planet to another. Across the ascending,
+darkling fields streamed the night-wind, and lonesomely swept on from
+wood to wood, and its ruffling fingers played with the plumage of the
+sleeping bird and the down of the whirring night-butterfly. Victor
+looked over toward the evening-red which Night had taken as a rose to
+wear on the bosom whereon suns repose. The sea of eternity lay in the
+form of night on the silver-sand of worlds and suns, and from the
+bottom of that sea the grains of sand glistened far up through the
+deep.
+
+Around the weeping-birch swelled an unaccountable melodious murmur,
+which he had this very day heard on the island. At length he stood up
+there under the birch, and the music, like that of an harmonica which
+has just stolen over paradises and through hedges of flowers, was loud
+around him; but he saw nothing further, save a high grassy altar (the
+birthplace of Emanuel's letter) and a low grassy bench. From what
+invisible hand, he thought with awe, can these tones issue, which seem
+to glide off from angels, as they fly over the next world, from
+mingling souls, when a too great bliss breathes itself out into a
+sigh, and the sigh dissipates itself into distant dying sound? It must
+be forgiven him, if on such a day, which threw his soul into growing
+agitations, in this awful hour of night, under this melodious
+mourning-tree, on this Holy of Holies of the invisible Emanuel, he at
+last came to believe that _he_ had this evening taken his flight from
+life, and that his soul, full of love, was still floating around him in
+these echoes and yearnings for the first and last embrace. He lost
+himself more and more in the tones and in the silence round about
+them,--his soul grew to a dream within him, and the whole nocturnal
+landscape grew to a cloud made of the sleep in which this light dream
+hung,--the fountain of endless life, flung up by the Eternal, flew far
+above the earth in the immeasurable arch with the spraying silver-sparks
+of suns over immensity; gleaming it encircled the whole vault of night,
+and the reflection of the Infinite overspread the dark eternity.
+
+O Eternal One, if we saw not thy starry heaven, how much would our
+heart, sunk into the mire of earth, know of thee and of immortality?--
+
+Suddenly in the east the night grew lighter, because the floating
+glimmer of the moon darted up on the Alpine ridges that hid the orb,
+and all at once the unaccountable tones and the leaves and the
+night-wind grew louder. Then Victor awoke as out of a dream and out of
+life, and clasped the harmonious, fleeting airs to his languishing bosom,
+and, amidst the gushing tears which, like a rain-cloud, veiled from him
+the whole landscape, he cried out, beside himself: "Ah, Emanuel,
+come!--Ah, I thirst for thee--Float no more in sound, thou blessed one;
+take thy deposed human face, and appear to me, and slay me by a
+shudder, and keep me in thy arms!" ...
+
+Lo! while the dim tear-drop still stood in his eye, and the moon still
+lingered behind the Alps, there came up the mountain a white form with
+closed eyes,--smiling, transfigured, blissful,--turning toward
+Sirius....
+
+"Emanuel, dost thou appear to me?" cried Horion, trembling, and melted
+into a new flood of tears. The form opened its eyes,--it spread out its
+arms. Victor saw not,--heard not; he glowed and trembled. The form flew
+to meet him, and he gave himself up, saying, "Take me!" They touched
+each other,--they embraced each other,--the night-wind swept through
+them,--the strange music sounded nearer,--a star shot down,--the moon
+flew up over the Alps....
+
+And when with its Eden-light it suffused the cheeks of the unknown
+apparition, Victor recognized that it was his dear teacher, _Dahore_,
+who had to-day cast his image into the mirror on the island. And Dahore
+said: "Beloved son, dost thou still know thy teacher? I am Emanuel and
+Dahore." Then the embrace grew closer. Horion would fain have
+compressed his gratitude for a whole childhood into one kiss, and lay
+dissolved in the arms of the teacher and in the arms of loving ecstasy.
+
+Twine around each other tightly, ye blessed ones; press your full
+hearts to each other even till you press tears out of them; forget
+heaven and earth, and prolong the sublime embrace!--Ah! so soon as it
+is dissolved, then has this frail life henceforward nothing firmer
+wherewith to knit you together than the beginning of the--second....
+
+At last Emanuel drew himself out of the attitude of love, and, bending
+aside, gazed like a sun, with large and open look, into Horion's face,
+and confronted with rapture the ennobled spirit and countenance of his
+blooming favorite. The latter sank before the look of love
+involuntarily on his knee, and said, with uplifted face: "O my teacher,
+my father! O thou angel! dost thou, then, still love me so
+exceedingly?"--But he wept too much for utterance, and his words were
+unintelligible, and died in his heart....
+
+Without answering, Emanuel laid his hand on the head of the kneeling
+pupil, and turned his glorified eye toward the glittering heavens, and
+said, with solemn voice: "This head, thou Eternal One, dedicates itself
+now to thee in this great night. Let only thy second world fill this
+head and this heart, and may the little, dark earth never satisfy
+them!--O my Horion! here on this mountain, on which, after a year, I go
+up from the earth, I conjure thee, by the great second world above us,
+by all the great thoughts wherewith the Eternal at this moment appears
+in thee,--I conjure thee to be still good, even when I shall have long
+been dead."
+
+Emanuel knelt down to him, held up the exhausted youth, and bent
+towards his paling face, and said, in a low and prayerful tone, "My
+beloved! my beloved! when we both are dead, in the second world may God
+never part us,--never part me and thee!"--He wept not, and yet could
+say no more; their two hearts, knit together, rested on each other, and
+night veiled silently their mute love and their great thoughts.
+
+
+
+
+                           14. DOG-POST-DAY.
+
+        The Philosophical Arcadia.--Clotilda's Letter.--Victor's
+                              Confessions.
+
+
+I have only two things to explain before going further,--the mysterious
+music and the shutting of the eyes. The former proceeded from an Æolian
+harp laid on the weeping-birch. As often as Emanuel came hither by
+night he let these breathed-out tones intermingle like blossoms with
+the whispering leaves, in order to exalt himself when he looked alone
+upon the exalted night. His eyes he often closed before the sun and the
+moon, whenever his inner man, winged like a cherub, had leave to bury
+itself in soft fantasies; into the streaming, many-colored waves of
+light which crowd through the eyelids he would then plunge, as into a
+zephyr, for a delicious swim, and in this light-bath the higher
+light-magnet within him drew heavenly light out of earthly light. As
+there are but few souls that know how far the harmony of outward nature
+with our own reaches, and in how very great a degree the whole creation
+is but an Æolian harp, with longer and shorter strings, with slower and
+swifter vibrations, passive before a divine breath,[164]--I demand not
+that every one should forgive this Emanuel.--
+
+After this finding of each other again, which threw a far gleam over a
+whole life, the two came home to the blind youth; and his flute carried
+the heart softly over in dream from the tossings of fevered blood into
+the tranquil ether of heaven.
+
+As I love so to be about Emanuel, the reader will not begrudge me the
+pleasure of turning over the leaves of all the hours which we are
+permitted to spend in his house, and to go along regularly, step by
+step.
+
+The morning for the first time disclosed to the pupil of Emanuel, as it
+does to children, what a Christmas present the night had provided for
+his heart. What a form came before him in the morning-radiance, when
+the still, childlike, composed face of the teacher, over which storms
+had once passed, as on the soft, white moon volcanoes have flamed,
+smiled upon him in such wise that his inner being melted into mute
+bliss! Especially when beheld in _profile_ did this lofty form appear
+to stand on the brink of earth, and to look down into the _second_
+hemisphere of the heavens, which is hid from us by the gravestone and
+the rich pasture-ground of this life. His countenance was transfigured
+when he lifted it to heaven, when he named God or Eternity, when he
+spoke of the longest day; in its light the leaf-gold of the present
+paled to the dead-gold of the past, and his spirit hung hovering over
+the body, as genii bloom out of flowers in arabesques. Never did Victor
+so easily attune himself, when coming out of a dream, to the new day,
+as he did this morning with Emanuel's voice, which was, so to speak,
+the music of the spheres to the blue heaven of his eyes, from which,
+as from that of Egypt, never a drop fell; from incapacity of the
+tear-glands, he could never weep; nor did this life any longer agitate
+his soul.
+
+The pure morning-apartment seemed to make the soul pure and still. He
+was the greatest bodily Purist; he washed his body quite as often as
+his clothes; and the uncleanness of medical language, even to the very
+words,--as, e. g. toothpicks, &c.,--was avoided by his stainless
+tongue. Even so did his heart remain unsoiled by so much as the images
+of great sins, and this unconscious innocence, as well as an
+unacquaintedness with our artful manners, made him, in the eyes of
+three different classes, either a child--or a maiden--or an angel.
+
+The breakfast of fruits and water, which, in fact, made up his whole
+bill of fare, called up reprovingly before our Victor the wine and
+coffee-grounds wherewith he had sometimes had to manure, like earthly
+ones, the flowers of his spirit. Flower-pots were Dahore's snuff-boxes,
+and glowed under the linden-green, which, with two tame, and yet
+free, ground-sparrows skipping through it, was the live, growing
+ceiling-piece of the apartment. His soul seemed also, like a Brahmin,
+to live on poetical flowers, and his speech was often, like his
+manners, Indian,--i. e. poetic. So was there throughout, as with divers
+magnates of men, a striking pre-established harmony between outward
+nature and his heart; he readily found in the corporeal the physiognomy
+of the spiritual, and _vice versâ_; he said matter, considered as
+thought, was just as noble and spiritual as any other thought, and that
+we represented to ourselves in it, after all, only the Divine
+conceptions of it. For example, during breakfast he lost himself in the
+glimmering dew-drop on a stock-gillyflower, and, by moving his eye to
+and fro, played through the gamut of its harpsichord of colors. "There
+must," said he, "be some harmony or other of accordant sounds between
+this minute particle of water and my spirit, as between virtue and me,
+because otherwise neither could so ravish me. And is, then, this accord
+which man makes with the whole creation (only in different octaves) a
+mere play of the Eternal, and no resonance of a nearer, greater
+harmony?" In the same way he would often gaze at a glimmering coal,
+till in his eyes it had expanded to a flaming meadow, on which,
+illumined by tender fancies, he roamed up and down....
+
+Have patience, reader, with this flowery soul; we will both think that
+men can more easily have one religion than one philosophy, and that
+every system presupposes its peculiar weaving in the heart, and that
+the heart is the bud of the head.
+
+The only circumstance that pained the blessed Victor this morning was,
+that he could not embrace the fair blind youth, and ask, "Have we not
+already once lived together, and is not my voice as familiar to thee as
+thine is to me?" For he looked upon him (as I do too), for several
+reasons, as the concealed son of Pastor Eymann. But as Dahore kept
+silent on the subject,--into whose clear, bright heaven one could
+otherwise look down even to the least nebulous star,--he feared before
+these holy ears he should be speaking too near to the verge of his oath
+of silence, though he should only disclose his inquiring conjectures
+about the blind one. This Julius seemed to have only two root-fibres in
+his nature, of which the one went to his flute, and the other to his
+teacher. On his white face, whereon the rapture of the musical genius
+and the abstractedness of the blind dreamer were blended with an almost
+womanly beauty, lay the reflection of his teacher, and its fibres had,
+like lute-strings, stirred only to harmonious movements. The poor blind
+one, who looked upon his Dahore as his father, was turned about, like
+down, by his lightest breath. Victor often drew the head of the dear
+blind one close to his face, in order to inspect the disordered eyes,
+and judge whether they might be restored. But though he saw with pain
+that the unhappy one must remain incurable on the full, radiant earth,
+nevertheless he kept on repeating his minute investigation, merely for
+the sake of having the dear, enchanting form nearer to his eye and his
+soul.
+
+In the morning Emanuel, as cicerone of Nature, led his guest through
+the ruins and antiques of the earth: for every tree is an eternal
+antique. How different is a walk with a religious[165] man from one
+with a vulgar, worldly soul! The earth appeared to him holy, just
+fallen from the hands of the Creator; it was to him as if he were
+walking in a planet hanging over us and clothed with flowers. Emanuel
+showed him God and love everywhere mirrored, but everywhere
+transformed,--in the light, in--colors, in the scale of living
+creatures, in the blossom and in human beauty, in the pleasures of
+animals, in the thoughts of men and in the circles of worlds; for
+either everything or nothing is his shadow. So the sun paints its image
+on all creatures,--great in the ocean, many-colored in the dew-drop,
+small on the human retina, as mock-sun on the cloud, red on the apple,
+silvery on the stream, seven-colored in the falling rain, and gleaming
+over the whole moon and over all its other worlds.
+
+Victor felt to-day, for the first time, the enlargement and
+transfiguration of his conscious being before a spirit which, _like_
+his, but _excelling_ his, like a spherical concave mirror reflected all
+the features of his nobler part in colossal size. The whole vulgar
+portion of his nature crept away when the higher, painted by Dahore on
+a large scale, erected itself above the low impulses. A man whom the
+perihelion of a great man does not set on fire and beside himself is
+nothing worth. He was hardly willing to speak, so that he might only
+hear _him_ all the time, although he had it in mind to stay here a good
+many days. As before a higher being and before the woman of his love,
+in whose presence one will neither show his head nor his tongue, so had
+he, renouncing self, sunk into pure truth and love. All the varnish of
+the little relations of place and citizenly respectability had cracked
+so clean off, and they all stood before him there so moss-grown, that
+he would not so much as name the names of Göttingen, of Flachsenfingen,
+or empty incidents of life, or strange personalities. In fact, Victor
+had a slight contempt for men who care more for the directions to the
+bookbinder than for the book, and more for the review of an author than
+for his system, and to whom the earth is no deciphering chancery of the
+book of nature, but a parlor (a talking-room), a news-office of
+wretched personalities, which they care neither to profit by, nor to
+retain, nor to estimate, but merely to tell; and he was disgusted with
+the German societies, in which there is so little philosophizing.--Oh,
+how blest he was, for once to think a whole day in company with
+another, and, what is still finer, to be permitted to poetize with him!
+
+His doubts upon the greatest matters which can weigh down our minds and
+lift up our hearts grew to-day to questions; the questions, to hopes;
+the hopes, to presentiments. There are truths of which one hopes that
+great men will be more strongly convinced than one can be one's self;
+and one will therefore by their conviction confirm and complete his
+own. Dahore held the two great truths (God and immortality) which, like
+two pillars, bear up the universe, firmly to his heart; but, like the
+rarer men to whom the truth is not merely the _shew-bread_ of vanity
+and the dessert of the head, but a _holy supper_ and _love-feast_ full
+of the _spirit of life_ for their weary heart, he cared little, if he
+could make no proselytes. Victor felt that _he_ understood handling the
+artillery-train and the electric pistols and batteries of the art of
+disputation better than Emanuel; he would have abhorred his own tongue
+if he had directed its readiness against this fair soul. He was silent
+for two reasons. "Undertake," said he, "to give a molten image, an
+altar-piece, of a great, shining truth that embraces thy whole
+being,--to do this on the flying second-hand whereon one stands in
+transient conversation, with the few dry paints wherewith human ideas
+are to be colored, and with the clumsy human tongue wherewith you must
+daub on these grains of color,--I tell you, a _silhouette_, a
+transparent asterism, will be all you can produce." The light heaven of
+certain simple-hearted men of deep feeling veils, like the outer one,
+all its suns, except the warmest, under the sheen of a void blue; but
+the unclean heaven of others full of wit and logic is bedizened with
+_mock-suns_, bows, northern lights, clouds, and redness.
+
+The second, better reason why he scorned the honor of opposition was
+his heart, which contained in itself more than the head could throw
+light upon. Certain views cannot be detached so easily as wall-pictures
+in Italy, and transferred from one head into another. The _light_
+which another can give thee _shows_, but _constructs_ not, the
+house-furniture of thy interior, and what the light really _creates_
+with some is meteorological appearance, optical illusion, but no
+substance.[166]--Hence all turns not upon the showing and seeing of a
+truth, i. e. of an object, but upon the effects which it works through
+thy whole inner being. For how is it that there are men who, as
+Socrates did Aristides, make us better merely by our being with
+them?--How do great authors bring it about, that their invisible
+spirit in their works seizes and holds us fast, without our being
+able to quote the words and passages whereby they do it, as a thickly
+leaved forest always murmurs, though not a single branch stirs?--Why
+did Emanuel overmaster his beloved Horion--more than by broad
+thesis-formulas, _rationes decidendi_ and _sententiæ magistrales_--merely
+by the transfiguration in his countenance, by the low echo-tone of his
+voice, by the radiance of his look, and by the devotion in his breast,
+when he spoke solemnly truths which were old to speech and new to the
+heart, like the following?--
+
+Man goes, like the earth, from _west_ to _east_; but it seems to him as
+if he went, with it, from east to west, from life to the grave.
+
+What is highest and noblest in man conceals itself, and is without use
+for the practical world, (as the highest mountains bear no herbage,)
+and out of the chain of fine _thoughts_ only some members can be
+detached as actions.[167]
+
+Our aimless activity, our clutchings at the air, must appear to higher
+beings like the clutching of dying men at the bed-clothes.
+
+The spirit awakes and will awake when the light of the senses goes out,
+just as sleepers awake when the night-light is extinguished.
+
+                           *   *   *   *   *
+
+Why did these thoughts linger like things of awe in the soul?--Because
+Horion felt something higher than language, which is invented only for
+every-day sensations, can ever represent; because, even in his
+childhood, he hated systems which thrust out of sight all that is
+inexplicable; and because the human spirit feels itself as much
+oppressed in the explicable and finite as it is in a mine, or in the
+thought of the heavenly space overhead being somewhere or other boarded
+up.
+
+How should he have had the heart or the occasion on such a day to ask
+Emanuel about his dying-day, or about Clotilda? Victor had that poetry
+of fellow-feeling which easily puts itself into the place of the most
+unlike persons, of women and philosophers. In the evening Dahore went
+to the abbey to teach astronomy, his most beloved science. During the
+astronomical school-hour the open face of Julius became an open heaven;
+he told his Victor everything, as if he were a second father. Now he
+related to him frankly that the year before an angel had again and
+again come to him, who grasped his hand, gave him flowers, spoke to him
+kindly, and at last vanished from him into heaven, but had left him a
+letter, which he was permitted to have read to him a year after, at
+Whitsuntide, by Clotilda,--yes, and that this good angel had yesterday
+flown by him with a kiss. Victor smiled with delight, but concealed his
+conjecture that _he_ looked upon the angel to be a shy, loving maiden
+from the boarding-school.--"But yesterday," said Victor, "I only was
+the angel that kissed thee _thus_!" and repeated it. Julius knew
+no fairer gift to make to those he loved than the picture of his
+father,--the portraiture of his exalted love, which forgot no human
+being, because it was based, not upon the superiorities, but upon the
+necessities, of men,--further, of his indulgence, of his
+disinterestedness, since a long virtue spared him the battle against
+his heart, and now he did nothing but what he wished to, and since the
+next world, hanging low down before him, preached a peculiar
+independence upon necessities. Five hundred thousand fixed stars of the
+first magnitude, according to Lambert, hardly give a light equal to
+that of the nearer full moon,--and so the present always outshines our
+inner world; but soar nearer to the fixed star of the next world, then
+does it grow to a sun, which transforms the moon of time and of the
+present into a petty nebula.--As to this Emanuel, all Maienthalers
+loved him (even the Parson, although he was a non-Catholic,
+non-Lutheran, and non-Calvinist); and he loved to be dependent on
+something, on others' love.[168]--During this description Victor
+yearned for him again with as much emotion as if they had been
+separated a year; accordingly, in the flush of evening he laid himself
+down under the birch-leaves opposite the school, in order immediately,
+with ardent arms, to take him prisoner.
+
+And as Victor lifted his soul on the tall, white columns of the park
+planned by his Lordship, on the sublime sculpture which wrote out a
+great thought that looked like a tempest, and just as he had carried a
+bee that had dropped down, his wings being glued up with honey, to the
+beehive sill,--just then Dahore, with a friendly manner, came up. The
+latter entered, himself,--for Victor would have held the covert
+starting of a subject as a sin,--on that of Clotilda, and said this
+used to be her favorite spot, and the resting-bench of her quiet soul.
+The place was not grand, but, what is more, it was opposite to
+something grand (even physical greatness, e. g. a mountain, needs
+distance as a pedestal); it lay in the deepest part of the dell,
+encircled with Emanuel's flower-chains, which he often laid out
+without enclosure, because all Maienthalers respected his little
+joys,--breathed upon by great clover-fields,--overspread by the moon,
+which in spring, only after reaching the mountain-top, beamed down this
+deep valley with a mournful medley of birch-shadows, water-glistenings,
+and bright spots,--and, finally, adorned with a grassy bench, which I
+should not have mentioned had it not been planted at both ends with
+great, drooping flowers, which, with a tender feeling, no one crushed
+who sat down between them. How was Victor surprised or enraptured when
+Emanuel asked about this Clotilda! Like jewels of dew, like tears of
+joy, all the words of his teacher fell into his languishing heart,
+because they were eulogies upon her tender soul, which leads its own
+tears only into those of _others_, and hides them before dry hearts;
+upon her fine ambition, which men's criticism misconstrues into
+_coldness_ and women's into _pride_; and on her warmth of love, which
+one would not have looked for in a heart like hers, fast closed as a
+bud, which now confounds inanimate with animated nature, in order by
+the former to learn to love the latter. It touched Victor even to tears
+when Emanuel so warmly praised his pupil, now withdrawn from this Eden;
+and when he actually went on to beg, in all simplicity, that he would
+be the friend of _his_ friend, and now especially because he was going
+to die, and because she would never come back again,--for she had been
+here the last time merely for the purpose--on Whitsuntide, where her
+parents could not smile at it--of publicly taking the sacrament with
+the boarding-school girls,--that he would now take _his_ place towards
+this starward-soaring eye, this heart aspiring to eternity,--then could
+he have fallen at the feet of his friend and _his_ maiden friend for
+emotion and love.... From such lips praise bestowed upon its object
+always gives to love an extraordinary growth, because that sentiment
+always seems a pretext,[169] and ripens at once, so soon as it has
+found it.
+
+If thy heart, my friend, does not beat quickly and intensely enough for
+another's,--although, in my opinion, it already pulsates at the
+fever-point, namely, a hundred and eleven times in a minute,--then just
+go, in order to transform thy cold fever into a warm one, thy quartan
+ague into a quotidian, to other particularly respected people, and
+let them praise her, the good soul, or only name her often before
+thee,--mortally sick, and provided with thy good hundred and forty
+pulsations to the minute, thou wilt go thy way, and have the desired
+fever.
+
+The innocent Emanuel, who did not guess Victor's warmth, thought he
+must do still more by way of giving him the sevenfold consecration as
+priest of friendship for Clotilda, and gave him a--letter from her.
+_Thou_ couldst do it, East Indian, since thou art here a child that has
+been made into an angel in the _limbus infantum_ (the children's
+heaven), since thou hast no mysteries, excepting the mystery of the
+three children (hence his Lordship did not make thee the reader of his
+letters), and since thou dost not at all dream that the giving away of
+another's letter is anything wrong. Still thy scholar should not have
+read it.
+
+But he did read it. He cannot defend himself by anything except by my
+reader, who here holds in his hand this very same letter of another who
+never wrote it for him, and nevertheless reads it through word for word
+in his chair. I, for my part, read nothing, but only copy off what the
+dog brings me.--It is a beautiful coincidence that this letter should
+have been written by her on that very same raining, melodious night of
+the garden-feast when he wrote his first to Emanuel.
+
+
+                                           "St. Luna, May 4, 179*.
+
+"You will not, perhaps, expect any excuse from me, revered teacher,
+that, when I have hardly left Maienthal, I come back in the form of a
+letter. In fact, I meant to write it even while on the road, then the
+second day, and finally yesterday. This Maienthal will spoil for me
+many other valleys; all music will sound to me like an Alpine horn,
+making me sad, and bringing to my heart the remembrance of the Alpine
+life under the weeping-birch tree.
+
+"In this mood I should not have been able to deny my heart the pleasure
+of opening itself and pouring itself out before yours in the warmest
+thanks for the most beautiful and instructive days of my life, had I
+not formed the resolve after some days to be in Maienthal again; after
+my second return home, my heart must have its will, and way.
+
+"In our house I found nothing changed,[170] nor anything in our
+neighbor's; and I found in all souls the same old love with which we
+had parted from each other,--only my Agatha, to be sure, is merry, but
+yet less so than she used to be. The only change in Herr Eymann's house
+is a guest whom every one calls by a different name,--Victor, Horion,
+Sebastian, young Lord, Doctor. This last name he fully deserves by his
+first action and first joy in St. Luna, which was the healing of the
+blind Lord Horion. What a piece of happiness for the saved and for his
+saviour!--May this youth one day only pass through your Eden, and meet
+with your good Julius, so as to repeat upon him the beautiful art--Oh!
+as often as I think upon it, that the male sex is blest with the means
+of the greatest, godlike benefactions,--that they, like a god, can
+distribute eyes, life, justice, science,--whereas my sex must confine
+its heart, so yearning to do good, to lesser services,--to the drying
+away of a tear for another, to the concealing of its own, to the
+exercise of a secret patience with happy and unhappy;--then the wish
+rises, O that that sex which has the highest benefits in its hands
+would vouchsafe to us the greatest,--that of imitating itself, and
+getting into our hands good things which should bless us by our
+distribution of them!---At present, a woman can have nothing in her
+soul to make her great, except only wishes.
+
+"I have just come in out of the open air from a little garden-feast at
+my Agatha's; and never is any fair bit of deep-blue sky exactly right
+to me, if it does not stand over your weeping-birch, where your eye
+counts up all its treasures and suns, and shows my heart all the tokens
+of Infinite Power and Love. To-day, in the garden, I thought with
+almost too sad a longing on your Maienthal; Herr Sebastian reminded me
+of it still oftener, because he seems to have had a teacher who
+resembled mine.[171] He talked very well to-day, and seemed to be made
+up of two halves,--a British and a French. Some of his fine
+observations have not gone from me,--e. g., 'Sorrows are like
+thunder-clouds: in the distance they look black, over our heads hardly
+gray.--As sad dreams betoken a glad future, so may it be with the
+so-often-tormenting dream of life when it is over.--All our strong
+feelings, like ghosts, hold sway only up to a certain hour; and if a
+man would always say to himself, This passion, this grief, this
+rapture, will in three days certainly be gone from this soul,--then
+would he become more and more tranquil and composed.' I report all this
+to you so exactly, in order, as it were, to punish myself for a too
+hasty judgment which I passed some days since (though within myself) on
+his propensity to satire.--Satire, also, seems to be merely for the
+stronger sex; I have never yet found one of my own who had found in the
+works of Swift or Cervantes or Tristram anything to her taste.--
+
+"_Two days later_.--I and my letter are still here; but to-day it
+starts four days in advance of me. I cannot help thinking, This last
+time every flower in Maienthal, and every word my best teacher says to
+me, will give me still greater and deeper joy than ever, because I
+journey thither right from the turmoil of visiting, and with such a
+melancholy heart. The morning after that lovely night of the
+church-going festival I sat alone in an arbor near the great pond, and
+made myself sadder with all that I saw and thought; for during that
+whole morning, by reason of a dream I had had, my faded friend[172]
+stood before my soul,--her grave lay transparent above her, and I looked
+down through it, and saw that lily of heaven lying within there pale and
+still,--I reflected, indeed, as the gardener buried flowers with their
+pots in the earth, that the body in which we are planted must, in like
+manner, go down into the earth for future blooming, but, nevertheless,
+I could no longer control my tears.--In vain did I look upon the
+sparkling spring, which draws every day new colors, new insects, new
+flowers out of the earth,--I only grew sadder, since it rejuvenates
+everything, but not man.[173]--And when I saw Herr von Schleunes with a
+frog-bow approaching the pond, I was obliged, as he could see my eyes
+at a great distance as he passed by, to make believe asleep, in order
+not to betray them.... But before my dearest teacher I would have
+opened them as now, because he forgives me my weaknesses.
+
+                                               "CLOTILDA v. L. B."
+
+Victor had kept his left hand, with which he held the letter, too near
+to his heart, and his arm and letter began to tremble with the thumping
+heart, and he could hardly read and comprehend it for emotion. "Such a
+teacher! such a pupil!"--beyond that his looks could say nothing more.
+
+There was a struggle within him whether he should tell his friend his
+love for Clotilda. In _favor_ of the confession was Emanuel's request
+to seek her society,--that eye of his beholding, as if out of fixed
+stars, all trifles of earth,--Victor's grateful desire to repay one
+secret with another, and, most of all, oh! this love for his teacher,
+this love of his teacher for him.... And this, too, conquered, however
+much there was otherwise to be said _per contra_. For if Victor's whole
+nature glowed in the fire of friendship, so did his heart mount higher
+and higher, and burn to lay itself open,--he still wrestled with it,
+and still it was silent,--it loved boundlessly,--it lifted itself up as
+if by an invisible power,--at last it burst asunder,--his bosom opened
+wide as before God,--and now, beloved, look in, but forgive him all!
+
+He was still in this inward conflict, when the moon, which had gone up
+behind their backs, projected their two shadowy knee-pieces before
+them.--He was reminded, by Emanuel's outstretched shadow, of a passage
+in his letter,[174] and of his sickly life and early passing away....
+This clove open his inner being; he gently turned his Emanuel round
+toward the moon, now pouring down its radiance, and told him and showed
+him everything,--not merely his love, however, but his whole history,
+his whole soul, all his faults, all his follies,--everything; he was,
+at this moment, as eloquent as an angel, and full as great; his heart
+undulated in the melting glow of love; and the more he said, the more
+he wanted to have to say.
+
+No sublimer and more blessed hour strikes on this earth than that in
+which a man erects himself, exalted by virtue, softened by love, and
+despises all dangers, and shows a friend how it is with his heart. This
+trembling, this dissolving, this exaltation, is more precious than the
+itching of vanity to disguise itself in idle refinings. But perfect
+sincerity comports only with virtue. Let the man in whom suspicion and
+darkness dwell by all means apply to his bosom night-screws and
+night-bolts,--let the bad man spare us his opening of coffins,--and
+whoso has no heaven's door about him to open, let him keep the
+hell-gate shut!
+
+Emanuel felt the divine or motherly joy which a friend experiences at
+the virtue and improvement of a friend, and forgot in his joy the
+different occasions of it.
+
+Reluctantly do I tear myself away for a night from this virtuous pair.
+May I get many more days of Maienthal to paint, and may Victor spend
+there many days more!
+
+
+
+
+                           15. DOG-POST-DAY.
+
+                              The Parting.
+
+
+Ah, he goes this very day! The emotions and conversations which we have
+described had shattered too severely the tender casing which enclosed,
+as a tulip does the bee, Emanuel's fair spirit; he rose pale and
+languid; and the blind one was the happiest, who saw neither this
+paleness nor the white handkerchief which he, during the night, instead
+of staining with tears, had stained with blood. He himself had still
+the pale evening red of yesterday's joy on his face; but this very
+indifference to the gradual extinguishing of his days, this growing
+feebleness and faintness of tone in his conversation, caused Victor to
+turn away his eyes from him whenever they had for some time rested upon
+him. Emanuel looked down calm as an eternal sun on the autumn of his
+bodily life; nay, the more the sand fell from his life's hourglass, so
+much the more clearly did he look through the empty glass. And yet the
+earth was to him a beloved place, a fair meadow for our earliest plays
+of childhood; and he still hung upon this mother of our first life with
+the love wherewith the bride spends the evening full of childish
+remembrances on the bosom of her beloved mother, before on the morrow
+she goes to meet the bridegroom of her heart.
+
+Victor reproached himself with every drop of blood shed by Emanuel, and
+resolved to go to-day, because this Psyche, with her great wings, could
+no longer stir herself in her web without tearing it. In Emanuel's eyes
+there shone an inexpressible love for his sympathizing scholar. He
+began of himself to speak of his dying-day, in order to comfort him,
+and represented to him that he could not go hence till after a year. He
+based his enthusiastic prediction on two grounds;--first, that most of
+his male relatives had died on the selfsame day and in the selfsame
+climacteric[175] of life; secondly, that several consumptive patients
+before him had read in their diseased breast, as in a magic mirror,
+their last day. Victor disputed him; he showed that the foretelling of
+one's last appearance, as if the hectic man could easily feel
+beforehand, from the regular and gradual failing of the vital energy,
+the last step or freezing-point, was false, because feelings of the
+future in the present were contradictions (_in adjecto_), and because
+in the midst of life we could as little have a presentiment of the
+arrival of death as in our waking hours we can (notwithstanding a
+parallel gradation of steps in this case also) that of sleep. Victor
+represented all this to him; and yet he did not fairly believe it
+himself; he was overmastered by the lofty man who could announce his
+entrance into the shadow of death as calmly and confidently as an
+entrance of the moon into the shadow of the earth.... We will forgive
+the sick man, and not hold ourselves wiser than he is, because he is
+more enthusiastic than we.--Victor was most consoled by Emanuel's
+notion that his deceased father would appear to him for the first time
+just before his death.
+
+Victor lingered, and tried not to linger; forbade, as physician,
+Emanuel's talking, in order to make the excuse to himself of a harmless
+postponement, and became more and more troubled, for the very reason
+that he cared little to speak himself.--How canst thou, good Victor,
+this very day hurry away from him, from this angel, who will perhaps
+disappear over the next grave?--It must be a sore thing for thee, since
+it is already so hard to quit a Maienthal full of blossoms, a blind one
+full of soft tones; painful is here the last pressure of hands, Victor,
+and sweet every delay!
+
+He resolved to take leave at night, because a parting in the morning
+begets too long a sadness, and the place in the heart from which the
+beloved object was torn away continues bleeding all day long. Emanuel
+would of course, at evening, have betaken himself to the seminary, as
+he did yesterday; then would Victor, before the blind one, whom he
+would beg for the saddest melody in the world, be able to let his full
+eyelids, with which he always had to go out in order to relieve the
+anguish, stream down to his heart's content.
+
+When at evening he had eaten his last meal, and the evening-bell began,
+his heart felt as if the breast had been lifted away from it, and
+needle-points of ice were blown upon it.[176] Full of love, he clasped
+the blind youth, whom he was not permitted to recognize as the playmate
+of his childhood, and who with his tones had given more raptures than
+he had in this night of his blindness received in return; and he let
+tears have their way, whose twofold, perhaps threefold, source Emanuel
+did not guess; for the sight of these eyes, which were nevermore to be
+opened, awoke in him now, since Clotilda's wish for their healing, much
+more sorrow. Emanuel he still begged, with a voice that hurried away
+over the incidental meaning, to accompany him a short distance, till
+Maienthal should be out of sight.
+
+Out in the darkling and still country, all his sorrows lingered in his
+breast beside their sighs. "When the moon glimmers in upon this valley
+of blossoms," thought he, "I shall have left it for a long time." Only
+the altar-lights, the stars, burned in the great temple. He proposed to
+himself to part with his teacher on the mountain where their union had
+taken place; but he went up by circuitous ways,--Emanuel gladly
+following whithersoever he led,--in order during the circuit to
+overmaster his taciturnity and his tears.
+
+But they arrived at the foot of the weeping-birch, and grief still held
+possession of his eye and his voice. "Ah!" thought he, "how great and
+glad was the first night here, and how painful is this!" They reclined
+on the earth beside each other on the grassy bank, solitary, silent,
+sad, before the darkly glimmering universe. Victor could hear the
+labored breathing of the diseased breast, and the future grave on this
+mountain seemed to open at his side. Oh! if it is bitter to stand by
+the bed wherein a loved and fading countenance lies with the hues of
+death, far more bitter is it, in the midst of the scenes of health,
+behind the erect form of the dear one, to hear the grave-digger Death
+softly at his work, and to think, as often as the loved face looks
+joyful, "Ah, be still more joyful! in a short time he will have gnawed
+round the roots of thy life, and thou wilt have passed away with thy
+joys and with mine!"--But ah! there is indeed no friend, man or woman,
+with whom we should not be obliged to think the same!--
+
+He knew not why Dahore was so long silent.--He foresaw not that the
+moon would illumine the mountain sooner than the valley. The moon, that
+Pharos on the coast of the second world, now encircled men with pale
+fields, taken from dreams, with wan, gleaming meadows born of a
+super-terrestrial perspective, and the Alps and woods it resolved into
+immovable mists; _above_ the hemisphere of earth stood deep the
+Lethe-flood of slumber, _below_ the green crust stood the dead sea, and
+two loving men lived between the wide domains of sleep and death.... At
+this moment Victor thought to himself, indeed, still more keenly,
+"Here, beside this birch-tree, under this cold sod, will _his_
+crumbling breast be forever hidden, and his heart will bleed no more;
+but ah! it will beat no more." He thought, indeed, upon gloomy
+resemblances, as the _immovable_ stars appeared to go _up_ and _down_,
+merely because the playing _earth_ turned itself about them, now
+_showing_ and now _hiding_ them; he turned, indeed, his melancholy
+glance away from the _ignes fatui_, that, gliding over valleys, danced
+only on the solemn darkness and on the graves, and which described
+round a solitary powder-house their deceptive circles.----
+
+But still he was silent, and thought, "Ah, well! we have each other
+yet."
+
+But then it was too much for his bleeding heart when the flute-wails of
+the blind one stole out from the solitary house into the night, and
+passed over the mountain and over the future grave.--Then were voices
+given to the sighs and death-bells to the future, and his sadness grew
+too oppressive, as he thought, amidst the flute-murmurs, how this
+unique, this irreplaceable man, who cherished so much love for him in
+his great heart, was going hence never to reappear.--Ah! and when,
+besides, just at this moment, Emanuel, who had been lying beside him
+silently lost in gazing on the heavens and like a departed one, changed
+his position on account of his painful and oppressed breathing, but
+with a countenance whose serenity was undisturbed by the pains in his
+breast, then a cold hand glided into Victor's swollen heart and turned
+itself about therein, and his blood curdled on it, and he said, without
+the power of looking upon him, in faint, supplicating, broken accents,
+"Do not die in a year, my dear Emanuel,--do not wish to die!"
+
+The genius of night had stood till now, invisibly, before Emanuel, and
+poured high raptures into his bosom, but no passions; and he said: "We
+are not alone,--my soul feels the passing by of its kindred, and lifts
+itself up,--_under_ the earth is sleep, _above_ the earth is dream, but
+between sleep and dream I see luminous eyes move along like stars,--a
+cool breath comes from the sea of eternity over the glowing earth,--my
+heart mounts up, and will break away from life,--all around me is
+as great as if God passed through the night.--Spirits! grasp my
+spirit,--it climbs to your embrace,--and bear it up yonder...."
+
+Victor turned round and looked imploringly into the beautiful, joyous,
+tearless countenance: "Thou _wilt_ die?"
+
+Emanuel's ecstasy soared above life: "The dark streak in the next
+world is only a meadow of flowers,[177]--suns shine to light us
+onward,--flying heavens come to meet us with spring-breezes. With only
+empty graves the earth flies round the sun; for her dead stand remote
+on brighter suns."--
+
+"Emanuel?" said Victor, in a questioning tone, weeping aloud, and with
+a voice of the most fervent yearning,--and the flute-notes sank
+sorrowfully into the broad night,--"Emanuel?"
+
+Emanuel, returning to himself, looked on him, and said, calmly: "Yes,
+my beloved!--I can no more accustom myself to the earth; the water-drop
+of life has become flat and shallow,--I can no longer move round
+therein,--and my heart yearns to be among the great men who have left
+this drop behind them.--O beloved, listen, I pray,"--and here he
+pressed to soreness the heart of his Victor,--"and hear this heavy
+breath going. See, I pray, this shattered body, this thick casing,--how
+it wraps round my spirit, and obstructs its passage.--
+
+"See, here my spirit and thine cleave frozen to the ice-cake, and
+yonder the night opens all her heavens, reposing one behind the other;
+yonder in the blue, glimmering abyss dwells all the greatness which has
+disrobed itself on the earth, all the truth that we guess, all the
+goodness that we love.--
+
+"See, how still is all up there in immensity,--how softly the worlds
+move, how silently the suns glow! The great Eternal reposes as a
+fountain, with his overflowing, infinite love, in the midst of them,
+refreshing and tranquillizing all; and around God lies no grave."
+
+Here Emanuel, as if raised by an infinite blessedness, stood up and
+looked lovingly toward Arcturus, who still hung under the zenith of
+heaven, and said, directing his words toward the broad deep of
+brilliancy: "Ah, how inexpressibly do I yearn to come up to you! Ah,
+break in pieces, old heart, and hold me not so long in these bonds!"
+
+"Die, then, great soul," said Victor, "and take thy way up yonder; but
+break with thy death my little heart also, and keep by thee the poor
+one who cannot forsake thee nor do without thee."
+
+The flute had ceased; the two friends had sunk into each other's arms
+to end their farewell. "Dear, beloved, never-to-be-forgotten one," said
+Emanuel, "thou movest me too deeply; but when, a year hence, I go up
+from this mountain, then shalt thou stand by me, and see how man is
+released from his bonds. Thy tears will be my last earthly pangs; but I
+shall say, what I say now, We part by night, but we meet again by day."
+And so he went.
+
+Victor had gently disengaged himself from the childlike lips,--he
+sought not to follow him on his night-track,--slowly he went along by
+one vast sleep.--Often he turned round and followed with eyes full of
+falling tears the falling stars over Maienthal; and at four of the
+morning he arrived with a heavenly soul at St. Luna, and entered the
+garden full of old scenes, and laid down in the familiar arbor his
+glowing head and his subdued heart in the dew of the morning for a
+cooling repose.
+
+O rest thou, rest thou!--ah! sleep only, either on the earth or under
+the earth, can still the ever-agitated bosom of man....[178]
+
+
+
+
+16. DOG-POST-DAY.
+
+The Potato-form-Cutter.--Drag-chains in St. Luna.--Wax
+   Embossments.--Chess according to the _Regula Falsi_.--The Thistle
+   of Hope.--Escort to Flachsenfingen.
+
+
+One would certainly want to sleep in one's clothes, like old Fritz, so
+soon as ever one came to understand that in his shirt he is beset and
+attacked, as Victor and I sometimes are, by the vampires of midnight
+melancholy. They stay away when one sits up and has all his clothes on;
+especially do boots and hat retain for us the feeling of day in the
+greatest degree.--
+
+A warm hand lifted up Victor's bedewed head from the
+sleeping-board,[179] and directed it towards the whole surging flood of
+morning-light. His eyes opened (as always) with indescribable mildness,
+and without night-clouds, before Agatha, and beamed on her with full
+radiance. But she hurried him away with his radiance out of the leafy
+bedchamber; for he must look himself up a dressing-comb and a
+morning-blessing, and, secondly, the table-couch was to be a tea-table
+for Clotilda, who liked to take _warm_ drinks in _cool_ places.
+
+--And so he stands out there between parsonage and palace in
+mid-morning. All seemed to him to have been just built and painted
+during his journey; for all that dwelt therein seemed to have changed
+and made him melancholy. "The parents in there," he said to himself,
+"have no son, my friend has no sweetheart, and I--no tranquil heart."
+And now, when at last he entered the house, and became once more a
+bright triumphal arch of the loving family-circle,--when he was
+compelled to contemplate with sympathetic and yet enlightened eyes the
+tender illusions of the parents, the groundless hopes of his friend,
+and the coming up of stormy days,--then stood one fixed tear for the
+future in his eye; and it grew not less when his adoptive mother would
+justify it by tender glances.... Partly, however, this veil was wafted
+over his soul merely from the preceding night, whose glimmering scenes
+were separated from him only by a short interval of sleep; for a night
+spent in the watches of emotion always ends with a melancholy forenoon.
+
+The Chaplain was just making butter-vignettes; I mean, he was cutting,
+with no other etching-tool than a penknife, and into no other
+copperplate except potatoes, printers' tail-pieces and quadrats, which
+were to be stamped on the July butter by way of ornament. One might
+have supposed that Victor would have helped himself out greatly by
+having wit enough to remark that the _old printed things_ were, to be
+sure, quite worthy of long books upon them, and long universal German
+literary reviews of the books, but of no human thought, and were ten
+times more unenjoyable than these _newest_ butter-_incunabula_;[180]
+for, if there could be anything wretcheder than the world's history
+(i. e. the history of rulers), whose contents consisted of wars, as the
+theatre-journal of _other_ puppets does of cudgellings, it could only
+be the history of _littérateurs_ and printers.[181] This, too, must
+have stood him in stead,--that he was, finally, philosophical, and
+demanded that man should be called neither a _laughing_ nor a
+_reasoning_, but a _prinking_ animal; to which remark the Chaplain's
+lady added nothing, except the application of it to her daughters.
+
+But in men of his sort, sadness, satire, and philosophy have place
+beside each other. To the potato-medal-coiner and the Chaplainess, who
+reckoned all women on earth among her daughters, and pronounced similar
+castigatory sermons against them all, he described his journey with as
+many satires and rasures as were needful for both parties; but when he
+heard the wishes of the family expressed that his Lordship might have a
+happy journey back with the beloved son of the Prince, and the
+intelligence that the Regency-Counsellor had already everything packed
+up to start for the city any hour that he might choose, then had Victor
+nothing to do but to take the secretive tear-ducts in his eye-sockets
+out of the way.
+
+But whither? Into the garden! That was not well-considered. Flamin
+followed, and they arrived together at the embowered closet in the
+presence of the tea-drinkers. Never did its branches overshadow a more
+embarrassed face, softer eyes, fuller looks, and livelier or lovelier
+dreams than Victor carried with him beneath them. He thought of
+Clotilda as now a wholly new being, and thought, therefore,--as he knew
+not whether she loved him,--very stupidly. Man, when he has climbed
+over the mountain, always regards the coming hill as nothing; Flamin
+had been his mountain, and Clotilda was his hill.--In all the shallows
+of conversation, where one is already half stranding or sinking, there
+is no grander ship's-pump than a story which one has to tell. Give me
+embarrassment, and the largest circle, and only _one_ disaster,--that
+is, the anecdote of it, which no one knows but myself,--and I will soon
+save myself. Victor therefore brought out his, life-preserver,--that
+is, his log-book,--from which he made for the bower a practical
+extract. I confess, a newspaper-writer might have falsified more, might
+have been guilty of more sins of _commission_, but hardly of more sins
+of _omission_.
+
+He gave himself, I fancy, a lift again with the Chaplainess, and
+injured himself unquestionably with Clotilda,--however much, out of
+good-will towards his hearers, and too strong a hatred of the court, he
+offended against Clotilda's satire-embargo in her letter,--when,
+without reflecting, too, that maidens love only the jest, not the
+jesters, he represented the benefit-drama of the Princess, not on the
+sublime side, as I did, but on the comic side. Clotilda smiled, and
+Agatha laughed.
+
+But when he named the name of Emanuel, and his house, and his mountain,
+then did friendship and memory diffuse over the fairest eye above which
+an eyebrow-arch, drawn by a line of beauty, ever yet flowed, a soft
+glimmer which wanted, every moment, to grow to a tear of joy. But it
+had to become one of another nature, when, in answer to the question
+about his health which Clotilda hopefully put to him as an adept in
+science, Victor was compelled to give the (faintly paraphrased) history
+of his nocturnal bleeding. He could not conceal the pang of sympathy,
+nor could Clotilda conquer it. O ye two good souls! what sore wounds
+will your hearts yet receive from your great friend!
+
+Whither could she now turn her loving and sorrowing eye, but to her
+good brother Flamin, towards whom her demeanor, in consequence of the
+double constraint which her silence and his interpretations imposed
+upon her, had been hitherto so indescribably mild?--As, now, Victor saw
+all this with such wholly different eyes,--as he stood before his poor
+friend, who with his present happiness was perhaps accumulating the
+poisonous nourishment of his future jealousy, and gazed openly and
+fixedly into the firm countenance which some time bitter days might
+rend with agony,--and as, generally, _past_ or _future_ sorrows of
+another took a stronger hold of him than _present_ ones, because fancy
+had him more in its power than the senses,--in this state of things, he
+could not for a moment assert the mastery over his eyes, but they bent
+their look, encircled with compassionate tears, tenderly on his friend.
+Clotilda was embarrassed about the resting-place of his look; so was he
+too, because man is less ashamed of the most vehement signs of hatred
+than of the smallest signs of love. Clotilda understood not the
+coquettish double art of throwing others into embarrassment or drawing
+them out of it; and the good Agatha always confounded the latter with
+the former.... "Ask him what ails him, brother!" said Agatha to
+Flamin....
+
+The latter led him out with like good intention behind the nearest
+gooseberry-bushes, and asked him in his firm way, which always held an
+assertion as a question,--
+
+"Something has happened to thee?"
+
+"Just come this way!" said Victor, and pulled him along behind some
+higher Spanish walls[182] of foliage.
+
+"Nothing has happened to me," he began, at last, with brimming
+eye-sockets and smiling features,--"nothing more than that I have been
+a fool for some twenty-six years" (that was his age). "I know thou art
+unfortunately a jurist, and perhaps a worse oculist than I myself am,
+and hast, perhaps, read very little in Herr Janin.[183]--Am I right?"
+
+Flamin's shaking of his head meant something more than No.
+
+"Very naturally; but if thou hadst, thou couldst have it from himself,
+or from the translation by Selle, very finely shown, that not merely
+the lachrymal gland secretes our tear-drops, but also the crystalline
+body,[184] the Meibomian[185] glands, the lachrymal caruncle,[186]
+and--our afflicted heart, I add to the rest.--Nevertheless, of these
+aqueous globules, which are made for the sorrows of poor, poor mortals,
+not more than (if things go rightly) four ounces are filtered in
+twenty-four hours.... But, my dear one, the fact is just this,--that
+things do not go rightly, especially with me; and it vexes me to-day,
+not that thou hast never peeped into Herr Janin, but that thou dost not
+observe my confounded, cursed, stupid way."
+
+"What one?"
+
+"Yes, indeed,--what one? but I mean this of to-day,--namely, that
+my eyes--thou mayst boldly ascribe it merely to a too feeble
+_tear-siphon_, under which head Petit comprehends all absorbing
+tear-ducts--run over, when, e. g., any one does me an injustice, or
+when I merely desire anything too strongly, or imagine to myself an
+approaching pleasure, or only, in fact, a strong sensation, or human
+life, or the mere weeping itself." ...
+
+His good-natured eye stood full of water as he said it, and justified
+all.
+
+"Dear Flamin, I wish I had been a lady, or a Moravian, or a
+player;--truly, if I wanted to make the spectators believe I was going
+about it (namely, weeping), it would be actually a fact, too, on the
+spot."--
+
+And here he fell softly and fondly, with tears which had an excuse for
+flowing, upon the beloved breast.... But for the viper-cure and
+iron-cure of his manliness he needed nothing but a "Hm!" and a shrug of
+the whole body; thereupon the youths went back as men to the arbor.
+
+There was nothing left there: the girls had stolen away to the meadows,
+where nothing was to be avoided, except high grass and bedewed shadows.
+The empty arbor was the best absorbing tear-siphon for his eyes; nay, I
+gather from reports of the epistolary Spitz that he was vexed. As the
+sister came back by-and-by alone, his companion was vexed too. In fact,
+if somehow or other my hero--which would be a misfortune for me and
+him--should in time fall in love with Clotilda, then will the heroine
+make us both warm enough,--him in acting, me in copying,--for the very
+reason that she herself will _not_ be warm, because she has neither
+superfluous warmth nor superfluous coldness, but always the alternating
+temperature which changes with the subject of conversation, but not
+with the speaker; because she takes away from a tenderly disposed
+fellow-man all pleasure in praising her, as she pays out no tithe
+thereof, or at least in offending her, as she issues no letters of
+indulgence; and because one really, in his agony, assumes at last that
+one can commit no other sins against her except such as are sins
+against the Holy Ghost. Jean Paul, who has been in such cases, and has
+often stood for whole years in one spot before such mountain-fortresses
+with his storming-ladders and labarums and trumpeters, and, instead of
+the garrisons, taken _himself_ off by an honorable retreat,--this Paul,
+I say, can form a conception of what an amount of parchment, time, and
+printer's ink may have to be used up in the case of Sebastian _contra_
+Clotilda, before we get things even to a _war-footing_. In fact, with a
+perfectly _rational_ woman a man never feels himself quite well; and
+only with a merely fine, fanciful, ardent, capricious one is he truly
+at home. One like Clotilda can make the best man, from mere distress
+and respect, frosty, stupid, and enraptured; and in most cases there
+comes in the additional misfortune, that the poor, worn-out, fond fool,
+by whom such an earthly angel absolutely will not let herself be
+worshipped, as the Apocalyptic one would not by the disciple John, can
+still seldom muster courage to say to the angel,--somewhat as one might
+to an angel of an opposite nature with the kingdoms of the world,
+demanding to be worshipped,--"Take thyself out of my sight!" Paul
+always in such cases takes himself away.----
+
+Victor did not do this; he absolutely now could not get away from the
+house, i. e. from the village. The summer days seemed to him to rest in
+St. Luna, softly breathing, fragrant, blissful; and he was going to be
+cast out of this softly straying gondola into the slave-ship of the
+Court,--out of the milk-house of the Parsonage into the princely
+arsenic-house,--out of the _kindergarten_ of household love into the
+ice-field of court love. That was a sore thing to him here in the
+arbor,--and so sweet a thing in Tostato's shop!--When man's wishes and
+situations exchange places, he accuses the situations, not the wishes.
+He could laugh at himself for it, he said, but he had a hundred reasons
+for lingering in St. Luna from one day to another: he was so much
+disgusted now with his intention of pleasing a man (the Prince) from
+any other motive than love; it was still more improbable that he should
+himself please than that he should be pleased; he would rather humor
+his own whims than those of crownéd heads, and he knew for certain that
+in the first month he should tell the Minister von Schleunes satirical
+things to his very face, and in the second even the Prince; and, in
+fact, now in midsummer he should just be fit to act the complete
+court-knave, whereas in winter, &c.
+
+Beside these hundred reasons, he had still weaker ones which he did not
+at all mention,--for instance, some such as these: He would gladly be
+about Clotilda, because he must necessarily, as it were, to justify his
+conduct,--but which, then, my dear, thy past or thy future?--disclose
+to her his knowledge about her consanguinity to his friend. To this
+disclosure there was wanting, what in Paris is dearest, _place_,--and
+then, too, the exordium. Clotilda was nowhere to be met alone.
+Connoisseurs say that every secret one tells to one of the fair sex is
+a sticking-plaster which attaches him to her, and often begets a second
+secret: was it for some such reason that Victor was so eager to
+contrive a way of showing to Clotilda his acquaintance with her
+sisterly relation?--
+
+He stayed day after day, as, besides, the butter-week[187] of the
+marriage must go by first. He had already marriage-medals in his
+pocket. But he never could see Clotilda except a second at a time;
+and, according to Bonnet, one needs half a second for a clear
+idea,--according to Hooke, a whole one, in fact. Therefore, before he
+could form a complete conception of this still goddess, she was always
+gone.
+
+At last more serious arrangements were made, not for departure, but for
+forming the purpose of it.... The sweetest minutes of a visit are those
+which once more postpone its close; the sweetest of all, those in which
+one already has cane or fan in hand, and yet does not go. Such minutes
+now encircled our Fabius of love; softer eyes said to him, "Hurry not!"
+warmer hands drew him back, and the mother's tear asked him, "Wilt thou
+rob me of my Flamin so soon as to-morrow?"
+
+"By no means," he answered, and kept his seat. Did not, I ask, the
+Chaplainess thrust for his sake her lingual executioner's sword into
+its sheath, because there was nothing he so hated as loud or silent
+defamations of a sex which, more unhappy than ours, sees itself
+maltreated by two sexes at once? For he often took maidens by the hand,
+and said: "Woman's faults, particularly _evil_ reports, moodiness, and
+sensitiveness, are _knot-holes_, which in the _green_ tree please us
+even into the honeymoon[188] as fine marble-veined _circles_, but
+which, in the _dry_, in the marriage-furniture, when the plug has
+shrunk and fallen out, gape open as ugly holes." Agatha now screwed her
+sewing-cushion to his writing-table and kissed him, whether he chose to
+look pleasant or sullen; Even the Chaplain sought to sweeten for him,
+if not the last days, which he dreamed away at his house, yet at least
+the last _nights_, for which purpose he needed nothing but a drum and a
+foot. The most fiery nocturnal witch-dances of the mice the Chaplain
+interdicted with his heel, that they might not wake up his guest; that
+is to say, he kept up against the foot-board of the bed from time to
+time a moderate cannonading, which knelled into the ear-trumpets of the
+dancers the more in proportion as it startled the ears of humanity.
+Against the Euler's knight's-moves of the rats he took the field with
+only a mallet, wherewith, breaking in like a day of judgment on their
+pleasure-parties and hunting-parties, he merely thumped once or twice
+on a drum, extemporized out of the bed-quilt.
+
+Matthieu was invisible, and, as courtiers mimic princes in everything,
+was parodying the nuptial days of his prince at least by little nuptial
+_hours_ of his own. The powder which issued out of cannons and the
+cornucopias of the firework-makers, the _vivat_ which was prayed from
+pulpits and shouted from taverns, and the expenses one incurred for all
+this, were, I think, so considerable, that the greatest prince need not
+have been ashamed to illustrate therewith his marriage and his--ennui.
+Coldness has forever a _speaking-trumpet_, and sensitiveness an
+_ear-trumpet_. The arrival of an unloved princely corpse or bride is
+heard of at the polar circles; on the contrary, when we inferiors fill
+our graves or our arms with loved beings, there fall only a few,
+unheard tears, disconsolate or blissful.
+
+Flamin pined for the session-table, whose labors were now soon to
+begin, and he could not comprehend this delay.... At last, for once,
+and with all seriousness, the day of departure was fixed, the 10th of
+August; and I am sure Victor would not have been on the 14th still in
+St. Luna, had not the Devil on the 8th brought along a Tyrolese.
+
+It is the same fellow who day before yesterday made his entry among us
+at Scheerau, with a wax retinue which he had got together, half from
+the imperial states and half from among the literati, and with the wax
+hands of these twin brothers of man took money from our purse. It is
+stupid, that Spitz did not bring me the present dog's-day the day
+before yesterday; I could myself have asked the churl, who embossed, in
+St. Luna, Victor and the Chaplain in wax, what was the real name of
+Victor, and of Eymann, and of St. Luna itself. The result is, that I am
+still, with an allowable and biographical curiosity about this
+carpenter of men, who surrounds us with awful reflections of our little
+being, following on his heels.
+
+Victor must, therefore, again tarry; for he had himself and the
+Chaplain baked in wax, in order to give, in the first place, to the
+latter, who had a childish fondness for all casts, dolls, and puppets,
+and, secondly, to the family, who longed to quarter the waxen
+mock-Victor in his vacated chamber, a greater pleasure than to himself.
+For he had a horror of these flesh-colored shadows of himself. Even in
+childhood, among all ghost-stories, those of people who had seen
+themselves crept with the coldest hand over his heart. Often at
+evening, before going to bed, he surveyed his trembling body so long,
+that at last he detached it from himself, and saw it standing thus
+alone beside his self and gesticulating as a strange form; then he
+would lay himself down, quaking, with this strange form, in the grave
+of sleep, and the darkling soul felt itself like a Hamadryad, grown
+over by the pliant fleshy bark. Hence he felt deeply the difference and
+the long interval between his self and its bark, when he looked for
+some time on another's body, and still more deeply when he contemplated
+his own.
+
+He sat opposite the embossing-stool and the embossing-tools, but fixed
+his eyes on a book again, so as not to see the corporeal form, in which
+he carried himself round, distant and duplicated. The reason why he
+nevertheless could endure the reduplication of his face in the glass
+can only be, that he regarded the supernumerary in the glass either
+merely as a superficial portrait without cubic contents, or as the only
+archetype with which we compare other duplicates of our person.... Upon
+these points I can never speak, myself, without a certain tremor....
+
+The wax-copy of Victor, to express his majority, was arrayed in a _toga
+virilis_, an overcoat which the original had cast off; likewise the
+chamber which the living one vacated was cleared out. The Chaplain
+proposed to himself to place this cheap edition of Horion in the window
+when the better one was gone, in such a manner that all the school
+youth, who learned from the chorister manners and _mores_, should doff
+their hats to it when they came tearing out of the school-house.
+
+Now at last!--For Mat came. The wrung-out cheeks of the latter, and his
+whole body, which had been under the lemon-squeezers of night-feasts,
+gave evidence that he did not lie when he said the princely bridegroom
+looked even eight times wretcheder, and was prostrate with the gout. He
+added in his bitter way, which Victor little liked, that these pale
+great people had in fact no blood except the little they cupped from
+their subjects or what stuck to their hands, as insects carry no red
+blood about with them, save what they have sucked from other creatures.
+This reminded Victor of his medical duties to this prince. Either Mat's
+wasted form,--for immoral night-life makes features and complexion
+still more repulsive than the longest confinement to the sick-bed,--or
+the recollection of his Lordship's warnings, or both, made him
+quite as odious to our court-physician as the latter through his
+court-doctorship had become to him: this secret poison of Matthieu's,
+however, manifested itself, not by an abated, but by an increased,
+almost ironical courteousness. On the contrary, Mat and Flamin seemed
+to be more familiar with one another than ever.
+
+In the forenoon, after shaving, Victor jumped up without washing
+himself again, and immediately packed up his boot-jack, and burst the
+suspenders of his pantaloons, and bespoke additional hands to discharge
+his life-ballast, (on account of his miserable packing,) and then stow
+it again. For he always gave over the whole trusteeship of the lumber
+of our petty life's furniture to strange hands, and that with such a
+contempt for the trumpery and such a recklessness of expenditure,--I
+never mean, indeed, to calumniate my hero, but, notwithstanding,
+it is proved by Spitz that he never collated the current money of a
+gold-piece when he changed it into silver, nor ever beat down in trade
+a Jew, Roman, or Moravian,--to such a degree, I say, did he carry this,
+that the whole female Hanse in St. Luna cried, "What a fool!" and that
+the Chaplainess always in the market-square slipped herself into his
+place. But he was incorrigible, because he made the journey of life,
+and therefore the luggage of the journey, look so diminutive through
+his philosophic eyes, and because nothing made him blush like the least
+appearance of self-interest: he ran off from all arrangements,
+outriders, and stage-rehearsals, when they appeared on his account; he
+was ashamed of every pleasure which was not to be divided, at least
+into two bites, one for a fellow-eater; he said, the forehead of a
+Hospodar[189] must have assumed the hardness of his crown, for
+otherwise such a man could not possibly endure what often, merely on
+his behalf, was done by a whole county,--the music, the triumphal
+arches, the odes, the cries of joy in prose, and the frightful
+cannonades.
+
+He had now nothing more to discharge in St. Luna than a mere flat
+civility; for thus much may I well assert without vanity, that
+a hero whom I have chosen for mine will have, I trust, sufficient
+good-breeding to go to the Chamberlain Le Baut and say, "_Au revoir!_"
+Besides, to such state visits he must now accustom himself.
+
+Mat, too, was over there, that image of a Cupid with bristly, plucked,
+drooping wings, tossed to the Chamberlain's lady: the latter joked with
+him about those vacant looks, which betrayed the intermittent pulse of
+his love. Le Baut was playing chess with Mat,--Clotilda sat at her
+little work-table full of silk-flowers, in the midst of this noble
+trio.... Ye poor daughters! what people have you not often to welcome
+and hear through! To Clotilda, however, this family friend was nothing
+but a stuffed-out mummy, and she knew not whether he came or went.
+
+Sebastian, as adoptive son of Fortune, as heir of the paternal post of
+favorite, was to-day received at the Chamberlain's with uncommon
+civility. Verily, if the courtier shuns unfortunates because sympathy
+for their sufferings comes over him too heavily, so does he gladly seek
+the society of the fortunate, because he loves to participate in their
+joy. The Chamberlain, who even continued to bow before one who, in his
+fall from a throne, hung midway in the air, naturally bent himself
+still lower before one who was in the act of making the opposite
+passage.
+
+Victor joined the women, but with an eye that strayed away to the
+chess-board, in order, if he should be embarrassed, immediately to have
+at hand a pretext for changing his attention or taking his leave. It
+was ingenious: for every word which he or the women said was a move at
+chess; he was obliged to conceal his coldness toward the Le Baut, that
+is, toward the stepmother,--how much did she know that nothing graces a
+mother more than a perfect daughter?--and his _warmth_ toward the
+stepdaughter. The reader must not ask: "What warmth, then, could the
+old stepmother desire?" For in the higher ranks claims are not altered
+by blood-relationship or age; merely in the lower is this the case;
+hence I always fear that what I address to the daughter may weary the
+mother, and I always cast about, and rightly, when she comes, for a
+better thread of discourse. Victor easily concealed his _coldness_ by
+virtue of humanity, which, with him, so often degenerated into a
+good-natured flattery of immoral hopes; and when a woman wanted to have
+him fall in love with her, he would say: "I cannot really tell the good
+little lamb, 'I would rather not.'" His _warmth_ toward Clotilda he
+concealed--badly, not because it was too strong, but precisely because
+it was not yet enough so. It is natural: a young man of education can,
+if he will, conceal and bury in silence his _reciprocated_ love,
+without making a pulpit announcement, but an _unreturned_ love, one
+which he himself calls nothing more than mere regard, he lets blaze out
+from him without cover. For the rest, I beg the world to sit down and
+consider, that my hero has not the Devil in his skin or sixteen years
+over his head, but that he cannot possibly feel a love for a person who
+hangs a Moses' veil over her sentiments and over her charms. Love
+begins and rises, throughout, only on reciprocal love, and with the
+lovers' mutual finding-out of each other. He has merely regard, but a
+very great, a growing and anxious regard; in short, his regard is that
+cold pulsating point in the yolk of the heart--the metaphor is drawn
+from an egg--to which the least outward warmth, often after years,
+imparts growing life and Cupid's wings.
+
+He now at the work-table investigated Clotilda's warmth with the
+pyrometer; but I cannot go beside myself for joy, that he found, on a
+scale subdivided into the minutest parts, her warmth to have risen
+1/111 of a line. For he is off the track: I would sooner rely on
+Lavater's forehead-measurer than on the heart- and warmth-measurer of a
+love-seeking man, who confounds his interpretations with his
+observations, and accidents with intentions. His pyrometer may,
+however, be right; for towards good men one is, when bad ones are by,
+(consider only Mat,) warmer than usual.
+
+Let no one blame Herr Le Baut and Frau Le Baut for congratulating my
+hero on the good fortune of going to such a court, to see such a
+prince,--the greatest in Germany, said _he_,--to such a princess,--the
+loveliest in Germany, said _she_. Mat smiled between Yes and No. The
+old man went on with his chess, the old woman with her praise. Victor
+saw with contempt how little possible it would be, in the case of two
+such souls, who held the steps of the throne for a scale of being, and
+the glacier of the throne for an Olympus and an Empyræum, and knew not
+where, except on this eminence, to find their happiness,--to give them
+better ideas of happiness, and worse ones of the eminence.
+Nevertheless, he was obliged to confess to Clotilda, who had on her
+face more than a No to the _eulogy_, that he negatived the whole of it
+as nobly as she. He therefore kneaded praise and blame together,
+according to an Horatian mixture, in order to make neither satirical
+nor flattering allusions to two dismissed court-people.
+
+"It is painful to me," said he, "that there are only pleasures there,
+and no occupations,--mere baskets of confectionery, and not a single
+work-bag, not to say no work-table like this one."
+
+"Do you think," asked Clotilda, with striking earnestness, "that all
+court-feasts pay for a single court-service?"
+
+"No," said he, "for one ought to be paid for the feasts themselves. I
+maintain there is nothing but drudgery there, and no enjoyment: all
+their amusements are only the illumination, the interlude, and the
+decorations, which please the player, who is thinking of his part, less
+than the spectator."
+
+"It is, at all events, good _to have been there_," said the old woman.
+
+"Certainly," said he; "for it is good not always to stay there."
+
+"But there are persons," said Clotilda, "who cannot make themselves
+happy there, simply because they do not love to be there."
+
+That was very fine and forbearing, but intelligible only to Victor's
+heart.
+
+"I would advise a fine enthusiast" (said he, and made no account, as
+usual, of the apparent contradiction between Victor's _life_ and
+Victor's _opinions_) "or a fiery poet to stay at home,--the _flights_
+of either, instead of _pas_, would be in court-life what an hexameter
+is in prose, which the critics cannot bear,--and to the soul with the
+softest sensibilities I would say, Be off with them! the _heart_ is
+there treated as a superfluous member, as in the six-fingered family in
+Anjou the sixth _finger_ is." ...
+
+The old woman shook her head quickly to the left.
+
+"And yet," he continued, "I would take all three for a month to court
+and make them unhappy, in order to make them wise."
+
+The Chamberlain's family could not accommodate themselves to Victor's
+style so well as my reader, who to my exceeding delight so cleverly
+distinguishes humor and the talent of looking at all sides of a thing
+from flattery and skepticism. Clotilda had slowly shaken her head at
+the last proposition. In fact, all battled to-day _for_ and _against_
+him, in that partial tone which women and relatives always assume
+towards a stranger, when an hour before they had carried on the same
+suit, but with a practical application, with their own kin.
+
+Victor, who had long been fearing: that he should become disconcerted,
+went off at last to where he had been so often looking,--to the
+chess-table, where they were playing with the greatest desire to--lose.
+The Chamberlain,--we all know how it was with him; he wrote nothing but
+commendatory letters for the whole world, and the sacramental cup would
+have been more to his taste, could he have drunk from it a _toast_ to
+some important man's health,--that personage only promoted as well as
+he could with the dry chess-statues another's success at the expense of
+his own; he was glad to lose, provided only Matthieu won. And then,
+too, he resembled those shamefaced souls who love to bestow their
+benefits secretly, and he could not find it in his heart to tell his
+adversary that he was securing him the victory; he took almost greater
+pains to conceal himself as a courtier than to _conquer himself_ as a
+Christian. Such a love ought, it would seem, to have been more warmly
+requited than by open malice; but Mat had the same object in view, and
+declined the victory which the other threw into his hands, like a real
+sharper. In vain did Le Baut devise the best moves for checkmating
+one's self. Mat matched him with still better ones, and threatened
+every minute to be checkmated too. And every one pities the poor
+Chamberlain, hunted about on the chess-board, and fearing, like a
+coquette, that he shall _not_ be conquered. It became at length, for a
+soft-souled eye, which certainly forgives the weak one sooner than the
+wicked one, no longer endurable; Victor, with a thousand excuses to the
+weak one and full of malice toward the malicious one, entered into the
+steeple-chase, and obliged the Page to accept his advice and his
+charitable subsidies, and to lay hold of military operations which he
+proposed of such worth, that the man with the office of Chamberlain's
+key, at last, in spite of his fears and in spite of the worst
+prospects,--lost the game. All present saw through all present, as
+princes do through each other in their public--playbills.
+
+He got at last his farewell audience, but very small solace. The fair
+form, beneath which all his ideals of beauty stood only as heraldic
+bearers and caryatides, was even colder than at the reception, and
+persisted in being only the echo of the parental courtesy. The only
+thing which still kept him up was a--thistle: namely, an optical one
+which had been sowed on the mosaic floor. That is to say, he took
+notice that Clotilda during the farewell avoided with her foot this
+flower-piece (which she certainly must have known) as if it were the
+original. In the evening he drew his chains of inferences, as they are
+taught in the universities; he engrafted upon this mock-thistle all the
+roses of his destiny. "She was certainly _distrait_, and why? I ask,"
+he said, speaking into his pillow; "for, besides, they have not yet
+detected my feelings over yonder," he asserted, as he laid himself on
+the second pillow. "O thou sweet eye that went down on the thistle,
+rise again in my sleep, and be the moon of my dreams!" said he, when he
+was already half-way into both. It was merely out of modesty that he
+thought he was not discovered, because he did not look on himself as
+remarkable enough to be observed.
+
+The 20th of August, 179-, was the great day when he took up his march
+to Flachsenfingen. Flamin had already trotted off at four o'clock in
+the afternoon, in order to avoid a leave-taking which he hated. But our
+Victor loved to bid farewell, and loved to tremble in the last silences
+of parting. "O ye poor, egoistic mortals!" he said,--"besides; this
+polar life is but so bald and cold; besides, we stand weeks and years
+near each other without stirring with the heart anything better than
+our blood,--only two or three glowing moments hiss and go out on the
+glaciers of life,--why do you still avoid everything that draws you out
+of your commonplace, and that reminds you how man loves? No! and if I
+went to the bottom, and if I could thenceforward no longer console
+myself, I would still, with bare heart and with all my wounds bleeding,
+dissolved and sinking, I would still press to my bosom the beloved
+being who must leave me, and would still say, It does me good!" Cold,
+self-seeking, comfortable persons avoid leave-taking, just as unpoetic
+ones of too intense sensibilities do; women, on the contrary, who
+alleviate all their sorrows by talking, and people of poetic
+temperament, who relieve all theirs by fantasying, court it.
+
+At six o'clock in the evening,--for it was only a skip to
+Flachsenfingen,--when the cattle came home, he sallied forth,
+accompanied by the whole family. On his more fortunate arm--mine has to
+bestir itself only for the good of science--hung the Britoness, and on
+his left Agatha; to the sister the poor house-poodle (Apollonia) had
+buckled herself, who thought, nevertheless, she might touch and enjoy,
+despite the sisterly interpolation and mediating spirit, the dear
+Doctor. So do the sparks of love, like the electric and magnetic
+element, dart through a medium of twenty interposed bodies. A
+philosopher, who sits down and considers that our fingers come not, in
+fact, a thumb nearer to the beloved soul, whether only the globe of the
+brain or that of the earth lie between them and it, will of course say,
+"All very natural!" Hence this sedentary philosopher explains why
+maidens half-love at the same time the male acquaintances of their
+beloved,--why the cane-chair of Shakspeare, the clothes-drawer
+of Frederick II., the bob-wig of Rousseau, content our yearning
+hearts.----
+
+But no one, except the queen-bee of this streaming swarm, wanted to go
+back again. "Only just as far as the six trees," said Agatha. When they
+had arrived at these frontier posts and boundary-trees of to-day's
+pleasure, there were seven of them, and there was a general agreement
+that _they_ were not meant, and they must go farther. The one who is
+escorted grows generally more and more nervous, and the escort more and
+more delighted, the longer it lasts. "Do let us go as far as that
+ploughman!" said the sharp-sighted Britoness. But at last our hero
+observed, that this Pillar of Hercules of their journey was itself a
+moving column, and that the ploughman was only a wayfarer. "The best
+thing is," said he, and turned about, "for me to go back, and not start
+till to-morrow." The Chaplain said: "As far as the old palace" (i. e.
+there was still _one_ wall of it remaining); "besides, I usually go
+there evenings!" But beyond this frontier fort of the loveliest of
+evenings the chattering column deceptively extended its march, and the
+eyes were forgotten for the ears. As, consequently, in these boundary
+disputes, one main article after another was broken by separate
+articles, there was really nothing further to be done, except to make
+the following attempt. "Only so far did I mean to have you go," said
+Victor;--"now you must keep on with me and spend the night at the
+apothecary's." "In fact," said the Chaplain's wife, coolly, "we'll go
+along together till sundown; we surely are not going to turn our backs
+upon this lovely sun." And certainly the evening had kindled nothing
+but _feux-de-joie_ in the sun, in the clouds, on the earth, and on the
+water.
+
+On the hill they saw already the spires of the city; the sun, that
+chosen turnstile of the escort, poured out of his deep hiding-place his
+gold-trailing purple streams over the beds of shadow. There, on the
+hill, as the sun vanished, Victor folded his arms round the married
+couple, and said, "O, make yourselves as happy as you do me, and return
+to your home in gladness!"--and then he took the sisters to his
+enraptured heart, and said, "Good, good night! I love you!"--and then
+he saw them all going back with their hidden sighs and tears; and then
+he called out, "Truly, I shall soon come back; it is really only a jump
+from one place to the other"; and then he cried after them, "I shall be
+a poor devil, if we are separated!"--and then his heavy eye followed
+them through all branches and hollows, and only when the loving company
+had sunk into the last valley, as into a grave, did he close his eyes
+and think on the ceaseless separations of man....
+
+At last he opened his eyes toward the outspread, obscured city, and
+thought: "Amidst that raised-work, in which men nestle with their
+little life, thy little days, too, are shut in,--this is the veiled
+birthplace of thy future tears, thy future raptures;--ah! with what
+eyes shall I look down again, years hence, over this misty
+environment,--and ... I am a fool! are, then, 2,300 houses standing
+only on my account?"
+
+_Postscript_. This sixteenth post-day the Mining-Superintendent has
+concluded in regular order at the end of June.
+
+
+                        FOURTH INTERCALARY DAY,
+                                  AND
+                      PREFACE TO THE SECOND PART.
+
+I am going to weld Intercalary Day and Preface together. Therefore,
+unless there is to be mere trifling with the matter of the Preface, the
+Second Part must be here, in some measure at least, touched upon. It
+deserves to be noticed by critics, that an author who in the beginning
+has before him for his domain eight pages of white paper--just as,
+according to Strabo, the territory of Rome was eight leagues
+broad--gets on by degrees so far, and peoples the scribbled paper
+with so many Greek colonists,--for such our German characters
+are,[190]--that at last he has often marched through and settled a
+whole alphabet. This puts him into a condition to begin the Second
+Part. My second is, as I know for certain, much better than the first,
+although it is, to be sure, ten times worse than the third. I shall be
+amply rewarded, if my work is the occasion of one review more being
+made in the world; nor can I conceive of anything, unless it be this
+very thought, that books must be written, so that the learned notices
+of them may go on, which could keep an author up to the unspeakable
+labor of standing all day at the inkstand, and dyeing whole pounds
+of paper-rags _Berlin-blue_.... And now let this cool, serious,
+_hocus-pocus_ of a Preface--an expression which Tillotson maintains to
+be an abridgment of the Catholic formula, _hoc est corpus_--suffice for
+good reviewers and universities.
+
+I return to that which I properly meant by this whole episode. I have
+conceived the idea, namely, of not only announcing my intention to give
+the extra leaflets and side-shoots wherewith the Intercalary Days are
+to be filled up, in alphabetical order,--for disorder is the death of
+me,--but also to make a beginning here on the spot, and continue as far
+as the letter I.
+
+
+         INTERCALARY--AND SIDE-SHOOTS, ALPHABETICALLY ARRANGED.
+
+                                   A.
+
+Age of Women.--Lombardus (L. 4. Sent. dist. 4) and Saint Augustin (l.
+22. de Civit. c. 15) prove that we all rise from the dead at that age
+at which Christ rose, namely, in the thirty-second year and third
+month. Accordingly, as in the whole of heaven there is no
+quadragenarian to be found, a child will be as old there as Nestor,
+namely, thirty-two years and three months. Knowing this, any one will
+highly esteem the fine modesty of women, who after the thirtieth year
+give themselves out (like relics) to be older than they are; for it
+would be enough, if a quadragenarian, or one of eight-and-forty years,
+should make herself out as old as good Rhine wine, or, at most, as old
+as Methuselah; but she thinks it is being more modest, if she ascribes
+to herself at once, however much her face contradicts it, the extreme
+old age which she can have only when her face has lain some thousands
+of years in the earth, namely, thirty-two years and three months. The
+merest dunce can see that she means only her future resurrection-age,
+and not any earthly age,--because she does not deviate from that
+standing year, which in eternity, indeed, when no human being can grow
+an hour older, is a matter of course. This unity of time they introduce
+into the _Intrigue drama_ of their life already in the thirtieth year,
+for the reason that after that time in Paris no woman can any longer
+dance in public, and (according to Helvetius) no genius can any longer
+write in a masterly style. This last fact they perhaps took into
+account in old times in Jerusalem, where any one after his thirtieth
+year, but no sooner, could get an office as teacher.
+
+                                   B.
+
+Basedow's School System.--Basedow proposes in his _Philalethia_ to
+hedge up thirty uneducated children in a garden, to leave them to their
+own development, and to assign them only mute attendants, who should
+not even wear human clothing, and then to publish in a protocol the
+results of the experiment. Philosophers are so preoccupied with
+possibility that they do not see reality; otherwise Basedow must have
+observed that our country-schools are just such gardens, in which
+Philosophy would try the experiment of what will at last come of human
+creatures, if they are absolutely deprived of all culture. I confess,
+however, that all these attempts must continue uncertain and imperfect
+so long as the schoolmasters cannot refrain from imparting to these
+little probationers some instruction, though it were the least
+possible; and the thing would work better with wholly dumb teachers, as
+there are deaf and dumb pupils.
+
+                             C (_vide_ K).
+
+                                   D.
+
+Divine Poet.--The Poet, although he paints the passions, nevertheless
+will hit them best at that period of life when his own, have
+slackened,--just as convex mirrors, precisely in those summers when the
+sun burned the faintest, have acted the most intensely, and in the hot
+ones the least so. The flowers of poesy are like other flowers, which
+(according to Ingenhouse) thrive best in a dim, hazy sunlight.
+
+                                   E.
+
+Emotion (Sentimental).--Sentimentality often imparts to the inner man,
+as apoplexy to the outer, greater sensibility and yet paralysis.
+
+                              F (_see_ Ph)
+
+                                   G.
+
+Goddess.-As the Romans would rather recognize their monarchs as gods
+than as masters, so do men like to call the directress of their heart
+_goddess_ rather than mistress,--because it is easier to adore than to
+obey.
+
+                                   H.
+
+H.--I have often seen people who had the wherewithal of living and knew
+how to live,--which are not two different things,--first, flutter about
+the best and most superior women and suck from the honey-cup of their
+hearts; and, secondly, I have seen them on the same day fold their
+wings and light on a miserable ninny, that the ninny might inherit
+their--heirs. But never have I compared these butterflies to anything
+but butterflies, which all day long visit and rifle flowers, and yet
+spawn their eggs on a dirty cabbage-stump.
+
+                                   H.
+
+Holbein's Leg.--I prefer repeating the H in the place of I, because
+under the Rubric of the I would come the _Invalides_, of whom I had
+meant to assert, that, as people who have had limbs taken off become
+full-blooded, so they have the less bread handed to them the more limbs
+they have had shot or cut off, and that this is called the Physiology
+and Dietetics of the military chest.--But I have pitied these (half)
+poor devils too much to do it.
+
+The famous legs of Holbein afford a better joke than legs that have
+been taken off. That is to say, this painter used his brush in Basle
+only upon Basle itself; and the self-same circumstance that drove his
+genius to this architectural dyeing-business compelled it often to hold
+recess-hours therein,--namely, he guzzled terribly. A house owner,
+whose name is wanting in history, often came to the house-door, and
+swore up at the scaffolding, when the house-stainer's legs--for that
+was all of the painter that could be seen--were standing or staggering
+in the neighboring wine-cellar. Then when Holbein by-and-by came
+stalking along with them across the street, a quarrel came to meet him
+and went with him up the scaffold. This irritated the painter, who made
+a study even of his cups, and he proposed to himself to reform the
+owner. That is to say, as he owed his misfortune wholly to his legs,
+whose festoons the man wanted to see under the scaffolding, he resolved
+to make a second edition of his legs, and paint them on the house in a
+hanging posture, so that the man, when he looked up from the house-door
+below, should get the idea that the two legs and their boots were
+painting away up there busily. And the owner took this idea, too; but,
+as he observed at last that the counterfeit foot-works hung all day in
+one spot and never moved along, he wanted to see what kept the master
+so long improving and retouching at one part, and so up he went. Up
+there in the vacuum he easily saw that the painter ceased where the
+knee-pieces began, at the knee, and that the trunk, which was wanting,
+was again guzzling in an _alibi_.
+
+I do not blame the owner for not at once on the scaffolding drawing a
+moral from the leg-works; he was too furious.
+
+I meant to have appended a further history of the princely portraits
+which hang there behind the President in the Session-Chambers instead
+of the originals, by way of casting-votes,--but I should disturb the
+connection; here, too, was formerly the end of the First Part.
+
+
+
+
+                           17. DOG-POST-DAY.
+
+   The Cure.--The Prince's Palace.--Victor's Visits.--Joachime.--
+      Copperplate Engraving of the Court.--Cudgellings.
+
+
+When I was in Breslau, I said, "I wish I were the Fetzpopel!"[191] just
+as I was devouring the portrait of that personage. The Fetzpopel is a
+silly woman whose face is stamped on the Breslau ginger-cookies. I say
+what follows not merely on my own account, for the sake of getting my
+own head on to such gingerbread paste, but also for the sake of other
+literati, whom Germany honors with monuments as little as it does
+me,--for instance, Lessing and Leibnitz. As one must always feel so
+disagreeably in the German circles, until half a rod of stones, at
+least, are got together for the monument of a Lessing or other magnate,
+(the most that we have as yet is what few stones good reviewers throw
+at a literary man, as the ancients did upon graves,)--accordingly, I
+expressed myself freely in the Breslau market-place before I had bitten
+into the Fetzpopel: "Either the temple of fame and the bed of honor for
+German authors are on this gingerbread here, or else there is no fame
+at all. When will it be the time, if it is not now, to expect of the
+Germans that they shall take the faces of their greatest men and emboss
+them upon eatables? because, certainly, the stomach is the most
+important German member. If the Greek lived only among statues of great
+men, and thereby became great himself, then surely would the Viennese,
+if he had the greatest heads always before his eyes and on his plate,
+fall into enthusiasm and an emulous desire to promote himself and his
+face also on to gingerbread, and other cakes, pies, and cracknels.
+Meusel's learned Germany might be copied in baker's-work,--one might
+emboss great heroes upon army-biscuit, in order to set on fire the
+common soldiery and make them hunger for glory,--great poets I would
+sketch on bridal-cakes in inlaid sculpture, and heraldic geniuses on
+oatmeal bread,--of authors for women sweet box-pictures might be
+designed for sugar-work. If this were done, then would heads like
+Hamann or Liskov meet more generally the German _taste_ in such dress;
+and many a scholar who had not a loaf of bread to eat would at least
+ornament one; and we should have, beside the paper nobility, a baked
+one also." As regards myself, who up to this time never saw my face
+anywhere except in the shaving-glass, they shall mould me (for I am
+least known in Westphalia) on Westphalia rye-bread.
+
+
+Now to the story again. A tall, curly-haired man stands in the night
+before the many-colored house of the apothecary Zeusel, peeps up at the
+lighted third story, which he is about to occupy, and at last opens,
+instead of the wooden door, the glass one of the apothecary's shop. O
+my good Sebastian! a blessing on thy entry! May a good angel give thee
+his hand, to lift thee over boggy roads and man-traps; and when thou
+hast fallen into a snare and been wounded, then may he fan the wound
+with his wing, and a kind man cover it with his heart!
+
+In the apothecary's shop, which blazed like a ballroom, one of the
+fattest court-lackeys was begging of one of the leanest dispensers a
+maniple more and a little pugillus[192] of moxa[193] for his Highness.
+But the lean man took behind his scales a half-open handful of moxa,
+and four finger-tipfuls more (for in fact a little pugillus amounts to
+only three finger-tips), and sent it all to the feet of the Prince.
+"When we have burnt all this," said he, pointing to the moxa, "his
+Highness will soon have a podagra as good as can be found in the
+country."
+
+The reason why the dispenser gave more than the recipe said was that he
+also wished to have his pew in the Temple of Fame; therefore he would
+first think over a recipe that was handed to him until he approved it,
+and then he always weighed out 1/11 or 1/17 of a scruple too much or
+too little, in order to take off from the doctor's head the civic crown
+of the recovery and put it on his own. "Only with such gifts can I work
+my cures," said he. Victor did not begrudge him the illusion. "A
+dispenser," said he, "who leads the whole column of convalescents, and
+turns over to the doctor merely the rearguard of corpses, has already
+laurels enough for this short life _under_ his brain-pan."
+
+The apothecary Zeusel has good breeding enough not to bore his tenant
+by forcing upon him a reception-dinner, and merely gave him _this_
+newspaper article from his oral _Morning Chronicle_ of the city, that
+the Prince had not so much got the gout as that he was trying to get it
+and settle it. He also gave him the Italian servant whom his Lordship
+had hired for him, and his chamber.
+
+--And therein Sebastian is now sitting alone on the window-seat, and
+seriously considering, without glancing at the beauties of the room or
+the prospect, what he properly shall have to do here to-morrow, and day
+after tomorrow, and longer. "To-morrow, I blaze away at once," said he,
+and twirled the tassel of the curtain-cord; "I and the gout must settle
+ourselves down with the Prince. It is hard when a man has to use the
+gouty matter of a Regent for water to turn his mill: a polypus in the
+_heart_ or dropsy on the _brain_ would annoy me less as a courtier;
+either would be respectable _means of grace_ and fins for swimming
+upward. No, I will stand straight and firm, entirely upright; from the
+very first I will not yield an inch, so that they shall always find me
+the same. Not so much as quartering and anchoring in antechambers is to
+be thought of." (Indeed, his Lordship had already stipulated to the
+soliloquist an exemption from the annoyance of court etiquette.) "Ah,
+ye fair spring-years! Ye are now flown away over my head, and with you
+peace and mirth and studies and sincerity, and none but good, genial
+hearts!" (He suddenly twirled the curtain-tassel up shorter.) "But,
+thou good father, thou hast not even had such good years,--thou roamest
+over the earth and givest up thy days to the welfare of men! No, thy
+son shall not spoil nor embitter for thee thy sacrifices,--he shall
+conduct himself here discreetly enough,--and then, when thou comest
+back again and findest here at court an obedient, favored, and yet
+uncorrupted son..." When the son actually thought to himself, that, if
+he should thus culminate in a right ascension at court, he might win
+the heart of the Chaplaincy, the heart of Le Baut, that of his father,
+those of his whole kindred, and (provided he thought of _that_)
+even the heart of Clotilda,--by that time he had twisted off the
+curtain-tassel and held it like a tuberose in his hand, ... and so he
+thought best to lay himself quietly down in his bed.
+
+--Get up, my hero! The morning sun already reddens thy balcony,--jump
+up amidst the ringing of the bells for the week-day sermon, and amidst
+the din of this market-day, and look round on thy bright chamber! Thy
+father, of whom thou hast been dreaming all night, has furnished it
+full of musical and artistic instruments and apparatus, and thou wilt
+think of him the whole morning; and yet the balcony offers thee still
+more,--the sight of a green strip of fields, and, toward the west, of
+the heights of Maienthal, the whole market-place, the private residence
+of the senior parson of the city opposite, into all the rooms of which,
+that he lets to thy Flamin, thou canst look!
+
+Flamin, however, is not in there just now: for it was he who had
+already laid hold of my hero, and accosted him in those words of mine,
+"Get up!" A new situation is a spring-cure for our hearts, and takes
+away from them the oppressive feeling of our transitoriness; and
+beneath such a cheerful sky of life my Victor to-day dances with
+everything and everybody,--with the forenoon hours,--with the
+Regency-Counsellor,--with the apothecary,--out through the apothecary's
+shop right before the dispenser, on his way up to the palace to make a
+few passages with the gouty Januarius.
+
+--He has hardly been at the Prince's half an hour, when Zeusel sees him
+running back again into his medicinal warehouse.... "Heigh! heigh!"
+thinks the apothecary.
+
+But it was quite different from what he thought. Through an abatis of
+uniforms--for the entrances to princes' apartments are almost like
+lanes of tents, and rulers cause themselves to be guarded as anxiously
+as if they feared they might be the _first_ or the _last_--Victor made
+his way into the sick-chamber. Before a patient who lies in a
+horizontal position one can keep a perpendicular one more easily. Great
+folk often confound the effect of their apartment and furniture with
+their own: if the _savant_ could come upon them on a common, in a wood,
+in a cabbage-field, he would know how to deport himself. Victor,
+however, had himself been brought up in apartments that were
+embroidered, and furnished with gold corner-clips. So when he found his
+father's friend in pain and with his legs packed up, he exchanged his
+English composure for the professional, and, instead of awaiting
+haughty princely questions, began to propose medical ones. When the
+doctor's medical confessional session was at an end, he laid his hand,
+instead of on the head of the penitent, on the Bible which lay by it,
+and was going to swear, but gave that up because a better idea had
+occurred to him, and he opened--this was what had come into his
+head--the gospel of the paralytic: "For the podagra in this case is not
+to be thought of," said he. He showed him that his whole complaint
+was--wind (figuratively and literally speaking),--that it lodged itself
+in the relaxed vessels of the system, and insinuated itself, like the
+Jesuits, under every different form, through all the members,--even his
+pain in the calf was nothing more than that displaced human or
+intestinal ether. The physician in ordinary, Culpepper, is to be
+excused for his error in regard to the Prince; for every physician must
+make his selection of some universal malady, into which he resolves all
+others, which he treats _con amore_, in which, as the theologue does in
+Adam's sin, or the philosopher in his first principle, he detects all
+the rest. It rested, therefore, with the free will of Culpepper,
+whether to pick out for himself as the radical malady, to be the
+nest-egg and mother-bulb of his pathology, the podagra in the case of
+men, with women the flux, or not. When he has once made his choice,
+then he is obliged to endeavor to fix it upon his Highness, like pastel
+or quicksilver. January had never, even from his chapel, heard anything
+more agreeable than Victor's assertion, which set him free from the
+prostration, dosing, and starving which he had had to go through.
+Victor, in his joy at the lightness of the malady, hurried away to give
+his recipe for it, after he had asserted, by way of consolation, that
+"an _ethereal_ body was still to be taken along with him, and would
+serve the soul, not indeed for a heavenly Graham's-bed,[194] but still
+for an air-bed, which made itself up. Only poor women's-souls--if one
+rightly regarded their bodies--might be said to lie on thorny straw
+sacks, smooth hussars'-saddles, and sharp sausage-sledges[195]; whereas
+shaven and tattooed spirits (monks and savages) wrapped themselves up
+with such fine bodies stuffed with whalebone shavings."[196]
+
+Away he flew; and I have already reported that the apothecary presently
+thought to himself: "Heigh! heigh!" In the apothecary's shop Victor
+said to the dispenser, at whom he flew like saltpetre: "Sir colleague,
+what think you about it, if we should have nothing to cure in the case
+of his Highness but wind? You must advise me. For my part, I should
+prescribe:--
+
+            _Pulv. Rhei Orient_.
+            _Sem. Anisi Stellati_
+            ----_F[oe]niculi_
+            _Cort. Aurant. immat_.
+            _Sal. Tart. [=a][=a] dr. I_.
+            _Fol. Senn. Alexandr. sine Stipit. dr. II_.
+            _Sacchar. alb. unc. sem_.--
+
+
+"If you agree with me, I have nothing more to say, except, _C. C. M. f.
+p. Subt. D. ad Scatulam, S_. Colic-powders, one teaspoonful as often as
+occasion requires."[197]
+
+As the dispenser looked at him seriously, he looked at him still more
+seriously; and the medicine was prepared without a change in the dose.
+When he had gone, the dispenser said to his two startled pages: "You
+couple of stupid epiglottises, don't you suppose he has sense enough to
+ask?"
+
+The biographer has no need whatever to justify the circumstance--since
+the powder and the hero justify it--that January got upon his legs the
+very same day.
+
+As princes feel no pressure of the atmosphere, except that of the air
+which is in their bodies, January's gratitude for his deliverance from
+this pressure, was so unbounded that for the whole day he would not let
+the Doctor go from his side. He must dine,--sup,--ride,--play with him.
+In the palace it was tolerable; it was not like Nero's, a city within a
+city, a Flachsenfingen in Flachsenfingen, but merely barracks and a
+kitchen full of soldiers and cooks. For before every mouldy archive,
+before every room where lay genuine diamonds, before every door-lock,
+and before every stairway a bayonet was planted, with the protector and
+patron who was attached to it. The numerous crew of kitchen-servants
+lived and fired up in the palace, because his Highness was continually
+eating. By this continual eating he would make his fasting easier for
+him; for at the three ritual mealtimes of men he touched--because
+Culpepper would so have it--desperately little, and could not wholly
+contradict the courtiers who praised his strict diet. A watchmaker from
+London had done the most to help him out in this moderation by
+contriving for him a servant's bell, and a spring-work whose index
+stood upon a great dial-plate in the servants' apartment; the margin of
+the dial-plate was encircled, instead of the hours and the days of the
+month, with the names of viands and wines. January had only to ring the
+bell and press the spring, and the household immediately knew whether
+the tongue and the victual-index pointed to pastry or to Burgundy. In
+this way, by tinkling like a mill when his inner man had nothing more
+to grind, he was most easily enabled to observe a stricter diet than
+physicians and moralists could well demand, and he shamed more than one
+grandee, whom, after eviscerating in death, they were obliged to lay
+out upon the bed of state with the hungry stomach under one arm and the
+thirsty liver under the other, as they give to capons also their two
+viscera as a body-guard between their two wings.
+
+Victor was as much at home in the palace as in the parsonage; for the
+court proper, the proper courtly worms'-nest and frog-spawn, was
+resident merely in the palace of the actual minister, Von Schleunes,
+because he had to do the _honneurs_ of the throne, to invite
+ambassadors, strangers, &c. The Princess resided in the large old
+palace, which was called the Paullinum. Thus, then, did January spend
+his days without pomp, but with comfort and convenience, in the true
+solitude of a philosopher, and passed them away in eating, drinking,
+and sleeping; hence could the Flachsenfingen Prorector compare him,
+without flattery, to the greatest of the old Romans, in whom we admire
+a similar hatred of show and state. January had, in fact, no court, but
+went himself to the court of his actual minister; with extreme
+reluctance, however: he could not love anything there,--neither the
+Princess, who was always there, nor Schleunes's unmarried daughters,
+which would have been against his London vow.
+
+About twelve o'clock at night Zeusel would have been glad to find out
+how all was going on, and brought to the physician in ordinary his
+niece _Marie_, whom he offered to him as a female lackey. The
+physician, who could not play the fool with any fool in the world,
+especially under four eyes, thrust before the slender pike a crateful
+of the food of truth, which the latter greedily devoured as if it were
+pine-apple. Marie was a relative and a Catholic, impoverished by a
+lawsuit, and disappointed in love, who, in the cold, hollow family of
+the apothecary, received and expected nothing but thrust-wounds of
+words and shot-wounds of looks; her broken and crushed soul resembled
+the marsh-willow, of which one can strip down backward all the twigs
+with the mere hand. She felt no longer pained at any humiliation; she
+seemed before others to crawl, but in truth she lay continually
+prostrate on the ground. When the gentle Victor saw this meek, averted
+form, over which so many tears had flowed, and this once beautiful
+face, on which, not the sorrows of fancy had laid their charming
+painter's-touches, but physical pangs had emptied their poison-bags,
+then did the fate of mortals bring sadness to his heart, and, with the
+softest of courtesy towards Marie's station, sex, and sorrow, he
+declined her services. The apothecary would have despised himself if he
+had taken this politeness for anything else than fine raillery and good
+breeding. But Victor threw her off once more; and the poor girl
+withdrew in silence, and, like a maidservant, without spirit enough for
+courtesy.
+
+Nevertheless, in the morning the rejected one brought him his breakfast
+with downcast eyes and painfully smiling lips; he had heard in his bed
+how the apothecary and his hard sprouts of daughters had twitted Marie
+with her "doleful whining air," and therefrom inferred a "_refusal_
+from the jesting gentleman" overhead. His soul bled within him, and at
+last he accepted Marie;--he made his eye and his voice so soft and
+sympathetic that he could have lent either to the most tender maiden;
+but Marie took nothing of it to herself.
+
+January could hardly wait for him to come again.
+
+The third day also it was just so.
+
+And so, too, the next week.
+
+--But I could wish my readers had all ridden in a body, at this time,
+through the Flachsenfingen gate, and that this learned company had
+scattered itself through the city in order to institute inquiries
+about our hero. The reading scouts sent by me to the coffee-houses
+would learn that the new English doctor had already unseated the
+old one,--helped the parson's son at St. Luna to the post of
+Regency-Counsellor,--and that great changes in all departments were at
+hand. The division which I distributed among the butlers, butchers,
+fishery-masters, castellans, and valets of the court, would bring me
+word that the Prince had patted the Doctor, not on the fingers, but on
+the shoulder,--that he had day before yesterday showed him with his own
+hand his picture-cabinet, and sent him the best piece out of it,--that
+in the theatre he had looked out with him from the stage-box,--that he
+had presented to him a snuff-box rich with jewels (the usual civic
+crown of rulers, and their calumet, as if we were Greenlanders, who
+never love to receive any other present so much as snuff),--and that
+they would travel together. Two of the very finest and most dignified
+readers whom I had detached from these columns, and of whom I had
+despatched the one to the Paullinum to the Princess, the other to the
+actual Minister, would at least report to me the news that Prince and
+Doctor had called together upon both, and that both had looked upon my
+hero as a singular, shy, taciturn Englishman, who owed everything to
+his father.
+
+But the last piece of news which the readers have related to me they
+cannot, I am sure, possibly know; and I will myself tell it to them.
+
+--Before I deliver this, let me first simply explain in three words how
+it was that Victor rose so rapidly. There may be Evangelist-Matthieus
+among my readers who take this sudden rise, like that of the barometer,
+as the sign of a speedy fall,--who will say that laurels and salad,
+which have been forced to ripen in twenty-four hours by spirit on a
+cloth, wither again just as soon,--nay, who will even joke about the
+matter, and give out that the Prince's intestines, with their ether,
+are a fish's swimming-bladder to my hero, who only by its inflation
+mounts upward. Mining-superintendents laugh at such readers, and inform
+them that men, particularly the occupants of thrones, look upon a new
+physician as a new specific,--that they are always most ready to obey a
+new one,--that Sebastian always deported himself towards every one the
+first time in the finest manner, whereas with old acquaintances he
+never said unnecessarily anything witty,--that January loved every one
+whom he could see through, and that he fortunately recognized in my
+hero merely a gay fellow fond of life, and did not remark around his
+head any of Bose's Beatifications,[198] which smell of phosphorus and
+emit painful sparks,--that Victor was not, like Le Baut, a _pot-plant_
+in a crown, but a hyacinth hanging in the open air high above it,--that
+he was cheery, and made every one else so,--and that another
+mining-superintendent would not have made so much ceremony with his
+readers as I: _he_ would merely have told them the main circumstance,
+that in Victor, in his waggery and behavior generally, the Prince had
+found and fallen in love with an enchanting resemblance to his fifth
+son, the _Monsieur_ (lost on the Seven Islands), and that he had made
+this observation even in London, although Victor was five years younger
+than the latter.
+
+January chose, himself, to present his favorite to everybody, and
+so to the Princess too. The philosophers have it to explain why
+Sebastian never once remembered, until he sat beside the princely
+bridegroom on the coach-cushion, the mad, enamored little strip of
+paper which, in Kussewitz, he had pasted above the Imperator of the
+_montre-à-regulateur_, and thrown into the Princess's bargain. He
+started, and held it to be impossible that he should have been such a
+fool. But such a thing is easy for a man. His fancy flung back upon
+every scene, upon every idea, so many focus-lights from a thousand
+mirrors, and spread around the future, which stretched out beyond, so
+many colored shadows and so much blue mist, that he was really
+frightened when a foolish action came into his head; for he knew, that,
+when he should have rejected it ten times and then thought it over
+thirty times more, then, after all, he should go and do it.--When the
+two appeared before the Princess, Victor was in that agreeable frame,
+which is nothing new to tutors and young scholars, which stiffens the
+limbs to bone, and sends the heart up into the mouth, and petrifies the
+tongue;--it was not the certainty that _Agnola_ (that was the name of
+the Princess) had read the aforesaid advertisement on the watch, which
+so disconcerted him, but the uncertainty whether she had or not. In his
+agony he never thought of _this_,--that she, of course, did not even
+know his handwriting or the authorship of the little slip; and even if
+one does think of that in his agony, still it does not leave him.
+
+--But all was, at once, above, below, and contrary to his expectation.
+The Princess had laid aside the face of sensibility with her
+travelling-dress, and had put on instead a fine, firm gala-face. The
+crowned bridegroom January was received by her with as much warm
+decorum as if he were his own ambassador of the first rank. For
+January, the disk of whose heart charged itself full of sparks on the
+electrizing-cushion of a fair cheek or a bosom-handkerchief, had for
+that very reason towards Agnola, with whom merely from policy he had
+concluded the concordats of marriage, all the warmth of the month after
+which he was named. Towards Victor, the son of her hereditary foe, the
+successor to the house-thief of princely favor, she cherished, as is
+easy to guess, true tenderness. Our poor hero, surprised at January's
+coldness, which seemed to promise on the part of the wife no special
+warmth toward himself, demeaned himself as gravely as the elder and
+younger Cato at once. He thanked God (and so do I) that he came away.
+
+But all the way back he kept thinking: "If I could only have got my
+missive out of the watch-case! Ah, then I would have done everything,
+poor Agnola, to reconcile thee to thy fate and thy husband!--Ah, St.
+Luna," he added, as they passed along before the city parson's house,
+"thou peaceful spot, full of flowers and of love! The masters of the
+hunt send thy Bastian from one baiting-house to another!"
+
+For he must also, for politeness' sake, go at least to the actual
+Minister's, and January took him along with him. Thither he went with
+gusto, as if into a sea-fight, or into a quarantine hospital, or into
+the Russian ice-palace.
+
+Furniture and persons in the house of Schleunes were in the finest
+taste. Victor found there, from the wabble-headed figures[199] and
+court-people, even to the basaltic busts of old philosophers, and to
+the dolls in the shape of Schleunes's daughters, from the polished
+floor to the polished faces, from the powdering cabinet to the reading
+cabinet,--both of which painted the head in the mere passage through
+them,--in short, everywhere he found all that the sumptuary laws have
+ever forbidden. His first embarrassment with the Princess gave him the
+pitch for a second. It was no longer the old Victor at all. I see
+beforehand that the worthy schoolmasters at the Marianum in Scheerau
+will be hard upon him for it,--especially the rector,--that he should
+have so little knowledge of the world as to be, while in this company,
+witty without vivacity, constrainedly free without complaisance, too
+constantly in motion with his eyes, too immovable in his other members.
+But one must suggest to these courtly and scholarly people, that he
+could not help it. The rector himself would have been embarrassed as
+well as Victor before the _bel-esprit_ of a minister's lady, whom,
+though, to be sure, Meusel has not introduced her into his, the court
+has into _its_ Learned Germany,--before her quizzing daughters,
+especially the handsomest, who was named Joachime,--before a number of
+strangers,--before so many people who hated him on his father's
+account, and who watched him in order to explain and verify his
+relations with the Prince,--before the Princess herself, whom the Devil
+had also brought hither,--before Matthieu, who here was in his element,
+and in his leading character and bravura air,--and before the
+Minister,--especially before this last. Victor found in him a man full
+of dignity, from whom business did not take away politeness, nor
+thinking wit; and whom a little irony and coldness only the more
+exalted, but who seemed to despise feeling, scholars, and mankind.
+Victor generally imagined to himself a minister--e. g. Pitt--as a Swiss
+glacier, on which the clouds and dew that nourish it freeze overhead,
+which oppresses the low places, and, in its alternation between melting
+and congealing, sends out great torrents down below, and out of whose
+clefts corpses are drifted.
+
+January himself was not quite comfortable among them: what availed him
+the finest dishes, if they were embittered by the finest conceits? The
+card-table was, therefore, especially upon the peaceful arrival of his
+spouse, his quiet place of anchorage; and his Victor was for this once
+also glad to anchor beside him. My correspondent thinks that the
+tuning-key to this over-fine, demi-semi-_tone_ was turned by the
+Minister's lady merely, who had all sciences in her head, and to
+be sure at-her tongue's end, and for that reason held a weekly
+_bureau-d'esprit_. In this ridiculous position, Sebastian played away
+his evening and gobbled down his _souper_; he could tell a good story,
+but he had no story to tell,--in the few _contes_ which stayed by him
+all was anonymous, and to the circle about him the names were precisely
+the things of the first importance; nor could he make use of his humor
+either, because a humor like his places the possessor himself in a mild
+comic light, and because, therefore, only among good friends whose
+respect one cannot lose, but not among bad friends whose respect
+one must hold by defiance, can it venture out in its sock and
+harlequin's-collar,--he did not even enjoy the happiness of inwardly
+laughing at them all, because he had no time for it, and because he
+never found people ridiculous till their backs were turned.
+
+He was confoundedly badly off. "You'll not catch me here again very
+soon," he thought to himself; and when, through the two tall glass
+doors of the balcony, which looked out upon the garden, the moon stole
+in with its dreamy light, which out there fell upon stiller dwellings,
+fairer prospects, and calmer hearts,--then he stole out upon the
+balcony (as his partnership at the card-table was broken up by the
+Prince after supper), and the night that glistened on the earth and in
+the heavens exalted his bosom with greater scenes. With what love
+thought he then of his father, whose philosophic coldness was like the
+January snow, which covers the seed from the frost, whereas that of the
+court resembles the snow of March, which devours the buds! How sorely
+did he reproach himself for every discontented thought about his honest
+Flamin's slight want of refinement! O, how his inner man erected itself
+like a fallen and forgiven angel, when he imagined to himself Emanuel
+leading Clotilda by the hand, and rapturously asking him, "Where hast
+thou found to-day an image of this my friend?" At this moment he
+yearned inexpressibly to be back again in his St. Luna....
+
+His quickening heart-beats were all at once checked by _Joachime_, who
+came out with a burst of laughter directed toward the parlor. As it was
+a burden to her to sit for a single hour, (I wonder how she could lie
+in bed a whole night,) she extricated herself as often as she could
+from the curb-bit of the card-table. The Princess released her this
+time, who suspended this _night-work_ of great people on account of the
+weakness of her eyes. Joachime was no Clotilda, but still she had two
+eyes polished like two rose-diamonds, two lips like painted ones, two
+hands like casts, and, in fact, all the duplicate members were very
+pretty.... And with these a court-physician can keep house well enough,
+though the single ones (heart, head, nose, forehead) are not those of a
+Clotilda. As now under the open heaven he recovered his spirits, and
+on the balcony, which for him was always a parlor, the use of his
+tongue,--as Joachime's tone attuned him again to his own,--as she
+assailed the taciturnity of the English, and he defended the
+exceptions,--as he could now run, like a spider, up and down along the
+thread of the conversation, and was no more to be disturbed by the
+Princess, who had followed after to cool off in the night-air her
+inflamed eyes,--and as one complains of feeling ennui only when one
+himself inflicts it,--and as I transcribe all this, I do enough (I
+think) for a reviewer, who stands up behind the coach-body of the
+Prince, and reflects and wonders what he shall have to hold on to
+(except the footmen's straps), in case Victor, sitting before him in
+the carriage, does not during the ride home wish the Minister's house
+at the Devil, but thinks more contentedly,--Well, it's tolerable
+enough![200]
+
+Victor's society agreed so well with the Prince, that he fancied he
+could as little do without him as a canoness out of the house can think
+of taking the badge of her order off her person. He always plunged into
+the sacred cup and welcome of the warm spring of a new friendship as
+immoderately as a guest at Carlsbad does into his. When he felt ennui,
+the Medicus was besought to come and drive it away; when he experienced
+an inward jubilee, that person was again entreated to appear, that he
+might participate in the jubilation. Only those times at which January
+felt neither ennui nor the contrary were left to his friend to spend
+entirely at his own pleasure. Victor had sworn beforehand to make an
+easy matter of refusing, and had broken out upon people of easy
+consent; now, however, he said, "The Devil may say, No! Just let a man
+find _himself_ in the same situation first!" ... And so must our poor
+Victor describe nothing but empty, dizzying gyres in the court-circle
+of the throne, among people for whose tone he could more easily have an
+_ear_ than a _tongue_, and whom he could read, but could not win.
+
+A youth in whose breast hang the night-pieces of Maienthal and St.
+Luna,--or one who has just arrived from a watering-village,--or one who
+has it in mind to fall in love,--or one who, in great cities or in
+their great circles, must be an _idle_ spectator,--every such one is
+also, for that very reason, a _dissatisfied_ spectator therein, and
+blows into his critical pipe against the trifling company, till he
+himself is drawn in. But when all these causes actually meet in one and
+the same man, then can he find no relief against his gall-bladder nor
+any biliary duct, except to take some fine paper and send off to the
+Eymanns in St. Luna a confounded satirical letter upon what he has
+seen.
+
+My hero despatched the following to the Parson:--
+
+
+"MY DEAR SIR AND ADOPTED FATHER:"--
+
+"I have not had hitherto spare time enough to lift my eyes up and see
+what moon we have. Verily, a court wants time for virtue. The Prince
+carries me about with him everywhere, like a smelling-bottle, and shows
+up his foolish Doctor. Erelong they will not be able to endure me: not
+because I am good for anything,--on the contrary, I am convinced they
+could bear the most virtuous man in the world quite as well as the
+worst, and that merely because he would be an Anglicism, an _homme de
+fantaisie_,[201] a _lusus naturæ_,--but because I do not talk enough.
+Business-people never trouble themselves about any conversational or
+epistolary style; but with court-people the tongue is the artery of
+their withered life, the spiral-spring and flag-feather of their souls;
+they are all born critics, who look at nothing but fine turns,
+expression, fire, and speech. This comes of their having nothing to do;
+their good works are _bon mots_,[202] their exchange business consists
+in visiting-cards, their housekeeping is a card-party, and their
+agriculture a hunting-party, and the _minor service_ a physiognomy.
+Hence they must have other people's faults all day long in their ears
+as an antidote to tedious leisure, as the physicians inoculate with the
+itch to counteract stupidity; a court-establishment is the regular
+penny post-office of the smallest items of news, even about you
+commoners, when you happen to have done anything really ridiculous. It
+were to be wished that we had festivals, or card-parties, or plays, or
+assemblies, or _soupers_, or something good to eat, or some amusement
+or other; but that is not to be thought of. We have, to be sure, all
+these things, but only their names; the President of the Exchequer
+would shrug his shoulders, if we should undertake to be, four times in
+a year, so brilliantly happy as you are four times a month. As our week
+consists of seven Sundays, it follows that our amusements are only
+signs in the calendar, epochs of time, to which no one pays heed; and a
+festival is nothing but a play-room for the plans which every one has
+in his head, the boards on which he is to act his leading part, and the
+season for continuing the intrigue against victims of love and of
+ambition. Here there is, every minute, a stinging mosquito, and the
+thistle-seed of beautifully painted trouble flies round far and wide.
+
+"There are many women here who are good, and disciples of Linnæus, and
+their eyes classify men botanically, according to his fine and simple
+_sexual_-system; they make a great distinction between virtuous and
+vicious love,--namely, that of _degree_, or at least of time; and the
+_best_ often speaks on the subject like the _worst_, and the worst like
+the best. Meanwhile we have here female virtue and manly fidelity, in
+their way,--but no idea of them can be communicated to a parson; for
+these two jellies are so soft and delicate, that, if I should undertake
+to carry them down over all the steps of the throne to the parsonage,
+they would arrive there in such a spoiled and ruined state, that one
+would give them down below there the two opposite names,--for which,
+however, we ourselves have up here our special and corresponding
+objects. Your commoners would find our elderly men ridiculous in
+matters of love, as _they_ would your daughters. But what often
+embitters for me this happy court-life is the universal want of
+dissimulation. For no one believes here what he hears, and no one
+thinks how he looks; all must, according to the regular laws of the
+game, like cards, have the upper side uniform, and put on an external
+stillness of face as a cover to the internal fire, as the lightning
+destroys only the sword and not the scabbard. Consequently, as a
+universal dissimulation is none at all, and as every one gives every
+other credit for poison, no one can _deceive_ another, but only
+_outwit_ him; only the understanding, not the heart, is taken in.
+Meanwhile, to speak the truth, that is not truth; for every one has two
+masks,--the general and the individual. For the rest, the colors which
+are used upon the scientific, refined, and philanthropic painting of
+the outer man are necessarily scraped off from the inner man, but
+advantageously, since there is not much on the inner man, and the study
+of appearance lessens reality: so have I often seen hares lying in the
+woods that had not an ounce of flesh or a drop of fat on their bodies,
+because all had been absorbed by the monstrous fur which had continued
+to grow after their death.
+
+"If one compares the substantial value of the throne and that of the
+low ground of the commonalty, the physical and moral exaltation of
+men appears to bear an inverse relation to that of their soil,
+just as the inhabitants of marshy lands are larger than mountaineers.
+But, nevertheless, those elevated people bear the state easily on
+butterfly-wings, survey its wheel-work with the hundred-eyed papilio's
+eye, and with a walking-cane defend the people from lions, or chase
+therewith the lions among the people, as in Africa the children of the
+herdsmen scare away with a whip the real lions of Natural History from
+the grazing cattle.... Dear Mr. Court-Chaplain, this satire began to
+pain me already on the former page; but here one is malicious, just as
+he is vain, without knowing when: the former, because one is obliged to
+take too much notice of others; the latter, because he is compelled to
+think too much of himself. No! Your garden, your sitting-room, are
+pleasanter; there, is no stony breast on which one _crucifies_ the arms
+and veins of friendship like a tree trained on an espalier; there, one
+is not obliged, as I am, to be twice a day under the barber's hands,
+and three times a day under the hair-dresser's; there, one has leave
+at least to put on his polished boot. Write soon to your adopted son,
+for I still deny myself the festival of a visit to you. Are there
+many baptisms and burials? What is _Fox_[203] doing, and the deaf
+bellows-blower? At this very moment I hear the mortar, instead of your
+rat-drum, pounding down below. Farewell.
+
+"And now at last I greet you, beloved mother! My hand is warm, and in
+my heart a pair of souls are beating; for now your face, full of
+motherly warmth, shines on all my satirical ice-peaks, and melts them
+into warm blood, which will throb for you and for you flow. How good it
+feels to love again! Your second son, Flamin, is well, but too busy,
+and at present in St. Luna.[204] Greet my sisters and all that love
+you.
+
+                                                      "Sebastian."
+
+
+He reserved the letter in order to despatch the Regency-Counsellor, who
+wanted to take his person along with him, with a freight at least.
+
+Meanwhile his and January's joint visits, with their stage
+entanglements, grew to quite other ones, even a ganglion of friendship
+between January and himself,--and at the same time gave this friendship
+increased notoriety. In St. Luna, in Le Baut's house, three times as
+much was made out of it as there was in it,--in the parsonage, nine
+times. To this was added a trifle, namely, a scuffle,--properly, two. I
+have the incident from Spitz,--Victor got it from Flamin,--he from
+Matthieu,--in whose noble historical style it can here be handed
+over to posterity. The Evangelist was never ashamed of a commoner,
+provided he could make a fool of him. Therefore he visited the
+court-apothecary without scruple. To the latter, who cordially hated
+the barrack-physician, Culpepper, on account of his coarse arrogance,
+and on account of the reason given in the note[205] below, Matthieu had
+long since promised to upset the Doctor. As the latter and the podagra
+had actually been banished by Victor from January's feet, the
+Evangelist gave the apothecary to understand that he himself would,
+without _his_ hint and wishes, have contributed far less to the fall of
+Culpepper than he had done. Zeusel, especially as he had the successor
+of the barrack-physician in his house, came after some days to the
+billiard-table with the certain conviction that he, from his
+apothecary's-shop, had thrust under Culpepper's posteriors the
+invisible leg, and hurled him down from the steps of the throne. There
+were present, unfortunately, the barrack-physician himself, and the
+noble Mat. Zeusel came upon this stage with the festoons of three
+watch-chains, with a pair of breeches on whose knees some Arabesques
+were printed, with a double waistcoat and double neck-tie, and with
+double signs of exclamation in his face at the barrack-physician;--his
+money-purse lay exactly under the _os sacrum_, because he, like some
+Englishmen, had caused his breeches-pocket to be concealed in the
+region of the breeches buckle. He had with him as his chamber-moor his
+long, lean dispenser, who in the adjoining drinking-room encountered
+the very short dispenser of the second apothecary's-shop, or shop of
+the _canaille_. The short dispenser, out of malice, followed the tall
+one about everywhere, merely to vex him; but this time he had just come
+back from the country with some hens'-eggs which he had collected as
+fees from convalescent patients.
+
+Matthieu, after an exegetic hint to Zeusel, took the liberty of
+being of Culpepper's opinion in regard to the Prince's gout. Culpepper,
+who would fain be an old German,--such old Germans can never
+dissemble when they are angry, though they can very well do so from
+self-interest,--fired away and said the English doctor was a complete
+ignoramus. Zeusel displayed with a broad smile, as with a printer's
+vignette, his contempt for the coarse man. The Medicus looked like the
+Equator, the apothecary like Spitzbergen. Now the tourney went on
+merely upon the subject of the gout. The second and umpire, Matthieu,
+gave it to be understood, that "Zeusel, to be sure, loved his prince
+and lord, but still he could wish that this love had had the best means
+and the wholesomest influences. "In bawdy-houses," said Culpepper,
+"_that fellow there may_ have influence." When the apothecary, at these
+words, proudly and contemptuously straightened himself up, the Doctor
+slowly jammed him down on the chair and on his money-purse, and,
+bringing down his fist upon his shoulder, nailed the little coxcomb
+with his purse to the seat.
+
+This pinning-down vexed the tailor-bird most of all, and he replied,
+trying to get up, that "he would this very day, if he were consulted,
+advise his Highness to adhere to his present better choice." The
+barrack-physician might perhaps have too hurriedly withdrawn his hand
+from the shoulder which it covered; for he grazed with it, as with a
+cannon, the nose of his adversary, whereupon the latter, like Saint
+Januarius, discharged some blood. The Evangelist was personally grieved
+"that two such sensible men could not fall out and fight with each
+other without personal hatred and heat, since they _might_, like
+princes who go to war, attack each other without either,--but the
+bleeding too well attested Zeusel's ebullition." ... Zeusel cried out
+to the Doctor, "You lout!" The latter, in his fury, actually took
+Matthieu's opinion, that the former bled only from fury, and compared
+him to those corpses which in old times bled, indeed, at the approach
+of the murderer, but from none other than quite natural causes. The
+Medicus, therefore, looked for his cane, which like a prince was
+gold-headed, and took his leave with the crowned stick, drawing it a
+few times, as with magnetic passes, across Zeusel's fingers; but I
+would call the staff, if I were in the place of other people, neither
+an ear-trumpet for Zeusel, which the physician applied to him, as they
+often do to persons hard of hearing, that the latter might hear better,
+nor yet a door-knocker, which he stretched out before the truth, that
+it might the more easily get admission into the apothecary. What he
+wanted was merely to oblige him to let his handkerchief drop, in order
+that he might look him in the face as he bade farewell, which he
+clothed in the following forbearing and neatly turned remark: "You tell
+your Doctor that he and you there are the two greatest blockheads in
+town."
+
+Under these last words both dispensers kept themselves still enough in
+other respects, though not with their tongues, indeed; for the tall
+dispenser saluted, as second chorus, the short one with the same
+war-song, and was a genuine Anti-Podagrist. Whoso considers that the
+tall one loved my hero on account of his politeness, and could not bear
+the short one, because Culpepper sent all his prescriptions to _his_
+shop,--such a one cannot expect anything less of the couple than a
+reflection of the scene in the billiard-room; but the tall dispenser
+was composed, and never, like Portugal, propagated edifying truths with
+blood, but--the moment the barrack-doctor called the court-physician a
+blockhead--he quietly took the hat of the short dispenser, who had
+deposited his income of eggs therein to guard them from being broken,
+and coolly, without the least resentment, placed the aforesaid hatful
+of eggs on the head of the professional brother; and by a slight
+squeeze fitted the Doctor's hat, which sat half an ell too high, upon
+the head of his friend,--with all the more propriety, as Castor and
+Pollux also had on egg-shells,[206]--and having effected this
+promotion, he went his way, without exactly caring to have much thanks
+for the felt-stuffing and the streaming face-poultice.
+
+Fisticuffs spread abroad lesser truths, as wars do great truths. The
+Court-Chaplain Eymann sent a long letter of congratulation to Victor,
+and called him "January's kidney-keeper," and begged for his promised
+visit. A travelling[207]-advocate knocked at his door as at that of a
+superior court, and begged him for a princely injunction against the
+Regency-College. The apothecary, with his application about the
+_lavement_,[208] still holds back.
+
+Victor still laid up for himself his first visit to St. Luna like a
+ripening fruit, and thereby vexed the Regency-Counsellor, who wanted to
+persuade him into it. But he said: "Those who are left behind in a
+place long indescribably for him who has gone from it, until he has
+made his first visit; and so, too, with him. After the first, both
+parties wait quite coolly and composedly for the second."--What he
+neither said nor thought, but felt and feared, was this: that his
+demigoddess, Clotilda, who inhabited the most holy place in his breast,
+and who by her invisibleness had become dearer, more indispensable, and
+for that very reason more sure to his soul, would, perhaps, at her
+appearance, take away at once all hopes out of his heart.
+
+It was on the evening of the day when he received Eymann's letter, that
+he thus fantasied: "Ah, if January would only continue so well! He must
+have exercise, but of an unusual kind,--the rider must walk, the
+pedestrian must drive. We ought to travel together on foot through the
+country, in disguise. Ah, I might, perhaps, be of service to many a
+poor devil! We would steal homeward through St. Luna,--No, no, no!" ...
+
+He started back himself, affrighted at a certain idea,--for he feared
+he should, when he had once had it, even execute it; hence he said to
+it three times, No. The idea was this,--to persuade the Prince to visit
+Clotilda's parents. But it was of no use; he remembered that his father
+had held too strict a court of cognizance over the Chamberlain and the
+Minister. "And yet, what harm can Le Baut do to me? If I should only
+draw three sun-glances from January upon the poor fool! The wisest
+thing for me is, not to think any more about it to-day."
+
+The dog will bring us the answer; I, for my part, make a bet--a fine
+connoisseur of human nature on my island bets the contrary--that he
+does not carry out this joke.
+
+
+
+
+                           18. DOG-POST-DAY.
+
+   Clotilda's Promotion.--Incognito-Journey.--Petition of the Majors of
+      the Chase.--Consistorial Messenger.--Caricature of the
+      Flachsenfingeners.
+
+
+To be sure he did--carry out the joke; but still at bottom I do not
+lose my bet. For it happened in this way. From the day when Doctor
+Culpepper had made that pass with his coarse hand, as with an
+electrical discharger, before the full-blooded nose of Zeusel, the man
+with three watches pressed his company upon my hero, who carried only
+one, and that, too, the clumsy one of the Bee-father. Zeusel always
+thanked God, if only a court-courier got drunk at his house, or the
+court-dentist over-ate himself. He always brought with him, when he
+came, certain secret items of intelligence, which were to be published.
+He kept nothing to himself, not though one had threatened to hang him
+in the cellar of his shop. He told our hero that the Minister was
+making interest in behalf of his Joachime for the place of second
+maid-of-honor to the Princess, who could select only the female part of
+her service for herself,--but that he could not fairly do it, because
+he, or his son Matthieu, had promised the Chamberlain Le Baut to
+procure the same place for Clotilda; he therefore begged my hero, who,
+as he saw, he said, was Matthieu's friend, to spare him the
+embarrassment, and induce the Prince (which would cost only _one_ word)
+himself to intercede with the Princess in behalf of Joachime; the
+Princess, who, besides, patronized the Minister, would, on more than
+one ground, do it with pleasure, and then the Minister could not help
+it, if the Chamberlain, the enemy of his Lordship, went away empty.
+
+The simpleton, as one can see, had guessed out, merely from the two
+accounts, which he had got hold of, of the two office-seekers, the
+whole of the remaining case; and the very circumstance, which Matthieu
+disclosed to him, that the Minister was vacating a quarter of a wing of
+his palace, for a companion of his deceased daughter Giulia, had only
+strengthened his conviction. To such a degree does malice supply the
+place, not only of years, but also of information and insight!
+
+My hero could say nothing to him except that--he did not believe a word
+of it. But after three minutes of private reflection he believed it
+all: for that was the reason, he saw, why the dear Clotilda had to come
+back from the seminary just at the arrival of the Princess,--that was
+the reason why Le Baut built around the Minister's son so many altars
+of incense and thank-offerings,--that was the reason why the old
+lady (in the Sixteenth Dog-Post-Day) serenaded, and so loudly,
+court-life,--in fact, as he further saw, two such outlawed, captive
+Court-Jews in Babylon must have the live Devil in them, until they are
+reinstated in the old holy city, and if they happen to have a handsome
+daughter, they will use her as the relay of their journey, and the
+Montgolfier of their balloon-ascension....
+
+"O, only come, Clotilda!" he cried, glowingly;--"the court-pool will
+then be to me an Italian cellar, a flowery parterre. If thou art only
+once settled at the Minister's, then I shall have spirits enough and
+sparkle properly. What will my father say, when he sees us stand with
+two leading-strings, with one of which thou holdest the Princess, and
+I, with the other, the husband?" ... At this moment, Clotilda's recent
+objections to court-life fell like ice-flakes into his boiling blood;
+but he thought to himself: "Women, however, are a little mite more
+pleased with the court-residence of splendor than they themselves
+suspect or say, and far more than men are. Cannot he, too, bear, then,
+with a like soul-edifying position? She, as step-daughter of the
+Prince, is only half-miserable, compared with him,--and does she know,
+then, whether she may not some time be recalled from her _field-état_
+to the court-garrison by an accident?" By this _accident_ he meant a
+marriage with Sebastian. Finally, he tranquillized himself with
+something which I also believe,--namely, that she had at that time,
+merely out of politeness, made a show of a certain coldness towards her
+new separation from her parents, and therefore towards the new place
+also; and then, too, pleasure at such a prospect might have been
+taken for warmth toward _somebody_ or other at court, e. g. toward
+her--_brother_, he thought to himself.
+
+And now yesterday's idea, upon which I have lost my wager, came forth
+again, having shot up astonishingly in _one_ night,--namely, that, if
+he could persuade the Prince to make the journey and the visit to the
+Chamberlain, and while they were still on the road, could plead with
+him for a good word to the Princess in behalf of Clotilda,--then was
+it, in the first place, impossible for the stepfather to refuse a
+prayer for the most beautiful stepdaughter,--and, secondly, impossible
+for the Princess, when her spouse should exercise the privilege of the
+first petition, not to draw all possible advantage from the first
+opportunity of laying him under obligations to her.
+
+--Eight days after, just at dusk,--in the autumn days night comes
+sooner,--the Court--Chaplain Eymann was standing on the observatory and
+peering at the sun, not for its own sake, but in reference to the
+evening-redness and the weather, because he wanted to sow the next
+morning,--when suddenly and with alarm he sprang down from the
+watch-tower into his house, and delivered the Job's tidings, that the
+Consistorial Messenger would be there in a moment, together with a
+French emigrant, and for the one there was not a farthing, and for the
+other not a bed in the house....
+
+No soul came.
+
+I can easily comprehend it; for the Consistorial Messenger reconnoitred
+around the parsonage, and so soon as he saw the court-physician,
+Victor, in wax, sitting up at the window, he marched instanter out of
+the village, straight back to Flachsenfingen. The emigrant had turned
+in at his professional cousin's, Le Baut's.
+
+The two travellers were named January and Victor, and were returning
+this very day from their facetious flying tour.
+
+That is to say, seven days ago, the Prince, who loved mask-dances and
+incognito-journeys and the ways of the commonalty, and who wished only
+the Minister's mental masks and incognito _further_, had started off on
+foot, with Victor, behind a fellow who had sallied forth in advance on
+horseback with the masquerade dresses and masquerade refreshments.
+January carried a sword in his hand, which was contained, not in any
+sheath, but in a walking-cane,--an emblem of court-weapons! He gave
+himself out in the market-town for the new Regency-Counsellor, Flamin.
+My hero, who at the outset had passed himself through the mint, and
+come out stamped as a travelling dentist, recoined himself in the third
+village into a Consistorial Messenger, simply because the couple met
+the true Messenger. This financial collector of the Consistory was made
+to hand over to the physician for this week--it cost the Prince only a
+princely resolution and an indulgence--his receipt-book and his
+ecclesiastical robe of office, together with the tin-plate sewed
+thereto. These plates are attached to Messengers, and the silver stars
+to coats of distinction, as the leaden ones are to bales of cloth, that
+one may know what the trumpery is worth.
+
+For Büsching such a Rekahn's journey would be a windfall,--to me it is
+a true torment; for my manuscript is, besides, so large already, that
+my sister sits on it when she plays the piano-forte, because the seat
+is not high enough without the addition of the Dog-Post-Days.
+
+What did January see, and what Victor? The Regency-Counsellor, January,
+saw among the public servants nothing but crooked backs, crooked ways,
+crooked fingers, crooked souls. "But a bow is crooked, and the bow is a
+sector of the circle, that emblem of all perfection," said the
+Consistorial Messenger, Victor. But what vexed January most was, that
+the officials respected him so exceedingly, when after all he gave
+himself out only for a regency-counsellor, and not for a regent. Victor
+replied: "Man knows only two neighbors: the neighbor at his head is his
+master, the one at his feet is his slave; what lies out beyond either
+of these two is to him God or beast."
+
+What did January see still further? Untaxed knaves he saw, who enriched
+themselves at the expense of taxed poor men,--honest advocates he
+heard, who did not, like his courtiers or the English highwaymen, steal
+under the mask of virtue, but without any mask, and to whom a certain
+remoteness from enlightenment and philosophy and taste will not after
+death be prejudicial, because they can then in their own defence set up
+against God the exception of their ignorance, and represent to Him,
+"that no other laws but those of their own sovereign and of Rome can
+bind them, and that neither is God Justinian, nor is Kant
+Tribonian."[209] He saw hanging from the heads of his country-justices
+bread-baskets, and from those of their subjects muzzle-baskets; he saw,
+that, if (according to Howard) it takes two men to support one
+prisoner, here there must be given twenty incarcerated ones, that one
+city-magistrate may live.
+
+He saw cursed stuff. But, on the other hand, as an offset, he saw on
+pleasant nights the cattle in fair groups feeding in the fields,--I
+mean the republican ones, namely, stags and wild boars. The
+Consistorial Messenger, Victor, said to him, that he had to thank the
+masters of the chase for this romantic spectacle, whose tender hearts
+had been as little able to execute the princely order of shooting wild
+game as were the Egyptian midwives to execute that of slaughtering the
+Jewish male children. Nay, the Financial Messenger at an alehouse had
+some yellow ink and black paper brought to him, and there,--while the
+slater drummed away on the roof to get some more slates brought to him,
+and the guests knocked on the pitchers to get them replenished, and the
+tavern-boy _tooted_ in at the window through a beer-siphon,--amidst
+this Babylonian din the Consistorial Tithingman drew up one of the best
+petitions that the noble gentlemen of the chase ever yet despatched to
+the Prince.
+
+               A PLAIN RELATION, FROM THE PETITION OF THE
+                      CHIEF MASTERS OF THE CHASE.
+
+"That, as the wild game could neither read nor write, it was the
+bounden duty of the masters of the chase, who could, to write for them,
+and on conscience report that all the wild game of Flachsenfingen was
+pining under the tyranny of the peasant, as well the red game as the
+black.[210] That it made a chief-forester's heart bleed, to stand out
+of doors at night and see how the country-folk, out of an incredible
+ill-will to the deer, all night long, in the coldest weather, kept up
+on the borders of the fields a noise and fire, whistling, singing,
+shooting, so that the poor game might not be able to eat. To such hard
+hearts it was not given to reflect, that, if one should station around
+their potato-tables, as they do around their potato-fields, just such
+shooters and pipers, who should shoot away every potatoe from their
+mouths, that then they would necessarily grow lean. From just this
+cause the game was so haggard, because it could but slowly accustom
+itself to such treatment, as cavalry-horses learn to eat their oats
+from a beaten drum. The deer had often to go miles away, like one who,
+in Paris, picks up his breakfast at the inns,--in order, at last, to
+dash into a cabbage-field, which was beset by no such coast-guards
+and adversaries of the wild game, and there get a good bellyful. The
+dog-boys, therefore, said justly, that they trampled down in _one_
+stag-hunt more grain than the game got to eat the whole week. These,
+and none other, were the reasons which had moved the chief masters of
+the chase to appear before his Highness with the humble prayer--
+
+"That your Highness would be pleased to enjoin it upon the
+country-people to stay at night in their warm beds, as thousands of
+good Christians do, and as the game itself does by day.
+
+"Thereby--the majors of the chase were emboldened to promise--a lift
+would be given at once to the country-folk and the stags, the latter
+could then graze the fields in peace, like the day-cattle, and would
+certainly leave the countryman the gleanings, while they contented
+themselves with the first-fruits. The country-folk would be happily
+freed from the ailments which come of night-vigils, from chills and
+exhaustions. But the greatest advantage would be this,--that, whereas
+hitherto peasants had grumbled at the hunting-socages (and not wholly
+without justice), because they delayed the time of the harvest, that
+then the deer in their place would undertake the harvest in the night,
+as the young men in Switzerland took upon themselves to cut the grain
+over night in the place of their sweethearts, so that the latter, when
+they came to their work in the morning, should find none there,--and
+thus would the hunting-socages no longer disturb any one in the matter
+of the harvest, except at most--the game," &c.
+
+
+But what have we to tell of the Consistorial Fee-Messenger, Victor?
+That ecclesiastical collecting-servant astonished all parsons by his
+drollery, and all parsons' wives by his readiness, and nothing but his
+tin and his papers could adequately certify the genuineness of such a
+specimen of a Messenger. He collected all that the Consistorial
+Secretary had liquidated, and excused himself by the plea that it
+became neither him nor the Secretary in this case to be conscientious.
+In his brief administration, he bagged without shame all back-standing
+marriage-pledges of the smallest value, ("We in the College," said he,
+"are greedy for a half-bats,"[211])--moneys, when parties were
+divorced,--moneys, when marriages were concluded by councils, whether
+by indulgences for mourning-time, for blood-relationship, or for want
+of parental consent,--moneys, when the moneys were only once (_or
+twice_) paid, but not yet for the second (or third) time, although the
+Consistory always required this after-ring or resonance of the money in
+the single case where people had lost the receipt,--moneys which the
+parsons had to pay down merely for decrees wherein they were _exempted_
+from payment.----
+
+Thereupon he emptied his bag before the Prince, and flattened down the
+billow of money, and began:--
+
+
+"Your Highness!
+
+"The Devil is in the Consistory: it might be a Lutheran _Penitentiaria_
+for all the Commandments, and is so only for the sixth. What an honest
+Consistorial administration has been able to scrape together lies there
+on the table. The pile might be as broad again, if the Consistory had
+sense enough to say, 'Who buys? fresh, new letters of indulgence for
+everything!'--It has shown, that, beyond certain degrees of
+relationship, it can grant bulls of dispensation as well as the Pope:
+why will it not, then, apply its indulgence to any nearer degrees? It
+would be able to dispense from great as well as from small, if it
+really set about it, and just as well from fast-day penances as from
+mourning, and thrice publishing, that erotic fast-time. By Heaven!
+if a single man, like the Pope, can be the spiritual washing-machine
+of whole continents, and can clean souls in bundles in the year
+of jubilee, then surely we all in the College may serve for the
+washing-machine of a single country. If that is not done, then we
+take--for we mean to live--sin-money and perquisites for the few things
+which we have graciously to wink at; and if in Sparta the _judges_
+worshipped the goddess of Fear, so with us the _parties_ revere this
+fair _ens_.[212]--Had we only, at least, power to absolve from five or
+six great sins,--only, e. g., from a murder,--then could we allow
+divorces and expeditings of marriages, (these wholly opposite
+operations we perform successfully, just as the Karlsbad water at the
+same time dissolves the stone in the bladder and petrifies what is
+dipped into the well,) and do it for half the money."
+
+Then, after a long pause,--"Your Excellency, it is, after all,
+impracticable, because the Devil has the secular counsellors mixed in
+among the ghostly; a half-_profane session-table_ cannot by any
+cabinet-making process be made over into a _holy chair_; there is,
+therefore, nothing to be wished--except a good digestion[213]--but a
+spirit of concord, that clerical and secular counsellors may properly
+feed upon the parties around which they sit, saving a couple of bones,
+that shall fall to us scribes and messengers. So have I often seen on
+the carcass of a dead horse starlings and ravens at once, in a motley
+row, sitting amicably together, and pecking away and devouring."----
+
+My correspondent assures me that by these addresses the Court-Physician
+effected more with January than the Court-Chaplain by his. Many parties
+got their money, and some judges a most gracious letter, from the
+Prince's own hand.
+
+Before I arrive with our disguised span in the suburbs of St. Luna,
+one or two things are still to be mentioned. To January's soul more
+knee-pedals were attached than to a pianoforte, which the favorite's
+knee, while it seemed to bend itself, moved at its pleasure. He was
+always the son of the present moment, and the reflection of his
+company. If he read in Sully, then he did not neglect for a week at a
+time the Regency-College, and sent for the President of Finance. If he
+read in Frederick II., then he was for furnishing the imperial
+contingent and himself commanding it, and went forenoons to the parade.
+He contemplated with pleasure the ideal of a good government, whether
+in print or in a speech, and often attempted approximations to it,
+reformations, investigations, and compensations, for whole weeks,--with
+the exception of _retrenchments_, which, after all, are the only merit
+a prince can earn without the help of others. During the whole crusade
+he was a true Philosopher Antoninus, and stood ready everywhere to
+reward and to punish and to enact; he felt, too, that he could make it
+practicable, if one only did not absolutely require him to _labor_ and
+to _abstain_; under _that_ the other part also went to the Devil.
+
+In the beginning, he was pleased with the sentimental journey; when it
+was over, he was so again; but in the midst of it, all that was pressed
+out after the first runnings grew more and more bitter, and he wished
+for himself, instead of the country bill-of-fare, his dietetic
+dial-plate. Then, too, he had accustomed himself so much to valor,
+that, for want of it,--i. e. of his body-guard,--he was, so to speak,
+timid; hence, on one occasion, in the dark, at the tavern, he was while
+in bed, about to run through a young weaver with his cane-sword,
+because the weaver had confounded at night the princely bed with one of
+more peaceful contents. For the rest, all the rays of his favor now
+converged to a focus upon the single man of rank, the only courageous
+and confidential friend whom he had,--his Victor.
+
+But my hero had everywhere something to enjoy,--at least, the thought
+of St. Luna; everywhere something to eat,--at least, when they came to
+a fruit-tree; everywhere something to read,--and though it were only
+charms against fires on the house-doors, old calendars on the walls,
+exhortations to charity on the alms-boxes; everywhere something to
+think of,--of the travelling pair, of the four acts of Nature's
+seasons, which are annually given over again, of the thousand acts in
+man, which never return; and everywhere something to love and to dream
+of,--for this was the very road which Clotilda had so often gone over
+on her journeys between Maienthal and St. Luna, and the friend of her
+rich heart found on this classic avenue nothing but great remembrances,
+magic passages, and a long, quiet, homelike bliss....
+
+"St. Luna!" cried January, delighted at the mere thought of seeing once
+more a man of the world,--Le Baut. The mask of an emigrant was a
+thought he had himself hit upon, the better to draw out the
+Chamberlain, with whom he meant finally to give himself out as an
+hereditary foe of the Prince. Had there been in Le Baut's soul a higher
+nobility than the heraldic, or had Victor but known that the
+Chamberlain would recognize the Prince at the first glance, and that he
+would be able to do so for the very reason that the genuine suspended
+Consistorial Messenger had probably before this whispered the whole
+secret in the ear of the city of Flachsenfingen, he would have
+dissuaded him from the _noble masque_.
+
+Sebastian, as we have mentioned, stayed back and in the open air,
+probably out of shame at his part, and evidently from a longing to look
+upon Clotilda's sunny face, which for so long a time had not risen upon
+him, in a scene more convenient and congenial to his heart. "And the
+parents will be glad to see me again," he thought beside, "when they
+have something to thank me for,"--namely, Clotilda's place at court.
+More than once did he start, as he stood watching there behind the
+blanket of the dark, to hear his name called out of the Parsonage, and,
+in fact, with such love and such longings for his answer that he could
+almost have given one. But it was only the people of the Parsonage
+talking with his little godson, and saying to him, "Dearest good
+Sebastian! Just see here: what have I got for you?" How the veiled
+paradise of to-day's spring lay in old relics around him! How he envied
+the shadowy heads in the palace, which he saw moving about the lights,
+and the old Parson's pug-dog, who would fain wag him in to the
+Parsonage-inmates, and who continued in there to perform his part on
+the stage of so sweet a past! But when some thistles round the palace
+reminded him of the mosaic ones on the floor within-doors, then was the
+envier to be envied, and, with the fairest dreams that were ever traced
+over the ground of his dark life, he went back to the Apothecary's.
+
+The next day January followed, delighted with the parents, enraptured
+with the daughter, because they were so fine and she so fair. It cost
+my hero nothing but a word to move the step-father to the intercession
+for the appointment of the step-daughter, which our hero and the father
+had so often longed to see; and it cost the step-father, too, only a
+word with the Princess to get his and their petition granted....
+Clotilda became maid-of-honor.
+
+Immediately upon that, the Minister von Schleunes, in a congratulatory
+letter, pressed upon Clotilda's parents the quarter-wing of his house,
+and was happy, in the epistle, "that a higher petition had _repeated_
+his own with such effect." I set up this nobleman as a model to all
+people of the world; although, at present, all writes itself _noble_ in
+the _moral_, as the Viennese do in the _heraldic_ sense.
+
+Victor, who with his soul's eyes was peeping all day long into the
+Chamberlain's window, could hardly wait to see Clotilda, first in St.
+Luna, and next at court. He put off the visit from day to day, and
+night after night made it in dream. Not even his visiting-card--his
+letter to the Parson--had he sent off; he wanted, not only to carry it,
+but actually to supersede it, himself. But this, last thought--of
+suppressing the letter, for fear Clotilda might possibly get hold of
+this malicious conduct-list of courts, and therefrom contract a
+repugnance to the new office--he hurled forthwith out of his soul, as
+Paul did the viper from his hand. Woe to the heart that is not sincere
+towards a sincere one, is not great towards a great one, and warm
+towards a warm one, when it should be all this even towards one that is
+nothing of it all!
+
+For the rest, he needed such a visit, and such a reciprocal visit,
+every day more and more; for he was not happy; and for this there were,
+besides himself, to blame, first, the Prince, secondly, Flamin,
+thirdly, nine thousand and thirty-seven persons. The Prince could not
+well help it; he poured out the whole cornucopia of his love on the
+Doctor, and took away from him all the freedom which the latter had
+been minded in the beginning so sacredly to maintain. Victor shook his
+head as often as he wrote in his journal, or log-book of his voyage of
+life, (at his father's behest,) and saw by his chart that he had passed
+over quite other seas and degrees of latitude and longitude than he or
+his father had desired. "However, I shall land right, at least," said
+he.--
+
+But his Flamin brought still more sadness to his soul, which everywhere
+at once sought and bestowed love. He wanted to impart to the
+Counsellor, with the news of Clotilda's appointment, a joy like
+his own; but his friend received it as coldly as he did its bearer.
+The dust of law-papers lay thick on the organ-pipes of his
+spirits.--Chained to the session- and writing-tables, he was now, like
+chained dogs, wilder than he had been before when unfettered.--The
+efforts of his colleagues to dislocate the body politic into an anagram
+did not get from him the approbation which they deserved.--Then, too,
+there lodged itself in his soul the leaven of the jealousy of
+friendship, which could not feel it right that his Victor should see
+him seldomer and others oftener.[214]--But most was he affronted by
+Victor's refusal, when he besought his company to St. Luna.... In a
+word, he was vexed.
+
+The nine thousand and thirty-seven men who were to my hero nine
+thousand and thirty-seven tormenting spirits are the gentlemen of
+Flachsenfingen jointly and severally, by means of their absurd
+character, which deserves not to be sketched here, but in an extra
+flyleaf.
+
+
+                            EXTRA FLY-LEAF,
+
+_Wherein is sketched the Ridiculous Character of the People of
+   Flachsenfingen,--or Perspective Plan of the City of Little Vienna_.
+
+Little Vienna is the name many give to my Flachsenfingen, just as we
+have a Little Leipsic, Little Paris,[215] &c. There can hardly,
+however, be two cities wider apart in manners than Flachsenfingen,
+where one gluts and drowns his life and his soul, and Vienna, where
+one, perhaps, does not sufficiently shun the opposite fault of a
+Spartan asceticism. The Little-Viennese, or Flachsenfingeners, open
+their hearts to the enjoyment of Nature far less than the orifice of
+the stomach.--Pastures are the kitchen-pieces of their cattle, and
+gardens those of the owners thereof; the Milky Way does not chain and
+satisfy their spirits half so much (though it is longer) as the
+Königsberg sausage of 1583 would have done, which was five hundred and
+ninety-six ells long, and four times as heavy as the learned man
+himself who has portrayed it to posterity,--Herr Wagenseil.[216]--Are
+these the traits upon which carriers ground the name of Little Vienna?
+I have often been in Great Vienna, and am personally acquainted with
+the grand crosses, little crosses, and commanders of the Order of
+Temperance, which is there so common. I can certainly, therefore,
+represent a valid witness, and must be believed, when I say, that,
+while in Little Vienna they guzzle extraordinarily, of Great Vienna,
+and emphatically of its cloister-people, I can and must maintain
+something very different: they have not only all the time the greatest
+thirst,--which certainly must needs be gone, if they quenched it,--but
+they also make use, against drunkenness, of a fine method of Plato's.
+That ancient advises us, in case of drunkenness, to look into a glass,
+in order, by the distorted figure therein which reminds us of our
+desecration, to be forever warned away from the vice. Hence whole
+chapters, the dean, the sub-senior, the junior canons, &c., often set
+vessels full of wine or beer before them, and lift them to their eyes,
+and in this _metamorphotic_ or caricaturing glass, which, by shaking,
+distorts still more the distorted features, contemplate themselves,
+according to the philosopher's advice, a good long while. I ask whether
+people who peer so deeply into the glass can love drinking?--
+
+It does not, however, follow from this, that I deny the Great-Viennese
+a resemblance to the Flachsenfingeners, in such traits as do honor.
+Thus, for example, I must gladly allow a similarity of the former to
+the latter in this respect, that they, neither of them, are ever down
+with the disease of poetry or enthusiasm or sentimentalism,--which are
+all one. Victor would make this eulogy sound in his language somewhat
+thus: "The Viennese authors (even the best of them, only Denis and
+hardly three others excepted) give the reader no wings to bear him up
+over the whole world of the actual by that nobility of soul, by that
+contempt of the earth, by that reverence for old virtue and freedom and
+the higher love, wherein other German geniuses shine as in holy
+rays."[217] And he would refer for proof to the "Vienna Sketches," to
+"Faustin,"[218] to Blumauer,[219] and to the "Vienna Almanac of the
+Muses." This reproach even a Viennese would accept and turn to
+his credit, by asking us whether we have to show (like him) a
+"Musen-Almanach," with a sediment of filth, whereupon one might write,
+"With approbation of the brothel."--This feeling of literary difference
+compelled even a Nicolai,--otherwise no special _amoroso_ of the Vienna
+authors,--in his "Universal German Library," to build up for them a
+separate side-box, although he throws writers of all other German
+circles together into _one parterre_, or pit. In like manner have I
+seen in Bavaria, on the gallows, beside the usual post for the three
+Christian fellow-confessors, a special schismatic cross-beam attached,
+to which only the Jew tribe were strung up.
+
+The Flachsenfingener knows that there is nothing in poets; and in
+books, where rills of verse run through the prose, he skips clean over
+the rills, just as certain people come late to church in order to
+escape the singing. He is a true servant of the state, who knows of
+what use the poetic golden vein is in the revision-, commission-,
+relation-, and enrolling-systems,--none at all; meanwhile, although he
+cannot appreciate a Klopstock or a Goethe, nevertheless he will not, in
+his leisure hours, despise a doggerel verse or crambo-rhyme. A soul of
+such a fortunate, robust nature, wherein one aims less to exalt his
+spirit than his income, makes it, to be sure, comprehensible how there
+may be a kine-pox, by means of which the Flachsenfingener has been
+able, like Socrates, to wander round alone in the plague of
+sentimentalism without being infected. The full moon produced with them
+full crabs, but no full hearts; and what they planted under it, that it
+might favor the growth, was not love, but--turnips. The genuine
+Little-Viennese shoots at much nearer targets than that white one over
+yonder. They marry there with true gusto, without having first shot
+themselves or sighed themselves to death,--they know no obstacles to
+love but ecclesiastical,--female virtue is a belt-buckle, which must
+hold as long as the surname of the daughter,--the hearts of daughters
+are there like letter-envelopes, which, when they have once been
+superscribed to one lord, can easily be turned so as to be addressed to
+another man,--the girls love there, not from coquetry, but from
+simplicity, any devil, except poor devils....
+
+In short, my correspondent, from whom I have all this, is almost
+prepossessed in favor of Little Vienna, and therefore contradicts
+vehemently the author of the "Travelling Frenchman," who is said to
+have said somewhere--if I had him in the house, I should know how
+Little Vienna is properly named--that the Flachsenfingener has not
+energy enough to be at least a highwayman. Knef says, however, he will
+not give up the hope that they have been thieves, and backs himself by
+the cases of those that have been hung.
+
+    _End of the Extra Fly-Leaf, wherein was sketched the Ridiculous
+         Character of the People of Flachsenfingen,--or of the
+             Perspective Plan of the City of Little Vienna_.
+
+But among such people my hero, with all his toleration, could not take
+any comfort whatever,--he who so hated all selfishness, especially in
+the sensual form, and who would gladly have attended Dr. Graham's
+lectures, wherein he taught men to live without eating,--he who so
+gladly opened his heart to the seed of truth winged by poesy,--who
+bore an Emanuel in his heart, and held the want of poetic feeling
+even as a sign that the _moral_ man had not yet laid aside all
+caterpillar-skins,--he who looked upon this whole life and the whole
+body politic as the hull in which the kernel of the next life
+ripens,--O, whoever thinks this is too lonely among them that think
+otherwise!--
+
+So it stood with the world around him, when he got a line from the good
+wife of the Parson:--
+
+
+"The general talk here is that you are dead. But I express my mind
+against people, that, as you let so little be heard from you, and have
+forgotten all the world, you must, for that very reason, be still
+alive. Do confirm my proposition! We all have a fond and foolish
+longing for you, and I should like to beg you to come on the
+twenty-first (if the wedding at the senior Parson's hinders you no more
+than it does my Flamin). We have nothing to offer you here, but the
+birthday of our Clotilda. O good my Lord, and my beloved Lordship, how
+has it been possible for you hitherto to remain so long mute and
+invisible? A true friend, who has nothing at all of the ladies of your
+court about her, not even their fickleness, wishes heartily to have you
+before her eyes and beside her ears,--and that lady is myself,--and
+when I see you come, I shall certainly weep for joy, let me laugh or
+pout the while as I will.
+
+                                                     "E."
+
+
+When did he receive this letter, so full of soul? And what answer did
+his make to it?--
+
+It was on the loveliest evening, which announced the coming of the
+loveliest Sunday morning and of the magic after-summer,--he looked at
+the evening red under which lay Maienthal's mountains, and his heart
+beat heavily within him,--he looked toward the dawning red of the full
+moon which kindled over St. Luna, and his yearning thitherward became
+inexpressible,--he thought of Clotilda, whose birthday fell upon
+to-morrow,--and so, very naturally, as to-day closed, he went--to bed.
+
+
+
+
+                           19. DOG--POST-DAY.
+
+   The Hair-Dresser with a (musical) Disease of the Lungs.--Clotilda in
+     Victor's Dream.--Extra Lines on Church-Music.--Garden Concert by
+     Stamitz.--Quarrel between Victor and Flamin.--The Heart without
+     Solace.--Letter to Emanuel.
+
+
+The October Sunday with which I fill up this Dog-Post-Day was,
+even at nine and a half o'clock in the morning, such a glad,
+glistening day in St. Luna, that the whole Parsonage thought of the
+Court-Physician.--"Ah, he ought to come to the concert this evening!"
+The _virtuoso_ Stamitz was to give one in Le Baut's garden.--"O, better
+earlier, even to dinner!"--"And to my forenoon sermon, if he will not
+come to the children's catechizing." Eymann, as he said this, had, more
+than anything else, his newly dressed peruke in his head, which Herr
+Meuseler had to-day placed _on_ it. This clever peruke-maker visited
+those of his diocesans (the parsons) who wore no hair of their own,
+often and with greater benefit to their heads than the Superintendent
+himself, that _Commander of the Faithful_, to whom most chaplains said,
+Your Excellency! If he could only have weaned himself from singing,
+lying, and drinking too much,--the _friseur_,--most of the clergy would
+have ordered their toupees--those artistic cock's-combs--of him; but as
+it was, they did not.
+
+As the Chaplain loved to make the _confitures_ of Fate, among which
+false hair is to be reckoned, bitter in some way, and to give them, as
+it were, an infusion of hops, he naturally sought to embitter to-day's
+peruke (for whose false curls he gave, in place of payment, genuine
+hair cut off from his people's heads) by the misgivings which he
+conjured up about the long staying away of Victor. He bethought
+himself: "We must have affronted him in some way,--he does not even
+write,--he has, perhaps, fallen out with my son,--something has
+occurred,--and then, too; the old Lord no longer gives us a
+side-glance,--our rats, also, had a hand (or a foot) in helping drive
+him away."
+
+By such elegies he threw at first himself, and at last even his
+hearers, into agony. He was not to be refuted in any way, except by
+one's bringing out some new subject of distress. The breaking-away spot
+in his cloud, or his _little book for help in distress_, was this time
+a literal book, the "Anecdotes for Preachers," by Teller, of Zeitz,
+which he to-day received through the peruke-maker from the clerical
+reading-circle. Clergymen, especially country clergymen, carry
+everything out with a minute, punctilious solicitude, into which they
+are partly scared by their reigning bugbear and dragon of a Consistory.
+Now in this book-club there was a law current--commentators and editors
+keep it--that every member who should find a grease-spot or ink-stain
+or rent in the book he was reading should enter it on the fly-leaf in
+an index and inventory of spots, together with the number of the page
+"where." Very naturally, every one who was even half-way an honest
+Lutheran would deny the _immaculate re_-(or _con_-)_ception_ of it, and
+the freckles were therefore all regularly registered, but nobody fined.
+Only the conscientious Court-Chaplain took upon himself, as scapegoat,
+the punishment of other people's sins; for he never could sleep a wink
+the whole night, when he found in a book more blots than in the
+sin-register, because he clearly saw that he should be made adoptive
+father of the anonymous smutch and buyer of the book.--Now Teller's
+Anecdotes for Black-Coats was a complete pile of linen for the wash,
+black with dirt. Was there not one dog's-ear upon another,--compound
+dog's-ears,--blot upon blot? were not the leaves regular
+_proof-sheets_,--and, in fact, speaking _without metaphor_? Eymann
+began, "And if money should come flying in to me through the
+window"....
+
+Just then Victor's letter flew in at the window, and its--author
+through the door.
+
+But, of course, the case was this:--Victor, before pleasant weather,
+had pleasant dreams; before bad weather, Satan and his kin appeared to
+him. The beautiful weather of Saturday, and the thought of Clotilda's
+birthday and of the after-summer, gave him a morning dream, which, in
+turn, gave him a stage on which only her sweet image played. A person
+whom he had seen behind the veil of dream stood before him all the next
+day in a magic reflection. With him dreams,--those night-moths of the
+spirit,--like the real moths, strayed out beyond the bounds of night
+and sleep; at least for the forenoon, he went on loving, awake, every
+person whom he had begun to love in dream. This time, by an exactly
+reverse process, waking love flowed on into dreaming love, and the
+actual Clotilda coincided with the ideal to form one saintly image, so
+radiant that any one who knows his dream will easily enter into the
+rest. Therefore must the dream be given to the readers, the poetic ones
+especially: for others I should be glad to prepare an expurgated
+edition of the Dog-Post-Days, in which it should be left out; for
+unpoetic souls that have no dreams themselves should not read any.
+
+But to you, ye good, seldom requited female souls,--ye who have
+a second conscience of your own, beside the first, for pure
+manners,--whose single virtue, when one looks at it nearly, is seen to
+bloom up into one wreath made of all the virtues, as nebulous stars,
+seen through glasses, fall into millions,--ye who, so changeable in all
+purposes, so unchangeable in the noblest one, go from the earth with
+unrecognized wishes, with forgotten worth, with eyes full of tears and
+love, with hearts full of virtue and grief,--to you, dear ones, I
+gladly tell the little dream and my long story!...
+
+"A hand which Horion did not see laid hold of him; lips which he saw
+not spake to him, 'Let thy heart now be clean and holy, for the genius
+of female virtue resides in this region.'--Lo! there stood Horion on a
+field clothed with forget-me-nots, over which the sky like a blue
+shadow fell; for all the stars had been withdrawn from it, only the
+_evening star_ stood gleaming alone up in the place of the sun. White
+ice-pyramids, streaked with down-trickling lines of evening redness,
+closed in, as with a wall of gold and silver ore, the whole dark
+horizon.----Therein Clotilda passed by, sublime as one dead, serene as
+a human being in the next world, conducted now by winged children, now
+by a veiled nun, now by an earnest angel, but she passed forever by
+before Horion; she smiled upon him in blissful lovingness while thus
+passing, but she passed by.--Flowery hillocks, almost like graves, rose
+and sank, for every one was stirred by the breathing of a bosom
+slumbering beneath it; a white rose stood over the heart that lay
+veiled below; two red ones grew over the cheeks, where tender blushes
+hid themselves in the earth; and overhead in the night-blue of heaven
+the white and red reflections of the hill-flowers glided fitfully into
+each other as often as the roses of the heart and the cheeks swayed
+with the hillock.--Dying echoes, awakened, however, by unheard voices,
+gave answer to each other behind the mountains; each echo lifted the
+little hills of slumber still higher, as if a deep sigh or a bosom full
+of rapture heaved them; and Clotilda smiled more blissfully, sinking at
+every resonance more deeply into the flowery earth.--The tones were too
+full of ecstasy, and the dissolved heart of man was fain to die
+therein. Clotilda sank now into the graves up to her heart; only her
+silent head still smiled above the meadow; the forget-me-nots at last
+reached up to the sunken eyes that were full of blissful tears, and
+bloomed over them.--Then suddenly a hill of slumber crept over the
+saint, and from beneath the flowers her words came up, 'Rest thou, too,
+Horion!'--But the sounds, growing more distant, transformed themselves
+during the burial into dim harmonica-tones.... And lo! as they sank
+into silence, there came up a great shadow like Emanuel, and stood
+before him like a short night, and covered the unknown moment as with a
+hand from a higher world. But when the moment and the shadow had passed
+away, then had all the hills sunk.--Then the reflections of the
+flowers, flowing together, gilded over the undulating heavens.--Then
+were seen _white_ butterflies, _white_ doves, _white_ swans, climbing
+up to the purple peaks of the ice-mountains with outstretched wings as
+with arms, and behind the mountains, as if by an uncontainable
+transport, blossoms were flung up, and stars and garlands.--And there
+on the highest ice-mountain, as it rose tranquil in clear radiance and
+purple blaze, stood Clotilda, glorified, consecrated, radiant with
+supernatural rapture, and on her heart fluttered a nebulous globe,
+which consisted of little vaporized tears, and on which Horion's pallid
+form was delineated, and Clotilda spread wide her arms."----
+
+But to embrace? or to soar away? or to pray?... Ah! he awoke too soon,
+and his eyes streamed down in greater tears than the nebulous ones, and
+a sinking voice cried incessantly all around him, "Rest thou, too!"
+
+O thou soul of woman,--thou that goest, weary and unrewarded, wounded
+and bleeding, but great and unspotted, up from the smoking battle-field
+of life,--thou angel, whom the heart of man, reared by storms, soiled
+by the world's dealings, can respect and love, but cannot reward or
+reach,--how does my soul at this moment bow down before thee! how do I
+wish thee now the soothing balm of Heaven, the requiting goodness of
+the Eternal! And thou, Philippina, precious soul, glide away into a
+secret cell, and, amidst the tears which thou hast already so often
+shed, lay thy hand upon thy soft, rich heart, and swear, "Forever shalt
+thou continue consecrated to God and virtue, even if not to repose!" To
+thyself swear it,--not to me, for I believe it without an oath.----
+
+What a parade-night, full of stars and dreams, was that! and what a
+gala-day of Nature followed upon it! In Victor's brain stood nothing
+but St. Luna, veiled in blue, bespangled with silver dew-drops, and
+graced by the loveliest angel, who to-day raised moist, glad eyes to
+the friendly heaven, and thought, "How beautiful art thou to-day, just
+upon my birthday festival!"--Even the Senior Pastor and his daughter,
+who both made a wedding,--the former an anniversary second wedding with
+his Senioress, the latter a first one with the preacher of the Orphan
+Asylum,--slipped themselves into the procession of his joyous thoughts
+as two new couples.
+
+He did not mean to go to St. Luna, but he said; "I will dress myself up
+just for a little walk."--
+
+"It is all one where I go to-day," he said, when he was out of doors;
+and so he took the St. Luna road.--
+
+"I can turn round at any time," he said, when he had gone half-way.--
+
+"But it would be something still more ridiculously funny, if I should
+be at once correspondent and postman, and deliver my own letter," said
+he, and drew it out.--
+
+"And answer my good mother's orally by the same opportunity," he
+continued, half in dream, and full of greater love towards her who had
+sent him the sweet nocturnal one by the intelligence of the birthday.--
+
+----But when he heard the first bells of St. Luna ringing for church,
+then he sprang up, and said, "Now I will no longer embitter the way by
+further scruples, but will march boldly and decidedly into the
+village."
+
+And so, taking the hand of Fortune, with all Nature smiling after him,
+with dreams in his heart, with innocent hope in his freshly blooming
+countenance, he entered into the Eden of his soul.
+
+Flamin he had not asked to go with him, in order not to rob the Senior
+Pastor of his wedding-guest, and because he did not know, himself, that
+he should reach St. Luna, and perhaps, too, because he did not want to
+have his fantasying attention to the sparkling morning disturbed by any
+news about juristic cases. In fact, he would rather take a walk with a
+woman than with a man. Men are almost ashamed, beside one another, of
+any except silent emotions; but womanly souls love to unfold to each
+other their bashful sensibilities; for they cover up the naked heart
+with maternal warmth, that it may not become chilled during the
+unveiling.
+
+As Victor passed round the Parsonage below, he saw himself up at the
+window, in his _second edition for a few good friends_; but the wax
+Victor had forthwith to be banished behind a false partition, that it
+might not frighten the fleshly one. The reception of the latter, and
+the feast of jubilee thereupon, need not be described by me in a more
+lively manner than by my saying that the pug-dog was almost crushed
+underfoot, the bulfinch hopped round in vain for his breakfast, nor did
+the Parson's wife offer any to the guest, in her joy at staring at him,
+and church did not begin till after the double usance of half an hour;
+so that this time more parishioners went to church drunk than usual.
+
+Victor, too, went thither intoxicated, but with joy. There is nothing
+more agreeable than to be a parson's wife, and to say to one's husband,
+while putting on his clerical bands, "Make the service a little longer
+to-day, else the mutton will not be quite roasted through."--Domestic
+trifles gratified my hero full as much as courtly ones provoked him.
+
+He went with the Parson and with the Parson's wife, who abridged all
+the processes of kitchen and toilet in a summary and manlike way. His
+toleration for the faults of the clerical order had nothing in common
+with that of the distinguished people who are fit for high dignities
+and dinners, which arises from supreme contempt, and which can endure a
+Christian priest as easily as an Egyptian; but it grew out of his
+opinion that the churches are still the only Sunday-Schools and Spartan
+school-gates for the poor commoners, who cannot hear their _cours de
+morale_ from the _state_. Besides, he loved, as a youth, the favorites
+of his childhood.
+
+Many preachers try to combine the rule of Quintilian, who requires that
+_bad_ arguments should be put forward in the earlier part of the
+discourse, with that of Cicero, who is for keeping them back till the
+latter part, by posting them in _both_ places; but Eymann held good
+feelings to be better than bad reasons, and wound around the peasants
+chains, not of reasoning, but of flowers.
+
+The _friseur_ above-mentioned, at first, would not go to church,
+because it was beneath his dignity, but afterward he could not do
+otherwise; for, on account of the court stranger present to-day,
+church-music was to be made.
+
+It is the only fault of the peruke-maker Meuseler, that he loves to
+sing too well, and is too fond of intruding his natural pipes into all
+church-music that is made in his perukial diocese, especially on Holy
+Whitsuntide. The St. Luna chorister could never bear this; but how to
+cheat him and feast a thousand ears? Simply thus: He frizzled out
+to-day what was still to be frizzled, (not to-day alone, but it was
+always so,) and merely glided up the choir-steps. Here he leaned add
+watched, till the chorister, seated on the musical sausage-sledge,
+struck with his finger the first note of the church-music. Then, like a
+sunbeam, he darted up into the choir, and filched away from the young
+counter-tenor his part, and sang it into the ears of the congregation,
+but with much whining and puffing, as if he were chanting his
+manuscript to the reviewers. For one must now, once for all, make it
+known to the world, that the enraged musician at the clavichord had,
+with a sharp-cornered triangle of elbows, furiously thrust back at the
+frizzling counter-tenor, in order to push the strange singing-bird out
+of the bird-house of the choir. But as the singer made his right arm
+the firm note-desk of his text, and the other a war-club,--like the
+Jews, who built up Jerusalem with one hand full of building-tools and
+the other full of weapons,--one sees that the peruke-maker, even
+amidst this continuance of fighting and fa-sol-la-ing, could do his
+very best, and execute somewhat during the musical truce of God. But
+so soon as the music had drawn its last breath, then the harmonious
+bird-of-passage and stormy-petrel skipped nimbly out across the choir,
+accompanied by the memory of a thousand ears and a single elbow. The
+chorister could not catch him, nor get scent of him.
+
+If, on the contrary, he had the good fortune to be passing with his
+bandboxes through a village just as parson and schoolmaster and
+pedagogic frog-spawn were quacking and croaking[220] round a deaf
+corpse,--all which many name, more concisely, a dirge,--then could the
+_virtuoso_, without the counter-prop of elbows, spring gayly with both
+feet into the motet,[221] work out the funeral serenade given to the
+dead man by his heirs, throw in gratis some final cadences to the
+funeral procession, and yet have time to offer in the village to the
+bailiff an entirely new bag-wig.--
+
+To our hero the music in country churches gave the greatest satirical
+pleasure. But little should we get by it, had I not the forethought to
+beg leave just for one poor little extra-syllable--one shall hardly see
+it--upon church-music.
+
+              POOR LITTLE EXTRA-SYLLABLE ON CHURCH-MUSIC.
+
+It always gives me pleasure to see the people keep their seats during
+church-music, because it is a proof that no one is bitten by the
+tarantula; for, if they should run out, one would see that they could
+not endure any discords, and so had been bitten. I, as profane
+music-master, compose for few churches,--that is to say, only
+the consecration-noise for new ones, or old ones that have been
+repaired,--and therefore, in truth, I understand nothing of the matter
+whereupon, in passing, I purpose to express myself; but thus much let
+me still be allowed to assert, that the Lutheran church-music is good
+for something,--in the country, not in the capitals, where, perhaps,
+the fewest discords are correctly delivered. Verily, a miserable,
+sottish, blue chorister, who in bravura-airs sings himself brown
+and beats others brown,--there are, therefore, two kinds of
+_bravura_-airs,--is able, with a few mechanics who on Sundays work at
+the fiddle, with a trumpeter who might blow down without an instrument
+the walls of Jericho, with a smith who lays about him with the sticks
+of the kettle-drums, with a few spasmodic youngsters that do not yet
+even understand singing, and still resemble a female singer, who
+labors, not, like the fine arts, for _ear_ and _eye_ alone, but also
+(only in a worse acceptation than the youngsters) for a third sense,
+and with the little wind which he draws from the lungs of the organ and
+his own lungs,--such a thumper, I say, is able, with so extraordinarily
+little musical rubbish, nevertheless, to get up a much louder
+thundering and fiddle-rosin-lightning around the pulpit Sinai--I mean,
+to draw a far more vehement and discordant church-music out of his
+choir--than many much better sustained theatre-orchestras and
+chapels, with whose harmonies temples are so often desecrated. Hence
+such a noisy man is pained afterward, when people misunderstand and
+falsely judge his church scraping and squeaking and groaning. Shall,
+then, the soft, low Moravian music steal into all our provincial
+churches?--Fortunately, however, there are still city choristers who
+are working against this, and who know wherein pure choral tone and
+discord are to be distinguished from court-tone.
+
+I expect, not readers, but organists, to know why mere dissonances--for
+consonances are to be endured only among the voices of the
+instruments--belong to the choir. Dissonances--according to Euler and
+Sulzer--are relations of tones which are expressed in high numbers;
+they displease us, therefore, not on account of their incongruity, but
+on account of our inability to reduce them rapidly to an equation.
+Higher minds would find the near relations of our harmonies too easy
+and monotonous,--the larger ones of our discords, on the contrary,
+charming and not above their comprehension. Now, as divine service is
+held more in honor of higher beings than for the profit of men, the
+church style must insist upon this, that a music shall be made,
+suitable for higher beings,--namely, of discords,--and that precisely
+that which is the most abominable to our ears shall be chosen as most
+appropriate for the temple.
+
+If we once open the church-doors to the instrumental music of the
+Moravians, then we shall at last be infected with their singing, and by
+degrees all that vocal bleating and bellowing will be lost which makes
+our churches so lively, and which to castrated ears is such a
+disagreeable hammer of the law, but for us so good a proof that we
+resemble the swine, which the Abbé de Baigne, at the command of Louis
+XI., arranged according to the scale, goaded with jacks, and set to
+squealing.--These are my thoughts on church-music, or modern German
+battle-song.
+
+              _End of the Extra-Syllable on Church-Music_.
+
+
+I should not have let the hair-dresser sing and strut so long, if my
+hero had been available for anything else, all this Sunday, than
+a supernumerary; but he did nothing of consequence the whole day,
+except, that, out of a sort of humanity, by unpacking, himself; her
+chests-of-drawers and bandboxes, he compelled old Appel, who would
+rather dress hams than her person, to prepare the usual Sabbath edition
+of the latter, printed with typographic splendor, as early as three
+o'clock in the afternoon; otherwise she would not have delivered the
+same till after supper. The Jews believe that they get, on the Sabbath,
+a new Schabbes-[222] or Sabbath-Soul: into maidens there enters one at
+least; into the Appels, two or three.
+
+But why do I expect my hero to make any more active demonstration
+to-day,--him who, to-day, buried in that dream-night and in the coming
+evening, his emotions stirred by every kindly eye, and by the
+_rudera_[223] and urns of a spring which he had dreamed away,--softly
+dissolved by the calm, bland summer, which still lay smiling and dying
+on the incense-altars of the mountains, on the crape-clad fields, and
+amidst the mute funeral escort of birds, and at the rising of the first
+cloud would pass away from the boughs,--Victor, I say, who to-day,
+greeted with a melancholy smile by nothing but tender remembrances,
+felt that he had hitherto been too mirthful? He could only look upon
+the good souls around him with glistening eyes of love, then turn them
+away, more intensely glistening, and go out. Over his heart and all
+its notes stood written, _Tremolando_. No one is more profoundly sad
+than he who laughs too much; for when this laughter ceases, everything
+has power over the exhausted soul, and a meaningless lullaby, a
+flute-concert,--whose D sharp and F sharp keys and mouthpieces are
+merely the two lips wherewith a young shepherd whistles,--opens the
+flood-gates of the old tears, as a whisper loosens the poised and
+trembling avalanche. He felt as if his dream of this morning absolutely
+did not allow him to address Clotilda; she seemed to him too holy, and
+still escorted by winged children, and placed upon icy thrones. As,
+upon the whole, he had to-day neither a tongue nor an ear for Le Baut's
+conversations in the realm of the morally dead, he preferred to listen
+unseen in the great leafy garden to this Stamitz concert, and at the
+farthest let himself be introduced to the company by accident. His
+second reason was, that his heart was made for a sounding-board of
+music, and gladly drank in the fleeting tones without disturbance, and
+loved to conceal their effects upon him from ordinary men, of the
+world, who can truly quite as little do without Goethe's, Raphael's,
+and Sacchini's things (and for not a whit inferior reasons) as without
+Löschenkohl's own. Emotion, it is true, raises one above being ashamed
+to show emotion; but while his emotions lasted, he hated and shunned
+all attention to another's attention, because the Devil smuggles in
+vanity among the best feelings, often one knows not how. In the night,
+in a shady nook, tears fall more gracefully, and by-and-by evaporate.
+
+In all this he was strengthened by the Parson's wife; for she had
+secretly sent to town and invited her son, and artistically prepared in
+the garden a surprise.
+
+The Parson's family repaired at last to the embowered concert-hall, and
+gave not a thought to the consideration how much they were despised by
+Le Baut's household, who held only noble metals and noble birth, never
+noble deeds, to be cards of admission, and who, highly valuing the
+people of the Parsonage as friends of his Lordship and of Matthieu,
+would, however, have valued them still higher as lap-dogs of either.
+
+Victor kept back a little in the Parsonage garden, because it was
+still too light, and also because he pitied poor Apollonia, who was
+peering solitary and unseen, in full finery, from the window of the
+summer-house, out into the air, and dandling perpendicularly the little
+god-son, whom she hung now over her head, now under her stomach. After
+the manner of a cit, he did not put on his hat in the summer-house, in
+order to strengthen her spirit by courtesy. An infant is, as it were,
+prompter and bellows-blower to the nurse: the young Sebastian sent
+Appel timely and sufficient succor under the siege by the elder one,
+and she undertook at last to speak, and remark that the god-son was a
+dear, good, beautiful, little "Basty." "But," she added, "the young
+leddy (Clotilda) must not hear that: she will have it that we should
+call him Victor, when she hears father call him Basty." Now she began
+to magnify how Clotilda loved his godchild, how often she would snatch
+the little monkey and smile on him and hug and kiss him; and the
+eulogist repeated on a small scale everything that she praised. Nay,
+the grown-up Sebastian did it after her, but he sought on the little
+lips only the kisses of _others_; and perhaps, in Appel's case, again,
+_his_ were among the things which are sought. Made happier himself, he
+left one whom he had made happier; for Love despatched now one gayly
+attired hope after another as messengers to his heart, and all said,
+"Truly, we do not deceive thee: trust us!"
+
+At last Stamitz began to tune up, about whom the stiff family of the
+Lord Chamberlain would certainly not have concerned themselves, because
+to-day there were no strangers present, had not Clotilda begged for
+this garden-concert as the only festival of her birth-night. Stamitz
+and his orchestra filled a lighted bower,--the noble audience sat in
+the next brightest niche, and wished the thing were already over,--the
+commonalty sat farther off, and the Chaplain, for fear of the
+catarrhal, dewy floor, twisted one leg round the other above the
+thighs,--Clotilda and her Agatha reclined in the darkest leafy box.
+Victor did not steal in, till the overture announced to him the seats
+and the seating of the company: in the remotest arbor, in a true
+aphelion, this comet took its place. The overture consisted of that
+musical scrawling and flourishing, of that harmonious phraseology, that
+crackling of fire-works produced by the mutual contact of sounding
+passages, which I so extol, when it is nowhere but in the overture.
+There it is in place; it is the sprinkling rain which softens the heart
+for the great drops of the simpler tones. All emotions in the world
+need _exordia_; and music paves the way, or the tear-ways, (lachrymal
+ducts,) for music.
+
+Stamitz--after a dramatic plan which not every conductor marks out for
+himself--gradually descended from the ears into the heart, and from
+allegros to adagios: this great composer sweeps in ever-narrowing
+circles around every bosom in which there is a heart, until at last he
+reaches it and folds it in a rapturous embrace.
+
+Horion trembled alone, without seeing his loved ones, in a gloomy
+arbor, upon which a single withered twig let in the light of the moon
+and of its pursuing clouds. Nothing ever stirred him more during music
+than to look at the chase of the clouds. When he accompanied with his
+eyes and with the tones these nebulous streams in their everlasting
+flight around our shadowy globe, and when he imparted to them all his
+joys and his wishes, then he thought, as in all his joys and sorrows,
+on other clouds, of another flight, of other shadows, than those above
+him,--then did his whole soul pine and languish; but the strings
+stilled the panting bosom, as the cold leaden bullet in, the mouth
+allays thirst, and the tones discharged the heavy tears from the full
+soul.
+
+Dear Victor! there is in man a mighty wish which was never fulfilled:
+it has no name, it seeks its object, though all that thou namest it and
+all joys are not its reality; but it recurs, when in a summer night
+thou lookest to the north or towards distant mountains, or when
+moonlight is on the earth, or the heavens are studded with stars, or
+when thou art very happy. This great, vast wish lifts our soul aloft,
+but with sorrow: ah! here below we are thrown upward in a prostrate
+position like epileptics. But this wish, to which nothing can give a
+name,--our strings and tones name it to the human spirit; the yearning
+soul then weeps more profusely and can no longer comprehend itself, and
+calls inward in rapture of lamentation between the tones: "Ay, all that
+ye name to me is what I want!" ...
+
+Mortal man, the enigmatical creature, has also a nameless, monstrous
+dread, which has no object, which awakes at hearing of spiritual
+apparitions, and which one sometimes feels when one only speaks of
+it....
+
+Horion yielded up his bruised heart, with quiet tears which no one saw
+flow, to the high adagios which laid themselves with warm wings of
+eider-down over all his wounds. All that he loved entered now into
+his shady arbor,--his oldest friend and his youngest; he hears the
+thunder-storm-bells of life toll, but the hands of friendship stretch
+forth to meet each other, and they clasp each other, and even in the
+second life they hold each other fast in withering grasp. All tones
+seemed the unearthly echoes of his dream, sent back by beings whom one
+neither saw nor heard....
+
+He could not possibly stay longer in this dark inclosure with his
+burning fancies, at this too great distance from the Pianissimo. He
+went--almost too boldly and too closely--through a leafy avenue up to
+the tones, and pressed his face far through the leaves, in order at
+last to see Clotilda in the dim and distant green glimmer....
+
+Ah, and he saw her! But in too angelic, too paradisiacal a form! He saw
+not the thinking eye, the cold mouth, the calm person, that forbade so
+much and desired so little; but he saw for the first time her mouth
+encircled by a sweet harmonious sorrow, with an inexpressibly touching
+smile,--for the first time her eye weighed down under a brimming tear,
+as a forget-me-not bows itself beneath a tear-drop of rain. O, this
+good soul surely concealed her fairest feelings most of all! But the
+first tear in a beloved eye is too mighty for a soft heart.... Victor
+knelt down, overpowered by reverence and rapture, before the noble
+soul, and lost himself in the darkling, weeping form, and in the
+weeping tones. And when he saw at length her features turned to
+paleness, because the green foliage overspread her lips and cheeks with
+a deathly hue from the reflection of the lamps,--and when his dream
+came back to him, with Clotilda sunk under the flowery hill,--and when
+his soul, dissolved into dreams, into sorrows, into joys, and into
+wishes for her who consecrated her birthday festival with devout
+tears,--oh, was there then any need, for the completion of his
+euthanasia, that the violin should die away, and that the second
+harmonica, the _viole d'amour_, should send its music-of-the-spheres to
+his naked, enkindled, palpitating heart? O, the pang of bliss quieted
+him, and he thanked the Creator of this melodious Eden, that He, with
+the _highest_ tones of His harmonica, which with unknown forces shiver
+the heart of man to tears, as high tones shatter glasses, had at last
+exhausted his bosom, his sighs, and his tears: amidst these tones,
+after these tones, there were no more sounds; the full soul was wrapped
+up in foliage and night and tears; the speechless swelling heart drank
+the tones into itself, and took the outer ones for inner ones; and at
+last the tones played like zephyrs around the head that was drowsy with
+bliss, and only in the innermost part of the dying soul still stammered
+the too happy wish: "Ah, Clotilda, could I surrender to thee to-day
+this mute, glowing heart!--ah, that I might on this imperishable
+heavenly evening, with this trembling soul, sink dying at thy feet, and
+say the words, 'I love thee!'"
+
+And as he thought of her festive anniversary, and of her letter to
+Maienthal, which had given him the greatest praise, that of being a
+scholar of Emanuel, and of little tokens of her regard for him, and of
+the sweet fraternization of his heart with hers,--ay, then did the
+heavenly hope of winning this ennobled heart for the first time draw
+near to him amidst the music, and that hope caused the sounds of the
+harmonica, like dying echoes, to float far and wide over the whole
+future of his life....
+
+"Victor!' said some one, in a slowly lengthened tone. He sprang up and
+turned his exalted features toward the--brother of his Clotilda, and
+embraced him with joy. Flamin, into whom all music flung war-flames and
+more open sincerity, looked at him wonderingly, inquiringly, and with
+an imperceptible suspicion, and with that friendliness which resembled
+scorn, but which was never anything but the smarting of injuries
+received.
+
+"Why didst thou not take me, too, with thee to-day?" said Flamin, in a
+friendly tone.
+
+Victor pressed his hand, and was silent.
+
+"No! speak!" said he.
+
+"Let it be for to-day, my Flamin; I'll tell thee some time," replied
+Victor.
+
+"I will tell it to thee myself," Flamin began, more quickly and warmly.
+"Thou thinkest, perhaps, I shall be jealous. And look thou, did I not
+know thee, I should be so: truly, another would be so, if he had thus
+lighted upon thee here, and put all things together,--thy late retreat
+from our summer-house out into the foliage, thy writing without a
+light, and thy singing of love"----
+
+"To Emanuel," said Victor, softly.
+
+"Thy sending off that leaf to her"----
+
+"It was another from her album," said he.
+
+"Still worse; _that_ I did not even know. Thy lingering in St. Luna,
+and a thousand other signs, which do not immediately occur to me,--thy
+going off alone today"----
+
+"O my Flamin, this is going too far! thou seest with other eyes than
+those of friendship."--
+
+Here Flamin, who never could dissemble without immediately becoming
+what he assumed, and who could never recount an offence without
+falling into the old anger, grew warmer, and said, in a less friendly
+manner,--
+
+"And others, too, see it,--even the Chamberlain, and the Chamberlain's
+wife."
+
+This tore Victor's heart.
+
+"Thou dear old friend of my youth! so, then, we are to be drawn and
+torn asunder, bleed we ever so much; so, then, this Matthieu is to
+succeed (for all comes from him, not from thee, thou good soul!) in
+getting thee to torment thyself, and me to torment thee. No, he shall
+not succeed; thou shalt not be taken from me. See, by Heaven!" (and
+here the feeling of his innocence stood in Victor erect and sublime,)
+"and though thou shouldst for years misunderstand me, still the time
+will come when thou shalt start back, and say to me, 'I have done thee
+wrong!'--But I shall gladly forgive thee."
+
+This touched the jealous one, who to-day, indeed, (for a special
+reason,) was more composed.
+
+"See," said he, "I believe thee always: say, dost thou never do
+anything against me?"
+
+"Never, never, my dear fellow!" answered Victor.
+
+"Now, then, forgive my heat," the other continued. "Thus have I
+already, with my cursed jealousy, once tormented Clotilda herself in
+Maienthal. But wrong not Matthieu; it is he, rather, who tranquillized
+me. He told me, to be sure, what Clotilda's parents thought they
+observed; nay, still more,--see, I tell thee everything,--he said they
+had even, on account of thy presumed liking and thy present influence,
+which the Chamberlain would fain avail himself of for his
+reinstatement, spoken of a possible betrothal to their daughter, and
+had even spoken to her and sounded her on the subject; but (to thee,
+however, this is a matter of indifference) my beloved remained true to
+me, and said, No."
+
+Now was the hitherto so happy heart of our friend broken: that hard No
+had never yet been uttered to him. With an inexpressible, crushing, but
+meek woe, he said, softly, to Flamin,--
+
+"Be thou, too, always true to me, for I have very little; and never
+torment me more as thou hast to-day."
+
+He could say no more; the stifled tears stormed surging up over his
+heart, and painfully collected themselves under the pupil; he must
+needs now have a still, dark place, where he could weep to his heart's
+content; and in his lacerated and smarting bosom there remained only
+one soft and balmy thought: "Now, in the night, I can weep as much as I
+will, and no one can see my shattered face, my shattered soul, my
+shattered fortune."
+
+And when he thought, "Ah, Emanuel, if thou shouldst see me as I am
+to-day!" he could hardly any longer contain himself.
+
+He fled, with suppressed tears, unconcerned who saw it or did not see
+it, out of the garden, over which a dark angel let float a great
+funereal banner and the music of a dirge. He bruised himself against
+a stone garden-roller which was used to crush the _sprinkled_
+grass-blades and _flowerets_,--he wept not yet, but on the observatory
+there would he satisfy himself and steep himself in abundant
+sorrow,--he kept repeating, "But she remained true, and said, No, no,
+no!"--the concert-tones glided after, like fire after the conjurer,--he
+waded through moist, slumbering lawns, which concealed their flowers,
+and, swifter than he, swept over the earth the shadowy outlines of the
+clouds overhead chased by the wind,--he stood at the foot of the
+observatory, still held back every tear, and hurried up,--he threw
+himself on the bench where he had seen Clotilda for the first time afar
+off, in a white dress,--"Rest thou, too, Horion!" she had called to
+him out of his dream from under the flowery hill, and he heard it
+again.----
+
+Here he tore open joyfully all his wounds, and let them bleed out
+freely in tears; they overspread with mournful streams the face which
+once had often smiled, but always good-naturedly, and which from other
+eyes had never wrung any, but only wiped them away; every flood was a
+load taken off, but the heart grew heavy again upon it, and poured out
+a fresh one.--At last he could hear the tones again; most of them sank
+and were lost before they were wafted to the tower; little ones arrived
+dying, and expired in his darkling heart; every tone was a falling
+tear, and made him lighter, and expressed his anguish. The garden
+seemed to consist of softly resounding, dark-green waves of shadow,
+veiled under a broken twilight. Stung by memory, he tore his eye away
+from it: "What does it concern me any longer?" he thought. But at last
+from this shadowy Eden and from the _viole d'amour_ came up the song,
+"Forget me not," to his weary heart, and gave him back the softer pang
+and the past love. "No," said he, "I never will forget thee, though
+thou hast not loved me! thy form will assuredly forever move me, and
+remind me of my dreams! ah, thou heavenly one, it is, indeed, now, the
+only thing that does not pain me, to think I forget thee not!"
+
+All was silent and extinguished; he was alone in the presence of night.
+At length, after remaining a long time in silence, he went down and
+back to Flachsenfingen, exhausted with weeping, and a poor man. And as,
+on the way, he cast a hurried glance up at the dark-blue heaven, in
+which floating clouds lay flung around the moon like _scoriæ_, and a
+hurried glance again over the half-annihilated shadowy landscape, over
+the shadow-hills and shadow-villages, all appeared to him dead, empty,
+and vain, and it seemed to him as if, in some brighter world, there
+were a magic-lantern, and through the lantern glasses moved on which
+earth and springs and human groups were painted, and we called the
+descending, dancing images of these glasses _us_ and an earth and a
+life; and _after all that was bright and many-colored, a great shadow
+followed on_.----
+
+Ah, I stir up, perhaps, once more, in many a breast, long-forgotten
+troubles! But it is good for us--since sorrows occupy so large a place
+in our memory--that this bitter winter-fruit should grow mild by lying,
+and that there is but a small difference between a past sorrow and a
+present bliss.
+
+Poor Victor arrived after midnight, with a pale face and burning eyes,
+at the house of the Apothecary. He asked for nothing, that he might not
+betray his broken voice. When he saw his every-day overcoat hanging in
+the moonbeams, and when he imagined himself a strange person to whom
+the coat belonged, and who took it off so joyfully in the morning and
+now would put it on again so sorrowfully, then did a certain compassion
+which he had for himself seize again with too strong an impression his
+exhausted heart. Marie came, and he turned not away from her even the
+signs of this compassion. She stood surprised; he said to her with the
+softest voice, woven of sighs, that he wanted nothing; and the good
+soul went slowly out without courage to console or to weep, but all
+night long she shed invisible tears for those of another, and for a woe
+which had not been whispered in her ear.
+
+Why did Fate to-day, of all days, open all the veins of his heart? Why
+must the Senior Pastor's silver wedding and the first marriage of his
+daughter to the preacher of the Orphan-House fall just on this day?
+Why, if indeed the two nuptial feasts had to coincide on this day, must
+they last till after midnight, when they gave poor Victor occasion to
+gaze into all the mouldering scenes of his burnt-up hopes, when he
+could see from his dark chamber, in a brilliantly lighted room, the
+love which linked hand in hand, pressed lips to lips, and mingled eyes
+and souls? At another time he would have smiled at the Orphan-House
+preacher and at two catechists of the poor; but tonight he could only
+sigh over them,--and it is a soft line of beauty on his inner man, that
+he did not grudge, but felicitated, the poor people's possession of
+what he was deprived of himself. "Ah, you are happy!" said he. "O, love
+each other truly, press your throbbing, transitory hearts ardently to
+each other, ere the wing of Time shatters them, and glow on each
+other's bosoms during the short minute of life, and exchange your tears
+and kisses ere eyes and lips freeze in the grave! Ye are happier than
+I,--I, who can give my heart full of love to no one but the worms of
+the grave, and on whose coffin a joiner shall paint the inscription,
+which like myself shall be buried in the earth: 'Ye good children of
+men, you loved me not, and yet I loved you so well!'"
+
+Every happy smile, every fleeting touch of the violin, every thought,
+became now, to his soft tear-bathed heart, a hard, sharp corner,--just
+as a hand which dips itself under the water feels everything hard to
+the touch.
+
+His unbounded sincerity, his unbounded tenderness, he could now satisfy
+in no other way than by a letter to Emanuel, into which he let his
+whole soul overflow.
+
+
+"O Dearly Loved Friend!
+
+"Ought I to hide it from thee, when griefs or follies unman me? Ought I
+to show thee the faults I have repented of, and never my present ones?
+No, come hither, dear one, to my wounded breast! I will lay open to
+thee the heart therein, let it bleed and beat under the exposure as it
+will. Thou wilt, perhaps, still cover it up again with thy fatherly
+love, and say, 'I love thee still.'
+
+"Thou, my Emanuel, reposest in thy lofty solitude, on the Ararat of the
+saved soul, on the Tabor of the shining One: there thou gazest, softly
+dazzled, into the sun of Deity, and seest calmly the cloud of death
+swim in over the sun; it veils the orb: thou growest blind under the
+cloud; it melts away, and again thou standest before God. Thou lovest
+men as children who cannot offend,--thou lovest earthly enjoyments as
+fruits, which one plucks for refreshment, but without hungering for
+them; the storms and earthquakes of life pass by thee unheard, because
+thou liest in a life-dream full of tones, full of songs, full of
+meadows,--and when death awakes thee, thou art still smiling over the
+bright dream.
+
+"But, ah! more than one tempest thunders into the life's-dream of the
+rest of us, and makes it distressful. If a higher being could enter
+into the hurly-burly of ideas which encompasses our spirit, and from
+which it must draw its breath, as we breathe in an air composed of all
+kinds of gases poured together,--if he were to see what kinds of
+nutriment pass through our inner man, from which it has to extract its
+chyle: that medley of comic operas,--Bayle's Dictionaries,--concerts of
+Mozart,--Messiahs,--military operations,--Goethe's poems,--Kant's
+writings,--table-talks,--lunar observations,--vices and virtues,--men
+and sicknesses and sciences of all sorts:--if the Being should examine
+this _olla-podrida_ of life, would he not be curious to know what
+heterogeneous and mutually repulsive juices thereby run together in the
+poor soul, and would he not wonder that anything settled and uniform is
+left as a residuum in man? Ah, Emanuel! if thy friend is now in a fine
+banquet-hall, now in a garden, now in an opera-box, now under the
+great night-heavens, now in the presence of a coquette, and now before
+thee,--surely, this ambiguous alternation of scenes must bring him
+sorrows, and perhaps leave stains....
+
+"No, I will not deceive my Emanuel----O, are, then, the trifles and
+the pebbles of this life worth our choosing crooked paths to avoid
+them, as the sapping-caterpillar submits to winding courses through the
+twig-work of its leaf? No, all that I have said is true; but I should
+not have said it, had not other sorrows led me to speak of these also;
+and yet, thou innocently, simple-heartedly, sublimely trusting teacher,
+thou wouldst have believed me! Ah, thou hast too good an opinion of
+me!... O, it is a long and weary step from admiration to imitation! But
+now look into my open heart!
+
+"Since I have, here in the charnel-house of my childish joys, in the
+beds where my childhood's years bloomed and faded, been conversing with
+perhaps too many dreams of the past,--and, still more, from the day
+when thou gavest my heart the provocative to the fever-stroke which has
+shaken my whole life,--since thou disclosedst to me the life wherein
+man exfoliates, and the thin, sharp moment whereon he so painfully
+stands,--since that farewell-night when my soul was great and my tears
+inexhaustible,--an eternal wound has been running within me, and the
+sigh of a longing which nothing can name but dreams and tears and
+love has lain like a stagnant vein, oppressive and consuming in my
+breast.----Ah! I still smile as ever, I still philosophize as ever, but
+my innermost heart only the beloved friend sees to whom I now lay it
+bare.
+
+"O Fate, why dost thou strike in man the spark of a love which must be
+smothered in his own heart's blood? Have we not all, abiding within us,
+the sweet image of a beloved, of a friend, before whom we weep, after
+whom we seek, for whom we hope,--ah, and so vainly, so vainly? Does not
+man stand before a human bosom, as the turtle-dove before a mirror,
+and, like her, coo himself hoarse before a dead, flat image therein,
+which he takes for the sister of his complaining soul? Why is it, then,
+that every fair spring-evening, every melting lay, every overflowing
+rapture, asks us, 'Where dost thou find the beloved soul to which
+thou wilt tell and impart thy bliss?' Why does music give the
+tempest-stricken heart, instead of peace, only greater waves,--as the
+tolling of bells, instead of dispelling, draws down the thunder-storms?
+And why is it, that out of doors, on a fair, still, bright day, when
+thou lookest over the whole unrolled picture of a landscape, over the
+seas of flowers that tremble upon it, over the shadows flung down by
+the clouds which fly from one hill to another, and over the mountains
+which stretch like shores and walls round our flowery circle,--why does
+then a voice within thee cry incessantly, 'Ah! behind the smoking[224]
+mountains, beyond the clouds that repose upon them, there rests a
+fairer land, there dwells the soul thou seekest, there heaven lies
+nearer to the earth'? But behind the mountain and behind the cloud
+there sighs also an unappreciated heart, that looks over towards this
+thy horizon, and thinks, 'Ah, in that far region I should doubtless be
+happier!'
+
+"Are we _not_, then, all happy?----Do not assert it, nor say to me,
+Emanuel, that, in the winter of this life, the few warm sunbeams that
+interrupt it burst and destroy the better man like a vegetable; say not
+that every year steals away something from our heart, and that, like
+ice, it grows less and less, the farther it drifts down the stream of
+Time; only say not that the wandering Psyche, though she hears her
+second self in her prison, yet can never get into its arms.----But thou
+hast already somewhere said: 'All loving souls on earth dwell apart
+from each other in two bodies, as on two hills; a waste lies between
+them, as between solar systems; they see each other, speak across by
+distant signs; at last they hear each other's voices from hill to hill;
+but they never touch each other, and each embraces only its thought.
+And yet this poor love crumbles like an old corpse, when it is
+exhibited; and its flame flickers like a burial-lamp, when it is
+uncovered.'
+
+"Are we, then, all not happy?--Do not say so!--Ah, man, who, even from
+childhood up, has been calling after an unknown soul that grew up in
+_one_ heart with his own,--that entered into all the dreams of his
+years, and therein gleamed from afar, and, after his waking, started
+his tears,--that in spring sent him nightingales, that he might think
+of her and long for her,--that in every tender hour visited his soul,
+with so much virtue, so much love, that he would so gladly have offered
+in his heart, as in a sacrificial chalice, all his blood to the
+beloved,--but who, alas! never, appeared, and only sent her image in
+every fair form, but forever kept back her heart;--oh, if at last, oh,
+if suddenly, oh, if blissfully, her heart beats against his heart, and
+the two souls embrace each other forever, he can no longer say it, but
+we can: 'This man, indeed, is happy, and is loved.' ...
+
+"Good Emanuel, thou forgivest me the pain of the fear that I may never
+be the happy man,--no, never!--Oh, even for this earth, broken up into
+graves, I should be perhaps too happy, I should be permitted to enjoy,
+perhaps, too great an Eden for so young a life, and one justified by
+such slight merits, if my too soft soul, which even now gives way under
+three happy minutes, which loves every human being, and hangs with the
+arms of a child on the heart of the whole creation,--oh, which is
+already made too blissful by this mere dream of love, and is
+overpowered by this description!--no, it were too blessed, such a soul,
+long since dissolved by melancholy and humanity, if it should once,
+after such a long, deathly yearning, at last, at last--O Emanuel, I
+tremble again for joy, and yet it can never, never be!--if it should
+find all its wishes, its whole heaven, so much love, accumulated in one
+dear, dear soul; if in the presence of great Nature, and before the
+face of Virtue, and before God himself, who gave love to her and to me,
+I could dare to say, weeping, to this only, this sweet, this beloved--O
+God, how shall I name her? this fore-loved one, whom in my frenzy I
+would now name: 'At last my heart has thee, thou good soul! to-day God
+gives us to each other, and we remain together through all eternity!'
+No, I would not say it; I should for ecstasy be dumb and die!
+
+"--Lo! it seemed to me just now as if a form passed across my chamber,
+and called, 'Victor!' I looked round, and beheld my empty room, and the
+Sunday clothes which I had taken off, and now, for the first time, I
+remembered that I was unhappy and not loved.
+
+"But thou, irreplaceable friend, misunderstand me not. I swear to thee
+that I will give thee these sheets unaltered, though to-morrow, when
+the whirlpools of to-night flow stiller and smoother, I should find all
+sorts of alterations necessary. Thy foolish friend remains,
+nevertheless, thy friend forever.
+
+                                                   "S. V. H."
+
+
+
+
+                           20. DOG-POST-DAY.
+
+  Letter from Emanuel.--Flamin's Fruit-Pieces on the Shoulders.--Walk
+                              to St. Luna.
+
+
+"Poor Sebastian!" said I, as I opened to-day's letter-bag, "before I get
+it open, I know already beforehand, that, after such a night, thou must
+have shut thyself up all day, to turn thy pale, exhausted face toward
+the garden of sorrow, that thou to-day lovest these poison-drops better
+than the vulnerary balsam, and that thou lookest into the glass to weep
+for this still, innocent form which it shows thee with its gashes, as
+if it were the form of a stranger.--Oh, when man has nothing more to
+love, he embraces the gravestone of his love, and sorrow becomes his
+loved one! Forgive one another the short delusion of mourning; for,
+among all the weaknesses of man, this is the most innocent, when,
+instead of soaring away like the bird of passage above winter, and
+flying to warmer zones, he sinks before it, and helplessly stiffens in
+his cold grief."
+
+Victor coffined himself, so to speak, that day in his chamber, which he
+opened to no one but a next-door neighbor of sorrows,--Marie,--whose
+form affected him as softly as an evening sun. Every other female face
+on the street gave him stings; and the brother of the lost Clotilda,
+whom he saw at the window, and to-day would gladly have embraced, lent
+to the remembrance which tears had dimmed, new colors.... Reader!--my
+female reader will be, of herself, more reasonable,--laugh not at my
+good hero, who _is_ none precisely where the strength of the soul
+becomes the strength of sorrow: at least, let me not hear it. Whoever
+has the sympathetic nerve of life--love--tied up or cut asunder, can
+well, if for no other reason, sigh and say, "Anything on earth can man
+lose more patiently than fellow-men."
+
+And yet at evening an accident--namely, a letter--made all his
+sorrows pass once more through his weary heart. A short letter from
+Emanuel--not, however, an answer to the one just sent to him--arrived.
+
+
+"My ever-loved one!
+
+"I have learned the day of thy entrance upon a new scene of tumultuous
+life, and I have said,' May my beloved still continue happy! may the
+tranquillity of virtue wall in his heart as with a breast against the
+frosts and storms of his new life! may neither his sorrows nor his
+raptures be loud! may he mourn softly and silently as a princess in
+soft white! may he enjoy softly and silently, and in the temple of his
+heart may Pleasure play only as a noiseless fluttering butterfly in a
+church! and may Virtue float before him in the higher heaven above our
+sun, and warm and irradiate and gradually attract to herself his
+heart!'
+
+"In thy affectionate anxiety for my parting life, thou wilt not have me
+write often: so little, dear one, dost thou believe my hope! Oh, the
+weights of my machine, as they run down, fall slowly and softly upon
+the grave; this earthly life arrays itself to my soul in ever fairer
+colors, and adorns itself for the farewell; this mock-summer around me,
+which stands beside the August summer like a mock-sun,--this and the
+coming spring take me beguilingly out of the arms of Nature.
+
+"So does the All-Gracious overhang with foliage, overspread with
+flowers, the churchyard-wall of life, as we cover the wall of an
+English garden with ivy and evergreen, and gives the end of the garden
+the appearance of a new thicket.--
+
+"So ascends the spirit even here in this _dark_ life, as the barometer
+ascends even during thick weather, and feels the influence of the
+_brighter_ life even under the clouds.
+
+"But I obey thy love, and will write to thee no more, except once in
+winter, when I describe to thee the great night wherein I told my blind
+Julius, for the first time, that there is an Eternal One.--In that
+night, my beloved, rapture and devotion bore me too high, and came near
+to rending my thin life. I bled a long time. In winter, when the charms
+of heaven take the place of those of earth,[225] forbid me not to paint
+the summer picture.
+
+"O my son!--I was compelled, indeed; to write to thee, because my
+friend Clotilda complains that the new year will draw her out of the
+green bower of solitude to the crowded market-place of the court; her
+soul is dark with sorrow, and stretches out its arms after the tranquil
+life which is being taken away from her. I know not what a court is;
+thou wilt know, and, I conjure thee, release my friend, and turn aside
+the hand that would draw her from St. Luna. If thou canst not do it,
+still forsake not at court the beloved soul; be her only, her most
+ardent friend; draw the bee-stings of earthly hours from her gentle
+heart. When cold words, like snow-flakes, fall upon this flower, then
+let the breath of love melt them to tears that shall flow before thy
+sight; when a tempest shall come up, over her life, then show her the
+angel who stands in the sun, and draws over our tempests the rainbow of
+hope. O thou whom _I_ so love, my sister also will so love thee; and
+when my friend discovers to her his gentle heart, his tender eye, his
+virtue, his soul, the home of Nature and of the Eternal, then will he
+see my sister grow happy before him, and the exalted countenance which
+melts into tears and smiles and love before him will remain forever in
+his heart.
+
+                                                  "EMANUEL."
+
+                               *   *   *
+
+Lo! in this glowing moment the exalted form which he had seen yesterday
+appeared again before his heart, with the sadly smiling lips and the
+eyes full of tears; and as the form continued floating before him, and
+gleamed and smiled, his soul rose up before her as before one dead, and
+during the uplifting of himself all his wounds began to bleed again,
+and he cried, "Now, then, never do thou vanish from my heart, thou
+sublime shape, but rest forever on its wounds!" Disconsolateness,
+exhaustion, and sleep overwhelmed his spirit, as well as his latest
+thought,--to go back shortly to St. Luna, and persuade her parents not
+to force her to court...
+
+The long sleep of death closes our _scars_, and the short sleep of life
+our _wounds_. Sleep is the half of time which heals us. On awaking,
+Victor, whose fever of love had yesterday been so aggravated by
+sleeplessness, saw today that his sorrow had been unmoderated
+because his hope had been immoderate. At first he had wished,--then
+observed,--then assumed,--then seen,--then interpreted,--then
+hoped,--then sworn to it. Every little circumstance, even his share in
+Clotilda's nomination as maid-of-honor, had poured mild oil of love
+into his flame. "Oh, fool that I am!" said he, with the three
+swearing-fingers placed upon his forehead; and, like all energetic men,
+he was so much the more spirited in proportion as he had been
+spiritless. Nay, he felt himself all at once too light; for a too
+sudden cure betokens, in the case of souls also, a relapse. A new
+consolation was his yesterday's resolve, that he would render Clotilda
+a service,--namely, save her from the court-service. He still reflected
+upon his determination to see her again.--Feelest thou, haply, Victor,
+that everything which Love does, in order to die, is only an expedient
+for rising again from the dead, and that its epilogues are only
+prologues to the Second Act?
+
+But a basket of apples in the market confirmed him again in his
+resolution. That is to say, Flamin came in. He began immediately with
+questions about the disappearance on Sunday, and with reports of the
+general uneasiness about the dear runaway. Victor, heated again
+by the whole recollection, and almost a little enraged against the
+image-breaker and government-attorney of a vain love, gave him the true
+answer:--"Thou tookest away from me in part my pleasure; and why should
+I, at so late an hour, come upon the stage?" The more vividly Flamin
+painted the affectionate concern of the Parson's wife and Clotilda
+about his disappearing, so much the more painful grew the maze of
+contending feelings within him. But for his conscience calling him
+back, it would now have been easier for him to confess the love that
+was hopeless, than formerly the love that was hopeful.--Accidentally
+Flamin wondered at the ripeness of the apples down below in the market,
+and desired some. A lightning beam now darted before Victor's eye at
+the inherited fruit-pieces on Flamin's shoulders, which always appeared
+in the after-summer at the time of the apples' ripening, but which, in
+the previous whirl of his feelings, he had forgotten. Heaven knows
+whether it has not escaped the reader himself, that Flamin bears this
+winter-fruitage (his maternal mole) on his back, which may become a
+Sodom-apple and Eve's-apple for him. Might not Matthieu, who until now
+could not examine upon Flamin this seal of his princely relationship,
+suddenly become convinced of all that which, with his thievish glances
+at his Lordship's letter, he had only been able to guess? And might he
+not afterward go to the Prince, and there mix for all our friends the
+most poisonous broths?--As, however, the magic image generally faded in
+one week, Victor needed for only so long a time to keep its wearer out
+of sight; he therefore laid before his friend, thus tattooed by Nature,
+the request to take for once a social walk to St. Luna, as they had day
+before yesterday missed each other.
+
+"I can't do it," said Flamin, who had the lesser delicacy not to avail
+himself of the request for company on account of the reproaches in Le
+Baut's garden, and forgot in that the greater delicacy of not imputing
+such a reference to his Victor.
+
+The latter, in a passionate hurry to avert two such evils (Clotilda's
+court-office and Matthieu's inspection), seized upon the singular
+expedient of proposing to the page to share the journey with him.
+
+"With pleasure!" said the Evangelist; "_this_ week I have to do
+cabinet-service, but I can _next_ week."
+
+And it was precisely this week that Victor wanted it to be done.--So
+many sudden miscarriages confounded him to such a degree, that he,
+whose careless and innocent heart was always an open letter with flying
+seal, dissembled now towards his dear, good friend Flamin.--He wanted
+at least to investigate the maternal mole and its distinctness for
+himself, He therefore went to him, and found him bent over his writing,
+and with a glowing work-face. He conjured him to consider that
+recreation and holidays were indispensable to him, and urged it upon
+him that he should work, like a compositor, standing. Then he came
+gradually upon the subject of Flamin's full-blooded chest, and upon the
+question whether it could bear his exertions without stingings and
+oppressions. Then he arrived at the point, and proposed that Flamin
+should, at all events, have a Burgundy-pitch plaster applied as
+lung-conductor to his shoulder-blades; yes, he would himself do it for
+him now, and show him how all was to be prepared. He hoped, besides, to
+draw thereby a curtain around the apple-piece. But he dissembled so
+wretchedly,--for he always succeeded in his innocent intrigues with
+maidens, and comic disguises for satirical purposes, while his
+serious ones always miscarried,--that even Flamin heard him out, and
+dryly replied, he had already had on such a plaster for two days,
+and--Matthieu had advised, and himself applied it.
+
+There was a fix.--Sebastian had nothing further left him than, with a
+singular _sangfroid_, which, on the St. Luna road, was mixed only with
+a few stings from the old thorny latelings of his withered Paradise, to
+go unaccompanied to the Chamberlain Le Baut, to say what was to be
+said, hardly to peep into the Parsonage, and quietly to trudge off
+again without a single--hope.
+
+Dear Fortune! better beheaded than scalped,--better _one_ disaster than
+ten miscarriages; I mean, break man upon thy wheel rather from above
+than from below upward!--
+
+Victor, to be sure, knew as yet not a word of the turn he should give
+to the subject, in order to put two such court-emigrants as the Le
+Bauts, who knew nothing holier than the _Latreia_ towards a prince, the
+_Douleia_ towards his minister, and the _Hyperdouleia_ towards his
+w--, out of humor with Clotilda's promotion; but he thought, "I will do
+what I can."
+
+Clotilda's parents received him with so much civility,--i. e. with so
+much courtesy of the body, with so much powdered sugar on every
+feature, with so much sirup of violets on every word,--in short, he
+found the report which Matthieu had rendered to Flamin of their amiable
+disposition towards him so well grounded,--that he could have selected
+no better opportunity than this to dissuade them from the transplanting
+of their daughter, had they not begun to thank him for having been
+himself the very transplanter. They had learned or guessed all, and
+thanked him for his intercession, to which they probably attached more
+self-interested views than the daughter did. It would have been
+ridiculous, in Clotilda's presence, to advise _her_ against
+Flachsenfingen, and dissuade from that for which they thanked him;
+still, however, he attempted something. He told the Chamberlain "his
+daughter deserved rather to _have_ a court than to adorn one; nay, that
+_he_ deserved at most in the whole matter--an excuse, as Clotilda would
+certainly prefer the society of her parents to the constraint of court;
+in that case, he would promise to put the index back again with the
+Prince, and rectify everything without disadvantage." The father took
+this expression for a strong deprecation of gratitude; the step-mother,
+for some piece of knavery or other; the daughter, for--words. She said,
+a little curtly, "I think it was easy to choose between disobedience
+and absence." For, unbending as she was to her step-mother, she
+willingly followed the hints of her father, whom, with all his
+weaknesses, and as the only soul on the earth attached to him, she
+tenderly loved. Victor, at last, though reluctantly, was forced to give
+it up; but why does man find it harder to resign himself to the future
+than to the past?--The coldness of the daughter was naturally not less
+(but sincerer) than the warmth of the parents.... And this coldness was
+precisely what refreshed his glowing brain. This cold, indifferent form
+was wrapped as a veil about the sublime and loving one, as it ever
+floated before him with that melancholy look which he could not endure.
+Without the consciousness of anything wrong, satisfied with his
+obedience to Emanuel's request, he withdrew, with his feelings
+oppressed by decorum, returning coldness with greater coldness.--He
+would have been a poor lover, if he had known what he wanted; for
+otherwise he never could have desired of Clotilda, even in case of her
+love for him, any extraordinary warmth towards a medicus whom her
+parents forced upon her (which injures a man even more than ugliness),
+who so impolitely took himself out of the garden without a birthday
+_carmen_, and who pressed her into the seven gilded towers of
+court-service, despite her reluctance, despite every probability of her
+future _prison-fever_.--But for the _vacant freehold_ of his heart this
+very vexation was wholesome....
+
+If my good reader ever has to take an eternal farewell of a too dear
+friend, let him take it _twice_.--The _first_ we all understand, as a
+matter of course, when he sinks in the intoxication of sorrow, in the
+hemorrhage of heart and eyes, and when the beloved object burns itself
+with flames into the tender soul; but _then_ he will never be able to
+forget the being thus torn from his heart. Therefore he must take a
+_second_ farewell, which is colder even for the reason that passionate
+emotions admit no _dal segno_[226] of repetition; nay, (if he will take
+the wisest course of all,) he must endeavor, after the first tragic
+leave-taking, to see her in a public place (e. g. at a coronation),
+where she must appear cold. Her frosty face will then snow over her
+glowing one in his brain; and my good reader has, undoubtedly,
+collected together again wits enough to know what he reads in the
+Dog-Post-Days....
+
+--Upon my word, if Jean Paul does not write industriously, then no one
+does; it has already struck one, and he took it for a quarter to
+twelve; my sister will already be folding her hands before the
+tucked-up smoking pike, which, like the serpent of eternity, has his
+tail in his mouth, and saying, incessantly, "It is all growing
+cold!"--"It must be so, after such glowing chapters," say I, "if thou
+meanest the reader and the author."--Already, while I still sit over
+the twentieth chapter, the post-dog is frisking round in the chamber
+with the twenty-first; and yet I will starve myself, unless I can still
+utter before dinner, like the seven wise men, seven golden sayings:--
+
+1. When one who is stung by a bee or by fate does not keep still, the
+sting tears out, and is left behind.
+
+2. Miserable earth, which three or four great or bold men can reform
+and agitate! Thou art a true stage: in the foreground are some fighting
+players and a few canvas-tents; the background swims with painted tents
+and soldiers!
+
+3. States and diamonds are in these days, when they have stains, cut up
+into little ones; and as
+
+4. Men in great states and bees in great hives suffer a loss of courage
+and warmth; accordingly now-a-days they join to small countries other
+small countries, as they do to beehives colony-hives.
+
+5. Man takes _his_ suffering for that of _humanity_, as the bees take
+the dropping of their bee-stand, when the sun already shines out again,
+for rain, and stay in-doors.
+
+6. But he commits daily a _lesser_ error: he regards as an _eternity_
+(that Aristotelian Unity of Time to the drama--of Existence) at first
+his present _hour_,--then his _youth_,--then his _life_,--then his
+_century_,--then the duration of the _globe_,--then that of the
+_sun_,--then that of the _heavens_,--then (this is the least error)
+_time_ itself....
+
+7. There are in man, in the beginning and at the end, as in books, two
+blank bookbinder's leaves,--childhood and old age; and so, too, in the
+Dog-Post-Days: see the end of this day and the beginning of the next.
+
+
+                         FIFTH INTERCALARY DAY.
+
+            _Continuation of the Register of Extra-Sheets_.
+
+                                   K.
+
+Cold.[227]--In our age decrease of _stoicism_ and increase of _egotism_
+are found side by side. The former covers its treasures and germs with
+ice; the latter is itself ice. So, in physics, _mountains_ wear away,
+and _glaciers_ increase.
+
+                                   L.
+
+Library (Circulating) for Reviewers and Young Ladies.--I still always
+adhere to my purpose of having it inserted in the Intelligence-leaf of
+the Literary Gazette, that I shall not destroy the purchase-money which
+I raise upon my _evening star_ [Hesperus], nor, like Musæus, fritter it
+away in the purchase of summer-houses, but shall lay out the whole
+capital upon a complete collection of all German _prefaces_ and
+_titles_ that appear from fair to fair. I can carry out the plan, if I
+give out a preface a week, on the payment of a penny, to reviewers, who
+do not care to read the book itself when they review it.
+
+That not even the surplus of the aforesaid mintage may lie as dead
+capital in my house, I shall employ it--if I do not change my mind--in
+getting the bookbinder to publish the _heavier_ German masterpieces,--e. g.
+Frederick Jacobi's, Klinger's, Goethe's Tasso,--likewise the better
+satirical and philosophical ones, in a _lighter_ ladies' edition, which
+shall consist wholly of so-called _puzzle-volumes_, which have no book
+slid into them. I shall thereby, methinks, be playing something pithy
+into the hands of my fair readers, which shall be as well bound and
+as well titled as the booksellers' edition, and in which--because the
+hard stone-fruit is already _shelled out_, and there is nothing
+inside--they can lay not only just as much of silk threads and silk
+snippings as in the printed edition, but six ounces more. _Allwill's_
+correspondence--a heavy, two-yolked ostrich's egg of the author's,
+which I have had _blown out_ by the bookbinder in this manner, because
+most of the fair readers are too _cold_ to hatch it--is now quite _light_.
+But of the German romances I shall never prepare such a work-box edition
+of empty state-carriages of the God of the Sun and the Muses, because I
+fear the trade would cry out about _piracy_.--A happy man were I, if
+the joint subscribers to my circulating-capsule-library had only been
+shown round as much as twice in some Italian and Portuguese bookeries:[228]
+they would there, where often only the titles of works--and of the
+stupidest, into the bargain--are daubed on the wall, be astonished to see
+what a miserable figure such useless libraries, beside my bookery of
+regular puzzle-books, which I select from so many departments and with
+some originality, cannot do otherwise than cut.
+
+--Thus, of course, German capsule-readers among the ladies will never
+be overtaken by you Portuguese women! Much rather will the former
+follow in the footsteps even of the men, advocates and business people,
+who subscribe to similar capsule-journalistics, and jointly read and
+circulate the covers of the best German journals,--which latter are
+often annexed as _curiosa_ even to the capsules, and fill them out....
+Such is my plan and sketch; but even sheep would presume I were merely
+playing off a joke here, unless I really carried it through.
+
+                                   M.
+
+Maidens.--Young maidens are like young turkey-hens, that thrive poorly,
+if one touches them often; and mothers keep these soft creatures, made
+of floating pollen, like _pastel-pictures_, under window-glass--because
+everything is afraid of us princess-stealers and fruit-thieves--until
+they are fixed. Meanwhile the proper crown-guard around a female heart
+is neither solitude,--which leads only to an untried innocence,[229]
+that falls, to be sure, not before the debauchee, but yet before the
+hypocrite,--nor society, nor hard labor,--otherwise no country girl
+would ever fall,--nor good teachings,--for these are to be had in every
+mouth and in every circulating library; but these four first and last
+things do it all at once, and they are at once superseded, united, and
+replaced by a wise and virtuous mother.
+
+                                   N.
+
+Names of the Great.[230]--When I see, as I do, how they scatter their
+productions for the Fair, occasional writings and fugitive pieces
+(children born out of wedlock) as anonymously as if they were reviews,
+then I say: "Herein I recognize genuine modesty; for natural children
+are precisely their best and their own, and can, besides, be
+acknowledged by the Prince _as_ genuine; whereas their supernatural [or
+extra-natural] ones born in wedlock have to do without the
+certification; and yet they will not let the world know the name of the
+benefactor, but quite as often (nay, oftener) get people _into it_ as
+_out of it_ secretly. What the child in other cases first learns to
+pronounce, such parents speak to him last,--their name. Methinks they
+follow herein Goethe's fine ear; for they hide themselves, while they
+fill the orchestra of the world with children's voices and with
+_vingt-quatre_,[231] and with alarm-works and repeating-works, (what a
+juxtaposition of unlike things!) just as Goethe demands of the playing
+musical artist that he shall work for the ears, but hide himself for
+the sake of sparing the eyes. Quite as beautifully do they do the thing
+when they finally adopt as children, and show to the world, their
+children by the thirtieth marriage (often after the five or twenty
+years' limitation), and thus imitate the greenfinches, which, it is
+said, make their nest and its inmates invisible by means of the
+so-called greenfinch-stone, till the latter are fledged."
+
+                                   O.
+
+Ostracism.--It was among the Greeks, as is well known, no punishment.
+Only people of great merits achieved it; and so soon as this banishment
+from the country was lavished upon bad men, it went entirely into
+disuse. An imperial citizen must lament that we, who have a similar
+public educational institution,--namely, banishment,--squander it often
+upon the very wretchedest rascals, and therefore--with the design of
+making one circle or country the spit-box and secreting-vessel of
+another--drive out of the country scoundrels who are hardly fit to stay
+in it. Thereby is this clearing of the country deprived for the most
+part of the honorable and distinguishing feature which it might have
+for the man of merit, and an honest man--e. g. a Bahrdt[232]--is almost
+ashamed to be invested with such an honor. There should, therefore, be
+an imperial police-regulation that only ministers, professors, and
+officers of decided worth, like important documents, should be
+dismissed and banished. To similar men I would also limit hanging. With
+the Romans, in truth, only great heads and lights were interred on the
+_way_[233] at the expense of a whole state; but what shall I think of
+the Germans, with whom seldom serviceable subjects, but mostly finished
+rogues, are buried at public expense, which they call hangman's fees,
+having been previously hanged on the gallows by the roadside?--Not even
+in his lifetime can a man, unless he has extraordinary, and often
+_eccentric_ merits,--although eccentric men fall back into the truth,
+as _comets_ do into the _sun_, as fuel,--make his calculations upon
+being, in some manner, as the ancients duplicated their noble men in
+statues and pictures, hung up in _effigy_ in a thick stone frame....
+Let me have an answer; I allow myself to be talked with.
+
+                                   P.
+
+Philosophy.--Some critical philosophers have now borrowed from the
+algebra a mathematical method, without which one cannot for a single
+minute--not so much think as--write philosophically. The algebraist, by
+the transposition of mere _letters_, catches truths which no chain of
+reasoning could ever draw out of the deep. In this the critical
+philosopher has imitated him, but with greater advantage. As he
+cleverly mixes together, not letters, but whole _technical words_,
+there rises from the alliteration of the same a cream of truths which
+he could hardly have dreamed of. Such philosophers are forbidden, and
+rightly, like the preachers of Gotha (Goth. Public Ordinances, P. III.
+p. 16), to use allegories, or any flower of speech, which, as other
+flowers do for the drawing-hounds, would spoil the scent.--Properly,
+however, the picturesque style is more definite than the technical
+word-style, which finally, as all _abstract words are pictures_, is
+also itself a picturesque style, only one full of pictures that have
+run out and faded. Jacobi is not obscure in consequence of his
+_images_, but in consequence of the new _ideas_ which through them he
+would communicate to us.
+
+I have lately been looking over the birth-lists of the learned and
+teaching republic, and counting up the young little Kants whom the old
+Kant--otherwise unmarried, like his cousin Newton--has for the last ten
+Fairs begotten. Demetrius Magnus, who wanted to make a book of authors
+of the same name, must have been very stupid, if he had undertaken to
+write in our times, and yet at the same time, though he nevertheless
+communicated that there had been sixteen Platos, twenty Socrateses,
+twenty-eight Pythagorases, thirty-two Aristotles, had very sinfully
+omitted to say that there are now as many philosophers and
+philosophists as those make when reckoned all together--namely,
+ninety-six--who could bear the name of Kant,--that is, if they chose
+to. Such mechanics--thus may I call the magisters, because formerly the
+mechanics, inversely, were called magisters, and the upper master
+arch-magister--one should take into account as the best propaganda
+which bulky books can have. They are, at best, competent to diffuse the
+system, because they know how to separate from it the incomprehensible,
+the spiritual, and to extract what is popular and palpable, i. e. the
+words for readers, who, otherwise simple, nevertheless would not die
+without a critical philosophy. The most miserable theological and
+æsthetic stone receives now a Kantian setting in words. Although every
+new system introduces a certain _one-sidedness_ of view into all
+heads,--especially as every cold philosopher has so much the more
+_one-sidedness_, precisely as he has the more _insight_,--still that is
+no matter; for great bars of truth come forth through the joint digging
+of the whole thinking-works.[234] Whoever has seen Kant standing on his
+mountain among his learned fellow-laborers, is reminded with pleasure
+of a similar incident in Peru, which Buffon communicates. When
+Condamine and Bouger were measuring there the equatorial degrees of the
+earth (as Kant did of the intellectual world), whole troops of apes
+appeared as coadjutors, put on spectacles, looked at the stars and down
+at the clocks, and reduced one thing and another to writing, although
+without salary, which is their only distinction from the vicariate
+Kants.
+
+Every man of genius is a philosopher, but not the reverse. A
+philosopher without fancy, without history, and without a _general
+knowledge_ of the most important things, is more one-sided than a
+politician. Whoever has adopted, rather than discovered, a system;
+whoever has not had beforehand dark presentiments thereof; whoever has
+not at least pined for it beforehand; in short, whoever does not bring
+with him a soul like a full, warm, ground filled with germs, which
+waits only for its summer,--such a one may indeed be a teacher, but not
+a scholar of the philosophy which he degrades to a mercenary
+profession; and, briefly, it is all one what place one climbs as his
+philosophical observatory,--a throne, or a Pegasus, or an Alp, or a
+Cæsar's-couch, or a bier,--and they are almost all higher than the desk
+in a lecture-room and hall of disputation.
+
+                              Q (_see_ K).
+
+                                   R.
+
+Reviewers.--An editor of a review should have six tables. At the first
+should sit and eat the advertisers of the _existence_ of a book; at the
+second, the wholesale appraisers of its _value_; at the third, the
+epitomists of it; at the fourth, the grammarians and philologists, who
+distribute to the public _catalogues raisonnés_ of other men's
+grammatical blunders; at the fifth, the fighters, who refute a new
+book, not by a new book, but by a sheet; at the sixth should stand the
+critical, princely bench, on which might sit Herder, Goethe, Wieland,
+and perhaps yet another, who survey a book as a human life, who
+apprehend its _individuality_, indicate at once the spirit of the
+literary creation and creator, and separate that incarnation and
+embodiment of the divine beauty which takes the form of an individual
+_from_ the beauty, and then disclose and pardon it.
+
+These six critical benches, which might edit six different literary
+periodicals, are now thrown over each other, and form _one_.--Frankly,
+however, as I come out against this jumbling together of learned (1)
+advertisements, (2) reviews, (3) extracts, (4) verbal and (5) real
+criticisms, and (6) artistic judgments, still I am ready and glad to
+admit that the critical _Fauna_ and _Flora_ of the first _five_ tables
+root out, perhaps, full as many shoots of weeds as they put forth
+themselves from their own germs; and I therefore appeal to a private
+letter of my own, which is beyond the suspicion of flattery, and
+wherein I associate it with a toadstool, which, although it produces,
+itself, upon an affusion (in this case, of ink), whole hosts of
+insects, nevertheless eradicates the flies.--But as among the reviewers
+there are also authors, like myself; as among the Portuguese
+inquisitors there are Jews; and, in fact, as I should want to talk
+whole intercalary years on the subject,--why talk a whole intercalary
+day?
+
+                                   S.
+
+Stripes.--"He that knoweth his Lord's will, and doeth it not, shall
+receive double stripes."--Who, then, gets the single ones? Not he,
+surely, who knows not the will and does it not?--It follows, therefore,
+that greater knowledge, not _aggravates_, but itself _creates_, moral
+guilt; for in so far as I absolutely do not discern a moral obligation,
+my offence against it is surely not less, but none at all.
+
+I will be my own Academy of Sciences, and assign to myself the
+following prize-question, which I will myself answer in a prize essay:
+"Since only such actions are virtuous as proceed from love for
+goodness, it follows that only those can be sinful which proceed from
+mere love of evil, and reference to self-interest must lessen the
+degree of a sin, as well as that of a virtue. But, on the other hand,
+what could there be but self-interest in our nature, which should impel
+us to what is bad? And if evil were done from a pure propensity to
+evil, then there would be a second, although opposite, autonomy[235] of
+the will."
+
+                                   T.
+
+Trouble, Tribulation.--Now, as I write these distressful sounds, which
+announce to me that Nature makes only _thorn-hedges_, but men _crowns
+of thorns_, all pleasure in lashing about me with the thorns of satire
+dies away, and I would rather draw some thorns out of your hands or
+feet.
+
+
+
+
+                           21. DOG-POST-DAY.
+
+        Victor's Professional Visits.--Concerning Houses full of
+               Daughters.--The Two Fools.--The Carrousel.
+
+
+The following remark comes not from the dog's knapsack, but from my own
+head: One needs not to be a panegyrist of our times, to see with
+pleasure that authors, princes, women, and others have now mostly laid
+aside the unnatural _false_ masks of virtue (e. g. bigotry, pietism,
+ceremonial behavior), and have entirely assumed instead the _genuine_
+tasteful _show_ of virtue. This improvement of our character-masks,
+whereby we hit more finely the exterior of virtue, is contemporaneous
+with a similar one on the stage, where they play their antics and their
+tragics no longer, as once, with _paper_ clothes and badly imitated
+laces, but with the _true_ ones.--
+
+"The Princess wanted you yesterday," said the Prince to the
+Court-Physician, almost as soon as he had entered with his exhausted
+face. The inflammation of Agnola's eyes had, in consequence of the
+autumn weather, night-feasts, and Culpepper's bold practice and her
+own--for the red capital letters of beauty (namely, painted cheeks) she
+was always putting on afresh--very much increased. Properly, Victor was
+too proud to let himself be sent for as a mere physician; nay, he was
+too proud to let himself be in demand for anything else (and though it
+were philosophy or beauty) than his character; for his father, who had
+just as much delicate pride, had taught him that we must not serve any
+one who does not respect us, or whom we ourselves do not respect,--nay,
+that one must not accept a favor from any one to whom one can only
+return outward, but not inward thanks. But this tender sense of honor,
+which never came into an unequal conflict with his self-interest,
+though it might well with his humanity, could never bind the hands
+wherewith he might relieve an unhappy Princess--unhappy, like himself,
+from a famine of love--at least of the pains of her eyes; perhaps,
+also, of _younger_ pangs; for his good-heartedness suggested to him
+nothing but reconciliations,--of the Prince with Le Baut, with the
+Princess, with the Minister. Nothing is more dangerous than to
+reconcile two persons,--unless, indeed, one is himself one of them; to
+set them at variance is much safer and easier.
+
+He found Agnola, even in the afternoon, still in her chamber, because
+its green tapestries flattered (not the face, to be sure, but) the hot
+eye. A thick veil over the face was her screen from daylight. When she,
+like a sun, lifted her veil, he could not comprehend how in Tostato's
+shop he could make, out of this Italian fire and these quick
+court-eyes, the face, red with weeping, of a blonde. A part of this
+fire belonged, to be sure, to her sickness. Her first word was a
+decided disobedience to his first; meanwhile she flew in the face of
+the Messrs. _Pringle_ and _Schmucker_, as well as himself; for the
+whole triune College advised leeches round the eyes; but those were
+disgusting to her. The medicus then suggested cupping-glasses at the
+back of the head; but her hair was more precious to her than her eyes.
+
+"Must, then, everything be bought with blood?" said she, with Italian
+vivacity.
+
+"Realms and religions ought not to be, but health should," said he,
+with English freedom of speech.
+
+Once more he demanded her blood. She would not give it to him, however,
+until he changed the sacrificial knife, and proposed opening a vein in
+the eye. Persons of rank, like learned men, are often ignorant of the
+commonest things: she thought the Doctor would open the vein. And as
+she thought so, he did it, with a hand trained by the couching-needle.
+
+Meanwhile, if (according to Pliny) a kiss on the eye is one on the
+soul, the opening of a vein in that organ is no joke; but one may,
+while he inflicts a wound, himself get one. The poor Court-Medicus
+must, with his swimming, friendly eye, from which only within a few
+days the tear of love has been dried away, boldly gaze into the sun
+pent up in an eye-socket, and, what is more, softly rest his finger on
+the warm face, and from the fountain of tears make bright blood spurt
+out.... One ought, before undertaking such an operation, to have a
+similar one performed on himself, for the sake of the cooling. But, in
+truth, fate had given him nothing this week but lancet-cuts into his
+heart's arteries. Let one, further, represent to himself how the whole
+female sex appeared to him like a magic, far-receded shape, which had
+once gleamed near to him in a dream, and as a paled moon by day, which
+he had worshipped in a bright night; and then will one have opened his
+good innocent heart to behold therein, beside a great ever-active
+sorrow, a thousand sympathetic wishes for the compassionated Princess.
+Despite her singular mixture of pride, liveliness, and refinement, he
+still thought he discovered a change in her, which he could explain
+partly by his to-day's assiduity and partly by his influence on the
+Prince, which had been thus far so favorable to her,--a change which
+would have given him greater courage, had he not insisted upon being
+threatened with special drafts upon his courage by the billet above the
+imperator of the compass-watch. At the former and first visit his
+courage was lamed, because he thought himself avoided, as the son of a
+father who seemed to fortify his influence by his care for natural
+children; for a man full of love beside one full of hatred is dumb and
+stupid.
+
+What put him most in heart to-day, next to the quarrels in which he was
+defeated (as the one about leeches, &c.), was the last and following,
+in which he conquered (one grows more courageous and prosperous when
+one contradicts a proud woman than when one flatters her): He saw a
+mask lying there; now, as he knew that in Italy ladies wore them in
+bed, as ours do gloves, using them as a sort of glove to the face, he
+straightly forbade her the mask, as being tinder to the inflammation of
+her eyes. It was no flattery when he said to her that the mask might
+take from her more than it gave. In short, he insisted upon it.--
+
+He was, perhaps, too tolerant towards the doubt which only a woman
+could make _endurable_ and _enduring_,--the doubt which one she mistook
+for the other, the Court-Physician or the favorite; for at last--though
+not without a fear of saying too much, which, with people of his fiery
+temperament, is a sign that the thing has already happened--he told
+her, what he had in the beginning kept back, that the sympathy
+(_empressement_) of the Prince had sent him to her; and he extolled the
+latter at his own expense, and so much the more, as he had nothing
+further of an extraordinary nature to adduce with regard to him, but
+only that he had--sent him to her.
+
+Then he went. With the Prince he bestowed on her as many
+_beatifications_ and as many _canonizations_ (two contrarieties on this
+earth) as decorum and his humor (two still greater contrarieties) would
+allow. Singular! she had, for all her fire, no humor. He knew January
+succumbed, not merely to the slanderer, but also to the flatterer. The
+crowned theatre-managers of the earth have determinations put into
+their hearts, and decrees into their mouths; they know what they mean
+and what they say two or three days later than their throne-prompter. A
+favorite is a Shakespeare and poet, who, from behind the persons he
+makes act and speak, never peeps or coughs out himself, but is a
+ventriloquist, and gives _his_ voice the sound of another's.
+
+When he visited his patient the next day, the eye-sockets were cooled
+down, though not the eyes. Agnola sat convalescent in a cabinet full of
+images of the saints. With the indisposition of her eyes had been taken
+away, at the same time, a source of conversation; and her pride blocked
+up the way at once to his sensibility and to his humor. Although he
+said to her a hundred times in his innermost heart, "Torment not
+thyself, proud soul; I am no favorite; I will not rob thee of anything,
+least of all of thy pride or another's love,--oh, I know what it is to
+win none,"--nevertheless he remained (in _his_ opinion) cold before
+her, and retired with the annoying prospect that his successful cure
+had cut off his return; for the other court visits were, after all, no
+confidential visits to the sick. Of the plaguy compass-watch he stood
+daily less and less in terror, except just when he was happier than
+usual.
+
+--Many people would sooner live without houses than without
+building-schemes; Victor, sooner without air to breathe than without
+castles in the air. He must always have on hand the lottery-chance and
+stocks of some plan or other for the future; and a woman was, in most
+cases, the partner in this grand-adventure trade. This time he was
+keenly bent upon the reconciliation of January and Agnola. He reasoned
+thus:--"It is easy on both sides. January will now always seek Agnola's
+society, though merely out of cunning, for the sake of getting with
+more decency into that of her future maid-of-honor, Clotilda, whom, in
+her condition of singleness, he can, according to his _vow_, still love
+with impunity. As he can neither withstand a long praise nor a long
+intercourse, this will imperceptibly accustom him to Agnola. She, who
+is now left alone on the side of the Minister Schleunes, will not
+reject the united regards of Victor and January," &c.... But whether
+only the beauty of the action, and not also the beauty of the Princess,
+incited him to this mediatorial office, that is what the Twenty-First
+Chapter cannot yet know; meanwhile, so far as I am concerned, let the
+following stand: his cold inner man, exhausted by bleeding, from which
+the harpsichord and the name of Clotilda and the awaking at morning
+still draw bloodless daggers, needs so much indeed the din of the world
+and everything that may benumb its wounds!
+
+With the design of such preliminaries to a peace, he excused his future
+disobedience to his father, who had counselled him against frequenting
+the house of Schleunes; for as the Princess always went there, it was
+the fittest neutral place for the peace-congress. Oh for only half
+an----
+
+
+                EXTRA-LEAF ON HOUSES FULL OF DAUGHTERS!
+
+The house of Schleunes was an open bookstore, whose works (the
+daughters) one could read there, but not carry home. Although the five
+other daughters stood in five private libraries as wives, and one,
+under the earth at Maienthal, was sleeping away the child's plays of
+life, there were, nevertheless, in this warehouse of daughters, three
+free copies left for sale to good friends. The Minister, at the
+drawings of the lottery of offices, loved to give his daughters as
+premiums for great winnings and prizes. To whom God gives an office, to
+him he gives, if not understanding, yet a wife. In a house rich in
+daughters, as in St. Peter's Church, there must be confession-pews for
+all nations, for all characters, for all faults, that the daughters may
+sit therein as mother-confessors, and absolve from everything, celibacy
+alone excepted. I have, as naturalist, often admired the wise
+arrangement of Nature for the propagation as well of daughters as of
+vegetables. Is it not a wise provision, I said to the natural historian
+Goetze, that Nature gives precisely to those maidens who need for their
+life a rich mineral fountain something _attaching_, by which they may
+fasten on to miserable nuptial finches, who shall carry them to fat
+places? Thus Linnæus[236] observes, as you know, that those kinds of
+seeds which only thrive in rich earth have little hooks on them, in
+order to hang the more easily on the cattle which carry them to the
+stable and manure-heap. Wonderfully does Nature scatter about by the
+wind--father and mother must make it--daughters and pine-seeds into the
+arable places of the forests. Who does not observe the final cause why
+many daughters receive from Nature certain charms in designated
+numbers, that some canon or other, a German Herr, a cardinal-deacon, an
+appanaged prince, or a mere country squire, may come along and take the
+aforesaid charmer, and, as groomsman or English bride's-father, hand
+her over, ready finished, to some blockhead or other, in a distant
+place, as a ready-made wife on sale? And do we find in the case of
+bilberries any less precaution on the part of Nature? Does not the same
+Linnæus observe, in the same treatise, that they are enveloped in a
+nutritious juice, that they may attract the fox to eat them, whereupon
+the knave--he cannot digest the berries--becomes, for all he knows, the
+sower of them?--
+
+Oh, my innermost spirit is more serious than you think. I am vexed with
+those parents who are traders in souls; I pity the daughters who are
+negro slaves. Ah! is it any wonder, then, if the daughters who were
+obliged to dance, laugh, talk, and sing at the West Indian market, in
+order to be carried home by the master of a plantation, if they, I say,
+are treated just as much like slaves as if they were sold and bought?
+Ye poor lambs!--and yet ye are quite as hard as your sheep mothers and
+fathers. What shall one do with his enthusiasm for your sex, when one
+travels through German cities, where every richest or most
+distinguished man, and though he were a distant relation of the Devil
+himself, can point with his finger to thirty houses, and say: "I don't
+know,--shall I pick out and marry one from the pearl-colored, or from
+the nut-colored, or perhaps from the steel-green house? The shops are
+all open for purchasers."--What, ye maidens! is, then your heart so
+little worth that you can cut it down, like old clothes, to suit any
+fashion, any breast? and is it, then, like a Chinese ball, now great,
+now tiny, in order to fit into the ball-form and wedding-ring case of a
+man's heart?--"It must indeed be so, unless one will continue to sit
+alone, like the Holy Virgin over yonder," is the reply of those to whom
+I make no reply, because I turn away from them with contempt, in order
+to say to the so-called Holy Virgin: "Forlorn, but patient one!
+Unappreciated and withered one! remember not the times when thou still
+didst hope for better ones than the present, and never repent the noble
+pride of thy heart! It is not always a duty to marry, but it is always
+a duty not to forgive one's self anything, never to be happy at the
+expense of honor, and not to avoid celibacy by infamy. Unadmired,
+solitary heroine! In thy last hour, when the whole of life and the
+former goods and scaffoldings of life, crushed into ruins, sink
+beforehand,--at that hour thou wilt look out over thy emptied life;
+thou wilt see there, it is true, no children, no husband, no wet eyes;
+but in the vast, void twilight a great, saintly form; angelically
+smiling, radiant, godlike, and soaring to the divine ones, will hover,
+and beckon to thee to ascend with her. Oh, ascend with her; that form
+is thy _virtue_."
+
+                        _End of the Extra-Leaf_.
+
+
+Some days after the Princess gave the Prince an _eye en médaillon_ with
+the fine conceit: she gave this _votive-tablet_ to the saint (this was
+so much the more _apropos_ as the Prince was named _Januarius_) who had
+sent her his wonder-worker, and who now received that which he had
+caused to be healed. January said to Victor, to whom he showed the eye,
+"She confounds St. Januarius with you, with St. Ottilia,"--who, as is
+well known, is the patroness of eyes.
+
+Victor was glad that Matthieu came to him to go with him to St. Luna;
+for the latter begged him, because this was done without him, to go
+with him to his mother's, "because to-day at the Princess's there was a
+great _souper_, but at his mother's not a soul,"--that is, hardly more
+than nine persons. Victor therefore--it mattered not to-day that the
+distinguished and interesting eye-sufferer was absent--gladly followed
+into Schleunes's Nuremberg _Exchange Library_ of daughters behind the
+tender Jonathan-Orestes-Mat, whom he, in fact, out of forbearance
+towards their mutual friend Flamin, treated now with more toleration.
+_Men_, like _ideas_, are associated together quite as often on the
+principle of _simultaneousness_ as on that of _similarity_; and as
+little can be inferred from the choice of _acquaintances_ as to the
+character of a youth, as in regard to that of a woman from her choice
+of a husband. Matthieu introduced him to his mother in the reading
+cabinet, just as she was hearing an English author read, with the
+words, "I bring you here a real live Englishman." Joachime was
+reading in a catalogue,--it was not a catalogue of books, but of
+stock-gillyflowers,--in order to select some gillyflowers for herself,
+not for the purpose of planting, but of imitating them--in silk. She
+hated flowers that grew. Her brother said, ironically, "She hated
+changeableness, even in a flower." For the truth was, she loved it even
+in lovers, and was quite different from April, which, like women, is in
+our climate far more steady than is pretended. In the cabinet there
+were also two fools, whom my correspondent does not so much as name to
+me, because he thinks they would be adequately designated and
+distinguished, if I should call the one the fragrant fool, and the
+other the fine one.
+
+Both fools were buzzing round the beauty. In fact, whenever I have
+wanted to study fools at great parties, I have always looked round
+regularly for a great beauty; they gather round such a one like
+wasps around a fruit-woman. And if I had no other reason--I have,
+however--for marrying the handsomest woman, I would do it for this
+reason, if for no other, that I might always have the queen-bee sitting
+in the hollow of my hand, after whom the whole foolish bee-swarm would
+come buzzing. I and my wife would then be like the fellows in Lisbon,
+who, having in their hands a pole of parrots strung together, and at
+their feet a leash of _monkeys_ skipping after them, trudge through the
+streets, and offer their crazy _personæ_ for sale.
+
+The fragrant fool, who was to-day on the _sunny side_ of Joachime, was
+reading to the mother; the fine one, who was on the _weather-side_,
+stood near Joachime, and seemed not to trouble himself about her
+_cooling of the temperature_. Victor stood there as transition from the
+torrid zone to the frigid, and represented the temperate; Joachime
+played three parts with one face. The fragrant fool shot, with his left
+hand, the swivel-gun of a silver _joujou_. This hanging seal of a fool
+he kept in motion, either, as the Greenlander does a block with his
+feet, for the sake of keeping himself warm,--or he did it, as the grand
+sultan for similar reasons must always be whittling with a jackknife,
+in order not to be always having somebody killed out of love,--or in
+order, as the stork always holds a stone in his claws, to have all the
+time an Ixion's-wheel in his hands, as a rowel on his heels,--or for
+the sake of health, in order to counteract the _globulus
+hystericus_[237] by the motion of an external one,--or as rosary
+bead,--or because he didn't know why.
+
+Each was satisfied with himself. When the mother begged our Englishman
+to read to her with his native accent, the _fine_ fool said, "The
+English, like certain sentiments, is easier to understand than to
+pronounce." That is to say, this fine sheep had universally the habit
+of being metaphorical. If a maiden said to him, "I cannot keep myself
+from feeling cold to-day," he made out of it coldness of the heart. One
+could not say, "It is cloudy, warm, the needle has pricked me," &c.,
+without his taking this as a ball-drawer, to extract his heart from the
+fire-arm of his breast, and exhibit it. It was impossible in his
+hearing not to be fine, and from your good-morning he twisted a
+_bon-mot_. Had he read the Old Testament, he would not have been able
+to admire sufficiently the fine turns that occur there. On the other
+hand, the _fragrant_ fool limited his whole wit to a lively face. He
+unfolded before you this bill of invoice and insurance-policy of a
+thousand bright conceits, and held it up to you, but nothing came. You
+could have sworn by the advertising-poster of wit in his fiery eye,
+"Now he is going to blaze out,"--but not in the least! He used the
+weapon of satire, as the grenadiers do hand-grenades, which they no
+longer throw, but only wear imitated on their caps.
+
+When the fine one had said his erotic _bon-mot_, Joachime looked at our
+hero, and said, with an ironical glance at the fine one, "_J'aime les
+sages à la folie_."
+
+The pride of the fragrant one in his to-day's superiority, and the
+apparent indifference of the fine fool to his own neglect, proved that
+neither was often in to-day's ease, and that Joachime coquetted in a
+peculiar style. She always made fun of us stately male persons, when
+two were with her at once,--of one alone less so; her eyes left it to
+our self-love to ascribe the fire in them more to love than to wit; she
+seemed to blab out what came into her head, but many things seemed not
+to come into her head; she was full of contradictions and follies, but
+her _intentions_ and her inclination nevertheless remained doubtful to
+every one; her answers were quick, but her questions still quicker.
+To-day, in the presence of the three gentlemen,--at other times she did
+it in the presence of the whole _bureau d'esprit_,--she stepped up to
+the looking-glass, took out her paint-box, and retouched the gay
+box-piece of her cheeks. One could not possibly think how she would
+look if she were embarrassed or ashamed.
+
+The virtue of many a lady is a thunder-house, which the electric spark
+of love shatters to pieces, and which they put together again for new
+experiments; to our hero, spoiled by the highest female perfection, it
+appeared as if Joachime must be classed among those thunder-houses.
+Coquetry is always answered with coquetry. Either this latter it was,
+or too feeble a respect for Joachime, which led Victor to make the two
+adorers ridiculous in the eyes of the goddess. His victory was as easy
+as it was great; he encamped on the foe's position,--in other words,
+Joachime took an increased liking to him. For women cannot bear him
+who, before their eyes, succumbs to another sex than their own. They
+_love_ everything that they _admire_; and one would not have made such
+satirical explanations of their predilection for physical courage, if
+one had considered that they feel this predilection for everything that
+is distinguished,--for men distinguished by wealth, renown, learning.
+The dry and wrinkled Voltaire had so much fame and wit, that few
+Parisian hearts would have rejected his satirical one. Add to this,
+that my hero expressed his regard for the whole sex with a warmth which
+the individual appropriated to herself; then, too, his favorite
+universal-love, furthermore his eye swimming in sorrow over a lost
+heart, and finally his infectious human tenderness, secured him an
+attention from Joachime which excited his to the degree, that he
+proposed to himself the next time to investigate what it might
+signify.----
+
+The next time soon came. So soon as the advent of the Princess was
+predicted by the Apothecary,--for _he_ was for the little future of the
+court his witch of Endor and of Cumæ, and his Delphic cave,--he went
+thither; for he did not drive. "So long as there is still a shoe-black
+and a pavement," said he, "I do not drive. But as to the more
+distinguished gentry, I wonder that they even travel on foot from one
+wing of the palace to the other. Could not one, just as they have a
+penny-post for a city, introduce a conveyance for the interior of the
+palace? Might not every chair be a sedan-chair, if a lady were less
+afraid of an Alpine tour from one apartment to another? And various
+circumnavigatresses of the world would even venture to make a
+pleasure-tour through a large garden in a close litter."--Victor's own
+journey lay straight through one,--namely, that of Schleunes. It was
+too bright and pleasant as yet to let him screw himself like a
+sewing-cushion to the card-table. He saw in the garden a gay little
+party strolling about, and Joachime among them. He joined them.
+Joachime expressed an artist's pleasure at the groupings of the clouds,
+and it was becoming to her beautiful eyes when she lifted them in that
+direction. As they had nothing clever to say, they sought to do
+something clever, so soon as they came to the _carrousel_.[238] They
+seated themselves in it, and caused it to be set agoing. Many of the
+ladies had absolutely not the courage to climb this potter's-wheel;
+some ventured into the seats; only Joachime, who was full as daring as
+she was timid, mounted the wooden tourney-steed, and took the lance in
+hand, to spear away the ring, with a grace which was worthy of finer
+rings. But in order not to expose herself to being thrown by the
+whirling Rosinante, Joachime had set my hero beside her as a banister,
+that she might hold on to him in time of need. The revolution of the
+axle grew more rapid, and her fear greater; she clung to him more and
+more firmly, and he clasped her more firmly in order to anticipate her
+effort. Victor, who understood very well the legerdemain and hocuspocus
+of women, easily saw through Joachime's Wiegleb's-natural-magic and
+"Trunkus Plempsum Schallalei";[239] besides, the reciprocal pressure
+had passed to and fro so rapidly, that one could not tell whether it
+had an originator or an originatress....
+
+As they are now all within doors, and I stand alone in the garden by
+the horse-mill, I will reflect ingeniously on the subject, and remark
+that great people, like women and the French and the Greeks, are
+great--children. All great philosophers are the same, and, when they
+have almost destroyed themselves with thinking, revive themselves by
+child's fooleries, as, e. g., Malebranche did; even so do great people
+refresh themselves for their more serious, noble diversions by true
+childish ones; hence the hobby-horse chivalry, the swing, the
+card-houses (in Hamilton's _mémoires_), the cutting out of pictures,
+the _joujou_. With this passion for amusing themselves, they are in
+part infected by the custom of amusing their superiors, because the
+latter resemble the ancient gods, who, according to Moritz, were
+appeased, not by atonement, but by joyous festivals.
+
+As he was acquainted with the whole theatre-company of the Minister,
+and, secondly, as he was no longer a lover,--for such a one has a
+thousand eyes for _one_ person, and a thousand eyelids for the
+rest,--he was not embarrassed at the Minister's, but actually enjoyed
+himself. For he had, to be sure, his plan to carry through there; and a
+plot makes a life entertaining, whether one _reads_ or _executes_ it.
+
+He was successful to-day in having a tolerably long talk with the
+Princess, and, to be sure, not about the Prince,--she avoided that
+subject,--but about her trouble of the eyes. That was all. He felt it
+was easier to play off an exaggerated regard than to express a real.
+The apprehension of appearing false _makes_ one appear so. Hence a
+sincere man has the look, with a suspicious one, of being half false.
+Meanwhile, with Agnola, who, in spite of her temperament, was
+coy,--hence a peculiar, lowered tone reigned in her presence at
+Schleunes's,--every step sufficed which he did not take backward.
+
+But toward the sprightly Joachime he took half a step forward. Not so
+much she, as the house, seemed to him to be coquettish; and the
+daughters therein--they constitute the house--he found to resemble the
+old Litones,[240] or people of the Saxons, who were one third free and
+two thirds serf, and who therefore could mortgage a third of their
+estate. Each had still a third, a ninth, a segment, of her heart left
+to her own free disposal. In fact, whoso has ever seen codfishing can
+learn the thing here from metaphor,--the three daughters hold long
+fishing-rods over the water (father and mother splash, and drive the
+codfish along), and have their hooks baited with state-uniforms
+or their own faces,--with hearts,--with whole men (as luring
+rivals),--with hearts which have already been once taken out of the
+stomach of another captured codfish;--from this, I say, one can see in
+some sort how they catch the other cod in the sea, precisely as they do
+the stock-fish on land,--namely, besides what has been mentioned (now
+let one read back again), with bits of red rag, with glass-pearls, with
+birds' hearts, with salted herrings and bleeding fishes, with little
+cods themselves, with fishes which one has taken out, half digested,
+from stock-fish formerly caught.----Victor thought to himself,
+"Joachime may be only lively or coquettish for all me; I can easily
+skip over marten-traps which I can see set right before my nose." Well,
+run, Victor; the _visible_ steel shall lead thee precisely upon that
+which is _concealed_. One may observe in the same person coquetry
+towards every other, and yet overlook it toward himself, as the fair
+one believes the flatterer whom she sets down as a consummate flatterer
+of all others.--He observed that Joachime had somewhat oftenish looked
+up at the new ceiling this evening, and he could not rightly tell why
+it pleased her. At last he saw that she was only pleased with herself,
+and that raising her eyes was more becoming to them than looking down.
+He undertook presumptuously to investigate this, and said to her, "It
+is a pity the painter of the Vatican had not made it, that you might
+look up at it oftener."--"Oh," said she, in a tone of levity, "I never
+would look up with others; I do not love admiration." By and by she
+said, "Men dissemble, when they wish to, better than we; but I tell you
+just as few truths as I hear from you." She confessed outright that
+coquetry was the best remedy against love; and with the observation
+that his frankness pleased her, but hers must please him too, she ended
+the visit and the Post-Day.
+
+
+
+
+                           22. DOG-POST-DAY.
+
+   Gun-Foundery of Love; e. g. Printed Gloves, Quarrels, Dwarf-Flasks,
+      and Stabs.--A Title from the Digests of Love.--Marie.--Court-Day.--
+      Giulia's dying Epistle.
+
+
+The reader will be vexed with this Dog-Post-Day; I, for my part, have
+already been vexed about it. My hero is evidently becoming entangled in
+the meshes of two female trains, and even in the bonds of the princely
+friendship... Nothing more is wanting than that Clotilda should
+actually be joined to the hurly-burly.----And something of this kind it
+becomes necessary for a mining-superintendent, an islander, to
+communicate confidentially to the people on the mainland.
+
+Besides, it must be done chronologically. I will dissect this
+Dog-Post-Day, which reaches from November to December, into weeks.
+Thereby more order will be observed. For I understand the Germans. They
+want, like the metaphysician, to know everything from the beginning
+onward, very exactly, in royal octavo, without excessive brevity, and
+with some _citata_. They furnish an epigram with a preface, and a
+love-madrigal with a table of contents; they determine the zephyr by
+compass and the heart of a maiden by conic sections; they mark
+everything, like merchants, in black-letter, and prove everything, like
+jurists; their cerebral membranes are living parchments, their legs
+private surveyors'-poles and pedometers; they cut up the veil
+of the Nine Muses, and apply to the hearts of these damsels
+turners'-compasses, and insert gauging-rods in their heads; poor Clio
+(the muse of history) looks, for all the world, like the Consistorial
+Counsellor Büsching, who trudges along slowly, bent up under a land
+freight of surveyors'-chains, clocks to calculate _thirds_, and
+Harrison's longitude-watches, and interleaved writing-almanacs, so that
+I specially weep for the poor Büsching as often as I see him striding
+along, since all Germany, (from which I should have expected something
+different,)--every magistrate, every stupid justice of the peace, (only
+we of Scheerau have never saddled him,)--has loaded down the good
+topographical carrier and Christopher (cross-bearer), like a statue
+hung with pledges, from knee to nostril, (so that the good man is
+hardly to be seen, and I wonder how he stays on his feet,)--has
+palisaded, I say, and built him in with all sorts of cursed devil's
+whisks, with village inventories, with advertising sheets, with
+heraldic works, with books of ground-plats and perspective plans of
+pigsties.
+
+They have even--that I may only _relate_ an example out of my own
+history of the German statistic stupidity, although in the very
+doing of it I _give one_--infected Jean Paul. Is it not an old
+story that he has approximately assigned in degrees, by means of a
+Saussure's cyanometer,[241] the blueness of the fairest eyes into
+which an _amoroso_ ever looked, and inspected the fairest drops that
+fell from them during the measurement, correctly enough, with a
+dew-measurer?--And has not his attempt to catch and prove female sighs
+by a Stegmann's measurer of the purity of the atmosphere found more
+than too many imitators among us?----
+
+
+                WEEK OF THE 22D POST-TRINITATIS, OR FROM
+                      NOV. 3d to 11th (EXCLUSIVE).
+
+Almost the whole of this week he sat out at the Minister's. Many
+people, when they have been only four times in a house, come again
+daily, like the quotidian fever,--in the beginning, like the spring
+sun, every day earlier; afterward, like the autumn sun, every day
+later. He saw, indeed, that he could not contribute anything at this
+court-and-ministerial party, either a mystery, or property, or a heart,
+because it would resemble honest courts of justice, which--just as
+the monks call their property a deposit, and say nothing belongs to
+them--inversely promote every deposit into a piece of property, and say
+all belongs to them. But he made no account of that. "I come indeed
+only for fun," thought he, "and no harm can be done to me."----
+
+The Minister, whom he met only over the table, had all the civility
+towards him which can be united with a face full of persiflage, and
+with a class of society in whose eyes all the world is divided into
+spies and thieves; but Sebastian perceived, nevertheless, that
+he looked upon him as a smatterer in medicine and the serious
+sciences,--as if they were not all serious,--and as an adept merely in
+wit and in the liberal arts. He was, however, too proud to turn to him
+any other than the empty new-moon-side, and concealed from him all that
+might convert him. Consequently, Victor must needs, in the eyes of the
+stupidest government-officer who had seen it, have deprived himself of
+all respect by the fact that, when the Minister started an interesting
+conversation with his brother, the Regency-President, about imposts,
+alliances, or the exchequer, he either did not attend, or ran off, or
+looked up the women.----Then, too, he loved in the Prince only the man;
+the Minister loved only the Prince. Victor could himself, when with
+January, deliver discourses on the advantages of republics, and the
+latter would often, in his enthusiasm, (if the supreme courts and his
+stomach had allowed it,) gladly have raised Flachsenfingen to a free
+state, and himself to the President of Congress therein. But the
+Minister hated all this with a mortal hatred, and fastened on all
+political free-thinkers--on a Rousseau, on all Girondists, all
+Feuillants, all Republicans, and all philosophers--the name of
+_Jacobin_, as the Turks call all foreigners, Britons, Germans,
+Frenchmen, etc., _Franks_. Meanwhile this was a reason why Victor now
+took a greater liking to Mat, who thought better on this subject, and
+why he fled from the father to the daughter.
+
+This week he got into Joachime's good graces. She gave to the fine and
+fragrant duo of fools, as we do to _virtue_, only the second prize, and
+to my hero, as we do to _inclination_, the prize-medal. But as he
+respected, at most, merely a certain sentimentalism in friendship and
+in love, he could, he thought, have ridden through the moon with this
+waggish girl, without sighing _for_ her (though he might, indeed,
+_over_ her). But these jolly ones, my Bastian, have seen the old Harry;
+for whenever they change to anything else, one changes with them to the
+same thing. She told him she wanted to give _pleasure_, like a Lutheran
+holy picture, but she would not be _adored_, like a Catholic one. She
+prepossessed him most by the gift peculiar to her sex, of understanding
+tender allusions,--women are so easy at guessing the meaning of others,
+because they always oblige others to guess their meaning, and
+_complete_ and _conceal_ each _half_ with equal success. But among her
+attractions I reckon also her constraint before the Princess, and
+before those who listened with their--eyes. For the rest, his heart,
+which Clotilda had rejected, was now in the situation of children who
+have made a bet that they will receive blows upon their hands without
+crying, and who still continue to smile when the tears already flow.
+
+
+              WEEK OF THE 23d POST-TRINITATIS, OR 46th OF
+                             THE YEAR 179-.
+
+Now he is there even in the forenoon. It is worthy of notice, that
+on St. Martin's day he scraped her powdered forehead with the
+powder-knife, and that he applied to her for some court offices in
+connection with the toilet. "I can be your rouge-box bearer, as the
+Great Mogul has tobacco-pipe and betel-bearers, or else your _cravatier
+ordinaire_, or your _sommier_ (i. e. prayer-cushion-bearer).--I would,
+if you did not kneel yourself on the cushion, myself do it before
+you.----I knew in Hanover a handsome Englishman who had his left knee
+stuffed and padded, because he did not know whom he should to-day have
+to adore, and how long."
+
+It is something quite as important, that on St. Jonas's day he forced
+her to accept a pair of fine gloves, on which a very simple face was
+painted. "It was his own," he said; "she should have the face only by
+night, in bed, in, or on, her hand, that it might look as if he kissed
+her hand through the whole November night."
+
+I go on with my pragmatic extracts from this siege-journal, and find
+recorded on Leopold's day that, as early as in the forenoon, Joachime
+said she would have her parrot, if she kept a master of languages for
+him, repeat nothing out of the whole dictionary except the word
+_perfide_! "Every lover," said she, "should keep a poll for himself,
+which should incessantly cry out to him, _perfide_!"--"The ladies,"
+said my hero, "are alone to blame: they want to be loved too long;
+often whole weeks, whole months. The like of that is beyond our powers.
+Have not the Jesuits made even love to God periodical? Scotus limits it
+to Sunday, others to the festival days.--Coninch says, it is enough if
+one loves Him once every four years.--Henriquez adds a year more to
+it.--Suarez says, it is enough if it is only done before one's
+death.----To many ladies the intermediate times have hitherto fallen;
+but the hours of the day, the seasons of the year, the days of
+betrothal, of burial, form just as many different sects among the
+Jesuits of Love."--Joachime made a beginning of putting on an angry
+look. The court-physician loved nothing better with a fair one than a
+quarrel, and added: "_C'est à force de se faire haïr qu'elles se font
+aimer--c'est aimer que de bouder--ah, que je vous prie de vous
+fâcher!_"--His humor had carried him beyond the mark.--Joachime had
+reason enough to fulfil his prayer for her wrath.--He wanted to
+continue the quarrel in order to settle it, but as there are cases
+where the _aggravation_ of an offence brings about forgiveness quite as
+little as the _taking of it back_ step by step, he did wisely in coming
+away.
+
+He wondered that he should think of her all day long. The feeling of
+having done her wrong brought her face with a suffering expression
+before his softened soul, and all her features were at once ennobled.
+Tacitus says, we hate another when we have offended him; but good men
+often love another merely on that account.
+
+The day following, Ottomar's day,--_Ottomar_! great name, which makes
+the long funeral procession of a great past sweep by all at once before
+me in the dark,--he found her serious, neither seeking nor shunning
+him. The two fools remained in her eyes the two fools, and gained
+nothing in any way. As, therefore, he clearly perceived that out of a
+transient resentment there had grown true repentance for her previous
+openness,--of which he seemed to have made too free a use and too
+selfish an interpretation,--it was now his duty to do in earnest that
+which he had hitherto done in joke, namely, to seek her and get her to
+be reconciled.
+
+But she stood all the time by the Princess, and nothing was done.
+
+I have not said it myself, because I knew the reader would see
+it without me,--that my hero thinks Joachime regards him as the
+image-worshipper of her charms, and as the moon-man, or satellite
+attracted by her. My hero has, therefore, long since made up his mind
+to leave her in this error. As to removing such an error,--for _that_ a
+man or a woman seldom has strength enough; but Victor had, besides,
+several reasons for indulging her with faith in his love (that is,
+himself, also, with faith in hers). In the first place, he wanted to
+conceal the reason of his coming; secondly, he knew that in the great
+world, and among the Joachimes, a lover is sought for only as third man
+in the game,--with them there is no dying of love, one does not even
+live on it; thirdly, he reserved for himself in all cases the
+sheet-anchor of making earnest out of jest; "when the knife is at my
+throat," thought he, "then I will set myself down and fall truly in
+love with her, and then all will be well"; fourthly, a coquette makes a
+_coquet_.[242] ... Here I began already, as is well known, to be vexed
+about the 22d Post-Day, although I know as well as anybody why all
+mankind, even the most sincere, even the male kind, incline to little
+intrigues towards their beloved; that is to say, not merely because
+they are little and _reciprocated_, but because one thinks by his
+intrigues to give more than he steals. Only the highest and noblest
+love is without real trickery.
+
+
+              WEEKS OF THE 24th AND 25th POST-TRINITATIS.
+
+On Sunday there was a ball. "Very naturally," said he, "she will not
+look on me. In ball-dress the fair sex are more implacable than in
+morning dress." Hardly had she seen him when she came to meet him,
+like an agitated heaven, with her fixed stars of brilliants and her
+pearl-planets, and in this splendor begged of him the forgiveness of
+her freak. She had at first made believe angry, she said, then had
+actually become so; and not until the next day had seen that she did
+wrong to appear so and had a right to be so. This prayer for
+forgiveness made our Medicus more humble than was necessary. She begged
+him sportively to beg her pardon, and made him acquainted with her
+percussion-gold of sudden resentment.
+
+For a space of two days this Westphalian peace was kept.
+
+But one quarrel with a maiden, like one fool, makes ten; and
+unfortunately one only likes the angry one so much the better (at
+least, better than the indifferent), just as people run most after
+_those_ Methodist preachers who damn them the most roundly. Joachime
+grew daily more susceptible of anger,--which he ascribed to an
+increasing love,--but so did he, too. Let them have spent the whole
+visit in the finest imperial and domestic peace, at the leave-taking
+all was put upon a war-footing again, ambassadors and furloughed ones
+(if I may be allowed these poetical expressions) recalled. Then with
+the angry sediments in his heart he withdrew, and could hardly wait for
+the moment of the next interview,--i. e. of his or her justification.
+Thus did they spend their hours in the writing of peace-instruments and
+manifestoes. The matter of dispute was as singular as the quarrel
+itself: it concerned their demands of friendship; each party proved
+that the other was the faulty one, and demanded too much. What most
+enraged our Medicus was, that she allowed the fine and the fragrant
+fools to kiss her hand, which she forbade him to do, and in truth
+without any reasons for the decision. "If she would only lie to me, and
+say, such or such is the reason,--that at least would be something,"
+said he; but she did him not the pleasure. To my sex, refusal without
+reasons, even conjecturable ones, is a pit of brimstone, a threefold
+death; upon Joachime, reasons and cabinet-sermons had equal influence.
+
+
+                        EXTRA-LEAF ON THE ABOVE.
+
+I have a hundred times, with my legal burden of proof on my back,
+thought of women who are able, with a certain effort, to act as well as
+to believe without any reasons. For surely, in the end, everybody must
+(according to all philosophers) reconcile himself to actions and
+opinions for which reasons are entirely wanting; for, since every
+reason appeals to a new one, and this again rests upon one which refers
+us to one, which again must have its own reason, it follows that
+(unless we mean to be forever going and seeking) we must finally arrive
+at one which we accept without any reason whatever. Only the scholar
+fails in this, that precisely the most important truths--the highest
+principles of morals, of metaphysics, &c.--are the ones which he
+believes without reasons, and which, in his agony,--thinking to help
+himself out thereby,--he names necessary truths. Woman, on the
+contrary, makes lesser truths--e. g. there must be drives, invitations,
+washing to-morrow, &c.--the necessary truths, which must be accepted
+without the insurance and reinsurance of reasons;--and just this it is
+which gives her such an appearance of soundness. For them it is easy to
+distinguish themselves from the philosopher, who thinks, and into whose
+eyes the sun of truth flames so horizontally that he cannot see, for
+it, either road or landscape. The philosopher is obliged, in the
+weightiest actions,--the moral,--to be his own lawgiver and law-keeper,
+without having the reasons therefor given him by his conscience. With a
+woman, every inclination is a little conscience, and hates
+_Heteronomies_,[243] and beyond that pronounces no reasons, just as the
+great conscience does. And it is precisely this gift, of acting more
+from private sovereignty than from reasons, which makes women so very
+suitable for men; for the latter would rather give them ten commands
+than three reasons.
+
+                 _End of the Extra-Leaf on the above_.
+
+
+What was full as bad was, that Joachime at last, only for the sake of
+removing his documentary piles of complaints and imperial grievances,
+allowed him her fingers, without giving him the least reason for it. He
+could, therefore, show no title of possession, and, in case of need,
+would have had no one who could protect him therein.
+
+There is, however, a well-grounded rule of right or Brocardicon[244]
+for men: that everything grows firmer with women, when one builds upon
+it, and that a little stolen favor legitimately belongs to us, so soon
+as we sue for a greater. This rule of right bases itself upon the fact
+that maidens always abate with us, as one does to Jews in trade, the
+half, and give only a couple of fingers when we want the hand. But if
+one has the fingers, then arises, out of the Institutions, a new title,
+which adjudicates to us the hand: the hand gives a right to the arm,
+and the arm to everything that is appended to it, as _accessorium_.
+Thus must these things be managed, if right is to remain right. There
+will, in fact, have to be a little manual written by me, or some other
+honest man, wherein one shall expound and elucidate to the female sex
+with the torch of legal learning the _modos_ (or ways) _acquirendi_ (of
+winning) them. Otherwise many modi may go out of use. Thus, e. g.,
+according to civil law, I am rightful proprietor of a movable thing, if
+it was stolen thirty years ago (in fact, it should be further back, and
+I should not be made to suffer for it, that one began the stealing
+later); so, too, by prescription of thirty minutes (the time is
+relative) everything belonging to a fair one lawfully falls to me,
+which (of a movable nature--and everything about her is movable) I may
+have purloined from her, and therefore one cannot begin soon enough to
+steal, because before the theft the prescription cannot begin to take
+effect.
+
+Specification is a good modus. Only one must be, like me, a
+Proculian,[245] and believe that a strange article belongs to him who
+has imparted to it a different form; e. g. to me, the hand which I have
+put into another shape by pressure.
+
+The late Siegwart said: _Confusio_ (mingling of tears) is my modus. But
+_commixtio_ (mixture of dry articles, e. g. the fingers, the hair) is
+now with almost all of us the _modus acquirendi_.
+
+I was going once to treat the whole thing according to the doctrine of
+the _Servitudes_,[246] where a woman has a thousand things to suffer
+(though all these servitudes are entirely extinguished by the
+consolidation[247] of marriage); but I do not myself any longer rightly
+retain the doctrine of the Servitudes, and would much rather examine
+any one in them than be examined myself.----
+
+I return to the Medicus. Since, then, he knew that a kissed hand is a
+warrant to the cheeks,--but the cheeks the sacrificial tables of the
+lips,--these of the eyes,--the eyes of the neck;--accordingly he would
+have proceeded exactly according to his text-book. But with Joachime,
+as with all antipodes of coquettes, _no favor paved the way for
+another, not even the great one for the small one_; you passed from one
+antechamber to another,--and what said my hero to this? Nothing but
+"Thank God that for once there is one better than she seemed, who,
+under the appearance of being our plaything, plays with us, and makes
+her coquetry the veil of virtue!"
+
+He felt now, as often as her name was mentioned, a soft warmth breathe
+through his bosom.
+
+
+                FROM THE END OF THE ECCLESIASTICAL YEAR
+              (DEC. 1) TO THE END OF THE CIVIL (DEC. 31).
+
+Flamin, whose patriotic flames found no air in the session-chamber, and
+stifled himself first, grew shyer and wilder every day. It was
+something new to him, that it took whole boards and commissions to do
+what one person might have done,--that the limbs of the state (as is
+also the case, indeed, with the limbs of the body) are moved by the
+_short arm_ of the lever, so as to do less with greater power, and a
+board, particularly, resembles the body, which, according to
+Borellus,[248] spends 2,900 times as much strength on a leap as the
+load which it has to lift requires. He hated all great people, and
+never went to see any: the page Mat did not even get visits from him.
+My Sebastian made his visits to _him_ seldomer, because his leisure and
+his calms of dissipation fell exactly upon Flamin's working hours. This
+separation, and the eternal sitting at Schleunes's,--which Flamin, from
+not being acquainted with Joachime's influence, was obliged at all
+events to ascribe to Clotilda's, for future visits to whom Victor must
+be creating a pretext by his present ones,--and even the Prince's favor
+towards the latter, which in Flamin's eyes could not be any result of
+his spirit of freedom and his sincerity;--all this drew the intertwined
+bonds of their friendship, which had made life to them hitherto a
+four-handed piece of music, further and further asunder; the faults and
+the moral dust which Victor could once brush off from his darling he
+hardly dared to blow off; they behaved towards each other more
+delicately and attentively. But my Victor, to whose heart Fate applied
+so many tongues of vampyres, and who was compelled to shut up in _one_
+breast the bitterness of lost love and the woe of failing friendship,
+was made by it all--really merry. O, there is a certain gayety of
+stagnation and grief, which is a sign of the soul's exhaustion, a smile
+like that on men who die of wounds in the diaphragm, or that on the
+shrivelled, drawn-back lips of mummies! Victor plunged into the stream
+of amusements, in order, under it, not to hear his own sighs. But
+often, to be sure, when he had all day long been sprinkling over ruined
+follies comic salt, which full as often bites the hand of the sower and
+makes it ache, and when he had not been able all day long to refresh
+himself with any eye, to which he would have dared to show a tear in
+his own,--when, thus weary of the present, indifferent to the future,
+wounded by the past, he had just passed by the last fool, the
+Apothecary, and when from his bow-window he looked out into the
+night hanging full of worlds, and into the tranquillizing moon, and
+upon the eastern clouds over St. Luna,--then were his swollen heart
+and his swollen eyeball sure to burst, and the tears which night
+concealed to stream down from his balcony on the hard pavement. "O,
+only _one_ soul," cried his innermost being with all the tones of
+melancholy,--"give but _one_ soul, thou eternal, loving, creative
+nature, to this poor, languishing heart, which seems so hard and is so
+soft, which seems so joyous and yet is so sad, seems so cold and yet is
+so warm!"
+
+It was well that, on such an evening, no chamberlain, no man of the
+world, stood in the balcony, just as poor Marie--on whom her former
+life has been precipitated like a crushing avalanche--came to desire
+his breakfast-orders; for he would get up, without wiping away a drop,
+and advance kindly to meet her, and grasp her soft, but red and
+hard-worked hand, which from fear she did not draw back,--although from
+fear she did turn away her face, hardened into stone against hope,--and
+say, as he softly stroked her eyebrows horizontally, with a voice
+rising from a heart full of the deepest emotion, "Thou poor Marie, tell
+me--I am sure thou hast little comfort--is it not so? There seldom
+comes any longer into thy gentle eyes anything that they love to see,
+unless it is thy own tears? Dear girl, why hast thou no courage before
+me? why dost thou not tell me thy woe? Thou good, tortured heart,--I
+will speak for thee, act for thee: tell me what weighs on thee, and if
+ever of an evening thy heart is too heavy, and thou mayest not venture
+to weep down below, then come up to me ... look at me now frankly ...
+truly I will shed tears with thee, let them say what they will and be
+hanged." Although she held it to be uncourteous to weep before so
+distinguished a gentleman, nevertheless, it was impossible for her, by
+a forcible bending away of her face, to thrust aside all the tears
+which his voice, full of love, drew in rivers from her eyes.... Take it
+not ill of his over-boiling soul, that he then pressed his hot mouth to
+her cold, despised, and unresistingly trembling lips, and said to her:
+"Oh, why are we mortals so unhappy, when we are too soft-hearted?"--In
+his chamber she seemed to take all as jest,--but all night long she
+heard the echo of the humane man;--even as jest, so much love would
+have been a comfort to her; then her past flowers once more
+crystallized in the window-frost of her present wintry-time; then she
+felt as if she were to-day, for the first time, unhappy.--In the
+morning she said nothing to any one, and towards Sebastian she was
+merely more devoted, but not more courageous; only, at times, she would
+concur with the dispenser down below, when he praised him, and say, but
+without further explanation, "One should cut up one's own heart into
+little bits, and sacrifice it for the English gentleman."
+
+Poor Marie! my own innermost heart repeats after the Doctor, and adds
+besides: Perhaps at this very moment, just such an unhappy woman, just
+such an unhappy man, is reading me. And I feel as if; now that I have
+struck the funeral bells of their past sad hours, I must also write
+them a word of consolation. But for one who has to be ever striding
+across new gaping ice-chasms of life, I know no resource but my own:
+the moment things grow bad, fling all _possible hopes_ to the Devil,
+and with utter renunciation fall back upon thyself, and ask, How now,
+if even the worst should come, what then? Never reconcile thy fancy to
+the _next_ misfortune, but to the greatest. Nothing relaxes one's
+spirits more than the alternation of warm hopes with cold anguish. If
+this method is too heroic for thee, then seek for thy tears an eye that
+shall imitate them, and a voice that shall ask thee why thou art thus.
+And reflect: the echo of the next life, the voice of our modest,
+fairer, holier soul, is audible only in a sorrow-darkened bosom, as the
+nightingales warble when one veils their cage.
+
+Often did Sebastian worry himself about this, that he could here exert
+so little his noble powers in behalf of humanity; that his dreams of
+preventing evil and accomplishing good through the Prince remained
+fever-dreams, because, e. g., even the best men at the helm of the
+state filled offices entirely according to circumstances and
+recommendations merely, and held offices, whether those of others or
+their own, never as obligations, but as mining-curacies. He was
+troubled about his uselessness; but he consoled himself with its
+necessity: "in a year, when my father comes, I set myself free and rise
+to something better," and his conscience added, that his own personal
+uselessness was serviceable to the virtue of his father, and that it
+was better to be, in a wheel, with all one's fitness for a pendulum, a
+tooth, without which the machinery would stop, than to be the pendulum
+of a toothless wheel.
+
+In such cases he always asked himself afresh: "Is Joachime, perhaps,
+like me, better, tenderer, less coquettish than she seems? and why wilt
+thou condemn her on the strength of an outward appearance, which is, to
+be sure, the same as thine own?" Her conduct seldom confirmed these
+favorable suppositions, nay, it often absolutely refuted them;
+nevertheless, he went on to expose himself to new refutations and to
+desire confirmation still. The necessity of loving drives one to
+greater follies than love itself; every week Victor let himself abate
+one perfection more from the female ideal, for which, as for the
+unknown god, he had already for years had the altar set up in his
+brain. During this haggling the whole of December would have slipped
+away, had it not been for the first day of Christmas.
+
+On that day, when he saw through every window laughing faces and
+gardens of Hesperides, he too would fain be joyful, and flew amidst the
+church-chorals to Joachime's toilet-chamber, in order there to make
+himself a Christmas pleasure. He had brought her for a present, he
+said, a bottle-case of liqueurs, a whole cellar of Rataffia, because he
+knew how ladies drank. When, at last, he drew his gantry full of
+bottles out of his--pocket: it was a miserable little box full
+of cotton-wool, in which stood imbedded neat little bottles of
+sweet-smelling waters, almost as long as wrens'-eggs. What is neat
+always pleases girls--as well as what is splendid. He delivered a long
+discourse to Joachime upon the temperance of her sex, who ate as little
+as humming-birds and drank as little as eagles: with a few show-dishes
+and a smelling-bottle he would feast an army of the female sex five
+thousand men strong, and there should still be something left. The
+physicians observed that they who had borne hunger longest had been
+women,--even in the middle classes the whole bee-flora on which these
+saints lived consisted of a colored ribbon, which they wore as sash or
+scarf, by way of a nourishing poultice and portable soup, and to which
+they attached nothing further, except at most a lover. Joachime, during
+the eulogy, drew out a bottle, because she thought it wax. Victor, by
+way of refuting her--or for some other reason--pressed it tightly
+into her hand, and fortunately crushed it. A mining-superintendent
+of my disposition would hardly introduce the crushing of a bottle,
+not big enough to cover one of Eymann's cucumbers with, into his
+Dog-Post-Days,--because he loves to serve up things of importance,--did
+not the bottle itself acquire an importance from the fact that it cut
+the softest hand upon which the hardest jewel ever yet threw lustre,
+till it ran blood. The Doctor was startled,--the patient smiled,--he
+kissed the wound, and these three drops fell like Jason's blood, or
+like a blood rectified by an alchemist, as three sparks into his
+inflammable veins, and the blood-coal of love assumed three glowing
+points;--nay, a little more, and he would have obeyed her, when she
+playfully commanded him (in order to spare him a greater embarrassment
+than he had) to revive the antiquated fashion of the Parisians, of
+writing to ladies with rose-colored ink, and here on the spot to
+despatch three lines to her in her own blood. Thus much is, at least,
+certain, that he told her he wished he were the Devil. To the
+last-named personage, as is well known, the warranty-deed or rather
+partition-treaty of the soul is despatched with the blood of the
+proprietor as fist-[249]pledge and consideration. Blood is the seed of
+the Church, the Catholic Church says; and here we are speaking of
+nothing less than the _temple_ of the fair.
+
+So it was--and so it stood--when the Court of the Princess was
+announced for to-day. This was, in the first place, plaguily awkward
+for him, because this evening was spoiled; and, secondly, it was
+agreeable to him, because Joachime was obliged to-day to put away the
+hat which he and she so loved. Since, as is customary, ladies had the
+robes and frisures prescribed to them by the Princess, in which they
+must celebrate in her presence the court-day, i. e. the incendiary
+Sunday of their freedom: accordingly, she could not to-day keep on the
+crape-hat which she so loved, and Victor too, but not on her; for it
+was just the mate of that which Clotilda had worn when, during the
+concert, she covered her moist eyes with the black-lace veil, which
+from that time always hung down over his bereaved eyes.
+
+I will describe the Court-day.
+
+The main object of the Court in setting forth at six o'clock in the
+evening was, to drive home again at ten o'clock in a right sulky mood.
+I can, however, deliver this ten times as copiously:--
+
+At six o'clock Victor, with the rest of the communion of brethren and
+sisters under orders, drove to the Paullinum. He envied, or rather
+blessed, the weaver, the boot-polisher, the wood-cutter, who had at
+evening his jug of beer, his prayers, his Johnny-[250]cakes and his
+trumpeting children; likewise their wives, who already had foretaste of
+the morrow, namely, of the marbled, speckled dresses which were to
+array them for the second holiday. In the May-colored atmosphere and
+zodiac stood the Princess as a sun, full as unhappy as her unhappy
+planets; _only dream_ (thought he) _can make a king happy or a poor man
+unhappy_. When he saw how they all, after a scanty frog-rain of words;
+and after refreshments, i. e. beatings and exhaustions, were harnessed,
+one post-team after another, according to the Court almanac and
+directory, to the card-tables,--to every board came the same motley set
+of old faces,--he wondered first of all at the universal patience; on a
+negro of the gold coast of the court (he swore to himself) if one only
+considers what he has to _hear_ and to _endure_, the _ears_ and the
+_skin_ are certainly, as in the case of roasted sucking-pigs, the best
+parts. Here the lion must beg _that_ animal to let him have his skin
+for a domino, which has usually borrowed his of him. Here among these
+forms bent up by small souls (as leaves also crook up when leaf-lice
+live on them) no great, no bold thought can be carried: like wheat
+which is _beaten down_, they can yield only _empty_ grains.
+
+Before the sitting down at table, that part or segment of
+the--halo[251] encircling the Italian _sun_, which was not invited,
+drove home, disgusted at the tediousness of play, and still more
+disgusted that certain persons in particular were honored with the
+tediousness of a seat at the table.
+
+Joachime, in whom the retiring Agnola found little satisfaction, went
+away with them, but not the Doctor, nor her brother Mat either, who had
+the honor of making, behind the chair of the Princess, in the column of
+march formed by herself, her chamberlain, a page, and a court lackey,
+exactly the central point; he stood, as every one knows, immediately
+behind the chamberlain, and was the only one who looked like a legible
+lampoon upon the _tout ensemble_. About the table, during[252] which
+there was little said, at most in a very low tone by two neighbors,
+here also there shall be nothing said.
+
+After dinner the Prince came and disturbed the stiff ceremonial, which
+he hated from love of comfort, just as Victor despised it on
+philosophical grounds. "Verily, an archangel," Victor would often say,
+"who should remark the wisdom and virtue observed by mortals in all
+trifles at their session-tables, altars, receptions, must needs bet his
+heaven and his wings that we are worth a farthing--or at least
+something--in greater things; but we all know where the conclusion
+limps; and this very disgust at the stiff, pedantic, decent micrology
+and machinery of men is the humor of the satirist. Moral deterioration
+comes about, it is true, through trifles, but not improvement: Satan
+creeps into us through Venetian blinds and _sphincters_[253]; the good
+angel enters through the front door."--Agnola rewarded our hero to-day
+for his previous so well meant assiduity with a warmer attention, which
+was made more beautiful in his eyes by her ornaments--she wore those of
+the former princess, her own, and those of her mother before her--and
+by her whole state-attire; for he loved finery on women and hated it on
+men. His esteem borrowed a tender warmth from the painful fact that she
+confounded January's selfish intentions in his visits (with reference
+to the future Clotilda) with fairer ones, and that nevertheless one
+could not say so to her. How came it that Agnola reminded him then of
+Joachime; that the latter was the _conductor_ of regard for the former;
+and that all loving emotions with which the Princess inspired him
+turned out wishes that Joachime might deserve and receive them?
+
+With a soul full of such longing, he drove back this very day without
+ceremony to that Joachime on whose hand, as we know, he had left a
+slight wound. He said to her, "He must, as murderer and Medicus, look
+once more to-day after the wound"; but a charming new trouble on
+Joachime's face fell like sunshine with a warming influence into his
+soul. He was impatient to go out with her on the balcony, to talk about
+it. Out there, he in a few minutes made the gash and the December chill
+a pretext for taking the hand and the gash into his own to warm it.
+"Cold is bad for wounds," he said; but the fine fool would here have
+had his own comment on the subject. The vacant evening, the
+remembrances of the childish joys of Christmas, the starry heaven,
+looking down from overhead, which magically illuminates all dark wishes
+of man, like flowers in the night,--these and the silence surcharged
+and burdened his forlorn soul, and he pressed the only hand which human
+kind at this moment extended to him. He put the question to her
+directly about her trouble. Joachime answered more softly than usual,
+"I was going to ask you the same; but with me it is natural." For she
+had, she related, on her return found the luggage of Clotilda and the
+news of her arrival, and--which is the precise point--the clothes of
+her sister Giulia, which Clotilda had hitherto given a place among her
+own. This Giulia, it will be remembered, had expired on Clotilda's
+heart, a day before the latter removed from Maienthal to St. Luna.
+
+A chaos shot through his heart; but out of the chaos only the faded
+Giulia took shape,--for Clotilda daily receded into a duskier sanctuary
+of his soul; her pale Luna-like image caressed with rays of another
+world his sore nerves, and he willingly suffered himself to believe
+that Joachime had her form. In his poetic exaltation, so seldom
+intelligible to women, the dead threw the halo which Clotilda diffused
+over her back again upon her sister. Joachime had to-day read over
+again the letter which Giulia had dictated to her in her last hour
+through Clotilda, and she still had it with her. Probably a heart full
+of unrequited love had borne the fair enthusiast down under the earth.
+Victor with gleaming eyes begged her for the letter; he opened it in
+the moonlight, and when he saw the beloved handwriting of his lost
+Clotilda, his whole heart wept.
+
+
+"Good sister!--
+
+"Forever farewell! Let me say that first, because I know not what
+moment may close my lips. The tempests of my life are going home.[254]
+I speak this farewell and my heartiest wish for thy welfare through my
+friend Clotilda's pen. Give the enclosed to my dear parents, and join
+thy prayer to mine, that they will leave me in my beautiful Maienthal,
+when I am gone. I see now through the window the rose-bush which stands
+by the sexton's little garden in the churchyard: there a place is given
+me, which like a scar shall testify that I once existed, and a black
+cross with the six white letters _Gulia_,--no more. Dear sister, do
+not, I beseech thee, allow them to confine my dust in a tomb!--O no! it
+shall flutter in the shape of Maienthal's roses, which I once so loved
+to sprinkle!--Let this heart, when it shall have dissolved into the
+pollen of a new eternal heart, play and hover in the beams of the moon,
+which has so often in my lifetime made my heart sad and soft. If thou
+ever drivest, dear sister, along by Maienthal, then will the cross peep
+out upon the road through the roses; and if it does not make thee too
+sad, then look over to me.
+
+"It seemed to me just now, for some minutes, as if I drew breath in
+ether,--in little thin draughts. It will soon be over. But tell my
+playmates, if they ask for me, that I was glad to go, though I was
+young. Very glad. Our teacher says, the dying are flying clouds, the
+living stationary ones, beneath which the former glide away, but verily
+at evening both are gone. Ah, I thought I should have to yearn for
+death a long time yet, from one year of sorrow to another; ah! I feared
+these pale cheeks, these eyes sunk with weeping, would not prevail upon
+death, that he would let me grow superannuated, and not take away my
+withered heart until it had throbbed itself to exhaustion: but, lo! he
+comes sooner. In a few days, perhaps in a few hours, an angel will
+appear before me and smile, and I shall see that it is death, and I,
+too, shall smile and say most joyfully, Take my beating heart into thy
+hand, thou ambassador of eternity, and care for my soul.
+
+"'But art thou not young?' the angel will say; 'hast thou not just
+stept upon this earth? Shall I recall thee so soon, even before it has
+its spring?'
+
+"But I shall answer: Look on these sunken cheeks, and these exhausted
+eyes, and only shut them to. O, lay the snake-stone[255] on my bosom,
+that it may suck out all the wounds, and not fall off till they are
+healed. Ah! I have haply done no good in the world, but also no evil.
+
+"Then will the angel say:' If I touch thee, thou becomest
+stiff,--spring and mankind and the whole earth vanish, and I alone
+stand beside thee. Is, then, thy young soul already so weary and so
+sore? What sorrows, then, can there be thus early in thy breast?'
+
+"Only touch me, good angel!--Now he says, 'If I touch thee, thou
+crumblest to dust, and all thy loved ones see nothing more of thee--'
+
+"O, touch me!..."
+
+
+Death touched the bleeding heart, and a human being had passed on....
+
+While Victor read the sorrowful sheet, the sister of the dead one had
+several times wiped her eyes, because she imagined to herself what he
+was reading, and when he looked up at her, there glimmered therein the
+seed-pearls of a tender soul. But he wished now that his face could be
+invisible, or that he could be in the balcony of his chamber, so as to
+give way to all sighs and emotions unseen. Had he been in a citizen's
+house, he might now have gone without being derided to the unpacked
+clothes, and into the future apartments of Clotilda; and he might have
+seen again, as it were, the green lawns of Maienthal, if he had seen
+the romantic dresses, wherein Giulia had roamed through them, locked up
+amidst the last kisses of a sister. But in such a house it was an
+impossibility.
+
+He could now, as he seldomer had the enjoyment of another's
+sensibility, easily pardon its even being carried to excess. That it
+shatters the body was to him the wretchedest objection, because,
+indeed, everything of a nobler sort, every effort, all thinking, wears
+it out; in fact, the body and life were only means, but not an end.
+"Giulia's heart in Giulia's body," said he, "is a pure dew-drop in a
+tender flower-cup, which everything crushes, chokes, dries up, and
+which yet has escaped the noonday sun; such souls, too pliable for a
+world full of storm, which have too many nerves and too few muscles,
+deserve for their sensibility's sake not the corroding salt of satire,
+which gnaws them like snails. Earth and we can give them few joys; why
+will we take from them the rest?"
+
+But the lines of sorrow which sympathy now drew through Joachime's
+smiles imprinted themselves distinctly in Victor's heart, and that
+which she would here conceal made her more charming than all that she
+had ever sought to show.
+
+Nothing is more dangerous than--as he had done some weeks before--to
+make believe he was in love: one becomes so forthwith in reality. Thus,
+the voluptuary _Baron_, when he had played one of Corneille's heroes,
+himself was one for some days. Thus Moliere died of a _malade
+imaginaire_, and Charles V. of a rehearsal-burial. Thus the paper crown
+which Cromwell had worn in a school-drama made him covet a harder
+one.--The second lesson which is to be learned from this (this,
+however, to be sure, presupposes Joachime's being a coquette) is, that
+a hero may scent coquetry, and yet run into the trap; a poet, like the
+nightingale (which he resembles in plumage, throat, and simplicity)
+sits up on the tree, and sees the snare set, and skips down and--into
+it.
+
+After some days,--while the question about Joachime's worth and his own
+love was rising and falling like a wave in Victor's mind,--while he
+stood on bad terms with Flamin, good ones with the Princess, and
+better with the Prince, who kept asking every day when Clotilda was
+coming,--she came.
+
+
+
+
+                           23. DOG-POST-DAY.
+
+       First Visit to Clotilda.--The Paleness.--The Redness.--The
+                              Race-Weeks.
+
+
+"Ay, I must confess," said Victor, as on the day after Clotilda's
+arrival he ran round in his chamber, "I could look with more courage
+into a thunder-storm or a tempestuous sea than into that little
+face,--into a radiant heaven, three noses long." He got relief,
+however, by striking a detached fortissimo chord on the piano: then he
+could go to see Clotilda. Only on the way he said: "Nowhere is there so
+much jangling as within a man. What a devilish uproar in this five-foot
+Disputatorium about the smallest trumpery, till a bill grows into an
+act! A portable national convention _in nuce_,[256] that is what I am;
+I cannot take a step, without the _right_ and _left_ first haranguing
+on the subject, and the _enragés_ and the _noirs_,[257] and the Duke of
+Orleans and Marat. The most detestable thing about this interior
+Ratisbon diet of man is, that Virtue sits therein with ten seats and
+one voice, but the Devil with one rump and seven votes."--
+
+By these humorous soliloquies he sought to divert himself from the
+aspect of his confused, stubborn, cold-sore spirit, which was always
+lifting Joachime to the level of Clotilda. He was finally put in
+perfect tune again merely by the virtuous resolution not to conceal now
+his love for Joachime,--"not to be ashamed of her," he had almost
+thought to himself. "If I _feign_ myself to be somewhat warmer toward
+Joachime and colder towards the other than I perhaps am, then the Devil
+must have his game in it, if I do not finally _become_ so."
+
+But the Devil had his game, and in fact a true game of Ombre[258] for
+_four_ persons,[259] with a dummy:[260] this croupier[261] had made the
+original vault of playing out the face[262] of Clotilda with a wholly
+different _color_ from what he had given her in Le Baut's palace.
+Victor found her, on meeting her again at Schleunes's, infinitely more
+beautiful than he had left her,--that is to say, more _pale_. As she
+was no nervous patient, never avoided the cold, even on December
+evenings walked out alone in the village, her cheeks were usually more
+like dark rosebuds than opened and whitened rose-leaves. But now the
+sun had become a moon: she had, in some sorrow or other, like the
+sapphire in the fire, lost nothing but color; instead of the blood, the
+soul, grown more still, lovely, and tender, seemed itself to look more
+nearly through the white crape curtain. All the blood which had receded
+from her cheeks flowed over into his, and rose like a magic potion into
+his head; meanwhile he tried to get into the latter the thought,
+"Probably it is more the quarrel with her parents, and less the
+affliction of being driven hither, that has made her sick."
+
+When one has once proposed to himself to make believe cold, one becomes
+still more so when one finds reasons for _not_ being so: Victor was
+made still colder by Clotilda's parents, who had come with her, and
+from whose faults the mantle seemed to him to be at once removed. Upon
+persons whom, for the sake of a third, one has esteemed too highly, one
+avenges himself, when the third no longer exerts the constraining
+influence, by a so much the greater depreciation of them. Then, too, he
+said to himself: "As she now seldom sees her brother Flamin, it would
+be a piece of simplicity to expose her to a minute's embarrassment by
+the announcement that I know the relationship." Poor Victor!
+Nevertheless, it was impossible for him even to charge his heart with
+so much electrical warmth--though he might rub it with cat-skins and
+beat it with fox-tails--as would be requisite in order that his pulse
+should beat full for Joachime, not to say feverishly; but _this very
+thing_ decided him to conduct himself exactly as if heart and pulse
+were fuller. "It were ignoble," thought he, "if the good Joachime
+should be made to atone for it, that I once had other hopes and wishes
+than my hitherto newest ones." This sacrifice warmed him to a proper
+degree of regard; this regard gave him the manly pride, which defies
+with its love and its choice all the four quarters of the world; this
+pride, again, gave him freedom and joy,--and now he was in a condition
+to talk with Clotilda like a reasonable man.
+
+All this inner history occupied, of course, twelve times as great a
+space of time as Mohammed's journey through all the heavens,--almost
+a good hour. But an accident threw itself into the midst of all
+his ideas. Namely, as the Minister's lady was a true female
+philosopher,--she knew that a couple of quartz crystals with some
+preparations and a drowned f[oe]tus do not make a philosopher, but
+nothing short of a lecture-room full of natural curiosities, and a
+reading cabinet,--and as the Chamberlain Le Baut was a philosopher, for
+his cabinet was quite as large,--the collection was exhibited to the
+Chamberlain, which he had himself helped to enrich. One would suppose
+that they must have laughed at each other in their sleeves, and taken
+each other for fools; but they really held each other for philosophers;
+for with great folks the fruits of the tree of knowledge grow so into
+the window and into the mouth,--they have so much facility in gaining
+knowledge (and therefore a second in showing it),--they so seldom seek
+in the wells of truth anything else than their own knee-pieces made
+with water-colors, and to wade into the depths of this fountain would
+give them such a chill,--and yet, on the other hand, they converse with
+so many sorts of persons of information in all departments,--that they
+get a smattering of everything over the table, and by oral tradition,
+like the disciples of the ancients, become through the ears living
+cyclopædias. If, afterward, they actually know how to absolutely
+renounce that which they have never heard, what difference is there,
+then, between them and the poorest philosopher, except in
+consciousness?
+
+In the cabinet of books and natural curiosities lay the whole
+New-Year's freight of buzzing chafers, with golden wing-sheaths minus
+wings,--I mean the gilt Musen-Almanachs. Matthieu, that mimic of the
+actual nightingales, was the sworn foe of the human ones, namely, the
+poets. He said,--what would have suited better for a Review,--"He was a
+great friend of verses, but only in winter,--for when he went roaming
+so through the flower-beds of an Annual, he became, like one who walks
+through a poppy-field, drowsy enough, and could go to sleep. And just
+as the nights grew longer, and one therefore needed a longer sleep, it
+was a fine thing that the Annuals should appear, exactly at the
+beginning of winter, and that these flowers should bloom at the same
+season of the year with the mosses; in this way one could at least be
+lulled to sleep beside the brook that murmured in the verses, when
+there was no more murmuring or sleeping on the frozen meadow."----
+
+Our Victor was as satirical as the Evangelist; he had in Hanover
+laughed as well as this fellow here,--e. g. he had complained that most
+Annual-minstrels unfortunately labored more for _connoisseurs_ than for
+dull readers, and were well contented if they only got the former to
+sleep,--that a man who could not write prose should try whether he
+might not make a popular bard, as only those birds can _sing_ who do
+not learn to talk,--that he could get through a good Annual at the
+quickest and most agreeable rate, if he only ran over the rhymes,--and
+that flat heads, like flat diamonds, to which no facettes can be given,
+became _hearts_, and instead of thoughts gave us tears, in which there
+swam not so much as the infusorium of an idea....
+
+But he saw still one side more than Matthieu, namely, the noble side.
+It was his custom to turn this side forward precisely when another had
+been showing the bad side, and _vice versâ_. His opinion was, that the
+poets were nothing but intoxicated philosophers,--but whoever could not
+learn philosophizing from them, would learn it quite as little from the
+systematicians. That philosophy made only the _silver-wedding_ between
+ideas, but poetry the first marriage; empty _words_ there might be, but
+no empty _sensations_. That the poet, in order to move us, has only to
+take for his lever all of noble that there is on the earth,--Nature,
+Freedom, Virtue, and God; and the very magic-words, the magic-rings,
+the magic-lamps wherewith he sways us, react at last upon himself.
+
+He delivered this opinion--when Matthieu had given his and Joachime her
+own, namely, that there were three or four leaves, at least, in the
+Musen-Almanachs which pleased her, namely, the smooth parchment
+leaves--much more briefly than we have put it;--the Minister's lady was
+of his opinion (for she herself was a versifex);--the Chamberlain said,
+"Every city and every prince did indeed adore the poets in appropriate
+temples,--namely, in the play-houses." Clotilda ventured now to join
+herself to the victors:[263] "When one reads a poet in January, it is
+as lovely as when one goes to walk in June. I cannot read either
+philosophers or learned men; there would, therefore, be left to me"
+(she meant to say, to her sex) "quite too little, if one should take
+from me the dear poets." "You would at most," said the Minister at
+last, "find your disciples in them; poets, like the saints, concern
+themselves little about the world and its knowledge; they can sing of
+the state, but not instruct it." "O thou grinning mummy!" thought
+Victor, "a precious stone which thou canst not work into the wall of
+the state-building is less to thee than a block of sandstone. If thou
+couldst only install every flaming soul sent into the world as a
+completion of the republican antiques, in the office of under-clerk,
+custom-house collector, or warden of the treasury (as the people of
+Grand Cairo transform their ruins into stables and horse-troughs)!" The
+noble Mat merely subjoined: "There was a painter in Rome who never
+talked with any one but by singing; and I knew a great poet who not
+even in common life could speak prose; but he could not do much beside,
+and had little of the world, but a great many worlds in his head. When
+he comes out in print, he will hardly play off more deception on
+his readers than any one has already played off on him, who chose
+to."--Victor saw, by Clotilda's downcast eye, that she observed, as
+well as he, that the Devil meant her Dahore: but he was silent; his
+soul was sad and embittered: he had, however, long since been hardened
+by court life to endure those whom he must needs hate.
+
+During this disputation the noble Mat had, unobserved, cut out the
+whole group in black paper. "Ah!" said Joachime, "this is not the first
+time that he has given _blackened_ likenesses of companies." But as
+Victor could never see silhouette-groups, without thinking of us
+fleeting shadows of mortals, of this dwindling and drying-up
+dwarf-life, of the night-pieces drawn upon life, and of the shadowy
+companies called peoples,--and as he was reminded of this not only by
+his melancholy, and not only by a wax-skeleton, by Madame Biheron,[264]
+which stood there among the natural curiosities, but still more by the
+pale form of Clotilda,--and as, casting a glance of comparison at the
+skeleton and the profile, she said softly to Victor, "So many
+resemblances might at another time make me sad,"--then was his full
+heart transpierced with a sharp pang at the thought of his eternal
+poverty, and at the certainty, "This great, beautiful heart will never
+stir for thine, and when her friend Emanuel is dead, thou art left
+forever alone"; and he stepped to the window, threw it open violently,
+drank in the north-wind, pressed his fist against his two eyeballs, and
+went back with his former expression of countenance to the rest of the
+company.
+
+But for to-day such agitations had torn deeply into his heart. And when
+Clotilda, at a solitary second, said to him that the Parson's wife and
+Agatha were angry at his staying away, then was he, to whom at these
+names the whole beclouded past opened like a heaven, in no condition to
+give an answer.
+
+When he returned home, Clotilda's voice, which he could of all her
+attractions least forget, kept incessantly speaking, and like the echo
+of a funeral-song, in his soul.... Reader, when that which thou lovedst
+has long vanished from the earth or from thy fancy, then will
+nevertheless the beloved _voice_ come back and bring with it all thy
+old tears, and the disconsolate heart which has shed them!... But not
+merely her voice,--everything came thronging back in the darkness upon
+his fancy: her modest eye, which did not in court-like style sparkle
+and bid defiance and express desire, as did those of the others,--that
+watchful delicacy, which since his entrance on court-life no longer
+appeared to him, either in her or in his father, too great,--to this
+add the image of Joachime and his chaos of inconsistencies, and the
+remark that a man whom the most certain proofs have satisfied that he
+is not loved, still suffers afresh at a _new_ one,--and then one can
+understand the commotions which sleep, that lull on life's ocean, had
+in his case to appease.--
+
+"That was the last fever-shake," said he the next morning, relying upon
+his present heart, whose eruptions, like those of volcanoes, daily
+burnt out its crater more and more. He enjoined upon himself,
+therefore, a weekly flight from the too dear soul, with the design that
+the new resonance of his love might cease its vibrations in his heart,
+and all become still again within him.
+
+But after a week he saw her again: verily, there sat the Devil again at
+the card-table, and played another color against him,--the _red_.
+Clotilda looked, not pale, but, though only slightly, red. This redness
+made a great blot on his inner man, and adulterated his inner coloring,
+as black does every color of the painter. For when he found her well
+again; it was not so much _agreeable_ to him,--for he saw how few
+claims he any longer had upon her tranquillity,--how she did not so
+much as distinguish him in this warehouse of human waste-paper, and how
+stupid he had been in letting himself dream so secretly, so very
+secretly, that her previous paleness proceeded actually from her vain
+longing after such a one as he;--at the same time it was not
+_disagreeable_ to him,--for he would have poured out all his heart's
+blood, if he could thereby have brought a single artery in her to its
+old course;--I say it was not so much either agreeable or disagreeable
+to him, as it was both, as it was unexpected, as it was a hint to--give
+himself to the Devil. His heart, and the image which had been too long
+therein, were absolutely crushed in two. "Be it so!" said he, and bit
+the convulsive lip with which he said it. For some days he cared not
+even to see Joachime. "Has _she_ then an eye for nature and a heart for
+eternity?" asked he, and he knew well the answer.
+
+Now came on a time for him, which was the precise opposite of the
+Sabbatical weeks,[265]--one may call them the _race-weeks_ or the
+_Tarantula-dancing-hours_ of visiting. It is a cursed time; man knows
+not where he stands. With Victor it fell just upon the winter-months,
+when, besides, the honeymoons of city and court occur. I will now
+portray them regularly.
+
+Victor sought, namely, to drown deeper his unhappy, discordant
+heart,--not with the drum-roll of amusements; under this it would only
+bleed the more, just as wounds flow more strongly under the sound of
+drumming; but with--people; these were the blood-stanching screws
+which he applied to his soul. His body was now, like the Catholic
+reliquiary body of an Apostle, in all places; he spent the whole day in
+running to and fro, now with the Prince and now without him.
+
+At last there was not a lady left in Flachsenfingen whose hand he had
+not kissed,--nor a toilet-table where he would have been satisfied.
+He made in the _racing-weeks_ double-knots, French _pas_,--dotted
+sketches of patterns,--little plays,--charades,--receipts for
+canary-birds,--verses for fans,--a thousand visits,--and still more,
+morning notes....
+
+These last, which he received and sent, were written in French and
+folded French-wise,--namely, crushed into the shape of hair-rollers.
+"They are," said he, "the hair-rollers of the fibres of the female
+brain,--the cartridges full of Cupid's powder,--the cocoons of loving
+butterflies": he spoke of the rise and fall of these female notes, and
+called them still further the proof-sheets of the female heart, and the
+outer-title-pages of the coquettish Edicts of Nantes. "I assert this,"
+he added, "to distinguish myself from the page Matthieu, who denies it,
+because he actually contends, that at first one presses letters upon
+the fair sex, then things of more cubic contents, e. g. fans, jewels,
+hands, then finally one's self; just as the mails at first only took
+letters, then packages, finally passengers."--
+
+He found those women daily more amusing who steal away from us people
+of understanding the heart out of the breast and the brain out of the
+head, and, to be sure, (as a certain nobleman did other stuff,) not
+from love for the stolen goods, but from love of robbery itself; the
+next morning, like the nobleman, they honestly send the goods back
+again to the owner. Their refinements,--his own,--his turns to
+escape theirs,--the attention which one had to bestow upon one's
+self,--the opportunity of bringing all emotions under the finest
+dissecting-knives, or solar and lunar microscopes,--the facility of
+taking away from the most sincere truths the sour taste and from the
+most agreeable the sickly-sweet,--all this made the toilet-tables of
+women, particularly of coquettes, to him _Lectisternia_[266] and tables
+of the gods. "By heaven," said the toilet-table-boarder or
+pensioner,[267] "a man is merely a Dutchman, at most a German, but a
+woman is a native Frenchwoman, or in fact a Parisian: man conceals his
+moral as he does his physical breast: thoughts and flowers, which do
+not fall through the racks of the four faculties, emotions which cannot
+be described in the acts or in a physician's report, one must really
+say only to a woman, and not to a man, especially one of
+Flachsenfingen"--or Scheerau.
+
+By way of excusing himself for associating with coquettes on the
+footing of a general lover, he appealed to his motive,--that of merely
+wishing to become acquainted with their ways,--and to the excellent
+Forster, who in Antwerp _knelt down_, as well as any born Catholic,
+before Rubens's altar-piece of the Virgin Mary ascending to heaven,
+merely to examine her more nearly.
+
+He had a still more dangerous excuse. "Man," said he, "should be
+everything, learn everything, try everything,--he should labor for the
+_union_ of the two _churches_[268] in his soul,--he should, if
+only for a couple of months, have been a city-musician,[269]
+grave-digger, gallows-_pater_,[270] an engineer, tragedy-manager,
+upper-court-marshal, an imperial vicar, deputy sheriff, a reviewer, a
+lady, in short, everything a man should have been for some days, in
+order that the hues of the prism might at last melt together into the
+perfect white."
+
+These principles are the more dangerous with one like him, who, strung
+with the tense strings of the most dissimilar powers, easily gave every
+one's note, not from dissimulation, but because his social poetic
+faculty could transport itself deeply into another's soul; hence he
+gained, tolerated, and copied the most unlike persons, notwithstanding
+his sincerity. But I pity him, that he has everywhere so much to
+suppress, his seeing through the Prince, his state of heart toward
+Clotilda, his conciliatory intrigues towards Agnola, his knowledge of
+Flamin's relations, &c. Ah, reserve and dissimulation easily run
+together; and must not a constant dropping, when one stands directly
+under it, at last wear scars in the most solid character?
+
+Nothing chills the noblest parts of the inner man more than intercourse
+with persons in whom one cannot take any interest. This hotel-life at
+court, this daily seeing people who never even say "I," whose relations
+one ignores as indifferently as their talents, unless some necessity
+seeks them,--this snatching only at the next moment, this racing by of
+the finest and most intellectual strangers and ant-swarms of visitors,
+who in three days are forgotten,--all this, which makes palaces like
+Russian ice-palaces, where even the stove full of naphtha flames is a
+lump of ice, and to which I need not at all add the _comic_ salt,
+which, besides, chills all warm blood, as that of _Glauber_ does hot
+water,--all this made his heart desolate, his days bald and burdensome,
+his nights distressful, his conduct too cold towards the good, too
+tolerant towards the bad.
+
+In addition to this, his Emanuel was silent, and, like nature, shut up
+his flowers within himself. He whom nature nourishes and builds up, is
+not in so good a mood in winter as in summer. The earth had on her
+powder-mantle of snow, and her night-gown on all day; the trees had
+wrapped up their buds in fleecy hair-papers, and the twigs looked like
+hair-pins. Victor's soul was like nature: O may Heaven soon warm in
+both the flowers of spring!
+
+As the pathological history of my Victor reminds me too painfully of
+the latent poisons in the human body, it shall soon come to an end. It
+pleased him that he became, by this fluttering round, more and more
+gallant and cold towards all women: the cord of love cuts less deeply
+into the bosom, when, plucked out into threads and floss, it flutters
+about everybody. He who, like his namesake, Saint Sebastian, looked
+like one stuck all full with (Cupid's) arrows, shot off arrows of
+another kind against the whole sex, though never against individuals.
+In this last circumstance his bitterness differed from Matthieu's, who
+could say of his own cousin, for example, who had lost her beauty by a
+late attack of small-pox: "Her beauty held out right valiantly against
+the small-pox, and brought off from this victory the most glorious
+_scars_, and all of them indeed, like those of Pompey's knights;[271]
+in front and in the face."
+
+As assaf[oe]tida is used for _haut gout_, so does one season the
+finest _savoir vivre_ by sundry bold incivilities. Bastian in the
+Tarantula-season was not to be embarrassed by anything: he went and
+came like a Parisian, without ceremony; he sought often bold, but
+advantageous postures of his body; during the play he made tours
+through the boxes as the Prince did through the coulisses; five times
+he carried matters so far (though with difficulty, and always only by
+means of setting before himself the example of the courtiers), that he
+listened indifferently, or absolutely looked away, when another was,
+telling him a story: all which things, if not essential, are
+nevertheless incidental to true politeness.
+
+Nor will I let it be unnoticed in his praise, that he took to himself
+the regular _exotic_ and _satirical_ liberties of the _Gallican_ Church
+toward several women at once, for in the presence of a single one he
+had still the old veneration of a noble heart. I will give at least one
+example of that. Once he was among five slanderesses (the company
+consisted of six females and a male person); the ugliest blackened all
+maidens, even those in print, e. g. the deceased Clarissa, whom she
+charged with not having in her intercourse with Lovelace been quite
+able to _sauver les dehors de la vertu_.[272] One can anticipate how
+the Königsberg school will receive it in their reviews, that he let
+himself down on one knee before the calumniatress, and said with some
+seriousness: "_O Clarisse! voici votre Lovelace; retranchons quatre
+tomes, commençons comme les faiseurs d'Epopées par le reste_."[273]
+
+To be sure, he frequently during the Tarantula-season reproached
+himself for the Tarantula-season; and when the Gentile-fore-court of
+his heart grew so full of women, while in the Holy of Holies there was
+nothing but mute darkness, and when his brain became an entomological
+cabinet of court trifles, then, of course, he often sighed in his
+balcony: "O come soon, good father, that thy sinking son may soar out
+of this unclean March fog into a clearer life, before he has utterly
+stained himself, so as no longer even to frame this wish." And
+as often as he got sight, in Joachime's chamber, of the views of
+Maienthal,--which Giulia had had taken by the painter of Clotilda's
+portrait,--then in the midst of his jestings he turned his eye away
+from them with a sigh.----But he was not healed, until fate said, Now!
+Then all at once the theatre-key struck, which bids men come and act in
+the players' rehearsal of life;--the play itself is not given till the
+next life;--and then transpired something which I shall at once report
+in the following chapter, when I have done relating in this one how
+Victor stood with all the people about him.
+
+With many, properly speaking, badly,--in the first place, with
+Clotilda. She resided, to be sure, at the Minister's; as maid of honor,
+she would have belonged in the Paullinum, only the Prince had so
+contrived it for the greater facility of seeing her; but she was always
+about the Princess, with whom she was soon linked in intimacy by a
+similarity of seriousness and a similarity of reserve. Her indifference
+to one who had with her a common friend and teacher inspired this
+Victor with a still greater, especially as lie knew she must feel that,
+in this cold mountain- and court-air, only a single, though faded,
+carnation slip of her fair soul bloomed, namely, himself. Then, too,
+the obligation of decorum, to look upon her coldly, must become a
+habit. The worst thing for him was that she was indifferent towards him
+without ill-feeling, and cold towards him with respect. Others were
+quite furious about the "phlegmatic virtue of this Pygmalion's statue."
+The noble Mat called her often the _Holy_ Virgin, or the Demoiselle
+Mother of God. It is made out very clearly by the Dog-documents, which
+I have opened, that some gentlemen of the Court, after various abortive
+attempts to explain to themselves a virtue irreconcilable with so much
+beauty, now on the ground of temperament, now of concealed love,
+and now of a coquettish coyness, ending at last, like the water
+at St. Clermont, in petrifying and becoming _its own bridge over
+itself_,--that these cunning gentlemen most felicitously fell upon the
+conjecture that Clotilda wore this mask over her face as a copy of the
+face of the Princess, for the sake of continuing in favor. Hence
+Clotilda's discreet virtue was judged by most with greater indulgence,
+while one could excuse it, as an intentional imitation of a similar
+fault in the Princess, even by the example of like imitations, as
+courtiers often aped the greatest external natural faults, nay, even
+the virtues of a prince. So thought at least the more reasonable
+portion of the Court.
+
+Agnola was assiduous in testifying an ever increasing gratitude to our
+hero for January's visits, although, as I think, she could detect the
+faithless intentions of the Prince in the presence of Clotilda full as
+well as she might sometimes see into Victor's soul in the presence of
+Joachime.... In fact, I should have begged the reader long since to be
+on the look-out; I deliver the facts with excusable stupidity, though
+with historic fidelity; if, now, there are therein fine, knavish,
+significant, intriguing traits and hints, it is without my knowledge,
+and therefore I cannot point them out to the reader with an index-hand,
+or announce them with a fire-drum,[274] but he himself--as he
+understands court histories--must know what I mean by my hints,--not
+_I_.
+
+With Joachime Victor would have gone on very well,--as he set down all
+faults which he found in other women, and not in her, to her credit as
+virtues, and as he grew more intimate with her personally; for the
+faults of maidens, like chocolate and tobacco, appear at first the more
+odd to the palate the better they taste to it afterward: he would have
+got on very well, but for two sharp corner-stones; but they were there.
+The first was,--for I will not reckon his slight annoyance at the short
+duration of her Christmas sentimentality,--that she was always finding
+fault with Clotilda, particularly with her "affected" virtue. The
+second was, that Clotilda sought her society quite as little: Victor
+could love no one whom Clotilda did not love. And now the race-weeks
+and visiting-Tarantula-dance hours of one man are at an end; but, alas!
+all posterity must yet cross the same hot _line_ of folly and of youth.
+
+
+
+
+                           24. DOG-POST-DAY.
+
+    Rouge.--Clotilda's Sickness.--The Play Of Iphigenia.--Difference
+               between Plebeian and Patrician[275] Love.
+
+
+On the 26th of February Victor found in the morning at Joachime's--the
+proud Clotilda. I know not whether it was by accident that she was
+here, or from politeness, or for the purpose of meeting more nearly a
+person whom Victor treated with some interest. But, O heavens! the
+cheeks of this Clotilda were pallid, her eyes were as if breathed over
+by an eternal tear, her voice emotional, as it were broken, and the
+pale marble body seemed only the image standing on the monument of the
+departed soul. Victor forgot the whole past, and his innermost soul
+wept for longing to succor her and wipe out from her life all dark
+winter landscapes. "I am as well as usual to-day," said she to his
+professional inquiry, and he knew not what to make of this unexpected
+paleness; he could not, in fact, to-day make anything, not so much as a
+joke or a piece of flattery; his soul, dissolved into sympathy, would
+not take any form; then, too, he was embarrassed. Clotilda soon took
+leave;--and it would not have been possible for him to-day, not for all
+Great Poland (that ice-floe beautifully ground down under the sledging
+of emigrating nations and crowns), after she was gone, to stay half an
+hour longer.
+
+Besides, he would have been obliged to go; for the page Matthieu called
+him to the Princess. The time was unusual; he could not wait to see,
+nor could he guess what was the matter. The Evangelist smiled (that he
+did now somewhat often when the Princess was the subject), and said:
+"To Princes and Princesses weighty things were trivial and trivial
+things weighty, as Leibnitz[276] said of himself. When the crown and a
+hair-pin fall from their heads together, they look first of all for the
+hair-pin."[277]
+
+By the way! It would be malice on my part toward the noble Matthieu, if
+I should longer suppress, the fact, that for some time he has been much
+more tender and ardent towards my hero,--which on any other man than
+he, I mean on a lurking villain, would be a Cain's-mark, and would have
+somewhat of the same meaning as the wagging of a cat's tail.
+
+Victor was astonished at the request of the Princess,--that he would
+cure Clotilda: that is to say, not at the fact of her making a
+request,--for she often did him that honor,--but at the intelligence
+that Clotilda, on whose cheeks he had hitherto seen the apple-blossoms
+of health at his soul's expense in the _race-weeks_, had worn only dead
+blossoms,--namely, rouge, which the Princess had been obliged to
+enforce upon her for the sake of having a uniformity of bloom with the
+remaining red copper-flowers[278] of the court. Agnola, who, like her
+rank, was quick, besought him further, when he was appointed to the
+medical upper-examining-commission, to enter on his office as soon as
+might be, this very day forthwith, at the play, where he would find the
+candidate for examination.
+
+And he found her. The play was a sparkling brilliant brought from
+Eldorado,--Goethe's _Iphigenia_. When he saw the patient again with the
+evening-red of the rouge, wherein she was to glow at another's behest
+even during her going down,--when he saw this still victim (marked
+red, as it were, for the altar), which he and others had driven away
+from its meadows, from its solitary flowers, to the midst of the
+sacrificial knives of the Court, mutely enduring, the extinction of its
+wishes, and when he compared with woman's dumb patience man's raging
+restlessness,--and when it seemed as if Clotilda had lent her sorrow to
+Iphigenia with the prayer, "Take my heart, take my voice and mourn with
+it,--mourn with it over thy separation from the fields of youth, over
+thy separation from a beloved brother,"--and when he saw how she tried
+to fasten her eyes more steadfastly on Iphigenia, when she pined for
+her lost brother, in order to control their overflow and their
+direction (towards her own brother in the Parterre, towards Flamin), O
+then did such great sorrows and their signs in his eyes and looks need
+a pretext like the omnipotence of genius, in order to be confounded
+with pangs growing out of poetic illusion!
+
+Never did a physician question his patient with greater sympathy and
+forbearance than did he Clotilda in the next interlude: he excused
+his importunity with the commands of the Princess. I must first
+state that the fair patient--although he had been hitherto a falling
+Peter, whom many a cock-crow had brought rather to tears than to
+repentance--nevertheless remained the _second person_, whom he never
+denied, ... i. e. whom, he never addressed with the frivolous,
+whimsical, bold, entrapping turns of conversation now so common with
+him. The _first person_--whom he esteemed too highly to write to him in
+the present state of his heart--was his Emanuel.
+
+Clotilda answered him, that "she was as well as ever; the only thing
+there was sickly about her," she said, smiling, "namely, her color, was
+already under the hands of a female surgeon, who, against her
+inclination, healed her only outwardly." This playful allusion to the
+rouging decreed by the Princess had the double design of excusing her
+painting and of diverting the Doctor from his tender-hearted
+seriousness. But the first was unnecessary,--since in the theatre even
+ladies who never wore rouge put it on as they entered the box and wiped
+it off on going out, in order not to hang there as the only quinces on
+a tree full of glowing Stettin-apples, and as, in fact, mineral cheeks
+were required of the whole female court-retinue as facial court livery.
+The second was vain; much more likely were the wounds of his heart to
+be aggravated by two causes: by that cold, almost fanatical resignation
+to fading away,--and by something inexpressibly mild and tender which,
+in the female face, often betokens the breaking heart, the failing
+life, as fruit by _soft_ yielding to _pressure_ announces its ripeness.
+
+O ye good creatures, ye women, while joy already beautifies you, is the
+reason why sorrow makes you still more beautiful and too touching
+_this_, that it so often overtakes you, or is it because sorrow borrows
+the dress of joy? Why must I here confess so passingly my pleasure at
+your endurance and veiling of sorrows, when at this moment before my
+fancy so many hearts full of tears sweep by with open countenances full
+of smiles, and win for your sex the praise of opening its heart as
+gladly to sorrow as to joy, as flowers, although they *unclose only
+before the sun, yet also burst open when it is overcast by a cloudy
+heaven?
+
+Victor, without being led off his track by her answer, continued:
+"Perhaps you cannot wean yourself from fair nature and from
+exercise,--these late hours, which I myself feel"----She prevented his
+finishing the sentence, to remind him that she had, he must remember,
+brought her present complexion with her from home. One sees, however,
+in this reminder more forbearance than truth; for she would not
+complain of her court office before the very one who had helped her
+gain it.----Victor, who saw her sickliness so clearly, and yet knew not
+how to propound another question, stood there dumfounded. Their own
+silence loosens reserved people's tongues: Clotilda began of herself,
+"As I do not know what harms me here, except the rouge, I beg my
+physician to prohibit me this dietetic fault," i. e. to persuade the
+Princess into a revocation of her rouge-edict. "I should be glad," she
+continued, "to gain some resemblance at least to two such good friends
+as Giulia and Emanuel,"--i. e. a pale color, or else the notion of a
+speedy death. Victor threw out a hasty "Yes," and turned his smarting
+eye toward the rising curtain.
+
+Never, haply, were the scenes of players and hearers more like each
+other. Iphigenia was Clotilda; the wild Orestes, her brother, was her
+brother Flamin; the soft, radiant Pylades was his friend Victor. And as
+Flamin stood below in the pit with his cloudy face,--(he came only for
+the sake of seeing his sister more conveniently,)--then did it seem to
+our and his friend as if he were addressed by him, when Orestes said to
+Pylades:--
+
+
+     "Remind me not of those enchanting days,
+      When a free room thy house afforded me:
+      Thy noble father wisely, tenderly,
+      Nursed the half-stiffened blossoms of my youth;
+      When thou, an ever-gay associate,
+      Even as a motley, light-winged butterfly
+      Plays round a dark-hued flower, day after day
+      Didst dance and hover round me with new life,
+      And win thy bliss a way into my soul."
+
+
+Clotilda felt quite as painfully that they were playing her life on the
+stage, and struggled against her eyes.... But when Iphigenia said to
+her brother Orestes,--
+
+
+     "O hear me! Look on me! See how my heart
+      Opens at last, after so long a time,
+      To the sweet bliss of kissing that dear brow,
+      Most precious treasure earth yet holds for me, ....
+      O let me,--let me--for in brighter waves
+      Not from Parnassus leaps the eternal stream
+      From rock to rock down to the golden vale,
+      Than from my bosom joy outgushing flows
+      And like a sea of bliss enclasps me round";--
+
+
+and when Clotilda mournfully surveyed the greater interval of sorrows
+and days between herself and her brother; then gushed up the inner
+fountains and filled her large eyes, so often fixed upon the heavens,
+and a quick bending forward hid the sisterly tear from all eyes
+untouched by emotion. But it did not escape the feeling eyes with which
+her friend beside her imitated her.... And here a virtuous voice said
+within Victor: "Disclose to her that thou knowest the secret of her
+relationship,--lift off from this sorely oppressed heart the load of
+silence: perhaps she is withering under a grief which a confidant may
+cool and take away!" Ah, to listen to this voice was indeed the least
+with which he could content his infinite sympathy! He said in an
+extremely low tone, and which emotion rendered almost unintelligible to
+her: "My father has long since disclosed to me, that Iphigenia knows
+the presence of her brother and of my friend." Clotilda turned suddenly
+and blushingly towards him; for a more minute explanation he let his
+eyes glide down to Flamin; turning pale; she looked away and said
+nothing; but during the whole play her heart seemed to be far more
+compressed, and she was compelled now to stifle still more tears and
+sighs than before. At last in the midst of her sadness she gave
+gratitude its rights, and whispered to him for his sympathy and his
+confidence, as if with a dying smile, her thanks. He laid upon the
+distaff of the conversation entirely new and foreign material, because
+he would fain, during the spinning, get a clearer and more certain
+light upon the sad impression which his confession seemed to have
+produced. He inquired after the latest letters from Emanuel. She
+replied: "I only wrote to him yesterday all through the eclipse of the
+moon; he cannot answer me often, because writing pains his breast."
+Now, as the eclipse of the 25th of February began at twenty minutes
+after ten in the evening, at eleven o'clock and forty-one minutes was
+at its climax, and at one o'clock and two minutes was over: accordingly
+Victor, as physician, could fall upon the medical sinner with sermons
+and hammers of the law and pronounce the verdict; now, it was no
+wonder. Pass it by, Doctor! These dear creatures can more easily obey a
+man--the Ten Commandments,--books,--Virtue,--the Devil himself more
+easily, than the Dietician. Clotilda said: "The midnight hours are
+simply my only free hours,--and Maienthal, indeed, I can never forget."
+
+"Ah, how could one?" said he.
+
+The music before the last act, and the tragic tone, and the sorrows
+inspired her, and she continued: "Did not one drink of _Lethe_, when
+one trod the shores of Elysium and when one left it?" ... She paused.
+"I would drink of no Lethe, not in the first case, still less in the
+_last_,--no!" And never was "No" said in a lower, softer, more
+slow-drawn tone. In Victor's heart a three-edged compassion passed
+painfully to and fro, as he imagined to himself Clotilda mocked by
+fate, writing and weeping in the midnight under a moon dismembered and
+beclouded by earth's shadow; he said nothing, he stared rigidly into
+the mournful scenes of the stage, and still wept on when the joyous
+ones had, there, already evolved themselves in their place.
+
+At home he made his brain-fibres Ariadne's threads to extricate himself
+from the labyrinth of  the causes of her trouble, and particularly of
+the _new_ one which had seemed to come upon her at his disclosure. But
+he remained in the labyrinth; undoubtedly grief begat the sickness, but
+who begat the grief? It would be hard for these poor, tender
+butterflies, if there were more than one mortal affliction; in every
+lane, in every house, thou wilt find a wife or a daughter who has to go
+to church or to the Tragedy to sigh, and who must go up into the upper
+story to weep; but this aggregated trouble is worried away with smiles,
+and years increase for a long time side by side with the tears. On the
+contrary, there is a grief which breaks them off,--think of that, dear
+Victor, in the joyful hours of thy general love,[279] and think of it,
+all ye who with warm, loving hands draw the throbbing heart of such a
+delicate creature out of its breast, to take it into your own by the
+side of your own heart, and warm it forever! When you then throw
+away this hot heart, which you have torn out like a butterfly's
+honey-proboscis: still, like that, it continues to quiver, but then it
+grows cold, and erelong beats no more.
+
+Unhappy love, then, was the gnawing honey-dew on this flower, Sebastian
+concluded. Naturally he thought of himself first; but all his nicest
+observations, his now so familiar _ricochet-glances_ out of the _corner
+of his eye_ had long since convinced him that he had to ascribe the
+distinction, which she did not deny him, more to her impartiality than
+to her inclination. Who else it could be at Court,--that was a thing
+which he in vain applied one electrometer after another to draw out.
+And he knew beforehand that he should experiment in vain, since
+Clotilda would baffle all auscultation of her inner state, if she had
+an unreciprocated inclination; reason was with her the wax, which they
+stick to one end of the magnetic needle, in order to obviate or conceal
+the sinking (_inclination_) of the other. Nevertheless, he made up his
+mind the next time to hold some divining-rods to her soul.----
+
+I must here utter a thought, which may discover some sense and my
+general speculation in the matter. My Dog-Post-Master Knef did not
+probably foresee that I should calculate the year and the duration of
+this whole story merely from the lunar eclipse of the 25th of February,
+which he announced, just as, in fact, great astronomers, by means of
+the moon's phases, found out so much about the earth's geographical
+longitude. 1793 was the year in which what is related in this chapter
+occurred: I am good for that; for as, at all events, the whole story,
+as is well known, takes place in the ninth decade of the eighteenth
+century, and as no lunar eclipse of a 25th of February is to be found
+there at all, except in the year 1793, i. e. the present year, my
+proposition is made out. To make assurance doubly sure, I have compared
+all the changes of moon and weather occurring in this book with those
+of 1792 and 1793; and all fitted together beautifully;--the reader
+should also reckon it after me. It is uncommonly gratifying to me,
+that, consequently, as I write in July, the history follows in a
+half-year from my description.--
+
+Victor delayed not his visit to the Princess's, that he might there
+announce the reserved Clotilda as a complete nervous patient. He
+himself laughed inwardly at the expression,--and at the Doctors,--and
+at their nervous cures,--and said, that, as formerly the French kings
+in their treatment of the goitre had to say, "The King touches thee,
+but God heals thee," so should physicians say, The city and country
+physician feels thy pulse, but God works the cure. Here, however, he
+had three good intentions in giving out that she was a nervous
+sufferer: first, that of gaining for her the abolition of her
+Court-vassalage,--at least her deliverance from the precise office of
+maid of honor, because the splinter of the reproach was continually
+festering in his heart, "It is my fault that she is obliged to be
+here"; further, of securing for her in advance permission to take the
+spring and country air, in case she should by and by sue for it;
+finally, of releasing her from her compulsory resemblance to those
+ladies on whose lead-colored faces, as on the leaden soldiers of
+children, the red daily wears off and is daily renewed. But as Agnola
+herself painted, he was obliged, out of courtesy, as physician, to
+forbid it to both at once. The Princess countersigned all his petitions
+very graciously: only as to the rouge-article she gave, in regard to
+herself, no resolution at all, and in regard to Clotilda the following:
+she had nothing to say against her appearing in her presence, except on
+court days and at the play, without rouge; and she would willingly
+grant her a dispensation from both, unless her health was restored.
+
+He could hardly wait for the moment of taking leave, so impatient was
+he to carry this imperial-recess or resolution to the beloved patient.
+He himself wondered at this complaisance of the Princess, with whom,
+generally, petitions were sins, and who refused nothing--except what
+was asked. His perplexity was now only this,--how to communicate to
+Clotilda the indulgences of the Princess, without the offensive
+confession of having made a plea of her illness. But out of this slight
+evil a great one extricated him: when he came into her presence, she
+looked ten times as sick as she had day before yesterday, at the
+disclosure of her relationship: her blossoms, heavy with cold dew,
+drooped to the earth.
+
+Gait and posture were unchanged; there was the same external
+joyousness, but the glance was often too fluttering, often too fixed;
+across the lily-cheeks darted often a hectic flush, through the lower
+lip at one moment a subdued convulsion.... At this point sympathy
+frightened her friend out of the bounds of courtesy, and he told her
+outright the consent of the Princess. He summoned to the aid of his
+burdened heart his previous court-boldness, and commanded her to make
+the coming spring her apothecary's shop, and the flowers her medicinal
+herbs, and her--fancy her pharmacy. "You seem," said she, smiling, "to
+count me among the larks, who must always have _green turf_ in their
+cage. However, that my Princess and you may not have had your kindness
+for nothing, I will, finally, do it. I confess to you, I am at least a
+_valide imaginaire_.[280] I feel myself well." ... She interrupted
+herself to question him, with the frankness of virtue and with an eye
+swimming in sisterly love, about her brother, whether he was happy and
+contented, how he worked, how he filled his position? She told him how
+sad a burden these questions, hitherto locked up so deeply in her soul,
+had been to her and she thanked him for the gift of his confidence with
+a warmth which he took as a delicate reproof of his previous silence.
+Of old she always loved to stand in a flower-garland of children;
+but in Flachsenfingen she had gathered still more of these little
+nebulous stars about her brightness, and indeed for a peculiar reason,
+namely, to cover the fact, that she drew to herself Giulia, a little
+five-years-old grandchild of the city Senior, with whom her brother
+resided, as his unwitting biographer and news-carrier. More than three
+times he felt as if he must fall at the feet of this lily-white angel,
+borne higher and higher by her cloud, and say with outspread arms:
+"Clotilda, be my friend, before thy death,--my old love for thee is
+long since crushed out, for thou art too good for me and for all of us;
+but I will be thy friend; my heart will I conquer for thee; for thee
+will I resign my heaven. O, thou wilt, besides, not live to see the
+evening dew of age, thou wilt soon close thy eyes, and the morning dew
+still hangs therein!" For he held her soul to be a pearl, whose
+mussel-body lies open in the dissolving sun, that the pearl may the
+earlier be dislodged. On leaving, he could with the frankness of the
+friend, which had taken the place of the lover's reserve, offer a
+repetition of his visits. Altogether he treated her now more warmly and
+unconstrainedly; first, because he had so utterly renounced her noble
+heart, that he wondered at his former bold claims to it; secondly,
+because the feeling of his disinterested, self-sacrificing honesty
+towards her poured balm on his previous stings of remorse.
+
+To this sickness was added an evening or an event, which the reader, I
+think, will not know how to understand. Victor was to take Joachime to
+the play, and her brother, was to come and fetch him first. I have
+already twice set it down, that for some weeks Matthieu had no longer
+been so repulsive to him as a mouse is to an elephant: he had, after
+all, found out a single good side, dug out some moral yellow mica
+attaching to him,--namely, the greatest attachment to his sister
+Joachime, who alone had the key to his whole heart, closed to his
+parents, the sole claim on his secrets and his services; secondly, he
+loved in Matthieu what the Minister condemned,--the spirit-of-salt of
+freedom; thirdly, it is so with us all: when he have heated our
+heart for some female one out of a family, we afterwards extend the
+stove-warmth to the whole kin and trenchership,--brothers, nephews,
+fathers; fourthly,  Matthieu was continually praised and excused by his
+sister. When Victor arrived at Joachime's, she had with her headache
+and dressing-maids,--finery and pain were increasing; at last she sent
+off the live fitting-machines, and so soon as she was hardened into a
+Venus out of the foam of powder and jewel boxes, rouge-rags and
+_mouchoirs de Vénus_, _poudres d'odeur_ and lip-pomades, then she sat
+down and said she should stay at home on account of headache. Victor
+stayed too, and very gladly. Whoso knows not the framework and cellular
+work of the human heart will wonder that Victor's friendship for
+Clotilda brought a whole honey-comb of love for Joachime into his
+cells; it was delightful to him when they visited and embraced each
+other; he sought not in the blessing-fingers of the Pope so much
+healing virtue as in Clotilda's; her friendship seemed to him an excuse
+for his, and to set Joachime on the pedestal of esteem, to which with
+all his windlasses he had not been able to raise her. Even the sense of
+his increasing worth gave him new right to love; and to-day even
+Clotilda's crape and princely hat would have asserted its helmet
+ornaments on Joachime's aching and more than commonly patient head. To
+her continued flirtation with the pair of fools he had long since
+adapted himself, because he knew very well _which one_ among the three
+wise men from the East she had not for a fool, but for an adorer. But
+to return!
+
+Matthieu, who also stayed at home to please his sister,--he and Victor
+and she made the entire band of this _concert spirituel_. Joachime on
+the sofa leaned back her delicate, sick head against the wall and
+looked at the inlaid floor, and her drooping eyelids made her more
+beautiful. The Evangelist went out and came in. Victor, as he always
+did, dashed round the chamber. It was a very fine evening, and I wish
+this of mine were so. The conversation turned upon love; and Victor
+asserted the existence of two kinds,--the citizenly, and the
+_distingué_ or French. He loved the French in books and as a general
+love, but he hated it the moment it was to be the only love; he
+described it to-day thus: "Take a little ice,--a little heart,--a
+little wit,--a little paper,--a little time,--a little incense; pour
+together and put into two persons of rank; in that way you have a good,
+true French Fontenellian love." "You forgot," added Mat, "one
+ingredient,--a small amount of senses, at least a _fifth_ or _sixth_
+part, which must be added to the medicine as _adjuvans_ or
+_constituens_.[281] Meanwhile, it has at least the merit of shortness;
+love, like a tragedy, should be restricted to unity of time, namely, to
+the space of one day, that it may not take still more resemblance to
+the tragic. But describe now common love!"
+
+_Victor_: "That I prefer."
+
+_Matthieu_: "Not I. It is merely a longer madness than anger. _On y
+pleure, on y crie, on y soupire, on y ment, on y enrage, on y tue, on y
+meurt,--enfin, on se donne à tous les diables, pour avoir son
+ange_.[282] Our talks are to-day for once full of arabesques and _à la
+grecque_: I will make you a cookery-book receipt for a good citizenly
+love: take two young and large hearts,--wash them clean in baptismal
+water or printer's ink of German romances,--pour on them warm blood and
+tears,--set them on the fire and under the full moon, and let them
+boil,--stir them briskly with a dagger,--take them out and garnish
+them, like crabs, with forget-me-not or other wild-flowers, and serve
+them up warm: in that way you have a savory citizenly heart-soup."[283]
+
+Matthieu further added, that "in the ardent commonalty-love there was
+more agony than amusement; in it, as in Dante's poem, the Hell was
+worked out best, and the Heaven worst. The older a maiden or a pickled
+herring was, so much the darker was the eye in both, and the eye was
+made dark by love. Every lady in one of the higher circles ought to be
+glad that she needs to retain nothing of the man's to whom she is
+chained but his portrait in the ring, as Prometheus, when Jupiter had
+once sworn to leave him soldered for thirty thousand years to Caucasus,
+wore during the whole period only a small bit of this Bastille on his
+hand in the shape of a finger-ring." Whereupon Matthieu darted out, as
+he always did after witty explosions. Victor loved the bitterest and
+most unjust satire in another's mouth, as a work of art; he forgave
+all, and continued cheerful.
+
+Joachime then said, jestingly: "If, then, no style of love is good for
+anything, as you two have proved, there is nothing left for us but to
+hate."
+
+"Surely not," said he, "your respected brother has simply not said a
+true word. Imagine to yourself, that I were the poor people's
+catechist[284] and in love. I am in love with the second daughter of
+the _pastor primarius_; her part is that of a listening-sister;[285]
+for maidens in citizenly life know not how to talk, at least they can
+do it better in hatred than in love. The poor's catechist has little
+_bel esprit_, but much _saint esprit_, much honesty, much truth, too
+much soft-heartedness, and infinite love. The catechist cannot spin out
+any gallant intrigue for several weeks or months, still less can he
+dispute the Pastor's second daughter into love, like a _roué_;--he
+holds his peace to keep up his hope, but with a heart full of eternal
+love, full of devoted wishes, trembling and silent, he follows every
+step of the loved and--loving one; but she guesses not his feelings,
+nor he hers. And then she dies.... But before she dies, comes the pale
+catechist disconsolate to the side of her dying bed, and presses her
+trembling hand ere it relaxes, and gives the cold eye one more tear of
+joy ere it stiffens, and breaks in even upon the pangs of the wrestling
+soul with the soft spring sound, 'I love thee.' When he has said it,
+she dies of the last joy, and then he loves no one on earth any more."
+...
+
+The past had come over his soul. Tears hung in his eyes, and confounded
+in a singular obscurity the image of the sick Clotilda with that of
+Joachime;--he saw and conceived a form which was not present;--he
+pressed the hand of the one that looked on him, and thought not that
+she might refer all to herself.
+
+Suddenly Matthieu entered, smiling, and his sister smiled with him, in
+order to explain everything, and said, "The court-physician has been
+taking the trouble to refute thee."
+
+Victor, suddenly chilled, replied ambiguously and bitterly: "You will
+comprehend, Herr von Schleunes, that it is easiest for me to put you to
+flight when you are not in the field."
+
+Mat transfixed him with his eyes; but Victor cast his down and repented
+his bitterness. The sister continued indifferently: "I think my brother
+is often in the condition of changing with the fashion." He received it
+with a sunny smile, and thought, as did Victor, that she alluded to his
+gallant adventures and sham-fights with women of all ranks that sit at
+the Diet. But when she had sent him off to inquire of her mother who
+was coming to the _cercle_ this evening, she said to the Medicus: "You
+do not know what I meant. We have at court a sick lady, who is the very
+incarnation of _your_ Pastor's daughter,--and my brother has not so
+much nor so little spirit as to act the poor's catechist." Victor
+started back, broke off and took his leave.
+
+Why? How so? On what account? But does not the reader perceive, then,
+that the sick lady must be Clotilda, who seeks to escape Mat's fine
+approaches within ear-shot and bow-shot of her heart? In fact, Victor
+had seen well enough that the Evangelist had been hitherto playing a
+more devoted part towards Clotilda than before her entrance into his
+Escurial and robber's castle he could carry on; but Victor had ascribed
+this politeness simply to the fact of her having there her quarters.
+But now the map of his plan lay open there: he had intentionally met a
+person who was indifferent towards him with the show of contempt
+(which, however, he finely directed more at her future small income
+than at her personal attractions), in order thereby to win her
+attention,--that next-door neighbor of love,--and afterward, by a
+sudden change to complaisance, to win something more than attention.
+"O, thou canst win nothing!" every sigh in Victor exclaimed. And yet it
+gave him pain, that this noble woman, this angel, must strike such an
+adversary with her wings. Now there were thirty things at once
+suspicious to him. Joachime's disclosure and coldness, Matthieu's
+smile, and--everything.
+
+So far this chapter, to which I have nothing more to append than some
+mature thoughts. Of course, one sees plainly, that poor Victor
+mutilates his soul to the size of every female one, as that tyrant did
+the bedfellows to the length of their bed.[286] To be sure, respect is
+the mother of love; but the daughter is often some years older than the
+mother. He takes back one hope of female worth after another. Latest of
+all, indeed, did he give up his demand or expectation of that sublime
+_Indian_ sense of eternity, which imparts to us, shadowy figures
+hanging in the magic smoke of life, an inextinguishable luminous point
+for self-consciousness, and which lifts us above more than _one_ earth;
+but as he saw that women, among all resemblances to Clotilda, acquired
+this last, and as he bethought himself that a worldly life grinds down
+all the greatness in man, as the weather gnaws away from statues and
+gravestones precisely the _relieved parts_, there wanted nothing to his
+handing over to Joachime the declaration of love which had long been
+fairly written out, nothing except, on her part, a misfortune,--a wet
+eye, a storm of the soul, a buskin. In more perspicuous words, he said
+to himself: "I wish she were a sentimental ninny and absolutely
+intolerable. Then when, some time or other, she had her eyes right
+full, and her heart too, and then, when I could not tell, for emotion,
+where my head was standing,--then I could advance and take out my heart
+and reach it to her and say, It is poor Bastian's, only keep it." It
+seems to me as if I heard him in thought softly add, "To whom else
+could I give it?"
+
+That he really had the first thought, we see from the fact that he
+inserted it in his diary, from which my correspondent draws everything,
+and which he, with the sincerity of the freest soul, made for his
+father, in order as it were to atone for his faults by protocolling
+them. His Italian lackey did hardly anything but engross it.---Did it
+not depend on the dog and his news-box, his declaration of love should
+take place this very day: I would break an arm of Joachime's,--or lay
+her in the sick-bed,--or blow out the Minister's lamp of life, or bring
+on some disaster or other in her house,----and then I would conduct my
+hero to the suffering heroine, and say: "When I have gone, kneel down
+and hand her thy heart." But in this way the chemical process of his
+love-making may last full as long as a process at law, and I am
+prepared for three quires.
+
+But here I will confess something which the reader's pride conceals:
+that he and I, at the entrance of every lady in these Dog-Post-Days,
+have made a _mis-shot_ of _salute_,--every one of them we have taken for
+the heroine of the hero,--at first Agatha,--then Clotilda,--then, when
+he enclosed his declaration of love in the watch of the Princess, said,
+"I see now beforehand through the whole business." Then we both said,
+"After all, we were right about Clotilda." Then in distress I laid hold
+on Marie, and said, "I shall not reveal anything further." At last
+it turns out to be one whom none of us had thought of (at least not
+I),--Joachime.--So it may fare with myself, when I marry....
+
+Before passing from the Post-Day to the intercalary day, the following
+additional minutes are to be passed: Clotilda put off her illegitimate
+cheeks, her _joues_[287] _de Paris_, her rouge, and seldomer exposed
+now her withering heart to the shaping of the court napkin-press. The
+Prince, who for her sake had attended as a transient hearer in the
+lecture-hall of his consort, stayed away somewhat often, and then
+called at Schleunes's: nevertheless, the Princess had magnanimity
+enough not to make our Victor atone, by the taking back of her
+gratitude, for the withdrawal of January's favor.--In Victor there was
+a long war, whether he should impart to Clotilda's brother the new
+proofs of her sisterly love:--at last,--moved by Flamin's suffering,
+impoverished heart, stung by reports and rascals and suspicion, and by
+the thought that he had been able hitherto to give so little pleasure
+to this ingenuous friend,--he told him almost everything (_except_ the
+relationship).
+
+P. S.--The undersigned testifies, by request, that the undersigned has
+completed his 24th Post-Day in due order on the last day of July, or
+Messidor. On the island of St. John's, 1793.
+
+                                     JEAN PAUL,
+
+                       _Mining-Superintendent of Scheerau_.
+
+
+                         SIXTH INTERCALARY DAY.
+
+      Concerning the Wilderness and the Promised Land of Humanity.
+
+There are vegetable men, animal men, and divine men.--
+
+When we were to be dreamed, an angel grew drowsy and fell asleep and
+dreamed. Then came _Phantasus_,[288] and swept broken meteorological,
+phenomena, things like nights, fragments of chaos, conglomerated
+plants, before him, and disappeared with them.
+
+Then came _Phobetor_, who drove herds of beasts along before him, that
+murdered and grazed as they passed, and disappeared with them.
+
+Then came _Morpheus_ and played before him with happy children, with
+crowned mothers, with shapes that kissed each other, and with fleeting
+mortals, and when the angel awoke with ecstasy, Morpheus and the human
+race and the world's history had disappeared....
+
+--At present the angel still sleeps and dreams,--we are still in his
+dream,--only _Phobetor_ is with him, and Morpheus still waits for
+Phobetor with his beasts to disappear....
+
+But let us, instead of dreaming, think and hope; and for the present
+ask: will _vegetable_ men, _animal_ men, at last be succeeded by
+_divine_ men? Does the _going_ of the world-clock betray as much design
+as the building of it, and has it a _dial-plate_ wheel and an _index
+hand_?
+
+One cannot (with a well-known philosopher) reason directly from final
+causes in _Physics_ to final causes in _History_, any more than I, in
+the individual, can deduce from the teleological (intentional)
+structure of a man a teleological biography of the same, or any more
+than, from the ingenious structure of animals, I call infer a
+continuous plan in their universal history. Nature is iron, always the
+same, and the wisdom shown in her framework is never obscured; the
+human race is free, and, like the infusorial animal, the multiform
+Vorticelle, assumes every moment, now regular, now anomalous shapes.
+Every physical disorder is only the hull of an order, every foul spring
+is the hull of a fair autumn; but are, then, our vices the buds of our
+virtues, and is the earthly fall of a continually sinking villain
+nothing but a disguised ascension of his to heaven?--And is there an
+object in the life of a Nero? Then I could just as well take back and
+reverse all and make out virtues to be the heart-leaves of disguised
+vices. But if, as many a one does, we carry the abuse of language so
+far as to reverse _moral_ height and depth, like _geometrical_,
+according to the _point of view_, as _positive_ and _negative_
+magnitudes; if, therefore, all gouty knobs, spotted fevers, and
+_lead_-[289] or _silver_-colics of the human race are nothing but a
+different kind of healthiness: then we certainly need not ask whether
+man will ever get well; in that case he could never in any possible
+maladies be anything but well.
+
+If a monk of the tenth century had shut himself up in a fit of
+melancholy, and meditated on the earth, not however on its end, but on
+its future: would not, in his dreams, the thirteenth century have been
+already a brighter one, and the eighteenth merely a glorified tenth?
+
+Our weather-prophesyings from _present_ temperature are logically
+correct and historically false, because new casualties, an earthquake,
+a comet, reverse the currents of the whole atmosphere. Can the
+above-imagined monk correctly calculate, if he does not assume such
+future magnitudes as America, Gunpowder, and Printer's ink?--A new
+religion, a new Alexander, a new disease, a new Franklin, can break,
+swallow up, dam, turn back the forest stream whose course and contents
+we propose to reduce on our parchment. There lie still four quarters of
+the globe full of enchained savage races;--their chain daily grows
+thinner,--time unlooses it;--what desolation, at least what changes,
+must they not bring about on the little _bowling-green_ of our
+cultivated countries? Nevertheless, all nations of the earth must one
+day be fused together and be purified in a common fermentation, if ever
+this atmosphere of life is to be cleared up.
+
+Can we draw from some miniature earthquakes and volcanoes, which we
+ourselves have produced with iron-filings and aquafortis, (in this
+case, types and printer's ink,) conclusions as to the Ætna eruptions,
+i. e. from the revolutions of the few cultivated peoples as to those of
+the uncultivated? Since we may assume that the human race lives as many
+thousands of years as the individual does years, may we venture from
+the sixth year to set the horoscope of youth and manhood? Add to this
+that the biography of this childish period is precisely the most
+meagre, and that awakened nations--almost all quarters of the globe are
+as yet full of sleeping ones--in _one_ year produce more historical
+material, and _consequently_ more historians, than a sleep-buried
+Africa in a century. We shall, therefore, _then_ be best able to
+prophesy from universal history, when the awaking nations shall have
+appended to it their million or two supplementary volumes.--All savage
+nations seem to have been under _one_ stamp; on the contrary, the mint
+of culture coins each one differently. The North American and the old
+German resemble each other more strongly than Germans do Germans of
+neighboring centuries. Neither the Golden Bull, nor the _Magna Charta_,
+nor the _Code Noir_, could Aristotle inlay into his forms of government
+and obedience; else he would have extended them; but are we then
+confident of foreseeing any better the future national convention in
+Mongolia, or the Decretal Letters and Extravagants of the enlightened
+Dalai-Lama, or the Recesses of the Arab Imperial Bench of Knights?
+Since Nature coins no people with _one_ mint-stamp or one hand alone,
+but with thousands at once,--hence on the German race is there a
+greater multitude of impressions than on the shield of Achilles,--how
+do we, who cannot even calculate the past, but simpler, revolutions of
+the globe, expect to look into the moral ones of its inhabitants?
+
+Of all that follows from these premises I believe the opposite,
+excepting the necessity of prophetic modesty. Scepticism, which makes
+us, instead of slow to believe, unbelieving, and instead of the _eyes_
+proposes to purge the _light_, becomes nonsense and the most fearful
+philosophical impotence and atony.
+
+Man regards his century or his half-century as the culmination of
+light, as a festal-day, to which all other centuries lead only as
+week-days. He knows only two golden ages,--the one at the beginning of
+the world, and the one at the end of it,--by which he understands only
+his own; he finds history to be like great woods, in the middle of
+which are silence, night-birds, and birds of prey, and whose borders
+only are filled with light and song.--Certainly all things serve me;
+but I too serve all. As Nature, who in her eternity knows no loss of
+time, in her inexhaustibleness no loss of power, has no other law of
+frugality assigned her than that of prodigality,--as she, with _eggs_
+and _seed-corns_, ministers equally well to _nourishment_ and to
+_propagation_,[290] and with an undeveloped germ-world sustains half a
+developed one,--as her way leads over no smooth bowling-alley, but over
+alps and seas;--our little heart must needs misunderstand her, whether
+in its hopes or in its fears; it must, as it becomes enlightened,
+reciprocally interchange _morning_ and _evening red_; it must, in
+its contentment, now regard after-summer as _spring_, and now
+_after-winter_ as _autumn_. _Moral_ revolutions mislead us more than
+_physical_, because the former according to their nature occupy a
+_greater_ play-room and space of time than the latter,--and yet the
+Dark Ages are nothing but a dipping into the shadow of _Saturn_, or an
+eclipse of the sun of short duration. A man who should be six thousand
+years old, would say to the six creation-days of the world's history,
+They are very good.
+
+But one should never set _moral_ and _physical_ revolutions and
+developments too near to each other. All Nature has no other motions
+than _former_ ones; the circle is her path, she has no other years than
+Platonic,--but man alone is _changeable_, and the straight line or the
+zigzag describes his course. A sun has its eclipses as well as the
+moon, has its bloom and decay like a flower, but also its
+_palingenesia_ and renovation. But there lies in the human race the
+necessity of an everlasting mutation; yet here there are only
+_ascending_ and _descending_ signs, no culmination; they do not
+necessarily draw one another after them, as in physics, and have no
+extreme limit. No people, no period returns; in physics, all must come
+back again. It is only accidental, not necessary, that nations, at a
+certain age and stage of progress, and on a certain rotten round of the
+ladder, fall again,--one only confounds the _last_ step, from which
+nations fall, with the _highest_; the Romans, with whom not single
+rounds, but the whole ladder broke, were not necessitated to sink by a
+culture which does not equal even our own.[291] Nations have no age, or
+old age with them often precedes youth. Even with individuals the
+crab's-walk of the mind in old age is only accidental; still less has
+virtue in them a summer-solstice. Humanity has then the capacity of an
+endless improvement; but has it the hope also?--
+
+The disturbance of the _equipoise_ of his own faculties makes the
+individual man miserable; the _inequality_ of citizens, the
+_inequality_ of nations, makes the earth miserable; just as lightnings
+arise from the neighborhood of the ebb and flow of the ether, and all
+storms from unequal distributions of air. But fortunately it lies in
+the nature of mountains to fill the valleys.
+
+Not inequality of goods,--for the majority of voices and fists on the
+part of the poor balances in the scale the power of the rich,--but
+inequality of culture, does most to create and distribute the political
+fly-presses and forcing-pumps. The _Lex agraria_ in the fields of
+science passes over at last into the physical fields. Since the tree of
+knowledge has thrust out its branches from the school windows of
+philosophy and the church windows of the priesthood into the common
+garden, all nations have become stronger.--Unequal cultivation chains
+the West Indies to the feet of Europe, Helots to Spartans, and the iron
+hollow-head[292] with the trigger on the negro's tongue presupposes a
+hollow-head of another kind.
+
+With such a frightful disparity among nations in power, wealth,
+culture, only a universal rush of storms from all points of the compass
+can terminate in a lasting calm. A perpetual balance of Europe
+presuppose a balance of the four remaining parts of the world, which
+one may, deducting small librations, promise our globe. In future men
+will quite as little discover a salvage as an island. One people must
+draw another out of pits blundering years. A more equal culture will
+conclude commercial treaties with more equal advantages. The longest
+rainy months of humanity--which always fell upon the time of national
+transplantations, just as one always sets out flowers on cloudy
+days--have spent themselves.
+
+One spectre still remains from the midnight, which reaches far into the
+hours of light,--War. But the claws and bill of the armorial eagle grow
+on, till, like the boar's tusks, they crook up and make themselves
+useless. As it was calculated in regard to Vesuvius, that it contained
+material for only forty-three eruptions more,--so might one also reckon
+the number of future wars. This long tempest, which already for six
+thousand years has been standing over our planet, will continue to
+storm till clouds and earth have charged each other full with an
+_equal_ measure of electric matter.
+
+_All_ nations become illuminated only in joint fermentation; and the
+precipitate is blood and dead men's bones. Were the earth narrowed
+to one half of its size, then would the time of its moral--and
+physical--development be shortened one half.
+
+With wars the strongest drag-chains of the sciences are cut off. Once
+war-machines were the sowing-machines of new knowledges, while they
+crushed old harvests; now it is the press which scatters the pollen
+more widely and gently. Instead of an Alexander, Greece would need now
+to send to Asia nothing but a--compositor; the conqueror grafts, the
+author sows.
+
+It is a characteristic of enlightenment that, although it still leaves
+to individuals the possibility of the illusion and weakening of vice,
+nevertheless it releases nations from company-vices and national
+deceptions,--e. g. from wrecking, piracy. The best and worst deeds we
+do in company; war is an example. The slave-trade must in our days,
+unless indeed the trade in subjects begins, come to an end.[293]
+
+The highest and steepest thrones stand, like the highest mountains, in
+the warmest lands. The political mountains, like the physical, daily
+grow lower (especially when they spout fire), and must at last be with
+the valleys in a common plain.
+
+From all this follows:--
+
+There comes one day a golden age, which every wise and virtuous man
+even now enjoys, and when men will find it easier to live well because
+they will find it easier to live indeed,--when men will have, not more
+pleasure (for this honey they draw from every flower and leaf-louse),
+but more virtue,--when the people Will take part in thinking, and the
+thinker--in working,[294] in order that he may save himself the need of
+Helots,--when military and judicial murder shall be condemned, and only
+occasionally cannon-balls shall be turned up with the plough. When that
+time comes, then will a preponderance of good no more stop the machine
+by frictions. When it comes, then will the necessity no longer lie in
+human nature of degenerating again and again breeding tempests (for
+heretofore the noble element has merely kept up a flying fight with the
+overpowering evil), just as, according to Forster, even on the hot
+island of St. Helena[295] there are no storms.
+
+When this festal day comes, then will our children's children be--no
+more. We stand now in the evening and see at the close of our dark day
+the sun go down with a red-hot glory, and promise us behind the last
+cloud the still, serene sabbath-day of humanity; but our posterity have
+yet to travel through a night full of wind, and through a cloud full of
+poison, till at last over a happier earth an eternal morning-wind full
+of blossom-spirits, moving on before the sun, expelling all clouds,
+shall breathe on men without a sigh. Astronomy promises the earth an
+eternal vernal equinox;[296] and history promises it a higher one;
+perhaps the two eternal springs may coincide.--
+
+Since man disappears among men, we downcast ones must erect ourselves
+before humanity. When I think of the Greeks, I see that our hopes move
+faster than fate.--As one travels by night with lights over the icy
+Alps, in order not to be terrified at the abysses and at the long road,
+so does fate spread night around us, and hands us only torches for the
+way immediately before us, that we may not worry ourselves about the
+chasms of the future, and the distance of the goal.--There were
+centuries when humanity was led with bandaged eyes--from one prison to
+another;--there were other centuries when spectres rattled and
+overturned all night long, and in the morning nothing was disturbed;
+there can be no other centuries except those in which individuals die,
+but nations rise, and in which nations decay, but mankind rises: when
+mankind itself sinks and falls to ruins, and ends with the scattering
+of the globe in a dust-cloud ... what shall console us?--
+
+A veiled eye behind the bounds of time, an infinite heart beyond
+the world. There is a higher order of things than we can
+demonstrate,--there is a Providence in the world's history and in every
+one's life which reason has the boldness to deny, and which the heart
+has the boldness to believe;--there must be a Providence, which,
+according to other rules than we have hitherto assumed, links this
+confused earth as daughter-land to a higher city of God,--there must be
+a God, a Virtue, and an Eternity.
+
+
+
+                               FOOTNOTES:
+
+[Footnote 1: His collected works, Vol. III. p. 68.]
+
+[Footnote 2: In Faust,--Scene of the Easter Holidays.--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 3: A Jew once separated from his wife when she appeared with
+bare arms; but it is difficult to ascribe the present frequent divorces
+in Paris to that cause.]
+
+[Footnote 4: It is amusing to hear Jean Paul call it so, but the German
+diminutive, "Werk_lein_," also expresses attachment to the thing in
+question. Thus children say _Väter-chen_, "Little Papa; Daddy."--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 5: Descriptive of Venus, or written under her
+influence.--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 6: The stick on which a painter rests his arm.--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 7: Similarity of the parts to the whole.--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 8: _Fliegende Blätter_.--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 9: Of course, "Forgive us our debts."--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 10: A city of the Tauric Chersonesus, the modern
+Crimea.--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 11: A Jesuit astronomer, A. D. 1598-1671, who named the
+moon's spots Tycho, Plato, Hercules, St. Catharine, &c.--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 12: He alludes to the chimney-sweeper of his perukes.]
+
+[Footnote 13: The name the Germans give to Death. _Hein_ would seem to
+mean Hal.--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 14: Probably peas, which the children, as now, blew through
+long tubes with great force.--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 15: In Upper Alsace, where every three years only the best
+youth receives the crown and medal, and the jurisdiction of the
+pastures.]
+
+[Footnote 16: A sort of fire-ball, which, as it goes, emits smoke to
+blind the enemy.--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 17: Small balls invented by him to put into a horse's ear,
+and act as a spur.--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 18: An island of the Malay Archipelago, wooded, volcanic, and
+spicy.--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 19: It is notorious how little I know of mining operations;
+I therefore thought I had reason to apply to my superiors for a
+spur which might stimulate me to do something in such a weighty
+science,--and such a spur is certainly the office of mining-superintendent.]
+
+[Footnote 20:  Except the two emperors Silluck and Athnac, and the four
+kings Sgolta, Sakeph-Katon, etc., I never had intercourse with any; and
+that only as upper-class scholar, because we jurists, with the Devil's
+help, had to learn Hebrew, wherein just the above-mentioned six
+potentates appear as the names of the accents on words. Perhaps,
+however, my correspondent means the great, acute, crowned accents of
+nations. [_Sakeph-Katon_ is the only one the translator has not been
+able to verify of these interesting names. _Kauton_ is given among the
+Hebrew accents, but not Sakeph.--Tr.]]
+
+[Footnote 21: Justus Möser, author of the "Patriotic Fantasies," one of
+Germany's dearest memories, in many respects a Franklin.--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 22: Lane of the mine.--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 23: Ass's Post.--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 24: Instrument for taking the distance of a star north or
+south from the equator.--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 25: Instrument for reckoning the deviation of the hour-circle
+from the meridian.--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 26: Jean Paul seems to indulge here in an hexameter himself:
+"Welches sie auch mehr bedarf, als der harmonische Gessner."--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 27: _Bewähren_ and _bewahren_ are the two German words.--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 28: E. g. their honor suffers, if their carriage does not
+pass ahead of another carriage of rank.]
+
+[Footnote 29: Such letters as David sent by Uriah to Joab. (See 2
+Samuel xi. 14, 15.)--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 30: _Kleeblatt_ (_trefoil_) in the German.--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 31: After an operation for the cataract, the sensitive retina
+represents everything magnified.]
+
+[Footnote 32: A piece of charred bone or horn used by natives of the
+East to absorb the blood from wounds made by the bite of a snake. See
+Tennent's Natural History of Ceylon, p. 312.--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 33: The _Psalter_ in the ox's stomach is the _Blättermagen_
+(lit. _leaf-stomach_), the third stomach of ruminant animals, the
+tripe. So we speak of the _leaves_ of fat.--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 34:
+           "My spirit flew in feathers then,
+              That is so heavy now."--Hood.]
+
+[Footnote 35: Joint-reporter.--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 36: A kind that heads in the form of a capuchin's hood.--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 37: When one's five numbers are all drawn in their order, it
+is a quinterne.--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 38: _Aufgebunden_ may mean either tied up or untied.--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 39: Burlesque and serious operas.--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 40: Or, figure in history.--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 41: The ideal of the beautiful.]
+
+[Footnote 42: As the Rabbins believe, according to Eisenmenger's
+Judaism, Part II. 7.]
+
+[Footnote 43: _Usance_ means the month's grace allowed for the
+payment of a bill of exchange; double usance, of course, allows two
+months.--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 44: Petrarch, like German reviewers, avoided nightingales,
+and sought frogs.]
+
+[Footnote 45: "Schatten_riss_ oder Schatten_schnitt_" is the
+German.--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 46: The literal rendering would be "_cut out of the eyes_,
+or, rather, out of the face." The phrase in Italics is a German idiom
+for expressing an exact likeness.--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 47: The readers of Boswell's Johnson will remember that
+interesting native of the South-Sea Islands.--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 48: Matthieu being the French for _Matthew_.--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 49: _Zeusel_ was a court-apothecary, mentioned on page 7, of
+whom we shall hear more.--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 50: An Italian word, meaning literally gallant, applied to
+those Platonic lovers who, with the connivance of the husbands,
+attended married ladies, and were everywhere seen in confidential chat
+with them.--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 51: La Mettrie was a noted medical man and materialist in his
+day, b. 1709.--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 52: Remember the beautiful passage in Bede's History, where
+the Northumbrian prince compares man's life to the flight of the
+swallow through the lighted hall out of darkness into darkness.--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 53: An allusion, perhaps, to the legend, so lovely to the
+fancy, that a crucifix in Naples, when Alphonso was besieged there, in
+1439, bowed its head before a cannon-ball, which consequently took off
+only the crown of thorns!--_Voyage d'un François_, Tom. VI. p. 303.]
+
+[Footnote 54: This clover insures him who accidentally finds it against
+future deception. Hitherto it has been found only by--princes and
+philosophers.]
+
+[Footnote 55: _Matz_, in German, means also both a starling and a
+blockhead.--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 56:  Elegant paper for the upper classes.--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 57: In the original, "hang hares' tails on us," i. e. "make
+fools of us."--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 58: Literally, spit-devils,--a sort of firework.--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 59: I. e. Birthday-festival.--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 60: Not one of the commonplace souls that jog steadily on
+like the hexameter.--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 61: This was a common practice of our old New England Puritan
+parsons.--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 62: Disciples of Kennicott, the well-known English verifier
+of the general accuracy of the Sacred Text.--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 63: A trap extemporized by setting up a heavy book obliquely,
+with one end resting on a stick, and the cheese attached.--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 64: Christina, daughter of Charles XII., abdicated in May,
+1654, at the age of twenty-eight.--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 65: A famous and popular old volume delineating the world of
+nature and life in pictures, with numbers referring to the different
+parts of each picture.--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 66: That is, threw into them, as into scrap-baskets, the bits
+of paper on which he had written his thoughts.--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 67: Allusion to Ezekiel.--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 68: Literally, _God's-box_.--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 69: _Gesprungen_ seems to mean both _vibrated_ and
+_snapped_.]
+
+[Footnote 70: _Haupt_- und _Staat-actionen_, the phrase used by Faust in
+his first dialogue with Wagner. Schlegel says the title was affixed to
+dramas designed for marionettes when they treated heroic and historical
+subjects.--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 71: Epiglottis.--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 72: What has come into the world feet foremost.--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 73: Basselisse (French).--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 74: _Ladenhüter_ (shop-keeper) is the German word,
+meaning goods that keep the store as a sick man keeps his
+bed,--_shop-ridden_.--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 75: A court that decided matters in dispute among the
+sovereigns of the German Confederation.--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 76: A selection of choice learning.--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 77: Midsummer-day.--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 78: A name given by the Greeks to the Hebrew word Jehovah,
+which consists, in the original, of _four letters_.--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 79: The thumb of a hanged thief was considered as a
+lucky-bone.--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 80: Full.--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 81: Or it _went a begging_, as we say.--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 82: "Rara avis."--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 83: See page 67.--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 84: It is precisely the possession of _heterogeneous_
+faculties in _similar_ degree that makes one inconsequent and
+inconsistent; men with one predominant faculty act by it with more
+equableness. In despotisms there is more quiet than in republics; at
+the hot equator there is a more even rate of the barometer than in the
+zones of four seasons.]
+
+[Footnote 85: One of Burns's words.--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 86: The bust of the Vatican Apollo, by which he would learn
+to model no other figure than his own.]
+
+[Footnote 87: There is something in the use and application of the word
+_Wissenschaft_ which requires for its appreciation an understanding of
+the peculiar genius of the German mind.--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 88: Bacon's remark will recur to the reader.--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 89: A solar system is only a dotted profile of the genius of
+the world, but a human eye is his miniature. The _mechanics_ of the
+bodies of the universe the mathematical masters of reckoning may
+calculate, but the _dioptrics_ of the eye, growing bright amidst
+nothing but dull moistures, transcends our algebraic audit-offices,
+which therefore cannot reckon away from the imitated eyes (the glasses)
+the space of diffusion and the narrow field.]
+
+[Footnote 90: Jean Paul would probably have said Rubicon if he had not
+been going to say it elsewhere,--e. g. p. 199.]
+
+[Footnote 91: Hieronym. cont. Jov. L 2.]
+
+[Footnote 92: _Hof_ means in German _both_ court--and yard.--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 93: Bayle's Dictionary, Art. _François d'Assise_, Note C.]
+
+[Footnote 94: A half-way house.--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 95: Jean Paul probably means, that such noble hearts as
+Victor's Le Baut might shut up into silence, but could not with his
+Chamberlain's master-key open and find out their secrets.--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 96: In a later edition Jean Paul substitutes for _Schein-tod_
+(sham death) a half French word, _Postiche-tod_ (supposititious
+death).--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 97: "On whose board he had a _stone_," literally,--a proverb
+for being in one's good graces.--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 98: There is an inconsistency in date of month here with p.
+135.--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 99: The dog as well as myself know what island that is, but
+no more.]
+
+[Footnote 100: "Burning-chambers," a name originally given to the place
+for judging criminals of state belonging to illustrious families. The
+room was lined with black, and lighted with flambeaux. Originated with
+Francis I. in 1535, in his persecution of heretics.--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 101: Plebeian.--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 102: One at hearing from Emanuel, the other at seeing
+Clotilda.--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 103: Red drops fall from butterflies in their last
+transformation, which they used to call bloody rain.]
+
+[Footnote 104: When one looks a long time into the blue of heaven, it
+begins to undulate, and these waves in the air one imagines in
+childhood to be angels at play.]
+
+[Footnote 105: This monologue is a fragment from an earlier dark hour,
+such as every heart of sensibility once suffers.]
+
+[Footnote 106: _Noth-münzen_ means originally coin containing alloy,
+struck off in hard times.--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 107: The Hebrew language has but three vowels
+("vowel-points") which, from the assistance they gave in enunciating a
+vast variety of words, were called _matres lectionis_, or mothers of
+the reading.--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 108: I. e. bowing so low.--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 109: Herkommen, as a common noun, means _tradition_ or
+_custom_.--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 110: An infusorial or minute animal, called in natural
+history _rotifera_ (wheel-bearer).--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 111: _Famulus_ is the Latin name in the German. Wagner was
+one in Faust.--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 112: So called in allusion to the _shaking_ they were giving
+it.--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 113: _Kopfstück_ (lit. _head-piece_), a coin bearing the head
+of the regent.--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 114: The billiard-pockets (like the contribution-bags) used
+to have bells to them.--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 115: Who felt himself to be "a child picking up pebbles on
+the shore of the great ocean of truth."--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 116: A conventual term,--a six.--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 117: God bless you!--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 118: Many thanks!--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 119: Of course a parody on "Verbum sat _sapienti_,"--"A word
+for the _fool_," &c.--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 120: Or reading-_easel_ (the latter word seeming to be an
+English corruption of the German _Esel_, ass),--any book-rest.
+_Maler-esel_ means a painter's easel.--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 121: When they occur in actual life.--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 122: Eclectic or miscellaneous science, not confined to one
+department.--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 123: A King of France once sent a vassal _illum baculum,
+quo se sustentabat, in symbolum traditionis_. (Du Fresne's
+Glossary.) So far as I know, there has never been made a good and
+serviceable--abridgment of this _glossarium_ for ladies.]
+
+[Footnote 124: Just as there are _listening sisters_ (_les Tourières_
+or _S[oe]urs écoutés_) who go with the nuns into the conversing room,
+to overhear their talk.]
+
+[Footnote 125: Or absentee-curates.--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 126: Literally _looker-on_,--one admitted to behold the
+secret ceremonies in the Eleusinian mysteries.--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 127: To know how to obey is a glory equal to that of
+commanding.--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 128: "Slaves are accounted nobodies."--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 129: In real life.--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 130: _To make one a queue_ is a proverb for imposing on him
+(like pinning a rag to one's coat-tail?).--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 131: _Diet_ (from _dies_) _implies_ the idea of _day_,
+but the German "Reichs_tag_" makes the pun more palpable in the
+original.--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 132: A lady's watch, as is well known, shaped like a heart,
+provided on the back with a dial-gnomon and magnetic needle. The latter
+points out to the ladies (who hate _cold_) the _south_ also, in fact,
+and the sun-dial-index serves as a moon-dial-index.]
+
+[Footnote 133: "Rome concealed the name of her god, and she was wrong;
+I conceal the name of my goddess, and I am right."]
+
+[Footnote 134: Or _Tensa_, the carriage on which they bore the images
+of the gods in the Circensian games.--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 135: A shrine.--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 136: Properly, a pitcher, or urn.--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 137: Here Jean Paul inserts, after "in die Federn," "(_nicht
+in die Feder_),"--i. e. _not into the pen_ (a German phrase for
+_dictating_). The pun could not be kept.--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 138: A watch that tells only the hours.--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 139: The reference is to Laurence Sterne, and the snuff-box
+he mentions in the early part of the "Sentimental Journey," as given
+him by a monk, and carried ever after as an amulet.--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 140: Ignatius's-plate means probably a breastplate, or
+medallion, consecrated by Ignatius Loyola.--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 141: I. e. to throw light upon it.--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 142: Like John Buncle, who went round, as was said, to
+propagate his faith and his species.--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 143: A fourth reason would be, that now, every time be loves
+another than Clotilda, he seems to earn a new claim to the gratitude of
+his friend.]
+
+[Footnote 144: Italian for everybody.--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 145: May there be a sly allusion--here to the possibility of
+their putting their hair up in papers torn from the leaves of Jean
+Paul's works?--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 146: Schickaneder was the Director of a Theatre in Vienna in
+the time of Mozart, and wrote the text for the _Magic Flute_.--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 147: A wreath given in derision to brides who before marriage
+had been unchaste.--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 148: And then are ready to verify the proverb: _Curses, like
+chickens, come home to roost_.--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 149: Musical interval.--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 150: Old scholastic term for a _past_ eternity, in
+contradiction to a coming eternity, _a parte post_.--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 151: The Invisible Lodge; a Biography in Two Parts. [A work
+of Jean Paul's.--Tr.]]
+
+[Footnote 152: Such was the name of his Lordship's wife, who in her
+twenty-third year sank to rest in the eternal arms.]
+
+[Footnote 153: In the original, _Semper-freie_ (always free,--eligible
+to office).--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 154: Hence too it was, that, so long as Victor was at the
+Parsonage, she avoided Flamin's society.]
+
+[Footnote 155: The reader will remember this same remark, in so many
+words, on p. 223.--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 156: It turned out more fortunately, and without loss of the
+stones, and I had the satisfaction to find that no woman who read the
+first edition of this work has, in her womanlike _castling_ or
+_rotation in office_, at all interchanged the two _thats_. Nay, even
+the female readers of the second edition have remained consistent with
+themselves.]
+
+[Footnote 157: Demoralization.--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 158: The German word _kleiden_; it has a corresponding double
+meaning of _dressing_, and also of _suiting_.--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 159: Science,--Mathematics.--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 160: Step-measurers.--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 161:  Men entitled to lecture in three branches.--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 162: Or disciple of the indifferential calculus.--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 163: Or, in prose, fiery water-wheel.--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 164:
+           "And what if all of animated nature
+            Be but organic harps diversely framed,
+            That tremble into thought, as o'er them sweeps,
+            Plastic and vast, one intellectual breeze,
+            At once the soul of each and God of all?"
+                                     Coleridge, _The Æolian Harp_.]
+
+[Footnote 165: _Fromm_ is the German. It is time the words _religious_
+and _pious_ were redeemed from the base uses of sectarianism and
+bigotry.--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 166: _Enlightenment_ in an _empty_ heart is mere memory-work,
+let it strain the faculty of acumen ever so much. Most men of our day
+resemble the new houses in Potsdam, in which (according to Reichard)
+Frederick the Second caused _lights_ to be placed at night, that every
+one, including Reichard himself, might think they were--_occupied_.]
+
+[Footnote 167: Most men have, perhaps, only an equal number of good
+_thoughts_ and _actions_; but it is still an open question how long the
+virtuous man may interrupt his good thoughts (which have less need than
+good actions of the outer world) by indifferent ones.]
+
+[Footnote 168: For the noblest leans just the most on loving souls, or
+at least on his ideals of them, with which, however, he is only in so
+far satisfied as he regards them as pledges of future prototypes. I do
+not except either the Stoic (that Epicurean God) or the Mystic: both
+love in the Creator only the sum total of his creatures; we the former
+in the latter.]
+
+[Footnote 169: The German _Vorwand_ means literally front wall (not far
+from the etymological meaning of _pretext_); so that there may be a
+figurative element here beyond what appears to the casual reader.--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 170: The reader of this letter will readily presuppose that
+Clotilda, as she does not know into whose hands it may fall,--in fact,
+it is actually in ours,--will have to hurry over her relations and
+mysteries (e. g. respecting Flamin, Victor, &c.) with an obscurity
+which to her proper reader was clear enough.]
+
+[Footnote 171: Let the reader remember that she is master of as much of
+this biography as he, if not more.]
+
+[Footnote 172: She means Giulia, from whose corpse grief had hurried
+her away.]
+
+[Footnote 173:
+
+           "Now spring returns, but not to me returns
+            The vernal joy my better years have known," &c.
+                                                    Michael Bruce.]
+
+[Footnote 174: "Fly not from me, because I am always encompassed by a
+great shadow, which increases till at last it shall wall me up."]
+
+[Footnote 175: Every seven years of human life.--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 176:
+
+           "Or had it drizzled _needle-points of ice_
+            Upon a feverish head made suddenly bald."
+
+                                            Coleridge's _Remorse_.]
+
+[Footnote 177: As the spots in the moon are fields of flowers and
+plants.]
+
+[Footnote 178: Here ended (in the original) the first volume.--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 179: So called, as it was made to answer for both bed and
+board. See the next sentence but one.--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 180: The rudiments of printing.--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 181: He is indignant, it is true, only at the _typographical_
+history of learned works, and despises only the anxious search after
+the birthdays, &c., of deceased and stupid books in the midst of a
+world full of wonders; but here, too, he must needs consider that
+brains which can let nothing _press_ upon them more than operations of
+the _press_ still do better this little something, which saves and
+accumulates most for the better ones, than nothing at all, or anything
+beyond their ability.]
+
+[Footnote 182: A name given to screens used for partitions.--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 183: A well-known good writer on the eyes.]
+
+[Footnote 184: Or crystalline lens?--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 185: Glands in the eyelids, discovered by Meibom in
+1673.--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 186: A glandule at the corner of the eye, which secretes
+moisture.--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 187: Honeymoon. One of Jean Paul's variations on the
+phrase.--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 188: The Germans are peculiarly rich in synonymes for the
+honeymoon. The word used here is _Flitterwochen_ (Spangle-weeks).--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 189: Moldavian or Wallachian governor.--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 190: Some of the German written letters are like the Greek.
+_Alphabet_ (at the end of the sentence) is a printer's term for 23
+sheets.--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 191: The Fetzpopel, or _ragged ninny_, was a sort of
+scarecrow or bugbear.--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 192: A fistful.--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 193: An Indian moss used for the gout.--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 194: An allusion to a scandalous Scotch imposture of
+1780.--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 195: Sledges for riding astraddle.--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 196: The Britons found out that whalebone shavings made the
+softest kind of bed.]
+
+[Footnote 197: The English of this seems to be:--
+
+     "Turkey rhubarb powdered.
+      Starred anise-seed.
+      Fennel   do.
+      Peel of green orange.
+      Carbonate of potash,--equal parts,--1 drachm.
+      Leaves of Alexandrian senna without stalks,--2 drachms.
+      Half an ounce of white sugar."
+
+And the final direction may read, "Of which let him take a mixture,
+finely pulverized, given in sufficient quantity to produce ejection.
+Mark [i. e. on the paper], Wind-powders," &c.--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 198: The name given to the halo about the head, when one is
+electrized.]
+
+[Footnote 199: An allusion, perhaps, to the pasteboard images carried
+about on the heads of Italian peddlers, in which the loose-hung head
+bobs right and left to the spectators.--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 200: The German expression for all this is too elliptical to
+be literally rendered. It is simply "Meinetwegen!" (For all me!)--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 201: Fancy-man.--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 202: Their good works are good words.--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 203: The horse referred to on page 91.--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 204: That is, he would be, when this letter arrived, for he
+was going to carry it.--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 205: Culpepper never did him the pleasure, for which he had
+so often begged him, of prescribing for the Prince a clyster, which
+then the apothecary himself would have administered, in order just for
+once to _get at_ the ruler, and transform _his_ weak side into his own
+sunny side.]
+
+[Footnote 206: When those twins chipped the shell of Leda's egg, out of
+which they were born.--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 207: Literally, "Knapsack."--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 208: French for clyster.--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 209: A Greek jurist, compared by Gibbon to Bacon, of great
+influence in the first half of the sixth century,--dishonest, but
+able.--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 210: The red-deer, and the wild-boar, bear, badger, &c.--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 211: i. e. about two kreutzers.--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 212: Entity.--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 213: "_Gesegnete Mahlzeit_" is the familiar phrase Richter
+uses; it was formerly common, at the close of dinner, to shake hands
+and wish "a blessing on the meal."--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 214:
+
+           "Hast thou a friend, take care to keep him,
+            And often to his threshold wend:
+            Briers and thorns o'ergrow the path
+            On which a man neglects to walk."--_Old Saying_.
+
+                                                            Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 215: Little Britain.--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 216: He with the long shoes, in his "Education of a Young
+Prince, 1705."]
+
+[Footnote 217: Thus did merely the first edition, in 1797, speak of the
+Viennese; a third, improved one, in 1819, acknowledges also an improved
+edition of them, although it retains lively _shadows_ of their former
+times.]
+
+[Footnote 218: A coarse writer no longer known.--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 219: Author of the Burlesque Virgil.--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 220: The author appears to have had in his mind a
+reminiscence of a passage in Bürger's "Lenore":--
+
+           "Like croak of frogs in marshy plain,
+            Swelled on the breeze that dismal strain," &c.--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 221: Sacred musical composition of a stylish character.--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 222: The Jewish name for Sabbath in the Middle Ages. See
+Auerbach's Spinoza.--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 223: Latin for ruins, fragments of old buildings, &c.--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 224: "He toucheth the hills, and they smoke."--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 225: December is most favorable to astronomical
+observations.]
+
+[Footnote 226: A musical direction: Go back to the sign; Begin
+again.--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 227: The German word is _Kälte_, which explains the
+incongruity of our English heading.--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 228: A word copied exactly from the German, and well enough
+justified by the analogy of _rookery_, for instance.--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 229: See that noble passage of Milton, beginning
+
+     "I cannot praise a fugitive and cloistered virtue."--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 230: I have wholly recast the letter N, because in the first
+edition I unfortunately had a good idea, which, without recollecting
+its first publication, I gave the world a second time, as a learned
+thief of my own property, in the commentary on the woodcuts. [Probably
+the ones illustrating the Ten Commandments, in the _Campaner Thal_,
+Jean Paul's work on Immortality.--Tr.]]
+
+[Footnote 231: The royal band (of twenty-four).--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 232: A freethinker and Freemason, in the latter half of the
+eighteenth century imprisoned, for a certain comedy, in Magdeburg
+fortress.--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 233: The highway.--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 234: As an example, we have now the First Principle of
+Morals, and that of the Forms of Government.]
+
+[Footnote 235: Self-government.--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 236: See his _Am[oe]n. Acad_., the treatise on the habitable
+globe.]
+
+[Footnote 237: The hysterical ball, i. e. the hysteric morbid feeling,
+as if a ball were rolling up into the throat.]
+
+[Footnote 238: Used here by Jean Paul evidently, with figurative
+freedom, for a Russian swing, but meaning originally a _chariot-race_
+(afterward tournament), and derived from _currus solis_ (chariot of the
+sun).--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 239: Conjurer's jargon.--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 240: "The _Litones_ were slaves among the old Saxons, who
+still possessed a third of their property, and could make contracts for
+it." _Flegeljahre_, No. 8.--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 241: An instrument for determining the blueness of the sky.]
+
+[Footnote 242: French for a male flirt.--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 243: Differing laws.--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 244: Axiom in law; named from Brocard, a Bishop of Worms, who
+made a collection of canons called "Brocardica Juris."--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 245: Proculus and Sabinus were the founders of two rival
+schools of jurisprudence in Rome (Proculians and Sabinians) in the
+first century of our era.--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 246: A term from the Pandects of Justinian, meaning
+liabilities to burdens or duties.--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 247: Alluding to the consolidating of stocks, debts,
+&c.--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 248: An Italian astronomer and anatomist, born in 1602.--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 249: Faust (meaning both fist and the Faust of story) is the
+word in the original.--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 250: Or journey.--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 251: There is a play on words in the original, _Hof_ meaning
+_court_, and also, when applied to the sun or moon, a _circle_ round
+the luminary.--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 252: The original has a slight pun; _über die Tafel_ meaning
+both _on the subject_ of the table and _during_ the table (or
+dinner).--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 253: A name given to different groups of delicate muscles in
+certain sensitive parts of the human body.--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 254:
+           "But where of ye, O tempests, is the goal!
+            Are ye like those within the human breast,
+            Or do ye find, like eagles, some high nest?"
+                                                  _Childe Harold_.]
+
+[Footnote 255: The snake-stone sucks at the wound till it has sucked
+out all the poison.]
+
+[Footnote 256: In a nutshell.--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 257: The conservative or court party in the French Revolution
+were called the _noirs_ (blacks), from the fact of the emigrant nobles
+wearing black velvet. The _Ensragés_ was the name of a radical
+club.--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 258: Literally, the game of _man_ (_ombre_, Spanish).--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 259: Joachime, Clotilda, Victor, and the Devil.]
+
+[Footnote 260: _Mort_ (French) in the original.--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 261: Manager of the game.--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 262: Or face-card.--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 263: No pun in the original.--Tr.]
+[Footnote 264: A Parisian anatomiste (b. 1719) persecuted by the
+profession to London, where she exhibited her wax-skeleton with
+success.--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 265: Described on pages 127-134.--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 266: Entertainments for the gods, at which their images
+were laid on couches (_lecti_), and food was served up to them in
+public.--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 267: _Panist_ from the Latin _panis_,--an allusion to an old
+class of charity scholars. It might be rendered, _loafer_.--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 268: Alluding to the long attempts in Germany to fuse the
+Calvinistie and Lutheran Churches.--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 269: _Musicus_ here, not _musicant_, which latter means the
+more common performer, fiddler, or whatever else.--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 270: Father confessor.--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 271: Plutarch mentions how vain Pompey's cavaliers were of
+their personal appearance, and that Cæsar accordingly directed his
+soldiers to aim at their faces; "for Cæsar hoped that those young
+cavaliers who had not been used to wars and wounds, and who set
+a great value on their beauty, would avoid above all things a stroke
+in that part, and immediately give way, as well on account of the
+present danger as the future deformity. The event answered his
+expectation."--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 272: To save the external decencies of virtue.--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 273: I. e., O Clarissa! behold your Lovelace; let us skip the
+first four volumes, and, like the makers of Epics, begin with the
+rest!]
+
+[Footnote 274: A kind of fire-alarm.--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 275: These terms are adopted as the shortest correspondents
+of the German _bürgerlich_ and _stiftfähig_.--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 276: He mistakes; Leibnitz only said, everything difficult
+was light to him, and everything light difficult.]
+
+[Footnote 277: As the old fellow who carried his pipe in his boot, when
+his leg was shot off at the battle of Prague, grabbed at his pipe first
+and then at his leg. (See Old Song.)--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 278: "Colors produced on ores by the action of the
+air."--Adler.]
+
+[Footnote 279: _Viel-Liebe_ is Jean Paul's word, to match which, after
+the analogy of Polygamy (marriage to many), we might coin the word
+_Polyagapy_ (love to many).--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 280: Instead of _malade imaginaire_, an imaginary invalid,
+she was an imaginary _convalescent_.--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 281: _Adjuvans_ is the ingredient which strengthens the
+powers of the main ingredients; _constituens_ is what gives the
+medicine the form of pill, electuary or mixture.]
+
+[Footnote 282: One weeps, one cries, one sighs, one lies, one raves,
+one kills, one dies,--in fine, one gives himself to all the devils, in
+order to have his angel.--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 283: As we say _pea-soup_, _vermicelli-soup_.]
+
+[Footnote 284: Referring to the one whose marriage to the Senior
+Parson's daughter Victor witnessed that night from his window.--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 285: See note to page 194.--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 286: Of course, Procrustes.--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 287: Cheeks.--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 288: The God of sleep was attended by three beings:
+_Phantasus_, who could change himself only into lifeless things;
+_Phobetor_, who could assume and conjure up all animal forms; and
+_Moropheus_, who could, all human forms. Metamorph. Lib. II. Fab. 10.]
+
+[Footnote 289: Painter's colics.--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 290: "Seed to the sower and bread to the eater."
+(Isaiah.)--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 291: Nor yet by a luxury, whose magnitude one exaggerates in
+comparing their outlays with our income, and which injured them only in
+this way, that they inherited the nations like East Indian cousins. It
+was that of a cobbler who has won the highest prize in the lottery; it
+was the squandering of a soldier after the plundering. Hence they had
+luxury without refinement. It could maintain its greatness only by
+growing greater. Had one thrown to them America with its gold bars,
+they might, with greater luxury, have gone on this crutch some
+centuries longer.]
+
+[Footnote 292: It is well known that the head of the poor negro is shut
+up in a hollow one of iron, which presses down his tongue.]
+
+[Footnote 293: Written in the year 1792.]
+
+[Footnote 294: The millionnaire presupposes the beggar, the scholar,
+the Helot; the higher culture of individuals is purchased by the
+degradation of the mass.]
+
+[Footnote 295: Written in 1792. At present the tempest which once stood
+in the heavens over all Europe lies out there in the level earth.]
+
+[Footnote 296: For after 400,000 years the earth's axis, as Jupiter's
+is now, will be perpendicular to the plane of its orbit.]
+
+
+
+                             END OF VOL. I.
+
+
+
+                           *   *   *   *   *
+      Cambridge: Stereotyped and Printed by Welch, Bigelow, & Co.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Hesperus or Forty-Five Dog-Post-Days
+Vol. I., by Jean Paul Friedrich Richter
+
+*** END OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK HESPERUS OR FORTY-FIVE ***
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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of Hesperus or Forty-Five Dog-Post-Days Vol. I., by
+Jean Paul Friedrich Richter
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: Hesperus or Forty-Five Dog-Post-Days Vol. I.
+       A Biography
+
+Author: Jean Paul Friedrich Richter
+
+Translator: Charles T. Brooks
+
+Release Date: May 9, 2011 [EBook #36071]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK HESPERUS OR FORTY-FIVE ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Charles Bowen, from page scans provided by the Web Archive
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+Transcriber's Notes:
+
+   1. Page scan source: Making of America
+      http://www.archive.org/details/hesperusorforty01paulgoog
+
+   2. Greek words are transliterated within brackets, e.g. [Greek:
+      naos].
+
+   3. The diphthong oe is represented by [oe].
+
+   4. [=a] represents a macron above the letter a.
+
+
+
+
+
+                         JEAN PAUL'S WRITINGS.
+
+                                _TITAN_.
+                             2 vols. 16mo.
+
+
+                   _FLOWER, FRUIT, AND THORN PIECES_.
+                             2 vols. 16mo.
+
+
+                _LEVANA, OR THE DOCTRINE OF EDUCATION_.
+                              1 vol. 16mo.
+
+
+                _THE CAMPANER THAL, AND OTHER WRITINGS_.
+                              1 vol. 16mo.
+
+
+                              _HESPERUS_.
+                             2 vols. 16mo.
+
+
+                          _LIFE OF JEAN PAUL_.
+           By Mrs. E. B. Lee. Preceded by his Autobiography.
+                              1 vol. 16mo.
+
+
+                           *   *   *   *   *
+The above are published in uniform volumes by
+                                       TICKNOR AND FIELDS, Boston.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+                                HESPERUS
+
+                                   OR
+
+                       _Forty-Five Dog-Post-Days_
+
+
+                              A BIOGRAPHY
+
+                           FROM THE GERMAN OF
+
+                     _JEAN PAUL FRIEDRICH RICHTER_
+
+
+                             TRANSLATED BY
+                           CHARLES T. BROOKS
+
+
+"The Earth is the _cul-de-sac_ in the great city of God,--the
+camera obscura full of inverted and contracted images from a fairer
+world,--the coast of God's creation,--a vaporous halo around a better
+sun,--the numerator to a still invisible denominator,--in fact, it is
+almost nothing at all."
+
+                        _Selections from the Papers of the Devil_.
+
+
+                            IN TWO VOLUMES.
+                                VOL. I.
+
+
+
+
+                                BOSTON:
+                          TICKNOR AND FIELDS.
+                                 1865.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+       Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 1864, by
+                          TICKNOR AND FIELDS,
+     In the Clerk's Office of the District Court of the District of
+                             Massachusetts.
+
+
+
+
+
+                           University Press:
+                      Welch, Bigelow, And Company,
+                               Cambridge.
+
+
+
+
+                         TRANSLATOR'S PREFACE.
+
+
+A work which has three prefaces by its author may be thought by some to
+need, and by others not to permit, a very long one from its translator.
+This is the first of Richter's romances which took hold of the German
+public. After he had long tried in vain, by a variety of literary
+devices, to entice or provoke the people's attention, and win or force
+a way to their hearts for his wit and his wisdom, his odd fancies and
+his noble sentiments, on the appearance of Hesperus, the siege, as
+Carlyle says, ("the ten-years'-siege of a poverty-stricken existence"
+Jean Paul himself calls it,) may be said to have terminated by storm.
+
+It was the Hesperus that brought Richter to Weimar. It was in Hesperus,
+and as Hesperus, that this singular genius rose on the horizon of
+Goethe and Schiller,--the latter of whom (as will be well remembered)
+tells his great friend that he has met "Hesperus," a strange being,
+like a man who has dropped from the moon. English readers may have
+different opinions on the question whether he "came down too soon" or
+too late. The Translator seems to see signs that Jean Paul is to be
+better and better understood and appreciated among us in this free and
+forming Western world, and he concludes his introduction of this second
+great labor to the public with the benediction upon the book which, in
+the closing paragraph of _his_ second Preface, the author so touchingly
+pronounces on this evening and morning star of his heart.
+
+The Translator is exceedingly indebted to his friend, Professor Knorr
+of Philadelphia, and to his former teacher, Dr. Beck of Cambridge, for
+their kind and patient assistance in correcting the proof-sheets of his
+work; and from the keen and practised eye of Mr. George Nichols he also
+received for some time valuable aid.
+
+Newport, R. I.
+
+
+
+
+                                PREFACE
+                         TO THE THIRD EDITION.
+
+
+Two long Prefaces follow on the heels of this third,--the first that of
+the second edition, and the next that of the first. Now, if I make this
+third again a long one,--and perhaps also, in fact, the many remaining
+ones of future editions,--I do not see how a reader of these latter can
+get through the lane of antechambers to the historical picture-gallery:
+he will die on his way to the book.
+
+I report, then, briefly. In this edition such amendments have been made
+as were most needed and easiest. In the first place, I have frequently
+translated myself into German out of the Greek, Latin, French, and
+Italian, and in fact in every instance where the speech-cleanser, with
+proper respect for the subject itself, demanded it. Once for all, we
+writers must all accommodate ourselves to the verbal-alien-bill, or
+decree for exiling foreigners, of Campe, Kolbe, and others; and even
+our beloved Goethe, however much he too "emergiert" and "eminiert,"
+will at last, in some future edition or other, have, for example, to
+throw both of these very words, which in the latest[1] he brings
+forward in the same line, out of the book. Is it not time, now that we
+have ejected the foreign peoples which had been long enough encamped in
+Germany, that we should send after them what has still longer remained
+behind,--their echo, or words?
+
+Only let Kolbe, or any other Purist, be a reasonable man, and not
+exhort us to change the technical words which are the common property
+of cultivated Europe--e. g. of music, of philosophy--into vernacular
+ones which will not be understood, especially in cases where the hand
+of the interpreter would snatch and pluck away the butterfly-dust of
+variegated allusions. For example, the name Purist itself may serve as
+an example. Supposing one should call Arndt a _political Purist_ of
+Germany, and Kolbe should substitute political _speech-purifier_, or
+pure of speech, this small conceit would give up in the translation the
+little bit of ghost that it haply possessed.
+
+Even if the author, however, has not turned out such things,--as some
+philological anchorites do, who, like the windpipe, eject all foreign
+matter with disagreeable coughing and spitting, and only retain their
+native air,--still he has at least sought to imitate the glaciers,
+which from year to year gradually shove down foreign bodies, such as
+stone and wood, from their sides. How diligently I have done this in
+the present edition of Hesperus, on every side, may be seen by the old
+printed copy interlined with the new emendations, and I could well wish
+Herr Kolbe would just travel to Berlin and inspect the copy. At least I
+will beseech the German Society there, which some years ago made me a
+member, to go to the bookstore and see for themselves what their
+colleague has done, what erasions and substitutions he has made.
+
+The ones who have properly sinned the most against the German language,
+and against those who understand no other, are the natural-historians,
+who--e. g. Alexander von Humboldt--import thee whole Latin Linnaeus into
+the midst of our language, without any other German signs of
+distinction than the final flourishes of German terminations, or
+tail-feathers, wherewith, however, they are as little intelligible to
+the mere speaker of German as a man would be to a stranger behind him
+through his mere queue. Has not our inexhaustible language already
+shown its capability of creating a German Linnaeus when we read a
+Wilhelmi, and still more that true German in heart and speech, Oken?
+
+For the rest, the German language will, in general, never shrink up and
+grow impoverished, even by the greatest hospitality towards strangers.
+For it steadily produces (as all dictionaries show) out of its ever
+fresh stems a hundred times as many children and grandchildren and
+great-grandchildren as the foreign birth it adopts in the place of
+children; so that after centuries the thicket that has sprung from our
+prolific radical words must overshadow and choke up the strange words
+which have shot up only as flying seed, and finally rear itself into
+a true banian forest, whose twigs grow down to roots, and whose
+upward-planted roots strike out into summits. How entangled and wild
+with foreign growth will, on the contrary, after some centuries, the
+English language be, for instance, with its native but powerless stem
+full of engrafted word-shrubbery, capable only of inoculation, and
+fetching back from its duplicate, America, more new words than wares!
+
+The second, but easier thing which has been done for this third,
+improved edition of Hesperus, of course is, that I have gone slowly
+through the whole Evening Star with weeder in hand, and carefully
+eradicated all the fungous weeds of genitives, or _Es_'s, in compound
+words, wherever I found them, which on the very title-page of the
+_Dog's_-Post-days was unfortunately the case. I had, however, much to
+endure in this work. Of the old actions of our over-rich language
+against itself, too many are attachments upon its real estate, and I
+was compelled, therefore, to leave many a nested crew of Es's where it
+had too long been settled, and appealed to witnesses and ear-witnesses
+for right of possession.
+
+Even up to the hour of this Preface, the author of the "_Morgen-Blatt_
+letters on compound words" has been waiting, not so much for a
+thorough-going _examination_, (it were, perhaps, too soon for that,)
+but first of all for a comprehensive _reading_ of them, which, to be
+sure, the scattering archipelago of sheets, like islands lying apart
+from one another, will make difficult so long as the periodical has not
+yet run through its circle of numbers. But then I shall hope from the
+speech-investigator, when he has them complete in his house and hands
+before his judgment-seat, a thorough refutation or approbation.
+
+Finally, in the third place, after the double amendment of two
+editions, (for the first received great improvements, and in fact
+_before_ it was printed,) a third was undertaken which had for its
+object to let fly at harshnesses, obscurities, mistakes, and other
+over-lengthenings and overshortenings of dress.
+
+But, heavens! how often must not a writing-man have to improve upon
+himself, who is hardly over half a century old! Were he to live, in
+fact, into a Methusalem's millennium, and continue to write, the
+Methusalem would have to append so many volumes of emendations that the
+work itself would have to be annexed to them as mere preliminary
+matter, appendix, or supplementary sheet.
+
+For several years the author has found in his earlier works, in a high
+degree, a fault which he has met with in Ernst Wagner, Fouque, and
+others, frequently repeated or imitated, namely, the passion for
+enacting, in his authorial person, the trumpeter, or usher, of the
+emotions, which the subject himself should have and show, but not the
+poet. E. g. "With sublime calmness Dahore replied." Why add _sublime_,
+when it is superfluous, presumptuous, and premature, provided the
+answer really exalts, or, if it does not so, the result is still more
+pitiful? The poet who, in this way, is the _fore-echo_ of his
+personages, takes for his model certain modern tragic poets, like
+Werner, Mullner, &c., who prefix to every speech for the actor the
+bookbinder's directions: "With touching emotion,"--"with a sigh of
+painful remembrance out of the depths of sorrow,"--mere sentences of
+intensity, or rather of impotence, which only a pantomimic dance needs
+or can follow, but which no piece of Shakespeare's, of Schiller's, or
+of Goethe's needs, because, indeed, the speech itself teaches how to
+speak it.
+
+For the rest, I have not the courage, now that I am a quarter of a
+century older and more aged, to give the first youthful outstreamings
+of the heart a different channel, and a weaker fall and course. Man in
+later life too easily regards every change in his junior as an
+improvement; but as no man can take the place of another, so, too,
+cannot the same man act as his own substitute in his different periods
+of life, least of all the poet.
+
+The best _wedded_ love is not what the _maidenly_ was; and so, too, is
+there in inspiration and delineation a maiden muse. Ah, all first
+things in poesy, as in life, whatever else may be wanting to them, are
+so innocent and good; and all _blossoms_ come so _pure-white_ into the
+world, in which by and by,--as Goethe says,[2] even of material colors,
+"The sun tolerates no white." Therefore shall all the ardent words of
+my inspiration for Emanuel's dying and Victor's loving and weeping, and
+for Clotilda's sorrow and silence, stand evermore in Hesperus uncooled
+and unchanged. Even the Now shall take nothing from the Once. For
+although during these twenty-five years I have been made, by some
+imitations and echoes of the book, actually sick of myself,
+nevertheless I overcome the disgust of this self-surfeit by the hope
+that the youth who wrote will again, by and by, find young men and
+young women to read him, and that hereafter, even for older readers,
+more will survive of the thing imitated than of the imitations.
+
+And so, then, may this Evening Star--which was once the morning star of
+my whole soul--run its _third_ circuit around the reading world in the
+fuller light of a better position toward the sun and the earth!
+
+                                            JEAN PAUL FR. RICHTER.
+
+Baireuth, January 1, 1819.
+
+
+
+
+                                PREFACE
+                         TO THE SECOND EDITION.
+
+
+I have as yet completed nothing of this Preface beyond a tolerable
+sketch, which shall here be given to the leader unadorned. I may
+perhaps, by the gift of this sketch, also raise the curtain which
+continues to hang down before my literary workshop, and which hides
+from posterity how I labor therein as my own serving brother and as
+master of the Scottish chair. A plan is with me, however, no outline of
+a sermon in Hamburg, which the head pastor gives out on Saturday and
+fills out on Sunday. It is no automaton, no lay figure, no canon, after
+which I work; it is no skeleton for future flesh, but a plan is a leaf
+or sheet on which I make myself more comfortable and move more at ease,
+while I shake out upon it my whole brain-tree, in order afterwards to
+pick over and plant the windfalls, and cover--the paper with organic
+globules and layers of ph[oe]nix ashes, that whole brilliant
+pheasantries may rise out of it. In such a sketch I keep the most
+unlike and antagonistic things apart by mere dashes. In such sketches I
+address myself, and _thou_ myself like a Quaker, and order myself about
+a great deal; nay, I frequently introduce therein conceits which I do
+not have printed at all, either because no connection can be contrived
+for them, or because they are of themselves good for nothing.
+
+And now it will be time that I should really present the reader such a
+sketch, which happens to be this time the plan of the present Preface.
+It is headed:--
+
+
+ARCHITECTURAL PLAN AND BUILDING MATERIAL FOR THE PREFACE TO THE SECOND
+EDITION OF HESPERUS.
+
+"But make it short, because, as it is, the world will find it a
+long way through two antechambers into the passengers'-room of the
+Book.--Joke in the beginning.--Seldom does a man bowl all the Nine
+Muses on the literary ninepin-alley.--The conclusion from the
+reflection.--Bring out many resemblances between the title Hesperus and
+the Evening Star, or Venus, of which the following must be specimens:
+That mine, like the latter, is full of high, sharp mountains, and that
+both owe their greater splendor to their unevenness; further, that the
+one as well as the other, in its transit across the sun (of Apollo),
+appears only as a black spot.--(In your copy-book of letters you must
+have made numbers of such allusions.)--The world expects that the
+Evening Star in the second edition will come up from below, as Lucifer,
+or Morning Star, and that the glorified body of the paper will
+tabernacle a glorified soul: let it pass, and bring the world to its
+right bearings.--Regard pedants, who sustain and fodder themselves on
+words, not on things, as like the after-moths, which devour and digest
+wax cakes, but no honeycomb.--No one so very much resembles as pedants
+do the magpies, which are at once thievish and _garrulous_: they dilute
+and filch.--Into the critical hell precisely those classes of persons
+are not cast, which the Talmud also exempts from the Jewish, namely,
+the poor, those who cannot count, and those who are carried off by the
+diarrh[oe]a.--Be a fox, and cajole the critical billiard-markers who
+announce loss and gain."----
+
+This last I do not understand myself, because this sketch was written
+as long ago as the winter. I can rather confess, without irony, that
+the critical quarter-judges, or country-judges, have spared my life,
+and have not thrown over me either a Spanish mantle, or a cloak of
+humility, or a bloody shirt and hair-shirt. This indulgence of the
+critics for a writer of books, who, like a Catholic, performs more good
+works than he needs for salvation, is certainly not their worst
+characteristic, as they thereby exert such a beneficial influence on
+our empty days. For one must now be very glad if only four or five new
+similes are sent to the Easter fair, and if at Michaelmas only a few
+flowers, which are novelties, are offered for sale. Our literary
+kitchen-servants know how to play off on the table-cloth and into our
+mouths the same _goutee_ over and over again, under the appearance of
+six different dishes, and entertain us twice a year with an imitation
+of the celebrated potato-banquet in Paris. At first came on merely a
+potato-soup; then potatoes again in another preparation; the third
+course, on the contrary, consisted of potatoes rehashed; so, too, the
+fourth. For the fifth, now, one could serve up potatoes again, when one
+had only announced for the sixth, potatoes cut into the novel form of
+brilliants,--and so it went on through fourteen dishes, of which,
+fortunately, one could still say, that at least bread, confectionery,
+and liquor comforted the stomach, and consisted of potatoes.----
+
+Censure is an agreeable lemon-juice in praise; hence both are always
+bestowed by the world together, as if in the form of an oxymel; just
+as, according to the Talmud, a few fingerfuls of assaf[oe]tida were
+thrown with the other things upon the altar of burnt-offerings. The
+only thing, accordingly, which I will expose about the reviewers after
+the foregoing praise, and with which they really offend, is this, that
+they seldom (their heart is good) understand much of the subject or
+writing on which they pass judgment; and even this blame applies only
+to the greater part of them.----
+
+"Weave it in (the sketch goes on) that you cannot make out what the
+unveiling and unshelling of women's arms,[3] bosoms, and backs at the
+present day can mean, just as, formerly, peacocks were served up on the
+game-dish with precisely the corresponding parts, necks, wings, and
+heads, unpicked.--It will be well, therefore, if you conjecture that
+the shell-less ladies are female Jesuits and Freemasons in disguise,
+because in both orders the mysteries and veilings begin with
+denudation; or lay these unfeathered limbs at the door of some
+starvation or other, as a chicken creeps forth from an egg, out of
+which one has only drawn off a few drops of the white, with featherless
+spots.--Threaten, at least, that ladies and crabs are best when caught
+and boiled in the moulting-season."----
+
+This is one of the cases of which I said above, that in them I was
+obliged to give up and throw away conceits of the sketch, for want of
+connection with the main subject: for really the whole matter of the
+moulting of the limbs has nothing in common with the Preface, except
+the year of birth.
+
+"You must deviate from other authors," the plan goes on, "and glide
+silently over the approbation you have reaped, so that the world may
+see just what you are.--One expects from the Preface to a second
+edition a little map of products, or a harvest register of all the
+after-bloom which exalts the second above the first: give them the
+register!--
+
+With pleasure!--First, I have corrected all typographical
+errors,--then all slips of the pen,--then many cacophonies of
+language,--moreover, verbal and real blunders enough; but the conceits
+and the poetical tulips I have seldom rooted out. I saw that if I did
+so there would be left in the world not much more of the book (because
+I should strike out the whole style) than the binding and the list of
+errata. The theologian hates juristic allusions,--the jurist,
+theological ones,--the physician, both,--the mathematician, all of
+them. I love them all. What shall one leave out or retain?--The woman
+is displeased with satire, the man with softening warmth, (for
+_coldness_ in _books_, as in _cakes of chocolate_, he holds to be proof
+of excellence,) and the public itself has forty-five opinions upon a
+chapter, as Cromwell dictated four contradictory letters to the same
+correspondent, merely for the sake of concealing from his scribes the
+purport of the one which he really despatched.----To which opinion
+shall an author adhere in such a disagreement?--Most properly to his
+own, as the world to its own.--
+
+For the rest, my little[4] work can hardly see so many _printed_
+editions as I have arranged of _written_ and improved ones in
+my study; and therefore great alterations in it are, if not less
+indispensable, at least more difficult. In the plan of the story
+itself, therefore,--even supposing I had forgotten that it is a
+true one,--there is little to change for the better, because the work
+is like my breeches, which were not made by a tailor, but by a
+stocking-loom, and in which the breaking of a single stitch of the
+right shank unravels the whole fabric of the left. For it is an
+essential, but undeniable, fault of the book,--which I easily explain
+by the want of episodes,--that the moment I take out from the first
+story (or volume) any defective stone whatever, immediately in the
+third all totters, and at last comes down. Of course I thereby fall far
+in the rear of the best new romances, where one can break out or build
+in considerable pieces without the least injury to the composition and
+fire-proof quality, simply because they resemble, not, like my book, a
+mere house, but a whole toy-city from Nuremberg, whose loose, unhitched
+houses the child piles away in his play-house, and whose mosaic of huts
+the dear little one easily puts together for his amusement, streetwise,
+just as he fancies. A true story always has the annoying thing about
+it, that in its case this cannot be done.
+
+However, I sufficiently excuse my work on the score of artistic
+_changes_ and _improvements_ by true _enlargements_ of it through
+historical additions. As I fortunately have for some years myself lived
+and been housed among the persons whom I have portrayed, accordingly I
+am perfectly in a position, as fly-wheel of this fair family circle, to
+supply, from the depositions of living witnesses, a thousand
+corrections and explanations which otherwise no man could learn, which
+however throw light on the somewhat dark history. Let the critic simply
+turn over the two nearest chapters of the book, or the remotest, or any
+others.
+
+My critics would complacently persuade me that I should have avoided in
+the additions what they call superfluous wit, and skilfully watered the
+gleaming naphtha-soil of my Evening Star, which was neither to be
+quenched nor sunk, with fresh history.----Heaven grant it! I have slim
+hope of it; but I should be glad if the reviewers would assure me that
+I had--although not sold at auction or covered up the crowded images in
+my Pantheon-Pandemonium--still, however, at least hung them farther
+apart.
+
+"On the whole," continues the sketch, "take in hand the historical
+_grafting-knife_ rather than the _weeder_!"
+
+I just said that I have done so.
+
+"But as touching those dried-up, withered men, in whose eyes nothing is
+great but their own image, and whose stomach at the sight of a fairer
+movement of the exalted heart is taken with a _reverse_ movement,--in
+short, whom everything nauseates (except what is nauseous),--make
+believe as if you did not perceive them; and so much more as they
+resemble patients who are gnawed by the tape-worm, and who, according
+to medical observations, sicken and vomit at all music, especially
+organs, think rather of the good souls whom thou knowest and lovest,
+and of the good ones whom thou only lovest,----and therefore at the end
+of the Preface be earnest and grateful and rejoice!"----
+
+Verily that I should have done, even without the sketch!--How could I
+remain insensible to the indulgence with which, on the whole, the world
+has appropriated the Aphrodito-graphic[5] fragments of my Evening Star,
+which runs around the sun with such remarkable aberrations, or
+deflections, and in so little of a planetary ellipse, that it may
+easily, as often happens to the Hesperus in the sky, be taken for a
+hairy, bearded, and tailed comet?--And how hard and cold must the soul
+be which could remain without emotion and without joy at the thought of
+the shortest happy day, nay, even happy second, or _third_, into which
+it had been able to introduce suffering men; and at the wide-spread
+relationship of lofty wishes and holy hopes, and friendly feelings,
+and at the gracious concordat wherein the brawlers and wranglers in
+this first world of the prosaic life give each other their hands
+in the _second_ world of poetry, in mutual recognitions, and become
+brothers?--
+
+Once more, good Asterisk and secondary planet of the soft evening-star
+above me, I follow thee on thy way with the wishes of three years ago
+for every soul which thou canst gladden. Only never rise upon any eye
+as a rainy star,--only never lead one astray, so that it shall take the
+_moonlight_ of poesy for the _morning_ of truth, and dismiss too early
+its morning dreams!--But into the torture-chambers and through the
+prison-gratings of forsaken souls throw a cheering radiance; and for
+him whose blessed island has sunk away from him to the bottom of the
+sea of eternity, transfigure thou the low, dark region; and whoever
+looks round and looks up in vain in a dismantled Paradise, to him may a
+little ray from thee show, down on the ground, under the yellow leaves,
+some hidden sweet fruit or other of a former time; and if there is any
+eye to which thou canst show nothing, draw it softly upward to thy
+brother, and to the heaven in which he shines.--Nay, and if I ever grow
+too old, then comfort me also!
+
+Hof, May 16, 1797.
+
+
+
+
+                PREFACE, SEVEN REQUESTS, AND CONCLUSION.
+
+
+                                PREFACE.
+
+I Was going to be indignant, in the beginning, at some hosts of readers
+with whom I know not what to do in this book, and I was about to
+station myself at the gate of Hesperus as porter, and with the greatest
+incivility send off particularly people who are good for nothing, for
+whom, as for a prosector, the heart is nothing but the thickest muscle,
+and who carry a brain and heart and interior parts generally as moulds
+of plaster statues do their stuffing of wood, hay, and clay, merely in
+order to turn out _hollow_ from the casting. I was on the point, even,
+of scolding at honest business-people who, like Antoninus the Great,
+thank the gods that they never did much at poetry; and at those to whom
+the chapel-leader, Apollo, must discourse on a rebeck, or straw fiddle,
+and his nine soprano girls with the ale-house fiddle and corn-stalk
+bass-viol. Nay, even at the reading sisterhood of the Romances of
+Chivalry, who read as they marry, and who among books, as among
+gentlemen's faces, pick out, not the fair, feminine ones, but the wild,
+masculine ones.----
+
+But an author should not be a child, and embitter for himself his
+Preface, when it is not every day that he has to make one. Why did I
+not rather in the first line address _those_ readers, and take them by
+the hand, to whom I joyfully give my Hesperus, and whom I would present
+with a free copy of it if I knew where they lived?--Come, dear, weary
+soul, thou that hast anything to forget, either a sad day or a clouded
+year, or a human being that afflicts thee, or one that loves thee, or a
+dismantled youth, or a whole life of heaviness; and thou, crushed
+spirit, for whom the present is a wound and the past a scar, come into
+my _Evening-Star_ and refresh thyself with its little glimmer; but, if
+the poetic illusion gives thee sweet, fugitive pains, be this thy
+conclusion from it: perhaps that, too, is an illusion which causes me
+the longer and deeper ones.--And as to thee, loftier man, who findest
+our life, which is passed only in a _glass_, darkly, less than thyself
+and death, and whose heart a veiled great spirit grinds brighter and
+purer in the dead dust of other mouldered human hearts, as one polishes
+the diamond with the dust of a diamond, I may call thee, too, down into
+my evening and night star to such eminence as I am able to throw up,
+that, when thou seest gliding around it at the foot, as around
+Vesuvius, _morganic fays_ and mist groupings and dreamy worlds and
+shadowy lands, thou shalt perhaps say to thyself, "And so is all dream
+and shadow around me; but dreams imply spirits, and clouds countries,
+and the shadow of the earth a sun and a universe?"--
+
+But to thee, noble spirit, who art weary of the age and of the
+after-winter of humanity, to whom sometimes, but not always, the human
+race, like the moon, seems to go backward, because thou mistakest the
+procession of clouds flying by below it for the course of the heavenly
+body, and who, full of exalted sighs, full of exalted wishes, and with
+silent resignation, hearest indeed beside thee a destroying hand and
+the falling of thy brothers, but yet castest not down thy eye, upraised
+to the ever serene, sunny face of Providence, and whom misfortune, as
+lightning does man, destroys, but not _disfigures_; to thee, noble
+spirit, I have, to be sure, not the courage to say, "Deign to look upon
+my play of shadows, that the Evening-Star which I usher before thee may
+make thee forget the earth on which thou standest, and which now with a
+thousand graves lays itself, like a vampyre, upon the human race, and
+sucks the blood of victims!"--And yet I have thought of thee all
+through the book, and the hope of bringing my little night and evening
+piece before wet, upraised, and steadfast eyes has been the sustaining
+maul-stick[6] of my weary hand.
+
+As I have now written too seriously, I must, out of the seven promised
+petitions, among which only four are such, omit three. I therefore
+present only the
+
+First Request. That the reader will pardon the title, "Dog-Post-Days,"
+until the first chapter has explained and excused it; and the
+
+Second. Always to read a whole chapter, and never half a one, because
+the great whole consists of little wholes, as, according to the
+Homoiomereia[7] of Anaxagoras, the human body consists of innumerable
+little human bodies; and the
+
+Seventh Request, which flows partly from the second, but concerns the
+critics only, not to anticipate me in their _fugitive leaves_,[8] which
+they call Reviews, by the publication of my leading incidents, but to
+leave the reader some few surprises, which, to be sure, he can have
+only once. And finally the
+
+Fifth Petition, which one knows already from the Lord's Prayer.[9]
+
+
+                              CONCLUSION.
+
+And now, then, become visible, little peaceful Hesperus--Thou needest a
+little cloud to veil thee, and a little year, in order to have
+completed thy orbit!-Mayest thou stand nearer to Truth and Virtue, as
+thy image in heaven does to the sun, than the earth into which thou
+shinest does to either of the three; and mayest thou, like that star,
+never withdraw thyself from the sight of men, except by hiding thyself
+in the sun! May thy influence be fairer, warmer, and surer than that of
+the Almanac-Hesperus, which superstition places on the misty throne of
+_this_ year!--Thou wouldst make me happy a second time if thou shouldst
+be an _Evening-Star_ to some withered mortal, and to some blooming one
+a _morning star_. Sink with the former and rise with the latter; glow
+in the evening sky of the first between his clouds, and overspread his
+past life-road up the mountain with a soft lustre, that he may
+recognize again the far-off flowers of youth; and rejuvenate his
+antiquated recollections into hopes!--Cool off the fresh youth in the
+early hours of life, as a tranquillizing morning star, ere the sun
+falls hot upon him and the whirl of day sets in!--But for me, Hesperus,
+thou art now well set; thou hast hitherto journeyed an beside the
+earth, as my companion-planet, as my second world, on which my soul
+disembarked as it left the body to the buffetings of earth; but to day
+my eye falls sadly and slowly off from thee and thy white flower-bed,
+which I planted around thy coasts, down upon the damp, cold ground
+where I stand, and I see how we are all encompassed with coolness and
+evening, torn far away from the stars, amused with glowworms,
+disquieted with _ignes fatui_, all veiled from each other, every one
+alone, and feeling his own life only through the warm, throbbing hand
+of a friend, which he holds in the dark.----
+
+Yes, there will indeed come another age, when it will be light, and
+when man will awake out of sublime dreams and find--the dreams again,
+because he has lost nothing but sleep.--
+
+The stones and rocks, which two veiled shapes, Necessity and Sin, like
+Deucalion and Pyrrha, throw behind them at the good, shall become new
+men.--
+
+And on the western gate of this century stands written: Here is the
+road to Virtue and Wisdom; just as on the western gate of Cherson[10]
+stood the sublime inscription: Here leads the way to Byzantium.----
+
+Infinite Providence, thou wilt make the day dawn.--
+
+But still struggles the twelfth hour of the night; nocturnal birds of
+prey shoot through the darkness; spectres rattle; the dead play their
+antics; the living dream.
+
+                                                        JEAN PAUL.
+In the _Vernal Equinox_, 1794.
+
+
+
+
+                           CONTENTS OF VOL. I.
+
+
+                            1. DOG-POST-DAY.
+
+   Difference between the 1st and 4th of May.--Rat-Battle-Pieces.--
+     Nocturne.--Three Regiments in future Breeches.--Couching-Needle.--
+     Overture and Secret Instructions of the Book.
+
+
+                            2. DOG-POST-DAY.
+
+   Antediluvian History.--Victor's Plan of Life.
+
+
+                            3. DOG-POST-DAY.
+
+   Sowing-Day of Joys.--Watch-Tower.--Fraternization of the Heart.
+
+
+                            4. DOG-POST-DAY.
+
+   Profile-Cutter.--Clotilda's Historic Figure.--Courtiers, and a Noble
+     Man.
+
+
+                            5. DOG-POST-DAY.
+
+   The Third of May.--The Nightingale.--The Abbate sitting on Music.
+
+
+                            6. DOG-POST-DAY.
+
+   The Threefold Deception of Love.--Lost Bible and Powder-Puff.--
+     Churching.--New Concordats with the Reader.
+
+
+                            7. DOG-POST-DAY.
+
+   The Great Parsonage-Park.--Orangery.--Flamin's Promotion.--Festal
+     Afternoon of Domestic Love.--Rain of Fire.--Letter to Emanuel.
+
+
+                            8. DOG-POST-DAY.
+
+   Examinatorium And Dehortatorium Of Conscience.--The Studious
+     Honeymoon of a Scholar.--The Cabinet of Natural History.--Answer
+     From Emanuel.--The Packed-up Chin.--Arrival of the Prince.--First
+     Intercalary Day.
+
+
+                            9. DOG-POST-DAY.
+
+   A heavenly Morning; a heavenly Afternoon.--A House without Walls; a
+     Bed without a House.
+
+
+                           10. DOG-POST-DAY.
+
+   The Bee-Master.--Zeusel's Oscillation.--Arrival of the Princess.
+
+
+                           11. DOG-POST-DAY.
+
+   Transfer of the Princess.--Smuggling of a Kiss.--Montre a
+     Regulateur.--Simultaneous Love.
+
+
+                           12. DOG-POST-DAY.
+
+   Polar Fantasies.--The Singular Isle of Union.--One more Bit from
+     previous History.--The Stettin-Apple as Coat-of-Arms.--Third
+     Intercalary Day.
+
+
+                           13. DOG-POST-DAY.
+
+   Concerning his Lordship's Character.--An Evening of Eden.--
+     Maienthal.--The Mountain and Emanuel.
+
+
+                           14. DOG-POST-DAY.
+
+   The Philosophical Arcadia.--Clotilda's Letter.--Victor's
+     Confessions.
+
+
+                           15. DOG-POST-DAY.
+
+   The Parting.
+
+
+                           16. DOG-POST-DAY.
+
+   The Potato-Form-Cutter.--Drag-chains in St. Luna.--Wax
+     Embossments.--Chess according to the _Regula Falsi_.--The
+     Thistle of Hope.--Escort to Flachsenfingen.--Fourth Intercalary
+     Day.
+
+
+                           17. DOG-POST-DAY.
+
+   The Cure.--The Prince's Palace.--Victor's Visits.--Joachime.--
+     Copperplate Engraving of the Court.--Cudgellings.
+
+
+                           18. DOG-POST-DAY.
+
+   Clotilda's Promotion.--Incognito-Journey.--Petition of the Majors
+     of the Chase.--Consistorial Messenger.--Caricature of the
+     Flachsenfingeners.
+
+
+                           19. DOG-POST-DAY.
+
+   The Hair-Dresser with a (musical) Disease of the Lungs.--Clotilda in
+     Victor's Dream.--Extra Lines on Church-Music.--Garden Concert by
+     Stamitz.--Quarrel between Victor and Flamin.--The Heart without
+     Solace.--Letter to Emanuel.
+
+
+                           20. DOG-POST-DAY.
+
+   Letter from Emanuel.--Flamin's Fruit-Pieces on Shoulders.--Walk to
+     St. Luna.--Fifth Intercalary Day.
+
+
+                           21. DOG-POST-DAY.
+
+   Victor's Professional Visits.--Concerning Houses full of
+     Daughters.--The Two Fools.--The Carrousel.
+
+
+                           22. DOG-POST-DAY.
+
+   Gun-Foundery of Love; e. g. Printed Gloves, Quarrels, Dwarf-Flasks,
+     and Stabs.-A Title from the Digests of Love.--Marie.--Court-Day.--
+     Giulia's dying Epistle.
+
+
+                           23. DOG-POST-DAY.
+
+   First Visit to Clotilda.--The Paleness.--The Redness.--The
+     Race-Weeks.
+
+
+                           24. DOG-POST-DAY.
+
+   Rouge.--Clotilda's Sickness.--The Play of Iphigenia.--Difference
+     between Plebeian and Patrician Love.--Sixth Intercalary Day.
+
+
+
+
+
+                               HESPERUS,
+
+                                   OR
+
+                           45 DOG-POST-DAYS.
+
+
+
+
+                            1. DOG-POST-DAY.
+
+   Difference between the 1st and 4th of May.--Rat-Battle-Pieces.--
+     Nocturne.--Three Regiments in future Breeches.--Couching-Needle.--
+     Overture and Secret Instructions of the Book.
+
+
+In the house of the Court-Chaplain Eymann, in the bathing-village of
+St. Luna, there were two parties: the one was glad on the 30th of April
+that our hero, the young Englishman, Horion, would return from
+Gottingen the 1st of May to stay at the parsonage,--the other disliked
+it; they did not want him to arrive till the 4th of May.
+
+The party of the 1st of May, or Tuesday, consisted of the Chaplain's
+son, Flamin, who had been educated with the Englishman till his twelfth
+year in London, and till his eighteenth in St. Luna, and whose heart
+with all its venous ramifications had grown into the Briton's, and in
+whose ardent breast during the long Goettingen separation there had been
+_one_ heart too few; next, of the Chaplain's wife, a native
+Englishwoman, who loved in my hero a countryman, because the magnetic
+vortex of nationality reached her soul over land and sea; and, finally,
+of their eldest daughter, Agatha, who all day long laughed out at
+everything and doted on everything without knowing why, and who, with
+her polypus-arms, drew every one to herself who did not live quite too
+many houses off from her, as food for her heart.
+
+The sect of the 4th of May could measure itself with its rival, for it
+also made out a college of three members. Its adherents were Appel
+(Apollonia, the youngest daughter), who acted as cook, and whose
+culinary reputation and certificate of good bakery would suffer by it,
+if the guest should come before the bread rose; she could well
+conceive what a soul must feel who should stand before a guest with
+her hands full of skewers and needles, beside the flat-iron of the
+window-curtains, and without having even the _frisure_ of her hat, or
+of the head which was to be under it, so much as half ready. The second
+adherent of this sect, who ought to have had most to say against
+Tuesday,--although he said least, because he could not talk and
+had only recently been baptized,--was to be carried to church on
+Friday for the first time; this adherent was the godchild of the
+guest. The Chaplain knew, to be sure, that the moon sent round her
+godfather-bidder, Father Riccioli,[11] among the _savans_ of earth, and
+got them into the church-book of heaven as godfathers to her spots; but
+he thought it was better for him to take a godfather within a
+circumference of not more than fifty miles. The Apostles'-day of the
+churching and the Festival-day of the arrival of the distinguished
+godfather would then have beautifully coincided; but now the plaguy
+fine weather was bringing godfather along four days too soon!
+
+The third disciple of Friday was, at bottom, the heresiarch of this
+party, the Court-Chaplain himself: the parsonage wherein Horion was to
+have his temporary court residence was all full of rats,--a regular
+ball-room and _plaza de armas_ of the same,--and of these the Chaplain
+wanted first of all to clear his house. Few court-chaplains, with
+hectic in their bodies and rats in their houses, ever made so much
+stench on that account as did this one in St. Luna against the beasts.
+It would have taken very few clouds of it to smoke all the court-dames
+out of Europe. Did not our hectic patient burn as much of the hoof of
+his nag as he had sawed off from it? Didn't he even take one of the
+sharp-toothed creatures themselves prisoner, and smear him with
+gudgeon-grease and train-oil, and then let the arrested subject go,
+that he might as a pariah trot up and down through the holes, and
+constrain by his ointment rats of higher caste to emigrate? Did he not
+go to work by the wholesale, and actually take a buck to board, of
+which he wanted nothing except that he should stink and displease the
+tailed monks? And were not all these remedies as good as useless?...
+For the deuse take rats and Jesuits! Meanwhile, I will at least offer
+people here on the very third page the moral, that against both of
+these pests, as against toothache, mental troubles, and fleas, there
+are a thousand excellent recipes which have no effect.
+
+We will now, in a body, make our way farther into the parsonage, and
+concern ourselves as minutely about the family history of the Eymanns
+as if we lived only three houses distant from them. Horion,--the accent
+must fall on the first syllable,--or Sebastian, by abbreviation
+_Bastian_, as the Eymanns called him,--or Victor, as Lord Horion, his
+father, called him, (for I give him now one name and now another, just
+as my prose-prosody requires,)--Horion had, through the Italian
+Tostato, who was a peripatetic Auerbach's court for that whole region,
+and was hurrying on to St. Luna, caused the little oral lie to be
+palmed upon his dear friends at the parsonage, that he was coming on
+Friday: he wanted, first, to give them a real surprise; and, secondly,
+he wanted modestly to tie the hands, which on his account _would_ be
+scouring, brushing up and serving up; and, thirdly, he regarded an oral
+lie as at least more trivial than a written one. To his father,
+however, he wrote the truth, and fixed his entrance into the parsonage
+for the 1st of May, or Tuesday. His Lordship had his abode in the
+residence city of Flachsenfingen, where he applied to the Prince at
+once moral blinders and _eye-glasses_, and _guided_ his vision while he
+_sharpened_ it; but he was himself blind, though only physically. For
+that reason his son had to bring an oculist with him from Goettingen,
+who should operate upon him in the Chaplain's house on Tuesday. When he
+caused his Victor to be made Doctor of Medicine, many Goettingen people,
+to my knowledge, wondered that so high-born a youth should put on the
+Doctor's head-piece,--that _Pluto's helmet_, which makes, not, like the
+mythological one, the wearer, but others indeed invisible,--and thrust
+on his finger the Doctor's ring,--that _ring-of--Gyges_, which only to
+others imparts invisibility: but was, then, the condition of his
+father's eyes unknown or an insufficient apology to the people of
+Goettingen?
+
+His Lordship wrote to the Court-Chaplain that he and his son would
+come to-morrow. The Chaplain read over the Job's-post silently three
+times in succession, and thrust it back with comic resignation into
+the envelope, saying: "We have now ample hope that to-morrow our
+Doctor will certainly arrive with the rest;--fine tournaments and
+watering-place amusements do I anticipate, wife! when to-morrow comes
+in, and my rats in a body dance like children before him;--besides, we
+have nothing to eat; and then, too, I have nothing to put on, for not
+before Thursday can I extort from that Flachsenfingen wind-bag[12] a
+hair-bag,--and you laugh at it? Is not one of us in the very middle of
+April made an April-fool of?" But the Chaplain's lady fell on his
+shoulder with redoubled exclamations of delight, and ran right off to
+gather to this rose festival of her good soul the little brethren and
+sisters of the church of the children. The whole family circle now
+resolved itself into three terrified and three delighted faces.
+
+We will seat ourselves only among the joyous ones, and listen
+while they, during the afternoon, work away as portrait-painters,
+drapery-painters, and gallery-inspectors, at the picture of the beloved
+Briton. All remembrances are made into hopes, and Victor is to bring
+nothing with him that is changed except his stature. Flamin, wild as an
+English garden, but more fruitful, refreshed himself and others with
+his delineation of Victor's gentle truthfulness and honesty, and of his
+head, and praised even his poetic fire, which he generally did not rate
+very high. Agatha called to mind his humorous knight's-leaps,--how he
+once took the drum of a passing dentist and drummed the village
+together for nothing before his theatre, because he had previously
+bought out the whole travelling apothecary's shop of this honest and
+true friend Hain,[13]--how he would often, after a child's baptism,
+post himself in the pulpit, and there be-preach two or three devout
+spectators in their work-day sward, till they laughed more than they
+wept,--and many another piece of waggery, whereby he would make no one
+ridiculous but himself, and set no one laughing but other people.
+
+But women will never approve of it (only men can) when one, like
+Victor, belongs to the British subdivision of humorists;--for with them
+and courtiers wit itself is caprice;--they cannot approve that Victor
+should love to _descend_ to carriers, clowns, and sailors, whereas a
+Frenchman would rather _creep upward_ to people of _ton_. For women,
+who always respect the citizen more than the man, do not see that the
+humorist makes believe that all which these plebeians say he prompts
+them to, and that he intentionally exalts the involuntarily comic to
+what is artistically so,--folly to wisdom, the earth's madhouse to a
+national theatre. Quite as little does an official comprehend, or a
+cit, or a metropolitan, why Horion should so often make such a wretched
+choice of reading from among old prefaces, programmes, advertisements
+of travelling artists, all which he would peruse with indescribable
+gusto,--merely because he made believe to himself that all this
+intellectual sack of fodder, which belonged properly only to the
+rag-picker, he had himself prepared and filled, with satirical design.
+In fact, as the Germans seldom appreciate irony and seldom write it,
+one is forced to foist fictitiously a malicious irony upon many serious
+books and reviews, in order to get any of it at all. And that, indeed,
+is no more nor less than what I myself aim at, when in court-session I
+elevate in thought the court-house to a play-house, the advocate to a
+juristic Le Cain and Casperl, and the whole assembly to an old Greek
+comedy; for I never rest till I have made myself believe that I have
+caused the good people just to study out the whole case as a star-part,
+and am therefore really theatre poet and manager. Thus, in fact, do I
+merrily carry my dumb head as a comic pocket-theatre of the Germans
+through their most august institutions (e. g. the university, the
+administration), and exalt, in perfect silence--behind the dropped
+curtain of my face-skin--the comic of Nature to the comic of Art.
+
+To return: the Chaplain's wife now related as much about Victor as all
+knew before. But this repetition of the old story is just the fairest
+charm of domestic discourse. If we can often repeat to _ourselves_
+sweet thoughts without _ennui_, why shall not another be suffered to
+awaken them within us still oftener? The good lady pictured to her
+children how gentle and tender, how delicate and womanly, her dear son
+was (for Victor always called her his mother),--how he relied upon her
+in all things,--how he was always sporting without ever teasing
+anybody, and always loved all human beings, even the greatest
+strangers,--and how she could open before him better than to any
+matron her oppressed heart, and how fondly he wept with her. A
+court-apothecary, with a heart of pumice-stone,--_Zeusel_ he writes
+himself,--once even regarded this melting of the warmest soul as a case
+of _lachrymal fistula_, because he thought that no eyes could weep but
+diseased ones.... Dear reader, do you not feel now just as the
+biographer does, who can hardly wait for the entrance of this good
+Victor into the parsonage and the biography? Will you not offer to him
+the friendly hand, and say: "Welcome, unknown one! Lo, thy soft heart
+opens ours here on the very threshold! O thou man with eyes full of
+tears, dost thou, then, feel with us, that in a life whose banks are
+lined with affrighted ones clinging to the _twigs_, and despairing ones
+clinging to the _leaves_, that, in such a life, where not only follies,
+but woes also hedge us round, man must keep a wet eye for red ones, an
+aching heart for every bleeding one, and a gentle hand that shall, in
+sad sympathy, hold the thick, heavy chalice of sorrow for the poor man
+who must drain it, and shall slowly raise it to his lips? And if thou
+art such a one, then speak and laugh as thou wilt, for no one should
+laugh at men but he who right heartily loves them."
+
+In the afternoon the Chief Chamberlain, Le Baut,--a fragrant
+leaf-skeleton,--sent his page, Seebass, to the Chaplain to beg that
+he would--for the palace lay near the parsonage across the way--remove
+the buck for a while, only until the wind should change, because
+his daughter was coming. "Esteemed Mr. Seebass!" answered the
+rat-controvertist, with emotion, "carry back my submissive compliments,
+and you see my distress. Tomorrow the Lord and his son and his oculist
+will gladden me with their presence, and the cataract is to be couched
+here. Now, at present, the whole house stinks, and the rats still carry
+on composedly their night-dance in the midst of the perfume; I assure
+you, Mr. Seebass, we can take assaf[oe]tida and stuff the parsonage
+with it up to the ridge-pole, not a tail shall we expel thereby; nay,
+it pleases them the more. I, for my part, am already preparing myself
+to see them to-morrow, during the operation, spring up on the very
+oculist and patient. Thus it fares with us all, please announce at the
+palace, but say that I was going to-day also to try an excellent
+rosewood-oil."
+
+He fetched, therefore, a great sack of hops and dragged it up under the
+roof, in order there, in a literal sense, to lead the rats by the nose
+into the bag. Rats are notoriously as dead-set upon rosewood-oil as men
+are on anointing-oil, which, so soon as only six drops fall on the
+skull, makes one a king or bishop on the spot, which I see by the fact,
+that in the first case a golden hoop shoots round the hair, and in the
+second it actually falls off. The militia, that is, the Chaplain,
+sprinkled the sack with some oil, and laid it with its mouth stretched
+and fastened wide open to receive the enemy;--he himself stood in the
+background, concealed behind a similarly oiled stove-screen. His plan
+was, to start out when the beasts were once in the sack, and carry off
+the whole crew like bees in a swarming-bag. The few chamber-hunters who
+read me must have frequently used this kind of trap. But they may not
+have stumbled over it as the Chaplain did, who was caught with the
+fragrant stove-screen between his legs, and who lay unable to stir,
+while the enemy ran off. In such a situation a man is refreshed by the
+trill of a curse. So after the Chaplain had struck a few such trills
+and thrills, had betaken himself to the family, and said to them, _en
+passant_: If there were in the temperate zone a fellow who from his
+swaddling-clothes rode a mourning-steed, who was lodged in a second
+mouse-tower of Hatto, and in an Amsterdam house of correction, and in
+limbo,--if there were any such correctioner, in regard to whom the only
+wonder was how he continued alive,--he alone was the one, and no devil
+beside him ... after he had relieved himself of this, he left the rats
+in peace,--and was himself very much so.
+
+In the night nothing memorable occurred, except that he kept awake and
+listened in every direction to hear if something with a tail might not
+be stirring, because he was minded to vex himself to his heart's
+content. As there was no sign of the beasts to be detected, not so
+much as a side-leap, he got out and sat on the floor, and pressed his
+spy's-ear to that. As good luck would have it, just then the movements
+of the enemy with their ballets and gallopades burst upon his ear. He
+started up, armed himself with a child's drum, and woke his wife up
+with the whisper: "Sweet! go to sleep again, and don't be frightened in
+your sleep; I'm only drumming a little against the rats; for the
+Zwickau Collection of Useful Observations for Housekeepers in Town and
+Country, 1785, recommends this course."
+
+His first thunder-stroke gave his hereditary foes the repose which it
+snatched from his blood relations.... But as I have now put everybody
+into a condition to imagine the Chaplain in his shirt and with the
+cymbal of the soldiery, let us rather go to the bed of his son Flamin,
+and see what _he_ is doing therein. Nothing,--but out of it he is at
+this moment taking a ride at this late hour, and that, too, without
+saddle or waistcoat. He, whose bosom was a cave of AEolus, full of
+pent-up storms--(any discreet prothonotary in Wetzlar would have
+scraped his fish-head or partridge's-wing cleaner or brushed his
+velvet-knee cleaner than he)--could not possibly lie longer on his
+pillow,--he to whom a drum came so near to-night, and to-morrow a
+friend. Anybody else, of course (at least the reader and myself), in
+the midst of the transparent night wherewith April was closing, the
+wide stillness on which the drum-sticks fell, the longing for a loved
+one with whom to-morrow would again make whole a desolate heart and a
+dismembered life, would have been filled by all this with tender
+emotions and dreams;--its only effect on the Chaplain's son was to
+fling him on his nag and out into the night: his inward earthquakes
+could only be allayed by a bodily gallop. He flew up and down the hill,
+on which he would to-morrow reunite himself to his Horion, ten times.
+He cursed and thundered at all his passions--to be sure _with_
+passion--which had hitherto laid the bone-saw to their hands linked in
+friendship. "Oh! when I once have thee again, Sebastian," he said, and
+twitched his nag round, "I will be so gentle, as gentle as thou, and
+never misconstrue thee; if I do, may the thunder--" Ashamed at his
+self-contradictory impetuosity, he rode merely at an ambling-pace home.
+
+His longing for his returning friend he expressed in the stable by
+plucking out some hairs from the top of the horse's head, drawing the
+cue-hair like the fourth string of a fiddle, and twisting off the bit
+of the key to the fodder-chest. Only a man who languishes for a friend
+_exactly_ as for a loved woman-deserves either. But there are men who
+go out of the world without ever having been troubled or concerned at
+the fact that no one in it had loved them. He who knows nothing higher
+than the _commercial treaty_ of self-interest, the _social contract_
+of civility, or even than the _boundary_ and _barter agreement_ of
+love, such a one,--but I wish he had never ordered me from the
+publisher!--whose withered heart knows nothing of the _Unitas Fratrum_
+of men joined in friendship, of the intertwining of their nobler
+vascular system, and of their sworn confederacy in strife and
+sorrow--But I see not why I should talk so long of this ninny, as he
+knows not how to enter into the least feeling of Flamin's yearning, who
+desired a loving, appreciative eye, because his faults and his virtues
+stood out in equal relief; for with other men, either at least the
+spots balance the rays, or the rays the spots.
+
+Only in princely stables is there an earlier and louder din than there
+was in the parsonage on the blessed 1st of May. I ask any female reader
+at random, whether there can ever be more to polish and to boil than on
+a morning when a lord with a cataract is expected, and his son, too,
+and an eye-doctor? Men's resting-days always fall upon women's
+rasping-days; father and son went composedly to meet the doctor and the
+coucher.
+
+The 1st of May began, like man and human history, with a mist. Spring,
+the Raphael of the northern earth, stood already out of doors and
+covered all apartments of our Vatican with his pictures. I love a mist
+whenever it glides off like a veil from the face of a fair day, and
+whenever it is created, not by the "four _faculties_," but by greater
+ones. When (as this one did on the 1st of May) it webs-over summits and
+streams like a drag-net,--when the clouds, pressed down by their
+weight, crawl along on our lawns and through wet bushes,--when in one
+quarter it soils the heavens with a pitchy vapor and lines the wood
+with a heavy, unclean fog-bank, while in the other, wiped off from the
+moist sapphire of the sky, it gilds with minute drops the flowers, and
+when this blue splendor and that dirty night pass over close by each
+other and exchange places,--who does not feel, then, as if he saw lands
+and nations lying before him, on which poisonous and mephitic mists
+move round in groups, now coming and now going? And when, further, this
+white night encompasses my melancholy eye with flying streams of vapor,
+with floating, fluttering particles of perfume-dust, then do I sadly
+see in the vapor human life pictured, with its two great clouds on our
+rising and setting, with its seemingly light space around us, and its
+blue opening over our heads....
+
+The Doctor may have thought so too, but not father and son, who are
+going to meet him. Flamin is more powerfully affected by distant than
+by near nature, by the gross than by the detail, just as he has more
+feeling for the state than for the family room, and his inner man loves
+best to twine upward on pyramids, tempests, Alps. The Chaplain enjoys
+nothing about the whole thing except--May-butter, and from his mouth,
+amidst all this moral apparatus, issues nothing but--spittle, and both,
+because he is afraid of the damp's preying upon him and gnawing at his
+throat and stomach.
+
+As they strode down from the hill which was the scene of the nocturnal
+gallop into a valley confused with patches of mist; there marched out
+from it to meet them three garrison regiments on the double-quick. Each
+regiment was four men strong and as many deep, without powder or shoes,
+but provided with fine openwork high-ruffles,--that is to say, with
+porous pantaloons, and with superfluous officers, because there were no
+privates for them at all. When I now go on in my description to add,
+that both staffs, as well the regimental as the general staff, had over
+six hundred cannon in their pockets, and in fact a whole siege-train of
+artillery, and that the first platoon had wholly new _yellow_
+balls,[14] unusual in war, which germinated sooner than the gunpowder
+sowed by the savages, and which they thrust with the tongue into the
+muskets,--I should (I fear) make my readers, especially my lady
+readers, a little too distressed (and the more as I have not yet hinted
+whether these were soldier-parents or soldier-children) if I were to
+dip my pen again, and actually append the annoying circumstance that
+the troops began to fire at the befogged Court-Chaplain,--unless I
+leaped forward instanter with the information beforehand that a man's
+voice from behind the army cried, "Halt!"
+
+Forth came out of the rear ranks the general field-marshal, who was
+just as tall again as his lieutenant of artillery;--with a round hat,
+with flying arms and hair, he rushed impetuously upon Flamin, and
+attacked him with intent to destroy,--less from hatred than from love.
+It was the Doctor! The two friends hung trembling in each other's arms,
+face buried in face, breast pushed back from breast, with souls that
+had no words, but only tears of joy: the first embrace ended in a
+second,--the first utterances were their two names.
+
+The Chaplain had volunteered as a private along with the army, and
+stood with tried feelings on his insulating-stool, with a bare neck,
+around which nothing clung. "Just hug each other a moment longer," said
+he, and turned half-way round: "I must station myself only just a
+minute or two at the hazel-bush yonder, but I will be back again
+directly, and then I, in my turn, will embrace Mr. Doctor with a
+thousand pleasures." But Horion understood the natural recoil of love;
+he flew from the son's arms into those of the father, and lingered long
+therein, and made all good again.
+
+With appeased love, with dancing hearts, with overflowing eyes, under
+the full bloom of heaven and over the garniture of earth,--for Spring
+had opened her casket of brilliants, and flung blooming jewels into all
+the vales, and over all the hills, and even far up the mountains,--the
+two friends sauntered blissfully along, the British hand clasping the
+German. Sebastian Horion could not say anything to Flamin, but he
+talked with the father, and every indifferent sound made his bosom,
+laden with blood and love, breathe more freely.
+
+The three regiments had gone out of every one's head; but they had
+themselves marched obediently after the general field-marshal.
+Sebastian, too humane to forget any one, turned round toward the escort
+of little Sansculottes, who came, however, not from Paris, but from
+Flachsenfingen, and had attended him as begging soldier-children. "My
+children," said he, and looked at nothing but his standing army,
+"to-day is for your generalissimo and you, the memorable day on which
+he does three things. In the first place, I discharge you; but my
+retrenchment shall not hinder you any more than a prince's would from
+begging; secondly, I pay each of you arrearage for three years; namely,
+to each officer an allowance of three seventeen-kreutzer-pieces,
+because we have in these days raised the wages; thirdly, run back again
+to-morrow, and I will have all the regiments measured for breeches."
+
+He turned toward the Chaplain, and said: "It is much better to make
+presents in articles than in money, because gratitude for the latter is
+spent as soon as that is; but in a pair of presented pantaloons,
+gratitude lasts as long as the overhauls themselves."
+
+The only bad thing about it will be, that the Prince of Flachsenfingen
+and his war-ministry will at last interfere in the matter of the
+trousers, since neither can possibly allow regular troops to have more
+_on_ their bodies than _in_ them, namely, anything at all. In our
+days it should at last enter the heads of the stupidest commissary
+of equipment and provisioning,--but in fact there are discreet
+ones,--first, that, of two soldiers, the hungry is always to be
+preferred to the well-fed one, because it is already known, by the case
+of whole peoples, that the less they have, so much the braver they are;
+secondly, that just as, in Blotzheim,[15] of two equally virtuous
+youths, the poorer is crowned, even so the poor subject is preferred to
+the rich, though they may be equally courageous, and is alone enlisted,
+because the poor devil is better acquainted with hunger and frost; and,
+thirdly, that now, when on all the steps of the throne, as on walls,
+cannon are placed (as the sun receives its brilliancy from thousands of
+vomiting volcanoes), and, as in a well-conditioned state, the rod of
+up-shooting manhood is forced into ramrods,--the people advantageously
+fall into two classes of paupers,--the protected and their protectors;
+and, fourthly, the Devil take him who grumbles!
+
+When my three beloved _personae_ at length arrived in front of the
+parsonage, the whole disbanded army had secretly marched after them and
+demanded the breeches. But something still greater had travelled after
+them from Flachsenfingen,--the blind lord. Hardly had the Britoness
+smiled-in her young guest, not politely, but delightedly, hardly had
+Agatha, for the first time, seriously, hid herself behind her mother,
+and old Appel behind the pots and kettles, when Eymann, who was in the
+midst of his cleaning, made a long leap from the window at which four
+Englanders--not foreigners, but horses--came trotting up. Now for the
+first time the question occurred to every one, where the oculist was;
+and Sebastian had hardly time to reply, that there was no one else to
+come, for he himself was to operate on his father. Into the short
+interval which the father occupied in passing from the carriage-door to
+the room-door the son had to squeeze in the fib, or rather the entreaty
+_for_ the fib, which the family was to put upon his Lordship, that his
+son had not yet arrived, but only the oculist, whom a recent apoplectic
+attack had deprived of his speech.
+
+I and the reader stand amidst such a throng of people, that I have not
+yet been able even to tell him that Dr. Culpepper had as good as
+punched out the lord's left eye with the blunt couching-needle; in
+order, therefore, to save the right eye of his beloved father,
+Sebastian had applied himself to the cure of those impoverished beings,
+who, as regards their sight, already grope round in Orcus, and only
+with four of their senses stand any longer outside the grave.
+
+When the son beheld the dear form veiled in such a long night, for whom
+there was no longer child or sunlight, he slid his hand, whose pulse
+trembled with pity, joy, and hope, under Eymann's, and hurriedly
+extended it, and pressed the father's under a strange name. But he had
+to go out of the house door again, till the trembling of his hand under
+the weight of the salvation it was bringing should subside, and he
+restrained out there his heart beating with hope by the thought that
+the operation might be unsuccessful; he looked with a smile up and down
+along the twelve-horse-team of the corps of cadets, that the emotion
+and yearning might pass from his excited breast. In-doors, meanwhile,
+the Chaplain's wife had made the blind man a still blinder one, and
+lied to him _quantum satis_; whenever a lie, a pious fraud, a _dolum
+bonum_, a poetic and legal fiction is to be gotten up, women offer
+themselves readily as business secretaries and court-printers, and help
+out their honest man. "I very much wish," said the father, as the son
+entered, "that the operation might at once proceed before my son
+arrives." The Chaplain's wife brought back the anxious son and
+disclosed to him the paternal wish. He stepped lightly forward amidst
+the embarrassed company. The room was shaded, the couching-lancet
+brought forth, and the diseased eye steadied. All stood with anxious
+attention around the composed patient. The Chaplain peered with a
+ludicrous anxiety and agony at the sleeping infant, prepared, at the
+least cry, to run with it immediately out of the couching-chamber.
+Agatha and Flamin kept themselves far from the patient, and both were
+equally serious. Flamin's noble mother drew near with her heart seized
+at once by joy and anxiety and love, and with her overflowing eyes,
+which obeyed her agitated heart. Victor wept for fear and for joy
+beside his dumb father, but he passionately smothered every drop that
+might disturb him. Thus does every operation, by the climax of
+preparation, communicate to the spectator heart-beating and trembling.
+Only the veiled Briton,--a man who lifted his head coldly and serenely,
+like a high mountain over a torrid zone,--he offered to the filial hand
+a face silent and motionless; he kept composed and mute before the fate
+which was now to decide whether his dreary night should reach even to
+the grave or no farther than this minute....
+
+Fate said, Let there be light, and there was. The invisible destiny
+took a son's anxious hand and opened therewith an eye, which was worthy
+of a finer night than this starless one. Victor pressed the mature lens
+of the cataract--that smoke-ball[16] and cloud cast over creation--down
+into the bottom of the pupil; and so, when an atom had been sunk three
+lines deep, a man possessed immensity again, and a father his son.
+Oppressed mortal! thou that art at once a _son_ and a _slave_ of the
+dust, how slight is the thought, the moment, the drop of blood or
+tear-drop, that is required to overflow thy wide brain, thy wide heart!
+And if a couple of blood-globules can become, now thy Montgolfier's
+globes and now thy Belidor's percussion-balls,[17] ah, how little earth
+it takes to exalt or to crush thee!
+
+"Victor! thou? Is it thou who hast cured me, my son?" said the
+delivered man, taking the hand that was still armed with the surgical
+instrument. "Lay it aside and bandage me again! I rejoice that I saw
+thee first of all." The son could not stir for emotion. "Bandage me,
+the light is painful! _Was_ it thou? speak!" He bandaged in silence the
+open eye amidst the glad tears of his own. But when the bandage hid
+from that noble stoical soul everything, his blushing and his weeping,
+then was it impossible for the happy son to contain himself any
+longer;--he gave himself up to his heart, and clung with his tears upon
+the veiled countenance to which he had given back brighter days; and
+when he felt on his trembling breast the _quicker_ beatings of his
+father's heart, and the _tighter_ embrace of his gratitude,--then was
+the best child the happiest,--and all rejoiced at his joy, and
+congratulated the son more than the father....
+
+Twelve cannon went off from that number of door-keys. They shot this
+History dead.
+
+For now it is actually gone,--not a word, not a syllable of it do I
+know any longer. In fact I have never in my life seen or heard or
+dreamed of, or romantically invented, any Horion or any St. Luna;--the
+Devil and I know how it is; and I, on my part, have, besides, better
+things to do and to lay open now, namely,
+
+
+                 THE OVERTURE AND SECRET INSTRUCTIONS.
+
+Another would have been stupid enough to begin at the very beginning;
+but I thought to myself, I can at any time tell where I live,--in fact,
+at the Equator, for I reside on the island of _St. John's_, which lies,
+as is well known, in the East Indian waters, which are entirely
+surrounded by the principality of _Scheerau_. For nothing can be less
+unknown to good houses, which keep their regular literary waste-book
+(the Fair-Catalogue) and their regular stock-book (the Literary Times),
+than my latest home product, the _Invisible Lodge_,--a work, the
+reading of which my sovereign should make still more obligatory on his
+children, and even on his vassals, (it would not expressly contradict
+the Recesses,) than the attending the national university. In this
+Lodge, now, I have placed the extraordinary pond better known by the
+name of the East Indian Ocean, and into which we, of Scheerau, have
+steered and moored the few Moluccas and other islands on which our
+productive business lies. While the invisible lodge was being
+transformed by the press into a visible one, we again prepared an
+island,--namely, the isle of _St. John's_, on which I now live and
+write.
+
+The following digression ought to be attractive, because it discloses
+to the reader why I prefixed to this book the crazy title,
+Dog-post-days.
+
+It was day before yesterday, on the 29th of April, that I was walking
+in the evening up and down my island. The evening had already spun
+itself into haze and shadow. I could hardly see over to Tidore
+Island,[18] that monument of fair, sunken spring-times, and my eye
+glanced round only on the near buddings of twig and blossom, those
+wing-casings of growing Spring,--the plain and coast around me looked
+like a tiring-room of the flower-goddess, and her finery lay scattered
+and hid in vales and bushes round about,--the moon lay as yet behind
+the earth, but the well-spring of her rays shot up already along the
+whole rim of heaven,--the blue sky was at length pierced with silver
+spangles, but the earth was still painted black by the night. I was
+looking only at the heavens,--when something plashed on the earth....
+
+It was a little Pomeranian dog, who had leaped into the Indian Ocean,
+and was now heading full for St. John's. He crawled up on my coast and
+rained a shower of drops as he waggled near me. With a dog who is an
+utter stranger, it is still more disagreeable undertaking to spin a
+conversation than with an Englishman, because one knows neither the
+character nor the name of the animal. The dog had some business with
+me, and seemed to be a plenipotentiary. At last the moon opened her
+sluices of radiance, and brought me and the dog into full light.
+
+
+                          "_To his Well-Born_,
+            _Superintendent of Mines_,[19] _Mr. Jean Paul_,
+                                  _on_
+_Free_.                                              _St. John's_."
+
+
+This address to me hung down from the neck of the animal, and was
+pasted to a gourd-bottle which was tied to his collar. The dog
+consented to my taking off his iron collar, as the Alpine dogs do their
+portable refectory-table. I extracted from the bottle, which in
+sutlers' tents had often been filled with spirit, something which
+intoxicated me still better,--a package of letters. _Savans_, lovers,
+people of leisure, and maidens are passionately sharp-set upon letters;
+business-people, not at all.
+
+The whole package (name and hand were strange to me) turned upon the
+one point, to wit, that I was a famous man, and had intercourse with
+kings and emperors;[20] and that there were few mining intendants of my
+stamp, etc. But enough! For I must needs not have an ounce of modesty
+left in me if, with the impudence which some really possess, I should
+go on excerpting and extracting from the letters, that I was the Gibbon
+and the Moeser[21] of Scheerau, (to be sure only in the biographical
+department, but then what flattery!)--that every one who possessed a
+life, and would see it biographically delineated by me, should set
+about the matter at once, before I was pressed away by some royal house
+as its historiographer, and could absolutely no longer be had,--that
+it might occur in my case as in that of other mine-intendants, before
+whom often the deluded public never took off its hat, until they had
+already passed into another lane,[22] i. e. world, etc. Who apprehends
+this last more than myself? But even this apprehension does not
+bring a modest man to the point of lowering himself down to be the
+bellows-blower to the man that shall sound his eulogy; as I to be sure
+should have done, if I had gone on to lay myself entirely bare. To my
+feeling even those authors are odious, who, in their shamelessness,
+only _then_ bring up the rear with the final flourish, that _modesty
+forbids them to say more_, when they have already said everything that
+modesty _can_ forbid.
+
+At length my correspondent ventures out with his design, namely, to
+make me the compiler of an unnamed family history. He begs, he
+intrigues, he defies. "He is able,"--he writes more copiously, but I
+abridge all, and in fact I deliver this epistolary extract with
+uncommonly little understanding; for I have been this half-hour
+scratched and gnawed in an unusually exasperating manner by a cursed
+beast of a rat,--"to establish everything for me by documentary
+evidence, but is not allowed to communicate to me any other names of
+the personages in this history than fictitious ones, because I am not
+wholly to be trusted,--in time he will explain everything to me,--for
+this is a history upon which and its development destiny itself is
+still working, and what he hands over to me is only the snout thereof,
+but he will duly make over to me one member after another, just as it
+falls off from the lathe of time, until we get the tail;--accordingly
+the epistolary _Spitz_ will regularly swim back and forth as a _poste
+aux anes_,[23] but I must not on any account sail after the postman;
+and thus," concludes the correspondent, who signs himself _Knef_,
+"shall the dog, as a Pegasus, bring me so much nutritious sap, that,
+instead of the thin Forget-me-not of an annual, I may rear a thick
+cabbage-head or cauliflower of folios."
+
+How successfully he has accomplished his purpose the reader knows, who
+is fresh from the first chapter of this story, which, from Eymann's
+rats to the cannonade complete, was all in Spitz's bottle.
+
+I wrote back to Mr. Knef in the gourd only so much as this: "Anything
+nonsensical I seldom decline. Your flatteries would make me proud if I
+were not so already; hence, flatteries harm me little. I find the best
+world to be contained in the mere microcosm, and my Arcadia stretches
+not beyond the four chambers of my brain; the Present is made for
+nothing but the maw of man; the Past consists of history, which,
+again, is an aggregate present peopled by the dead, and a mere
+_Declinatorium_[24] of our perpetual _horizontal_ deviations from the
+cold pole of truth, and an _Inclinatorium_[25] of our _vertical_ ones
+from the sun of virtue. There is left, therefore, to man, who wants to
+be happier in than out of himself, nothing but the Future, or fancy,
+that is, romance. Now, as a biography is easily exalted into a romance
+by skilful hands, as we see by Voltaire's 'Charles' and his 'Peter,'
+and by autobiographies, I undertake the biographical work, on condition
+that in it the truth shall be only my maid of honor, but not my guide.
+
+"In visiting-parlors one makes one's self odious by general satires,
+because every one can take them to himself; personal ones they set down
+as among the duties of _medisance_, and so pardon them, because they
+hope the satirist is attacking the person rather than the vice. In
+books, however, it is exactly the reverse, and to me, in case several
+or more knaves, as I hope, play parts in our biography, their
+_incognito_ is a quite pleasing feature. A satirist is not so
+unfortunate herein as a physician. A lively medical author can describe
+few maladies which some lively reader shall not think he himself has;
+he inoculates the hypochondriac by his historical patients with their
+pains as thoroughly as if he put him to bed with a real attack of them;
+and I am firmly convinced that few people of rank can read living
+descriptions of the unclean disease without imagining they have it, so
+weak are their nerves and so strong their fancies, whereas a satirist
+can cherish the hope that a reader will seldom apply to himself his
+pictures of moral maladies, his anatomical tables of spiritual
+abortions; he can freely and cheerily depict despotism, imbecility,
+pride, and folly, without the least apprehension that any one will
+fancy himself to have anything of the kind; nay, I can charge the whole
+public, or all Germans, with an aesthetic lethargy, a political
+enervation, a politico-economical phlegma towards everything which does
+not go into the stomach or the purse; but I rely upon every one who
+reads me, that he at least will not reckon himself in the number, and
+if this letter were printed, I would appeal to every one's inner
+witness. The only performer whose true name I must have in this
+historical drama--especially as he plays only the prompter--is
+the--Dog.                     JEAN PAUL."
+
+
+I have, as yet, got no answer, nor any second chapter; so now it
+depends wholly on the Dog whether he will present the sequel of this
+History to the learned world or not.
+
+But is it possible that a biographical mining intendant, merely for the
+sake of a cursed rat, who, besides, is not working at any journal, but
+only in my house, must just run away from the public and thunder
+through all rooms, to worry the carrion to death?...
+
+... _Spitzius Hofmann_ is the name of the dog; _he_ was the rat, and
+was scratching at the door with the second chapter in the flask. A
+whole crammed provisionship, which the learned world may nibble at
+have I taken off from Hofmann's neck; and now the reader, who loves to
+read wise things as well as stupid ones, shall have opened to him
+to-day--for henceforth it is certain that I shall go on with my
+writing--glad prospects which, from a certain feeling of modesty,
+I do not designate.... The reader sits now on his sofa, the
+fairest reading-Hours dance round him and hide from him his
+repeating-watch,--the Graces hold my book for him and hand to him the
+sheets,--the Muses turn over the leaves for him, or in fact read it all
+to him;--he has nothing to disturb him, but the Swiss or the children
+must say, "Papa is out." As life has on one foot a sock and on the
+other a buskin, he loves to have a biography laugh and weep in one
+breath; and as the fine writers always understand how to combine with
+the useful moral of their writings a something immoral which poisons,
+but charms,--like the apothecaries, who draw at once _medicines_ and
+_aqua vitae_,--so does he willingly forgive me, in consideration of the
+immoral which is prominent, the religious quality which I sometimes
+have, and _vice versa_; and as this biography is set to music, because
+Ramler sets it beforehand into hexameter (which it certainly needs far
+more than Gessner's harmonious prose[26]), he can, when he has done
+reading, stand up and play or sing it.... I, too, am almost as happy as
+if I read the work;--the Indian Ocean flings up the peacock-wheels of
+its illuminated circle of waves before my island,--I stand on the best
+footing with all, the Reader, the Reviewer, and the Dog;--everything is
+ready to hand with each Dog-post-day: a recipe for ink from an
+alchemist; the gooseherd with quills was here day before yesterday; the
+bookbinder with gay writing-books only to-day: nature buds, my body
+blooms, my mind produces,--and so I hang my blossoms over the tan-bed
+and forcing-bed (i. e. over the island), send my root-fibres through
+the soil, unable (Hamadryad that I am) to guess from my foliage how
+much moss years may collect on my bark, how many woodchafers the future
+may gather upon the pith of my heart, and how many tree-lifters Death
+may lay under my roots,--nothing of all this do I surmise, but swing
+joyfully--thou good destiny!--my boughs in the wind, lay my suckling
+leaves to the bosom of a Nature filled with light and dew, and, with
+the breath of universal life fluttering through me, stir up as much
+articulate noise as is necessary, that one or another sad human heart,
+while contemplating these _leaves_, may forget, in short, gentle
+dreams, its stings, its throbbings, its stiflings----O, why is a man
+sometimes so happy?
+
+For this reason: because he is sometimes a _litterateur_. As often as
+Fate, under its veil, dots off from the great world atlas to a special
+map the little life-stream of a _literatus_, which runs over some
+lecture-halls and bookshelves, it may possibly think and say thus:
+"Surely there is no cheaper or rarer way of making a creature
+happy than by making him a literary one: his goblet of joy is an
+inkhorn,--his feast of trumpets and carnival is (if he is a reviewer)
+the Easter-fair,--his whole Paphian grove is compressed into a
+bookcase,--and what else do his blue Mondays consist of than (written
+or read) Dog-post-days?" And so Fate itself leads me over to the
+
+
+
+
+                            2. DOG-POST-DAY.
+
+             Antediluvian History.--Victor's Plan of Life.
+
+
+At the gate of the First Chapter, the readers ask the incomers: "What
+is your name?--your character?--your business?"
+
+The Dog answers for all: H. Januarius--i. e. Herr Januarius, not Holy
+Januarius; but the Prince of Flachsenfingen bore that name--had, in his
+younger years, made the grand tour or journey round the beautiful and
+the great world. He everywhere distributed gifts to strangers, which
+cost him but a single _don gratuit_ from his subjects, and he succored
+and pitied many oppressed peasants in France, who fared as badly as his
+own did in Flachsenfingen. For the defenceless female sex, like all
+travelling princes, he did, if possible, still more; one may say of the
+greater number of them, that, like Titus, or like one sailing westward
+round the world, they, to be sure, sometimes lose a _day_, but seldom a
+_night_, without making others, and consequently being themselves,
+happy. In fact, the Regent must have foreseen the present depopulation
+of France; for he took measures betimes against it, and left behind him
+in three Gallic seaboard cities three sons, and on the so-called Seven
+Islands only one. The first was called the Welshman, the second the
+Brazilian, the third the Calabrian; the one on the Seven Islands, the
+Monsieur, or _Mosye_: these names were probably meant to allude to
+Princes of Wales, Brazil, and Asturias. He let his children grow up in
+no worse ignorance than ignorance of their rank: they were to be formed
+for future co-workers in his administration. Januarius was, to be sure,
+sensual and somewhat feeble, but--except where he _feared_--extremely
+philanthropic.
+
+Lord Horion met Prince January twice on his journeys: the first time he
+cut across the princely planetary orbit as a comet, in the sense of a
+hairy star; the second, as a comet with a tail when in its perihelion.
+What I mean is this: it was just when Horion was in love with a scion
+of January's house, who lived in London, that he saw the Prince for the
+second time, and at his house in London entertained him and his court.
+Upon this very distant relative of the Prince my papers--from an
+excessive deference to political and domestic relations--throw an
+unseasonable veil. She was, at the time of marrying his Lordship,
+twenty-two years old, and her whole person was (if I may venture to
+adopt the bold expression of a London eulogist) nothing but a single,
+tender, still blue eye. That is all which is vouchsafed to the public.
+
+The Prince willingly let himself be mastered and managed--by the lord,
+whom a singular mixture of coldness and genius constituted an unlimited
+monarch and commander of souls. The lord had, moreover, a beautiful
+niece in his house, whose charms in princes' eyes made such a spiritual
+Old Man of the Mountain as he at once _younger_ and more _smooth_.
+
+But the death-bell threw its discords into these harmonies of life. The
+beloved of his Lordship fled from the rough earth, and left behind her
+his first-born son as a memorial, and pledge of love; she died in her
+twenty-third year, as it were of the life of her child, some days after
+its birth, and the thin, tender twig broke down under the ripe fruit.
+Lord Horion bowed silently to fate. He had loved her terribly, without
+showing it: he mourned her in the same manner, without moistening his
+deep black eye.
+
+The Prince found in the niece, i. e. in a true Englishwoman, something
+to his taste, for the reason that he _had_ found what was still more so
+in the Frenchwomen; and on this ground he would, inversely, have loved
+them, had he previously known her. The subsequent Chief Chamberlain, Le
+Baut, had the same sentiments, and, what is still more, toward the same
+person; and as Indian courtiers imitate all wounds of their sovereign,
+so did Le Baut with an arrow of Cupid copy those of his master, and
+transferred to himself therewith one of the severest.
+
+These London histories cannot last much longer, and then we shall
+happily get back again to our St. Luna.
+
+A burning fever seized the Regent, which his physician, Dr. Culpepper,
+held to be merely zigzag dartings of fitful, gouty matter. I have been
+unable, hitherto, to ascertain whether this Culpepper has any tolerably
+near relationship to his well-known namesake and professional co-master
+in London. The fever hunted January so hard, and the Father Confessor
+instituted with his conscience, instead of extinguishing processes, so
+many incendiary ones, that in the agony of death he took a solemn oath
+never again at the sight of a maiden to think of Depopulation and
+Revolution. The same weakness which strengthened his superstition and
+childlike credulity ministered to his sensuality; when he was up again,
+he absolutely knew not what to do. The niece and his oath were
+next-door neighbors in the chambers of his brain. A clever ex-Jesuit
+from Ireland, who lived only for doubts of conscience, and had himself
+a _conscientia dubia_, flew to the help of the doubter, and gave him to
+understand that "his vow, especially before getting absolution from it,
+he must conscientiously keep, excepting the sinful and impossible point
+therein, that, namely, which, without the consent of his spouse, he had
+neither the right to promise nor the power to fulfil." In other words,
+the Jesuit failed not to show him, that he had in his fever sworn off
+only from the _unmarried_ sex, and limited his celibacy merely to nuns,
+that accordingly his vow did not, to be sire, forbid him compound
+adultery, (which confession would do away) but it did with extreme
+strictness the simple kind. January was too religious not to refrain
+wholly from the simple form.
+
+It is hard to investigate the relation in which his now _increased_
+love for his four grand dukes or _little_ dukes in Gaul stood to the
+fulfilment of his vow; in short, he gave his Lordship the commission
+and full power to fetch the four little persons from Gaul to London,
+because he wanted to take his beloved anonymous little posterity with
+him to Germany. It was uncertain whether he loved the mothers so
+heartily for the children's sake, or the children for the sake of the
+mothers. His Lordship went gladly, like Kotzebue (but differently),
+after the death of his beloved, to France. At last there came, not from
+him, but from the tutors of the Welshman, the Brazilian, the Calabrian,
+the sad intelligence, that in one night, probably according to a
+concerted plan of conspired prince-stealers, the three children had
+been abducted; and not long after that the sorrowful post was not only
+confirmed by his Lordship, but aggravated by the new one, that the
+Monsieur or Mosye on the Seven Islands was no more--to be found there.
+
+Fate often gives man the balsam before the wound: January received his
+fifth son, whom I shall never call anything but the Infante, still
+earlier than the tidings of his forfeited blessing of children. The
+chief Chamberlain, Von Le Baut, had wedded the mother of the Infante
+(his Lordship's niece); but he dated his marriage three quarter-days
+back, instead of announcing it one later. I have never been able to see
+the connection of this anachronism or misreckoning of time with the
+Prince's vow. For the rest, dangerous as January's _votum_ made him to
+the _husbands_ of his court, and harmless to the _fathers_,
+nevertheless, the virtuous confidence which the husbands reposed in the
+female virtue which they had appropriated to themselves by marriage was
+so unlimited, that they, without hesitation, led that virtue into the
+midst of his unbridled flames. Nay, they even disdained the fear of
+being suspected of doing so in order that, when he laid down his crown
+on the toilet-table of their spouses, they might play with the shining
+wall-crown (_corona muralis_) as with a _joujou_, and with its
+brilliancy throw a dazzling light into people's windows: for a courtier
+cares more to own his wife than to watch over her.[27]
+
+It will come on presently, cry the puppet-players; it will be over
+presently, say I.
+
+When, at length, his Lordship returned empty-handed, he was
+greatly surprised, not at the presence of the Infante, but at his
+adoption,--namely, at the marriage of Le Baut. But this High
+Chamberlain was--and no one minded it less than Horion--an ardent
+friend of the Prince; this rendered him capable of doing for him
+(as Cicero requires) even that which he would never have done for
+himself,--namely, a dishonorable action. In fact, it is an uncommon
+piece of good fortune for a courtier or a world's man, whose honor his
+high position exposes often to the worst of weather, that this honor,
+however sensitive to slight contusions,[28] easily gets over great
+ones, and can, if not by words, yet by deeds, be assailed without
+injury. Something similar is remarked by physicians in regard to
+madmen, or rather their skin, which to be sure feels the lightest
+touch, but on which no blister will draw. The Prince was knit to Le
+Baut by a threefold ligament,--by gratitude, son, and wife; his
+Lordship plucked the ligament asunder; that is to say, he laid bare
+to his niece the Chamberlain's heart, and discovered to her the
+poison-bag therein, and a dramatically carried out _plan_, which she
+had hitherto regarded as an _indulgent confidence_. All the nobility
+and pride of her nature flamed up in her with shame and wrath, and,
+pursued by crashing recollections, she flew with her child, and with
+the prospect of a second, out of the city to a country-seat of his
+Lordship's.
+
+Now the Prince with his Lordship and his court (including even Dr.
+Culpepper) returned to Germany. Le Baut tarried awhile longer to
+appease the niece and persuade her to take the journey. But it was not
+only impossible to draw all her deeply sunk roots out of the land of
+freedom and go with the party to Germany, but she even separated
+herself, not only by seas, but by a bill of divorce, from the filthy
+favorite. She was obliged to leave with the Chamberlain her second
+child, his real daughter; but the first, the Infante, she clasped to
+her maternal breast. Le Baut was glad enough to let it be so, and
+thought that after the building-oration the scaffolding of the building
+should also go into the house-stove. But when he appeared under the
+German throne-canopy, his sun (January) stood at the summer solstice,
+which from decreasing warmth gradually passed over to cold storms.
+January's love could more easily rise and fall than stay still, and the
+greatest crime with him was absence. Le Baut, stripped of both wife and
+child, must needs lose now in comparison with his Lordship, because the
+latter came upon the stage, and under January's throne-canopy as
+treasurer and coast-warden of two treasures left behind in London. But
+there were deeper reasons. His Lordship easily governed the Regent,
+because he held him in neither by his own nor other people's vices, but
+by his own virtues. In the first place, he required nothing of him, not
+so much as diet and chastity. Secondly, he lifted no cousins into the
+saddle, but tipped bad men out of it; he bore him like a hawk on his
+gloved fist, but the falconer did it not for the purpose of darting the
+Prince upon doves and hares, but in order to make him at once
+_watchful_ and _tame_. Thirdly, his firmness and his fineness mutually
+compensated each other: the best one to rule over changeable men is the
+unchangeable. Fourthly, he was not the favorite, but the associate,
+remained always a Briton and a lord and the country's beneficent
+bee-father (apiary), whereas January was the queen-bee and in the
+queen-bee's prison. Fifthly, he was one of the few men to whom one must
+be _equal_ in order to resist their will; and any one who would play
+the juggler's trick of throwing a padlock on his mouth slyly, soon had
+one to fetters and manacles on his own soul. Sixthly, he had a good
+cheese. This last point needs no copious explanation. In Chester he had
+a farmer, who produced a cheese, the like of which was not to be found
+in Europe; but to princes generally an extraordinary cheese is more
+gratifying than an extraordinary address of thanks from the provincial
+syndic.
+
+With such a conjunction of ill stars, of course our Chamberlain found
+the bill of divorce, which at first was written with sympathetic ink in
+January's face, gradually more and more legible. Still he read it
+through several times every week, in order to read it correctly; he
+could now no longer procure any lapdog a place, that is, a lap,--his
+letters of recommendation were Uriah's-letters,[29]--and now, when he
+actually succeeded in getting, through his Lordship, the charge of
+chief Chamberlain, he thought it high time to try, against the gout in
+his knee, bathing at his knightly seat of St. Luna year in and year
+out, and so he set off, having first been obliged to solemnly promise
+the whole court that he should come back well.
+
+Properly, now, the preliminary history would be, according to promise,
+ended, so that I might get well on in the later history this work
+contains, were I not absolutely obliged on the Court-Chaplain's account
+to add this much more:--
+
+The only place of which Le Baut had the presentation at court was
+the parish of St. Luna. He invested therewith, as its patron, the
+Rat-contradictor Eymann, who had begged from him in London the oral
+vocation to the Court-Chaplaincy, and who could no longer obtain it.
+Hence the Dog-post-days always call him the Court-Chaplain, although in
+fact he is only a country pastor.
+
+From the slight circumstance that Eymann, as travelling preacher,
+accompanied January's retinue, a great deal grew out. Eymann, at his
+Lordship's country-seat, offered to his present wife the neck- and
+breast-pendant of a heart hollowed with consumption, as a slight gift,
+which was accepted. To the couple while still in England their Flamin
+was born. Her Ladyship loved in the person of the Court-Chaplain's wife
+a worthy sister of her sex, and a worthy fellow-citizen of her native
+land; she urged her with fervent prayers to stay in England, and when
+all were refused, she begged and prevailed upon her at least to let her
+Flamin--in order to be at all events half a Briton--stay behind in the
+society of Victor and the Infante, till the friendly trio[30] should be
+transplanted simultaneously into German soil.
+
+The Parson's wife was strong enough to sacrifice for the sake of her
+Flamin's finer education the enjoyment of his presence, and left him
+behind under the eyes of love and in the little arms of childish
+friendship. The same training hand--_Dahore_ was the name of the
+teacher--reared and watered the three noble flowers, which sucked from
+one kind of bed and ether three kinds of color, and developed unlike
+stamens and honeycups. Dahore had the hearts of all children in his
+tender hand, simply because his own never boiled and blustered, and
+because an ideal beauty sat upon his youthful form and an ideal love
+dwelt in his pure breast. The three children loved and embraced each
+more warmly in his presence, as the Graces enfold each other before
+Venus Urania: they even bore all the same name, as the Otaheitans
+exchange names with those they love. When they had attained some
+ripeness of years, his Lordship came to put them all with Dahore on
+board ship for Germany. But before the embarkation the Infante caught
+the small-pox and was made blind, and Dahore was obliged to return with
+him to the distressed and weeping lady. Victor had long and
+speechlessly hung on the neck of his sick friend and clung around
+Dahore's knee, refusing to part from his two loved ones; but his
+Lordship parted them: Flamin and Victor were, from that time, educated
+in Flachsenfingen, the former for a jurist, the latter for a physician.
+
+There are some improbabilities in Spitzius Hofmann's gourd-flask; but
+the Dog must be held responsible for what he delivers. Now the story
+goes straight forward again.
+
+His Lordship, during the cannonading of the tattered or riddled
+garrison, withdrew with Victor into another apartment; and his first
+word was, "Unbandage me a moment, and leave thy hand in mine, that I
+may be sure of thy attention, for I have much to say to thee." Good
+man! we all remark that thou art more tender than thou art willing to
+appear, and we all praise it. Not _coldness_, but _cooling-off_, is the
+greater wisdom; and our inner man should, like a hot metal-casting in
+its mould, cool but slowly, in order that it may round itself out to a
+smoother form: for that very reason has Nature--just as they _warm_ the
+mould for statuary metal--poured his soul into an _ardent_ body.
+
+He continued: "I have, my dear boy, in my blindness been able to
+dictate to thee only empty letters; I meant to save my secrets for thy
+arrival. I am watched by a small gunpowder-conspiracy." Victor
+interrupted him with the question, how he had so suddenly become blind.
+His Lordship answered, reluctantly, "One eye was probably so already
+before thy departure for Goettingen, but I did not know it."
+
+"But the other?" said Victor.
+
+Over his Lordship's face glanced the cold shadow of a buried pang; he
+looked on his son a long time, and answered, as if abstractedly and
+hurriedly, "Also! as I look on thee, thou seemest to me much taller and
+larger."
+
+"That is, perhaps," replied he, for he guessed his thought, "an ocular
+illusion of the sensitive retina.[31] You spoke of a gunpowder-plot."
+
+"They have found out," his Lordship continued, "that the Prince's son
+is not in London: they even assume that the disease was given to him at
+that time designedly; and the Prince daily speaks of the moment when I
+shall bring his son back to him. Perhaps he knows these suspicions. I
+was obliged to postpone my departure for London till my cure. Now I
+shall shortly start for England, where the son is not, to bring his
+mother; him I shall bring from otherwheres, and with just as good eyes
+as thou hast given me."
+
+"Then," Victor broke out, "not the best of men, but his enemies, will
+be hurled down."
+
+"No, I am to be _hurled down_ first (to express myself in thy
+fashion),--but thou hast interrupted me: I have never had the courage
+to interrupt other people like fools,--for my absence is just what they
+want."
+
+I, as installed historiographer, ask no leave of any one, and interrupt
+whom I will. One who is interrupted may jest, indeed, but he can no
+longer argue. The Socrates grafted upon Plato, who never let a sophist
+have his talk out, was therefore one himself. In England, where they
+tolerate systems even among the wine-cups, a man can spread himself
+out like a royal folio: in France, where the spectacles of wisdom
+are splintered into sharp, shiny bits, one must be as curt as a
+visiting-card. A hundred times is the wise man silent before the
+coxcomb, because he needs twenty-three sheets to express his opinion.
+Coxcombs need only lines; their opinions are upstarting islands, held
+together by nothing but emptiness.... I add the remark, that between
+the lord and his son a fine, courteous wariness reigned, which in the
+case of so near a relationship is to be justified only by their rank,
+their mental structure, and their frequent separation.--
+
+"But my presence is, perhaps, still worse. The Princess--"
+
+(The Prince's bride, since his first wife died early and without
+children, as Spitz says.)
+
+"The Princess brings along with her a stream of diversions, in which he
+will no longer hear any voice but that which lures to pleasure. An
+interrupted influence is as good as lost. And then, too, I am, up to a
+certain point, so tired of this game, that I gladly flee from the new
+engagements in which this new arrival would involve me. Should she, as
+they say, not love him, she might so much the more easily govern him;
+and then my absence would be, again, not good. But, setting me aside,
+what dost thou propose to do during my absence?"
+
+After a crotchet-rest, he answered himself, "Thou wilt be his
+Physician-in-ordinary, Victor." Victor's hand twitched in his father's.
+"Thou hast already been promised to him; and he longs for thee, simply
+because I have often named thee. He is impatient to see for himself how
+any one looks whose father he knows so well. As Physician-in-ordinary,
+thou canst, with thy art and thy fancy, keep him clear of strange
+fetters until I come again; then will I impose still softer ones on
+him, and go back forever. My engagement has had hitherto the design
+merely of averting strange ones, particularly a certain--" Then, with
+full heart and changed voice, "My beloved! it is hard in this world to
+win Virtue, Freedom, and Happiness, but still harder to diffuse them.
+The wise man gets everything from himself; the fool, from others. The
+freeman must release the slave, the philosopher think for the fool, the
+happy man labor for the unhappy."
+
+He rose, and presupposed Victor's Yes. The latter had therefore to
+dribble out his rhetorical flood during the leave-taking. He began
+with compressed breath: "I detest most cordially the simoom of the
+court-atmosphere ..." (his Lordship has to answer for it with me, that
+the son leaves out here the concessive conjunction, "to be sure":
+whoever lets it be seen that he expects obedience, gets it at least in
+a prouder shape) "which sweeps over nothing but prostrate men, and
+turns him to powder who remains upright! I wish I could be in an
+antechamber on a court-day; I would say to all in my thoughts: 'How I
+hate you and your sour honey of pleasure- and plague-parties; the
+cursed watchman's- and rower's-bench of your card-tables; the gifts of
+full dishes of slaughtered provinces (I mean your gaming-plates and
+your meat-plates)!' But I know very well I can never express myself
+strongly enough upon the servile, tide-waiting court-oysters, who know
+not how to stir or open anything--not excepting their hearts--but only
+their shell, to draw something in ..."
+
+"I have not _interrupted_ thee yet," said his Lordship, and stood still
+for a moment.
+
+"Meanwhile," the son continued, "I wade with the greatest pleasure down
+to the oyster-bank ... O, my dear father! how could I help going? Why
+have I not hitherto left your diseased eye unbandaged, that you might
+see in my face the absence of a single objection to your wishes? Ah!
+around every throne hang a thousand wet eyes, upturned by maimed men
+without hands; above sits iron Fate in the form of a prince, and
+stretches out no hand. Why shall not some tender-hearted man go up, and
+guide Fate's rigid hand, and with one hand dry, down below, a thousand
+eyes?"
+
+Horion smiled, as one who should say, Young man!
+
+"But I beg only for some legal postponements and delays, in order that
+I may get time to be more stoical and foolish,--foolish,--that is, I
+mean--contented. I should be glad to laugh and go on foot for two
+months longer among the good people around us, and by the side of my
+Flamin, particularly just now in the almanac spring and in that of my
+years, and before the ship of life freezes into the harbor of old age.
+Stoical I must be at any rate. Verily, did I not lay Epictetus's manual
+as a serpent-stone[32] to myself and my wounds, in order that the stone
+might suck out the moral poison; were I to go out of the house with a
+breast full of cancer-sores; what would the court think of me?... Ah!
+but I mean it seriously. The poor inner man--dried up by the
+intermittent fever of the passions, exhausted by the heart-palpitation
+of pleasure, burning with the wound-fever of love needs, like any other
+sick man, solitude and stillness and tranquillity, in order to get
+well."
+
+Though he named the word "tranquillity," his inner being was agitated
+even to the dissolving-point, so much had the passions already stirred
+his blood and shaken his heart.
+
+And now the two went back in a deepening silence of harmony to Eymann.
+
+"I have a request for my Flamin."
+
+"What is it?" said his Lordship.
+
+"I do not yet know, but he wrote me he would soon name it."
+
+"Mine to him is," said his Lordship, "that, if he will get a place, he
+must love the Pandects better than tactics, and, instead of the rapier,
+take the pen."
+
+The son had been treated too politely by the father to have courage
+enough to ask for his secrets, especially that relating to the
+whereabouts of January's son. I treat the reader with the same
+delicacy, and hope he will have just as little courage; for, when any
+one explains himself guardedly, nothing is more uncivil than to put a
+new question.
+
+His Lordship now travelled back, a cured man, to the Prince.
+
+
+
+
+                            3. DOG-POST-DAY.
+
+   Sowing-Day of Joys.--Watch-Tower.--Fraternization of the Heart!
+
+
+The departure of his Lordship was the removal of the dam which had
+hitherto stood in the way of the flood of narrations, questions, and
+pleasures. The first investigation upon which the Parsonage entered
+was, to see whether it was really the old Bastian. And he it was, hide
+and hair; even the left side-lock he had still, as of old, shorter than
+the right. When the butcher's boy comes home from Hungary, he wonders
+that his kin are the same old pennies; they, however, wonder that he is
+no longer so. But in the present case there was mutual delight at the
+unchangedness on both sides. On every face lay the halo of joy, but
+on each composed of different rays. On a soft face, like Victor's,
+rapture looks like virtue. Old Appel, who had never, in all her life,
+turned over any leaves but those of David's Psalter and that in an
+ox's stomach,[33] expressed her pleasure all day long to the brass
+kettles by scouring them with unusual zest. The Vienna hospital for
+animals--consisting of an old pug and puss, who no longer hated
+each other, just as in the old man the good and bad souls are
+reconciled--and the bird-collection under the stove, which was one
+rusty-black bulfinch strong, took their full share of interest in the
+general uproar, and introduced themselves, and--which no ambassador
+would have done--waived the right of the first visit. Agatha expressed
+her joy only with her lips, by keeping silence with them, and pressing
+them to her brother's. To the Court-Chaplain's credit, it is reported
+that he took the invalid pug, who had the podagra in his hind-feet and
+the chiragra in his fore-paws, and shoved him quietly in his basket
+keeping-room and chamber under the stove again; restored the
+architectural order of the chairs without scolding; and rocked the
+little Bastian amidst the joyful confusion of tongues, that he might
+not wake up and aggravate it. But in the highly refined heart of
+Victor's countrywoman, the Chaplain's wife, the rays of joy from the
+whole family came to a focus, and diffused through her whole bosom the
+living glow of love. She smiled right into Victor's face to such a
+degree that she knew no way of escape but by bethinking herself of his
+destined chamber, which she directed to be opened and shown to him.
+Agatha flew forward with the jingling bunch of keys; and the guest, as
+he entered, was followed by only so many people as there were in the
+house, all eager to see what he would say to it.
+
+He surrendered himself to all this friendly handling, not with the vain
+egotism of a cultivated stranger, but with a delighted, docile, almost
+child-like confusion; it gave him not the least concern that he looked
+like a child, so gentle, so glad, and so unpretending. In such hours it
+is hard to sit down, or to listen to a story, or to tell one....
+Everybody began one, but the Chaplain interposed: "We have quite other
+things to talk about." But no _quite other things_ came. Everybody
+wanted to enjoy the stranger where there were only four ears, but the
+six remaining ears could not be kept away. My description of his
+confusion is itself confused, but so it is with me always; for
+instance, when I describe haste, I do it, unconsciously, with the
+greatest. To a heart like his, that hung rocking in the feathers[34]
+of love, was there any need that it should see in every notched
+window-sill, in every smooth pavement-pebble, in every round hole
+drilled by the rain in the door-step, his boyhood's years mosaically
+pictured, and that he should enjoy in the same objects age and novelty?
+Those boyish years, which appeared to him out of a shadow, abiding on
+the lawns of St. Luna, between happy Sundays and among beloved
+faces,--those _boyish years_ held a dark mirror in their hands, in
+which the glimmering perspective of his _childish years_ ran backward;
+and in that remote magic-night stood, dimly gleaming, the form of
+_Dahore_, his never-to-be-forgotten teacher in London, who had so
+loved, so indulged, so improved him. "Ah!" thought he, "thou unrequited
+heart, too warm for this earth, where beatest thou now? why can I not
+unite my sighs with thine, and say to thee, Teacher, Beloved? O, man
+often perceives but late how much he was loved, how forgetful and
+ungrateful he was, and how great the heart he misunderstood." What
+nourished his still pleasure the most was the thought that he had
+earned it by his filial obedience to his father, and by his resolve to
+undertake the future labors-of-Hercules at court; for into every great
+joy of his the doubt would fall, like a bitter stomach-drop, whether he
+deserved it,--a doubt which reigning houses, palatines, patriarchs, and
+grand-masters have skilfully taken from them in childhood. The better
+sort of men find pleasure sweetest only after a good action,--the
+Easter-Festival after a Passion-Week.
+
+My lady-readers will now want to hear what was cooked for dinner;
+but the documents of this Post-day, which reach me half by wheel and
+half by water, state, in the first place, that no one had any
+appetite,--which joy takes away more than grief,--except the three
+regiments, which slashed like veterans into the enemy,--that is, into
+the leavings of the table; secondly, that the meal was still leaner
+than the guest himself. We will, however, hereby invite all the
+reading-societies in a body to the _immovable_ feast of the 4th of May,
+the Friday when, for the first time, Victor's arrival and his godson's
+churchgoing are suitably celebrated.
+
+The Parson's wife extricated the beset darling in the afternoon from
+the musical circle of so many tones, and smuggled him away from under
+the eyes of her husband, whose Directress and Lady Mayoress she was,
+and led him to his chamber, that she might there, before him alone,
+distress and delight herself, and speak out her heart, like a mother.
+Long-suppressed sighs and antiquated tears now forced their way out of
+the opened motherly heart into another and tender one, which was,
+indeed, her son's best friend. She complained to him of Flamin's
+excitability, which Victor used always to allay; of his love for
+military life, while, after all, he was a scholar; and, finally, of the
+company he kept,--namely, he went roving round with a young page, one
+_Matthieu_, son of the Minister _Von Schleunes_, a dissolute,
+universally-beloved, universally-spoiled, bold, artful young scoffer,
+who, when his service allowed it, would spend his time either over
+yonder with the Chamberlain's people, or here with her son: "Heaven
+only knew what designs he had in his visits at a citizen's house." She
+rejoiced that Victor would bear off his old friend out of the traps and
+fangs of this rake. Victor pressed her hand with emotion, and said: "I
+could hardly think of sharing his heart with the best bond-fellow.
+Not so much as fall in love should he dare to, if it depended on me.
+Only me must he love, and one other person, who depicts him quite
+wrongly,--namely, yourself." He greatly mistrusted, also, her drawing
+of the sun-spots of Matthieu, because women seldom comprehend eccentric
+men, and because maidens, indeed, often love wild youths, but matrons
+(enlightened by marriage) always prefer gentle ones.
+
+He easily drew the hearts of married women into his drag-net by a
+certain kindly gallantry towards them which a German saves for
+unmarried ones. Old ladies and old tobacco-pipes, however, easily
+cleave to men's lips. The younger pigeons he enticed to himself by his
+_comic salt_, as they catch turtle-doves by another kind. A _bon-mot_
+is to them a _dictum probans_; a _pasquin_, a _magister sententiarum_;
+and the critical calendar of scandal is to them a Kant's Critique of
+the Pure Reason, in an improved edition. With his medical doctor's
+ring, also, he fastened to himself female souls; as physician, he laid
+claim to corporeal mysteries, and then the spiritual easily follow
+these.
+
+In the evening, when the woodland stream of the first jubilation had
+run out, three sober words were at length possible. The Parson, too, by
+this time, scolded less; for joy had made him rabid in the forenoon.
+Anger and the body are strengthened together, and therefore by
+pleasure. Hence in January and February, when dogs get the longer
+madness, men have the short one of wrath; hence convalescents grumble
+more at all about them, just as people do under strong mental
+excitements,--e. g. Dog-post scribes; hence, too, in the exhaustion
+following sick-headache, or a fit of intoxication, one is gentler than
+a lamb.
+
+Towards evening, there already transpired something of consequence.
+Apollonia swept and dusted her blood-relationship and her guest with
+her whisks even sooner than the spiders and the dust. On the 4th of May
+was this day's arrival of the long-absent fugitive to be right properly
+celebrated. Flamin and Victor led the way through the Parsonage garden,
+whose _memorabilia_ and _curiosa_ are so edifying that the
+correferent[35]  of these acts wishes he could, by the Dog-express,
+portray the garden to me more clearly. The Chaplain had stamped off
+many beds, not into rectangles, but had curved and twisted them into
+the shape of Latin characters, in double black-letter, to represent the
+initials of his family. His own (E) he had sowed with radishes;
+Apollonia's (A), with capuchin-lettuce;[36] Flamin's (F), with
+rape-cole; Sebastian's (S), with sweet-root, or _Glycyrrhiza vulgaris_
+(liquorice). Whoever was not present had left for him, at all events, a
+vacant place and _almanac royal_ among squashes and Stettin-apples,
+round which was wrapped a perforated paper with the name cut out,
+which, after the peeling off of this wrappage, would appear green or
+red on the pale fruit. Victor, as he passed along by a C made of
+tulips, asked his Flamin the meaning of it. "Why dost thou ask?" he
+inquired; and the loquacious Parsonage-people, following after, drove
+away the answer.
+
+Beyond the Parsonage-meadow stood--one had only to leap the brook--a
+hill, and thereon an old watchtower, in which there was nothing but a
+wooden staircase, and overhead nothing but a board covering instead of
+the Italian roof, both of which the Chamberlain had had made, that the
+people--not himself, for the unfeelingness of magnates labors for the
+feeling of minorites--might up there look round them a little. One
+could see from there the columnar architecture of the Creator, the
+Swiss mountains, standing, and the Rhine moving along with his ships.
+On the tower two linden-trees had grown aloft, twined together by
+nature, so as, sometimes, with their foliage, which had been hollowed
+out into a green niche and underlaid with a grassy bench, to fan, up
+there, a fevered islander. The loving party climbed the battlement, and
+carried up with them in their rural breasts a tranquillity which softly
+copied therein the still outer heaven that encircled these good hearts
+with its veiled suns. One lingering cloud gave a farewell glow, but it
+melted away before it burned out.
+
+Now could the supplementary volumes of the Universal History of St.
+Luna be conveniently issued. Eymann could deliver his folio volumes of
+_gravamina_ (grievances) upon the consistorial councils and the rats.
+All at once, Agatha, like her saintly namesake, was invoked down below
+by the organ-blower _loci_, who was _valet-de-place_ of the village,
+and Parsonage-coachman. When certain authors say, "The coachman was
+blind, and the horse was deaf," they exactly reverse the case. The
+churl was deaf. He had in his _mouchoir de Venus_--the handkerchief is,
+with the common people, at once letter-bag and envelope, because a
+letter is as important and rare a thing to them as a good one is to a
+reviewer--to-day discovered and unwrapped an epistle to Agatha, which
+he should have delivered yesterday with his Lordship's: but coachmen
+consider a master only as the mock-sun and second party to the horse,
+and the lady absolutely as no more than a parasite-growth of the
+stable; hence "immediately" means with them one or two or three days;
+and "to-morrow forenoon" meant, on the Ratisbon notification-programme
+of matters to be voted on, one or two or three years. Agatha, with more
+eagerness, hurried down, held the letter towards the lighter quarter of
+the west, and deciphered something, which, with sparkling eyes, she
+carried in a gallop up the stairs. "She is coming to-morrow!" she cried
+out to Flamin; for she seemed almost, in the person of every one of her
+friends, to love only the companion and friend of her other friends.
+The case was this: _Clotilda_, Le Baut's only daughter by his first
+wife (his Lordship's niece), was coming from the Girls' Institute in
+Maienthal, where she had been educated, back to her father.
+
+"Do _you_ take good care!" said the Chaplain's wife; "she is very
+beautiful."
+
+"Then," said he, "I shall much rather take care _not_ to take care."
+
+"In fact," she continued, "all that is beautiful is now gathering
+around you" (here he tried to confuse and chastise her by a flattering
+look, but in vain). "The Italian Princess comes, too, on St. John's
+Day; and she is said to be as charming as if she were no princess at
+all, but only an Italian woman." There she did most princesses wrong;
+but a certain irony upon her own sex was the only fault of the
+Chaplain's wife, to whom, as to many other mothers, there were almost
+no step-sons and hardly anything but step-daughters.
+
+He hoped, he replied, that very few princesses, even in America, had
+yet been married, in whose affections he could not have become
+completely entangled, and that merely from pity for such a poor, tender
+creature or heraldic beast, pressed under the seal-stamp and then on
+the contracts, which were often the only children of these marriages.
+"The young Mothers of the Country are really, like bee-mothers, set up
+for sale in their queen's prison, and wait to see into what hive the
+bee-father, or Father of the Country, will this year trade them off
+again."
+
+A woman cannot possibly comprehend how a man whom she esteems can
+fall in love, except with her; and she can hardly wait to get sight of
+his beloved. Quite as curious is she about this man's style in his
+love,--that is, whether it is of the Flemish or French or Italian
+school. The Chaplain's wife questioned her confidential guest on this
+point also.
+
+"My harem," he began, "reaches from this watchtower to the Cape, and
+away round the globe: Solomon is but a yellow straw-widower compared
+with me. I have in it even his wives; and, from Eve with her Sodom's
+Borsdorf-apple down to the latest Eve with an Imperial apple, and even
+to a marchioness with a mere fruit-piece, they are all in my hold and
+breast."
+
+A lady excuses esteem for her sex on the ground that she is included
+therein. Women themselves have not so much as an idea of the
+peculiarities of their sex.
+
+"But what says the favorite Sultana to this?" asked the Grand
+Inquisitress.
+
+"She--" He paused, less from embarrassment than as one sunk in the
+fulness of glowing dreams. "_She_, of course--" he continued. "I pledge
+my head, meanwhile, that every youth has two periods, or, at least,
+moments. In the first, he stakes his head that he would sooner let his
+heart mould in his thorax or chest, and his _poples_ or knee-joint grow
+lame, than that either should stir for any other woman than the very
+best of her sex,--for a real angel, a decided Quinterne.[37] He
+absolutely insists on the highest prize in the marriage Loto,--that is,
+in the first period; for the second comes, and cheats him out of so
+much. The female Quinterne would naturally require a _male_ one; and,
+in case he were _that_,...
+
+"I am a stupid drawing, an _ambe_, a double number, I say, and
+absolutely refuse to let the period have its talk out; but I shall
+still be on the look-out for the _Quinterne_.... And here let me ask,
+What would be the use of being a man if one were not a fool? Well, now,
+if I should draw the above-mentioned Quinterne,--which, to be sure,
+without any extravagant hope, I may well presuppose,--I should not be
+indifferent on the subject, but in raptures. Good heavens! I must
+instanter be frizzled, and have my profile taken. I should make verses
+and _pas_, and both with their traditional _pedes_ (or feet); I should
+bend myself oftener than a devout monk, to make bows and (where there
+was anything to gather) bouquets; body, soul, and spirit I should have
+consist with me of so many finger-tips and feelers, that I should
+perceive at once (the Quinterne would perceive it still quicker) if our
+two shadows should come in collision. The touch of the smallest little
+end of a ribbon would be a good conductor to the electrical ether,
+which would shoot out from me in lightnings, as she would be charged
+negatively and I positively; and as to touching her hair, that could
+not create any less explosion than if a world should fall into the
+dishevelled[38] hair of a bearded comet....
+
+"And yet what does it all amount to, if I have sense, and consider what
+she deserves, this good creature, this faithful, this undeserved one?
+What, in fact, were dull verses, sighs, shoes (boots I should put
+away), one or two hands pressed, a sacrificing heart, but a slight
+_gratial_ and _don gratuit_, if thereby a creature was to be obtained
+who, as I see more and more, has everything belonging to the fairest
+angel that conducts man through life (invisibleness perhaps excepted);
+who has all virtues, and arrays them all in beauties; who gleams and
+gladdens like this spring evening, and yet, like it, conceals her
+flowers and all her stars, except the star of love; into whose
+all-powerful and yet gentle harmonica of the heart I would fain be so
+absorbed in listening; in whose eyes I would behold with such
+extraordinary delight the tear-drops of the tenderer soul, and the
+beamings of the loftier one; by whose side I could so fondly remain
+standing through the whole flying _opera buffa_ and _seria_[39] of
+life,--so fondly, I say, that so the poor Sebastian might at least,
+when, in life's holy evening, his shadow grew longer and longer, and
+the landscape around--him melted away to a broad shadow, and he
+himself, too, that I might at least behold _both_ shadowy hands," (one
+of them Flamin was just then holding,) "and exclaim--" (Checking
+himself:) "Here comes the-old bellows-blower, too, with something in
+one of his!"
+
+As he could no longer either hide his emotion behind jest, nor the
+signs of it in his eyes behind some low-hanging linden-leaves, it was a
+real piece of good luck, that, just at the second when his voice was
+about to give way to it, he looked over the watch-tower, and saw the
+coachman come racing over again. The man cried from below, "he had got
+it from Seebass, but not till this moment." Agatha flew down
+passionately, and, after reading a billet below, darted off across the
+meadow. The bellows-blower ascended slowly, like a barometer before
+settled weather, and lifted himself and the billet he had brought back
+with him,--not a minute the sooner for all the beckoning overhead
+there,--with his levers, to the top of the tower. In the billet was
+written, in Clotilda's hand, "Come to thy bower, beloved friend!"
+
+All eyes now ran after the runner, and fluttered with her through the
+clear-obscure of evening into the Parsonage, around whose arbor,
+however, no one could yet be seen. Hardly had Agatha caught sight of
+the opening of the latter, when her hurrying became flying; and when
+she was almost up to it, a white form flew out with widespread arms and
+into hers, but the arbor concealed the end of the embrace, and the eyes
+of all lingered long in vain expectation up in the cloister of love.
+
+The Chaplain's wife, who generally would allow maidens only
+degradations and not elevations of rank, now imparted to Clotilda all
+the seven consecrations, and praised her so much--perhaps also because
+she was a countrywoman of hers on the mother's side--that Victor could
+have embraced the eulogist and her subject at once. The Chaplain added,
+as his mite to her praise, that he had printed the initial of her name
+(C) with tulips in red, like a title, and that the letter would shine
+out, when the bed bloomed, far and wide.
+
+The husband and husbandman began now to break in more and more upon the
+sphere-music of night with the reed-stops of his cough; at last, he
+made off with Victor's enthusiastic female friend, and left the two
+friends alone, in the lovely night, with the two full hearts that
+panted to pour themselves out into each other.
+
+Flamin had, during this whole day, shown a deepening silence of
+touching tenderness, which seldom found its way into his being,
+and which seemed to say, "I have something on my heart." When the
+watch-tower was comparatively deserted, Victor, who had become full of
+loving and softening dreams, could no longer conceal his tear-swimming
+eyes: he opened them freely before the oldest darling of his days, and
+showed him that open eye which says, "Look right through, if thou wilt,
+down to my very heart; there is nothing therein but clear love." ...
+Silently the vortices of love swept round the two, and drew them nearer
+together; they opened their arms for each other, and sank into each
+other's without a sound, and between the brother-hearts lay only two
+mortal bodies. Covered deep by the stream of love and ecstasy, they
+closed for a moment their enraptured eyes; and when they opened again,
+there stood the night sublimely before them, with its suns withdrawn
+into eternal depths; the milky-way ran, like the ring of eternity,
+around the immensity of space; the sharp sickle of the earthly moon
+glided, cutting, across the short days and joys of men.
+
+But in that which stood under the suns, which the ring encircled, which
+the sickle smote, there was something higher, clearer, and more lasting
+than they: it was the imperishable friendship lodged in these
+perishable integuments.
+
+Flamin, instead of being satisfied by this exhausting expression of our
+speechless love, became now a living, flying flame. "Victor! in this
+night give me thy friendship forever, and swear to me that thou wilt
+never disturb me in my love to thee."
+
+"O thou good soul! I have given thee my heart long since, but I will
+gladly swear to thee again to-day."
+
+"And swear to me that thou wilt never plunge me into misfortune and
+despair."
+
+"Flamin! that distresses me too much."
+
+"O, I beseech thee, swear it! and lift thy hand and promise me, even if
+thou hast made me unhappy, nevertheless that thou wilt not forsake me
+nor hate me." ... Victor pressed him to his bosom. "But we will come up
+hither when we can no longer be reconciled,--O, it pains me, too,
+Victor!--up hither, and embrace each other, and throw ourselves down
+and die!"
+
+"Ay!" said Victor, in a low and exhausted voice. "O God! has anything
+happened, then?"
+
+"I will tell thee all. Now let us live and die together."
+
+"O Flamin! how inexpressibly I love thee to-day!"
+
+"Now will I let thee see into my whole heart, Victor, and reveal to
+thee all."
+
+But, before he could do it, he had to man himself by holding his peace;
+and they remained a long time silent, lost in the depths of the inner
+and outer heavens.
+
+At last he was able to begin, and to tell him that that Clotilda, about
+whom he had jested to-day, had written herself in ineffaceable
+characters on his heart; that he could neither forget nor possess her;
+that the creeping fever of a frightful, frenzied jealousy burned,
+galling, within him; that he could not, to be sure, say a word to her
+about his love, according to her prohibition, until her brother (the
+Infante) should come back and be present; but that she, to judge by her
+demeanor, and according to Matthieu's assurances, had perhaps some
+regard for him; that her position must be an eternal wall of separation
+between them, so long as he took the _juristic_ instead of the
+_military_ road to promotion; and that on this last, if his Lordship
+would lend him a hand in the matter, he would attain to Clotilda more
+swiftly on similar steps; and that the request of which he had spoken
+in his letters to Victor was just this,--that he would repeat all to
+his Lordship, and beg his assistance. In fact, his wild arm could hold
+the sword better than the balance of justice. A frightful
+predisposition to jealousy, which even from future possibilities
+catches palpitations, was the chief reason.--Victor rejoiced that he
+could give his feelings the best language,--namely, action, and
+assented to all he required, with delight at his confidence, and at the
+absence from his communication of dreaded news; and so, newly attached
+to each other, they went to rest. And the Twins--that ever-burning,
+intertwined name of friendship--glimmered in the west, beckoning upward
+out of an _earthly_ eternity; and the heart of the Lion blazed on their
+right....
+
+There are men laid upon this earth, and bound to the soil, who never
+erect themselves to the contemplation of a friendship which winds
+around two souls, not earthy, metallic, and unclean bonds, but the
+spiritual ones that interweave this world itself with another and man
+with God. Such ones, degraded to the dust, it is, that, like
+travellers, regard from below the temple that hangs round the Alpine
+peaks as baseless and airy, because they do not themselves stand on
+the heights, and on the great floor of the temple,--because they know
+not that in friendship we revere and love something higher than self
+(which latter cannot at once be the _source_ and the _object_ of
+love),--something higher, namely, the embodiment and reflection of the
+virtue which in ourselves we only _approve_, and not till we see it in
+others can _love_.
+
+Ah! can, then, higher beings judge severely the weaknesses of the
+shadowy groups that seek to hold fast to one another, driven apart as
+they are by north winds,--who would fain press to their bosoms the
+noble, invisible form of each other over which the thick and heavy
+earthly mask hangs,--and who fall, one after another, into graves into
+which the mourned draw their mourners?
+
+
+
+
+                            4. DOG-POST-DAY.
+
+      Profile-Cutter.--Clotilda's Historic Figure.[40]--Courtiers,
+                            and a Noble Man.
+
+
+Clotilda, as Sebastian learned the next morning, had originally meant
+to stay at the seminary till after St. John's; but, as her best friend
+and schoolmate _Giulia_ had gone beforehand, not to her parents, but to
+the long home, her distressed eyes must needs draw themselves away by a
+speedier departure from the grave-mound which lay like a ruin over her
+forlorn heart. Without packing up, she had fled from the flowerless
+Golgotha of her wounded soul; and a second contemplation of it, and a
+second departure, and a renewal of the old tears, still awaited her.
+
+Never was a great beauty praised in a more unembarrassed manner by a
+little one than Clotilda was by Agatha. Generally, the only thing
+maidens appreciate about maidens is the heart; the evanescent charms of
+another's face have so little worth in their eyes, that they hardly
+care to mention them. Young men are justly reproached with selecting by
+preference beautiful youths for their friends. In the case of girls, on
+the contrary, their eulogists make much of the fact that they entirely
+despise female beauty, as a too loose and base cement-and-mortar of
+friendship, and that, therefore, to a beautiful woman, the _heart_ of
+the very ugliest is more precious than the face of the handsomest on
+the five zones and scarfs of the earth. Agatha was otherwise: she ran
+over, the first thing in the morning, to the palace, to dress her
+friend.
+
+Flamin behaved still worse. He could not wait for the reality itself to
+hang up Clotilda's Madonna-image in the chambers of Victor's brain: he
+anticipated it with the pen-and-ink sketch of a painter, which is, at
+least, not cold; for painters, in the _aesthetic_ and in the
+_calligraphic sense_, seldom write well. The painter had, merely for
+the sake of seeing and sketching Clotilda, stretched himself, almost
+every Sunday morning, on a hill of Maienthal, where he transferred to
+his note-book the glittering landscape round the seminary; and the
+beautiful head which looked out of the eighth window he transferred
+into his heart. Even Flamin, who generally set even the vignettes of
+prose above the living oil-paintings of poetry, found, in the following
+Madonna or Clotilda of the artist, something to his taste:--
+
+"When my conscious being is a single thought, and burns; and when, with
+the flames waving around me, I dip my hand into colors, to cool myself
+therein;--then, when the lofty beauty[41] that forever beams within me
+lets fall its image on the waves which tremulously picture heaven and
+earth, and sets on fire the clear stream; and then, when an image of
+Pallas, descending from heaven, rests upon the stream, a lily-casing
+and cast-off wing-wrappage of an up-flown angel,--a form whose
+unstained soul no body, but only the snow which lies around the throne
+of God, and out of which the angels weave their fleeting vehicular
+bodies,[42] encloses; and when the most delicate drapery is too coarse
+and hard, and becomes a wooden frame around that divine breath on the
+countenance, around that trembling flowered-velvet of flesh, around
+that skin of white roses transfused with a glow of red ones; when this
+reflection of my shining soul falls upon the colored surface,--then
+every one will turn round, and think Clotilda is lying asleep on the
+bank.... And here my art is over; for, ah! when she awakes, and when,
+for the first time, the soul shall move these charms like wings; when
+the fast-closed bud of the lips shall break into a smile, and the bosom
+breathes in half a sigh, and, from modesty, breathes it not out again;
+when the sighs, veiled in songs, steal from those lips,--which, like
+two souls, hover over without touching each other--as bees steal out of
+roses; when the eye stirs between gleams and tears;--then, when at
+length the goddess of heavenly love approaches her daughter, and
+electrically touches her still heart, and says, 'Do thou, too, love';
+and now, when all charms tremble and bloom out, shrink and languish,
+hope and shudder, and the dreaming heart shuts itself up more deeply
+into its blossoms, and hides itself, trembling, behind a tear, from the
+happy one who has divined and deserves it;--then the happy one is mute,
+the happy one and the artist."
+
+Victor saw beside him the happy one, who was his friend, looked upon
+him with moist eyes, and said, "Of that thou wast worthy!" But now
+twenty rowels spurred him to follow Agatha to the palace;--the
+pen-and-ink drawing of the artist; the arrangement of dresses; the
+relationship; the desire which every man has to see the Grace and
+Infanta of his friend; the desire which _not_ every one has, but he
+had, to speak with any one for the first time (rather than for the
+eighth time); and, most of all, the evening of yesterday. Flamin's fire
+had yesterday burned Victor's bosom to a heap of tinder, through which
+nothing but sparks were running. He should have set all before him
+indifferently, because the contest _against_ love differs in nothing
+from the contest _for_ it, except in order of precedence. But let not
+the reader by any means imagine that now (as in one of your emasculated
+and emasculating romances) the Devil is to break loose in our
+biography, and the hero is to march into the palace and there fall down
+before Clotilda, and beg, on bended knee, "Be the heroine!" and go
+about to wrangle with her, out of love, and with the former _pastor
+fido_ out of hatred, and actually play nothing else than the aesthetic,
+self-seeking, sensitive--scamp. If I should wish this last, I could
+excuse myself only on the ground that then I might perhaps come to some
+biographical murders and duels. I hope, however, I may still, without
+injury to morals or honesty, in the course of these pages make out a
+murder or homicide or two, at least in the last volume, where every
+aesthetic reaper thins out his characters, and throws half of them into
+the _oubliette_ or family-vault of the inkstand.
+
+Victor had too many years and acquaintances to allow himself, with so
+little regard to days of grace and double usance,[43] on the spot,
+before supper,--_cito citissime_,--what hast thou, what canst thou?--to
+fall in love. His optic nerve daily unravelled itself into finer and
+more delicate fibres, and touched all points of a new form, but the
+sore feelers curled back again more readily; every month the sight of a
+new face, like new music, made a _stronger_ and _shorter_ impression.
+He could only talk his way into love, not see it. Only words winged by
+virtue and sensibility are the bees which, in such cases, carry the
+pollen of love from one soul into another. But such a love, of the
+better kind, is annihilated by the least immoral alloy. How could it
+form and filter up in a defiled heart, filled with high-treason against
+a friend?
+
+Victor would have gone to the palace as early as half past nine, but
+the Lady Chamberlain had not yet combed out her eyebrows and the King
+Charles's spaniel.
+
+Seebass brought a billet to Flamin:--
+
+
+"I cannot see you, my dearest, to-day. Three Graces hold me fast, and
+the third you yourself have sent. Tell your British friend he must love
+me because I love you. Surgery may do without sympathy, but friendship
+cannot.
+
+                             "Your        Matthieu."
+
+
+An absurd billet! When Victor heard that Agatha was the third Grace,
+there was a great hole torn in the curtain of the theatre in which
+Matthieu played Flamin's friend and Agatha's--first lover. Nothing is
+more annoying than a nest in which there sit none but brothers or none
+but sisters: the nest must be shaken up into a mixed and motley
+gradation,--that is to say, of brothers and sisters, packed in layers,
+so that an honest _pastor fido_ can come and ask after the brother when
+he is only on the look-out for the sister; and so, too, must the girl
+who loves a brother absolutely and by stronger necessity have a sister
+whose friend she is, and who may be hook and handle to the brother. Our
+_Turkish_ decorum required, therefore, that Matthieu should point his
+opera-glass at Flamin to see Agatha; and that Clotilda should visit the
+latter, since Flamin, as a man without ancestors, but of honor, could
+not possibly force his citizen's-visits upon the house of a
+chamberlain. Clotilda came often, and thereby involved herself in a
+contradiction, which I have till now been unable to solve, with the
+womanly refinement of her character.
+
+Flamin dipped Matthieu's likeness into a quite different dyeing-copper
+from that the mother used: he was a jolly genius, and nothing worse. He
+personated everything in the world, and no one could personate him. He
+could imitate and travesty all the players of the Flachsenfingen
+troupe, and the boxes too. He understood more sciences than the whole
+court; yes, and more languages, even to the voices of the nightingale
+and the cockerel, which he mimicked so perfectly that Petrarch[44] and
+Peter would have run away. He could do with women what he chose, and
+every court dame excused herself by the example of her neighbor; for it
+used to be part of the _ton_ in Flachsenfingen to have one's fidelity
+once put to the proof. They say love for him began to be knit, like a
+stocking, at the calf, but it is utterly false. It is therefore no
+wonder that, with such uninterrupted moderation in courtly pleasures,
+he grew stronger and _healthier_ than the whole burnt-out, evaporated
+court, only he was too caustic, and too philosophic, and almost too
+roguish.
+
+Victor and the reader and I have still, after all, only an indistinct,
+blurred crayon-drawing of Matthieu in our heads. My hero was somewhat
+pleased with him, as every eccentric man is with an eccentric one; it
+was a fault of his, that he pardoned too easily those of energy, even
+moral ones. With redoubled curiosity did he now take his way to the
+palace, or rather to its great garden, which joined thereto its
+semicircle of green beauties. He put in at the harbor of an embowered
+alley, and was delighted at the way in which the pierced shadow of the
+arbor, around whose iron skeleton tender twigs wound-like soft hair
+around hair-needles, glided dazzlingly over his body. Side by side with
+his arbor another parallel one passed along. He followed some scattered
+black paper snippings as way-marks. The fluttering of the morning wind
+tossed down from a twig a little leaf of fine paper, which he picked up
+to read. He was still on the first line, "Man has two minutes and a
+half, one in which to smile once, ..." when he ran against an almost
+horizontal queue, which was a black club of Hercules, compared with
+mine or the reader's plaited capillary tube. The queue was projected by
+a head crooked downward, which, peering in a listening attitude out of
+a niche in the arbor, was cutting a female profile, the original of
+which in a by-avenue was talking with Agatha. At the rustle of Victor's
+approach, the person, whose half-face was being stolen through the
+niche, turned round with surprise, and saw the proprietor of the
+Cyclops-queue with the profile-scissors, and also the hero of the
+Dog-post-days. The proprietor, without saying a word, thrust his
+artistic hand through the bush-work, and reached out to her her shadow
+or shadow-cutting.[45] Agatha took it, smiling; but the nameless one
+seemed to assume toward the cutter of forms and faces that seriousness
+which, on female faces, is nowise distinguished from contempt but in
+its ambiguousness, because his scissors awoke too strong a suspicion of
+his having been listening. Victor could perceive nothing of the
+nameless one yet except her stature, which, although bent forward a
+little, still surpassed the ordinary height. The face-cutter turned
+about with two flashing black eyes toward Victor, received him very
+politely, knew his name, told his own,--Matthieu,--and had, at his
+eighth pace, already had four good ideas. The fifth was, that he,
+unsolicited, introduced my hero to the couple in the side-arbor. The
+leafy nunnery-grating came to an end; a female form stepped forth, and
+Victor was so struck by it, that he, who knew little about
+embarrassments, or was made only more quick-witted by them, began his
+introductory sermon without the exordium, and that was--Clotilda. When
+she had said three words, he listened so to the melody instead of the
+text, that he understood not a word of what she was saying....
+
+I have here, lying beside me, on the snow-white ground of vellum, the
+very _silhouette_ which Matthieu had taken of her with the scissors. My
+correspondent will have me depict Clotilda as uncommonly beautiful.
+Otherwise, he says, a hundred things in this history are
+incomprehensible; and therefore he sends me (because he cannot trust my
+fancy) at least her profile. And that is to be, even during my writing,
+steadily looked at all the time,--so much the more, as it might seem
+actually to have been cut from the very face[46] of another loveliest
+female angel that ever flew out of an unknown paradise down to this
+earth: I mean the Fraulein von * * *, at present maid-of-honor in
+Scheerau; I am not sure whether all my readers know her.
+
+Victor felt as if his blood had been driven outward, and with warm
+touches described its circles on the external skin. At last Clotilda's
+cold eye, of which not the intoxicated pride of beauty, but the sober,
+retiring pride of innocence belonging only to the female sex, was
+mistress, and her nose, which betrayed too much reflectiveness, brought
+his new Adam to his legs again, upon which the old Adam had already set
+himself up. He congratulated himself that he was Flamin's friend, and
+consequently had some claims upon her attention and her society.
+Nevertheless he continued to feel all the time as if everything she did
+occurred now for the first time in the world; and he watched her as one
+does a man who has been operated on for blindness from his birth, or an
+Omai,[47] or a Li-Bu. He kept thinking, "How could sitting down ever
+become her,--or the handing of a fruit-dish, or the eating of a cherry,
+or stooping down to read a note?" I am a still worse ninny beside the
+above-mentioned court dame.
+
+At last came Le Baut into the garden, after the first toilet, and his
+wife after the second. The Chamberlain--a short, supple, bedizened
+thing, that will pull off its hat before the Devil in hell when it
+enters there--received the son of his hereditary enemy in an uncommonly
+complimentary manner, and yet with a dignity, for which, however, not
+his heart, but his rank, gave him strength. Victor, for the mere reason
+that he imagined him an injured person, cherished a predisposition of
+good-will towards him. Although Le Baut's tongue was almost, like his
+teeth, false and inserted, and consequently the words were so, too,
+which were made up of dentals and linguals, still his neither coarse
+nor uncourteous flatteries--among which his attitudes and intentions
+also are to be counted--pleased our honest Victor, who could not hate
+fine flatterers, as being weak persons. The Chamberlain's lady--who was
+already in the years which a coquette seeks to conceal, although she
+had still more reason to conceal the preceding ones--received our
+well-disposed hero with the sincerest voice that ever yet issued from a
+false Judas's bosom, and with the most artful face, on which it seemed
+impossible that the deceptions of love could ever have found room for a
+glance.
+
+The new company took away Victor's embarrassment at once. He soon
+remarked, indeed, the peculiar fighting- and dancing-positions of the
+circle towards each other. Clotilda seemed reserved and indifferent
+towards all, except her father. The step-mother was refined towards the
+Chamberlain, haughty towards her step-daughter, obliging towards
+Victor, and bore herself with an easy and subservient coquetry towards
+Matthieu, who, on his part, was, toward the wedded pair, alternately
+complimentary and ironical; towards Clotilda, cold as ice; and towards
+my hero, as courteous as Le Baut was to all. Nevertheless Victor was
+more joyous and free than any of them, not merely because he was under
+the free heavens,--for a room always lay upon him like a blockhouse,
+and a chair was like the stocks,--but because he was among _fine_
+people, who, despite the most angular relations, give to conversation
+four butterflies'-wings, that it may--in contrast to the clinging
+caterpillar, who impales himself on every thorn--fly without noise and
+in little curves over all prickles, and alight only on blossoms. He was
+the greatest friend of fine people and fine turns of expression; hence
+it was that he took so much pleasure in the society of a Fontenelle, a
+Crebillon, a Marivaux,--of the entire female sex, and particularly of
+the decently coquettish portion of it. Do not mistake me. Ah! upon his
+Flamin, upon his Dahore, on all great men who were exalted above the
+refined, cowardly, vacant microcosmologists of the great world, his
+whole soul hung glowing; but for that very reason did he seek out,
+with a view to greater completeness, the smaller men, as fringe and
+corner-trimmings, with so much zeal.
+
+Four persons had at this moment four telescopes pointed at once at his
+soul: for himself, he took nothing of the kind into his hand, because
+he was too good-natured and too happy to be the spy of a heart; and
+only after the lapse of some days did he observe the image which any
+one with whom he had been in company left behind in his brain. He did
+not conceal himself, and yet he was seen in a false light: good men can
+more easily see into bad ones than the latter can into the former. He
+guessed others better than they guessed him. Only Clotilda deserves a
+word of defence for having, even until after dinner,--during which Le
+Baut, the greatest story-teller of this story-telling century, carried
+through his part,--regarded him as too malicious and satirical. But she
+could hardly do otherwise: a woman easily discerns the human, but
+hardly the divine (or devilish), nature in a man, with difficulty his
+worth, but easily his intentions, and his inner complexion more so than
+his contour. Matthieu gave occasion for her error, but also (as I shall
+presently report) for its retraction. This Evangelist,[48] who was a
+much greater satirist than his namesake in the New Testament, placed
+almost all Flachsenfingen on his private pillory, from Prince and Court
+down to Zeusel;[49] only the Minister (his father) and his many sisters
+he was compelled, unfortunately, to leave out, and likewise those
+persons with whom he happened at the moment to be talking. What was
+called calumny in him was at bottom an exaggerated Moravianism. For, as
+St. Macarius commands that one shall, out of humility, add twenty
+ounces of evil when one has five, but with regard to good, the
+reverse,--accordingly ingenuous, courtly souls, seeing that no one will
+use this modest language, endeavor to speak it in every one's name, and
+always ascribe to him whose humility they wish to represent fifteen
+ounces more of evil and less of good than he really has. On the
+contrary, in the case of present company, they find this mediatorial
+system of satisfaction unnecessary: hence the life of such court-nobles
+is wholly dramatic; for as, according to Aristotle, comedy paints men
+as worse, and tragedy as better, than they are, so do the nobles
+referred to bring forward in the former only _absent_, in the latter
+only _present_ persons. I do not know whether this perfection will go
+to the length of atoning for a real fault of the Evangelist,--namely,
+that, like the Romans on the Lupercalia, he--too often made thrusts at
+the female sex. Thus, for instance, he said to-day, maidens and
+raspberries were wormy before they were ripe; female virtue was the
+red-hot iron which a woman (as was also the case in the old ordeals)
+had to carry from the font (the baptismal-day) to the altar (the
+wedding-day), in order to maintain her innocence, &c. Nothing fell upon
+Clotilda--and the same I have always found the case with the best of
+her sex--more keenly than satire upon her whole sex; but Victor was
+astonished at her art--very peculiar to her sex and to worldly
+experience at once--of concealing the fact, that she both--endured and
+despised.
+
+The Evangelist's example brought it about that Victor, too, began to
+phosphoresce at all points of his soul; the spark of wit ran round the
+whole circle of his ideas, which, like Graces, clasped each other by
+the hand, and his electrical chime of bells outdid the Page's
+discharges, which were lightnings, and stank of brimstone. Clotilda,
+who was very observing, mistrusted Sebastian's lips and heart.
+
+The young nobleman held him to be one of his feather, and in love
+with Clotilda; and that, on the ground that "the gayer or more earnest
+tone into which a man fell in company was a sign that a female
+electrical-eel had struck at his bosom." I must confess it,--Victor's
+effervescent soul never allowed him to hit that expression of respect
+for women which does not run into untimely tenderness, and for which he
+often envied cultivated people of the world; his regard unfortunately
+always looked like a declaration of love. The Chamberlain's lady
+accounted him as false as her Cicisbeo.[50] People like her cannot
+comprehend any other kind attentions than polite or artful ones.
+
+They kept our hero over there all day and half the evening.
+
+Not once in the whole day was he able,--although the invisible eyes of
+his inner man stood full of tears at Clotilda's noble figure, at her
+secret grief for her cold, buried friend, at her thrilling voice when
+she merely spoke to Agatha,--for all that, he never found himself able
+to say so much as an earnest word: toward strangers his nature always
+impelled him in the beginning to make sundry satirical leaps and other
+caprioles. But in the evening, when they were in the festal garden,
+where his usual shudder at the emptiness of life was made more intense
+by merriment, as it always was,--whereas serious, sad, passionate
+conversations diminished it,--and when Clotilda granted him only a very
+cold civility, as if shown to him at a father's dictation, and did not
+divine in its full extent the difference between him and Matthieu, who
+assumed no second world, nor any inner man organically adapted to it:
+then was there a stifled feeling about his yearning heart; too many
+tears seemed to fill his whole breast and press for a passage; and as
+often as he looked up to the great, deep heavens, something whispered
+in his soul: Take not the least thought for the fine circle, but speak
+out!
+
+But there was only _one_ soul for him, to which Nature had attached
+those treadles, as to pedal-harps, which impart to every thought a
+higher tone of the spheres, to life a holy worth, and to the heart an
+echo from Eden: that soul was not his once so-loved Flamin, but his
+teacher, Dahore, in England, whom he had long ago lost from sight, but
+never from his dreams. The shadow of this great man stood, as it were,
+projected upon the night, hovering and erect before him, and saying,
+"Dear one, I see thy inward weeping, thy sacred longing, thy desolate
+heart, and thy outstretched, trembling arms; but all is in vain; thou
+wilt never find me, nor I thee." He gazed at the stars, whose exalting
+science his teacher had even then instilled into his youthful soul; he
+said to Clotilda: "The topography of the heavens should be a piece of
+our religion; a woman ought to learn the catechism and Fontenelle by
+heart." And then he described the astronomical lessons of his Dahore
+and the teacher himself.
+
+From Clotilda's face there broke forth a great transfiguration, and she
+depicted with words and looks her own astronomical teacher at the
+Seminary,--how he was just as noble and just as quiet,--that he called
+himself _Emanuel_, and bore no surname, because he said, "With
+transitory man, with one whose genealogical tree so speedily sank into
+nothingness, the difference between family names and baptismal names
+was too slight";--that, unhappily, his noble soul inhabited a shattered
+body, which already bent low toward the grave,--that he was, according
+to the assurance of her Abbess, the gentlest and greatest man who had
+yet come from the East Indies (his native country), although there were
+some singularities of his way of life in Maienthal, which one had to
+overlook....
+
+Matthieu, whose wit borrowed from the snake his line of beauty, his
+poisonous tooth, his leap, and his coldness, said, softly and
+composedly: "It is well for his withered body that he was not made
+astronomer and night-watchman here at once; he applied, several years
+ago, for a telescope and a horn."
+
+Clotilda was, for the first time, suffused with a flush of angry
+redness, like the morning before the rain: "If," said she, quickly,
+"you know him merely from my portraiture, you cannot possibly seek this
+characteristic among his." But the Chamberlain came to the Page's
+assistance, and said that Emanuel had actually, five years before, been
+refused that application. Clotilda looked, as if for help, to the only
+one whose attentiveness was not ironical,--our Victor, on whom the
+reflection of her transfiguration threw its beauty,--and asked, more in
+the tone of hope than of assertion, "Should one expect anything like
+that of such a mind?" "Of mine sooner," he replied, by way of evasion;
+for he, who could have contradicted the Pope to his face, found it
+often impossible to gainsay fair lips, especially when they propounded
+a question with so much reliance on his negative. "As often as I walk
+through towns by night, I listen to the bodily night-watch with more
+pleasure than to the spiritual. In the silent, listening night, under
+the outspread starry heaven, there is something so sublime in the
+homiletic owl's-song or hoot of the night-watch, that I have a hundred
+times wished me a horn and six verses."
+
+The Chamberlain and his _associe_ took this for clumsy persiflage; the
+latter--perhaps for the sake of displeasing Clotilda, to the advantage
+of his heart's czarina, armed with false bosom and false rump--went on
+unshamed with his, and asserted that the best method of making the
+aforenamed anonymous person sad was a very merry one, a comedy;--to be
+sure, a farce moved him still more strongly, as he himself witnessed in
+him at Goethe's moral puppet-play or fair.
+
+Then flashed upon the surprised Victor a new face and a new relation;
+for he was exactly like Emanuel. A fair, with its human streams running
+up and down,--with its flitting of figures to and fro, as in a clock
+with images,--with its perpetually buzzing air, in which fiddle-squeak
+and human janglings and lowing of cattle conspire in one deafening
+roar,--and with the booths, crammed with commodities, offering a mosaic
+picture of our little life, patched up of varied necessities.... a
+village-fair, by all these reminiscences of the great, frosty
+_New-Year's fair_ of Life, made Victor's noble bosom at once heavy and
+full; he sank away, sweetly overpowered, into the din, and the human
+ranks around him absorbed his soul into its stiller fantasies. That was
+the reason why Goethe's Hogarthian _tail-piece_ of a village-fair (like
+Shakespeare) always left him melancholy; just as he was most fond,
+indeed, of finding in the low-comic the highest earnest (women are
+capable only of a reverse discovery), and a comic book, without any
+nobler trait or hint (e. g. Blumauer's AEneid), he could endure as
+little as La Mettrie's[51] disgustingly laughing face, or the faces on
+the frontispieces of the Vade Mecum.
+
+Like a true youth, he forgot himself and all around him, half-stretched
+out his arms, and said, with an eye in which one saw a soul longingly
+laboring at a portrait of Emanuel: "Now I know thee, thou nameless one!
+thou art the lofty man, who is so rare.... I assure you, Herr Von
+Schleunes, this Mr. Emanuel has something in him ... No, amidst this
+life on the wing, a thing which darts so _prestissimo_ out of one
+rain-shower into another,[52] and from cloud to cloud, should not keep
+its bill open on the stretch for one continued peal of laughter.... I
+have read today somewhere: Man has only two and a half minutes, and
+only one for a smile...." He had quite lost himself in the thicket of
+his feelings, else he would have kept back more than he did, especially
+the last line of the leaf found in the garden. Clotilda was startled at
+something or other. He would now gladly have read the leaf through. She
+related to him now those characteristics of her teacher into which she
+knew better how to enter; that he was a Pythagorean, went only in white
+robes, had himself put to sleep and waked with flute-music, ate no
+leguminous fruits or animal food, and often walked half the night under
+the stars.
+
+Lost in mute rapture over the teacher, he hung with enthusiastic eyes
+upon the friendly lips of the pupil, who was ennobled by her interest
+in a sublime and singular genius. She found here the first man whom she
+had ever put into an unfeigned enthusiasm for her Pythagorean favorite;
+and all her chasms turned themselves, blooming, towards Emanuel's
+image, like flowers toward the sun. Two fair souls discover their
+affinity first of all by the like love which binds them to a third. The
+full, inspired heart loves to hush and hide itself in a finery-room,
+which holds only heterogeneous persons, but when it finds therein
+its second, then in its joy at that its silence and secrecy and the
+finery-room are all forgotten.
+
+The quicksilver of Victor's morning gayety had fallen ten degrees. In
+the twilight of his soul nothing peered forth but the paper which he
+wanted to read, and in fact presently read out in the avenue; and so he
+took an early leave.
+
+The leaf had blown out of Clotilda's loose Album, and was written
+by--Emanuel.
+
+"Man has here two and a half minutes,--one to smile, one to sigh, and
+half a one to love; for in the midst of this minute he dies.
+
+"But the grave is not deep, it is the gleaming footmark of an angel who
+seeks us. When the unknown hand sends the last arrow at the head of
+man, he bends his head in anticipation, and the arrow merely takes off
+the crown of thorns from his wounds.[53]
+
+"And with this hope, go forth from Maienthal, noble soul! but neither
+continents nor graves nor the second world can sunder or bind together
+two human beings: but only thoughts part or marry hearts.
+
+"O, may thy life hang full of blossoms! From thy first Paradise may a
+second, as from the midst of one rose a second, be destined to bloom!
+May the Earth glow in thy sight, as if thou stoodest above it, and
+followedst with thine eye its path in heaven! And as Moses died because
+God kissed him, so be thy life a long kiss of the Eternal! And may thy
+death be mine!... EMANUEL."
+
+"O thou good, good soul!" cried Victor, "I can now no more forget thee.
+Thou must--thou wilt--take an interest in my weak heart!" From his
+inner strings the drops of vapor that choked their music had now fallen
+off. His brain became a radiant landscape, in which there stood nothing
+but Emanuel's shining form. He arrived late at the parsonage, with a
+face expressive of blissful emotion; and in this glow he arrayed before
+his spectators the image of Clotilda, to whom he gave everything an
+angel has, even the wings that threatened a short stay. His friendship
+raised him so far above the suspicion of a suspicion, that he thought
+he could give his friend no warmer or tenderer proof of the same, than
+by the strongest sympathetic praise of Clotilda; Flamin's love for her
+passed over through this friendship into his soul. The feeling for the
+beloved of a friend carries with it an unspeakable sweetness and moral
+tenderness. For Victor I answer, in this matter, that he understood,
+indeed, how a friend can sacrifice his love to another, but not how the
+other can accept the offering; but for Flamin I cannot stand security
+that he is cool enough, and a sufficient connoisseur of men, to regard
+the prize-medals which Victor stamps upon Clotilda, and upon which he
+sets her beautiful face and his coat of arms, as only just so many
+coins _de confiance_, and as pledges of brotherly fidelity. He was too
+impetuous and too ambitious to see, or even to listen to, the truth;
+for his open-hearted friend had to suppress many a tender reproach,
+which would have tried him too much, because he had too much love of
+praise and fieriness of spirit, and too little self-confidence. Hence a
+flatterer like Matthieu fastened himself so much the more firmly with
+his ivy-hooks into the fissures of this rock. When he a little harshly
+called the nameless Emanuel an enthusiast, Victor said little more
+about him that day. Flamin--either because he was a Jurist, or because
+he was a Hotspur, or both--could endure anything better than poets,
+philosophers, courtiers, and enthusiasts,--one excepted, who was all
+these at once, namely, his Sebastian Victor.
+
+
+
+
+                            5. DOG-POST-DAY.
+
+   The Third of May.--The Nightingale.--The Abbate Sitting on Music.
+
+
+I must here--premise, once for all, that I should be very stupid if I
+did not notice the multitude of improbabilities in this history: I am
+well aware of them all; nay, I have observed some of them--e. g. in
+Clotilda's behavior, or those in my hero's medical doctorship--even
+sooner than the reader, because I have--read everything before he has.
+I therefore delayed no longer, but entreated my correspondent by
+to-day's Hofmann-mail to write me by the dog the next time, in his
+portrait-box, what we were all about. I told him flatly, that the devil
+a bit did he know, though I did, however, of the readers and their
+tyranny. I must tell him (I said) that they were people of sense, whom
+a Biographer, nay, even a Romance-architect, dared not approach with
+poetic deception, but they would say, like the Areopagus, "Give us the
+naked historical fact here, without any superfluous poetic dressing
+up." And in fact it was a marvel to me, I went on to say, that he
+should not yet know that they had so much, partly understanding and
+partly four-leaved clover[54] in them, that, if the greatest authors
+and tragic poets should undertake to be fine, and by aesthetic
+juggleries to excite in them fear, like cuppers, or pity, like beggars,
+they would cold-bloodedly let these men work till they were tired, and
+say, "We are not to be caught." That the Reviewers, however, were still
+more crazy and clever, and were perhaps the best _Skotometers_
+(measurers of darkness), at the same time that they were the
+wretchedest _Photometers_ (light measurers) going. And finally, I said
+right out to my historical adjutant, that it was no injury to him, but
+very much to me, that I should be translated into several languages,
+and therein, for every improbability in the text, be dragged down into
+the scourging-cellar of a note, and there sorely lashed, without daring
+to open my mouth, if the interpreting scoundrel who translated (or
+transported) my gourd-bottle-case like a cask of wine, from one country
+to another, should, on the way, as all carriers do, outwardly
+besprinkle and inwardly fill up the wine with water.--He must, at
+least, (I entreated him) give me an answer, that I might show it to the
+readers, as an evidence that I had written to him.
+
+By the next Dog-post-day, therefore, at all events, great things may be
+expected.--
+
+Besides, the 4th of May comes into that also, with what should
+seem its two important Thanksgiving festivals for the arrival of the
+two Sebastians,--the little one into the world, the elder at the
+bathing-town.--Even Clotilda is to be there to-morrow, and Victor is
+very eager (and so am I) to see her in the sunshine of love beside
+Flamin; for over yonder all her charms seemed to bloom round a heart
+not yet smitten and ripened by love's ray, as flower-leaves hide the
+_white heart-leaves_ from the sun.... Matthieu came to-day to take
+leave, because he was going back to-morrow to the city. Our hero was
+less and less pleased with him, and a Page's history, which he related
+of himself, renewed Victor's resolve to fulfil soon the entreaty of the
+Parson's wife by ridding himself of such a fellow.
+
+Matthieu, as Page, rendered service to the chief Tutor's lady, I
+believe both the greater and the lesser service. Nevertheless, he had
+once to smuggle an Abbate and conscience-keeper into one of her
+cabinets, which was destined to be the confessional and holy place to a
+degree of which, to be sure, her stupid, jealous husband had no notion.
+Now there was in the next room a musical armchair, upon which, in fact,
+one played with no other instrument than the rump; so soon as one sat
+down in it, it began its overtures, and I myself once sat in such
+a one at Prince Esterhazy's. Our Mat,[55] as all the citizens of
+Flachsenfingen called him,--some government people called him even the
+Evangelist,--appointed the Abbate two hours too soon; but, lest the man
+with the shorn peruke should be tired of waiting, he first carried in
+the music-making chair as resting-bench and anchoring-ground for weary
+expectants. Toward three of the night, when the company was gone,
+except the chief Tutor, the counsellor of conscience, weary of
+standing, let his rump sink at last into the easy-chair stuffed out
+with favorite arias, and woke up with his breeches the whole wailing
+music therein with its thrilling passages, without the least
+possibility of stilling the cabinet-serenade of this alarmer. At last
+the husband darted like a herring at the final cadences (or falls), and
+dragged from his organ-stool the sedentary conscience-man in the midst
+of counterpoint and shakes, and spoiled his quail-call for him, I
+believe, by an administered cudgelling. The chief Tutor's lady easily
+guessed the master of the chair, Mat; but so very much a matter of
+course is pardon at court,--not merely _past_ offences, but _future_
+ones being forgiven there by good, easy female souls,--that the chief
+Tutor's lady did not avenge herself upon Mat, although he _served_ her
+two weeks and a half longer, till after just two weeks and a half....
+
+Victor was indignant at Flamin's laughter; he loved drollery, but not
+bantering. His sweetened blood began gradually with this _mother of
+vinegar_ to grow sour towards this Mat, whose cold, ironical gallantry
+toward the honest Agatha of itself exasperated him, though her
+phlegmatic, and, as it were, married pulse, beat in his absence and in
+his presence at the same rate. Still more heart-burning matter and acid
+collected in Victor's bosom, from the fact that he, who tolerated
+everything,--vain men, proud ones, atheists, enthusiasts,--could
+nevertheless not endure men who regard virtue as a kind of refined
+provision-bakery, wantonness as allowed, the spirit as an almsgatherer
+for the flesh, the heart as a blood-syringe, and our soul as a new
+shoot of the body. But this was what Matthieu did, who besides had a
+passion for philosophizing, and threatened to infect Victor's friend,
+who, in fact, was as cold toward the whole world of poets and spirits
+as a statesman, with his philosophical cancer-poison.
+
+In the evening he endeavored to sound, a little nearer to Flamin's
+ear, a blast upon a second Trumpet of Fame against the departed
+pseudo-Evangelist. It was in the garden that he blew it. He took the
+hand of which Matthieu's was not worthy into his better one, and began,
+with the finest and heartiest forbearance.--which one must grant even
+to true friendship for a hollow friend,--his iconoclastic attack. For
+while he charged it upon the lady of the Chamberlain, that she threw
+down at Agatha from her high post looks nowise cleaner than what
+monkeys used to throw down from their high roosts at passers-by; and
+while he blamed the young Page, that, like many of the nobility, only
+among the nobility could he scent best (perhaps by the help of
+contrast) the heretical odor of one belonging to the burgher-class, and
+that his words and looks at the palace flew like icicles at the good,
+warm heart of Agatha; at the same time the reproach of this May-frost
+toward the sister was only a pretext behind which he veiled the
+observation, that the Page would not be Flamin's friend, if he were not
+Agatha's lover.
+
+Flamin's silence (the sign of his indignation) gave the stream of his
+eloquence a new and swifter descent; in addition to this a nightingale,
+poetizing in Le Baut's garden, woke up all the echoes of love in his
+soul.--He therefore grasped, of course, both of Flamin's hands in that
+effervescence which always transformed his steps toward an object into
+springs, and thereby overshot the mark. Many plans miscarry, because
+the heart toils after the head, and because at the end of the execution
+one applies less caution than at its beginning. He looked upon his
+beloved, the fluting throat of the nightingale set the text of his love
+to music, and with indescribable emotion he said: "Best one, thy heart
+is too good not to be outwitted by those who cannot reach thee. O if,
+some day, the sharp edge of court _ton_ should pass bloodily across the
+veins of thy breast (Flamin's looks seemed to ask, Art thou not then
+even satirical?)--O if he, who has no faith in virtue and
+disinterestedness, should one day himself cease to show any; if he
+should sorely betray thee; should the hand, which court-life had
+hardened, like a lemon-squeezer, wring blood and tears from thy heart,
+then, I beseech thee, despair not, only not of friendship,--for thy
+mother and I love thee far otherwise. O verily, at the time when thou
+art forced to say, Why did I not hearken to my friend who so warned me,
+and to my mother who so loved me?--then mayest thou come to me, to one
+who never changes, and who prizes thy error higher than self-interested
+vigilance; then would I lead thee weeping to thy mother, and say to
+her, take him wholly, thou only art worthy to love him." To all this
+Flamin said not a word. "Art thou sad, my Flamin?" "Tired! "I am sad;
+the plaints of the nightingale strike upon my soul like echoes of
+_future_ ones," said Victor. "Are you pleased with this nightingale,
+Victor?" "Indescribably, as if she were a friend of my innermost soul."
+"Thus are people imposed on; it is _Matthieu singing_," Flamin quickly
+answered. For the Evangelist differed from a nightingale in nothing
+except size. And then Flamin, somewhat irritated, and yet with a
+pressure of his friend's hand, took his departure.
+
+
+
+
+                            6. DOG-POST-DAY.
+
+   The Threefold Deception of Love.--Lost Bible and Powder-puff.--
+     Churching.--New Concordats with the Reader.
+
+
+Knef's answer is wretched: "By your well-born's favor, dated the 6th
+instant, I see that the public has taste and some refinement, which
+does not surprise me, since the same is treated like gold-leaves, which
+are beaten out thin and fine, first within a book of parchment, and
+then between two of sheep-skin leaves, and thus, in like manner, by
+being passed from one book to another, and therein through the force of
+the press-bar, is made as fine as cavalier-paper.[56] If the public
+keeps on reading in this way a year or two, it may at last be more
+clever than Germany itself. Touching the improbabilities in our
+work, several such are of course desirable, because without them a
+biography or a romance gives miserable satisfaction, since it wants the
+charm by which the German hospital-ship and ship of fools, full of
+original romances, proves so attractive to us, ... which ship, as
+secretive-gland of disagreeable works, may justly be called the liver
+of the Republic of Letters, and the bookstore the gall-duct. But in
+reference to improbabilities, I am myself only too apprehensive that
+even the few on which we rely may in the end disappear. I am, &c."
+
+The wag, as one may easily see, would fain pull the wool[57] over my
+eyes and those of the reader. For me, however, it is a magnificent
+document in evidence that I have done my part by writing to the rogue.
+
+There are certain persons who, if in the evening they were very warm
+and friendly, the next morning are very gloomy and cold,--like
+Maupertuis's half-suns, which burn only on one side and disappear
+from us when they turn towards us the earthly half,--and if they were
+cold, the next time they are warm. Flamin forgot the next morning both
+the warm evening and the night-chill. Today is the festival of
+churching! Over there with Sebastian he launched out like a German
+police-puritan and purist, with fire-devils[58] and musketry against
+churching,--against infant-baptismal festivals,--against felling trees
+for Christmases and Whitsuntides,--against holidays, and against all
+the merry-makings of mankind.
+
+Nothing in our century so enraged Victor as its haughty
+crusade-preachings against unfashionable follies, whereas with
+unfashionable vices it makes contracts of subsidy. He took a long
+breath to start with, and then showed that the good of a state, as of a
+man, consisted not in riches, but in the use of riches, not in its
+commercial, but in its moral worth, that the sweeping out of the
+ancient leaven and most of our institutions and pandects and edicts had
+for their object only to enhance princely incomes, not morality, and
+that one wanted to have vices and subjects, like the old Jews, bring
+their offerings only in one city, namely, the residence city,--that
+humanity, from time immemorial, had cut its nails only on its bare
+_hands_, not on its covered _feet_, which often themselves decayed on
+that account,--that economical and sumptuary laws were still more
+needful to princes themselves, at least to the highest classes, than to
+the lowest,--that Rome owed to her many holidays much of her
+patriotism.... Flamin had no eye for the little pearl-print of domestic
+joy, for infusory-flowerets of pleasure; on the contrary, his soul kept
+step with a Brutus when he strode majestically up to Pompey's statue,
+and with a sigh over fate drove the scissors of the Parcae into the
+greatest heart of earth, which confounded its worth with its right.
+Victor had room in his heart for the most unlike feelings.
+
+I cannot repeat often enough, that to-day is the churching. I will
+sketch it for posterity; not, however, with that curtness with which a
+newspaper-writer condenses the funeral of a king into three sheets, but
+a little more circumstantially. For the stately initial letters of this
+day the Parsonage had quite other reasons _in petto_ than one has ever
+yet, to my knowledge, been pleased to disclose to our age: three
+interested parties wished to deceive each other,--at least, two did a
+third.
+
+In the first place, the Lady of the Parsonage wished to deceive our
+hero, who did not know that to-day was the birthday of his father, and
+that that personage--whom she had taken the liberty of inviting--was
+coming today for the space of five minutes. In the morning, she set her
+two daughters to boiling yarn, in order that they might confess nothing
+to Victor,--at least, not the truth; for it is a well-known
+superstition that yarn boils whitest when one lies soundly over the
+operation. Hence we should be the more watchful when women lie, and
+inquire whether they mean, by their poetical deceptions, to _burn
+anything else white_ except yarn. Her beloved Victor--that was her
+plan--should to-day present to her husband, whose cradle-festival[59]
+also fell on to-day, the usual congratulation, and afterward halve it,
+and carry it on to his Lordship, who was to arrive with his own
+birthday.
+
+Secondly, Sebastian and she wished to deceive the old Chaplain, who had
+forgotten that he had been born, which absence of mind had already
+occurred to him at his first birthday. Mankind keep the run of
+another's life better than of their own; truly we make altogether too
+little account of a history which once was ours, and which is the shell
+of hours that have flown away, and yet the drops of time through which
+we swim do only in the distance of memory form the rainbow of
+enjoyment. Men know when all emperors were born and all philosophers
+died; women know, by reckoning time, only this, when their husbands,
+who are _their_ regents and classic authors, underwent both. Victor,
+whose delicate feeling was seared by too great attentions to himself,
+was glad that Eymann's shoulders must bear half of to-day's honor.
+
+Thirdly, the Lord of the Parsonage wanted to play his deception as well
+as any one else, and in fact upon everybody. As this Festival-day was
+to him--like the three High Festivals of the Cloisters--at the same
+time shaving-day, on which the wisest heads make the foolishest faces,
+the barber must needs cut with the razor-lancet upon the skin of the
+soul-keeper, as upon the bark of a birch-tree, a memorial of himself;
+but the little blood that flowed out suggested to the Parson a cleverer
+thought than what the cupper left therein, which, however, secreted the
+nervous sap, that, according to the merest sciolists, is the grease of
+our mental motions, the gold solution of our most significant ideas,
+and the spirit of our spirit. This cleverer thought which I so much
+praise was, to have a vein opened in his left arm, to conceal it from
+the whole household, in the evening to congratulate his Lordship and
+everybody, and, at last, to strip up his sleeve and show the wound,
+like a Roman, and say, "Congratulate me, I pray, on the bleeding!" He
+executed his idea, and the shaver was obliged, to his amazement, to
+hack something else beside the chin. The wounded man escorted him even
+to the outer door, not so much from politeness, as in order that he
+might not hold forth to the whole domestic company on the subject, but
+keep the occurrence absolutely to himself, except in houses where
+there was a beard and an ear. For let an historian be ever so much the
+_month-hand_ of the age, and consequently the newspaper-compositor its
+_hour-hand_, and accordingly a woman its _second-hand_, still, after
+all, the beard-trimmer is both, woman and _second-hand_.
+
+As Flamin and Victor passed down into the sitting-prinking-summer and
+winter-room, from amidst none but glad faces protruded one sullen one,
+which belonged to the Parson, who was plunging about like one
+possessed: there were two things which he could not possibly nose
+out,--his Bible and his powder-puff. Three minutes before he had thus
+lamented: "Am not I and my wretched life then singled out for a true
+Passion-history? Let an urn of fortune be given me, from which anybody
+else would claw out, as if he were crabbing, whole kingdoms. So soon as
+the Archfiend sees it to be me, he drops his dung in; and I claw that
+out instead of crabs and kingdoms, and nothing more. It would have gone
+finely to-day, the Devil saw,--we should have had until four o'clock in
+the afternoon no fun, but dog's-work; but then we should have broken
+loose; then would have come the dinner in the summer-house, the
+congratulation and salutation and real jollity.... And for you all
+this is still waiting; but to me, if the puff and the Bible do not
+appear, just send some of the soot and ashes (the leavings of the
+evening-feast) that I may brush therewith Fox's [his horse's] bit, and
+in the evening I can weed radishes by the summer-house."
+
+At this moment, he had to salute, with the dipped flag of his poll, his
+tasselled cap, the Briton just entering,--when the gesture shook out of
+the cap a hair-tuft, which, to be sure, was not the long-sought Bible,
+but was the puff, which had been given up for lost. That is to say, the
+thinking and reading world, to which one does not often disclose the
+weightier facts, must at least come at this one,--that the Court
+Chaplain, just as men are snatched from among men to overtop and master
+the rest, precisely so bound up the hairs which his comb plucked out,
+into a skin-fascicle or hair-union, in order to powder therewith the
+others that were left standing,--which now could not, of course, by
+this most exalted spirit and pentameter,[60] be well christened
+anything else than a hair-puff. Nevertheless, Eymann's face was longer
+than his cap; he let this syringe of the coloring powder of his head
+lie and cool there, and said, "If I don't ferret out the Bible, then I
+don't see how this tuft alone is to get me out of the scrape."
+
+As the Bible was sought before Luther's time, so now was the Canstein
+Bible, with its black beetle's-wing-shells. If anything could make this
+hard blow still more bitter, it was this,--that Eymann's band, like his
+reason, lay between the lost canonical leaves[61] as in a napkin-press;
+for the clergy, especially the Pope, love to make the Bible commentary
+a smoothing-press and finery-box to their outer man. Although he had
+eight other Bibles, even the simple Biblical Chrestomathy of Seiler, in
+the house, and to-day, at week-day church, did not need any at
+all, still it was certainly better and more human--that is, more
+foolish--that he should whistle the head of his vestry-beadle, the
+schoolmaster, to the window, and postpone divine service, like a
+reformation, by a quarter of an hour's interim, than that, instead of
+simply the hour of tolling, he should change nothing less than Bible
+and bands. Good heavens! how like exegetists and Kennicottists[62] they
+searched and smiled! "This hunting for the Bible," said Sebastian,
+"redounds to a clergyman's honor, especially as he seeks the truths in
+the Bible only by _daylight_, not by _funeral-torches_."
+
+The monks, like the lighters of the street-lamps, have a _ladder_ and
+much oil, but with the oil they _extinguish_ the lamps and their own
+thirst, and with the ladder they conduct those who light them again up
+to the gallows.
+
+As the Chaplain passed along before the quiet head of the six-weeks'
+child, which to-day's lace-cap already oppressed, he went back, from
+vexation at its indifference, lifted its bedizened head with his right
+hand, and thrust the left through the stratum of the cradle-straw,
+thinking there to exhume the Bible, which is usually the pillow and the
+supporting amulet of children (particularly of _Dauphins_), saying,
+meanwhile: "The miserable little brat would lie there through all our
+misery, perfectly cool, seeming to say, 'What's that to me?' if I
+didn't stir him up." And just at this moment something fell, not like a
+shot, but like a book, although it can be heard through my quill, even
+to the thirtieth century. Eymann flew, thoughtfully, into the second
+story, and found at his feet a smashed--mouse under his long-sought
+Bible. The Protestant imperial circles can never have been ignorant of
+the students' or Dr. Luther's mousetraps,[63] for which one needs only
+a book, and which are to mice what symbolical books were to candidates.
+Sebastian drew forth the corpse by the tail from under the Biblical
+vellum-mould, and Seiler's Bible-arrangement, swung the cadaver toward
+the light, and delivered extempore this funeral sermon: "Poor
+schismatic! the Old and New Testaments were the death of thee, but
+neither thou nor the Testaments are to blame! Only be glad that the
+Bible did not absolutely singe thee to ashes, like a Portuguese
+Israelite; but thy lines fell in enlightened times, where it takes away
+nothing but livings. It is genuine wit, if I ask, As the Bible used to
+extinguish conflagrations into which it was thrown, why not, then,
+_auto-da-fes_ also?"
+
+I have long been watching for an opportunity here to force the world to
+ask why the case of a mouse's death should interest it more than the
+shooting down of an army in general history,--the loss of another's
+hair-puff more than Christina's abdicated crown.[64] ... This interest
+arises from the source whence it comes with those Oto whom the case
+really occurs: because I relate it copiously, i. e. because the
+readers, like the heroes concerned in it, painfully live over one
+moment of childish history after another. Many little blows riddle the
+firmest man as surely as one great one; and it is all one whether fate
+does it or an author. And thus it comes that the modern man is placed
+so near to the index-finger of time, that he can see it move; hence a
+trifle, when it takes up _many_ moments, becomes so great to us, and
+this short life, which, like the picture of our soul in the _Orbis
+Pictus_,[65] consists of points--of black and golden ones--seems so
+long. And hence, too, everywhere, as on this page, does our serious
+mood stand so near to our mirthful.
+
+Except Flamin, all moved to church, godfather and godchild. It was a
+so-called week-day prayer-hour, such as will be set apart in every
+rational duchy and margravedom, where one still sees to it that the
+parson shall freeze once or twice a week, and that, as novices do for
+the exercise of obedience, they may be obliged to sprinkle dry sticks,
+to scatter the seed of the Divine word into empty pews, as Melancthon
+did into empty pots.[66] In German countries, mine and a few others
+excepted, it takes two centuries thoroughly to do away a folly,--one to
+recognize it, and one more to do it away. The _views_ of a consistory
+always become rational a hundred years sooner than its orders
+(_circularia_) do.
+
+In the latticed pew of the Eymanns, whose door made nearly a right
+angle with that of the vestry, Sebastian found all the flowers again,
+or at least the flower-skeletons, which had bloomed around his fair
+childhood's days,--figurative and literal ones; and the literal ones,
+which had crept away all soiled under the footstool of the choir-pew,
+opened out again into flowers of memory. He thought of his childish
+sorrows here,--among them the length of the sermon,--and of his
+childish pleasures, among which were to be reckoned the length of the
+voluntary and Eymann's kneeling on the middle of the pulpit-stairs. He
+pushed back the wooden lattice-window, and found in its wooden groove
+his initials, V. S. H., notched by his own hands. So far is it from the
+child to the youth! And man wonders at the distance. "Ah! then," said
+Horion,--and we will say it with him,--"all was to thee as yet
+infinite, and nothing little but thy heart. Ah! in that warm,
+quickening time, when a father is still God the Father, and a mother
+the mother of God, not yet did the bosom, oppressed with spirits,
+graves, and storms, press itself for comfort to a human one. All the
+four quarters of the world were installed in this church; all rivers
+were named Rhine, and all princes January. Ah! this tranquil and lovely
+day was set in a golden horizon of infinite hope and a ring of
+morning-red. Now the day is gone, and the horizon sunk, and only the
+skeleton remains there,--the latticed pew."
+
+But if we now, even in the noonday hours of life, think and sigh thus,
+how much more at evening, when man folds up his flower-leaves, and
+becomes undistinguishable like other flowers,--at evening, when we
+stand low in the western horizon and go out,--then, when we turn round,
+and survey the short road strewed with trampled-out hopes,--oh! then,
+how much more sweetly will it not look upon us,--the garden of
+childhood, lying in the east, low down near the place of our rising,
+and still suffused with an old, pale redness,--how much more magically
+will it gleam on us, and yet how much more will it affect us to
+tenderness! And thereupon man lays himself down on the earth not far
+from the grave, and hopes here below no more.
+
+To Eymann it must be a touching thought, that he, as he had for years
+given the benediction in this church to newly-delivered mothers only
+parishionally related to him, could, for once, give his wishes to a
+nearer one. Victor crept back into all his boyish Sundays and their
+illusions by this simple act, that he to-day, as in his tenth year,
+went, while the whole congregation were singing, into the vestry, to
+the Parson, and asked him for the page of the hymn. He enjoyed it with
+a real childish gusto to think that there were four _moving_
+creatures[67] in the temple,--the Parson, the Schoolmaster, the
+Exchequer-master of the poor's-box,[68] and himself. Is there anything
+more sublime, thought he, than a jingling alms-bag-father with a long,
+horizontal balance-pole, walking to and fro alone, among nothing but
+stiffened statues?
+
+After church the festival began with mere preliminaries, as a treaty of
+peace does with articles about the neutral ground, about rank, &c. Only
+the world must not suppose that anything came on sooner than five
+o'clock in the afternoon, or that any one could earlier than that slip
+out of his prosaic week-day clothes into the poetic festal ones, or
+quietly settle down beside a neighbor; but, according to the order and
+programme of pleasure, all must now run up and down, obedient to
+Apollonia, that _majoress-domo_,--must carry away bean-poles and
+seed-cornucopias out of the summer-house,--fan out therefrom
+butterflies that had burst the cocoons and waked up bottle-flies,--tie
+back the twigs which had grown over the windows,--lug down the
+orangery, which consisted of a hundred blossoms of a pomegranate-tree,
+out of the parsonage into the garden alley, in like manner an invalid
+harpsichord, whose sounding-board had not sprung[69] so often as its
+strings.... The serious Flamin was compelled by the bustling Sebastian
+to take part in these puppet-plays,[70] and between them, in this
+preparatory chase of pleasure, the tormented visage of Eymann had to
+labor, to which Victor delivered the most essential exhortations:
+"Master Godfather, we cannot be earnest and busy enough,--this festival
+may yet be talked of in places where it will have influence; but a
+middle course between princely pomp and Belgian stinginess will, I
+think, throw upon us the most favorable light." All went well,--even
+the clouds dispersed,--Clotilda would come. The primate of the
+festival, in whose honor the church-going took place,--the little
+six-weeks'-man,--memorized his part aloud, which he had to perform
+after five o'clock, and which, as in the case of more than one hero of
+festivities, was to consist of nothing but going to sleep.
+
+The memorizing consisted of his waking and screaming in one steady
+scream for the bosom in which the Creator had stored up for him the
+first manna in life's wilderness. But not till five o'clock did the
+mother still him with the maternal sleep-potion, and enable the little
+speaker to close his throat-lid[71] and eyelids at once. At first I had
+come near suppressing--from respect for the Parson's lady--the fact
+that she suckled, and so, like a whale as it were, still reckoned among
+the mammalia, nourished at her bosom another child than Cupid; but I
+flattered myself, upon reflection, that a person who is neither a
+theatre-princess nor a crown-princess would not be so strictly judged
+as others, if she _had_ children or milk....
+
+Before I say that Clotilda came, I will, inasmuch as she has eight
+residences,--although many a magnate who owns sixteen noble residences
+still seeks a seventeenth with walls in which he may sleep,--offer a
+slight excuse for her going into the house of a common citizen; but she
+needs after all no other justification than the fact that she was in
+the country, where often the oldest blood can avail itself of no better
+intercourse than that of citizens, unless perhaps it is that of cattle,
+which even some not uncultured cavaliers really prefer....
+
+It strikes five o'clock,--the matchless beauty enters,--the moon hangs
+down towards her out of heaven like a white leaf newly budded,--the
+gay, innocent blood in St. Luna rises under her influence like the
+tide,--all is rehabilitated.
+
+But the sixth chapter is run out.... And as Spitz is not yet on hand
+with the seventh, the reader and I can exchange with each other a
+rational word. I confess, he has long appreciated me and my doings; he
+sees clearly that all goes on in the finest biographical train,--the
+dog, my littleness, and the heroes of these dog-days. Nor have I ever
+denied that he will continue to be more and more dazzled by the
+splendor and sparkle of this foot-birth,[72] since I am so very busy,
+waxing, rubbing, and polishing at it,--more so than if it were a man's
+boot or a military horse's-hoof in Berlin. Nay, I need not wait to have
+it foretold to me from any cup of coffee-grounds (for I see it already
+from my knowledge of human nature and from the coffee which I drink)
+that this is saying the very least, and that the proper reading-rage
+will then, and not till then, come over the poor dear fellow, when, in
+the course of this work, at which, as in the low-warp tapestry,[73] two
+workmen weave sitting in one chair, the historic figures of this
+tapestry, together with their grouping, shall come forth from the ball
+of the foot to the seam of the skull. At present there is hardly a
+heel, a shin-bone, a stocking finished....
+
+But when twenty or thirty ells of the work have been run off, then can
+I and my by-sitter expect what I will here portray: the reader will
+hurry as if the Devil were after him; to get through one Dog-post-day
+he will let six courses grow cold and the dessert warm. But what am I
+saying? An incarnate Romish king shall ride through the streets and a
+cannon-thunder bring up the rear,--he shall not hear it; his better
+half shall give in his library the best of suppers to a connubial
+excrescence,--he shall not see it; the excrescence itself shall hold
+assaf[oe]tida under his nose, shall give him in sport light blows with
+a woodman's axe,--he shall not feel it, so beside himself shall he be
+on my account, regularly out of his senses.
+
+Now that is a misfortune, the certainty of which I seek vainly to
+hide from myself. When it once comes on, and I have unhappily brought
+him into that historical clairvoyance where he no longer hears or
+sees anything except my characters, which are put in _rapport_ with
+him,--neither father nor cousin,--then I may be sure that he will hear
+a mining-superintendent still less,--for story is what he wants, and of
+_me_ he knows absolutely nothing more,--nay, I will suppose, I should
+let off the motliest fire-works of wit, yes, that chains of
+philosophical conclusions should hang down in skeins out of my mouth,
+like ribbons from a juggler's,--what would it avail me?
+
+Nevertheless, ribbons must hang down and fire-works play; but it shall
+be in this way: As from each year so many hours are left off that the
+remainder of four years makes out an intercalary day,--and as with me
+after four Dog-post-days there will always be so many Postscripts, so
+much wit and acuteness lying quite idle, as so much unsalable
+stuff,[74] that a regular _intercalary day_ could well be made,--it
+shall be made as often as four dog-dynasties have gone by; only this is
+still requisite, that I first conclude and ratify with the reader the
+following boundary agreement and domestic contract, in form and manner
+to wit:--
+
+I. On the part of the reader it is allowed and granted to the
+mining-superintendent on St. John's, him and his heirs and assigns,
+from this time forward, after every fourth Dog-post-day, to prepare and
+print a witty and learned intercalary day, in which there is no
+narrative.
+
+II. On the part of the mining-superintendent permission is given the
+reader to skip over every intercalary day and read only the historical
+days, in consideration whereof both powers waive all _beneficia
+juris_--_restitutionem in integrum_--_exceptionem laesionis enormis et
+enormissimae_---_dispensationem_--_absolutionem_, _etc_. At the Congress
+of St. John's, May 4, 1793.
+
+Thus reads the genuine instrument of the so-called Dog-contract between
+the mining-superintendent and the reader, and this Act of Renunciation
+may and must, in future misunderstandings between the two powers, be
+laid before an umpire or a confederate court,[75] as the single ground
+of decision.
+
+
+
+
+                            7. DOG-POST-DAY.
+
+   The Great Parsonage-Park.--Orangery.--Flamin's Promotion.--Festal
+     Afternoon of Domestic Love.--Rain of Fire.--Letter to Emanuel.
+
+
+His Lordship excepted, all are now sitting and waiting for me in the
+parsonage-garden; but the garden itself not a mortal soul is yet
+acquainted with. It is a Chrestomathy[76] of all gardens, and yet no
+larger than the church. Many gardens resemble it in being at once
+kitchen-gardens, flower-gardens, and orchards; but it is also a _jardin
+des animaux_, as it contains in fact the whole Fauna of St. Luna, and a
+botanical garden, too; it is overgrown with the entire Flora of the
+village; and it is a garden of honey-bees and humble-bees also, as
+often as they happen to fly into it. Meanwhile such minor merits are
+really hardly worth naming, when a garden once has, like this, the
+merit of being the greatest English garden through which a man ever
+strode. It hides not only its end,--as every park, like every purse,
+must do,--but even its beginning, and seems to be merely the terrace
+from which one can see into that which one cannot see over, but, like
+Cook, may well circumnavigate. In the English parsonage-garden there
+are not single ruins, but whole broken-up cities, and the greatest
+princes have rivalled each other in their passion for furnishing it
+with romantic wildernesses and battle-fields and gallows-trees, to
+which (and that carries the illusion still higher) real rogues are
+tied, into the bargain, as fruit-pendants. The buildings and shrubs of
+different parts of the world are there, not huddled together into an
+absurd neighborhood, but neatly kept apart from each other by regular
+seas or water-scapes, which its size easily makes possible, since it
+contains over nine million square miles; and with what taste, in fact,
+these masses are brought together, the reader may estimate from the
+fact that all lords and all reviewers in the literary periodicals, and
+the readers themselves, are drawn into the garden and often stay
+therein sixty years.--
+
+The Parson thinks also to get some credit from it as a Dutch garden,
+particularly by a peruke made of water, which hangs not on a wig-stand,
+but on a tin pipe, and which leaps so in curls that already several
+city-parsons have wished they could wear it. Butterfly-show-glasses
+kept off the night-chills from precocious roses of silk and early
+cucumbers of wax. Cucumbers which consisted of real cucumbers, he was
+the first among all pastors to put in, in order to worry himself with
+the fear that they might freeze; for this fear he must have, in order
+to rejoice whenever a glass bottle was broken in his house: he could
+then carry this ice- or glass-mountain (which, in the case of wines,
+unfortunately heightens every year as our thirst does) into the garden,
+and with this manure-bell cover the heart-leaves. Round more important
+beds he ran a motley, mosaic border of crockery; his family was his
+verge-tool,--I mean, they had to break for him the few porcelain cups
+which he needed, in order with this motley powdered sugar to set off
+the more considerable patches, as a prince enchases and berings himself
+with the variegated order-ribbons drawn through the button-holes of his
+antechambers. As he could not set _whole_ cups round the beds, but must
+first analyze them by his chemists, a reviewer who eats with him must
+avail himself of my hint to understand how it happens, if such a
+consumptive patient is not beside himself for rage, when some very
+valuable vessel is broken; for only when it happens to worthless ones
+is he no longer master of himself. Every housewife should set off such
+a bed as an Arndt's garden of Paradise, as a Golgotha for porcelain
+whereof the _fashion is changed_, for the good of her soul, in order
+that she may not lose her senses when a cup falls. "Dearest!" I would
+say, "bear up under this misfortune like a Christian woman; it, will
+turn out for thy advantage either in eternity yonder, or here in the
+garden."
+
+Near a house, Dutch garden-ornaments, with their homely minuteness,
+make a better figure than thrilling Nature, with her eternal majesty.
+Eymann's clipped and carved parsonage-garden was in fact merely a
+continued family-room without roof or partition.
+
+As the Parson twitched our Victor round through the garden, the guest
+almost forgot to praise the garden as a magazine of ideas, simply
+because he was looking forward too curiously and warmly to the arrival
+of Clotilda, and her demeanor towards his friend. Fortunately it
+occurred to him that the Parson counted upon incense-offerings and
+censers; he was so unwilling to defraud a laurel-hoping heart, that he
+for that very reason loved to attach himself to people of some merit,
+that so he might indulge his humane disposition to praise, without
+expense to the truth. Victor rejoiced at the prospect of Flamin's and
+Clotilda's meeting: how beautifully, he thought, will the moonlight of
+soft love fall upon his and her proud faces! And he held in store a
+rich tolerance and love for their love. For he not only had so much
+insight into the fleeting nature of our pleasures, that he could hardly
+be angry over the maddest, but he could even be present at the
+journeyman's greeting (or methodology) of--two lovers with real
+pleasure. "It is very foolish,"--he said in Goettingen,--"every
+good-hearted man opens his arms in sympathy, when he sees friends,
+brothers and sisters, or parents embrace each other; but if a couple of
+monkeys in love dance round before us at the end of Cupid's string, and
+though it were on the stage, not a devil of us will take any interest
+in them, unless they dance in a romance. But why? Certainly not from
+selfishness, otherwise the wooden heart in the human block would also
+in the presence of friendship between others, or filial love, remain
+nailed fast; but, because the love of lovers is selfish, we are so too;
+and because in a romance it is not so, we are not so either. I, for my
+part, go on in my thinking, and make believe to myself in regard to
+every span of lovers I meet, that they were printed and bound, and I
+had them from the circulating library for paltry reading money. It
+belongs to the higher disinterestedness to sympathize even with its
+opposite. And by all means with you, poor women! Would you or I, then,
+oftentimes, with this life of yours so frittered away in sewing,
+cooking, washing, know that you had a soul, unless it fell in love?
+Many of you through long tearful years have never lifted your head
+except in the short, sunny day of love, and after it your bereft heart
+sank back again into the cool depths; so water-plants lie all the year
+drowned in water, only at the time of their bloom and love do their
+ascending leaves sit upon the water and sun themselves gloriously,
+and--then fall down again."
+
+At last Clotilda entered, in conversation with the Parson's wife. She
+had on a crape hat, with a black lace portcullis, which at once
+beautified, divided, and concealed with a pierced shadow her beautiful
+face. But her eye avoided Flamin's eye, and only at times stole
+thoughtfully after it. He proved that precisely people of the greatest
+courage have the least with regard to beauty; he advanced not towards
+her one step. She asked our Victor eagerly about the arrival and the
+health of his Lordship. She then proposed to him, with the usual
+medical uncertainty of her sex, whether such an operation often
+transpired so easily, and whether he had already restored to many so
+much as he had to his father: he answered both questions in the
+negative, and she sighed openly. His respectful distance towards her
+would have increased by that at which his friend kept himself from her,
+had he not had something to hand her,--Emanuel's note. He could not
+steal it, as he had already repeated to her the first line; secondly,
+he must present it _under four eyes_ (he could not through Agatha, for
+example), because he knew how she carried discretion to the extreme
+limits. Clotilda was one of those persons--troublesome to this
+biographer and his hero--who love to conceal all trifles: e. g. what
+they eat, where they are going to-morrow; who are furious with a friend
+if he blabs out how on St. Thomas's day last year they had a slight
+headache. With Clotilda it arose not from fear, but from a dark
+presentiment that he who babbled indifferent mysteries might at last
+tell weighty ones. He felt towards her, notwithstanding her pride, a
+mighty drawing to sincerity. He led her aside to the pomegranate-tree,
+and there--sparing her by his open-hearted lightness of manner the
+burdensome obligation she might feel with regard to a secret--handed
+her back the leaf. She was astonished, but said at once, her surprise
+related merely to her own negligence; i. e. she trusted him, but had
+some suspicion or other of her house-mates, and of the manner in which
+it got into the arbor. She took advantage of the orangery, and bent her
+inspired face close to the pomegranate blossoms. Victor could not
+possibly stand there alone so stupid; he, still a little struck with
+her astonishment, and at last with her almost too great pride, felt
+also a hankering after the pomegranate incense, and held his face down
+in it toward hers. He should have known, however, that any one who
+smells of anything does not look at the thing, but straight before him.
+Hardly, then, had he applied his olfactory nerves to the blossoms, when
+he opened his eyes, and Clotilda's large eyes stood opened full upon
+him; they were just at the highest and most effective elevation, of
+45 deg., whether you speak of eyes or bow-shots. He turned his pupils
+forcibly down toward the leaves; she, still more prudently, stepped
+back from the bewildering orangery.
+
+However, she was not embarrassed. He thought it unjust toward Flamin to
+observe her sentiments towards himself; but still he remarked this
+much,--that the observatory on which one would watch the occultations
+of her heart must be higher than is necessary in regard to other women.
+The custom of being admired had made her proof against that showing up,
+as in a glass, the impression of her charms with which men so often win
+to themselves the attention of woman's vanity. She was, as I have said,
+not embarrassed, but went on to tell her listener something further of
+Emanuel's character, which she lately, out of respect for her teacher,
+had not been willing to lay before such unholy ears,--namely, that he
+firmly believed he should die a year hence in the midnight of St.
+John's day.[77] Victor could easily guess that she herself believed it;
+but what he did not guess was, that this proud one, from pure
+tenderness of heart, had hastened her purpose of leaving Maienthal on
+St. John's day, in order not to meet the beloved man on the anniversary
+of the future day of his death. According to her account, this Emanuel
+had had a painfully exalted position among men; he was alone; he had
+had great friends on his bosom, but all had passed into the grave, and
+therefore he would also hide there his own head. Years give to stormy,
+over-vigorous men a finer harmony of the heart, but from refined, cold
+natures they take more than they give. Those strong hearts resemble
+English gardens, which age always makes greener, fuller, more leafy;
+whereas the man of the world, like a French one, is covered by years
+with dried-up and disfigured boughs.
+
+Victor grew more troubled; every word which he won from her he regarded
+as a sacrilege upon his friend, the more so as the latter did not
+understand so well as he the art of opening a conversation with a lady.
+He had not the heart to shine, because he feared thereby to be a rival
+of his friend for her good graces. His Flamin seemed to him to-day
+taller, more beautiful, and better than ever, and he himself shorter
+and more stupid. He wished a thousand times his father had already
+come, that he might deliver to him with the greatest ardor Flamin's
+prayer for his aid in obtaining Clotilda.
+
+At last he came, and Victor drew a full breath again. The good youth
+often seeks, by acts of sacrifice, to reconcile his conscience again
+with his _thoughts_. With heart-beatings of enthusiasm he awaited the
+moment of solitude. A garden detaches and draws together people in the
+easiest manner, and only in such a place should one impart secrets;
+Victor could soon, in an arbor which wove itself on four chestnut-trees
+with its blooming vein-work nest-wise over their heads, embrace his
+father with trembling emotion, and speak and glow for his friend with
+tongue and heart. His Lordship's surprise was greater than _his_
+emotion. "Here," said he, "is something which has long since fulfilled
+thy prayer in a different way; but I wished to reserve for thee the joy
+of bearing the message";--and therewith he gave him a most gracious
+autograph, wherein the Prince called the practising Advocate Flamin
+into the Administrative Council.
+
+A most gracious autograph is the _Tetragrammaton_[78] and means of
+grace, which works supernatural effects and state-miracles; and the
+illustrious writing-thumb is the magic thief's-thumb,[79] as it were,
+by which the different wheels of the state-repeating-watch--the
+lever-wheel, the face-wheel, often merely the hand--is shoved forward
+or backward, according as it desires an hour earlier or later.
+Hence ministers often climb up and cut off for themselves such a
+thief's-thumb to carry in their pockets.
+
+Sebastian is seized by joy, as by Habakkuk's angel, by the hair of the
+head, and carried through the garden, and driven with his news to the
+first he might meet, and that proved to be the Chaplain, who, with a
+comic face, swore it was all a fib of Victor's; but his restrained
+jubilation almost burst his compressed veins. Victor had no time for
+refutation, but hurried off with such a message to the heart to which
+it rightly belonged,--the mother's. The mother could not shape her
+mouth to anything but a blessed smile, into which the drops of joy
+overflowed from her eyes. No joy in nature is so sublimely affecting as
+the joy of a mother at the good fortune of a child. But the son, in
+whose soul, such as it was to-day, this sunbeam of fate was really
+needed, could not, in the surprise, be immediately found.
+
+His Lordship, meanwhile, talked with Clotilda as with a daughter, and
+gave her a letter from her mother and the intelligence of his
+approaching departure. His manly kindness, guided by respect and graced
+by refinement, ennobled her attentiveness to his looks; and as she came
+forth from the affectionate and low-toned conversation with sparkling
+eyes, her tall form, which usually stooped a little, was raised by a
+certain inspiration to a noble stature, and she stood in the temple of
+Nature, as a priestess of the temple, infinitely beautiful. His
+Lordship separated from her. She found Flamin near the tulip-formed
+letter C, and the Goddess of Fortune appeared to him in the sweetest
+human incarnation, to deliver to him her gift. We need not say that the
+news and the news-bearer threw him into equal ecstasy.
+
+Joy had shaken up the whole bee-garden in a swarming-bag and turned it
+into chaos. The foaming wine-fermentation could not work itself off
+till it ended in clear, tranquil rapture. His Lordship took himself out
+of the way of a gratitude swelled by so many ripieno[80] voices and off
+to his carriage, when the mother with her dumb heart-fulness overtook
+him; but nothing could she get from her blissfully burdened heart to
+her lips, save the modest words, that "to-day was his birthday, and his
+son did not know it, and ought _also_ to have been surprised with a
+rapture." He tried to escape from her with a grateful smile, and said
+that he must hasten back to the Prince, who perhaps had taken as kind
+an interest in this very day as she; but Sebastian, with his friend
+whom he had found, overtook him at the garden-gate, and the hurrying
+lord was delayed a little longer by a swift embrace of his son. Not
+until he was off did the mother, who longed to unburden her love, clasp
+tenderly Victor's hand, and, forgetting the agreement, asked: "O
+dearest, why, then, did you not congratulate him on his birthday? For,
+indeed, _I_ could not." Now for the first time he understood and felt
+the sudden embrace of his father, and stretched out his arms after him
+and would fain reciprocate it.
+
+Here the old Parson, also coming out of the garden, struck in and said,
+as if talking nonsense, "I wish he were Administrative Councillor"; but
+his wife, without making any reply to that, said to him with
+overflowing voice and love, "Such a cradle-festival thou hast never yet
+lived to see as to-day's, Peter!" Agatha looked at her inquiringly and
+admonishingly. "Just out with it," said she, and enfolded the children
+and drew them both into the paternal embrace, "and wish your good
+father length of days and three more blessed children."
+
+The father could not say anything, but stretched his hand toward the
+mother, to round the group of the loving Eden. Victor's sympathetic
+blood swelled up in his heart, to dissolve it in love, and he thought
+the silent prayer: "Never may any misfortune, All-gracious One, tear
+these entwined arms asunder!" But Flamin soon drew himself out of the
+concatenation, and said to Victor with a most grateful pressure of the
+hand, "Thou knowest not how I am always wronging thee." The Chaplain
+thought he should hide his emotion from all by saying: "I wish I had
+not deceived you. I have let myself be bled, but it was a stupid thing;
+if I had only known! only known! It is true; there, see for
+yourselves!" And finding that this mask was not adequate to cover the
+whole emotion of his soul, he called, in an overloud tone, to the poor
+forgotten Apollonia, who was rocking at the house door the awakened
+Bastian, to "come here!" But the poor girl, whose merely distant
+participation in the general mingling of hearts touched our Victor's
+tenderest feelings, shyly hesitated, till the mother came and
+indemnified her against any loss by all that for which mothers are
+never repaid. But not until the Parson's wife held her child in her
+arms and on her lips, did she feel that the imprisoned flames of her
+affections found vent, and her heart its alleviation.
+
+Ah, that man should receive the fairest love precisely at the time when
+he does not yet understand it!--alas that not until late in life's
+year, as he contemplates with a sigh the love of other parents and
+children, he should say hopefully to himself, "Ah, thus did mine
+certainly love me too!"--alas that then the bosom to which thou wouldst
+hasten with thy thanks for half of a life, for a thousand unappreciated
+anxieties, for an inexpressible, never returning love, is already lying
+crushed under an old grave, and has lost the warm heart which so long
+loved thee!...
+
+In domestic happiness the calm, cosey pleasures driven in between four
+narrow walls are only the most accidental constituent; its nervous and
+vital fluid is the blazing fire-fountains of love which spring out of
+kindred hearts into each other. The involuntary surprise had
+disconcerted the intentional ones. But the flood of joy had swept all
+parties together; and they still remained in the same confidential
+closeness to each other, when it had abated again. They sat down to the
+entertainment in the summer-house. Seldom are banquets spiced as this
+one was, by two extraordinary advantages,--want of food and want of
+room. Nothing whets the appetite so much as the fear of its not finding
+enough to satisfy it. It had been contrived by Sebastian, that for each
+guest only his favorite dish should be provided; for the Parson,
+stuffed crabs and potato cheese; for Flamin, ham; for the Hero, good
+Harry's beans. But in this case every one wanted another's favorite
+dish, and set his own up at auction.[81] Even the ladies, who generally
+eat and do not eat, like fishes, nibbled a little. The second
+intoxicating ingredient which they had, thrown into their cup of joy,
+was the table, together with the garden-house, of which the former
+would not hold the food nor the latter the feeders. Sebastian had
+betaken himself, with Agatha, to an affiliated table which had been
+adjoined outside to the window of the banquet-hall, merely for the
+purpose of screaming in from out there and whining, more than eating.
+This caprice was, at bottom, a covered modesty which feared being
+honored inside at the expense of the other guests, on his Lordship's
+account. His own solitude--perhaps in a painful sense--pictured to him
+the shy Appel, who, as vestal of the hearth, ate only the drawback toll
+of returning dishes, merely to try how they had tasted to others. He
+could not longer endure the thought of this separation, but took wine
+and the best of the dessert, and carried it in to her in her kitchen
+winter quarters. As, in doing so, he displayed upon his face, instead
+of his gayety towards girls, of which she might have made a too humble
+interpretation, the greatest seriousness of courtesy; he was so happy
+as to have given to a soul pinched up by nature itself--with no other
+flower-pot here to send its roots round in than a cooking-pot, and only
+the kitchen for its concert-hall and the spit for its music of the
+spheres--a golden evening and a long memory of pleasure. Let no one
+maliciously thrust his fist in the way of such a good snail-soul, and
+laugh to see how she wriggles over it; and let him who stands upright
+willingly stoop and gently lift her along over her little stone.
+
+As to Clotilda, before dinner things went very well, but after dinner
+very ill. I speak of Sebastian, who, after the handing in of the
+petition to his Lordship, was happier and more light-hearted, and
+actually talked as frankly with Clotilda as if she were--a bride. For
+he had already said in Hanover, that "there was not a more tedious and
+holy thing than a bride, particularly if it were a friend's; sooner
+would he fritter away his time about the musty Pandects in Florence, or
+a holy body in a glass shrine at Vienna, than about her." In fact, it
+was hard to fall in love with Clotilda; I know the reader would not
+have done it, but would have gone coldly away again. "Her Grecian lose
+under the almost manly breadth of forehead," he would have said, "this
+sister-nose to all Madonnas and this frontier wild-game[82] so rare on
+German faces, her still but bright eyes, which seek nothing beyond
+themselves, this British gravity, this harmonious thoughtful soul,
+raise her above the rights of love. And even if this majestic form
+should incline to love, who could ever be so selfish as to pocket the
+present of a whole heaven, or so proud as to shoot his heart into hers
+like a smoke-ball, and becloud thereby this still, pensive serenity?"
+The reader will be glad to read his own words.
+
+But after dinner things went differently. Under Victor's cerebral
+membrane, some hobgoblin had so thrown into pi all the letters of his
+ideas in the inner letter-case, that he was up to this time gay, but
+unsatisfied. He had tried to tie and untie Agatha's hair, to separate
+her double-bows into unequal, and for that very reason into equal
+halves again; but the operation had not pleased him as usual,--to-day's
+interludes of domestic love had put his mirthful spirit wholly out of
+joint,--and it seemed to him as if, withdrawn from the present joy, he
+should be happier, at least for a few minutes, in some quiet corner,
+and he particularly longed to see the sun set.
+
+Add to all this the sight of Clotilda's increased love towards
+Agatha,--the sight of his friend, who, by the deepening silence of his
+tenderness, his mildening voice, and by a devotedness so irresistible
+in impassioned natures, commanded every heart, "Love me,"--and,
+finally, the spectacle of night....
+
+He had already been long sad, when he seemed still gay. Now the mother
+took the little hero of the forenoon out under the bland evening heaven.
+They all stood outside of the garden-tabernacle-of-the-covenant, in the
+first temple of man's devotion. The evening-blood of the sinking sun
+flowed into the clouds, as into the sea sinks the blood of its giants
+dying in its depths. The porous cloud did not avail to hide the heavens;
+it swam round about the moon, and let her pale silver glisten from
+amidst the slags.
+
+The red clouds painted the infant. Every one took lightly his soft
+hands, which had already burst from the bud of pillows and the
+chrysalis of swaddling-bands. Clotilda--instead of lavishing on the
+little one carnally coquettish caresses, as many girls do _before_ or
+_for_ men--poured down a steadily streaming look full of hearty love on
+the new man, untied his too tight and cutting shirt-sleeve, screened
+from him the moon at which he was squinting, and said, playfully,
+"Smile this way and love me, _Sebastian_!" She could not possibly have
+meant to charge this line with metaphorical _ricochet_-shots; besides,
+the elder, unswaddled Sebastian knew full well that she could have
+anticipated no double sense; nay, he knew the rule, that the very
+anxiety wherewith some people banish certain subjects from their talk
+betrays the presence of the same in their thoughts. And yet, for all
+that, he had not the courage to smile like the rest, or to take the
+little hand which she had touched in his. She turned to him, and said,
+"But how does the child learn _our language, unless it has already a
+language it can master_?"
+
+... I have, out of mere regard to the philosophers, had this printed in
+italics.
+
+"Then it follows," he answered, "that the language of pantomime must
+signify just as much as articulate speech. As often as I see a deaf and
+dumb man go to sacrament, I think of this,--that all the instruction
+you can give imports nothing into man, but only indicates and arranges
+what is already there. The child's soul is its own drawing-master, the
+teacher is simply its colorist."
+
+"What if this lovely evening," she continued, "should one day come up
+again to the memory of this little one? Why does the sixth year look
+more beautiful in remembrance than the twelfth, and the third still
+more beautiful?" A beautiful woman one cannot interrupt so easily as an
+ex-Dean; and so she was permitted to recur to this reminiscence: "Herr
+Emanuel once said, one should relate to children every year the story
+of their past years, in order that they might one day look back through
+all their years, even into the haze of the second." It is as if I heard
+the above-mentioned maid of honor[83] personally speaking, under whose
+thin lace cap there lay more philosophy than under many a doctor's
+beaver, as quicksilver sticks in crape, and runs through leather.
+
+Victor answered, with the usual sympathy of his good heart: "Emanuel
+stands near to man, and knows him. Two scene-painters lead man, beset
+by magic, through the whole stage,--_Memory_ and _Hope_; in the present
+he is uncomfortable; enjoyment is poured out for him, as for Gulliver,
+only into a thousand Liliputian moments; how shall that intoxicate or
+satisfy? When we picture to ourselves a happy day, we compress it into
+a single happy thought; when we come upon it, this thought is diluted
+through: the twenty-four hours."
+
+"I think of that," she replied, "as often as I walk through meadows; in
+the distance are flowers upon flowers, but, near at hand, they are all
+scattered apart, and separated by the grass. But yet, after all,
+_memory is enjoyed only in the present_."
+
+Victor continued to think only of the flowers, and said, abstractedly,
+"And in the _night_ the flowers themselves look like grass,"--when it
+began suddenly to sprinkle.
+
+They all stepped, in solemn mood, into the summerhouse, on whose
+roof the rain pattered down, while through the open windows the
+alternately shutting and opening moon's eye threw in like a glacier its
+snow-glances,--the tepid blossom-breath of the whole glistening
+landscape stole with healing balm on every human sigh, every burdened
+bosom. In this confined circle, separated from nature by the
+alternation of night and moonshine, one must needs take refuge in
+something near and familiar, in the old harpsichord. Clotilda's voice
+might make a flute-accompaniment to the whispering rain without. The
+Parson's wife begged--her to favor them, and with her favorite _aria_
+from Benda's Romeo,--"Perchance, my lost repose! perchance one day in
+the grave I may find thee!" &c.,--a song whose tones like fine
+dissolving perfumes penetrate the heart through a thousand entrances,
+and tremble there, and tremble more and more intensely, till at last
+they shiver it to atoms, and leave nothing of it behind in the
+harmonious annihilation but tears.
+
+Clotilda without any hesitating vanity consented to sing. But for
+Sebastian, in whom all tones came in contact with naked, quivering
+feelers, and who could work himself into sadness at the very songs of
+the herdsmen in the fields--this, on such an evening, was too much for
+his heart; under cover of the general musical attentiveness, he had to
+steal out of the door....
+
+But here, under the great night-heaven, amidst higher drops, his own
+can fall unseen. What a night! Here a splendor overwhelms him, which
+links night and sky and earth all together; magic Nature rushes with
+streams into his heart, and forcibly enlarges it. Overhead, Luna
+fills the floating cloud-fleeces with liquid silver, and the soaked
+silver-wool quivers downward, and glittering pearls trickle over smooth
+foliage, and are caught in blossoms, and the heavenly field pearls
+and glimmers. Through this Eden, over which a double snow-shower of
+sparks and of drops played and whirled through a misty rain of
+blossom-fragrances, and wherein Clotilda's tones, like angels that had
+got lost, went flying about, now sinking and now soaring through this
+magic-maze, Victor staggered, dazzled, overwhelmed, trembling and
+weeping, and sank down exhausted into the arbor where he had to-day
+fallen on his father's heart. He thought over the wintry life of that
+good father amidst mere strangers to the heart, and his solitary, sad
+celebration of today's festival, and the cold, empty room in the
+paternal bosom, which once the lost form of the beloved one had
+inhabited, and he yearned painfully for the heart of his invisible
+mother. He lifted his leaning head into the rain, and from the large
+open eyes fell not strange drops alone. He glowed through his whole
+being, and night-clouds must cool it. His finger-tips hung down,
+lightly folded in one another. Clotilda's tones dropped now like molten
+silver-points on his bosom, now they flowed like stray echoes from
+distant groves into this still garden. He spoke no name, he thought no
+thought, he neither acquitted himself nor accused himself; he saw it
+all as in a dream, when now a thick night glided across the garden, and
+now a sea of light swept after it.
+
+But it seemed to him as if his bosom would burst, as if he should be
+blest could he at this moment embrace beloved persons, and crush in the
+closeness of that embrace in a blissful frenzy his bosom and his heart.
+It was to him as if he should be over-blessed, could he now before some
+being, before a mere shadow of the mind, pour out all his blood, his
+life, his being. It was to him as if he must scream into the midst of
+Clotilda's tones, and fold his arms around a rock, only to stifle the
+painful yearning.
+
+He heard the leaves drip, and took it for a continuing rain. But the
+_Staub-bach_ of the heavens had scattered itself in spray, and only
+Luna's fall of light any longer besprinkled the landscape. The sky was
+deep-blue. Agatha had been seeking him during the rain, and had only
+just found him. He woke up, obediently and silently went out with her,
+and met only cleared-up heavenly faces,--then all his nerves quivered,
+and he was compelled with a mute obeisance to take his painful and
+friendly leave. Each one had his own thoughts on the subject. But the
+Parson's wife told the company, he loved to hear music at a distance,
+only it always made him too melancholy.
+
+Ah, when he reached his chamber, a happy and consoling thought embraced
+his soul. Clotilda's dirge, and all, fixed before his sight the form of
+the exalted Emanuel,--and it seemed to say: "In a year I shall be
+already under the ground, only come to me, poor child, I will love thee
+till I die!" Without desiring a light, he wrote with streaming eyes,
+which no light could have helped, this letter to Emanuel:--
+
+
+"EMANUEL!
+
+"Say not to me, I know thee not! How can man, on this little grain of
+sun-dust called the earth, on which he warms himself, and during the
+swift moments which he counts off on his pulse between the flash of
+life and the stroke of death, still make a distinction between
+acquaintances and non-acquaintances? Why do not these little creatures,
+who have wounds of the same kind, and for whose coffins Time takes the
+same measure, fall without hesitation into each other's arms, and sigh,
+'Ah, we are doubtless like each other and acquainted!' Why must first
+these fleshly statues into which our spirits are chained move towards
+and touch each other, before the beings disguised therein can imagine
+and love each other? And yet it is so human and so true a thought: what
+then does Death take from us except fleshly statues, what from our eyes
+but the loved countenance, what from our ears but the dear voice, and
+the warm bosom from our own? Ah, Emanuel! be to me no dead man! Accept
+me! Give me thy heart! I will love it!
+
+"I am not very happy, my Emanuel! When my great teacher, Dahore,--that
+shining Swan of heaven, who, fastened to life by his broken wing-joint,
+looked up wistfully at other Swans, as they winged their way toward the
+warmer latitudes of the second life,--ceased to write to me, he did it
+in these words: 'Seek my duplicate! Thy breast will continue to bleed,
+until thou coverest its scar with another, and the earth will agitate
+thee more and more violently, if thou standest alone,--and only around
+the solitary do ghosts creep.'
+
+"Emanuel, art thou not tranquil and gentle and indulgent? Does not thy
+soul yearn to love all men, and is not a single heart too narrow for it
+to shut itself up therein with its love, as a bee is shut up in a tulip
+when it folds itself to sleep? Hast thou not had enough of the
+repeating-work of our merry bells and mourning-bells, and art thou not
+weary of the family likeness of all evenings and times? Dost thou not
+look, out from this fleeting earth over the long way above thee, that
+thou mayst not grow nauseous and giddy, as one for the same reason
+looks out of a carriage into the road? Believest thou not in men around
+whom floats the mountain air of a higher position, and who up on their
+height stand in the midst of a still heaven, and look down into the
+thunders and rainbows near the earth? Believest thou not in a God, and
+seekest thou not his thoughts in the lineaments of nature, and his
+eternal love in thy breast? If thou art and thinkest all this, then
+thou art mine; for thou art better than I, and my soul would fain lift
+itself to a higher friend. Tree of the higher life, I embrace thee, I
+twine around thee with a thousand faculties and tendrils, that I may
+mount up out of the trampled mire around me! Ah, a great man might
+heal, tranquillize, quicken, exalt me,--me, poor creature, only rich in
+wishes, distracted by the war between my dreams and my senses,--flung
+sorely to and fro between systems, tears, and follies,--disgusted at
+the earth, which I cannot replace for myself, laughing merely from
+anguish at the tearful comedy, the most contradictory, saddest, and
+merriest shadow among all the shadows in the wide night.... O fair,
+good soul, love me!
+
+                                               "HORION."
+
+
+Leaning his head on his hand, he let his tears flow, without thinking
+or looking, till nature was spent. Then he went to the harpsichord, and
+sang over to its accompaniment the most passionate passages of his
+letter; what strongly moved him always impelled him to singing,
+especially the emotion of longing. What can it matter to us that it was
+prose?
+
+At the last line of his epistolary song the door slowly opened.
+
+"Is it thou?" said a voice.
+
+"Ah, come in, Flamin!" he answered.
+
+"I only wanted to see whether you had come back," said Flamin, and went
+away.
+
+I think it is necessary that I should here insert at least the
+following, namely, that Victor possessed too much fancy, humor, and
+thoughtfulness not to give out, when these three strings were violently
+struck at once, pure dissonances, which, with more harmonious intervals
+between these faculties,[84] would not have appeared; that he had,
+therefore, more _leaning_ to enthusiasms and enthusiasts than
+_disposition_ that way; that his negative-electrical philosophy had
+always to contend with his positive-electrical enthusiasm for the
+balance of power, and that from the effervescing of these two spirits
+came nothing but humor; that he wanted to have all his carnations of
+joy on the same bed, although one adulterated the colors of the rest
+(e. g. refinement and enthusiasm, exaltation above the world and
+familiarity with the tone of the world); that from all this, beside
+irony and the highest tolerance, must also result a heavy, immovable
+feeling of the nothingness of our inner moods, so fleeting and sketched
+with such a contrariety of colors; and that he, whom the bad man
+regards as two-sided and the well-disposed one as changeable, needs
+nothing, for the gracing and rounding off of his Adam or Palladium
+buried up in so much wood, but the scythe of Time. Time then be it.
+
+
+
+
+                            8. DOG-POST-DAY.
+
+   Examinatorium and Dehortatorium of Conscience.--The Studious
+     Honeymoon of a Scholar.--The Cabinet of Natural History.--Answer
+     from Emanuel.--The Packed-up Chin.--Arrival of the Prince.--First
+     Intercalary Day.
+
+
+I wish the story were done, so that I might get it printed; for I have
+already too many subscribers to it among the common folk. An author
+in our days accepts advance payment for his book from the lowest
+fellow,--the tailor makes his pre-payment in clothes, the hair-dresser
+in powder, the landlord in rooms.
+
+Every morning Victor gave himself a curtain lecture under the bed-quilt
+for the evening previous; the bed is a good confessional and
+audience-hall of conscience. He wished that yesterday's garden-club
+would take him for a veritable fool instead of a lover. "Ah, if Flamin
+himself should torment himself with jealousy, and if our hearts, once
+so long parted, should already come to be so again!" Here the bed-box,
+from a confessional, grew to be a fiery oven. But an angel laid himself
+in beside him, and blew away the blaze. "But what, then, have I done?
+Have I not with a thousand-fold pleasure spoken, acted, kept silence
+for his sake? Not a look, not a word, can be charged against me,--what
+else then?" The angel of light or fire had now to blow terribly against
+the shooting flame. "What else? Thoughts, perhaps, which however, like
+field-mice of the soul, leap under the feet, and stick like adders. But
+could the disciples of Kant impute to me then, that I took the little
+image of the loveliest and best form, which I hitherto vainly summoned
+up in the lands of three lords, and threw such a Raphael's head, such
+an antique of Paradise, out of the window of the _villa_ of my brain,
+like apple-parings and plum-stones? I should wonder at the Kantians, if
+they did. And if it must stay there, am I to be an ox, ye Catechists,
+and coldly glower[85] at it? Not I. Nay, I will trust myself, and
+demand of the fairest heart even friendship, and yet leave to it its
+love!" Dear reader, during this whole summary process before the
+judicial commission of conscience, I have said to myself, over thirty
+times, "Neither of you, you nor the reader, is a hair more honest with
+your conscience!"
+
+He drew himself slowly by the bed-cord out of the bed, which he used to
+quit with a spring; some wheel of his ideas stuck within him. He read
+his yesterday's letter, and found it too stormy. "That is just our
+insignificance," said he, "that everything which man holds to be
+eternal freezes over night; not across our face do the most vehement
+gales pass more swift and traceless than across our heart. Why then am
+I not to-day what I was yesterday, and perhaps shall be to-morrow? What
+does man gain by this boiling up and down? And what has he then within
+himself to build upon?"
+
+Meanwhile, the fire-wheel of our earthly time, the sun, had whirled up
+its revolving streams, and burned on the shore of the earth. He flung.
+up the window, and was fain to bathe his naked breast in the fresh
+morning wind, and his hot eye in the Red Sea of Aurora; but something
+within him interposed itself like an after-taste between him and the
+enjoyment of the morning-land. The remorse of conscience for _future_
+actions spoils a good man utterly for enjoyment.
+
+There rose slowly within him an overmastering emotion,--the former
+night passed by again before him with its flashing rain, and brought
+back to him his passionate heart and Emanuel's shadow,--he ran more and
+more vehemently, and in fact transversely, through the chamber,--tied
+his night-gown tighter, shook something from his eye, gave a
+perpendicular jump, jerked out a "No!" and said, with an inexpressibly
+serene smile, "No! I will not cheat my Flamin! I will neither seek nor
+shun her, nor will I desire her friendship till the time of his highest
+happiness. As I look upon thee[86] yonder, so will I upon her glorious,
+heavenly bust, without desiring that it take on warmth, and turn on me
+its cold plaster eye. But thou, my friend, be happy and all blessed,
+and never mayst thou once remark my conflict!"
+
+Now, for the first time, did the church-attire of morning gladden him,
+and the morning air flowed like a cool necklace over his hot bosom, and
+threw back the playing hair and shirt-frill. He felt that now he was
+worthy to have written to Emanuel, and to have looked up at the
+heavens....
+
+Flamin entered with some coldness, which was increased by the sight of
+the letter. Victor was not to be made cold; only when, down below, no
+one reminded him by a word of his yesterday's Dithyrambics, then did
+he, from fear of being betrayed, make an angry, covert oath, if _she_
+came, not to come,--which could be kept, too, for she did not come. She
+had still to bring away luggage from Maienthal, to besprinkle her
+friendships, and once more to set foot in the magic circle of her
+beloved teacher; and had, therefore, gone off.
+
+The following weeks danced now like just so many hours in Anglaises and
+Cotillons before Sebastian. His forenoons hung full of fruits, his
+afternoons full of flowers; for in the morning his soul with its
+exertions lived in his head, towards evening in his heart. In the
+evening one loves cards, poems, confidential talk, woman, music, very
+much; in the morning, very little; in the spirit-hour is that love at
+its highest strength.
+
+Except two other doubts that troubled him,--the first was, whether
+his Emanuel would write to him soon enough to enable him to visit
+him before he should be harnessed to the pole of the court and
+state-carriage; the second was the fear of being so too soon,--now he
+had hardly anything to do except to be happy or to make others so; for
+precisely in these weeks fell his holy or Sabbatical weeks...
+
+I know not whether the reader is yet acquainted with them; they are not
+found in the improved almanac; but they occur regularly (with some men)
+either immediately after the vernal equinox or in the after-summer.
+
+With Victor the first alternative was the one,--exactly in the middle
+of spring. I need not inquire whether it is the body, the weather, or
+who or what, that rings in this truce of God in our breast; but I must
+describe how they look, the Sabbatical weeks. Their form is precisely
+this: in a holy or Sabbatical week, many--e. g. I--are put off with
+mere Sabbatical days or hours. At first, one slumbers lightly, as on
+balanced clouds,--one awakes like a serene day. At evening one had made
+a firm resolve beforehand, and had therefore written it down in ciphers
+on the door, to grow better, and to apply the weeding-knife every day
+to one bed of weeds at least,--on awaking one is still so minded, and
+in fact carries it out. The gall, that excitable spirit, which usually,
+when it is poured, instead of into the duodenum, into the heart or
+heart's blood, sends up boiling and hissing clouds, is now in a few
+seconds absorbed or precipitated, and the exalted mind _feels calmly
+the bodily effervescence_ without any of its own. In this lull of the
+wings of our lungs, one utters only soft, low words, one clasps
+lovingly the hand of every one with whom he speaks, and one thinks,
+with melting heart, "Ah! I could not begrudge it to one of you, if you
+were still happier than I." On the clean, healthy, tranquil heart, as
+on the Homeric gods, light wounds immediately close. "No!" thou keepest
+saying in the Sabbatical week, "I must for some days to come maintain
+this tranquillity." Thou requirest, as material for joy, hardly
+anything but existence; nay, the sun-sting of a rapture would condense
+this cool, magical, transparent morning haze into a tempest. Thou
+lookest up steadily into the blue, as if thou wouldst fain give thanks
+and weep, and around upon the earth as if thou wouldst say, "Wherever I
+might be to-day, there I should be happy!" and a heart full of sleeping
+storms thou carriest, as a mother does her child sunk into slumber,
+shyly and watchfully over the soft flowers of joy.... But the storms
+start up, nevertheless, and assail the heart!...
+
+Ah, what must we not all already have lost, if the pictures of blissful
+days win from us nothing but sighs! O tranquillity, tranquillity, thou
+evening of the soul, thou still Hesper of the weary heart, which always
+abides beside the sun of virtue, if at thy very name our inner being is
+dissolved into tears, ah, is not that a sign that we seek thee, but
+have thee not?
+
+Victor owed the _siesta_ of his heart to the sciences,[87] particularly
+_Poetry_ and _Philosophy_, which two move, as do _comets_ and
+_planets_, around the _same sun_ (that of Truth), and differ only in
+the _shape_ of their orbits, as comets and poets have the _greater
+ellipse_. His training and talents had accustomed him to the vital air
+and oxygen of the study, which is also the only dormitory of our
+passions, and that only cloister and haven of bliss for men who would
+escape the broad whirlpool of the senses and fashions. The sciences
+are, more than virtue, their own reward, and they make one a partaker
+of happiness,--she only makes him worthy of it; and the prize-medals,
+pensions, and positive rewards, and the _patent_ which many scholars
+would fain get for their studying, belong at most to the literary
+apprentice-brethren, who make it a penance and a torture, but not to
+the masters of the chair, who make it a pleasure and a delight. A
+scholar has no _ennui_; only a throne-incumbent has to prescribe for
+himself, against this nervous consumption, a hundred court-festivals,
+cavaliers of honor, whole countries, and human blood!
+
+Good heavens! a reader who, in Victor's Sabbatical weeks, should have
+taken a ladder and climbed up to his window,--would he have espied
+anything there but a jubilant thing, that went gliding about over the
+fields of learning as among islands of the blest?--a thing which, in
+its ecstasy, knew not whether it should think or compose or read, and
+particularly _what_ or _whom_, out of the whole _high_ nobility of
+books ranged before it. In this bridal chamber of the mind (such are
+our study-chambers), in this concert-hall of the finest voices gathered
+from all times and places, the aesthetic and philosophical enjoyments
+almost overpowered his faculty of choice. Reading hurried him into
+writing, writing to reading, thinking to sentiment, and the latter to
+the former.
+
+I could go on with more satisfaction in this description, if I had
+previously written how he studied; namely, that he never wrote without
+having read himself full[88] on the subject, and the reverse, that he
+never read without having first _thought_ himself _hungry_. One should,
+he said, without an intense occasion and impulse from without, i. e.
+from within, not only not make verses, but even a philosophical
+paragraph; nor should any one set himself down and say: "Now, at three
+o'clock on this Bartholomew's day, I will go at it, and cleverly prove
+the following proposition." I can now proceed.
+
+Now when, in this mental laboratory, which served less for analytic
+chemistry than for synthetic science, he ascended from the turmaline
+which attracts grains of ashes to the sun which attracts worlds, and
+even to the unknown sun toward which solar systems fly; or when the
+anatomical charts were to him the perspective sketch of a divine
+architecture, and the dissecting-knife became the gnomon of his
+favorite truth: that, in order to believe in a God, there was need of
+nothing more than two men, of whom the one might be dead, too, that the
+living one could study him, and turn over his leaves[89]; or when
+Poetry, as a second nature, as a second music, wafted him upward softly
+on her invisible ether, and he chose undecidedly between the pen and
+the keys, when he wanted to communicate aloft; ... when, in short, in
+his heavenly sphere, supported on a human cervical-vertebra, the nebula
+of ideas gradually resolved itself into bright and dark parts, and
+beneath an unseen sun filled itself more and more with ether,--when one
+cloud became conductor to another,--when at last the gleaming mass of
+cloud came together,--then did the inner heaven (as the outer one often
+does), by eleven o'clock in the forenoon, grow from all the flashes
+into one sun, from all the drops into one flood, and the whole heaven
+of the upper faculties came down to the earth of the lower ones, and
+... some blue patches of the second world were for a flying moment
+open.
+
+We cannot delineate our inner states more philosophically and clearly
+than by metaphors, i. e. by the colors of related states. The narrow
+defamers of metaphors, who, instead of the brush, would rather give us
+the black-lead, ascribe to the _coloring_ the unrecognizableness
+of the _drawing_; but they ought to charge it merely on their
+non-acquaintance with the original subject. Verily, nonsense plays
+hide-and-seek more easily in the roomy, abstract, artificial words of
+the philosophers--since words, like Chinese shadows, increase with
+their circumference at once the obscurity and the emptiness of their
+contents--than in the narrow green hulls of the poets. From the Stoa
+and the Portico of thought one must have an outlook into the Epicurean
+gardens of poetry.
+
+In three minutes I shall come back to my story. Victor said, he must
+have mountain-, garden-, and swamp-meadows, because he possessed
+_three_ different whimsical souls, which he must drive to pasture on
+three sorts of grounds. He meant by that, not, as the scholastics do,
+the vegetative, animal, and intellectual souls, nor, as the fanatics
+do, the three parts of man, but something very like,--his _humorous_,
+_sentimental_, and _philosophical_ souls. Whoever should take away from
+him one of these, he said, might as well strip him of the remaining
+ones. Nay, sometimes, when the humorous soul happened at the moment to
+be sitting uppermost on the revolving cross-bench, he carried his
+levity so far as to express the wish that a joke might be made even in
+Abraham's bosom, and that he might with his three souls sit down at
+once on the twelve thrones.
+
+His afternoons he gave up now to a streaming humor which did not even
+find its proper hearers,--now to the people of the parsonage,--now to
+all the school-going youth of St. Luna, whose stomachs (to the vexation
+of every good schoolmaster) he provisioned more than their heads,
+because he thought that, in the short years when the bib expands to a
+napkin, enjoyment must find its way over the children's _serviette_,
+and had no other entrance than the mouth. He never went out without a
+whole military-chest full of small change in his waistcoat pocket. "I
+scatter it without thinking," said he; "but if from this metallic seed
+sowed broadcast whole evenings of joy spring up for the poor devils,
+and if just the innocent ones so seldom have them, why shall not one do
+something for the saved virtue and for pleasure at once?"
+
+He said he had heard moral lectures, and desired for his extra-judicial
+donations and merciful endowments nothing but forgiveness. His Flamin,
+who pronounced him a careless sowing-machine on rocks, spent his little
+holidays before approaching the session-table in ardent hopes of being
+serviceable there, and in preparations for being able to be so; often,
+when the higher patriotism, with saintly halo and Moses'-glory, broke
+out on the beloved Flamin's face, tears of friendly gladness stood in
+Victor's eyes, and in the moment of a lyric philanthropy both swore on
+their hearts for the future a mutual support in well-doing and joint
+sacrifices for mankind. The difference between them was merely
+reciprocal exaggeration,--Flamin treated vice too intolerantly, Victor
+too tolerantly; the former, as administrative counsellor, rejected,
+like the Anabaptists, all festivals, and, like the first Christians,
+all flowers (in every sense); the latter, like the Greeks, loved both
+too much;--the former would have sacrificed to honor human victims; the
+latter knew no robber of honor but his own heart: he overleaped at the
+tea-table the paper half-nobility of our miserable points of honor,
+and, mocking at mockery, submitted himself only to the high nobility of
+virtue....
+
+Victor sucked, with the feet of a green-frog, on every flower-leaf of
+joy,--at children, animals, village-Lupercalia, lessons; but dearest of
+all to him was Saturday. Then he made excursions through the glad
+unrest of the village, along by servant-men, hammering at their
+scythes, not to magnetize, but to sharpen them, and before the
+shop-door of the schoolmaster, at which his eye, like a Swiss, often
+stood for half an hour. For he could very well study the state of St.
+Luna's commerce in the little great-adventure-trade of the
+schoolmaster, who knew no smaller merchants' exchange than the one in
+his breeches' pocket. From this East India House he saw at a late hour
+people procuring the cheap pleasures of Sunday,--the wholesale dealer
+(the schoolmaster is meant), supported by his negro slaves, made the
+Sunday morning of St. Luna sweet with his syrup and hot with his
+coffee; and as well by the tobacco-culture of Germany was this
+tradesman enabled with spiral cables of pigtail to furnish the heads of
+the pipes, as through the silk culture the daughter's heads with
+Sabbath-streamers out of his Auerbach's court.... Our hero all knew.
+From every kennel a dog came wagging his tail to meet him to whom he
+had thrown in bread; from every window children screamed after him,
+whom he had bantered; and many boys, whom he passed, counted themselves
+happy if they had a cap on,--for then they could take it off before
+their master. For his first growing up in St. Luna was the history of
+St. Luna, which must have been drawn from the oral blue-books of the
+historic persons, and from the Imperial Postilion, the Parson's wife.
+This last, as a Mrs. Plutarch, always held up two characters, like
+pieces of cloth, side by side; and her husband read to him according to
+the best of his science and conscience upon the Church- and
+Reformation-history of his diocese. Victor devoted himself to this
+microcosmic world-history from two motives: first, in order--which is
+the object of professional students with the larger history--to dismiss
+it again clean from memory; secondly, in order to be as much at home in
+the village as the constable or the midwife, whence he hoped to derive
+the advantage of being grieved if a St. Lunite should die, and glad if
+he had previously married.
+
+Now the story strides forward again, from one day to another, as if on
+the stones of the stream of time.
+
+So sweetly then had the spring passed along before him with Sabbatical
+weeks, with Whitsuntides, with white blossoms, which fell gradually,
+like butterflies' wings, from the flying season. Victor had postponed
+the visit to Le Baut, thinking, "I shall have, at all events, to budge
+soon enough down out of the soft lap of Nature, and up to the court
+wire-bench and the object-holder (the throne) of the court-microscope";--he
+had, to be sure, daily exhorted himself, now, soon, before Clotilda's
+arrival, to start so as not to draw any suspicion upon his intentions,
+but always in vain, ... when suddenly (for the day before it was the
+13th of July) the 14th appeared, and with it Clotilda's luggage without
+her. Now he actually (according to the official dog-reports) crossed on
+the 15th the Brook of St. Luna,[90] passed the Alps of the Chamberlain's
+steps, and pitched his Caesar's tent on Le Baut's sofa. He knew that
+to-day no one was there, not even Mat.
+
+"Heaven keep our politeness safe and sound," said he; "without it there
+were not only no holding out among a set of knaves, but it pays also
+minute-tributes of pleasure, whereas benevolence pays only quarterly
+assessments and exchequer-instalments, and charitable contributions."
+Mr. and Mrs. Le Baut were as courteous as never before (I could swear,
+they had nosed out something of Victor's court-doctor's hat and
+Doctor's crown); only they knew not what sort of a mouth-piece they
+should screw on to such a whimsically twisted instrument as Victor was.
+Like all study-inhabiting crustacea, he would rather talk of things
+than of persons; Flamin, however, the reverse. For the married pair,
+there was nothing in any Messiad more sublime than that now, on St.
+John's day, the Italian Princess would be coming: of that no mortal
+could talk enough, especially in the village. I know not to what slip
+of Victor's it was owing, that he led most women into the notion that
+he loved them. Suffice it, the Chamberlain's wife, who at her years
+demanded no longer _love_, but the _show_ of love, thought, "Perhaps!"
+Let no one mistake her, she, to be sure, always spent the first hour
+with a man on the _watch-tower_ of observation; but the second, then,
+only on the _hunting-screen_, if the first had been fortunate, and she
+was cool enough not to hope more than she saw: she even made a jest of
+every one who, in view of her vanity--a womanly vanity, however--of too
+easily presuming upon conquests, should think to flatter her otherwise
+than openly. Suffice it, she judged our Victor to-day too favorably, in
+her sense, or too unfavorably in ours; as, in general, mere courtiers
+can see through only mere courtiers. Of Clotilda not a word was said,
+not even of the time of her return.
+
+In fact, the Le Baut had a monstrous pride in herself to contend with
+towards her step-daughter,--of which my correspondent should have
+informed me what it rested upon, whether on relations or on merits; for
+of both there was an ample supply, inasmuch as the Chamberlain's wife
+had been the w----, that is, the mistress, of the present Prince's
+deceased father. I and a clever man have considered the question _pro_
+and _con_, whether she resembled Caesar in love or in ambition. The
+clever man says, "In love," because a woman never forgets love, when a
+prince has been her teacher therein. The illustrious deceased father's
+heart had adored two beauties in her particularly, which aforetime the
+Scots[91] used to be so fond of eating, namely, the bosom and the rump.
+The great have their peculiar _grossieretes_, which the little dream
+not of. I would not print it, but it was known to the whole court, and
+therefore to many of my readers also. Well, the Devil brought along
+Time, who whetted his scythe and mowed away all of each of these charms
+which _hung over_ in his territory. Now with women at courts--or in the
+courtyard[92] of a school, or a warehouse, or in a cow-yard--vanity, so
+soon as old Saturn (i. e. Time) attacks it with his scythe-chariot and
+with the small shot from his hour-glass, makes one of the most skilful
+retreats that I know of. Vanity lets itself be driven from one work or
+member after another; but at last it throws itself out of the weak
+parts into _strongholds_, e. g. into finger-nails, foreheads, feet,
+&c., and from there the Devil himself cannot dislodge it. The
+Chamberlain's wife had first to make herself such a part, namely, a
+_gorge de Paris_ and a _cul de Paris_; these four _boundary hills_ of
+her kingdom had daily to be restored, and raised, out of respect for
+property, against the shifting of boundaries produced by years. From
+this, now, my clever man concludes that her soul is always writing
+letters of marque to her body.
+
+I am precisely the antipode of the clever man, and contend that Cupid
+is only her serving-brother, not the master of the lodge,--her
+adjutant, not her generalissimo; and this for the reason that she is
+still always applying either her own or Le Baut's hand to the
+restoration of the Solomon's Temple wherein she used to be adored as a
+goddess, side by side with the god,--because in marrying him she
+married nothing but the Chamberlain's key and his _assemblees_ and his
+hopes of future influence,--because her hostility to Clotilda relates
+not to the face, but to the brain,--because her love is now without
+jealousy. That is to say, she stood in a certain amatory relation with
+the Evangelist Matthieu, which (according to our feeling as common
+citizens) differs from hatred in nothing but--duration. Persiflages of
+love were their declarations of love; their glances were epigrams; his
+hours of assignation he seasoned with comic accounts of his
+corresponding hours in other places; and at the time of day when a holy
+man usually prays off his psalm,[93] both were ironical. Such an
+_erotic_ connection is nothing but the subdivision of a _political_....
+But to return to the story.
+
+The Chamberlain proposed now to show his guest something of more
+interest to a doctor and a scholar. To the chamber wherein the
+something was, they passed through the Chamberlain's wife's, and
+through Clotilda's. As they made a day of rest[94] in the former,
+Victor's eyes were fixed dreamily on Clotilda's profile, which Matthieu
+had lately cut out of nothing, and which the Chamberlain's wife, out of
+flattery to the profile-cutter, had hung up here under glass.
+Singularly--i. e. accidentally--the glass at this moment flew to pieces
+over the fair face, and Victor and the father were startled; for the
+latter was, like most great folk, for want of time, at once
+superstitious and sceptical; and it is well known that superstition
+regards the flying to pieces of a portrait-glass as a forerunner of the
+death of the original. The distressed father reproached himself with
+the permission he had given Clotilda to stay so long in Maienthal,
+since she would certainly injure her health there by unprofitable,
+youthful enthusiasms. He meant her mourning for her buried Giulia; for
+it was merely from sorrow for her, that, on the first of May, she had
+hurried hither without any baggage; and even the clothes of the beloved
+friend she had to-day sent among her own. He broke off in a cheerful
+tone, for Matthieu came, the brother of this Giulia, who only wanted to
+show and excuse himself, because, like several of the court church of
+half-brothers, he was going to meet the Princess.
+
+Victor grew stiller and sadder; his bosom became at once a swelling
+flood of invisible tears, whose source he could not trace to his heart.
+And when next they had to pass through Clotilda's still and vacant
+chamber, where order and simplicity too intensely reminded him of the
+fair soul of the proprietor, his sudden and touching dumbness struck
+others also. He tore his eyes hurriedly away from some flower-drawings
+by her own hand, from her white inkstand, and from the beautiful
+landscape of the oil-tapestry, and stepped up hastily to that which Le
+Baut was unlocking. It was not any noble heart which the latter, with
+his golden key, although bored like a cannon, could fasten,[95]--the
+Titular Chamberlains in Vienna apply only an hermetically sealed
+one,--but what he opened was his _Cabinet d'histoire naturelle_. The
+cabinet contained rare copies and some _curiosa_;--a calculus taken
+from the bladder of a child, two seventeenths of an inch long and two
+seventeenths of an inch broad, or the reverse; the hardened _vena cava_
+of an old Minister; a pair of American feather-trousers; tolerable
+Fungites, and better specimens of _Strombi_ (e. g. a staircase-shell,
+_not genuine_); the model of a midwife's chair and of a sowing-machine;
+species of gray marble from Hof in Voigtland; and a petrified
+bird's-nest,--duplicates not included.... Meanwhile I and the reader
+prefer to all this dead trumpery the living ape who was the cabinet's
+sole ornament and--owner. Camper should cut off from this living
+specimen the Chamberlain's head, and dissect it, if only to see how
+near the monkey borders upon man.
+
+A great person has always some branch or other of science which he
+cares nothing about, and to which, therefore, he particularly devotes
+himself. To Le Baut's soul, hungering for knowledge, it was all one
+whether it were set in a cabinet of seals or of gems or of pistoles.
+Were I a great person, I would with the greatest zeal make buttons--or
+deliveries--or books--or Nuremberg wares--or wars--or right good
+institutions, merely from cursed ennui, that _mother of vinegar_ to all
+vices and virtues which peep forth under ermine and stars of orders.
+Nothing is a greater proof of the general growth of refinement than the
+general growth of ennui. Even the ladies, out of mere flat ennui, a
+hundred times contrive pastimes for themselves; and the cleverest man
+utters his greatest number of platitudes, and the best his greatest
+number of slanders, merely to a circle that knows how to adequately
+bore him.
+
+The court-page was the cicerone of the cabinet, perhaps for the sake of
+going about. Victor wronged him by the medical supposition that he
+affected a certain loose, unsteady, slouchy gait common to debauchees
+in high life; for he really had it, and for the reason that he, on
+quite other grounds than Victor's fine ones, never loved to--sit. But
+to proceed: Unless the Chamberlain's wife meant to tear aside the
+curtain from before Victor's soul, and spy out therein his sentiments
+toward herself and Clotilda by the fright which I am about to relate,
+then it can have been nothing but a very bad spirit which led the hand
+of the said Chamberlain's wife to a silver ingot. Behind the ingot lay,
+perhaps killed by crumbs of arsenic, a mouse. A female reader, who in
+similar dangers has suffered as a patient, can imagine how the
+Chamberlain's wife felt when she grasped, with the hard substance,
+something soft, and drew it forth, and then saw what it was. A _real_
+fainting-fit was inevitable. I confess I should myself hold her swoon
+merely as a feint, were the occasion less; e. g. had it been, not her
+senses, but her honor, that was assailed: but a mouse is a very
+different matter. In fact, before such malicious spectators as her
+husband and her Cicisbeo, she must long since have banished from her
+stage, as the French from theirs, this Fifth Act Murder; nay, I do not
+believe she could in any way have rendered herself so ridiculous in the
+eyes of a triumphant enemy of her virtue (except by a real swoon) as by
+a fictitious one. Terror at the trance[96] deprived the Evangelist of
+the use of his reason, and left him only the use of his wickedness and
+his hands, with which he instantly tore open the whole blind- and
+fence-work of her bosom, in short, the whole optical breast, to get air
+enough for the true one, on whose board he had a piece,[97] namely, her
+heart. But Victor pushed him away, and, sprinkling her with a few drops
+of ice-water, out of tender respect for her charms and her life, soon
+raised her up again. However, she forgave the page all that she
+guessed, and thanked the court-physician for all in which she was
+mistaken....
+
+... Let me look away a moment from this black cobweb, and refresh
+myself with surveying the fairer world around me on my island, where
+there is no enemy,--and the flashing play of fishes and children on the
+shore,--and the playing mother who flings to them flowers and watchful
+glances,--and the great maple-trees which, softly murmuring with a
+thousand leaves and flies, bend downward to meet the foliage that
+glimmers in mimic dance under the waves,--and how the warm earth and
+the warm sky rest on each other in slumbering love, and bear one
+century after another....
+
+Victor, before the end of his rural day, went sadly home. Saturday (the
+16th of June[98]) sped softly by, and in its flight shook out a whole
+flower-head of winged seed for new flowers of joy.
+
+The stars glided lightly over its night. A friendly, blue Sunday
+morning hung floating over the village in its finery, and held its
+breath lest it should snatch off a ripe, linden-blossom, or the down of
+a marsh-marigold. Victor could hear the forte-pianissimo sounding down
+from the palace over the reposing village, and must needs sigh with the
+asthma of blissful longing, "Ah, when shall I have to cease swimming
+upon this still, shining sea, over this fair anchorage of life?" ...
+When Fate answered, "To-day!" For this very day, on Sunday, there came
+from the residence-city of Flachsenfingen a light-headed fool (in fact,
+two) in a no less light-bodied Berlin, and took out of his package a
+letter to him from his Lordship.
+
+
+"On the 21st of June (Thursday), the Italian Princess makes her entry
+into Kussewitz. On Wednesday, I leave here, and present thee in St.
+Luna to the Prince, who accompanies me to that place. I pray thee,
+however, to repair on the Saturday following to the _Island of
+Union_,[99] because the little which, for want of opportunity, I cannot
+say to thee in St. Luna, I shall reserve for the island. Thou wilt find
+me there. The bearer of this is our respected court-apothecary
+_Zeusel_, in whose house thou wilt, as court-physician, have thy future
+residence. Farewell!"                     H.
+
+
+"Zeusel?" asks the reader, and ponders the matter. "I know not the
+Zeusels." No more do I; but I say to myself, Is not this carrying
+things too far? And is it not a regular imposition, that the
+correspondent of this work cannot, by all the representations made to
+him by me through the dog, be induced even to arrange things in this
+history in as orderly a manner as they are, indeed, in every wretched
+romance, and even in--a house of correction, where every new
+correctioner rehearses neatly to the old ones, in the very first hour,
+his total _Fata_, even to the introductory cudgelling on entering, from
+which the historian has freshly arrived. By Heaven! people actually
+rush and leap into my work, as into a passengers' room, and neither
+reader nor Devil knows who their dogs and cats are.
+
+"I wish..." said Victor, and made six circumflexes upon it as
+apostrophes of the same number of omitted curses. For he was now to
+pass over from the Idyl of country life into the travestied AEneid of
+city life, and no road is surely more wretchedly paved than that from
+the study into the court smelting-houses and _chambres ardentes_,[100]
+from peace to turmoil. Besides, Emanuel had not yet written. Clotilda,
+the _Hesper_ of those two fair evenings, was like the Hesperus in the
+sky, not to be seen over St. Luna. As we said, it was a wretched state
+for him. And now, in addition to all this, that Zeusel, his future
+landlord, the Court Apothecary, was, so to speak, a fool, full as
+light as his Berlin, or as the court-fourier, with whom he came, but
+fifty-three years older than the carriage, that is to say, fifty-four
+years old, and, taken for all in all, a human diminutive and
+vinegar-eel in body and soul, _peaked_ in all respects, in chin, nose,
+wit, head, lips, and shoulder. This fine vinegar-eel--for the eel
+contends that he understands a certain refinement, which never could
+belong to any Roturier,[101] and he does not deny that his great
+ancestors wrote themselves, not Zeusels, but _Von Swobodas_--was
+travelling with the court-fourier, who administered the
+quartermastership in Kussewitz for the princely bride, toward that
+place, in order to remain there just so long as he was not wanted.
+Zeusel meant absolutely to have influence on the Flachsenfingen court
+by something beside his clyster-hydraulics, and to work upon the court
+household with something more than senna-leaves; therefore he bought up
+at a high price all private intelligence (he improved it forthwith into
+public) which he could collect of new meteorological phenomena in the
+court-atmosphere, and then, when certain people turned somersets down
+from the steps of the throne, he smiled finely enough, and remarked
+that he hoped such persons had regarded him as their friend, and not
+noticed the leg which he had thrust out of his shop-door by way of
+giving them a sly lift. He was, in spite of some good-heartedness, a
+liar from the beginning, not because he wanted to be malicious, but
+refined; and he evaporated his sound understanding, that it might drop
+in wit.
+
+Towards Victor, as future courtier and patron, he knew not, for all
+that, how to assume the upright court-dignity which respects at once
+itself and others; but towards the people of the parsonage he amply
+observed the regular courtly contempt, and showed them well enough how
+little, without designs upon the Lord's son, he should have thought of
+even _looking_ over their garden-wall or window-sill, to say nothing of
+_coming_ over. Victor never hated anything else in his neighbor but
+hatred of other neighbors; and his respect for all classes, his
+contempt for all _eminent_ fools, his disgust at ceremonies, and his
+inclination as a humorist for the little theatres of life, formed the
+greatest contrast to the pharmaceutic infusorium, and to its disgust
+with men and deference for grandees.
+
+Victor gave his landlord thirty greetings to carry with him to the
+Italian _Tostato_ in Kussewitz, who had travelled with him, laughing
+and dancing, a day and a half out of Goettingen. The Apothecary, at his
+departure, left behind in Victor an annoying, sour sediment; even at
+the organ-blower, who brought up the coffee every Sunday, he could not
+laugh as usual. I will explain why he used to laugh at him.
+
+On that day the coachman was shaved, and, in fact, at first
+hand,--namely, by his own. Now the chin of this lazy box-incumbent had
+thrown up more mole-hills--so I euphoniously name warts--than are
+necessary for shaving and mowing. Among these the old man hacked and
+planed on Sunday morning,--for then it is that the common people put
+off at once the old Adam and the old shirt, and leave sins and beard to
+grow only on working-days,--boldly slipping his knife up and down among
+the warty _chagrin_ and cutting away. Now the man would have looked
+pitifully, with his ploughed-up facial foreground,--so that one must
+needs have wept blood at that which ran in red lines down over the chin
+of this stone river-god,--if the Prosector, like a Roman, had, out of
+stupidity, exhibited his wounds. But he showed nothing,--he had more
+sense than that; he picked tobacco-spunk into small caps, and put the
+headpieces upon the sore warts, and so made his appearance.
+
+"Let a Spener, a Cato the younger," said Victor, "just come into my
+study, and not laugh when a bellows-blower follows with coffee-cups,
+and with sixteen scalped warts and his chin bound up in spunk, looking
+like a garden-rockery overgrown with beautifully distributed moss,--let
+a Spener, I say, help laughing, if he can."
+
+To-day he could help it himself. Weary of the day, he went out into the
+peaceful evening, and laid himself on his back on the summit of a steep
+hill; and when the sun, dissolved into a cloud of gold, tremulously
+flowed away over the liquid gloss of the flowers, and swam down on the
+grassy sea of the mountains, and as he lay nearer to the warm,
+throbbing heart of Nature, sunk down upon the soft earth as if in the
+repose of death, drawing down the clouds into him with sighs, fanned by
+winds coming from afar, lulled by bees and larks,--then did
+remembrance, that after-summer of human joy, steal into his soul, and a
+tear into his eye, and longing into his breast, and he wished that
+Emanuel might not reject him.--Suddenly slight steps drew nigh to his
+reclining ears; he started up, alarmed and causing alarm. A heavy
+travelling carriage came staggering lazily up the hill; behind, instead
+of servants, three pale foot-soldiers had thrust their hands into the
+footmen's straps, who had only a single leg among them which was of
+flesh, while they footed it on five wooden stilt-legs or boot-makers'
+signs, which, with something still longer, made of wood,--namely, three
+well-wrought beggar's staffs,--they had taken from the enemy; a
+coachman walked beside the carriage, and a gentlewoman, and close by
+Victor, as he sprang up, stood--Clotilda.
+
+She came from Maienthal. This sudden illumination eclipsed all the
+tables of the law hung up in his soul, and he could not at once read
+the tables. She looked upon him with softer rays than ever, and the sun
+lent some too. With a smile, as if she anticipated his first questions,
+she gave him a--letter from Emanuel. A shrinking "Ah!" was his answer;
+and before he could accommodate himself to two ecstasies,[102] the
+carriage was already at the top of the hill, and she in it, and all had
+gone off.
+
+He hesitated with trembling to gaze, absorbed, into the still, blue
+paradise of the fairest soul that ever overflowed. At last he looked
+upon the traces of a beloved human hand which he had not as yet
+touched, and read:--
+
+
+"Horion!
+
+"Man climbs a mountain, as the child does a chair, in order to stand
+nearer the face of the infinite Mother, and to reach her with his puny
+embrace. Around my height the earth lies sleeping, with all its eyes of
+flowers under the soft mist; but the heavens already lift themselves up
+with the sun under the eyelid; under the paled Arcturus mists begin to
+glow, and colors extricate themselves from colors; the globe of earth
+rolls, vast and full, to rapture, of blossoms and living creatures,
+into the burning lap of morning.
+
+"So soon as the sun comes, I look into it, and my heart lifts itself up
+and swears to thee that it loves thee, Horion!... Glow, Aurora, through
+the human heart as through thy field of cloud, illuminate the human eye
+like thy dew-drops, and send up into the dark breast, as into thy
+heaven, a sun!...
+
+"I have now sworn to thee, I give thee my whole soul and my little
+life, and the sun is the seal on the bond betwixt me and thee.
+
+"I know thee, beloved; but knowest thou whose hand thou hast taken into
+thine? Lo, this hand has closed in Asia eight noble eyes,--no friend
+survives me,--in Europe I veil myself,--my sad history lies near the
+ashes of my parents, in the waters of the Ganges, and on the 24th of
+June of the coming year I go out of the world.... O Eternal One, I go;
+on the longest day the happy spirit wings its way out of this temple of
+the sun, and the green earth opens and closes with its flowers over my
+sinking chrysalis, and covers the heart that is gone with roses....
+
+"Waft greater waves upon me, morning-air! Draw me into thy broad floods
+that stand over our lawns and woods, and bear me in clouds of blossoms
+over sparkling gardens and over glimmering streams; and dizzied between
+flying blossoms and butterflies, melting away under the sun with
+outspread arms, faintly floating over the earth, let me die, and let
+the bloody garment, dissolved into a red morning-vapor, like the ichor
+of the butterfly[103] just released, fall into the flowers, and let a
+hot sunbeam absorb the azure-bright spirit out of the rose-chalice of
+the heart up into the next world.... Ah, ye beloved, ye departed, are
+ye indeed departed? are ye, then, moving along as dark waves[104] in
+the quivering blue of heaven? even, now, in that abyss, full of veiled
+worlds, do your ethereal garments billow around the hidden suns? Ah,
+come back, sweep hitherward; in a year I melt and flow into your heart!
+
+"--And thou, my friend, seek me soon! No one on earth can love thee so
+truly as a man who must soon die. Thou good heart, which these mild
+days press into my hands, even at this last moment, for a farewell, I
+will love and warm thee inexpressibly. During this year in which I am
+not yet taken away, I will stay with thee entirely; and when Death
+comes and demands my heart, he shall find it only on thy breast.
+
+"I know my friend, his life and his future. In thy coming years stand
+open dark chambers of martyrdom; and when I die, and thou art with me,
+I shall sigh, Why can I not take him with me, before he sheds his
+tears?
+
+"Ah, Horion! there lies in man a black Dead Sea, out of which only when
+it is agitated the blessed island of the next world lifts itself up
+with its clouds. But my lips will already lie under the earthly clod
+when the cold hour comes to thee in which thou wilt no longer see any
+God,--in which Death shall lie on his throne, and mow around him, and
+fling even to the domain of nothingness his frosty shadows and the
+lightnings of his scythe. O beloved, my grave-mound will then be
+already standing when thy _inner_ midnight comes on; with anguish thou
+wilt mount upon it, and look sternly into the soft wreaths of the
+constellations, and cry:[105] 'Where is he whose heart crumbles beneath
+me? Where is eternity, the mask of time? Where is the Infinite One? The
+veiled self grasps after itself on all sides, and strikes against its
+cold form.... Gleam not upon me, broad starry field; thou art only the
+conglomerate _picture_, formed of colored earths, on an infinite
+_churchyard-gate_, that stands before the desert of a life buried under
+space.... Laugh me not to scorn, ye shapes on higher stars, for, if I
+melt away, ye melt away also. One, one thing, which man cannot name,
+glows forever in the immeasurable smoke, and a centre without limit
+calcines a circumference without limit.--Still I exist; the Vesuvius of
+death yet smokes above me, and its ashes envelop me; its flying rocks
+bore through suns, its lava-torrents move dissolved worlds, and in its
+crater the former world lies stretched out, and it sends up nothing but
+graves.... O Hope, where abidest thou?' ...
+
+"Float enraptured around me, animated gold-dust, with thy thin
+wings,--I will not crush thy short flower-life; swell upward, giddy
+zephyr, and waft me down into thy blossom-cups. O thou immeasurable
+flood of radiance, fall from the sun over this narrow earth, and bear
+up on thy waves of splendor the heavy heart before the highest throne,
+that the eternal and infinite Heart may take the little ones which are
+nigh to ashes, and heal and warm them!
+
+"Is, then, a poor son of this earth so unhappy that he can quail in the
+midst of the splendor of morning, so near to God on the hot steps of
+his throne?
+
+"Fly not from me, my dear one, because a shadow always encompasses me,
+which daily grows darker, until at last it shall wall me in as a little
+night. I see the heavens and thee through the shadow, in the midnight I
+smile, and in the night-wind my breath goes forth full and warm. For, O
+man, my soul has stood erect toward the stars; man is an asthmatic, who
+suffocates if he lies down and does not lift up his breast.--But darest
+thou despise the earth, that forecourt of heaven, which the Eternal has
+thought worthy to move along as one in the bright host of his worlds?
+The great, the godlike, which thou hast in thy soul and lovest in
+another's,--seek it not in any sun-crater, on any planet-floor; the
+whole next world, the whole of Elysium, God himself, appear to thee in
+no other place than in the midst of thee. Be great enough to despise
+the earth; be greater, so as to respect it. To the mouth which is bent
+down to it, it seems a rich, flowery plain; to man in his _perigee_, a
+dark world; to man in his _apogee_, a glimmering moon. Then, and not
+till then, will the holy element, which from unknown heights is sent
+down into man, flow from the soul, mix itself with the earthly life,
+and quicken all that surrounds thee. So must the water, shed from
+heaven and its clouds, first run under the earth, and well up from it
+again, before it is purified into a fresh, clear draught. The whole
+earth is trembling now for rapture, till all rings and sings and
+shouts, as bells sound of themselves during an earthquake. And the soul
+of man is made greater and greater by its nearness to the Invisible....
+
+"I love thee exceedingly!
+
+                                         "EMANUEL."
+
+
+Horion read through swimming eyes. "Ah," he wished, "were I only, this
+very day, near thee, with my disordered heart, thou glorified one!" and
+now, for the first time, occurred to him the nearness of St. John's
+day, and he proposed to himself on that day to see him. The sun had
+already vanished; the evening red fell like a ripe apple-blossom; he
+felt not the hot drops on his face, nor the icy dew of twilight on his
+hands; and with a bosom illuminated by dreams, and a heart
+tranquillized and reconciled to earth, he wandered back....
+
+--By the way! is it, then, necessary that I should elaborate an apology
+for Emanuel as stylist and as _stylite_ (in the higher sense)? And if
+such is necessary, need I therein bring forward anything more than
+this,--that his soul is still the echo of his Indian palms and the
+River Ganges; that the walk of the better sort of unfettered men, just
+as in dream, is always a flight; that he does not manure his life, like
+Europeans, with the blood of other animals, nor hatch it out of dead
+flesh, and this abstinence in eating (quite another effect than that of
+excess in drinking) makes the wings of fancy lighter and broader; that
+a few ideas, to which he guides with partial hand all the mental sap
+and nutriment (and this distinguishes not only madmen, but also
+extraordinary men; from ordinary ones), must in him obtain a
+disproportionate weight, because the fruits of a tree become so much
+thicker and sweeter when the rest have been plucked; and more of the
+same sort? For, to speak candidly, those readers who desire an apology,
+themselves need one, and Emanuel deserves something better than
+a--criminal defence.--
+
+At this moment the consolation leaped up within my hero like a
+fountain, that he was to begin on Thursday his metempsychosis through
+nature,--his journey. "Deuse take it!" said he, skipping up; "what
+needs a Christian to coin money for the present distress,[106] and put
+on mourning-cloaks, when he can journey on Thursday to Kussewitz to see
+the handing-over of the Italian Princess, and on Saturday to the _Isle
+of Union_, and, what is more, on the same day, which is _one_ day
+before St. John's, to Maienthal, to his dear one, his angel?"
+
+O Heavens! I would that he and I were already about the
+journey,--really it may perhaps, unless all hopes deceive me, be quite
+tolerable!--
+
+During the week-day prayer-hour of Wednesday, two carriages rolled
+along. Out of the full one stepped his Lordship and the Prince; out of
+the empty one, nobody. Old Appel had dressed herself up splendidly, and
+locked herself into the pantry. The Chaplain was happier,--he taught in
+the Temple. Seldom does one make a clever face when one is presented,
+or a stupid one when one presents. His Lordship led his son to the
+Prince's hand and heart, as a collateral security for his future
+loyalty, but with a dignity which won as much reverence as it showed.
+My good hero behaved himself like a--fool; he had far more wit than our
+deference for higher persons, or theirs towards us, allows. A talent
+which expresses itself outside the limits of feudal service may be
+regarded as high-treason.
+
+His wit was only a covered embarrassment, into which he was thrown by
+two faces and a third cause. First, the Prince's....
+
+--If the reading world complains that so gradually, as they observe,
+one new name and actor after another steals into this star Venus, and
+makes it so full, that, at last, the historical picture-gallery becomes
+a regular gallery of vocables, in which they must wander round with a
+directory in their hands, they have really only too much ground for the
+complaint, and I have myself already complained the most bitterly of
+the same thing; for, after all, the greatest load remains on my
+shoulders, inasmuch as every fresh ninny is a new organ-stop drawn out,
+which I have to take into my performance, and which makes the pressing
+down upon the keys more disagreeable to me; but my correspondent
+forwards to me in the gourd-flask, without leave asked, all these
+people to be quartered on me, and the rogue actually writes me I have
+only to tell the world, _There are still more people coming_.--
+
+The Prince's face threw our hero into embarrassment, not from anything
+imposing about it, but because everything of that kind was discharged
+from it. It was a week-day and _current_ face, that belonged on coins,
+but not on prize-medals,--with arabesque lines, which mean neither good
+nor evil,--tinged with a little dead gold of court-life,--anointed with
+a soft oil, which might stifle the strongest waves,--a sort of sweet
+wine, more drinkable for women than men. Of the finest turns, which
+Victor had intended to reciprocate, there was nothing to be heard or
+seen; but of apt and easy ones so much the more. Victor was embarrassed
+by the conflict and interchange of politeness and truth. Social
+embarrassments arise not from the uncertainty and impracticableness of
+the path, but from the crossways of choice and the perplexity of the
+scholastic ass between his two bundles of hay. Victor, whose politeness
+always sprang from philanthropy, must to-day let it spring from
+self-interest; but this was precisely what he could not get into him.
+Beside the paternal face, before which, with most children, the whole
+wheelwork of a free behavior grates and sticks, a third cause made him
+disconcerted and witty,--namely, that he was after something. I can
+tell by the look of every one,--except a courtier, whose life, like a
+Christian's, is a constant prayer for something,--the moment he enters
+the door, whether he calls as an alms-beggar and saint-by-works, or as
+merely a member of the joy-club.
+
+Long before the people left the church, Victor already conceived a
+hearty love for the Prince,--the reason was, he was determined to love
+him, though the Devil himself stood before him there incarnate. He
+often said, Give me two days, or _one_ night, and I will fall in love
+with whomsoever you propose. He was delighted to find on January's face
+no second-hands, no minute-hands, of those assignation-hours with which
+a good Caesar generally seeks gladly to interleave, as with honeymoons,
+the tedious years of wedlock; but on his face nothing was displayed but
+continence, and Victor would rather swear by the face than by the
+reputation. He misses the mark; for on the male face--although it is
+made of mere printed characters of physiognomy, as certain pictures are
+of written letters--Nature has, nevertheless, written the _matres
+lectionis_[107] and signs of sensuality very small, but upon the female
+larger, which is really lucky for the former and stronger and less
+chaste sex. In fact, adultery is, with princes of the January stamp,
+nothing but a milder sort of ruling and conquering. And yet honest
+regents always return--with pleasure the wives, so soon as they have
+conquered them, to their former lords. This, however, is only the same
+greatness which led the Romans to deprive the greatest kings of their
+realms, in order afterward to present them with them again.
+
+As princes are not, like jurists, bad Christians, but prefer to be none
+at all, January prepossessed our Victor by sundry sparks of religion,
+and by some hatred of the French Encyclopedists; although he saw that
+for a prince religion has indeed its good, but also its bad side, since
+only a crowned Atheist, but no Theist, possesses the invaluable
+_privilegium de non appellando_, which consists in this, that the
+accused party is not permitted (_per saltus_ or by a _salto mortale_)
+to appeal to the highest jurisdiction beyond the pale of earth.
+
+The conversation was indifferent and empty, as in such cases it always
+is. In fact, men deserve, for their conversation, to be dumb; their
+thoughts are always better than their talk; and it is a pity that one
+could not apply to good heads some barometrograph, or compositor's
+harpsichord, which should write off outwardly what is thought within. I
+would bet that every great head goes to the grave with a whole library
+of unprinted thoughts, and lets only some few book-shelves of printed
+ones go out to the world.
+
+Victor submitted to the Prince the usual medical interrogatories, not
+merely as physician-in-ordinary, but also as a man, for the sake of
+loving him. Although people from the great world and the greatest have,
+like the sub-man, the orang-outang, lived out and died out in
+their twenty-fifth year,--for which reason, perhaps, in many
+countries kings are placed under guardianship as early as their
+fourteenth,--nevertheless January had not ante-dated his life so far,
+and was really older than many a youth. The Prince won the good, warm
+heart of Sebastian most by the unpretending simplicity which served
+neither vanity nor pride, and whose ingenuousness differed from the
+usual sort only in refinement. Victor had seen vassals stand in such a
+manner beside the mouth[108] of their liege-lord; that the latter
+looked like a shark carrying a man crosswise in his jaws; but January
+resembled a Peter-fish, which holds forth in _its_ jaws a fine
+_stater_.
+
+The Court-Chaplain, when he arrived, in his astonishment at a crowned
+guest, found it impossible to stir lip or foot; he remained immovable
+in the broad water-spout of the priestly frock, which was thrown around
+him like a sheet of royal paper round marchpane. The only thing in
+which he indulged, and on which he ventured, was--not to put away the
+Bible (the mouse-trap), but--to send his eyes secretly round the room,
+to spy out whether _it_ had been properly stitched, folded, and
+superscribed by the registresses of rooms.
+
+The Prince proceeded at once on his journey with his Lordship, who had
+to reserve his leave-taking of his son and his farewell sermons till
+the solitary day they were to spend on the Isle of Union. The son
+contracted a liking for the company of the Prince, when he thought over
+his demeanor towards his father; he had a double joy, a filial and a
+human, as that father transformed his own happiness into the happiness
+of the poor country, and only for the sake of doing good made
+foot-tracks for himself in the rock of the throne, as in Italy the
+footsteps of angels who have appeared and left a blessing are shown
+in the rocks. Other favorites resemble the executioner who hollows
+out for himself foot-holes in the sand, so as to stand steadier when
+he--beheads.
+
+When the room was emptied, the first of Eymann's members to wake
+up--he still stood in the sentry-box of the priest's frock--was the
+index-finger, which stretched itself out, and pointed out to the
+family-circle the bed. "It would have been more satisfactory and
+serviceable to me," said he, "to have been strangled to death with that
+rag, than to have had his _Serenissimus_ spy it out." He meant,
+however, his own soiled cravat, which he himself had thrown upon the
+nuptial bed,--that art-chamber and wareroom of his linen. Whenever one
+contradicted any tormenting notion of his, he argued it so long that at
+last he believed it himself; but if one admitted it, then he conjured
+up certain scruples, and adopted a different opinion. "His Highness
+must inevitably have seen the tattered thing through the bed-curtains,"
+he replied. Finally he travelled over all the places where January had
+stood, and took observations at the torn neck-tie, and investigated its
+parallax. "We must adhere to the _blinding_ of the windows, if we want
+to have any _peace_," he concluded, and--
+
+So do I.
+
+P. S. I shall always remark after an eighth chapter (because I get
+ready exactly two Dog-post-days in a week), that I have again worked
+for the space of a month. I therefore report that to-morrow June comes
+on.
+
+
+
+
+                         FIRST INTERCALARY DAY.
+
+       Must Treaties be kept, or is it enough that they are made?
+
+
+The latter.--To-day the mining-superintendent exercises, for the first
+time, on the reader's ground and soil the right (_servitus oneris
+ferendi_, or I may say _servitus projiciendi_) which, according to the
+contract of May 4, he actually possesses. The main question now is,
+whether a dog-contract between two such great powers--inasmuch as the
+reader has all the quarters of the world, and I, in turn, have the
+reader--must, after being concluded, also be kept.
+
+Frederick, the Antimachiavellist, answers us, and backs himself by
+Machiavelli: Certainly every one of us must keep his word so long as
+it--is for his advantage. So true is this, that such treaties would
+never be broken, if they were not once--concluded; and the Swiss, who,
+as late as 1715, swore one with France, might quite as well in all the
+Cantons have lifted their fingers and taken an oath they would every
+day regularly--make water.
+
+But so soon as the advantage of contracts ceases, then is a regent
+entitled to break them in two cases,--those which he makes with
+other regents, and those he makes with his own step-children of the
+country,--his subjects.
+
+While I was already at work in the cabinet, (not later than six
+o'clock, with the goose-wing, dusting the session-table, not with the
+pen,) I had under the latter a clever fugitive paper, wherein I
+proposed to show that the _ouverture_ of treaties (_au nom de la Sainte
+Trinite_ or _in nomine Sanctissimae et individuae Trinitatis_) was the
+cipher which ambassadors sometimes place over their reports, meaning
+that the opposite is to be understood. Nothing, however, came of the
+fugitive paper but a--manuscript. In this I was simple enough, and
+proposed first to advise princes, that, in regard to lies of necessity
+and truths of necessity, they must have, for every latitude and
+hour, _declinations_ and _inclinations_. I proposed to whistle the
+state-chanceries to myself into a corner, and whisper in their ears, I
+would never suffer it, and, though I had only nine regiments in pay and
+starvation, that my hands and feet should be glued together with the
+sealing-wax of contracts, and my wings clogged with ink. That
+would I for the first time introduce into state-praxis; but the
+state-chanceries laughed at me, afar off in my foolish corner, and
+said, The whistler may believe, himself,--we do the thing otherwise.
+
+In the works of Herr _Herkommen_[109]--the best German publicist, who,
+however, writes no _acta sanctorum_ it is proved that a reigning prince
+need not observe at all any treaties, privileges, and concessions
+granted by his predecessor to his subjects; hence it follows that he is
+far less bound to keep his _own_ covenants with them, since the
+enjoyment of the benefit of these covenants, which consists in nothing
+but the keeping or breaking, manifestly vests in him as proprietor. Mr.
+Herkommen says the same on every page, and absolutely swears to it.
+Nay, can there be a dean or rector magnificus who exercises so little
+reason--considering that, according to a general assumption, a king
+never dies, and consequently predecessors and successors grow together
+into one man--as not to draw from this the conclusion that the
+successor may regard his own covenants as those of his predecessor, and
+accordingly, since the two make only one man, may break them just as
+much as if they were transmitted ones?
+
+Whoso chose to discourse philosophically about this might prove that,
+in fact, _no man whatever_ needs keep his word, not merely no prince.
+According to physiology, the old body of a king (a reader, a
+superintendent of mines) in _three_ years makes way for a new one. Hume
+carries it still farther with the soul, inasmuch as he considers that
+as a fleeting (not frozen) stream of phenomena. How much soever, then,
+the king (reader, author) may, at the moment of making a promise, be
+bound to keep it, still he cannot possibly be held thereto the next
+minute after, when he has already become his own successor and heir; so
+that, in fact, of us two contracting parties of the 4th of May, nothing
+more is extant than our mere _posthumi_ and successors,--namely,
+ourselves. As now, fortunately, promising and fulfilling never enter
+into one and the same moment, herefrom may follow the conclusion,
+pleasant to all of us, that, in fact, no one at all is bound to keep
+his word, whether he is the top of a throne or only a chip thereof. Nor
+will courtiers (the corner-clips of the throne) oppose this
+proposition.
+
+The public is requested to consider the Preface as the Second
+Intercalary Day, for the sake of symmetry.
+
+
+
+
+                            9. DOG-POST-DAY.
+
+           A Heavenly Morning; a Heavenly Afternoon.--A House
+                 without Walls; a Bed without a House.
+
+
+Ah, the poor miner, the delver in rock-salt pits, and the island-negro
+have in their calendar no such day as is here described or repeated!
+Sebastian stood on Thursday, as early as three o'clock, on the
+flying-board of his bee-hive, in order in one day to land in _Great
+Kussewitz_ and be off again before people were up. A reader who
+has an atlas on the floor at his feet cannot possibly confound this
+market-town, where the presentation of the Princess takes place, with a
+namesake of a town, which the city of Rostock has annexed to its
+immovable property. Unfortunately, the whole house loved him so that it
+had already, for half an hour earlier, been out of the morning feathers
+of which the greatest wings of dream are made. Amidst the din of
+carriage-chains, dogs, and cockerels, he tore his tender heart away
+from eyes that were all love, and, as the beating of the former and the
+melting of the latter annoyed him, all grew still worse; for external
+noise stills the inner tumult of the soul.
+
+Out of doors all the grass-pastures and grain-fields were bathing
+in the _shower-bath_ of the dew and in the cold _air-bath_ of the
+morning-wind. He hardened in it, like hot iron; a morning-land full of
+immeasurable hopes encircled him; he stripped his breast, threw himself
+all aglow into the dripping grass, washed (but not with any higher
+purpose than girls have) his firm face with liquid June-snow, and;
+strung with tenser fibres, stepped back from the shower-bath to his
+toilet,--only hair and breast he confined in no imprisonment.
+
+He would certainly have started earlier, but he wanted to avoid the
+moon, whom he could no more marry to the sun than he could their
+respective children to each other,--namely, night-thoughts and
+morning-thoughts. For when the morning-clouds envelop man in their dew,
+when the loving birds dart noisily through the gleaming mist, when the
+sun looms forth out of the hazy glow, then does man, quickened in
+spirit, press his foot more deeply into the earth, and cling with new
+ivy-twigs of life more firmly to his planet.
+
+Slowly he waded through a low avenue of hazel-bushes, and reluctantly
+swept off their chilled chafers; he held himself in, and stopped at
+last, in order to make himself late, that he might not reach the
+neighboring thicket just when the sun was entering his theatre. Already
+he heard the musical _melee_ in the thicket; rosy clouds were spread
+like flowers in the sun's pathway; the watch-tower of the parsonage and
+village, that high altar whereon his first lovely evening had glowed,
+kindled again; the singing world of the air hung exulting in the hues
+of morning and the heavenly blue; sparks of clouds darted up from gold
+bars along the horizon; at last the flames of the sun streamed in over
+the earth....
+
+Truly, were I every evening to depict sunrise, and every morning to see
+it, still I should cry, like the children, Once more, once more!
+
+With benumbed nerves of vision, and with flakes of color swimming
+before him, he passed on slowly into the wood, as into a dark minster,
+and his heart swelled even to devotion....
+
+--I will not assume that my reader has such a prosaic feeling in regard
+to morning as to deem this poetic one irreconcilable with Victor's
+character; nay, I venture to presume that his knowledge of human nature
+will find little trouble in discovering the _key-note_ between two such
+distant tones in Victor as humor and sensibility. I will therefore
+commit myself unconcernedly to the happy contemplations of his feeling
+soul, and to my assurance of having all hearts in unison with mine.
+
+The planet Venus and a grove show most beautifully in the morning and
+the evening; on both, at these hours, more rays of the sun fall than at
+any other. Hence our Victor felt, in the thicket, as if he went through
+the gate of a new life, as on this fiery morning he sauntered onward
+with the sun, which darted beside him from twig to twig, through the
+murmuring wood, away along under symphonious branches, which were so
+many music-barrels set in motion, over moss that lay in green sun-fire,
+and under evergreen bathed in heavenly blue. And this morning renewed
+in his heart the painful likeness of _four_ things,--life, a day, a
+year, a journey, which resemble each other in their fresh, exultant
+beginning, in the oppressive interlude, in the weary, sated close.--
+
+Outside in the copse, in the background of the woodland, Nature
+unrolled before him her altar-piece, miles long, with its chains of
+hills, with its dazzling country-houses, which had decked themselves
+with gardens as with festoons, and with the miniature-colors of the
+flowerets which played on the silver line of beauty traced by the
+brooks. And a cloud of enraptured, sporting, buzzing little creatures
+of silk-dust swept or hovered over the undulating picture.--What way
+should Victor take in the labyrinth of beauty?--All the sixty-four
+radii of the compass stretched themselves out as so many fingerposts,
+and he had sense enough not to propose to himself any particular hour
+of arriving. He therefore slipped off everywhere, to the right and to
+the left; he climbed over into every vale that hid itself behind a
+hill; he visited the pierced shadow-projection of every row of trees;
+he laid himself down at the feet of a more than commonly beautiful
+flower, and refreshed himself with pure love by its spirit, without
+breaking its body; he was the travelling-companion of the powdered
+butterfly, and observed his burying himself in his flower, and the
+hedge-sparrow he followed through the bushes to her brooding-cell and
+nursery; he let himself be spell-bound in the circle which a bee drew
+around him, and quietly suffered himself to be immured in the shaft of
+his own nosegay; he exercised upon every village which the motley
+landscape held up to him the right of way, and loved best to meet the
+children, whose days played even like his hours--
+
+But men he avoided....
+
+And yet there leaped from his heart a high fountain of love, which
+penetrated even to the remotest brother; and yet was he so entirely
+free from egotism, from that _sensitive_ intolerance, which has its
+degree and source in common with the _Moravian_.---The reason, however,
+was this: the first day of a journey was wholly different from the
+second, third, eightieth; for on the second, third, eightieth, he was
+prosaic, humoristic, social,--i. e. his heart adhered everywhere like
+hooked seed, and sent the roots of its happiness into every other
+being's lot. But on the first day came veiled spirits from all hours
+into his soul, who vanished if a third spoke,--a soft intoxication,
+which the atmosphere of nature, like that of a wine-store, communicated
+to him, spread itself, like an enchanted solitude, around his soul....
+But why shall I depict the first day before I depict him?
+
+In the first hours of the journey, he was to-day fresh, glad, happy,
+but not blissful; he drank as yet, only he was not drunken. But when he
+had thus for some hours wandered on, with drinking eye and absorbing
+heart, through pearl-strings of bedewed web-work, through humming
+vales, over singing hills, and when the violet-blue sky peacefully
+joined itself to the smoking heights and to the dark woods, rising like
+garden-walls behind each other,--when Nature opened all the pipes of
+the stream of life, and when all her fountains leaped up, and,
+flashing, played into each other, painted over by the sun,--then was
+Victor, who went through these flying streams with a rising and thirsty
+heart, lifted and softened by them; then did his heart swim, trembling
+like the sun's image in the infinite ocean, as the salient point of the
+wheel-animal[110] swims in the fluttering water-globule of the mountain
+stream.--
+
+Then did flower, meadow, and grove dissolve into a dim immensity, and
+the color-grains of Nature melted away into a single broad flood, and
+_over_ the glimmering flood stood the Infinite One as a sun, and _in_
+it, as a reflected sun, the human heart.--
+
+All was one; all hearts grew to one greatest heart; a single life
+throbbed; the blooming pictures, the growing statues, the dusty clod of
+earth, and the infinite blue vault became the beholding face of an
+immeasurable soul.--
+
+He might shut his eyes as much as he pleased, still there lingered in
+his dark breast this blooming immensity.
+
+Ah, if he could have plunged up into the clouds, so as to sweep thereon
+through the undulating heavens over the boundless earth!--ah, if he
+could have floated with the flower-fragrance over the flowers,--could
+have streamed with the wind over the summits, through the woods!--O now
+would he rather have fallen on the heart of a great man, and sunk,
+enraptured and weeping, into his bosom, to stammer out, "How happy is
+man!"
+
+He must needs weep, without knowing why; he sang words without sense,
+but their tone went to his heart--he ran, he stopped--he dipped his
+glowing face into the cloud of blossoming bushes, and would fain lose
+himself in the humming world between the leaves; he pressed the
+scratched face into the deep, cooling grass, and hung delirious on the
+breast of the immortal mother of Spring.
+
+Whoever saw him from a distance took him for a madman; perhaps many a
+one does so still, who has never himself experienced how, through the
+cleared-up, blissful breast, as through the serenest sky, storm-winds
+may sweep, which in both dissolve in rain.
+
+In this hour of his regeneration-day, his genius gave his heart the
+fiery baptism of a love, which clasped all men and all creatures into
+its flames. There are certain precious minutes of rapture--ah, why not
+years?--when an inexpressible love towards all human creatures flows
+through thy whole life, and opens thy arms softly to every brother. The
+least that Victor could do, whose heart was on the sunny side of love,
+was, if any one met him near a mountain, to turn out for him toward the
+steep side,--not to pass by any one who was fishing, for fear of
+throwing a frightening shadow on the water,--to wander slowly through a
+flock of sheep, and, if a child was shy of him, to make a long circuit
+aside. Nothing could surpass the soft voice with which he wished every
+pilgrim more than _this_ good morning; nothing the look of anticipating
+emotion with which in every village he sought to spy out any poor body
+whose calluses and scars and gashes required a sponge or pain-killing
+drops. "Ah, I know as well as an amanuensis[111] to a Professor of
+Morals," he said to himself, "that it is no virtue, but only a luxury,
+to take away the crown of thorns from a lacerated brow, the prickly
+girdle from sore nerves; but this innocent pleasure will still be
+begrudged me, and when on so many roads mangled men are lying, why on
+mine does no one stretch out his hand that I might place in it some
+compensation for this undeserved heaven in my breast?"
+
+He would fain carry his joy to another's heart to be tasted, as the bee
+delivers its mouthful of honey to the lips of another bee. At length
+two children came puffing along, one of whom was tackled as pulling
+beast of burden to a wheelbarrow, and the other harnessed on in front
+as pushing driver. The barrow was freighted with six porous bags full
+of pine-cones which the poor span were hauling to feed a consumptive
+fire. The two frequently exchanged places, so as to hold out; and the
+driver always wanted presently to be the horse again. "My good
+children! can't your father push, then?"--"The tree has broken
+both his legs short off."--"Then certainly your big brother could go to
+the wood?"--"He has to plough over yonder."--Victor stood on the
+fallow-field beside a waistcoat with full as many colors as holes, and
+near a dirty bread-sack, both which belonged to the brother, who at a
+distance was ploughing on the stage of this scene with half a post-team
+of lean cows. The emptying of a full hand into the lap of misery
+lightened Victor's heavy soul, as did the outgushing, which followed,
+of the full eye; his conscience, not his selfishness, was his objector
+to the _greatness_ of his gift--he gave it, however, but in coins of
+small denominations--the children left their merchandise, and while one
+of them ran across the field to the plough, the other ran down to the
+village to his mother. The ploughman in the distance pulled off his
+hat--would fain have uttered loud thanks, but could only blow his
+nose--went on ploughing without his hat; but when at length he called
+out his thanks after the youth, the latter had already escaped far
+beyond earshot....
+
+Do not, clear reader, wish this or the succeeding interlude of human
+sorrow left out of the great scenes of happy nature; and may thy heart,
+like Victor, by giving deserve to receive!
+
+In his good-hearted haste he soon overtook a journeyman blacksmith sick
+with fever, whose travelling-trunk or portmanteau was a filled
+handkerchief; he also carried on a stick a wretched, faded pair of
+boots, which he had to spare, because the other which he dragged along
+on other sticks, namely, on his legs, was still wretcheder and less
+without color than without soles. When he had tenderly greeted the
+feverish man and made him a present, he looked into his pale, livid
+face, and he could not deny him some smart-money.... Ah, the whole
+smart-money for this life is not paid out till we reach a higher! When
+he had civilly questioned him and informed himself about his hungry
+journeyings, about his correction-house fare, about his flights from
+one country to another, and about his thin viaticum which the mistress
+denied him when the master was out,--then was he ashamed, before the
+All-gracious One, of his flower-field of rapture, which he no more
+deserved "than that poor devil there," and he made him an additional
+present; and when he again waited for him to speak, and learned that he
+was fifty years old without any prospects, and when the distress
+overmastered him which he always felt at the sight of _old_ but
+_undeveloped_ men, gray apprentices, old clerks, old dispensers, old
+amanuenses, then was he somewhat excusable for running back again and
+silently giving the astonished old man the new signs of his
+overflowing, benignant soul; and when, at this renewed parting, he felt
+his heart, which was dissolved into love, and only floated, as it were,
+round his soul, thirst more and more for doing good, and felt an
+incomprehensible inclination for fresh giving, and a longing to pour
+out upon somebody to-day everything, everything, then for the first
+time did he perceive that he was now too tender and too happy and too
+giddy and too weak.
+
+So soon as the people in the village had in hand the certain
+intelligence of this transit-toll of generosity, in the afternoon about
+fifteen children stationed themselves on different posts along the way,
+manned the narrow passes, and distributed sentries and _enfans perdus_
+to prevent evasion of the revenue-laws....
+
+A man who, like Victor, construed three straight leagues into seven
+crooked ones, is often hungry, but certainly more so than he;--he took
+merely a Leibnitz's monad-meal out of his pocket, biscuit and wine, and
+appeased therewith the stomach which hung and drew upon his spirit, in
+order not to darken and foul, by throwing in any pieces of flesh, the
+clear lake of his inner being, with its reflected arch of heavenly blue
+and heavenly red. In fact, he hated gormandizers as men of too gross
+selfishness, as well as all living larders, where layers of fat crush
+in the spirit, as masses of snow do a house. The soul, he said, takes
+an odor from the contents of the body, just as wine does from the fruit
+which is near it in the cellar, and in the mephitic vapor in which the
+souls of the Flachsenfingenites bob up and down over the brew-kettles
+which seethe their potatoes and beer, the poor birds must surely fall
+down tipsy and stifled into this dead sea.
+
+He broke his biscuit not in any house, but in the skeleton, i. e.
+framework of a house, which had just come from the hands and axes of
+the carpenters into the sight of the village. As he looked through all
+the divisions and subdivisions of this architectural skeleton, and saw
+at once through sitting-room, kitchen, stable, and loft, he thought to
+himself: "Another play-house for a poor, little human troupe, who are
+here to play out their benefit comedy, their Gay's Beggars'-opera, with
+no voice to cry from the stage-box, _Encore!_ Ah! before these beams
+have blackened to ebony by the winter smoke, many an eye-socket will
+have grown red with grief; many a northwester of life will blow through
+the window upon trembling hearts, and into these nooks, which are yet
+to be darkly walled up, will many a back, sore with bruises from the
+warfare of common life, creep away to wipe off sweat or blood. But joy
+(he went on soliloquizing as he looked at the place for stove and
+table) will also set a gilliflower-tree or two before the window for
+your inmates, and drive up before your house-door, which is yet to be
+hung, and unload its freight of the three holy feasts, and the church
+fair, and the child's baptism.--Heavens! how foolish that I should
+prefer thinking all this in the mere ribs of a house to seeing it
+yonder in the walled-up houses of the village!"
+
+During this table-talk and house-warming-oration, whereat, however, no
+drinking-glass was shivered, the white breast of a swallow swooped low
+across the road, and her bill took up a load of slacked lime for her
+little garret. The wasp shaved off from the joist-work paper-shavings
+for the layers of her bulbous sphere. The spider had already knit her
+spider's house into the larger one. All creatures played the carpenter
+and mason in building up for themselves their little islands in the
+infinite sea; but grovelling man looks not over his shoulder, and sees
+not that all is like him.
+
+Sebastian quitted his wooden inn, his skeleton of a Frankfort Red
+House, more intoxicated with happiness than he could have gone from a
+fully-built one. In certain men a dark melancholy diffuses itself,--a
+shadow of the soul all the greater when the shadows around them are the
+smallest: I mean about one o'clock of a summer afternoon. When in the
+afternoon the lawns lie more intensely perfumed, and the woods with
+drooping leaves stand, more softly sighing and sleeping beneath the
+brooding sun, and the birds sit on the trees as dumb figurants or
+supernumeraries,--then in the Eden that lay sweltering under the cloud
+of blossoms an oppressive yearning seized upon his heart,--then was he
+wafted by his fancies under the eternally blue sky of the East, and
+under the wine-palms of Hindustan,--then did he rest himself in those
+still lands, where, without stinging necessities or scorching passions,
+he sank dissolved into the dreamy tranquillity of the Brahmin, and
+where the soul in its elevation holds itself steady and no longer
+trembles with the trembling earth, like the fixed stars whose gleam
+trembles not, seen on mountains,--then was he too happy for a German
+colonist, too poetic for a European, too luxurious for a neighbor of
+the North Pole.... Every summer morning he feared that in the summer
+afternoon he should fantasy too effeminately.
+
+Fasting, wine, heaven, and earth had to-day so lavishly filled the
+chambers of his heart with the sleep-potion of rapture, that they must
+needs, when anything more was poured in, overflow through the eyes.
+These now gushed forth; and behind his dimmed eyes, in the overshadowed
+inner chamber, lined with the green of nature, and darkened, as it
+were, with curtains of evening redness, a colored night came on,
+wherein all the little shapes of his childhood rose cloudily before
+him,--the earliest playthings of life were laid out,--his first May
+months played like little angels on an evening cloud, and they could
+not in their wing-clothes fly round the great cloud, and the sun did
+not scorch them.
+
+Ah! what he had long forgotten,--long lost,--long loved,--songs without
+sense and tones without words, nameless plays,--buried nurses,--dead
+servants,--all these came to life again; but before all, and greatest
+of all, moved the form of his first, his dearest teacher, Dahore, in
+England, who said to his melted soul, "We were once side by side."--O
+this eternally loved spirit, who even then saw in our Victor the wings
+that lift themselves toward the next world,--who even then was more the
+friend than the master of his so tender, tempestuous, loving, aspiring
+heart,--this never-to-be-forgotten spirit would not leave him; his form
+pushed aside the shroud, began to shine and to say, "Horion, my Horion,
+did I not hold thee by the hand, wast thou not in my heart? But it is
+long since we loved each other, and my voice is no longer recognizable
+to thee, scarcely my face; ah, the seasons of life roll not back, but
+onward, downward, forever." He leaned against a tree and kept drying
+his eye, which could no longer find the road, and his sight was fixed
+calmly on the woods which stretch toward St. Luna, and on the hazy
+hills that separate him from Maienthal and from his second teacher....
+
+Kussewitz burst upon him. But too soon; his soul in its emotion was not
+ready to go among strangers. He was glad to come upon an overturned
+trough, out of which sheep were licking salt, and a hedge-pen, which
+folded them at night, and the hut on two wheels wherein their keeper
+slept. He had a peculiar curiosity and predilection for little copies
+of houses; he always walked into or up to every collier's hut, every
+hunter's and fowler's house, for the sake of saddening and comforting
+himself with his own confinement, and with the parodies of our little
+life and with the ground-floor of poverty. He never went blindly by
+anything small, over which the world's man and business man stalk so
+scornfully; just as, on the other hand, he never stopped before any
+pomp of citizenly life. He opened, therefore, a little door to the
+travelling bed of the shepherd: it looked so poverty-stricken in
+there, and the straw, which took the place of eider-down and silk
+pillow-cases, was so lowly and rumpled, that he felt an indescribable
+longing to enter; he needed now a diving-bell that should separate him
+from the rushing, crushing, sublime sea around him. I wish one could
+conceal the fact from the European cabinets, the Imperial Diet, and the
+Chief Commissary, that he actually laid himself down therein. But now
+the excitement of his senses, into which the door of his bedchamber
+admitted only a small section of the blue sky, soon passed over into
+the exhaustion of slumber, and over the hot eye the lid closed.
+
+
+
+
+                           10. DOG-POST-DAY.
+
+    The Bee-Master.--Zeusel's Oscillation.--Arrival of the Princess.
+
+
+Since the last Post-day our hero has been sleeping. The German
+_Reviewers_ should do me the favor to start him up.
+
+But they are knaves, these headsmen and partners of the censors; they
+wake up neither readers nor princes, but only Homeric sleepers. The sun
+already hangs low, and peers horizontally into his Dr. Graham's-bed,
+and he still lies there glowing in the face of it....
+
+The sheep had to do it with their bleating and bells. When the
+belfry-bell of Great Kussewitz, with the accompaniment of sheep-bells,
+wafted into his opening ears an evening prayer set to music,--when into
+his opening eyes the red outline of the departed sun which had
+illuminated his to-day's paradises entered, and the evening glow, whose
+gold leaves the evening wind breathed upon the clouds,--when the air,
+bedewed like his nosegay, refreshed his bosom,--then was to-day's
+sultry afternoon rolled back a whole week; Victor had dropped upon a
+new island of the blest; new-born and rejoicing, he crept back out of
+his piece of travelling property. "O mad me!" he said; "but I do not
+rejoice extraordinarily in the fact that half an ounce of grains of
+sleep can eat away clean out of man a whole glowing world, and that the
+turning over of the body is the sinking of his paradise and his hell."
+
+On the high road two sedan-bearers went jogging off at a short gallop
+between the supporting poles of their leather die.[112] He made after
+them,--their load, he thought, must be far lighter to them than a whole
+country and its sceptre, both which, however, a regent knows how to
+balance, as a juggler does a sword, dancing, on the nose, on the teeth,
+everywhere. They bore, however, the heaviest thing in the world,
+beneath which cities, thrones, and continents have often broken down.
+
+"What are you moving round with at such a rate?" he asked. "With our
+most gracious Lord!" It was January,--it is, however, quite in
+accordance with the aesthetic and artistic tricks wherewith an author so
+extraordinarily excites the expectation of his readers, that I do not
+divulge what it was of January that sat in the bounding litter, until I
+utter the next word.
+
+It was his image. The bust always travelled ahead before the bride, in
+order to arrive in season at her bedchamber, and hang itself up by a
+nail to the wall. On the whole _sentimental journey_ the _cubic
+contents_ of the bride had slept only in chambers, on which the
+_superficial area_ of the bridegroom hung down like a garden-spider all
+night long....
+
+As I do not mean in any manner to cut myself of, by the barrier-treaty
+which I have concluded with my cousin the reader, from the right of
+making, beside the Intercalary Days, extra-leaves, extra-leaflets, and
+pseudo-extra-leaves, inasmuch as I have, the rather, by certain secret
+and separate articles, which I have made merely in my own head, as the
+Pope does certain cardinals, reserved to myself the privilege, I will
+now exercise the right which my self-made By-Recess offers me on the
+spot.
+
+
+               EXTRA LEAFLET UPON THE ABOVE BUST-PIECES.
+
+"I maintain," said I, in the billiard-room at Scheerau, at a moment
+when I was not striking, "that dukes, margraves, and other graves, and
+many of high nobility, would be stupid, if in our day,--or, in fact,
+in future days,--when the crown grows bald before the chin gets a
+beard,--when many a face wants no requisite for spectacles except the
+bridge,--when particularly the man of rank is glad to be, instead of a
+_cast_, at least an _outline_, of a man,--they would not be wise, I
+recapitulate, if they celebrated no better marriage than a true
+one,--that is, no pictured--one; if their busts were stamped on
+nothing better--that is, on no breast--than on the pewter covers of
+beer-pitchers, so that they could _intoxicate_ people in no other way
+than this latter; and if they, who uniformly act by plenipotentiaries,
+on imperial benches, in session-chairs, in bridal beds (marrying by
+ambassadors), should conceive that in the last-mentioned case there
+were any truer and more innocent chief commissary than their own
+picture on an ell of canvas." ... As we just then played in mass, and I
+happened to be king, and in my fiery state went on to say, "What the
+Devil! we kings understand how to substitute skilfully enough, for the
+_plastic_ arts in virtue and in marriage, the _delineative_ arts; and
+_not merely_ in billiards does a king stand quite idle with his
+sceptre-cue!"--then the fire of my speech might well seem far from
+strange.
+
+          _End of the Extra Leaflet on the above Bust-pieces_.
+
+
+At the house of the Count of O---- (so was called also a famous officer
+in the Seven Years' War, and by Shakespeare the world, and the whole
+territory of an old lady; and, according to Bruce, with the Hebrews
+this vowel was a particular favorite; but this is, after all,
+unprofitable learning here) the Princess and the painted bridegroom
+alighted. Victor would not, with his to-day's dress and his to-day's
+heart, mingle in the tumult of the world; and yet he would gladly have
+seen all.
+
+As he approached Kussewitz, a little red and white house peered forth
+to meet him,--red as a squirrel-cage, and smiling as a summer-house. He
+stepped up to it and to its gleaming windows, but immediately stepped
+back again; he would not hinder an old human couple, for whom the bell
+had been the organ, from finishing their prayer. When he entered, with
+his face exalted by the reflection of to-day's transfiguration, an old
+man turned a silver head, which stood like a mild moon over the evening
+of his life, and a face of smiling wrinkles, toward the guest. Only a
+hypocrite--that stockjobber of virtue--is not, after praying, more
+gentle and complacent. The old woman was the first to lay aside the
+look of devotion. Victor, with his victorious simplicity, asked a
+night's lodging. To grant it to him was what only such contented people
+as these could do; to request it was what none could do, except one
+who, like him, shunned landlords, because their cold, selfish sympathy
+and love, coming and going with every guest, was too repulsive to his
+warm soul. Secondly, he was attracted by the cleanliness which even the
+slut loves in _strangers'_ houses, and which, in them, is a proof of
+contentment and of--childlessness. Thirdly, he wanted to remain to-day
+incognito, and out of the thronged streets, with his soul so
+consecrated by Nature.
+
+He soon felt himself at home; even before the supper was washed and
+picked and ready, he found out, or, rather, took it in, that the gentle
+old man, named _Lind_, was a bee-keeper. The latter I believe; for
+otherwise he would not have been so mild, as, in fact, in most cases,
+animal society is less corrupting than human. Hence Plato assigns the
+Lange's colloquies of man with the animals as the best thing left of
+Saturn's golden reign. It is not all one whether one is a dog-keeper, a
+lion-keeper, or a bee-keeper; for our menagerie in the lower viscera,
+according to the Platonic allegory, barks and bleats in unison with the
+external one.--When Victor actually went with the old man round the
+house and among the bee-hives, then he came back into the supper-room
+with the face of a man who claimed already a seat in the Kussewitz
+Church and a page in the church-book. Did he not already know that the
+bee-father had followed three parsons and five squires in Kussewitz to
+the grave; that he had celebrated his first marriage with his "mother"
+(so he called his wife) at the age in which the silver wedding usually
+falls; that his head had still memory and hair; that he expected to
+carry black eyebrows under the coffin-lid; that he, Lind, had not the
+least need, like old _Gobel_ and even the beadle _Stenz_, for the
+sake of his eyes, to take his place near the church-window, but
+could read his verse anywhere; and that he once every year went to
+Maienthal to church, and thrust a sovereign[113] into the church
+billiard-pocket,[114] because the churchyard there covered all his
+relations on the father's side?
+
+
+O, this contentment with the evening-clouds of life refreshes the
+hypochondriacal hearer and spectator, whose melancholy strings in an
+old man's presence begin so easily to tremble like a death-watch; and
+an ardent old man seems to us an immortal being, hardened against the
+scythe of death, and a finger-post pointing to the next world! Victor
+especially saw, with heavy thoughts, in an old man, an organized past,
+a bent incarnation of years, the plaster cast of his own mummy standing
+before him. Every childish, forgetful, petrified old man reminded him
+of the masters of forges, who in their old age, like the human soul,
+have to undergo a crab-like promotion, and on account of their usual
+loss of sight become casters again,--then head smiths,--then foundery
+apprentices. The good Newton,[115] Linnaeus, Swift, went back to be
+foundery-apprentices of learning. But so singularly timid is man, that,
+while he regards his soul, in its greatest _advantageous_ dependence
+upon his organs, still as a _vowel_,--and justly,--nevertheless, in the
+case of an _injurious_ dependence upon the same, fears it may be merely
+a _consonant_ of the body,--and _that_ unjustly.
+
+As a walk about a strange place gives a traveller the best
+naturalization act, and as Victor was incapable of being anywhere a
+stranger, he went--out a little way. There are many nights when it is
+not night. He saw outside, not far from the garden-fence of the senior
+(not the seignior of nobility, but the senior parson), a very beautiful
+girl sitting, buried in a Latin Whitsuntide programme, and praying from
+it with folded hands. A case of beauty and craziness united he never
+could resist; he greeted her, and would not let her roll up and put up
+her Latin prayer-book. The good soul, having lost her prayer-book and
+paternoster, had easily despatched her devotions out of the Whitsuntide
+programme _De Chalifis literarum studiosis_, as she neither understood
+Latin nor how to read, and looked upon the folding of the hands as a
+Masonic finger-speech, which would be readily understood in the _higher
+places_. She unrolled from a paper a sixth finger which had been cut
+off, and said the cloister of Mary in Flachsenfingen, on whose mother
+of God her father had wished to hang it as a thank-offering, would not
+accept it, because it was not made of silver. As Buffon ascribes to
+man's fingers the clearness of his ideas, so that the thoughts may be
+dissected at the same time with the hand, it follows that one who has a
+_sext_[116] of fingers, must think 1/6 or 1/11 the more clearly; and
+such a one, with such a supernumerary writing-finger, could do more in
+the sciences than we with the whole hand.
+
+She related that her father would not marry her till after two years,
+and that his son could get her sister, if she were not only just
+six years old,--and they two had been adopted as children by the
+six-finger,--and that he had his bijouterie shop wherewith he wandered
+from one ducal palace to another; just now in that of the Count of
+O----, together with board and lodging, and that he was an Italian,
+named _Tostato_. Heavens! Victor knew him full well. Without further
+question--for he loved besides to go a Sabbath-day's journey or two
+with any girl or any Pomeranian dog, and used to say he never would
+make the least distinction between a new face and a pretty one, even if
+he were obliged to--he marched off with her straight toward the Count's
+to see her father. He peeled off more and more of the hull of his
+little maid of honor: she was not only uncommonly beautiful, but
+equally--stupid.
+
+But now she ran away from him; the Flachsenfingen Court came travelling
+along, and she must needs see the ladies alight. He kept close to the
+tail of the whole corps, which was still trailing along the street,
+while half the rump was already in the palace. The draggling tail was
+somewhat short and thin, consisting of the Court-apothecary Zeusel, who
+from vanity was on hand with his fifty-four years and his youthful
+clothes and his bumping coach to take part in the affair. The smallest
+man in the world, in the biggest carriage in the world, could so little
+be looked upon as an _entity_, that I count his coach as an empty
+ceremonial coach, in which the coachman shook him about like a dry
+kernel in a walnut.
+
+I will describe more copiously how the coachman winnowed and bolted
+him, and will make it up by being shorter in matters of less
+consequence.
+
+Of course, if I should lay such an imputation upon the coachman as to
+say that he knew how by speed and stones to give the coach-body that
+hard pulsation, which made Zeusel sit more on the air than on the
+coach-cushion,--then would Kastner in Goettingen reply to me, and prove
+that the apothecary himself, by the counteraction which he produced
+upon the cushion by his posteriors, was to blame for the repulsion of
+the homologous pole; but we have, I trust, less to do here with the
+truth than with the apothecary. Victor, as Court-doctor, took a
+_distant_ interest in the apothecary; nay, he would gladly have begged
+the favor of being allowed to get in and sit by his side, that he might
+see more distinctly how the skilful Vetturino sent the ball, Zeusel,
+into the air. But to the weak nerves of Victor comic scenes, by the
+physical suffering which they in reality brought with them, were too
+hard and sharp,--and he contented himself with following behind the
+bouncing box, and merely conceiving how the thing inside rose like a
+barometer to indicate the pleasant weather of the drunken coachman,--he
+merely pictured it out to himself (therefore I need not) how the good
+little courtier at a climax, to which the fellow brought him (who ended
+every lift with a higher one), would thrust his left hand, not into his
+waistcoat pocket, but merely into the coach-strap, while in his right
+he would be obliged to warm and squeeze for an hour a pinch of snuff,
+which for want of a quiet moment he could not raise to his empty nose
+till the rascal of a coachman cried, Brrr!
+
+Come along! said the stupid girl to Victor, and drew him to her
+father's. The Italian made his windmill gesture, and placed himself
+against Victor's ear and whispered into it, _Dio vi salvi!_[117] and
+the latter thanked him in a still lower voice in Italian, _Gran
+merce!_[118] Thereupon Tostato breathed three or four uncommonly
+soft-voiced curses into Victor's ear-cell. He had not lost his wits,
+but only his voice, and that only by a cold. He cursed and condoled
+about it, that to-morrow, of all days, he should have to be dumb as a
+haddock, precisely when so much was to be cut. Victor congratulated
+him sincerely on that very account, and begged him to accept him till
+to-morrow, not only as Doctor, but also as partner and spokesman; he
+would talk for him in the shop to-morrow, in order the better and
+incognito to see all that went on. "If you will tell me to-day,"
+replied Tostato, "one more funny story." And now when he actually
+produced the adventure of Zeusel with an Italian systole and diastole
+of the hands, and when Tostato grew foolish with laughing at the
+joke,--(the Italian and Frenchman laugh with the whole body, the
+Englishman only in the brain,)--then was it no wonder that he took him
+into partnership at once. His doctorship he began by pulling off the
+patient's stocking and binding it round the untuned throat, for a warm
+stocking is worn with equal medicinal benefit on foot and neck; with a
+garter it would be different.
+
+Now the beauty and stupidity of the programme-pray-er appeared greater
+than ever in his eyes; he would gladly have kissed her, but it was
+impracticable: the Bijoutier followed him about everywhere, eager for
+his witty overflowings, and held both ears under to catch the drops.
+
+He took this occasion, as he thought of the German indifference
+to wit and the fine arts, to lay down the fundamentally false
+proposition,--The Englishman, the Frenchman, and the Italian are _men_;
+the Germans are _citizens_. The latter _earn_ life; the former _enjoy_
+it. And the Dutch are a cheaper edition of the Germans on mere printing
+paper and without engravings.
+
+He was on the point of going back to bee-keeper Lind's: when at this
+late hour of the night--so late that the Court-courier had set down the
+appearance of this comet a whole hour too soon in his astronomical
+tables--the Princess with her attendant atmosphere arrived. As he had
+talked of her so long, he needed nothing more to make him love her,
+than to hear the rolling of her chariot and the silk-rustle of her
+walk. "A princely bride," he said, "can be much better endured than
+another; show me any other difference between a Crown-princess, a
+crowned bride, and a crowned wife, than that which the state-almanac
+assigns." Whoever shall further consider, that he knew her personal
+disinclination towards the Prince, who at his first marriage had
+postponed her for her sister,--and whoever reads now what I here
+mention that Tostato told him she had a handkerchief in her hand on
+alighting from her carriage,--such a one will already be wise enough
+not to be angry at his saying: "I would that these crown-beasts, who
+are suffered to snap off the fair white hands of such a beautiful
+child, as swine eat off the tender ones of children--I would... but my
+wares, of course, will be near enough to her to-morrow to admit my
+seeing the handkerchief, Mr. Partner."
+
+At the Bee-father's, to whom he went home again, there was a more
+tranquil world, and his house stood in the green, silent as a cloister
+of sleep around a holy place of dreams. Victor pushed his little bed on
+the attic floor towards an opening through which the moon streamed in,
+and thus, overhung with hushed swallows' and wasps' nests, he saw peace
+in the form of Luna float down to his own nest; but she smiled upon him
+so potently that at length he sank away dissolved into guileless
+dreams. Good man! thou deservest the bright flower-pieces of dreams,
+and a fresh nosegay of head and breast on waking; thou hast never yet
+tormented any man, never yet supplanted any one, overcome no female
+honor, nor ever bartered away thy own; and thou art merely a little too
+volatile, too effeminate, too gay, too human.
+
+
+
+
+                           11. DOG-POST-DAY.
+
+        Transfer of the Princess.--Smuggling of a Kiss.--Montre
+                   a Regulateur.--Simultaneous Love.
+
+
+Voltaire, who never could write a good comedy, would not have been
+competent to create this Eleventh Dog-post-day.
+
+In regard to the Eleventh Dog-post-day I remark, to be sure, that
+Nature has created plants with all variety of numbers of stamens, only
+none with eleven, and seldom also men with eleven fingers.
+
+Meanwhile life, like shell-fish, tastes best in the months without R.
+
+In reply to this, some say that the pen of an author goes, like a
+watch, the faster, the longer it has been going; but I reverse it, and
+say rather, men who write much make fast writers.
+
+And yet people cannot well bear men who are the fifth wheel of a coach;
+but every baggage-wagon has a fifth wheel strapped on behind it, and in
+case of accident this is a true _wheel of fortune_. Reinhold read
+Kant's Critique through _five times_ before he understood it. I pledge
+myself to be more intelligible to him, and require to be read only half
+as often.
+
+To speak out freely, I cherish some contempt for a head full of elastic
+ideas, which jump with their spring-feet from one cerebral chamber to
+another; for I find no difference between them and the elastic worms in
+the intestines, which Goetze saw, before a light, leap to the height of
+three inches.
+
+Of course the following thought does not rightly hang together with the
+foregoing chain of conclusions and flowers; namely, that I am afraid of
+finding imitators, and so much the more as I am, here, myself, one of a
+certain class of witty authors. In Germany no great author can light a
+new torch, and hold it out into the world till he is tired and throws
+away the fag-end of it, without the little ones immediately pouncing
+upon it, and running round and shining round for half-years longer with
+the little end of a light. Thus have I (and others) in Ratisbon been
+run after a thousand times by the boys, who held in their hands
+remnants of wax-torches which the ambassadorial retinue had thrown
+away, and offered to light me to my landlord's for a few kreutzers ...
+_Stultis sat!_[119]
+
+In the morning Victor hastened to the palace. He got a tradesman's
+dress and the shop. At ten o'clock came on the "transfer" of the
+Princess. The three apartments in which it was to take place stood,
+with their folding doors, opposite to his shop. He had never yet seen
+the Princess--except all night in his dreams, and he can hardly wait
+for it all....
+
+Nor the reader either: does he not even now snuff his candle and his
+nose,--fill up pipe and glass,--change his position, if he rides
+upon a so-called _reading-ass_,[120]--press the book smoothly open, and
+say with uncommon delight, "I am somewhat sharp-set for that
+description!"--I verily, am not at all; I feel as if I were to be shot
+with arquebuses. Positively! an infantry-soldier who in midwinter
+storms a hostile wall of the thickest paper, in the opera, has his
+heaven on earth, compared with a mining-superintendent of my stamp.
+
+For one who drinks coffee and sets out to make a description of any
+school-act of the Court,--e. g. of a Court-day, of a marriage, (in
+fact, of the preliminaries thereof,) of a Transfer,--such a drinker
+pledges himself to reproduce scenes, whose dignity is so extremely fine
+and fugitive that the smallest false by-stroke and half-shadow makes
+them perfectly ridiculous,--hence even spectators, on account of such
+accidental touches, laugh at them _in natura_;[121]--he pledges
+himself, I say, so to reproduce such scenes, bordering on the comic,
+that the reader shall remark the dignity, and be as little able to
+laugh at them as if he himself were one of the performers. It is true I
+may presume to count upon myself somewhat, or rather upon the fact,
+that I myself have been at Courts and acted the part of master of the
+Harpsichord (whether this was a mask of higher honors or not, I leave
+here undecided); from a privilege, then, which has fallen to me alone
+of almost the whole scribbling Hansa, and to which I actually and
+gladly own my indebtedness for that preponderance which has (by some)
+been detected in me over the so inferior crew of authors in the
+_Scientia media_[122] of courts,--therefrom, I say, one should promise
+one's self almost extraordinary things. I fear, however, we shall come
+off slimly; for I was not even able to rehearse to my pupil Gustav the
+crown-suit in Frankfort seriously enough to make him leave off
+laughing. So, too, Yorick never could scold in such a way as to drive
+his people off, but they always took it as a joke.
+
+It would have been my misfortune if I had depicted the transfer of the
+Princess (I thought at first, to be sure, there would then be more
+dignity in it) under the figure of the transfer of a house to creditors
+sealed with a chip of the door, or as a transfer of a fief by
+_investitura per zonam_, or _per annulum_, or _per baculum
+secularem_.[123] But I have luckily hit upon the thought of portraying
+the transfer, under the poetic garb of a historical benefit-comedy,
+with that dignity which theatres give. I have, for that purpose,
+as much and more unity of place--(three chambers)--of time--(a
+forenoon)--and of interest--(the whole joke)--in my hands, as I need.
+And if an author reads through beforehand, into the bargain, as I do,
+the saddest serious works, Young's Night Thoughts, the uncatholic
+_gravamina_ of the Lutherans, the third volume of Siegwart, and his own
+love-letters; if, further, he has never yet trusted himself, without
+first laying before him and running through Home's and Beattie's
+excellent observations on the source of the comic, in order to know at
+once what comic sources he was to avoid;--such an author can safely,
+without fear of vainglory, make and fulfil the promise to his readers,
+that, thus comically guarding himself against the comic, he may perhaps
+be able, not wholly without touches of sublimity, to deliver and depict
+the following
+
+
+       HISTORICAL BENEFIT-COMEDY OF THE TRANSFER OF THE PRINCESS.
+
+                             IN FIVE ACTS.
+
+The half-word Benefit signifies merely the profit which I myself gain
+from it.
+
+Act First.--Of three chambers, the middle one is the scene of the play,
+the trading-mart where they exhibit, the hall of _correlation_
+(Ratisbonically speaking) where all matters of importance are referred
+and matured. On the other hand, in the first adjoining chamber is
+stowed the Italian, and in the second the Flachsenfingen court, each
+calmly awaiting the beginning of a part for which Nature has formed it.
+These two apartments I regard only as the sacristies of the central
+one.
+
+The middle chamber, i. e. its curtain, which consists of two
+folding-doors, at last rises and shows to partner Sebastian, who is
+peeping out from his shop beside the catarrhal half of the firm, a
+great deal. There appears at the door of coulisse No. 1 a red-velvet
+chair; again, at the door of coulisse No. 2, another, a brother and
+relative of the first; these duplicates are the seats whereon the
+Princess sits in the course of the action, not because weariness, but
+because her rank, expressly desires it. One discovers now (caught in
+the Act it may be said to be) a long fringed table, dividing the middle
+chamber (which is itself a hyphen to the two coulisses) into two
+halves. One would not expect that this session-table, in its turn,
+would be again halved by something which a stupid person hardly sees.
+But let a man step into Victor's shop; then will he have a view of a
+strip of silk-cord, which, beginning under the pier-table, streaming
+across the agate floor and under the partition-table, ends in front
+on the threshold; and thus a mere silk-band easily divides the
+dividing-table and thereby the dividing-chamber, and finally
+the divided company of performers, into two of the most equal
+halves,--whence let us learn that at court everything is cut up, and
+even the prorector, in his time and turn, is stretched out on the
+dissecting-table. Of this silk-lace, wherewith the grand seignior
+divides his favorites from above downwards, but into fractions, we
+cannot and must not say any more in the First Act, because--it is
+over....
+
+I found it uncommonly easy to draw up this scene in a serious manner;
+for as, according to Plattner, the ridiculous attaches only to man, the
+sublime, which in my performance assumes the place of the comic, was
+easy to be had in an act where nothing living played, not even cattle.
+
+Act Second.--The stage grows now more alive, and upon it enters now the
+Princess, handed in by the Italian Minister from coulisse No. 1; both
+act at first, like nature, silently on this parade-ground, which on
+paper is already two pages long....
+
+Just one look from the stage into the stage-box! Victor is playing also
+on his own account, in the fact that he picks out from the lorgnettes
+which he has to sell the most concave, and gets therewith a view
+of the heroine of my benefit-comedy.... He saw the confession- and
+praying-stool on which she had to-day already knelt. "I wish," he said
+to Tostato, "I had been her father confessor to-day; I would have
+pardoned her her sins, but not her virtues." She had, in fact, that
+regular statuesque and Madonna's-face, which covers quite as often
+hollow as well-filled female heads; her courtly _debut_ concealed, it
+is true, every wave and every gleam of wit and expression under the icy
+crust of decorum; but a soft, childlike eye, which makes us eager for
+her voice, a patience, which remembers rather her sex than her rank, a
+weary soul which yearned for a twofold repose, perhaps for her maternal
+fields, even an unnoticeable line around the eyes, drawn by pain in
+those organs, or perhaps by still deeper ones,--all these charms, which
+grew into sparks, cast into the dry tinder of the partner behind the
+eye-glass, made him in his box regularly half-crazy at the fate of such
+charms. And how could it do otherwise than make one's head hot,
+especially when the heart is already so, to think that these innocent
+victims, like the Moravian women, must see alps and oceans rise between
+their cradle and bridal-bed, and that cabinets export them like
+silkworm-seed in the cornucopia of despatches?... We turn again to our
+Second Act, wherein one proposes nothing more than to--arrive.
+
+Coulisses Nos. 1 and 2 are still choke-full of actors and actresses,
+who must now come out. This is the day on which two courts, like two
+armies, are halted over against each other in two rooms, composedly
+preparing themselves for the minute when they are to march out and
+stand face to face, until at last it actually comes to that point, to
+which after such preparations and in such nearness to each other it
+very naturally must come, that of going away. The cubic contents of No.
+1 stream after the Princess, consisting of Italians;--at the same
+moment, also, the court-retinue from coulisse No. 2 takes up its line
+of march towards head-quarters; it consists of Flachsenfingenites. At
+this moment two countries--properly only their abstracted and
+evaporated spirits--stand quite near each other, and now all depends
+upon the silken strings beginning to operate which I stretched
+across the room in the first Act; for the boundary shiftings and
+population-mixings of two so contiguous lands as Germany and
+Italy would be in one room almost as inevitable as in a _Papal
+brain-chamber_, had we not the string; but _that_ we have, and this
+keeps two populations, threatening to run into each other, so
+effectually apart, that it is only a pity and a shame--honesty feels
+the greatest--that the German Cabinets have not drawn some such cordon
+between themselves and the Italian; and did it not, then, depend upon
+them, where they would apply the cord,--to the floor, or to Italian
+hands or to Italian necks?
+
+When the English General History of the world and its German abridgment
+shall once have so nearly come up with the times as to take in hand and
+relate the year of this transfer, and among other things are able to
+remark that the Princess, after her entrance, seated herself in the
+velvet chair,--then should the Universal History quote the author from
+whom it borrows, namely, myself.... That was the second Act, and it was
+a very good one, and not so much comic as sublime.
+
+Third Act.--In this there is nothing but talking. A court is the
+parlor or talking-room of the country; the ministers and envoys are
+_listening-brethren_.[124] The Flachsenfingen Secretary read at a
+distance an Instrument, or the emption-bill of her marriage. Thereupon
+speeches were whispered,--two by the Italian minister,--two, also, by
+the Flachsenfingen minister (Schleunes),--none by the bride, which was
+a shorter way of saying nothing than that of the ministers was.
+
+Since, now, this sublime Act were verily ended, if _I_ should say
+nothing: it will, I trust, be allowed me for once, after many weeks, to
+obtain by begging and to append a little _extra-leaf_, and therein to
+say something.
+
+            AN EXTRA-LEAF (BY GRACIOUS PERMISSION) UPON THE
+                 GREATER FREEDOM ENJOYED IN DESPOTISMS.
+
+Not only in Gymnasia and republics, but even (as may be seen on the
+former page) in monarchies, speeches enough are made,--not to the
+people, but still to their _curatores absentes_.[125] Even so is there
+in monarchies freedom enough, although in despotisms there may be still
+more of it than in them or in republics. A true despotic state has,
+like a frozen cask of wine, not lost its _spirit_ (of freedom), but
+only compressed it from the watery circumference into a fiery point; in
+such a happy state freedom is distributed merely among the few who are
+_ripe_ for it, the Sultan and his Bashaws, and that goddess (who is
+pictured still oftener than the bird Ph[oe]nix) holds herself
+indemnified, and more and better than that, for the reduced _number_ of
+her worshippers, by their _worth_ and _ardor_, since her few
+_epopts_[126] or _initiates_--the Bashaws--enjoy her influence in a
+measure of which a whole people is never capable. Freedom, like an
+inheritance, is lessened by the multitude of heirs; and I am convinced
+that he would be most free who should be free alone. A democracy and an
+oil-painting are to be put only on a canvas without _knots_
+(inequalities), but a despotism is a piece of _relieved_ work,--or
+something still more rare: despotic freedom lives, like canary-birds,
+only in _high_ cages; republican liberty, like yellow-hammers, only in
+_long_ ones.
+
+A despot is the _practical reason_ of a whole country; the subjects are
+just so many impulses contending therewith, which must be overcome. The
+legislative power, therefore, belongs to him alone (the executive to
+his favorites);--even mere talented men (like Solon and Lycurgus) held
+the law-giving power in themselves alone, and were the _magnetic
+needle_ which _guided_ the ship of state; a despot consists, as their
+throne-successor, of almost nothing but laws, his own and others at
+once, and is the magnetic mountain, which draws the ship of state to
+itself. "To be one's own slave is the hardest slavery," said an old
+man, at least an ancient and a Latin; but the despot demands of others
+only the easier kind, and takes upon himself the harder. Another says
+_Parere scire, par imperio gloria est_;[127] a negro slave, therefore,
+wins glory and honor as much as a negro king. _Servi pro nullis
+habentur_;[128] hence it is that political nullities feel so little the
+pressure of the court atmosphere; whereas despotic realities earn their
+freedom by the very fact that they know so well how to feel and prize
+its worth. A republican in the nobler sense, e. g. the Emperor of
+Persia, whose liberty-cap is a turban and his liberty-tree a throne,
+fights for freedom behind his military Propaganda and behind his
+Sans-culottes with an ardor such as the ancient authors demand and
+depict in the Gymnasia. Nay, we are never justified in denying such
+enthroned republicans a Brutus's greatness of soul, before we have put
+them to the proof; and if in history good were delineated more than
+evil, one would have even now the means of showing, among so many
+Shahs, Khans, Rajahs, and Califs, many a Harmodius, Aristogeiton,
+Brutus, &c. who was able to pay for _his_ freedom (slaves contend for
+another's) even with the death of otherwise _good_ men and friends.
+
+   _End of the graciously allowed Extra-leaf upon the greater Freedom
+                        enjoyed in Despotisms_.
+
+
+The extra-leaf and the Third Act are ended, but the latter was shorter
+and more serious than the former has been.
+
+Fourth Act.--By the act of dropping the curtain and raising it again, I
+have carried the world over from the shortest Act into the longest. To
+the Princess who now, as the German Imperial History announces, is
+sitting--came her compatriots in a body, who neither looked very
+honest nor very stupid, the chief-governess, the Court-confessor, the
+Court-AEsculapius, ladies and servants and all. This court-train does
+not say its farewell,--that has already been said privately,--but
+merely recapitulates it by a silent bow. The next step of the united
+Italians was from the middle chamber to--Italy.
+
+The Italians passed along before Sebastian's warehouse, and wiped off
+from their faces, whose hard parts were _en haut-relief_,--the German
+were _en bas-relief_, a nobler glimmer than that which courts
+communicate: Victor saw among so many accentuated eye-sockets the
+multiplied signs of the melancholy with which he himself was oppressed
+as he thought of the willing stranger-heart which remained behind alone
+under the frosty canopy of the German throne and clouds, torn away from
+her loved ways and scenes, brought before microscopic eyes, whose focal
+point scorches into tender feelings, and bound to a breast of ice....
+
+When he thought of all this, and saw the compatriots, how they pocketed
+their feelings and packed themselves off, because they were not
+permitted to exchange another word with the Princess; and when he
+looked upon the mute, submissive form within there, who was not allowed
+to show any other _pearls_ than Oriental ones, (although the dream and
+the possession of the latter signifies Western ones, or of the evening
+land,--tears, I mean,) then did he wish, "Ah, that I could only, thou
+good creature, draw a treble veil over thy eye long enough for it to
+shed a tear!--might I only kiss that hand, so rudely set up at auction,
+as thy court-ladies are now doing, so as to inscribe with my tears upon
+the sold hand the nearness of a sympathizing heart." ...
+
+Be tender and expand not your hatred of princes into hatred of
+princesses! Shall a bowed-down female head not touch our hearts with
+pity, because it leans on a mahogany table? and shall great tears not
+move us, because they fall upon silk? "It is too hard," Victor said,
+when in Hanover, "that poets and _magistri legentes_, when they pass by
+a chateau, make, with an envious, malicious pleasure, the remark, In
+there as much bread of sorrow is baked, perhaps, as in fishermen's
+huts. O yes, doubtless greater and harder loaves! But is the eye, out
+of which in the badger's kennel of a Scotchman nothing extorts a tear
+but the smoke of the room, worthy of a greater compassion than the
+tender one which, like that of an Albino, smarts at the very rays of
+joy, and which the spirit fills with spiritual tears? Ah, down in the
+valleys only the skin is punctured, but up on the high places of rank,
+the heart; and the index-hand of the village clock moves merely around
+the hours of hunger and sweat, but the second-hand, set with
+brilliants, flies round dreary, despairing, bloody minutes."
+
+But fortunately never is rehearsed to us the passion-history of those
+womanly victims, whose hearts are tossed to the mint, and, like other
+jewels, cast among the throne-insignia,--who, as flowers with souls,
+hung upon an ermine-clad dead man's heart, fall to pieces, unenjoyed,
+on the bed of state, mourned by no one, save by a distant, tender soul,
+which finds no place in the Court-almanac....
+
+This Act consists of nothing but _goings_: in fact, this whole comedy
+resembles the life of a child. In the first Act, there was _providing
+of household furniture_ for the coming existence; in the second, the
+_arrival_; in the third, _talking_; in the fourth, _learning to walk_,
+&c.
+
+When Germany had delivered discourses enough to Italy, and Italy to
+Germany, then Germany, or rather Flachsenfingen, or properly a piece of
+it, the Minister Schleunes, took the Princess by the hand and led her
+out of the torrid zone into the frigid; I mean, not from the bridal bed
+to the wedded bed, but--from the Italian territory of the apartment
+into the Flachsenfingenite, away over the silken Rubicon. The
+Flachsenfingen court stands over yonder as right wing, and has not yet
+gone into the fight. So soon as she had passed the silken line, then it
+was well that the first thing she did in her new land should be
+something memorable; and in fact she did, before the eyes of her new
+court, take 41/2 paces and--sit down in the Flachsenfingen chair, which I
+set out vacant for that purpose in the very first Act. Now, at last,
+the right wing marched into fire, for the kissing of hands and sleeves.
+Each one in the right wing--the left not at all--felt the dignity of
+what he entered upon, and this feeling which melted into one with
+personal pride came--as according to Plattner pride is akin to the
+sublime--quite _apropos_ to my Benefit-farce, in which I cannot succeed
+in being sublime enough. Great and silent, embarked in silken bow-nets,
+buried in a gulf of robes, the court-dames sail up with their lips to
+the still hand which is fastened with conjugal manacles to a
+stranger's. Less stately, but still stately, is urged on, also, the
+Adamitish portion of the _Dramatis Personae_, among whom, unfortunately,
+I see the apothecary Zeusel.
+
+We know no one among them but the minister, his son Mat, who does not
+observe anything whatever of our hero, the Physician in ordinary to the
+Princess, Culpepper, who, transformed by fat and his doctor's beaver
+into a heavy Lot's-pillar-of-salt, pushes himself like a turtle into
+the presence of the Regent and Patient.
+
+No mortal knows how Zeusel torments me. Contrary to all order of
+precedence, I prefer to present, sooner than I do him, the fat
+livery-servants, swollen into knavish stupidity, whose coats consist
+less of threads than of laces, and who bend themselves like yellow
+ribbon-preparations before weary eyes, wont to look on fairer forms.
+Victor regarded, through his English opera-glass, the Italian glazed
+court-faces as at least picturesquely beautiful; on the contrary, he
+found the German parade-masks so worn out and yet so starched, so
+languid and yet so on the stretch, their looks so evaporated and
+yet so brimstone-smoked!... I still keep Zeusel back by means of some
+Easter-lambs or _agnus Dei's_ of pages' faces, soft and white as mites;
+a nurse would like to lay them with their nipple-glass-mouths to her
+breast.
+
+Zeusel was no longer to be restrained; he has broken through and has
+the Princess by the wing--the whole joke of this play, I mean the whole
+serious meaning of it, is now once for all spoiled. This gray fool has
+in his old days--his nights are still older--buttoned himself into a
+complete historical copper-plate, that is to say, into a zoological
+fashionable waistcoat, wherein, with his four variegated rings, too, he
+looks for all the world like a green game-wagon, on which the animal
+pieces of the whole chase are painted, and four rings for the ringing
+of the swine's snouts are there _in natura_.[129] I must now see and
+suffer it,--as he does everything in the past,--while he, fuddled with
+vanity and hardly able to distinguish watch-chains from gala-coats,
+runs up and catches at some silken stuff to kiss it. It was easy to
+foresee that the man would spoil my whole altar-piece with his
+historical figure; I would absolutely have suppressed the ninny and
+covered him up behind the frame of the picture, had he not with his
+flappers and skippers stood out too prominently and made too much of a
+chattering; and then, too, my correspondent has expressly introduced
+and designated him among the benefit-confederates. It hardly pays for
+the trouble to write--
+
+Act Fifth; since all is now thrown into pickle and the reading world is
+in a grin. In the Fifth Act, which I make without any gusto, there
+still continued to be nothing done,--whereas Tragedy-makers and
+Christians turn over the conversion and all important matter into the
+last Act, as, according to Bacon, a courtier thrust his petitions into
+the Postscript,--nothing, I say, except that the Princess let her new
+maids of honor do their first example in arithmetic and subtraction;
+namely, the problem of disrobing.... And as undressing concludes the
+fifth Acts of Tragedies, where Death does it,--and of Comedies, where
+Love does it,--so, too, would this Benefit-Comedy, which, like our
+life, wavers between Comedy and Tragedy, wearily end with an
+undressing.
+
+                      _End of the Benefit-Comedy_.
+
+
+I was too much excited yesterday. To be sure the Apothecary is the Dog
+and Cat, in my picture, biting each other under the table of the Holy
+Supper; but, upon the whole, the very farce is sublime. Let one just
+consider that all is carried on in a monarchical form of government,
+which, according to Beattie, more than the republican form, helps out
+the comic,--that, according to Addison and Sulzer, precisely the most
+waggish men are the gravest, and that, consequently, the same thing
+must hold in regard to the stuff they work;--one must then see at once,
+from the comic element which my Acts contain, that they are serious....
+
+My hero delivered in the shop a vehement Father Merz's controversial
+sermon _against_ something which imperial cities and towns preach in
+favor of: "That men can act so without brains, the white or the gray,
+and without a particle of taste, as not to be ashamed sinfully and like
+dogs to fritter away the two or three years in which Pain has them not
+yet in his game-ticket, nor Death on his night-list,--not in doing
+absolutely nothing, or in the half bar-rests of chancery-holidays or
+the whole bar-rests of comitial holidays, or with the whimsicalities of
+joy,--what were more laudable?--but with the whimsicalities of torture,
+with twelve Herculean labors to do nothing, in the correction-houses of
+antechambers, on the _tratto di corda_ of tight-strung ceremonials....
+My dear seneschal, my fairest chief-governess, I approve all; but
+life is so _short_ that it does not repay the trouble to make one's
+self a _long_ queue[130] therein.--Could we not shake out our hair,
+and leap over all entrance-halls (or -hells), over all ushers and
+dancing-masters, away into the very midst of the May-flowers of our
+days, and into their flower-cups?... I will not express myself
+abstractly and scholastically; if I did, I should have to say, Like
+dogs, ceremonies grow mad with age; like dancing-gloves, each serves
+only for once, and must then be thrown away; but man is such a cursed
+ceremonious creature, that one must swear he knows no greater or longer
+day than the diet[131] of Ratisbon."
+
+While Victor was at his meal, Tostato was not present, but in the shop.
+Now he had already, the evening before, been unable to get out of his
+head a design of kissing the pretty dunce. "If I can kiss a saint who
+is stupid as a cow but _once_, then I have peace for the rest of my
+life." But, unluckily, the so-called _smallest_ (the sister), whose
+understanding and nose were too great, had to float round the dunce, as
+bob to the angle; and the bob would instantly have twitched, had he so
+much as put a lip to the bait. However, he was cunning, at least: he
+took our _smallest_ on his knee, and danced her up as Zeusel's coachman
+did him, and called this _clever_ one sweet names over her head, all of
+which he dedicated with his eyes to the _stupid_ one (at court he will
+dedicate with reversed dissimulation). He covered up twice in joke the
+spying eyes of the _smallest_, merely in order to do it a third time in
+earnest, when he drew the dunce to himself, and with his right hand
+brought her into a position, where he could,--especially as she allowed
+it, because girls do not like to refuse a trick, often from the mere
+pleasure of guessing it,--amidst his court-services to the blind one,
+offer the other the hasty kiss, for which he had already contrived so
+many _avant-propos_ and lines of march. Now was he satisfied and well;
+if he had been compelled to lie in wait two evenings longer for the
+kiss, he would have fallen deeply in love.
+
+He was again sitting at his masthead when the Princess dined. It took
+place with open doors. She stirred up his wild-fire of love with the
+gold spoon as often as she pressed it to her small lips; she scattered
+the fire apart again with the two toothpicks (sweet and sour) as often
+as she resorted to them. Tostato & Co. disposed to-day of the most
+costly articles. No man knew the _& Co_.,--only Zeusel looked more
+sharply into Victor's face, and thought, "I must have seen you before."
+Towards half past two in the afternoon, good luck would have it that
+the Princess herself came to the shop, to look up Italian flowers for a
+little girl with whom she had fallen in love. In all masquerades, as
+every one knows, one takes masquerade liberties, and in every journey
+the freedom of a fair. Victor, who in disguises and on journeys was
+almost too bold, undertook to speak in the mother-tongue of the
+Princess, and, in fact, with wit. "The Devil," thought he, "cannot
+surely catch me for that." He remarked, therefore, with the tenderest
+complacency toward this fair child in Moloch's arms, simply this in
+regard to the silk-flowers: "The flowers of joy, too, are unhappily,
+for the most part, made of velvet and iron wire, and with the
+_shaping-iron_." It was only a miracle that he was polite enough to
+leave out the circumstance that it was just the Italian nobility who
+elaborated the Italian Flora. She looked, however, at his goods, and
+bought, instead of flowers, a _montre a regulateur_,[132] which she
+requested to have brought over to her.
+
+He delivered the watch to her with his own hand; but, unfortunately, no
+less with his own hand--the reader will be frightened, but at first he
+himself was frightened, and yet thought over the conceit till at last
+he approved it--had he previously stuck on, above the _Imperator_ of
+the watch, a delicate strip of paper, wherein, with his own hand, he
+had written, in pearl type: "_Rome cacha le nom de son dieu et elle eut
+tort; moi je cache celui de ma deesse et j'ai raison_."[133]
+
+"I know this people well enough," thought he; "they never open or wind
+up a watch in their life!" Ha, Sebastian! what will my reader or _thy_
+lady reader think?
+
+She started this very evening for the country she had obtained by
+marriage, the future string-floor of her sceptre. Our Victor felt
+almost as if he had transferred another heart than the metal one with
+the billet, and thought with pleasure of the Flachsenfingen court.
+Before her ran her copied bridegroom or his litter, from which he
+alighted on the wall of the bedchamber. As he was her god, I can
+compare him or his image with the images of the ancient gods, who were
+carried round on a peculiar _vis-a-vis_, called a _thensa_,[134]--or in
+a portrait-box, called [Greek: naos],[135]--or in a cage, called
+[Greek: kadiskon].[136]
+
+Thereupon Victor went with his commercial consul round behind the
+coulisses of the benefit theatre. He untied the silken demarcation-line
+and barring-chain,--drew it up like a disgusting hair,--felt of
+it,--held it first far from his eye, then near to it,--and pulled it
+apart, before he said: "The power may lie where it will,--a silk ribbon
+may insulate bodies politic as well as electrical, or it may be with
+princes as with cocks, who never can get a step farther, if one takes
+chalk and draws therewith a straight line from their bill to the
+ground,--nevertheless this much you see, partner,--if an Alexander
+should displace the boundary-stones, such a string would be, in
+opposition thereto, the best epitome of the natural law and a
+_barriere-alliance_ of the same nature." He went into her bedroom, to
+the empty sepulchre,--that is, to the bed of the risen bride,--into
+which the _sponsus_ could look down as he lay at anchor on the wall.
+Whole divisions of conceits marched mutely through his head, which,
+thus full, he pressed sidewise with his cheek against a silken pillow,
+as large as a lap-dog's, or the side-cushion of a carriage. Thus
+reclining and kneeling, he said, speaking half into the feathers:[137]
+"Would that on the other pillow also there lay a face looking into
+mine! Dear Heaven! two human faces opposite each other,--each drawing
+the other into its eyes,--listening to each other's sighs,--breathing
+away from each other the soft, transparent words,--that were what you
+and I absolutely could not stand, partner!"--He sprang up, gently
+patted down his hare's form smooth again, and said, "Lay thyself softly
+around the heavy head which sinks upon thee; smother not its dreams;
+betray not its tears." Had even the Count of O----, with his fine,
+ironical look, come in at this moment, he would not have minded this.
+It is unfortunate for us Germans that we alone--while to the Englishman
+even a world's-man sets down his hare's leaps, caprioles, and gambols
+as so many elegant _pas_, _forward capers_ and _backward capers_ and
+_side-capers_--cannot possibly march along with sufficient gravity and
+composure.
+
+At evening he ran in again to the harbor of his beekeeper; and his
+tossing heart threw out its anchor into the tranquil, blooming nature
+around him. The old man had meanwhile mustered up all his old papers,
+baptismal and marriage-certificates, and private documents of reference
+for the Nuremberg Bee-father's case, and said, "Let the gentleman read
+them!" He wanted himself to hear it all over again. He showed also his
+"Trinity-ring" from Nuremberg, in which was inscribed:
+
+
+                 "Here, by this ring, you see,
+                  Father, Son, Spirit, three,
+                  Make one sole Deity."
+
+
+The Bee-father went on to make no secret of it, that he formerly,
+before he procured this ring in Nuremberg on a court-day, had not been
+able to believe in the Trinity; "but now one must be a beast, if he
+could not comprehend it."--The morning before his departure, Victor
+was in a double embarrassment,--he was very desirous of having a
+present; secondly, of making one. What he wanted to have was a plump
+hour-watch,[138] won at a raffle where the ticket was twenty kreutzers.
+This piece of work, whose thick hand had measured off the thread of the
+old man's life on the dirty dial-plate in nothing but gay, joyous
+bee-hours, he wanted as a Laurence's-box,[139] an amulet, an
+Ignatius's-plate,[140] against hours of Saul. "A manual laborer," said
+he, "needs really only a little sun, to go warmly and contentedly
+through life; but we, with our fantasy, are often as badly off on the
+sunny side as on the stormy side,--man stands more firmly in mud than
+on ether and morning-redness." He wanted to press upon the acceptance
+of the happy veteran of life, as purchase-money for the hour-watch and
+prize-medal for his lodgings, his own watch that told the seconds.
+Lind had not the heart for it, but grew red. At last Victor represented
+to him that the second-watch was a good fire-ball[141] for the
+Trinity-ring, a thesis-image of that article of faith, for the
+_threefold_ hands made, after all, only _one_ hour.--Lind _swapped_.
+
+Victor could neither be the mocker nor the Bunclish[142] reformer of
+such an erring soul, and his sympathetic whimsicality is nothing but a
+doubting sigh over the human brain, which has its seventy _normal
+years_, and over life, which is an interim of faith, and over the
+theological doctors'-rings, which are just such Trinity-rings, and over
+the theological lecture-rooms and recitation-rooms, wherein just such
+second-telling watches indicate and strike.
+
+--At last he leaves Kussewitz at six o'clock in the morning. A very
+beautiful daughter of the Count of O---- did not come back until seven
+o'clock; that is fortunate for us all, for otherwise he would be still
+sitting there.
+
+The Dog-post-day is run out. I know not whether I should make an
+extra-leaf or not. The Intercalary Day is at the door; I will therefore
+let it be, and only insert a Pseudo-extra-leaf, which, as is well
+known, differs from a canonical merely in this,--that in the apocryphal
+I do not give notice by any superscription, but only slip off from the
+history in an underhand way to mere irrelevant things.
+
+I take up my historical thread again, and ask the reader what he
+thinks of Sebastian's flirtations. And how does he explain them to
+himself?--He replies, and philosophically indeed: "Through Clotilda;
+she, by her magnetizing, has put him _en rapport_ with the whole female
+world; she has knocked at this swarm of bees, and now there is no more
+peace.--A man may sit for twenty-six years cold and sighless in his
+book-dust; but when he has once breathed the ether of love, then is the
+oval hole of the heart forever shut, and he must go forth into the air
+of heaven and be continually gasping at it, as I see by the coming
+dog-post-days plainly enough." The reader has accustomed himself to a
+quaint philosophical style, but what he says is true; hence a maiden
+never sues so eagerly for a second lover for her stage as after
+the decease of the first, and after her vows to throw away her
+recruiting-license.
+
+But how could the reader fail to hit upon still weightier
+reasons,[143]--1. General love, and 2. Victor's maternal marks?
+
+1. General love is too little understood. There is as yet no
+description of it extant but mine,--namely, in our days,
+reading-cabinets, dancing-halls, concert-halls, vineyards,
+coffee-tables, and tea-tables are the forcing-houses of our hearts and
+the wire-mills of our nerves; the former are too big, the latter too
+fine. Now when, in these marriage-seeking and marriageless times, a
+young man, who still watches like a Jew for his female Messiah, and
+still is without the highest object of the heart, accidentally reads
+with a dancing-partner, with a lady member of his club, or an
+_associee_, or sister in office, or other collaboratress, a hundred
+pages in the "Elective Affinities" or in the Dog-post-days,--or
+exchanges from three to four letters with her upon the culture of silk
+or clover, or on Kant's _Prolegomena_,--or scrapes the powder from her
+forehead some five times with the powder-knife,--or with her, and by
+her side, ties up the intensely fragrant kidney-beans,--or actually at
+the ghostly hour (which becomes full as often the sentimental hour)
+quarrels with her on the first principle of morals;--then is this much
+certain,--that the aforesaid youth (provided _refinement_, _feeling_,
+and _reflection_ hold a mutual balance within him) must needs behave a
+little madly, and feel towards the aforesaid collaboratress (that is,
+if she does not by some higglings of head or heart offend against his
+feelers) something which is too warm for friendship and too _unripe_
+for love,--which borders on the former, because it includes several
+objects, and on the latter, because of this it dies. And this is, in
+fact, neither more nor less than my general love, which I have
+otherwise called simultaneous and Tutti-[144]love. Examples are odious;
+else I would adduce mine. This universal love is a glove without
+fingers (or mitten), into which, because no partitions separate the
+four fingers, any hand easily slips; into the partial love, or the
+glove proper, only a single and particular hand can squeeze itself. As
+I was the first to discover this fact and island, I can give it the
+name wherewith others will have to name and call it. It shall be
+christened henceforward collective or simultaneous love, though
+I might also, if I and Kolbe chose, let it be named preluding
+love,--confederate-tenderness,--general warmth,--the fidelity of
+adopted childhood.
+
+To please the theologians and humor their fiddle-faddle about final
+causes, I throw in here the following fixed principle: I should like to
+see the man who, without this general love, could in our times, when
+paired love is, by the demands of a greater _metallic_ and _moral_
+capital, made more rare, hold out three years.
+
+2. The second cause of Victor's so easily falling in love with women
+was his maternal mark,--i. e. a resemblance to his own and every
+mother. Besides, he asserted that his ideas had exactly the pace--that
+is, the leap--of woman's, and that he had, in fact, a great deal of
+woman in him; at least, women resemble him in this,--that their love
+springs up through talking and intercourse. Their love, it may safely
+be said, has not much oftener begun than ended in hatred and coldness.
+An imposed and hated bridegroom makes often a loved husband. "I will,"
+he used to say in Hanover, "get into her heart's ears, if not into her
+heart. Could Nature, then, have built into the female bosom two such
+spacious heart-chambers--one can turn round therein--and two such neat
+heart's-alcoves--the heart's treasure-bag I have not yet touched
+upon--merely for this purpose, that a man's soul should hire these four
+apartments all alone without a mother's son beside, as a female soul
+inhabits the four cerebral chambers of the head's female suite? Quite
+impossible! and in fact they do no such thing: but (but whoever is
+afraid of immoderate wit, let him now step out of my track) in the two
+wings of this rotunda and in the side-buildings everything takes up its
+quarters that goes in, i. e. more than comes out--as in a toll-house or
+pigeon-house there is a constant coming and going--one cannot count, if
+one is there to see--it is a beautiful _temple_ in which there is
+_right of thoroughfare_.--Such regard not the few who so shut
+themselves up as to give the chief box of the heart to only a single
+lover, and merely the two side boxes to a thousand friends."
+
+Nevertheless Jean Paul never could succeed--though there might be ever
+so much surplus room--even so far as to get into the heart's ears,
+which, to be sure, is the very least thing. Because his face looks too
+meagre, his complexion too sallow, his head is much fuller than his
+pocket, and his income that of a titular-mining-superintendency: so
+they quarter the good rogue merely in the _coldest_ place away up under
+the eaves of the _head_ not far from the hair-pins,[145]--and there he
+is still sitting now and laughing out (in writing) his Eleventh
+Chapter....
+
+
+
+
+                           12. DOG-POST-DAY.
+
+   Polar Fantasies.--The singular Isle of Union.--One more Bit from
+     previous History.--The Stettin-Apple as Coat-of-Arms.
+
+
+We are living now in the dark middle-ages of this Biography, and
+reading on toward the enlightened eighteenth century or Dog's-day.
+Still, even in this twelfth, as in the night before a fair day, great
+sparks fly. "Spitz," said I, "eat me out of what thou wilt, only
+enlighten the world."
+
+Sebastian hastened on Saturday with joyful soul under an overclouded
+heaven to the island of Union. He could arrive there, if he did not
+delay, before the cloudiness was absorbed. Under a blue heaven, like
+Schickaneder[146] he brought out the Tragedies, but under an ashen-gray
+one the comedies, of his inner man. When it rained, he absolutely
+laughed out. Rousseau built up in his brain an _emotional_ stage,
+because he cared neither to go out of the coulisse nor into a box of
+actual life; but Victor had in his pay between the bony walls of his
+head a _comic_ theatre of the Germans, merely for the sake of not
+ridiculing _actual_ men; his humor was as ideal as the virtue and
+sensibility of other people. In this mood he delivered (like a
+ventriloquist) purely internal discourses to all Potentates;--he posted
+himself on the bench of Knights with church-visitation-discourses,--on
+the bench of the cities with funeral-discourses,--in the Papal chair he
+held forth in straw-wreath[147]-discourses to the _virgin_ Europe and
+the Ecclesiastical _bride_. The potentates had all, to answer him
+again, but one may imagine _how_--when he, like a minister from his
+prompter's hole put everything into their mouths;--and then, to be
+sure, he went his way and made fun of every one of them.
+
+Mandeville says in his Travels, that at the North Pole in the
+winter-half of the year every word freezes, but in the summer-half
+thaws out again and is audible. This intelligence Victor pictured out
+to himself on the way to the island; we will lay our ears to his head
+and listen to the inner buzzing.
+
+"Mandeville and I are not at all obliged to explain why at the North
+Pole words, as well as spittle, turn to ice as they fall, just as
+quicksilver does there; but we are obliged to reason from the
+phenomenon. If a laughing heir wishes there long years to his testator:
+the good man does not hear the wish sooner than the following spring,
+which may already have laid him dead. The best Christmas sermons do not
+edify good souls before haying-time. Vainly does the Polar court lay
+its New-Year's wishes before _Serenissimo_; he hears them not, till
+warm weather, and by that time half of them have already miscarried.
+They ought, however, to place a _circular stove_ as speaking-trumpet in
+the antechamber, so that one might hear in the _warmth_ the court
+speaker. An oratorical brother, without a stove-heater, would there be
+a defeated man. The faro-player, to be sure, vents his curses on St.
+Thomas's day; but not until St. John's day, when he has already won
+again, do they begin to travel;[148] and one might make summer-concerts
+out of the winter ones without any instruments: all one has to do is to
+seat one's self in the hall. From what other cause can it arise that
+the Polar wars are often carried on half-years before the declaration
+of war, except from this, that the declaration issued in winter does
+not make itself heard till _good weather_?--And so, too, one cannot
+hear anything of the winter-campaigns of the Polar armies till during
+the summer-campaigns. I, for my part, should prefer to travel to the
+Pole so as to be there only in winter, merely for the sake of uttering
+real insults to the people's, particularly the court-retinue's, face;
+by the time they came at last to hear them, the defamer would be snugly
+ensconced again at Flachsenfingen.--Their winter-amusements are not to
+blame for it, if the Northern administration fails to propose and
+decide a multitude of the weightiest things: but only during the
+canicular holidays is the voting to be heard; and then, too, can the
+decisions of the chamber upon matters of grace and _forest-law_ take
+shape in speech. But, O ye saints, if I at the Pole--while the sun was
+in Capricorn and my heart in the sign of the Crab--should fall down
+before the fairest woman, and in the longest night make to her
+declarations of love all night long, which, however, in a third of
+a third[149] assumed the form of ice and reached her in a frozen
+state,--i. e. did not reach her ears at all,--what should I do in
+summer, when I had already grown cold and already possessed her, if at
+the very hour in which I was hoping to have a good quarrel with her,
+now, in the midst of the scolding, my Capricorn-love-declarations
+should begin to thaw out and to utter themselves? I could do nothing
+with any composure, but to make the rule, Let any one be tender at the
+Pole, but only in Aries or Cancer. And if, finally, the transfer of a
+Princess should take place at the Pole, and, in fact, at that point
+where the earth does not move, which is best suited to the twofold
+inactivity of a Princess and a lady, and if the transfer should
+actually occur in a hall, where every one, particularly Zeusel, had in
+the long winter evenings slandered her; then, when the air in the hall
+began to repeat the slanders, and Zeusel in his distress sought to
+escape,--then would I pat his shoulder in a friendly manner and say,
+Whither away, my friend?"--
+
+"To Grosskussewitz, I help in the catching department," replied the
+veritable beadle of St. Luna, who behind some masonry had with one hand
+unclasped a book and with the other buttoned up a wallet. Victor felt a
+happy pressure upon his heart at an antique from St. Luna. He asked him
+about everything with an eagerness that seemed as if he had been away
+for an eternity _a parte ante_.[150] The reader who buttoned up his
+wallet became an author, and drew up at sight for the gentleman the
+year-books, i. e. hour-books of what had since occurred in the village.
+Into twenty questions Victor involved the one he had to put about
+Clotilda, and learned that she had been hitherto every day at the
+Parson's. This vexed him. "As if," thought he, "I had not strength of
+soul enough to look upon a friend's love,--and then too, as if----." In
+fact, he thought, at such a distance, he was the more at liberty to
+think of her.
+
+The reading constable was a reader under my jurisdiction: the book
+which he carried about on his poaching-expeditions after thieves was
+the _Invisible Lodge_.[151] Victor requested the First Part to be
+handed to him: the Beadle was in the Second, just at the Pyramid, at
+the moment of the first kiss. Our hero made more and more rapid strides
+in reading and in walking, and ended book and walk together.
+
+The island stood before him!--Here, on this island, my reader, open
+both eyes and ears!... Not that any memorable things presented
+themselves,--for these would of themselves make their way into
+half-open ears and pupils,--but for the very reason that only everyday
+matters are to be recorded.
+
+His Lordship stood alone on the shore of the sea which flowed round the
+island, and awaited and received him with a seriousness which veiled
+his friendliness, and with an emotion which still wrestled with his
+wonted coldness. He was going now to cross over to the island, and yet
+Victor saw no means of transportation. There was no boat there; nor
+would it have been practicable to get one off, because iron spikes
+stood under the water in such numbers and direction that no boat could
+move. The guard that had hitherto been stationed on the shore to
+protect the island against the destructive curiosity of the populace
+was to-day removed. The father went with his son slowly around the
+shore, and dislodged out of their beds, one after another, twenty-seven
+stones which lay at equal distances from each other. The island had
+been constructed _before_ his Lordship's blindness, and _then_ was
+not yet prohibited to strangers; but during that affliction he
+had caused its interior to be completed and concealed by unknown
+nocturnal workmen. During the tour round the island Victor saw its
+fruit-espaliers of high tree-stems, which seemed to direct their
+shadows and voices toward the interior of the island, and whose
+foliage-work the tossing waves sprinkled with their broken suns and
+stars; bean-trefoils clasped the pine-trees, and round the cones
+ringlets of purple blossoms played their antics; the silver-poplar
+bowed down under the enthroned oak; fiery bushes of Arabian beans
+blazed from farther in out of leafy curtains; trees, grafted by
+approach, on double stems latticed up the avenues from the eye; and by
+the side of a fir, which overtopped all the summits, was a taller one,
+which had been bent down by storms half over the water, and which
+rocked itself above its grave. White columns lifted up in the middle of
+the island a Grecian temple, immovable above all the wavering
+treetops.--Sometimes a stray tone seemed to run through the green Holy
+of Holies. A tall, black gate reached to the tops of the pines, and,
+painted with a white sun-disk, looked toward the east, and seemed to
+say to man, Pass through me; not only thy Creator, but thy brother, has
+worked, here!--
+
+Opposite to this gate lay the twenty-seventh stone. Victor's father
+displaced it, took out a magnet, bent down, and held its _south_ pole
+to the gap. Suddenly machines began to gnar, and the waves to whirl,
+and an iron bridge rose out of the water. Victor's soul was overfilled
+with dreams and expectations. Shuddering, he followed his father, and
+set foot upon the magic island. Here his father touched a thin stone
+with the _north_ end of the magnet, and the iron bridge sank down
+again. Before they stepped up to the elevated gate a key turned itself
+from within, and unlocked, and the gate flew open. His Lordship was
+silent. On his face a higher soul had risen like a sun: one no longer
+knew him; he seemed to be transformed into the genius of this magic
+island.
+
+What a scene! So soon as the gate was opened there ran to and fro
+through all twigs an harmonious murmur; breezes flew in through the
+gate, and absorbed the sounds into themselves, and floated on with
+them, trembling, and reposed only on bended blossoms.--Every step
+opened farther a great, sombre stage.--Round about the scene lay marble
+fragments, on which the blacksmiths' coals had drawn forms of
+Raphael's, sunken Sphinxes, map-stones, whereon dim Nature had etched
+little ruins and effaced cities, and deep openings in the earth, which
+were not so much graves as moulds for bells that had been cast therein.
+Thirty poisonous trees stood twined round with roses, as if they were
+signs of the thirty years of man's passionate madness. Three-and-twenty
+weeping birches had bent themselves down to form a low bush-work, and
+were crowded into each other; into this bush ran all the paths of the
+island. Behind the bushes ninefold crape-veils, in waves that mutually
+swallowed each other, obscured the sight of the high temple; through
+the veils five lightning-rods rose into the heavens, and a rainbow,
+formed of two shoots of water that leaped up and arched over into each
+other, hovered glittering over the twigs, and evermore the two streams
+arched themselves aloft, and evermore they shivered each other to
+pieces overhead by their contact.
+
+As Horion led his son, whose heart was grasped, affrighted, oppressed,
+kindled, chilled, by invisible hands, into the low birch thicket, the
+stammering dead-man's-tongue of an organ-trill began to speak, through
+the lone silence, to the sigh of man, and the tremulous tone sank too
+deeply into a soft heart.--There stood the two on a grave darkly built
+over with bush-work; on the grave lay a black marble, on which were
+chiselled a bloodless white heart, with a veil over it, and the pale
+words, "_It is at rest_." "Here," said his Lordship, "my second eye
+became blind; _Mary's_[152] coffin lies in this grave; when that
+arrived at the island from England, the diseased eye was too severely
+inflamed, and never saw again."--Never did Victor shudder so; never did
+he see on a face such a chaotic, shifting world of flying, coming,
+conflicting, vanishing emotions; never did such an ice of brow and
+eyes congeal upon convulsive lips;--and so a father looked, and a son
+felt every sensation repeated in himself.
+
+"I am unhappy," said his father, slowly; a more bitter, biting tear
+burned on the pupil of his eye; he hesitated a little, and placed his
+five open fingers upon his heart, as if he would grasp and pluck it
+out, and looked upon the pale stone one as if he would say, Why is not
+mine resting too? The good, dying Victor, crushed with the anguish of
+affection, melting into pity, longed to--fall upon the dear, desolated
+bosom, and to say more than the sigh, "O God, my good father!" But his
+Lordship gently repelled him, and the tear of gall, unshed, was stifled
+by the eyelids. His Lordship resumed, but more coldly: "Think not that
+I am specially affected; think not that I desire a joy or deprecate a
+sorrow: I live now without hope, and without hope I die."
+
+His voice came cutting over ice-fields; his glance was made sharp by
+frost.
+
+He continued: "When I have, perhaps, made _seven_ human beings happy,
+then must it be inscribed on _my_ black marble, _It rests_.... Why dost
+thou wonder so? Art thou even _now_ at peace?"--The father stared at
+the white heart, and then stared more fixedly straight before him, as
+if a shape had risen out of the grave,--the freezing eye laid and
+turned itself about on a rising tear, as if to smother it. Suddenly he
+drew back a veil from a mirror, and said, "Look in, but embrace me
+immediately after!" ... Victor gazed into the mirror, and saw, with a
+shudder, an eternally loved face appear therein,--the face of his
+teacher _Dahore_; his knees smote together, but still he did not look
+over, his shoulder, and embraced that father who was without hope.
+
+"Thou tremblest far too violently," said his Lordship; "but ask me not,
+my dear boy, why all is so. At a certain stage of years one opens no
+more the old breast, full as it may be."
+
+Ah, I pity thee! For _those_ wounds which can be disclosed are not
+deep; _that_ grief which a humane eye can discover, a soft hand
+alleviate, is but small; but the woe which a friend must not see,
+because he cannot take it away,--that woe which sometimes rises into
+the eye in the midst of blessedness in the form of a sudden trickle
+which the averted' face smothers,--_this_ hangs in secret more and more
+heavily on the heart, and at last breaks it, and goes down with it
+under the healing sod. So are iron balls tied to man when he dies on
+the sea, and they sink with him more quickly into his vast grave.--
+
+He continued: "I am going to tell thee something; but swear, here upon
+these precious ashes, never to divulge it. It concerns thy Flamin, and
+from him thou must conceal it."
+
+Victor, so hurled from one wave to another, started at this. He
+remembered that Flamin had wrung from him on the watch-tower the
+promise, that, if ever they should have offended each other too sorely,
+they would die together. He hesitated to take the oath; at last he
+said, "But shortly before my death may I tell it to him?"
+
+"Canst thou know when that will be?" said his father.
+
+"But in case--?"
+
+"Then!" said his father, coldly and curtly.--
+
+Victor swore, and trembled at the future import of the oath.
+
+He also had to promise not to visit this dark island before his
+Lordship's return.
+
+They passed out of the leafy mausoleum, and sat down on an overturned
+stalactite. At times, during the conversation, a strange harmonica-tone
+fell from leaf to leaf, and, at a great distance, the four rivers of
+Paradise seemed to go sounding away under a zephyr that trembled with
+it.
+
+The father began: "Flamin is Clotilda's brother, and the Prince's
+son."--
+
+Only such a lightning-flash of thought could now have penetrated into
+Victor's already dazzled soul; a new world now started up within him,
+and snatched him away from the great one before his senses.--
+
+"Furthermore," continued Horion, "January's three other children still
+live in England,--only the fourth, on the Seven Islands, is invisible."
+Victor comprehended nothing; his Lordship rent away all veils from the
+past, and introduced him to a new outlook into the life immediately
+before him, and into that which had flown away. I shall, in the sequel,
+communicate all his Lordship's disclosures and secrets to the reader;
+at present I will first relate the leave-taking of father and son.
+
+While his Lordship accompanied his son into the dusky, subterranean
+passages of former times, and told him all that he concealed from the
+world, tears started from Victor's eyes at many a trifle which could
+not deserve any; but the stream of these soft eyes,--it was not the
+narrative, but the returning contemplation of his unhappy father
+and the neighborhood of the buried and mouldering fair form and of
+the funereal marble, that wrung it out of the incessantly weeping
+heart.--At last all tones on the island ceased,--the black gate seemed
+to shut to,--all was still,--his Lordship came to an end with his
+revelations, and said, "Fulfil thy purpose of going to-day to
+Maienthal, and be cautious and happy!"--But although he took his leave
+with that refined reserve which in his rank guides and governs the
+hands and arms of even parents and children, still Victor pressed his
+childish bosom, so big with sighs and emotions, to his father's, with
+such an intensity as if he would fain crush in two his impoverished
+heart for the sake of the tears which he was compelled to let rise to
+sight ever hotter and larger. Ah, the forsaken one! When the bridge
+which clove asunder the father's and the son's days had risen up,
+Victor went over it alone, staggering and speechless; and when it had
+sunk into the water again, and the father had disappeared into the
+island, pity weighed him down to the ground; and when he had drawn all
+his tears, like arrows, out of his suffering heart, slowly and dreamily
+he quitted the still region of riddles and sorrows, and the dark
+funeral garden of a dead mother and a gloomy father, and his whole
+agitated soul cried incessantly, "Ah, good father! hope at least, and
+come back again, and forsake me not!"--
+
+And now all that in the foregoing part of the story has created
+obscurities, all that his Lordship exposed to his son, we will explain
+to ourselves also. It will still be remembered that, at the time when
+he set out for France to fetch away the Prince's children,--the
+so-called Welshman, Brazilian, and Asturian, and the _Monsieur_,--the
+dark intelligence of their abduction came to hand. This abduction,
+however, he had (as he now confessed) himself arranged,--only the
+disappearance of the _Monsieur_ on the Seven Islands had occurred
+without his knowledge, and he could therefore with his untruth mix some
+truth, as mouth-glue. These three children he caused secretly to be
+taken to England, and educated at Eton for scholars, and in London
+for civilians,[153] in order to give them back to their father as
+blood-related assistants of his tottering administration. Hence he had
+helped the so-called Infante (Flamin) become an administrative
+councillor. So soon as he once gets the whole infant colony together,
+he means to surprise and bless the father with the delightful
+apparition. The (at present) invisible son of the Chaplain, who before
+the embarkation took the small-pox and blindness, he therefore keeps in
+the dark, because otherwise it would be too easily guessed to whom
+Flamin properly belonged.
+
+Victor asked him how he would convince the Prince of a relationship to
+four or five strangers. "By my word," was Horion's first reply; then he
+subjoined the remaining evidences,--in Flamin's case, the testimony of
+his mother (the niece), who would come with him; in the case of the
+others; their resemblance to their pictures, which he still possessed,
+and finally the maternal mark of a Stettin apple.
+
+Victor had already often heard from the Parson's wife that all
+January's sons had a certain mother's or father's mark on the left
+shoulder-blade, which looked like nothing, except in autumn, when the
+Stettins ripen; then it also grew red, and resembled the original. The
+reader himself must remember, in the annals of the curious and learned
+societies, whole fruit-basketfuls of cherries, whose red pencilling was
+only faint on children, and heightened in redness not until the
+ripening of the prototypes on the twigs. If I could believe a
+fellow-bather of mine, I myself should have such a Stettin fruit-piece
+hanging on my shoulder; the thing is not probable nor important;
+meanwhile next autumn,--for I have proposed it to myself several
+autumns, but now Knef, through his dog, reminds me of it,--so soon as
+the Stettins mature, I might, to be sure, take a looking-glass and
+examine myself behind.--And on the same ground this Stettin festoon
+puts off the return of his Lordship, at least the transfer and
+recognition of the children, till the autumnal season of its
+reddening.--
+
+I make no scruple of communicating here a satirical note from my
+correspondent. "Make believe," he writes, "in regard to this
+intelligence, as if you did it at my behest, and, when you have once
+related his Lordship's _expose_ and revelation, very quietly relate it
+over to your reader a second time; so that he may not forget, or get it
+confused. One cannot cheat readers enough, and a clever author will be
+fond of leading them into marten-traps, wolf-pits, and deer-nets." I
+confess, for such tricks I always had a poor talent; and, in fact, will
+it not be more creditable, both to me and to the reader, if he fixes it
+at once in his mind, at first hearing, that Flamin is January's natural
+and Le Baut's assumed son,--that the Parson's is blind, and not yet
+apparent,--that three or four other children of January's, from the
+Gallic seaboard towns, are still to follow;--more creditable, I say,
+than if I should now have to chew it over for him a second time, (in
+fact, it would be a third time,) that Flamin is January's natural and
+Le Baut's assumed son,--that the Parson's is blind, and not yet
+apparent,--and that three or four other children of January's, from the
+Gallic seaboard towns, are still to follow?
+
+The reason why his Lordship required of his son the oath of silence
+towards Flamin was, that the latter, by his native honesty, kept all
+secrets, but in a heat of passion betrayed all; because in such a case
+he would make his birth tell, merely for the sake of backing himself in
+a quarrel with an adversary; because he might the very next day, on
+account of this revelation, become, instead of a fencing-master with
+the sword of Themis, a fencing-scholar with the war-blade; and because,
+in fact, a secret, like love, fares still better between two partners
+than among three. His Lordship thought, too, that out of a man to whom
+you gave money in order that he might become something, more would be
+made than out of one who should be something because he had money, and
+who looked upon the coins as his hereditary arms, and not as the
+prize-medals laid out for his future redemption of them.
+
+After all these developments, his Lordship made to our Victor still one
+more, and a weighty one, upon which he was always to look back on the
+icy career of his future court-life as to a warning-tablet.
+
+When his Lordship was struck blind before the house that held the ashes
+of his beloved, his whole correspondence with England, with the niece
+and with the tutors of the princely children, was embarrassed, or at
+least changed. He was obliged to have the letters received by him read
+to him by a friend whom he could trust: but he could trust no one. Only
+one female friend he found out who deserved the distinguished
+preference of his confidence, and that was none else than Clotilda. He
+who did not, like a youth, squander his secrets, could nevertheless
+venture to put Clotilda in possession of his greatest, and to make
+her book-keeper and reader to him of the letters of her mother, the
+so-called niece. In fact, he held women's power of keeping a secret to
+be greater than ours,--at least in weighty matters and in the concerns
+of men whom they love.--But just hear what the Devil did last winter:
+to me it is memorable.
+
+His Lordship received a letter from Flamin's mother, in which she
+renewed her old entreaties for a speedier promotion of the beloved
+child, and her inquiries after his fortunes at the Parsonage. Luckily
+just then Clotilda was making a visit at St. Luna, and saved him the
+journey to Maienthal. He visited the Chamberlain, to hear the letter
+from the mouth of his reader. He had great difficulty in securing in
+Clotilda's chamber an hour free from eavesdroppers. When he at last got
+it, and Clotilda began to read to him the letter, the latter was called
+away from the reading by her step-mother. He hears her immediately come
+back again, read the letter over in a sort of darkly murmuring tone,
+and say softly that she was going away again, but would come back in a
+moment. After some minutes Clotilda appears, and when his Lordship asks
+why she went out the second time, she denies a second leaving,--his
+Lordship insists,--she likewise persists,--finally Clotilda falls upon
+the bitter conjecture whether Matthieu may not have been there, and
+with his theatrical art and throat, which contained all human voices,
+himself have mocked and travestied her, in order under her credentials
+to read the important letter. Ah, there was too much in favor of the
+conjecture and too little against it! To be sure Matthieu could not now
+undertake upon Flamin, whose academic career had just expired, the
+October-test of the shoulder-device; but he stuck (so it afterward
+seemed to Clotilda and his Lordship) with his green-frog-feet to that
+good soul, and, under the cloak of love for Agatha and for his friend,
+hung out his threads, let the wind swing and stretch them across
+between the princely palace and the Parsonage-house,--kept on spinning
+one after another, until at last his father, the minister Schleunes,
+should have woven the right web for the entangling of the prey.... I
+confess, this conjecture throws light for me on a thousand things.--
+
+Victor was even more astounded than we are, and proposed to his
+Lordship whether he might not, without injury to his oath, reveal to
+Clotilda his induction into these mysteries, as he had two reasons for
+it: first, her delicacy would be spared embarrassment at the appearance
+which her sisterly love must otherwise, in her opinion, have in his
+eyes;[154] secondly, one keeps a secret better, if only _one_ more
+person helps him hold his tongue about it, as is well known from the
+case of Midas's barber and the reeds; the third reason was, that he had
+several reasons. His Lordship naturally did not refuse.
+
+For the rest, he introduced his Victor with no pedantic rules of march
+to the ice-course and tilt-yard of the court. He merely advised him
+neither intentionally to seek nor to shun any one, particularly the
+house of Schleunes,--to unbridle his friend Flamin, who was in
+Matthieu's leading-strings, and to guide him, instead of by the bit,
+rather with a friendly hand,--and himself to covet the rank of a
+doctor, and nothing more. He said, rules before experience were like
+geometry before the operation for the cataract. Even after the harvest
+of experience Gratian's _homme de cour_ and Rochefoucauld's Maxims were
+not so good as the memoirs and history of courts, i. e. the experiences
+of others. Finally he appealed to his own example, and said, it was
+only within a few years that he had understood the following rules of
+_his_ father's.
+
+The greatest hatred, like the greatest virtue and the worst dogs, is
+quiet.--Women have more _flow_, and fewer _overflows_, of emotion than
+we.--There is nothing one hates so much in another as a _new_ fault,
+which he does not show till after some years.--One commits the most
+follies among people who are of no account.--It is the most common and
+pernicious delusion, that one always takes one's self to be the only
+one who remarks certain things.--Women and soft-hearted people are
+timid only in their own dangers, and courageous in those of others,
+where they have to save them.--Trust no one (and though it were a
+saint) who in the smallest trifle leaves his honor in the lurch; and a
+woman of that kind still less.--Most persons confound their vanity with
+their sense of honor, and allege wounds inflicted on the one as wounds
+inflicted on the other, and the reverse.--What we undertake from
+humanity, we should always accomplish, if we mixed in no selfishness
+with our motive.--The warmth of a man is by nothing more easily
+misunderstood than by the warmth of a young man.
+
+The last observation, which perhaps had a nearer reference, he had made
+while he was already on the shore of the island in the attitude of
+leave-taking, which he did with that considerate courtesy which in his
+rank guides the hands and arms of even parents and children.[155]
+
+
+                         THIRD INTERCALARY DAY.
+
+                 Meteorological Observations upon Man.
+
+When, in the former chapter, I wrote down his Lordship's pithy sayings,
+I found that some came into my own head, which might be serviceable for
+the Intercalary Day. I have never made one observation alone, but
+always twenty, thirty, in succession, and this very first one is a
+proof of it!
+
+                                   *
+
+When any one remains modest, not after praise, but after censure, then
+he is really so.
+
+                                   *
+
+The talk of the people, and still more the letters of maidens, have a
+peculiar euphony, arising from a constant interchange of long and short
+syllables (Trochees or Iambuses).
+
+                                   *
+
+The two things which a maiden most easily forgets are, first, how she
+looks (hence mirrors were invented); and, secondly, wherein the pronoun
+_that_ differs from the conjunction _that_. I fear, however, that they
+will from to-day forward observe the distinction, merely for the sake
+of upsetting my assertion. And _then_ one of my two touchstones is
+lost[156] with which I have hitherto tested learned ladies; the second,
+which I retain, is the left thumb-nail, which the penknife has
+sometimes notched full of red marks, but seldom, however, because they
+drive the quill more easily than they make the pen.
+
+                                   *
+
+One who has received many benefits ceases to _count_, and begins to
+_weigh_ them, as if they were votes.
+
+                                   *
+
+The transporting one's self into good characters does more harm to a
+poet or player, who retains his own, than entering into bad ones. A
+clergyman who, besides, is free to take only the first of these steps,
+is more exposed to moral _atony_[157] than the maker of verses and
+parts, who is able to make up again for a holy part by an unholy one.
+
+                                   *
+
+Passion makes the best observations and the wretchedest conclusions. It
+is a telescope whose field is so much the brighter, as it is narrower.
+
+                                   *
+
+Men require of a new Prince, Bishop, Domestic Tutor, Nursery Tutor,
+Capon-Stuffer, Town-Musician, or Town-Recorder _only in the first week_
+very special merits which were wanting in his predecessor; for in the
+second they have forgotten what they required and what they missed.
+
+                                   *
+
+Such sentences please women most and stay by them longest.
+
+                                   *
+
+Therefore, by way of reward, I will manufacture more than one upon
+themselves.--They regard others only as younger, not as fairer, than
+themselves.
+
+                                   *
+
+They are even ten times more artful and false towards each other than
+towards us; but we are almost more honest to each other than to them.
+
+                                   *
+
+They look to it only that one _does_ justify himself with them, no
+matter _how_.
+
+                                   *
+
+They forgive a loved man more stains than we do a loved woman. Hence
+the romance-writers let the heroes of their quill guzzle, storm, duel,
+and stay overnight anywhere and everywhere, without the least prejudice
+to the hero.--The heroine, on the contrary, must sit at home by her
+mother and be a little angel.
+
+                                   *
+
+On the whole, they are so delicate, so mild, so sympathetic, so
+refined, so loving and love-thirsty, that I cannot get it into my head
+why it is that they cannot really like each other, unless it is for
+some such reason as this, that they are too courteous to each other to
+be formally reconciled or formally at variance with each other. You
+dear ones! you sometimes love a man because he has a friend and is one.
+O how beautifully would a friend of your own sex _fit_[158] you!
+
+                                   *
+
+One learns taciturnity best among people who have none, and loquacity
+among the taciturn.
+
+                                   *
+
+If self-knowledge is the road to virtue, so is virtue still more the
+road to self-knowledge. An amended and purified soul is darkened by the
+least moral poison, as certain precious stones are by every other, and
+now after the amendment one observes for the first time how many
+impurities still lurk in all corners.
+
+                                   *
+
+I will close with some rules for improvement. Never, when the bosom has
+to fear that thorn in the side, anger, eloquently represent to any one
+his faults; for in the very act of convincing him of his guilt thou
+persuadest thyself of it, and so becomest exasperated. Picture to
+thyself every morning the possible situations and passions into which
+during the day thou mayst fall; then thou wilt deport thyself better,
+for one seldom behaves badly, in a repeated case, the second time.--Is
+thy friend angry with thee, then provide him an opportunity of showing
+thee a great favor. Over that his heart must needs melt, and he will
+love thee again.--No resolves are great save those which one has more
+than once to execute. Hence _forbearing_ is harder than _undertaking_;
+for the former has to be kept up longer, and the latter is also linked
+with the sense of a double expression of power, a psychological and a
+moral.--Only despair not at a single failing; and let thy whole
+repentance be--a nobler action.--Only make thyself (by stoicism, or in
+ally way thou canst) _tranquil_, then wilt thou have little trouble in
+making thyself _virtuous_ also.--Begin the culture of thy heart, not
+with the rearing of noble motives, but with the extirpation of bad
+ones. When the weeds are once withered or uprooted, then will the
+nobler flowerage spontaneously and vigorously spring up.--The virtuous
+heart, like the body, grows sound and strong more by _work_ than by
+good _food_.
+
+Therefore I can stop.
+
+
+
+
+                           13. DOG-POST-DAY.
+
+          Concerning his Lordship's Character.--An Evening of
+              Eden.--Maienthal.--The Mountain and Emanuel.
+
+
+In regard to his Lordship I have three words to say, that is, three
+opinions to state.
+
+The first is wholly improbable; it is, that, like all men of the
+world and of business, he regards mankind as an apparatus for
+experiments, as so much hunting-gear, war-material, knitting-work:
+such men look upon heaven only as the key-board to earth, and the soul
+as orderly-sergeant of the body; they carry on wars, not for the sake
+of winning crowns of oak-leaves, but to secure the oak soil and acorns;
+they prefer the successful man to the deserving one; they break oaths
+and hearts to serve the state; they respect poetry, philosophy, and
+religion, but as means; they respect riches, statistics of national
+prosperity, and health, as objects; all they honor about pure
+Mathesis[159] and pure female virtue is the transmutation of each into
+impure for manufactures and armies; in the higher astronomy all they
+care for is the transformation of suns into odometers[160] and
+way-marks for pepper-fleets, and in the most exalted _magister
+legens_[161] they seek only an alluring tavern-sign for poor
+universities.
+
+The second opinion is at least the opposite of the first, and an
+improvement upon it: it is, that to his Lordship, as to other
+great men, the race-course is the goal and the steps taken the
+garlands.--Fortune and misfortune differ, with him, not in _worth_, but
+in _manner_; both are, in his view, two converging race-tracks toward
+the eternity's ring of inner promotion; all accidents of this life are
+to him mere arithmetical examples in _unknown_ terms, which he solves,
+not however as a merchant, but as an indifferentialist[162] and
+algebraist, to whom products and multiplicands are of equal interest,
+and to whom it is all one whether he reckons by letters or by
+hundredweights.
+
+Verily, a man has almost as much to reproach himself with, if he is
+discontented, as if he had committed a crime; and inasmuch as it
+depends upon his ocean of thoughts, whether he will raise out of it as
+an island an Otaheite-Arcadia or the lowest hell, he deserves all that
+he creates....
+
+Nevertheless, the third opinion is the true one, and at the same time
+it is mine: his Lordship, how much soever he may seem to be an
+indeclinable man, who has no object, but is a verb in _mi_, has
+nevertheless the following paradigm (and so inversely we find in the
+most ordinary man a short plan for the most singular one): he is one of
+the unhappy great ones who have too much genius, too much wealth, and
+too little repose and knowledge, to be habitually happy; they hunt
+pleasure instead of virtue, and miss both, and cry out at last
+over every bitter drop which is given them in a sugar-loaf; like
+silver-plate, precisely at the point of melting in the fire of pleasure
+are they the most inclined to overspread themselves with a dark skin;
+their ambition; which otherwise hides with plans the emptiness of high
+life, is not strong enough for their heart, which in this emptiness
+withers; they do good from pride, but without the love of doing it;
+they play with the empty shell of life as with a ringlet, and deem it
+not even worth the while to shorten it; and yet they do deem it worth
+the while, when they, who stand through this night-frost of the soul,
+outwardly smiling and cold, inwardly all in a fever, without hope,
+fear, or faith, renouncing all, making light of everything, and shut up
+in themselves,--when they feel a stroke of death, a great sorrow clutch
+at their unhappy hearts.----Ah the poor lord! can thy heart then find
+no rest till it finds it under the lid of black marble?
+
+"Ah the poor lord!" his son incessantly repeated, as with oppressed
+soul he went toward Maienthal. The outward heaven around him was still;
+a great cloud completely overspread it, but rested on a blue rim along
+the whole circle of the horizon. In Victor's breast, on the contrary,
+streams of air rushed against each other and whirled together into a
+hurricane, drinking up brooks and tearing up trees. His father's image
+hung pale in this tempest. Victor's future days were hurled to and
+fro.--His future life was compressed into a narrow, veiled image, and
+it distressed him just as much to think that he _must_ live it as _how_
+he must.
+
+What saddened him most was the mere external and trifling circumstance
+that his father had remained alone and concealed in the depths of the
+island. Once the conjecture came over him, whether the greater part of
+what he had witnessed had not been mere dramatic machinery which his
+father (who in his youth had been a tragic poet) had employed to give
+more firmness to his vow of silence; but he was immediately disgusted
+at his own heart. Why are the purest souls tormented with a multitude
+of disgusting, poisonous thoughts, which like spiders crawl up on the
+shining walls, and which they only have the trouble of crushing to
+death? Ah, our _victories_ are not wholly distinguishable from our
+_defeats_!
+
+It is singular that the _perspective_ thought of Clotilda's
+blood-relationship to Flamin was the one which he followed out least of
+all.
+
+When man can obtain from reason no balsamic relief, he begs it at the
+hands of Hope and Illusion; and they two then willingly share his
+sorrow. Just as the blue sky of to-day by little and little peered
+through light seams in the clouds, and the sea of mist collected into
+hanging lakes, so also did the dark thoughts break asunder in Victor's
+soul.--And when the swollen masses of cloud in the broad blue passed
+into fleece, till at last the blue sea swallowed up all banks of vapor,
+and bore nothing on its infinite expanse but the blazing sun, then did
+Victor's soul also cleanse itself from vapors, and the sun-image of
+Emanuel, whom he was to-day to reach, shone soft and warm and cloudless
+into all his wounds.... The form of his loved Dahore, the form of his
+loved father, the form of his hidden mother, and all beloved images,
+reposed like moons in a mournful group over his head; and this sadness,
+and the sacred oath to keep himself virtuous and obey all his father's
+wishes, breathed upon his inflamed bosom some solace in regard to his
+father's fate.
+
+He could even to-day see the sun go down behind the church-tower of
+Maienthal.
+
+The broad cleared-up sky made him more tender, the thought of falling
+to-day upon the heart of a noble man, whose soul dwelt above this blue
+atmosphere, made him more exalted, the hope of being consoled by this
+man for his whole life made him more tranquil.--
+
+He hastened, and, his haste drew out the saddest lute-stop of his soul.
+For he seemed not to be going over the summer fields, but they seemed
+rather to be hurrying along before him; landscape after landscape,
+theatres of woods, theatres of grain-fields, flew by; new hills rose
+with other lights, and lifted up their woods, and others with theirs
+dropped down; long, shadowy steppes ran backward before the flood of
+yellow sunlight; now valleys full of flowers billowed around him, now
+bare, hot hill-shores carried him upward; the stream murmured close to
+his ear, and suddenly its windings glistened from far away across
+poppy-fields; white roads and green paths met him, and fled from him,
+and led round the broad earth; full villages, with gleaming windows,
+swept by, and gardens with undressed children; the declining sun was
+now lifted up, now lost again, and now withdrawn to the summits of the
+hills.--
+
+This fleeting of Nature's dissolving views bedimmed his moistened eye,
+and brightened the inner world; but the steady abiding of an incessant
+music, the constant choir of larks above him, whose contending cries
+melted to one in his soul, this distant hum from air and woods and
+bushes, this harmonica of Nature, moved him to say to himself: "Why do
+I in this solitude hold back every drop that would fall? No; besides, I
+am too sensitive to-day, and I will exhaust myself before I see the
+beloved man."
+
+At last he ascended the broad mountain that stations itself with its
+scattered columns of trees and gray cubes of rock before Maienthal,
+which lies in greenness at its foot.... Then the earth, tuned by the
+Creator, rang with a thousand strings; the same harmony stirred the
+stream, divided into gold and gloom, the humming flower-cup, the
+peopled air, and the waving bush; the reddened east and the reddened
+west stood stretched out like the two rose-taffeta wings of a
+harpsichord, and a tremulous sea gushed from the open heavens and the
+open earth....
+
+He burst into a mingling flood of tears at once of joy and sorrow, and
+the past and the future simultaneously stirred his heart. The sun with
+ever-increasing swiftness dropped down the heavens, and the more
+swiftly did he climb the mountain, the quicker to follow its flight
+with his eye. And there he looked down into the village of Maienthal,
+that glimmered among moist shadows....
+
+At his feet, and on this mountain, lay, stretched like a crowned giant,
+like a transplanted spring-island, an English park. This mountain
+toward the south and one toward the north met and formed a cradle in
+which the peaceful village rested, and over which the morning and the
+evening sun spun and spread out their golden veil. In five gleaming
+ponds trembled five duskier evening heavens, and every wave that leaped
+up painted itself to a ruby in the hovering fire of the sun. Two brooks
+waded, in shifting distances, darkened by roses and willows, over the
+long meadow-land, and a watering fire-wheel,[163] like a pulsating
+heart, forced the sunset-reddened water through all the green
+flower-vases. Everywhere nodded flowers, those butterflies of the
+vegetable world, on every moss-grown brook-stone, from every tender
+stalk, round every window, a flower rocked in its fragrance, and
+scarlet lupines traced their blue and red veins over a garden without a
+hedge. A transparent wood of gold-green birches climbed, in the high
+grass over there, the sides of the northern mountain, on whose summit
+five tall fir-trees, as ruins of a prostrated forest, held their eyrie.
+
+Emanuel's small house stood at the end of the village, in a tangled
+growth of honeysuckle, and in the embrace of a linden-tree which grew
+through it.--His heart gushed up within him: "Blessings on thee, quiet
+haven! hallowed by a soul which here looks up to heaven, and waits to
+launch into the sea of eternity!"--Suddenly the windows of the
+abbey where Clotilda had been educated flung upon him the flames
+of the evening-redness,--and the sun went, softly as a Penn, toward
+America,--and the thin night spread itself over nature,--and the green
+hermitage of Emanuel wrapped itself in obscurity.... Then he knelt
+there alone on the mountain, on that throne-step, and looked into the
+glowing west, and over the whole still earth, and into the heavens,
+and expanded his spirit to think on God.... As he knelt, all was so
+sublime and so mild,--worlds and suns came up from the east, and the
+little insect, with his play of colors, nestled down into his mealy
+flower-cup,--the evening-wind flapped its immeasurable wing, and the
+little naked lark rested warmly under the soft-feathered breast of the
+mother,--a man stood on the mountain-ridge, and a golden-chafer on the
+stamens; ... and the Eternal loved his whole world.
+
+His spirit was now made up to take in a great man, and he yearned for
+the voice of a brother.
+
+He staggered, without following any path, down into the village, with
+the pewit in its great circles, and the may-chafer in its little ones,
+sweeping around him. At the foot of the mountain the hybrid day grew
+darker,--in the starry heaven the curtain rose,--the vapor of evening,
+which had gone up hot, fell cold, as men do, back to the earth: one
+more loud lark went circling upward, as the last echo of day, over the
+mountain.
+
+At last he neared Emanuel's linden. He would rather have embraced him
+under the great heavens than under the close ceiling of a room. Through
+the window he saw an uncommonly beautiful youth standing and playing on
+a flute. The player drew out of its heavenly gates a fugitive and
+floating elysium. Victor listened to him for a long time, in order to
+still his beating heart; at last, with tearful eyes, he went round the
+house, and would fain have fallen speechlessly and blindly on the necks
+of the youth and of Emanuel. As he passed along before the window, the
+youth did not return his greeting; as he opened the house-door, a soft
+chime of bells began to make music. Then the youth came out
+immediately, and asked him, in a friendly tone, who was there; for he
+was blind. Victor stepped into a Holy of Holies when he entered the
+apartment lined with linden-leaves, which was the nest of the winged
+man, who at this moment was out of it, under the great night of God.
+Emanuel was to return toward midnight. The room was open and clean;
+some leaves of fruits which had been eaten lay on the table; flowers
+glowed around all the windows; a telescope leaned against the wall;
+remains of an Oriental wardrobe bespoke the East Indian....
+
+The voice of the beautiful youth had in his ear something inexpressibly
+touching, because it seemed like one he knew; it went deep into his
+heart, like the melody of a song that sounds up from childhood. He
+could rest freely with the steady gaze of love upon that face, that
+looked out into an eternal night; he wanted to kiss those childish lips
+full of melodies, and still he hesitated. But as he went out of the
+house again in quest of Emanuel, and when the bells began to chime
+again,--for they sounded whenever the door opened, to announce to the
+blind one every arrival,--then he could no longer restrain himself
+amidst the lovely music, but he touched the mouth of the blind one, as
+he leaned at the open window, with a kiss as soft as a breath. "Ah,
+angel! art thou, then, come down again from heaven?" said the blind
+one, confounding him with some well-known being or other.
+
+How good was it to be out of doors! The evening-bell of the village
+sounded its call over the slumbering fields, and a distant soul was
+inclining its ear, perhaps, to catch the dying echoes of its broken
+tones. The evening wind, rustling through twigs full of green fruits,
+joined in. The evening star--the moon of our twilight--rested kindly on
+the road of the sun and of the moon, and sent its solace in the
+interval during the absence of both.--"Where mayst thou be at this
+moment, my Emanuel? Art thou resting, perhaps, in the sight of the
+evening-red,--or gazing into the starry sea?--art thou in the ecstasy
+we call a prayer,--or ..."
+
+At this moment, all at once the thought flashed up in him, that, as
+to-night St. John's day began, his Emanuel might have expired in the
+enjoyment of the evening.... The more eagerly did he seek after him
+with his eyes under every tree, in every deeper shadow; he looked up to
+the hills, as if he might see him there, and to the stars, as if even
+there he might venture to seek him.--He went round the village, whose
+circular wall was a festoon of cherry-trees which silvered the green
+circumference with a milky-way of blossoms long since fallen, and
+hurried over the ruins of the houses which the children had built
+during the day, towards the fading windows of the abbey, which rose on
+the southern mountain down whose slope he had entered the village; for
+the blind one had told him that this mountain was Emanuel's
+observatory, and that he went thither every night. The green stairway,
+which made its successive landings of terraces and moss-banks, and on
+which a balustrade of bush-work ran upward, led him to a mountain which
+terminated sublimely in the ether with a tall weeping-birch. With every
+grass-plot, as from a bath, new limbs of dark Nature lifted themselves;
+he went on, as if from one planet to another. Across the ascending,
+darkling fields streamed the night-wind, and lonesomely swept on from
+wood to wood, and its ruffling fingers played with the plumage of the
+sleeping bird and the down of the whirring night-butterfly. Victor
+looked over toward the evening-red which Night had taken as a rose to
+wear on the bosom whereon suns repose. The sea of eternity lay in the
+form of night on the silver-sand of worlds and suns, and from the
+bottom of that sea the grains of sand glistened far up through the
+deep.
+
+Around the weeping-birch swelled an unaccountable melodious murmur,
+which he had this very day heard on the island. At length he stood up
+there under the birch, and the music, like that of an harmonica which
+has just stolen over paradises and through hedges of flowers, was loud
+around him; but he saw nothing further, save a high grassy altar (the
+birthplace of Emanuel's letter) and a low grassy bench. From what
+invisible hand, he thought with awe, can these tones issue, which seem
+to glide off from angels, as they fly over the next world, from
+mingling souls, when a too great bliss breathes itself out into a
+sigh, and the sigh dissipates itself into distant dying sound? It must
+be forgiven him, if on such a day, which threw his soul into growing
+agitations, in this awful hour of night, under this melodious
+mourning-tree, on this Holy of Holies of the invisible Emanuel, he at
+last came to believe that _he_ had this evening taken his flight from
+life, and that his soul, full of love, was still floating around him in
+these echoes and yearnings for the first and last embrace. He lost
+himself more and more in the tones and in the silence round about
+them,--his soul grew to a dream within him, and the whole nocturnal
+landscape grew to a cloud made of the sleep in which this light dream
+hung,--the fountain of endless life, flung up by the Eternal, flew far
+above the earth in the immeasurable arch with the spraying silver-sparks
+of suns over immensity; gleaming it encircled the whole vault of night,
+and the reflection of the Infinite overspread the dark eternity.
+
+O Eternal One, if we saw not thy starry heaven, how much would our
+heart, sunk into the mire of earth, know of thee and of immortality?--
+
+Suddenly in the east the night grew lighter, because the floating
+glimmer of the moon darted up on the Alpine ridges that hid the orb,
+and all at once the unaccountable tones and the leaves and the
+night-wind grew louder. Then Victor awoke as out of a dream and out of
+life, and clasped the harmonious, fleeting airs to his languishing bosom,
+and, amidst the gushing tears which, like a rain-cloud, veiled from him
+the whole landscape, he cried out, beside himself: "Ah, Emanuel,
+come!--Ah, I thirst for thee--Float no more in sound, thou blessed one;
+take thy deposed human face, and appear to me, and slay me by a
+shudder, and keep me in thy arms!" ...
+
+Lo! while the dim tear-drop still stood in his eye, and the moon still
+lingered behind the Alps, there came up the mountain a white form with
+closed eyes,--smiling, transfigured, blissful,--turning toward
+Sirius....
+
+"Emanuel, dost thou appear to me?" cried Horion, trembling, and melted
+into a new flood of tears. The form opened its eyes,--it spread out its
+arms. Victor saw not,--heard not; he glowed and trembled. The form flew
+to meet him, and he gave himself up, saying, "Take me!" They touched
+each other,--they embraced each other,--the night-wind swept through
+them,--the strange music sounded nearer,--a star shot down,--the moon
+flew up over the Alps....
+
+And when with its Eden-light it suffused the cheeks of the unknown
+apparition, Victor recognized that it was his dear teacher, _Dahore_,
+who had to-day cast his image into the mirror on the island. And Dahore
+said: "Beloved son, dost thou still know thy teacher? I am Emanuel and
+Dahore." Then the embrace grew closer. Horion would fain have
+compressed his gratitude for a whole childhood into one kiss, and lay
+dissolved in the arms of the teacher and in the arms of loving ecstasy.
+
+Twine around each other tightly, ye blessed ones; press your full
+hearts to each other even till you press tears out of them; forget
+heaven and earth, and prolong the sublime embrace!--Ah! so soon as it
+is dissolved, then has this frail life henceforward nothing firmer
+wherewith to knit you together than the beginning of the--second....
+
+At last Emanuel drew himself out of the attitude of love, and, bending
+aside, gazed like a sun, with large and open look, into Horion's face,
+and confronted with rapture the ennobled spirit and countenance of his
+blooming favorite. The latter sank before the look of love
+involuntarily on his knee, and said, with uplifted face: "O my teacher,
+my father! O thou angel! dost thou, then, still love me so
+exceedingly?"--But he wept too much for utterance, and his words were
+unintelligible, and died in his heart....
+
+Without answering, Emanuel laid his hand on the head of the kneeling
+pupil, and turned his glorified eye toward the glittering heavens, and
+said, with solemn voice: "This head, thou Eternal One, dedicates itself
+now to thee in this great night. Let only thy second world fill this
+head and this heart, and may the little, dark earth never satisfy
+them!--O my Horion! here on this mountain, on which, after a year, I go
+up from the earth, I conjure thee, by the great second world above us,
+by all the great thoughts wherewith the Eternal at this moment appears
+in thee,--I conjure thee to be still good, even when I shall have long
+been dead."
+
+Emanuel knelt down to him, held up the exhausted youth, and bent
+towards his paling face, and said, in a low and prayerful tone, "My
+beloved! my beloved! when we both are dead, in the second world may God
+never part us,--never part me and thee!"--He wept not, and yet could
+say no more; their two hearts, knit together, rested on each other, and
+night veiled silently their mute love and their great thoughts.
+
+
+
+
+                           14. DOG-POST-DAY.
+
+        The Philosophical Arcadia.--Clotilda's Letter.--Victor's
+                              Confessions.
+
+
+I have only two things to explain before going further,--the mysterious
+music and the shutting of the eyes. The former proceeded from an AEolian
+harp laid on the weeping-birch. As often as Emanuel came hither by
+night he let these breathed-out tones intermingle like blossoms with
+the whispering leaves, in order to exalt himself when he looked alone
+upon the exalted night. His eyes he often closed before the sun and the
+moon, whenever his inner man, winged like a cherub, had leave to bury
+itself in soft fantasies; into the streaming, many-colored waves of
+light which crowd through the eyelids he would then plunge, as into a
+zephyr, for a delicious swim, and in this light-bath the higher
+light-magnet within him drew heavenly light out of earthly light. As
+there are but few souls that know how far the harmony of outward nature
+with our own reaches, and in how very great a degree the whole creation
+is but an AEolian harp, with longer and shorter strings, with slower and
+swifter vibrations, passive before a divine breath,[164]--I demand not
+that every one should forgive this Emanuel.--
+
+After this finding of each other again, which threw a far gleam over a
+whole life, the two came home to the blind youth; and his flute carried
+the heart softly over in dream from the tossings of fevered blood into
+the tranquil ether of heaven.
+
+As I love so to be about Emanuel, the reader will not begrudge me the
+pleasure of turning over the leaves of all the hours which we are
+permitted to spend in his house, and to go along regularly, step by
+step.
+
+The morning for the first time disclosed to the pupil of Emanuel, as it
+does to children, what a Christmas present the night had provided for
+his heart. What a form came before him in the morning-radiance, when
+the still, childlike, composed face of the teacher, over which storms
+had once passed, as on the soft, white moon volcanoes have flamed,
+smiled upon him in such wise that his inner being melted into mute
+bliss! Especially when beheld in _profile_ did this lofty form appear
+to stand on the brink of earth, and to look down into the _second_
+hemisphere of the heavens, which is hid from us by the gravestone and
+the rich pasture-ground of this life. His countenance was transfigured
+when he lifted it to heaven, when he named God or Eternity, when he
+spoke of the longest day; in its light the leaf-gold of the present
+paled to the dead-gold of the past, and his spirit hung hovering over
+the body, as genii bloom out of flowers in arabesques. Never did Victor
+so easily attune himself, when coming out of a dream, to the new day,
+as he did this morning with Emanuel's voice, which was, so to speak,
+the music of the spheres to the blue heaven of his eyes, from which,
+as from that of Egypt, never a drop fell; from incapacity of the
+tear-glands, he could never weep; nor did this life any longer agitate
+his soul.
+
+The pure morning-apartment seemed to make the soul pure and still. He
+was the greatest bodily Purist; he washed his body quite as often as
+his clothes; and the uncleanness of medical language, even to the very
+words,--as, e. g. toothpicks, &c.,--was avoided by his stainless
+tongue. Even so did his heart remain unsoiled by so much as the images
+of great sins, and this unconscious innocence, as well as an
+unacquaintedness with our artful manners, made him, in the eyes of
+three different classes, either a child--or a maiden--or an angel.
+
+The breakfast of fruits and water, which, in fact, made up his whole
+bill of fare, called up reprovingly before our Victor the wine and
+coffee-grounds wherewith he had sometimes had to manure, like earthly
+ones, the flowers of his spirit. Flower-pots were Dahore's snuff-boxes,
+and glowed under the linden-green, which, with two tame, and yet
+free, ground-sparrows skipping through it, was the live, growing
+ceiling-piece of the apartment. His soul seemed also, like a Brahmin,
+to live on poetical flowers, and his speech was often, like his
+manners, Indian,--i. e. poetic. So was there throughout, as with divers
+magnates of men, a striking pre-established harmony between outward
+nature and his heart; he readily found in the corporeal the physiognomy
+of the spiritual, and _vice versa_; he said matter, considered as
+thought, was just as noble and spiritual as any other thought, and that
+we represented to ourselves in it, after all, only the Divine
+conceptions of it. For example, during breakfast he lost himself in the
+glimmering dew-drop on a stock-gillyflower, and, by moving his eye to
+and fro, played through the gamut of its harpsichord of colors. "There
+must," said he, "be some harmony or other of accordant sounds between
+this minute particle of water and my spirit, as between virtue and me,
+because otherwise neither could so ravish me. And is, then, this accord
+which man makes with the whole creation (only in different octaves) a
+mere play of the Eternal, and no resonance of a nearer, greater
+harmony?" In the same way he would often gaze at a glimmering coal,
+till in his eyes it had expanded to a flaming meadow, on which,
+illumined by tender fancies, he roamed up and down....
+
+Have patience, reader, with this flowery soul; we will both think that
+men can more easily have one religion than one philosophy, and that
+every system presupposes its peculiar weaving in the heart, and that
+the heart is the bud of the head.
+
+The only circumstance that pained the blessed Victor this morning was,
+that he could not embrace the fair blind youth, and ask, "Have we not
+already once lived together, and is not my voice as familiar to thee as
+thine is to me?" For he looked upon him (as I do too), for several
+reasons, as the concealed son of Pastor Eymann. But as Dahore kept
+silent on the subject,--into whose clear, bright heaven one could
+otherwise look down even to the least nebulous star,--he feared before
+these holy ears he should be speaking too near to the verge of his oath
+of silence, though he should only disclose his inquiring conjectures
+about the blind one. This Julius seemed to have only two root-fibres in
+his nature, of which the one went to his flute, and the other to his
+teacher. On his white face, whereon the rapture of the musical genius
+and the abstractedness of the blind dreamer were blended with an almost
+womanly beauty, lay the reflection of his teacher, and its fibres had,
+like lute-strings, stirred only to harmonious movements. The poor blind
+one, who looked upon his Dahore as his father, was turned about, like
+down, by his lightest breath. Victor often drew the head of the dear
+blind one close to his face, in order to inspect the disordered eyes,
+and judge whether they might be restored. But though he saw with pain
+that the unhappy one must remain incurable on the full, radiant earth,
+nevertheless he kept on repeating his minute investigation, merely for
+the sake of having the dear, enchanting form nearer to his eye and his
+soul.
+
+In the morning Emanuel, as cicerone of Nature, led his guest through
+the ruins and antiques of the earth: for every tree is an eternal
+antique. How different is a walk with a religious[165] man from one
+with a vulgar, worldly soul! The earth appeared to him holy, just
+fallen from the hands of the Creator; it was to him as if he were
+walking in a planet hanging over us and clothed with flowers. Emanuel
+showed him God and love everywhere mirrored, but everywhere
+transformed,--in the light, in--colors, in the scale of living
+creatures, in the blossom and in human beauty, in the pleasures of
+animals, in the thoughts of men and in the circles of worlds; for
+either everything or nothing is his shadow. So the sun paints its image
+on all creatures,--great in the ocean, many-colored in the dew-drop,
+small on the human retina, as mock-sun on the cloud, red on the apple,
+silvery on the stream, seven-colored in the falling rain, and gleaming
+over the whole moon and over all its other worlds.
+
+Victor felt to-day, for the first time, the enlargement and
+transfiguration of his conscious being before a spirit which, _like_
+his, but _excelling_ his, like a spherical concave mirror reflected all
+the features of his nobler part in colossal size. The whole vulgar
+portion of his nature crept away when the higher, painted by Dahore on
+a large scale, erected itself above the low impulses. A man whom the
+perihelion of a great man does not set on fire and beside himself is
+nothing worth. He was hardly willing to speak, so that he might only
+hear _him_ all the time, although he had it in mind to stay here a good
+many days. As before a higher being and before the woman of his love,
+in whose presence one will neither show his head nor his tongue, so had
+he, renouncing self, sunk into pure truth and love. All the varnish of
+the little relations of place and citizenly respectability had cracked
+so clean off, and they all stood before him there so moss-grown, that
+he would not so much as name the names of Goettingen, of Flachsenfingen,
+or empty incidents of life, or strange personalities. In fact, Victor
+had a slight contempt for men who care more for the directions to the
+bookbinder than for the book, and more for the review of an author than
+for his system, and to whom the earth is no deciphering chancery of the
+book of nature, but a parlor (a talking-room), a news-office of
+wretched personalities, which they care neither to profit by, nor to
+retain, nor to estimate, but merely to tell; and he was disgusted with
+the German societies, in which there is so little philosophizing.--Oh,
+how blest he was, for once to think a whole day in company with
+another, and, what is still finer, to be permitted to poetize with him!
+
+His doubts upon the greatest matters which can weigh down our minds and
+lift up our hearts grew to-day to questions; the questions, to hopes;
+the hopes, to presentiments. There are truths of which one hopes that
+great men will be more strongly convinced than one can be one's self;
+and one will therefore by their conviction confirm and complete his
+own. Dahore held the two great truths (God and immortality) which, like
+two pillars, bear up the universe, firmly to his heart; but, like the
+rarer men to whom the truth is not merely the _shew-bread_ of vanity
+and the dessert of the head, but a _holy supper_ and _love-feast_ full
+of the _spirit of life_ for their weary heart, he cared little, if he
+could make no proselytes. Victor felt that _he_ understood handling the
+artillery-train and the electric pistols and batteries of the art of
+disputation better than Emanuel; he would have abhorred his own tongue
+if he had directed its readiness against this fair soul. He was silent
+for two reasons. "Undertake," said he, "to give a molten image, an
+altar-piece, of a great, shining truth that embraces thy whole
+being,--to do this on the flying second-hand whereon one stands in
+transient conversation, with the few dry paints wherewith human ideas
+are to be colored, and with the clumsy human tongue wherewith you must
+daub on these grains of color,--I tell you, a _silhouette_, a
+transparent asterism, will be all you can produce." The light heaven of
+certain simple-hearted men of deep feeling veils, like the outer one,
+all its suns, except the warmest, under the sheen of a void blue; but
+the unclean heaven of others full of wit and logic is bedizened with
+_mock-suns_, bows, northern lights, clouds, and redness.
+
+The second, better reason why he scorned the honor of opposition was
+his heart, which contained in itself more than the head could throw
+light upon. Certain views cannot be detached so easily as wall-pictures
+in Italy, and transferred from one head into another. The _light_
+which another can give thee _shows_, but _constructs_ not, the
+house-furniture of thy interior, and what the light really _creates_
+with some is meteorological appearance, optical illusion, but no
+substance.[166]--Hence all turns not upon the showing and seeing of a
+truth, i. e. of an object, but upon the effects which it works through
+thy whole inner being. For how is it that there are men who, as
+Socrates did Aristides, make us better merely by our being with
+them?--How do great authors bring it about, that their invisible
+spirit in their works seizes and holds us fast, without our being
+able to quote the words and passages whereby they do it, as a thickly
+leaved forest always murmurs, though not a single branch stirs?--Why
+did Emanuel overmaster his beloved Horion--more than by broad
+thesis-formulas, _rationes decidendi_ and _sententiae magistrales_--merely
+by the transfiguration in his countenance, by the low echo-tone of his
+voice, by the radiance of his look, and by the devotion in his breast,
+when he spoke solemnly truths which were old to speech and new to the
+heart, like the following?--
+
+Man goes, like the earth, from _west_ to _east_; but it seems to him as
+if he went, with it, from east to west, from life to the grave.
+
+What is highest and noblest in man conceals itself, and is without use
+for the practical world, (as the highest mountains bear no herbage,)
+and out of the chain of fine _thoughts_ only some members can be
+detached as actions.[167]
+
+Our aimless activity, our clutchings at the air, must appear to higher
+beings like the clutching of dying men at the bed-clothes.
+
+The spirit awakes and will awake when the light of the senses goes out,
+just as sleepers awake when the night-light is extinguished.
+
+                           *   *   *   *   *
+
+Why did these thoughts linger like things of awe in the soul?--Because
+Horion felt something higher than language, which is invented only for
+every-day sensations, can ever represent; because, even in his
+childhood, he hated systems which thrust out of sight all that is
+inexplicable; and because the human spirit feels itself as much
+oppressed in the explicable and finite as it is in a mine, or in the
+thought of the heavenly space overhead being somewhere or other boarded
+up.
+
+How should he have had the heart or the occasion on such a day to ask
+Emanuel about his dying-day, or about Clotilda? Victor had that poetry
+of fellow-feeling which easily puts itself into the place of the most
+unlike persons, of women and philosophers. In the evening Dahore went
+to the abbey to teach astronomy, his most beloved science. During the
+astronomical school-hour the open face of Julius became an open heaven;
+he told his Victor everything, as if he were a second father. Now he
+related to him frankly that the year before an angel had again and
+again come to him, who grasped his hand, gave him flowers, spoke to him
+kindly, and at last vanished from him into heaven, but had left him a
+letter, which he was permitted to have read to him a year after, at
+Whitsuntide, by Clotilda,--yes, and that this good angel had yesterday
+flown by him with a kiss. Victor smiled with delight, but concealed his
+conjecture that _he_ looked upon the angel to be a shy, loving maiden
+from the boarding-school.--"But yesterday," said Victor, "I only was
+the angel that kissed thee _thus_!" and repeated it. Julius knew
+no fairer gift to make to those he loved than the picture of his
+father,--the portraiture of his exalted love, which forgot no human
+being, because it was based, not upon the superiorities, but upon the
+necessities, of men,--further, of his indulgence, of his
+disinterestedness, since a long virtue spared him the battle against
+his heart, and now he did nothing but what he wished to, and since the
+next world, hanging low down before him, preached a peculiar
+independence upon necessities. Five hundred thousand fixed stars of the
+first magnitude, according to Lambert, hardly give a light equal to
+that of the nearer full moon,--and so the present always outshines our
+inner world; but soar nearer to the fixed star of the next world, then
+does it grow to a sun, which transforms the moon of time and of the
+present into a petty nebula.--As to this Emanuel, all Maienthalers
+loved him (even the Parson, although he was a non-Catholic,
+non-Lutheran, and non-Calvinist); and he loved to be dependent on
+something, on others' love.[168]--During this description Victor
+yearned for him again with as much emotion as if they had been
+separated a year; accordingly, in the flush of evening he laid himself
+down under the birch-leaves opposite the school, in order immediately,
+with ardent arms, to take him prisoner.
+
+And as Victor lifted his soul on the tall, white columns of the park
+planned by his Lordship, on the sublime sculpture which wrote out a
+great thought that looked like a tempest, and just as he had carried a
+bee that had dropped down, his wings being glued up with honey, to the
+beehive sill,--just then Dahore, with a friendly manner, came up. The
+latter entered, himself,--for Victor would have held the covert
+starting of a subject as a sin,--on that of Clotilda, and said this
+used to be her favorite spot, and the resting-bench of her quiet soul.
+The place was not grand, but, what is more, it was opposite to
+something grand (even physical greatness, e. g. a mountain, needs
+distance as a pedestal); it lay in the deepest part of the dell,
+encircled with Emanuel's flower-chains, which he often laid out
+without enclosure, because all Maienthalers respected his little
+joys,--breathed upon by great clover-fields,--overspread by the moon,
+which in spring, only after reaching the mountain-top, beamed down this
+deep valley with a mournful medley of birch-shadows, water-glistenings,
+and bright spots,--and, finally, adorned with a grassy bench, which I
+should not have mentioned had it not been planted at both ends with
+great, drooping flowers, which, with a tender feeling, no one crushed
+who sat down between them. How was Victor surprised or enraptured when
+Emanuel asked about this Clotilda! Like jewels of dew, like tears of
+joy, all the words of his teacher fell into his languishing heart,
+because they were eulogies upon her tender soul, which leads its own
+tears only into those of _others_, and hides them before dry hearts;
+upon her fine ambition, which men's criticism misconstrues into
+_coldness_ and women's into _pride_; and on her warmth of love, which
+one would not have looked for in a heart like hers, fast closed as a
+bud, which now confounds inanimate with animated nature, in order by
+the former to learn to love the latter. It touched Victor even to tears
+when Emanuel so warmly praised his pupil, now withdrawn from this Eden;
+and when he actually went on to beg, in all simplicity, that he would
+be the friend of _his_ friend, and now especially because he was going
+to die, and because she would never come back again,--for she had been
+here the last time merely for the purpose--on Whitsuntide, where her
+parents could not smile at it--of publicly taking the sacrament with
+the boarding-school girls,--that he would now take _his_ place towards
+this starward-soaring eye, this heart aspiring to eternity,--then could
+he have fallen at the feet of his friend and _his_ maiden friend for
+emotion and love.... From such lips praise bestowed upon its object
+always gives to love an extraordinary growth, because that sentiment
+always seems a pretext,[169] and ripens at once, so soon as it has
+found it.
+
+If thy heart, my friend, does not beat quickly and intensely enough for
+another's,--although, in my opinion, it already pulsates at the
+fever-point, namely, a hundred and eleven times in a minute,--then just
+go, in order to transform thy cold fever into a warm one, thy quartan
+ague into a quotidian, to other particularly respected people, and
+let them praise her, the good soul, or only name her often before
+thee,--mortally sick, and provided with thy good hundred and forty
+pulsations to the minute, thou wilt go thy way, and have the desired
+fever.
+
+The innocent Emanuel, who did not guess Victor's warmth, thought he
+must do still more by way of giving him the sevenfold consecration as
+priest of friendship for Clotilda, and gave him a--letter from her.
+_Thou_ couldst do it, East Indian, since thou art here a child that has
+been made into an angel in the _limbus infantum_ (the children's
+heaven), since thou hast no mysteries, excepting the mystery of the
+three children (hence his Lordship did not make thee the reader of his
+letters), and since thou dost not at all dream that the giving away of
+another's letter is anything wrong. Still thy scholar should not have
+read it.
+
+But he did read it. He cannot defend himself by anything except by my
+reader, who here holds in his hand this very same letter of another who
+never wrote it for him, and nevertheless reads it through word for word
+in his chair. I, for my part, read nothing, but only copy off what the
+dog brings me.--It is a beautiful coincidence that this letter should
+have been written by her on that very same raining, melodious night of
+the garden-feast when he wrote his first to Emanuel.
+
+
+                                           "St. Luna, May 4, 179*.
+
+"You will not, perhaps, expect any excuse from me, revered teacher,
+that, when I have hardly left Maienthal, I come back in the form of a
+letter. In fact, I meant to write it even while on the road, then the
+second day, and finally yesterday. This Maienthal will spoil for me
+many other valleys; all music will sound to me like an Alpine horn,
+making me sad, and bringing to my heart the remembrance of the Alpine
+life under the weeping-birch tree.
+
+"In this mood I should not have been able to deny my heart the pleasure
+of opening itself and pouring itself out before yours in the warmest
+thanks for the most beautiful and instructive days of my life, had I
+not formed the resolve after some days to be in Maienthal again; after
+my second return home, my heart must have its will, and way.
+
+"In our house I found nothing changed,[170] nor anything in our
+neighbor's; and I found in all souls the same old love with which we
+had parted from each other,--only my Agatha, to be sure, is merry, but
+yet less so than she used to be. The only change in Herr Eymann's house
+is a guest whom every one calls by a different name,--Victor, Horion,
+Sebastian, young Lord, Doctor. This last name he fully deserves by his
+first action and first joy in St. Luna, which was the healing of the
+blind Lord Horion. What a piece of happiness for the saved and for his
+saviour!--May this youth one day only pass through your Eden, and meet
+with your good Julius, so as to repeat upon him the beautiful art--Oh!
+as often as I think upon it, that the male sex is blest with the means
+of the greatest, godlike benefactions,--that they, like a god, can
+distribute eyes, life, justice, science,--whereas my sex must confine
+its heart, so yearning to do good, to lesser services,--to the drying
+away of a tear for another, to the concealing of its own, to the
+exercise of a secret patience with happy and unhappy;--then the wish
+rises, O that that sex which has the highest benefits in its hands
+would vouchsafe to us the greatest,--that of imitating itself, and
+getting into our hands good things which should bless us by our
+distribution of them!---At present, a woman can have nothing in her
+soul to make her great, except only wishes.
+
+"I have just come in out of the open air from a little garden-feast at
+my Agatha's; and never is any fair bit of deep-blue sky exactly right
+to me, if it does not stand over your weeping-birch, where your eye
+counts up all its treasures and suns, and shows my heart all the tokens
+of Infinite Power and Love. To-day, in the garden, I thought with
+almost too sad a longing on your Maienthal; Herr Sebastian reminded me
+of it still oftener, because he seems to have had a teacher who
+resembled mine.[171] He talked very well to-day, and seemed to be made
+up of two halves,--a British and a French. Some of his fine
+observations have not gone from me,--e. g., 'Sorrows are like
+thunder-clouds: in the distance they look black, over our heads hardly
+gray.--As sad dreams betoken a glad future, so may it be with the
+so-often-tormenting dream of life when it is over.--All our strong
+feelings, like ghosts, hold sway only up to a certain hour; and if a
+man would always say to himself, This passion, this grief, this
+rapture, will in three days certainly be gone from this soul,--then
+would he become more and more tranquil and composed.' I report all this
+to you so exactly, in order, as it were, to punish myself for a too
+hasty judgment which I passed some days since (though within myself) on
+his propensity to satire.--Satire, also, seems to be merely for the
+stronger sex; I have never yet found one of my own who had found in the
+works of Swift or Cervantes or Tristram anything to her taste.--
+
+"_Two days later_.--I and my letter are still here; but to-day it
+starts four days in advance of me. I cannot help thinking, This last
+time every flower in Maienthal, and every word my best teacher says to
+me, will give me still greater and deeper joy than ever, because I
+journey thither right from the turmoil of visiting, and with such a
+melancholy heart. The morning after that lovely night of the
+church-going festival I sat alone in an arbor near the great pond, and
+made myself sadder with all that I saw and thought; for during that
+whole morning, by reason of a dream I had had, my faded friend[172]
+stood before my soul,--her grave lay transparent above her, and I looked
+down through it, and saw that lily of heaven lying within there pale and
+still,--I reflected, indeed, as the gardener buried flowers with their
+pots in the earth, that the body in which we are planted must, in like
+manner, go down into the earth for future blooming, but, nevertheless,
+I could no longer control my tears.--In vain did I look upon the
+sparkling spring, which draws every day new colors, new insects, new
+flowers out of the earth,--I only grew sadder, since it rejuvenates
+everything, but not man.[173]--And when I saw Herr von Schleunes with a
+frog-bow approaching the pond, I was obliged, as he could see my eyes
+at a great distance as he passed by, to make believe asleep, in order
+not to betray them.... But before my dearest teacher I would have
+opened them as now, because he forgives me my weaknesses.
+
+                                               "CLOTILDA v. L. B."
+
+Victor had kept his left hand, with which he held the letter, too near
+to his heart, and his arm and letter began to tremble with the thumping
+heart, and he could hardly read and comprehend it for emotion. "Such a
+teacher! such a pupil!"--beyond that his looks could say nothing more.
+
+There was a struggle within him whether he should tell his friend his
+love for Clotilda. In _favor_ of the confession was Emanuel's request
+to seek her society,--that eye of his beholding, as if out of fixed
+stars, all trifles of earth,--Victor's grateful desire to repay one
+secret with another, and, most of all, oh! this love for his teacher,
+this love of his teacher for him.... And this, too, conquered, however
+much there was otherwise to be said _per contra_. For if Victor's whole
+nature glowed in the fire of friendship, so did his heart mount higher
+and higher, and burn to lay itself open,--he still wrestled with it,
+and still it was silent,--it loved boundlessly,--it lifted itself up as
+if by an invisible power,--at last it burst asunder,--his bosom opened
+wide as before God,--and now, beloved, look in, but forgive him all!
+
+He was still in this inward conflict, when the moon, which had gone up
+behind their backs, projected their two shadowy knee-pieces before
+them.--He was reminded, by Emanuel's outstretched shadow, of a passage
+in his letter,[174] and of his sickly life and early passing away....
+This clove open his inner being; he gently turned his Emanuel round
+toward the moon, now pouring down its radiance, and told him and showed
+him everything,--not merely his love, however, but his whole history,
+his whole soul, all his faults, all his follies,--everything; he was,
+at this moment, as eloquent as an angel, and full as great; his heart
+undulated in the melting glow of love; and the more he said, the more
+he wanted to have to say.
+
+No sublimer and more blessed hour strikes on this earth than that in
+which a man erects himself, exalted by virtue, softened by love, and
+despises all dangers, and shows a friend how it is with his heart. This
+trembling, this dissolving, this exaltation, is more precious than the
+itching of vanity to disguise itself in idle refinings. But perfect
+sincerity comports only with virtue. Let the man in whom suspicion and
+darkness dwell by all means apply to his bosom night-screws and
+night-bolts,--let the bad man spare us his opening of coffins,--and
+whoso has no heaven's door about him to open, let him keep the
+hell-gate shut!
+
+Emanuel felt the divine or motherly joy which a friend experiences at
+the virtue and improvement of a friend, and forgot in his joy the
+different occasions of it.
+
+Reluctantly do I tear myself away for a night from this virtuous pair.
+May I get many more days of Maienthal to paint, and may Victor spend
+there many days more!
+
+
+
+
+                           15. DOG-POST-DAY.
+
+                              The Parting.
+
+
+Ah, he goes this very day! The emotions and conversations which we have
+described had shattered too severely the tender casing which enclosed,
+as a tulip does the bee, Emanuel's fair spirit; he rose pale and
+languid; and the blind one was the happiest, who saw neither this
+paleness nor the white handkerchief which he, during the night, instead
+of staining with tears, had stained with blood. He himself had still
+the pale evening red of yesterday's joy on his face; but this very
+indifference to the gradual extinguishing of his days, this growing
+feebleness and faintness of tone in his conversation, caused Victor to
+turn away his eyes from him whenever they had for some time rested upon
+him. Emanuel looked down calm as an eternal sun on the autumn of his
+bodily life; nay, the more the sand fell from his life's hourglass, so
+much the more clearly did he look through the empty glass. And yet the
+earth was to him a beloved place, a fair meadow for our earliest plays
+of childhood; and he still hung upon this mother of our first life with
+the love wherewith the bride spends the evening full of childish
+remembrances on the bosom of her beloved mother, before on the morrow
+she goes to meet the bridegroom of her heart.
+
+Victor reproached himself with every drop of blood shed by Emanuel, and
+resolved to go to-day, because this Psyche, with her great wings, could
+no longer stir herself in her web without tearing it. In Emanuel's eyes
+there shone an inexpressible love for his sympathizing scholar. He
+began of himself to speak of his dying-day, in order to comfort him,
+and represented to him that he could not go hence till after a year. He
+based his enthusiastic prediction on two grounds;--first, that most of
+his male relatives had died on the selfsame day and in the selfsame
+climacteric[175] of life; secondly, that several consumptive patients
+before him had read in their diseased breast, as in a magic mirror,
+their last day. Victor disputed him; he showed that the foretelling of
+one's last appearance, as if the hectic man could easily feel
+beforehand, from the regular and gradual failing of the vital energy,
+the last step or freezing-point, was false, because feelings of the
+future in the present were contradictions (_in adjecto_), and because
+in the midst of life we could as little have a presentiment of the
+arrival of death as in our waking hours we can (notwithstanding a
+parallel gradation of steps in this case also) that of sleep. Victor
+represented all this to him; and yet he did not fairly believe it
+himself; he was overmastered by the lofty man who could announce his
+entrance into the shadow of death as calmly and confidently as an
+entrance of the moon into the shadow of the earth.... We will forgive
+the sick man, and not hold ourselves wiser than he is, because he is
+more enthusiastic than we.--Victor was most consoled by Emanuel's
+notion that his deceased father would appear to him for the first time
+just before his death.
+
+Victor lingered, and tried not to linger; forbade, as physician,
+Emanuel's talking, in order to make the excuse to himself of a harmless
+postponement, and became more and more troubled, for the very reason
+that he cared little to speak himself.--How canst thou, good Victor,
+this very day hurry away from him, from this angel, who will perhaps
+disappear over the next grave?--It must be a sore thing for thee, since
+it is already so hard to quit a Maienthal full of blossoms, a blind one
+full of soft tones; painful is here the last pressure of hands, Victor,
+and sweet every delay!
+
+He resolved to take leave at night, because a parting in the morning
+begets too long a sadness, and the place in the heart from which the
+beloved object was torn away continues bleeding all day long. Emanuel
+would of course, at evening, have betaken himself to the seminary, as
+he did yesterday; then would Victor, before the blind one, whom he
+would beg for the saddest melody in the world, be able to let his full
+eyelids, with which he always had to go out in order to relieve the
+anguish, stream down to his heart's content.
+
+When at evening he had eaten his last meal, and the evening-bell began,
+his heart felt as if the breast had been lifted away from it, and
+needle-points of ice were blown upon it.[176] Full of love, he clasped
+the blind youth, whom he was not permitted to recognize as the playmate
+of his childhood, and who with his tones had given more raptures than
+he had in this night of his blindness received in return; and he let
+tears have their way, whose twofold, perhaps threefold, source Emanuel
+did not guess; for the sight of these eyes, which were nevermore to be
+opened, awoke in him now, since Clotilda's wish for their healing, much
+more sorrow. Emanuel he still begged, with a voice that hurried away
+over the incidental meaning, to accompany him a short distance, till
+Maienthal should be out of sight.
+
+Out in the darkling and still country, all his sorrows lingered in his
+breast beside their sighs. "When the moon glimmers in upon this valley
+of blossoms," thought he, "I shall have left it for a long time." Only
+the altar-lights, the stars, burned in the great temple. He proposed to
+himself to part with his teacher on the mountain where their union had
+taken place; but he went up by circuitous ways,--Emanuel gladly
+following whithersoever he led,--in order during the circuit to
+overmaster his taciturnity and his tears.
+
+But they arrived at the foot of the weeping-birch, and grief still held
+possession of his eye and his voice. "Ah!" thought he, "how great and
+glad was the first night here, and how painful is this!" They reclined
+on the earth beside each other on the grassy bank, solitary, silent,
+sad, before the darkly glimmering universe. Victor could hear the
+labored breathing of the diseased breast, and the future grave on this
+mountain seemed to open at his side. Oh! if it is bitter to stand by
+the bed wherein a loved and fading countenance lies with the hues of
+death, far more bitter is it, in the midst of the scenes of health,
+behind the erect form of the dear one, to hear the grave-digger Death
+softly at his work, and to think, as often as the loved face looks
+joyful, "Ah, be still more joyful! in a short time he will have gnawed
+round the roots of thy life, and thou wilt have passed away with thy
+joys and with mine!"--But ah! there is indeed no friend, man or woman,
+with whom we should not be obliged to think the same!--
+
+He knew not why Dahore was so long silent.--He foresaw not that the
+moon would illumine the mountain sooner than the valley. The moon, that
+Pharos on the coast of the second world, now encircled men with pale
+fields, taken from dreams, with wan, gleaming meadows born of a
+super-terrestrial perspective, and the Alps and woods it resolved into
+immovable mists; _above_ the hemisphere of earth stood deep the
+Lethe-flood of slumber, _below_ the green crust stood the dead sea, and
+two loving men lived between the wide domains of sleep and death.... At
+this moment Victor thought to himself, indeed, still more keenly,
+"Here, beside this birch-tree, under this cold sod, will _his_
+crumbling breast be forever hidden, and his heart will bleed no more;
+but ah! it will beat no more." He thought, indeed, upon gloomy
+resemblances, as the _immovable_ stars appeared to go _up_ and _down_,
+merely because the playing _earth_ turned itself about them, now
+_showing_ and now _hiding_ them; he turned, indeed, his melancholy
+glance away from the _ignes fatui_, that, gliding over valleys, danced
+only on the solemn darkness and on the graves, and which described
+round a solitary powder-house their deceptive circles.----
+
+But still he was silent, and thought, "Ah, well! we have each other
+yet."
+
+But then it was too much for his bleeding heart when the flute-wails of
+the blind one stole out from the solitary house into the night, and
+passed over the mountain and over the future grave.--Then were voices
+given to the sighs and death-bells to the future, and his sadness grew
+too oppressive, as he thought, amidst the flute-murmurs, how this
+unique, this irreplaceable man, who cherished so much love for him in
+his great heart, was going hence never to reappear.--Ah! and when,
+besides, just at this moment, Emanuel, who had been lying beside him
+silently lost in gazing on the heavens and like a departed one, changed
+his position on account of his painful and oppressed breathing, but
+with a countenance whose serenity was undisturbed by the pains in his
+breast, then a cold hand glided into Victor's swollen heart and turned
+itself about therein, and his blood curdled on it, and he said, without
+the power of looking upon him, in faint, supplicating, broken accents,
+"Do not die in a year, my dear Emanuel,--do not wish to die!"
+
+The genius of night had stood till now, invisibly, before Emanuel, and
+poured high raptures into his bosom, but no passions; and he said: "We
+are not alone,--my soul feels the passing by of its kindred, and lifts
+itself up,--_under_ the earth is sleep, _above_ the earth is dream, but
+between sleep and dream I see luminous eyes move along like stars,--a
+cool breath comes from the sea of eternity over the glowing earth,--my
+heart mounts up, and will break away from life,--all around me is
+as great as if God passed through the night.--Spirits! grasp my
+spirit,--it climbs to your embrace,--and bear it up yonder...."
+
+Victor turned round and looked imploringly into the beautiful, joyous,
+tearless countenance: "Thou _wilt_ die?"
+
+Emanuel's ecstasy soared above life: "The dark streak in the next
+world is only a meadow of flowers,[177]--suns shine to light us
+onward,--flying heavens come to meet us with spring-breezes. With only
+empty graves the earth flies round the sun; for her dead stand remote
+on brighter suns."--
+
+"Emanuel?" said Victor, in a questioning tone, weeping aloud, and with
+a voice of the most fervent yearning,--and the flute-notes sank
+sorrowfully into the broad night,--"Emanuel?"
+
+Emanuel, returning to himself, looked on him, and said, calmly: "Yes,
+my beloved!--I can no more accustom myself to the earth; the water-drop
+of life has become flat and shallow,--I can no longer move round
+therein,--and my heart yearns to be among the great men who have left
+this drop behind them.--O beloved, listen, I pray,"--and here he
+pressed to soreness the heart of his Victor,--"and hear this heavy
+breath going. See, I pray, this shattered body, this thick casing,--how
+it wraps round my spirit, and obstructs its passage.--
+
+"See, here my spirit and thine cleave frozen to the ice-cake, and
+yonder the night opens all her heavens, reposing one behind the other;
+yonder in the blue, glimmering abyss dwells all the greatness which has
+disrobed itself on the earth, all the truth that we guess, all the
+goodness that we love.--
+
+"See, how still is all up there in immensity,--how softly the worlds
+move, how silently the suns glow! The great Eternal reposes as a
+fountain, with his overflowing, infinite love, in the midst of them,
+refreshing and tranquillizing all; and around God lies no grave."
+
+Here Emanuel, as if raised by an infinite blessedness, stood up and
+looked lovingly toward Arcturus, who still hung under the zenith of
+heaven, and said, directing his words toward the broad deep of
+brilliancy: "Ah, how inexpressibly do I yearn to come up to you! Ah,
+break in pieces, old heart, and hold me not so long in these bonds!"
+
+"Die, then, great soul," said Victor, "and take thy way up yonder; but
+break with thy death my little heart also, and keep by thee the poor
+one who cannot forsake thee nor do without thee."
+
+The flute had ceased; the two friends had sunk into each other's arms
+to end their farewell. "Dear, beloved, never-to-be-forgotten one," said
+Emanuel, "thou movest me too deeply; but when, a year hence, I go up
+from this mountain, then shalt thou stand by me, and see how man is
+released from his bonds. Thy tears will be my last earthly pangs; but I
+shall say, what I say now, We part by night, but we meet again by day."
+And so he went.
+
+Victor had gently disengaged himself from the childlike lips,--he
+sought not to follow him on his night-track,--slowly he went along by
+one vast sleep.--Often he turned round and followed with eyes full of
+falling tears the falling stars over Maienthal; and at four of the
+morning he arrived with a heavenly soul at St. Luna, and entered the
+garden full of old scenes, and laid down in the familiar arbor his
+glowing head and his subdued heart in the dew of the morning for a
+cooling repose.
+
+O rest thou, rest thou!--ah! sleep only, either on the earth or under
+the earth, can still the ever-agitated bosom of man....[178]
+
+
+
+
+16. DOG-POST-DAY.
+
+The Potato-form-Cutter.--Drag-chains in St. Luna.--Wax
+   Embossments.--Chess according to the _Regula Falsi_.--The Thistle
+   of Hope.--Escort to Flachsenfingen.
+
+
+One would certainly want to sleep in one's clothes, like old Fritz, so
+soon as ever one came to understand that in his shirt he is beset and
+attacked, as Victor and I sometimes are, by the vampires of midnight
+melancholy. They stay away when one sits up and has all his clothes on;
+especially do boots and hat retain for us the feeling of day in the
+greatest degree.--
+
+A warm hand lifted up Victor's bedewed head from the
+sleeping-board,[179] and directed it towards the whole surging flood of
+morning-light. His eyes opened (as always) with indescribable mildness,
+and without night-clouds, before Agatha, and beamed on her with full
+radiance. But she hurried him away with his radiance out of the leafy
+bedchamber; for he must look himself up a dressing-comb and a
+morning-blessing, and, secondly, the table-couch was to be a tea-table
+for Clotilda, who liked to take _warm_ drinks in _cool_ places.
+
+--And so he stands out there between parsonage and palace in
+mid-morning. All seemed to him to have been just built and painted
+during his journey; for all that dwelt therein seemed to have changed
+and made him melancholy. "The parents in there," he said to himself,
+"have no son, my friend has no sweetheart, and I--no tranquil heart."
+And now, when at last he entered the house, and became once more a
+bright triumphal arch of the loving family-circle,--when he was
+compelled to contemplate with sympathetic and yet enlightened eyes the
+tender illusions of the parents, the groundless hopes of his friend,
+and the coming up of stormy days,--then stood one fixed tear for the
+future in his eye; and it grew not less when his adoptive mother would
+justify it by tender glances.... Partly, however, this veil was wafted
+over his soul merely from the preceding night, whose glimmering scenes
+were separated from him only by a short interval of sleep; for a night
+spent in the watches of emotion always ends with a melancholy forenoon.
+
+The Chaplain was just making butter-vignettes; I mean, he was cutting,
+with no other etching-tool than a penknife, and into no other
+copperplate except potatoes, printers' tail-pieces and quadrats, which
+were to be stamped on the July butter by way of ornament. One might
+have supposed that Victor would have helped himself out greatly by
+having wit enough to remark that the _old printed things_ were, to be
+sure, quite worthy of long books upon them, and long universal German
+literary reviews of the books, but of no human thought, and were ten
+times more unenjoyable than these _newest_ butter-_incunabula_;[180]
+for, if there could be anything wretcheder than the world's history
+(i. e. the history of rulers), whose contents consisted of wars, as the
+theatre-journal of _other_ puppets does of cudgellings, it could only
+be the history of _litterateurs_ and printers.[181] This, too, must
+have stood him in stead,--that he was, finally, philosophical, and
+demanded that man should be called neither a _laughing_ nor a
+_reasoning_, but a _prinking_ animal; to which remark the Chaplain's
+lady added nothing, except the application of it to her daughters.
+
+But in men of his sort, sadness, satire, and philosophy have place
+beside each other. To the potato-medal-coiner and the Chaplainess, who
+reckoned all women on earth among her daughters, and pronounced similar
+castigatory sermons against them all, he described his journey with as
+many satires and rasures as were needful for both parties; but when he
+heard the wishes of the family expressed that his Lordship might have a
+happy journey back with the beloved son of the Prince, and the
+intelligence that the Regency-Counsellor had already everything packed
+up to start for the city any hour that he might choose, then had Victor
+nothing to do but to take the secretive tear-ducts in his eye-sockets
+out of the way.
+
+But whither? Into the garden! That was not well-considered. Flamin
+followed, and they arrived together at the embowered closet in the
+presence of the tea-drinkers. Never did its branches overshadow a more
+embarrassed face, softer eyes, fuller looks, and livelier or lovelier
+dreams than Victor carried with him beneath them. He thought of
+Clotilda as now a wholly new being, and thought, therefore,--as he knew
+not whether she loved him,--very stupidly. Man, when he has climbed
+over the mountain, always regards the coming hill as nothing; Flamin
+had been his mountain, and Clotilda was his hill.--In all the shallows
+of conversation, where one is already half stranding or sinking, there
+is no grander ship's-pump than a story which one has to tell. Give me
+embarrassment, and the largest circle, and only _one_ disaster,--that
+is, the anecdote of it, which no one knows but myself,--and I will soon
+save myself. Victor therefore brought out his, life-preserver,--that
+is, his log-book,--from which he made for the bower a practical
+extract. I confess, a newspaper-writer might have falsified more, might
+have been guilty of more sins of _commission_, but hardly of more sins
+of _omission_.
+
+He gave himself, I fancy, a lift again with the Chaplainess, and
+injured himself unquestionably with Clotilda,--however much, out of
+good-will towards his hearers, and too strong a hatred of the court, he
+offended against Clotilda's satire-embargo in her letter,--when,
+without reflecting, too, that maidens love only the jest, not the
+jesters, he represented the benefit-drama of the Princess, not on the
+sublime side, as I did, but on the comic side. Clotilda smiled, and
+Agatha laughed.
+
+But when he named the name of Emanuel, and his house, and his mountain,
+then did friendship and memory diffuse over the fairest eye above which
+an eyebrow-arch, drawn by a line of beauty, ever yet flowed, a soft
+glimmer which wanted, every moment, to grow to a tear of joy. But it
+had to become one of another nature, when, in answer to the question
+about his health which Clotilda hopefully put to him as an adept in
+science, Victor was compelled to give the (faintly paraphrased) history
+of his nocturnal bleeding. He could not conceal the pang of sympathy,
+nor could Clotilda conquer it. O ye two good souls! what sore wounds
+will your hearts yet receive from your great friend!
+
+Whither could she now turn her loving and sorrowing eye, but to her
+good brother Flamin, towards whom her demeanor, in consequence of the
+double constraint which her silence and his interpretations imposed
+upon her, had been hitherto so indescribably mild?--As, now, Victor saw
+all this with such wholly different eyes,--as he stood before his poor
+friend, who with his present happiness was perhaps accumulating the
+poisonous nourishment of his future jealousy, and gazed openly and
+fixedly into the firm countenance which some time bitter days might
+rend with agony,--and as, generally, _past_ or _future_ sorrows of
+another took a stronger hold of him than _present_ ones, because fancy
+had him more in its power than the senses,--in this state of things, he
+could not for a moment assert the mastery over his eyes, but they bent
+their look, encircled with compassionate tears, tenderly on his friend.
+Clotilda was embarrassed about the resting-place of his look; so was he
+too, because man is less ashamed of the most vehement signs of hatred
+than of the smallest signs of love. Clotilda understood not the
+coquettish double art of throwing others into embarrassment or drawing
+them out of it; and the good Agatha always confounded the latter with
+the former.... "Ask him what ails him, brother!" said Agatha to
+Flamin....
+
+The latter led him out with like good intention behind the nearest
+gooseberry-bushes, and asked him in his firm way, which always held an
+assertion as a question,--
+
+"Something has happened to thee?"
+
+"Just come this way!" said Victor, and pulled him along behind some
+higher Spanish walls[182] of foliage.
+
+"Nothing has happened to me," he began, at last, with brimming
+eye-sockets and smiling features,--"nothing more than that I have been
+a fool for some twenty-six years" (that was his age). "I know thou art
+unfortunately a jurist, and perhaps a worse oculist than I myself am,
+and hast, perhaps, read very little in Herr Janin.[183]--Am I right?"
+
+Flamin's shaking of his head meant something more than No.
+
+"Very naturally; but if thou hadst, thou couldst have it from himself,
+or from the translation by Selle, very finely shown, that not merely
+the lachrymal gland secretes our tear-drops, but also the crystalline
+body,[184] the Meibomian[185] glands, the lachrymal caruncle,[186]
+and--our afflicted heart, I add to the rest.--Nevertheless, of these
+aqueous globules, which are made for the sorrows of poor, poor mortals,
+not more than (if things go rightly) four ounces are filtered in
+twenty-four hours.... But, my dear one, the fact is just this,--that
+things do not go rightly, especially with me; and it vexes me to-day,
+not that thou hast never peeped into Herr Janin, but that thou dost not
+observe my confounded, cursed, stupid way."
+
+"What one?"
+
+"Yes, indeed,--what one? but I mean this of to-day,--namely, that
+my eyes--thou mayst boldly ascribe it merely to a too feeble
+_tear-siphon_, under which head Petit comprehends all absorbing
+tear-ducts--run over, when, e. g., any one does me an injustice, or
+when I merely desire anything too strongly, or imagine to myself an
+approaching pleasure, or only, in fact, a strong sensation, or human
+life, or the mere weeping itself." ...
+
+His good-natured eye stood full of water as he said it, and justified
+all.
+
+"Dear Flamin, I wish I had been a lady, or a Moravian, or a
+player;--truly, if I wanted to make the spectators believe I was going
+about it (namely, weeping), it would be actually a fact, too, on the
+spot."--
+
+And here he fell softly and fondly, with tears which had an excuse for
+flowing, upon the beloved breast.... But for the viper-cure and
+iron-cure of his manliness he needed nothing but a "Hm!" and a shrug of
+the whole body; thereupon the youths went back as men to the arbor.
+
+There was nothing left there: the girls had stolen away to the meadows,
+where nothing was to be avoided, except high grass and bedewed shadows.
+The empty arbor was the best absorbing tear-siphon for his eyes; nay, I
+gather from reports of the epistolary Spitz that he was vexed. As the
+sister came back by-and-by alone, his companion was vexed too. In fact,
+if somehow or other my hero--which would be a misfortune for me and
+him--should in time fall in love with Clotilda, then will the heroine
+make us both warm enough,--him in acting, me in copying,--for the very
+reason that she herself will _not_ be warm, because she has neither
+superfluous warmth nor superfluous coldness, but always the alternating
+temperature which changes with the subject of conversation, but not
+with the speaker; because she takes away from a tenderly disposed
+fellow-man all pleasure in praising her, as she pays out no tithe
+thereof, or at least in offending her, as she issues no letters of
+indulgence; and because one really, in his agony, assumes at last that
+one can commit no other sins against her except such as are sins
+against the Holy Ghost. Jean Paul, who has been in such cases, and has
+often stood for whole years in one spot before such mountain-fortresses
+with his storming-ladders and labarums and trumpeters, and, instead of
+the garrisons, taken _himself_ off by an honorable retreat,--this Paul,
+I say, can form a conception of what an amount of parchment, time, and
+printer's ink may have to be used up in the case of Sebastian _contra_
+Clotilda, before we get things even to a _war-footing_. In fact, with a
+perfectly _rational_ woman a man never feels himself quite well; and
+only with a merely fine, fanciful, ardent, capricious one is he truly
+at home. One like Clotilda can make the best man, from mere distress
+and respect, frosty, stupid, and enraptured; and in most cases there
+comes in the additional misfortune, that the poor, worn-out, fond fool,
+by whom such an earthly angel absolutely will not let herself be
+worshipped, as the Apocalyptic one would not by the disciple John, can
+still seldom muster courage to say to the angel,--somewhat as one might
+to an angel of an opposite nature with the kingdoms of the world,
+demanding to be worshipped,--"Take thyself out of my sight!" Paul
+always in such cases takes himself away.----
+
+Victor did not do this; he absolutely now could not get away from the
+house, i. e. from the village. The summer days seemed to him to rest in
+St. Luna, softly breathing, fragrant, blissful; and he was going to be
+cast out of this softly straying gondola into the slave-ship of the
+Court,--out of the milk-house of the Parsonage into the princely
+arsenic-house,--out of the _kindergarten_ of household love into the
+ice-field of court love. That was a sore thing to him here in the
+arbor,--and so sweet a thing in Tostato's shop!--When man's wishes and
+situations exchange places, he accuses the situations, not the wishes.
+He could laugh at himself for it, he said, but he had a hundred reasons
+for lingering in St. Luna from one day to another: he was so much
+disgusted now with his intention of pleasing a man (the Prince) from
+any other motive than love; it was still more improbable that he should
+himself please than that he should be pleased; he would rather humor
+his own whims than those of crowned heads, and he knew for certain that
+in the first month he should tell the Minister von Schleunes satirical
+things to his very face, and in the second even the Prince; and, in
+fact, now in midsummer he should just be fit to act the complete
+court-knave, whereas in winter, &c.
+
+Beside these hundred reasons, he had still weaker ones which he did not
+at all mention,--for instance, some such as these: He would gladly be
+about Clotilda, because he must necessarily, as it were, to justify his
+conduct,--but which, then, my dear, thy past or thy future?--disclose
+to her his knowledge about her consanguinity to his friend. To this
+disclosure there was wanting, what in Paris is dearest, _place_,--and
+then, too, the exordium. Clotilda was nowhere to be met alone.
+Connoisseurs say that every secret one tells to one of the fair sex is
+a sticking-plaster which attaches him to her, and often begets a second
+secret: was it for some such reason that Victor was so eager to
+contrive a way of showing to Clotilda his acquaintance with her
+sisterly relation?--
+
+He stayed day after day, as, besides, the butter-week[187] of the
+marriage must go by first. He had already marriage-medals in his
+pocket. But he never could see Clotilda except a second at a time;
+and, according to Bonnet, one needs half a second for a clear
+idea,--according to Hooke, a whole one, in fact. Therefore, before he
+could form a complete conception of this still goddess, she was always
+gone.
+
+At last more serious arrangements were made, not for departure, but for
+forming the purpose of it.... The sweetest minutes of a visit are those
+which once more postpone its close; the sweetest of all, those in which
+one already has cane or fan in hand, and yet does not go. Such minutes
+now encircled our Fabius of love; softer eyes said to him, "Hurry not!"
+warmer hands drew him back, and the mother's tear asked him, "Wilt thou
+rob me of my Flamin so soon as to-morrow?"
+
+"By no means," he answered, and kept his seat. Did not, I ask, the
+Chaplainess thrust for his sake her lingual executioner's sword into
+its sheath, because there was nothing he so hated as loud or silent
+defamations of a sex which, more unhappy than ours, sees itself
+maltreated by two sexes at once? For he often took maidens by the hand,
+and said: "Woman's faults, particularly _evil_ reports, moodiness, and
+sensitiveness, are _knot-holes_, which in the _green_ tree please us
+even into the honeymoon[188] as fine marble-veined _circles_, but
+which, in the _dry_, in the marriage-furniture, when the plug has
+shrunk and fallen out, gape open as ugly holes." Agatha now screwed her
+sewing-cushion to his writing-table and kissed him, whether he chose to
+look pleasant or sullen; Even the Chaplain sought to sweeten for him,
+if not the last days, which he dreamed away at his house, yet at least
+the last _nights_, for which purpose he needed nothing but a drum and a
+foot. The most fiery nocturnal witch-dances of the mice the Chaplain
+interdicted with his heel, that they might not wake up his guest; that
+is to say, he kept up against the foot-board of the bed from time to
+time a moderate cannonading, which knelled into the ear-trumpets of the
+dancers the more in proportion as it startled the ears of humanity.
+Against the Euler's knight's-moves of the rats he took the field with
+only a mallet, wherewith, breaking in like a day of judgment on their
+pleasure-parties and hunting-parties, he merely thumped once or twice
+on a drum, extemporized out of the bed-quilt.
+
+Matthieu was invisible, and, as courtiers mimic princes in everything,
+was parodying the nuptial days of his prince at least by little nuptial
+_hours_ of his own. The powder which issued out of cannons and the
+cornucopias of the firework-makers, the _vivat_ which was prayed from
+pulpits and shouted from taverns, and the expenses one incurred for all
+this, were, I think, so considerable, that the greatest prince need not
+have been ashamed to illustrate therewith his marriage and his--ennui.
+Coldness has forever a _speaking-trumpet_, and sensitiveness an
+_ear-trumpet_. The arrival of an unloved princely corpse or bride is
+heard of at the polar circles; on the contrary, when we inferiors fill
+our graves or our arms with loved beings, there fall only a few,
+unheard tears, disconsolate or blissful.
+
+Flamin pined for the session-table, whose labors were now soon to
+begin, and he could not comprehend this delay.... At last, for once,
+and with all seriousness, the day of departure was fixed, the 10th of
+August; and I am sure Victor would not have been on the 14th still in
+St. Luna, had not the Devil on the 8th brought along a Tyrolese.
+
+It is the same fellow who day before yesterday made his entry among us
+at Scheerau, with a wax retinue which he had got together, half from
+the imperial states and half from among the literati, and with the wax
+hands of these twin brothers of man took money from our purse. It is
+stupid, that Spitz did not bring me the present dog's-day the day
+before yesterday; I could myself have asked the churl, who embossed, in
+St. Luna, Victor and the Chaplain in wax, what was the real name of
+Victor, and of Eymann, and of St. Luna itself. The result is, that I am
+still, with an allowable and biographical curiosity about this
+carpenter of men, who surrounds us with awful reflections of our little
+being, following on his heels.
+
+Victor must, therefore, again tarry; for he had himself and the
+Chaplain baked in wax, in order to give, in the first place, to the
+latter, who had a childish fondness for all casts, dolls, and puppets,
+and, secondly, to the family, who longed to quarter the waxen
+mock-Victor in his vacated chamber, a greater pleasure than to himself.
+For he had a horror of these flesh-colored shadows of himself. Even in
+childhood, among all ghost-stories, those of people who had seen
+themselves crept with the coldest hand over his heart. Often at
+evening, before going to bed, he surveyed his trembling body so long,
+that at last he detached it from himself, and saw it standing thus
+alone beside his self and gesticulating as a strange form; then he
+would lay himself down, quaking, with this strange form, in the grave
+of sleep, and the darkling soul felt itself like a Hamadryad, grown
+over by the pliant fleshy bark. Hence he felt deeply the difference and
+the long interval between his self and its bark, when he looked for
+some time on another's body, and still more deeply when he contemplated
+his own.
+
+He sat opposite the embossing-stool and the embossing-tools, but fixed
+his eyes on a book again, so as not to see the corporeal form, in which
+he carried himself round, distant and duplicated. The reason why he
+nevertheless could endure the reduplication of his face in the glass
+can only be, that he regarded the supernumerary in the glass either
+merely as a superficial portrait without cubic contents, or as the only
+archetype with which we compare other duplicates of our person.... Upon
+these points I can never speak, myself, without a certain tremor....
+
+The wax-copy of Victor, to express his majority, was arrayed in a _toga
+virilis_, an overcoat which the original had cast off; likewise the
+chamber which the living one vacated was cleared out. The Chaplain
+proposed to himself to place this cheap edition of Horion in the window
+when the better one was gone, in such a manner that all the school
+youth, who learned from the chorister manners and _mores_, should doff
+their hats to it when they came tearing out of the school-house.
+
+Now at last!--For Mat came. The wrung-out cheeks of the latter, and his
+whole body, which had been under the lemon-squeezers of night-feasts,
+gave evidence that he did not lie when he said the princely bridegroom
+looked even eight times wretcheder, and was prostrate with the gout. He
+added in his bitter way, which Victor little liked, that these pale
+great people had in fact no blood except the little they cupped from
+their subjects or what stuck to their hands, as insects carry no red
+blood about with them, save what they have sucked from other creatures.
+This reminded Victor of his medical duties to this prince. Either Mat's
+wasted form,--for immoral night-life makes features and complexion
+still more repulsive than the longest confinement to the sick-bed,--or
+the recollection of his Lordship's warnings, or both, made him
+quite as odious to our court-physician as the latter through his
+court-doctorship had become to him: this secret poison of Matthieu's,
+however, manifested itself, not by an abated, but by an increased,
+almost ironical courteousness. On the contrary, Mat and Flamin seemed
+to be more familiar with one another than ever.
+
+In the forenoon, after shaving, Victor jumped up without washing
+himself again, and immediately packed up his boot-jack, and burst the
+suspenders of his pantaloons, and bespoke additional hands to discharge
+his life-ballast, (on account of his miserable packing,) and then stow
+it again. For he always gave over the whole trusteeship of the lumber
+of our petty life's furniture to strange hands, and that with such a
+contempt for the trumpery and such a recklessness of expenditure,--I
+never mean, indeed, to calumniate my hero, but, notwithstanding,
+it is proved by Spitz that he never collated the current money of a
+gold-piece when he changed it into silver, nor ever beat down in trade
+a Jew, Roman, or Moravian,--to such a degree, I say, did he carry this,
+that the whole female Hanse in St. Luna cried, "What a fool!" and that
+the Chaplainess always in the market-square slipped herself into his
+place. But he was incorrigible, because he made the journey of life,
+and therefore the luggage of the journey, look so diminutive through
+his philosophic eyes, and because nothing made him blush like the least
+appearance of self-interest: he ran off from all arrangements,
+outriders, and stage-rehearsals, when they appeared on his account; he
+was ashamed of every pleasure which was not to be divided, at least
+into two bites, one for a fellow-eater; he said, the forehead of a
+Hospodar[189] must have assumed the hardness of his crown, for
+otherwise such a man could not possibly endure what often, merely on
+his behalf, was done by a whole county,--the music, the triumphal
+arches, the odes, the cries of joy in prose, and the frightful
+cannonades.
+
+He had now nothing more to discharge in St. Luna than a mere flat
+civility; for thus much may I well assert without vanity, that
+a hero whom I have chosen for mine will have, I trust, sufficient
+good-breeding to go to the Chamberlain Le Baut and say, "_Au revoir!_"
+Besides, to such state visits he must now accustom himself.
+
+Mat, too, was over there, that image of a Cupid with bristly, plucked,
+drooping wings, tossed to the Chamberlain's lady: the latter joked with
+him about those vacant looks, which betrayed the intermittent pulse of
+his love. Le Baut was playing chess with Mat,--Clotilda sat at her
+little work-table full of silk-flowers, in the midst of this noble
+trio.... Ye poor daughters! what people have you not often to welcome
+and hear through! To Clotilda, however, this family friend was nothing
+but a stuffed-out mummy, and she knew not whether he came or went.
+
+Sebastian, as adoptive son of Fortune, as heir of the paternal post of
+favorite, was to-day received at the Chamberlain's with uncommon
+civility. Verily, if the courtier shuns unfortunates because sympathy
+for their sufferings comes over him too heavily, so does he gladly seek
+the society of the fortunate, because he loves to participate in their
+joy. The Chamberlain, who even continued to bow before one who, in his
+fall from a throne, hung midway in the air, naturally bent himself
+still lower before one who was in the act of making the opposite
+passage.
+
+Victor joined the women, but with an eye that strayed away to the
+chess-board, in order, if he should be embarrassed, immediately to have
+at hand a pretext for changing his attention or taking his leave. It
+was ingenious: for every word which he or the women said was a move at
+chess; he was obliged to conceal his coldness toward the Le Baut, that
+is, toward the stepmother,--how much did she know that nothing graces a
+mother more than a perfect daughter?--and his _warmth_ toward the
+stepdaughter. The reader must not ask: "What warmth, then, could the
+old stepmother desire?" For in the higher ranks claims are not altered
+by blood-relationship or age; merely in the lower is this the case;
+hence I always fear that what I address to the daughter may weary the
+mother, and I always cast about, and rightly, when she comes, for a
+better thread of discourse. Victor easily concealed his _coldness_ by
+virtue of humanity, which, with him, so often degenerated into a
+good-natured flattery of immoral hopes; and when a woman wanted to have
+him fall in love with her, he would say: "I cannot really tell the good
+little lamb, 'I would rather not.'" His _warmth_ toward Clotilda he
+concealed--badly, not because it was too strong, but precisely because
+it was not yet enough so. It is natural: a young man of education can,
+if he will, conceal and bury in silence his _reciprocated_ love,
+without making a pulpit announcement, but an _unreturned_ love, one
+which he himself calls nothing more than mere regard, he lets blaze out
+from him without cover. For the rest, I beg the world to sit down and
+consider, that my hero has not the Devil in his skin or sixteen years
+over his head, but that he cannot possibly feel a love for a person who
+hangs a Moses' veil over her sentiments and over her charms. Love
+begins and rises, throughout, only on reciprocal love, and with the
+lovers' mutual finding-out of each other. He has merely regard, but a
+very great, a growing and anxious regard; in short, his regard is that
+cold pulsating point in the yolk of the heart--the metaphor is drawn
+from an egg--to which the least outward warmth, often after years,
+imparts growing life and Cupid's wings.
+
+He now at the work-table investigated Clotilda's warmth with the
+pyrometer; but I cannot go beside myself for joy, that he found, on a
+scale subdivided into the minutest parts, her warmth to have risen
+1/111 of a line. For he is off the track: I would sooner rely on
+Lavater's forehead-measurer than on the heart- and warmth-measurer of a
+love-seeking man, who confounds his interpretations with his
+observations, and accidents with intentions. His pyrometer may,
+however, be right; for towards good men one is, when bad ones are by,
+(consider only Mat,) warmer than usual.
+
+Let no one blame Herr Le Baut and Frau Le Baut for congratulating my
+hero on the good fortune of going to such a court, to see such a
+prince,--the greatest in Germany, said _he_,--to such a princess,--the
+loveliest in Germany, said _she_. Mat smiled between Yes and No. The
+old man went on with his chess, the old woman with her praise. Victor
+saw with contempt how little possible it would be, in the case of two
+such souls, who held the steps of the throne for a scale of being, and
+the glacier of the throne for an Olympus and an Empyraeum, and knew not
+where, except on this eminence, to find their happiness,--to give them
+better ideas of happiness, and worse ones of the eminence.
+Nevertheless, he was obliged to confess to Clotilda, who had on her
+face more than a No to the _eulogy_, that he negatived the whole of it
+as nobly as she. He therefore kneaded praise and blame together,
+according to an Horatian mixture, in order to make neither satirical
+nor flattering allusions to two dismissed court-people.
+
+"It is painful to me," said he, "that there are only pleasures there,
+and no occupations,--mere baskets of confectionery, and not a single
+work-bag, not to say no work-table like this one."
+
+"Do you think," asked Clotilda, with striking earnestness, "that all
+court-feasts pay for a single court-service?"
+
+"No," said he, "for one ought to be paid for the feasts themselves. I
+maintain there is nothing but drudgery there, and no enjoyment: all
+their amusements are only the illumination, the interlude, and the
+decorations, which please the player, who is thinking of his part, less
+than the spectator."
+
+"It is, at all events, good _to have been there_," said the old woman.
+
+"Certainly," said he; "for it is good not always to stay there."
+
+"But there are persons," said Clotilda, "who cannot make themselves
+happy there, simply because they do not love to be there."
+
+That was very fine and forbearing, but intelligible only to Victor's
+heart.
+
+"I would advise a fine enthusiast" (said he, and made no account, as
+usual, of the apparent contradiction between Victor's _life_ and
+Victor's _opinions_) "or a fiery poet to stay at home,--the _flights_
+of either, instead of _pas_, would be in court-life what an hexameter
+is in prose, which the critics cannot bear,--and to the soul with the
+softest sensibilities I would say, Be off with them! the _heart_ is
+there treated as a superfluous member, as in the six-fingered family in
+Anjou the sixth _finger_ is." ...
+
+The old woman shook her head quickly to the left.
+
+"And yet," he continued, "I would take all three for a month to court
+and make them unhappy, in order to make them wise."
+
+The Chamberlain's family could not accommodate themselves to Victor's
+style so well as my reader, who to my exceeding delight so cleverly
+distinguishes humor and the talent of looking at all sides of a thing
+from flattery and skepticism. Clotilda had slowly shaken her head at
+the last proposition. In fact, all battled to-day _for_ and _against_
+him, in that partial tone which women and relatives always assume
+towards a stranger, when an hour before they had carried on the same
+suit, but with a practical application, with their own kin.
+
+Victor, who had long been fearing: that he should become disconcerted,
+went off at last to where he had been so often looking,--to the
+chess-table, where they were playing with the greatest desire to--lose.
+The Chamberlain,--we all know how it was with him; he wrote nothing but
+commendatory letters for the whole world, and the sacramental cup would
+have been more to his taste, could he have drunk from it a _toast_ to
+some important man's health,--that personage only promoted as well as
+he could with the dry chess-statues another's success at the expense of
+his own; he was glad to lose, provided only Matthieu won. And then,
+too, he resembled those shamefaced souls who love to bestow their
+benefits secretly, and he could not find it in his heart to tell his
+adversary that he was securing him the victory; he took almost greater
+pains to conceal himself as a courtier than to _conquer himself_ as a
+Christian. Such a love ought, it would seem, to have been more warmly
+requited than by open malice; but Mat had the same object in view, and
+declined the victory which the other threw into his hands, like a real
+sharper. In vain did Le Baut devise the best moves for checkmating
+one's self. Mat matched him with still better ones, and threatened
+every minute to be checkmated too. And every one pities the poor
+Chamberlain, hunted about on the chess-board, and fearing, like a
+coquette, that he shall _not_ be conquered. It became at length, for a
+soft-souled eye, which certainly forgives the weak one sooner than the
+wicked one, no longer endurable; Victor, with a thousand excuses to the
+weak one and full of malice toward the malicious one, entered into the
+steeple-chase, and obliged the Page to accept his advice and his
+charitable subsidies, and to lay hold of military operations which he
+proposed of such worth, that the man with the office of Chamberlain's
+key, at last, in spite of his fears and in spite of the worst
+prospects,--lost the game. All present saw through all present, as
+princes do through each other in their public--playbills.
+
+He got at last his farewell audience, but very small solace. The fair
+form, beneath which all his ideals of beauty stood only as heraldic
+bearers and caryatides, was even colder than at the reception, and
+persisted in being only the echo of the parental courtesy. The only
+thing which still kept him up was a--thistle: namely, an optical one
+which had been sowed on the mosaic floor. That is to say, he took
+notice that Clotilda during the farewell avoided with her foot this
+flower-piece (which she certainly must have known) as if it were the
+original. In the evening he drew his chains of inferences, as they are
+taught in the universities; he engrafted upon this mock-thistle all the
+roses of his destiny. "She was certainly _distrait_, and why? I ask,"
+he said, speaking into his pillow; "for, besides, they have not yet
+detected my feelings over yonder," he asserted, as he laid himself on
+the second pillow. "O thou sweet eye that went down on the thistle,
+rise again in my sleep, and be the moon of my dreams!" said he, when he
+was already half-way into both. It was merely out of modesty that he
+thought he was not discovered, because he did not look on himself as
+remarkable enough to be observed.
+
+The 20th of August, 179-, was the great day when he took up his march
+to Flachsenfingen. Flamin had already trotted off at four o'clock in
+the afternoon, in order to avoid a leave-taking which he hated. But our
+Victor loved to bid farewell, and loved to tremble in the last silences
+of parting. "O ye poor, egoistic mortals!" he said,--"besides; this
+polar life is but so bald and cold; besides, we stand weeks and years
+near each other without stirring with the heart anything better than
+our blood,--only two or three glowing moments hiss and go out on the
+glaciers of life,--why do you still avoid everything that draws you out
+of your commonplace, and that reminds you how man loves? No! and if I
+went to the bottom, and if I could thenceforward no longer console
+myself, I would still, with bare heart and with all my wounds bleeding,
+dissolved and sinking, I would still press to my bosom the beloved
+being who must leave me, and would still say, It does me good!" Cold,
+self-seeking, comfortable persons avoid leave-taking, just as unpoetic
+ones of too intense sensibilities do; women, on the contrary, who
+alleviate all their sorrows by talking, and people of poetic
+temperament, who relieve all theirs by fantasying, court it.
+
+At six o'clock in the evening,--for it was only a skip to
+Flachsenfingen,--when the cattle came home, he sallied forth,
+accompanied by the whole family. On his more fortunate arm--mine has to
+bestir itself only for the good of science--hung the Britoness, and on
+his left Agatha; to the sister the poor house-poodle (Apollonia) had
+buckled herself, who thought, nevertheless, she might touch and enjoy,
+despite the sisterly interpolation and mediating spirit, the dear
+Doctor. So do the sparks of love, like the electric and magnetic
+element, dart through a medium of twenty interposed bodies. A
+philosopher, who sits down and considers that our fingers come not, in
+fact, a thumb nearer to the beloved soul, whether only the globe of the
+brain or that of the earth lie between them and it, will of course say,
+"All very natural!" Hence this sedentary philosopher explains why
+maidens half-love at the same time the male acquaintances of their
+beloved,--why the cane-chair of Shakspeare, the clothes-drawer
+of Frederick II., the bob-wig of Rousseau, content our yearning
+hearts.----
+
+But no one, except the queen-bee of this streaming swarm, wanted to go
+back again. "Only just as far as the six trees," said Agatha. When they
+had arrived at these frontier posts and boundary-trees of to-day's
+pleasure, there were seven of them, and there was a general agreement
+that _they_ were not meant, and they must go farther. The one who is
+escorted grows generally more and more nervous, and the escort more and
+more delighted, the longer it lasts. "Do let us go as far as that
+ploughman!" said the sharp-sighted Britoness. But at last our hero
+observed, that this Pillar of Hercules of their journey was itself a
+moving column, and that the ploughman was only a wayfarer. "The best
+thing is," said he, and turned about, "for me to go back, and not start
+till to-morrow." The Chaplain said: "As far as the old palace" (i. e.
+there was still _one_ wall of it remaining); "besides, I usually go
+there evenings!" But beyond this frontier fort of the loveliest of
+evenings the chattering column deceptively extended its march, and the
+eyes were forgotten for the ears. As, consequently, in these boundary
+disputes, one main article after another was broken by separate
+articles, there was really nothing further to be done, except to make
+the following attempt. "Only so far did I mean to have you go," said
+Victor;--"now you must keep on with me and spend the night at the
+apothecary's." "In fact," said the Chaplain's wife, coolly, "we'll go
+along together till sundown; we surely are not going to turn our backs
+upon this lovely sun." And certainly the evening had kindled nothing
+but _feux-de-joie_ in the sun, in the clouds, on the earth, and on the
+water.
+
+On the hill they saw already the spires of the city; the sun, that
+chosen turnstile of the escort, poured out of his deep hiding-place his
+gold-trailing purple streams over the beds of shadow. There, on the
+hill, as the sun vanished, Victor folded his arms round the married
+couple, and said, "O, make yourselves as happy as you do me, and return
+to your home in gladness!"--and then he took the sisters to his
+enraptured heart, and said, "Good, good night! I love you!"--and then
+he saw them all going back with their hidden sighs and tears; and then
+he called out, "Truly, I shall soon come back; it is really only a jump
+from one place to the other"; and then he cried after them, "I shall be
+a poor devil, if we are separated!"--and then his heavy eye followed
+them through all branches and hollows, and only when the loving company
+had sunk into the last valley, as into a grave, did he close his eyes
+and think on the ceaseless separations of man....
+
+At last he opened his eyes toward the outspread, obscured city, and
+thought: "Amidst that raised-work, in which men nestle with their
+little life, thy little days, too, are shut in,--this is the veiled
+birthplace of thy future tears, thy future raptures;--ah! with what
+eyes shall I look down again, years hence, over this misty
+environment,--and ... I am a fool! are, then, 2,300 houses standing
+only on my account?"
+
+_Postscript_. This sixteenth post-day the Mining-Superintendent has
+concluded in regular order at the end of June.
+
+
+                        FOURTH INTERCALARY DAY,
+                                  AND
+                      PREFACE TO THE SECOND PART.
+
+I am going to weld Intercalary Day and Preface together. Therefore,
+unless there is to be mere trifling with the matter of the Preface, the
+Second Part must be here, in some measure at least, touched upon. It
+deserves to be noticed by critics, that an author who in the beginning
+has before him for his domain eight pages of white paper--just as,
+according to Strabo, the territory of Rome was eight leagues
+broad--gets on by degrees so far, and peoples the scribbled paper
+with so many Greek colonists,--for such our German characters
+are,[190]--that at last he has often marched through and settled a
+whole alphabet. This puts him into a condition to begin the Second
+Part. My second is, as I know for certain, much better than the first,
+although it is, to be sure, ten times worse than the third. I shall be
+amply rewarded, if my work is the occasion of one review more being
+made in the world; nor can I conceive of anything, unless it be this
+very thought, that books must be written, so that the learned notices
+of them may go on, which could keep an author up to the unspeakable
+labor of standing all day at the inkstand, and dyeing whole pounds
+of paper-rags _Berlin-blue_.... And now let this cool, serious,
+_hocus-pocus_ of a Preface--an expression which Tillotson maintains to
+be an abridgment of the Catholic formula, _hoc est corpus_--suffice for
+good reviewers and universities.
+
+I return to that which I properly meant by this whole episode. I have
+conceived the idea, namely, of not only announcing my intention to give
+the extra leaflets and side-shoots wherewith the Intercalary Days are
+to be filled up, in alphabetical order,--for disorder is the death of
+me,--but also to make a beginning here on the spot, and continue as far
+as the letter I.
+
+
+         INTERCALARY--AND SIDE-SHOOTS, ALPHABETICALLY ARRANGED.
+
+                                   A.
+
+Age of Women.--Lombardus (L. 4. Sent. dist. 4) and Saint Augustin (l.
+22. de Civit. c. 15) prove that we all rise from the dead at that age
+at which Christ rose, namely, in the thirty-second year and third
+month. Accordingly, as in the whole of heaven there is no
+quadragenarian to be found, a child will be as old there as Nestor,
+namely, thirty-two years and three months. Knowing this, any one will
+highly esteem the fine modesty of women, who after the thirtieth year
+give themselves out (like relics) to be older than they are; for it
+would be enough, if a quadragenarian, or one of eight-and-forty years,
+should make herself out as old as good Rhine wine, or, at most, as old
+as Methuselah; but she thinks it is being more modest, if she ascribes
+to herself at once, however much her face contradicts it, the extreme
+old age which she can have only when her face has lain some thousands
+of years in the earth, namely, thirty-two years and three months. The
+merest dunce can see that she means only her future resurrection-age,
+and not any earthly age,--because she does not deviate from that
+standing year, which in eternity, indeed, when no human being can grow
+an hour older, is a matter of course. This unity of time they introduce
+into the _Intrigue drama_ of their life already in the thirtieth year,
+for the reason that after that time in Paris no woman can any longer
+dance in public, and (according to Helvetius) no genius can any longer
+write in a masterly style. This last fact they perhaps took into
+account in old times in Jerusalem, where any one after his thirtieth
+year, but no sooner, could get an office as teacher.
+
+                                   B.
+
+Basedow's School System.--Basedow proposes in his _Philalethia_ to
+hedge up thirty uneducated children in a garden, to leave them to their
+own development, and to assign them only mute attendants, who should
+not even wear human clothing, and then to publish in a protocol the
+results of the experiment. Philosophers are so preoccupied with
+possibility that they do not see reality; otherwise Basedow must have
+observed that our country-schools are just such gardens, in which
+Philosophy would try the experiment of what will at last come of human
+creatures, if they are absolutely deprived of all culture. I confess,
+however, that all these attempts must continue uncertain and imperfect
+so long as the schoolmasters cannot refrain from imparting to these
+little probationers some instruction, though it were the least
+possible; and the thing would work better with wholly dumb teachers, as
+there are deaf and dumb pupils.
+
+                             C (_vide_ K).
+
+                                   D.
+
+Divine Poet.--The Poet, although he paints the passions, nevertheless
+will hit them best at that period of life when his own, have
+slackened,--just as convex mirrors, precisely in those summers when the
+sun burned the faintest, have acted the most intensely, and in the hot
+ones the least so. The flowers of poesy are like other flowers, which
+(according to Ingenhouse) thrive best in a dim, hazy sunlight.
+
+                                   E.
+
+Emotion (Sentimental).--Sentimentality often imparts to the inner man,
+as apoplexy to the outer, greater sensibility and yet paralysis.
+
+                              F (_see_ Ph)
+
+                                   G.
+
+Goddess.-As the Romans would rather recognize their monarchs as gods
+than as masters, so do men like to call the directress of their heart
+_goddess_ rather than mistress,--because it is easier to adore than to
+obey.
+
+                                   H.
+
+H.--I have often seen people who had the wherewithal of living and knew
+how to live,--which are not two different things,--first, flutter about
+the best and most superior women and suck from the honey-cup of their
+hearts; and, secondly, I have seen them on the same day fold their
+wings and light on a miserable ninny, that the ninny might inherit
+their--heirs. But never have I compared these butterflies to anything
+but butterflies, which all day long visit and rifle flowers, and yet
+spawn their eggs on a dirty cabbage-stump.
+
+                                   H.
+
+Holbein's Leg.--I prefer repeating the H in the place of I, because
+under the Rubric of the I would come the _Invalides_, of whom I had
+meant to assert, that, as people who have had limbs taken off become
+full-blooded, so they have the less bread handed to them the more limbs
+they have had shot or cut off, and that this is called the Physiology
+and Dietetics of the military chest.--But I have pitied these (half)
+poor devils too much to do it.
+
+The famous legs of Holbein afford a better joke than legs that have
+been taken off. That is to say, this painter used his brush in Basle
+only upon Basle itself; and the self-same circumstance that drove his
+genius to this architectural dyeing-business compelled it often to hold
+recess-hours therein,--namely, he guzzled terribly. A house owner,
+whose name is wanting in history, often came to the house-door, and
+swore up at the scaffolding, when the house-stainer's legs--for that
+was all of the painter that could be seen--were standing or staggering
+in the neighboring wine-cellar. Then when Holbein by-and-by came
+stalking along with them across the street, a quarrel came to meet him
+and went with him up the scaffold. This irritated the painter, who made
+a study even of his cups, and he proposed to himself to reform the
+owner. That is to say, as he owed his misfortune wholly to his legs,
+whose festoons the man wanted to see under the scaffolding, he resolved
+to make a second edition of his legs, and paint them on the house in a
+hanging posture, so that the man, when he looked up from the house-door
+below, should get the idea that the two legs and their boots were
+painting away up there busily. And the owner took this idea, too; but,
+as he observed at last that the counterfeit foot-works hung all day in
+one spot and never moved along, he wanted to see what kept the master
+so long improving and retouching at one part, and so up he went. Up
+there in the vacuum he easily saw that the painter ceased where the
+knee-pieces began, at the knee, and that the trunk, which was wanting,
+was again guzzling in an _alibi_.
+
+I do not blame the owner for not at once on the scaffolding drawing a
+moral from the leg-works; he was too furious.
+
+I meant to have appended a further history of the princely portraits
+which hang there behind the President in the Session-Chambers instead
+of the originals, by way of casting-votes,--but I should disturb the
+connection; here, too, was formerly the end of the First Part.
+
+
+
+
+                           17. DOG-POST-DAY.
+
+   The Cure.--The Prince's Palace.--Victor's Visits.--Joachime.--
+      Copperplate Engraving of the Court.--Cudgellings.
+
+
+When I was in Breslau, I said, "I wish I were the Fetzpopel!"[191] just
+as I was devouring the portrait of that personage. The Fetzpopel is a
+silly woman whose face is stamped on the Breslau ginger-cookies. I say
+what follows not merely on my own account, for the sake of getting my
+own head on to such gingerbread paste, but also for the sake of other
+literati, whom Germany honors with monuments as little as it does
+me,--for instance, Lessing and Leibnitz. As one must always feel so
+disagreeably in the German circles, until half a rod of stones, at
+least, are got together for the monument of a Lessing or other magnate,
+(the most that we have as yet is what few stones good reviewers throw
+at a literary man, as the ancients did upon graves,)--accordingly, I
+expressed myself freely in the Breslau market-place before I had bitten
+into the Fetzpopel: "Either the temple of fame and the bed of honor for
+German authors are on this gingerbread here, or else there is no fame
+at all. When will it be the time, if it is not now, to expect of the
+Germans that they shall take the faces of their greatest men and emboss
+them upon eatables? because, certainly, the stomach is the most
+important German member. If the Greek lived only among statues of great
+men, and thereby became great himself, then surely would the Viennese,
+if he had the greatest heads always before his eyes and on his plate,
+fall into enthusiasm and an emulous desire to promote himself and his
+face also on to gingerbread, and other cakes, pies, and cracknels.
+Meusel's learned Germany might be copied in baker's-work,--one might
+emboss great heroes upon army-biscuit, in order to set on fire the
+common soldiery and make them hunger for glory,--great poets I would
+sketch on bridal-cakes in inlaid sculpture, and heraldic geniuses on
+oatmeal bread,--of authors for women sweet box-pictures might be
+designed for sugar-work. If this were done, then would heads like
+Hamann or Liskov meet more generally the German _taste_ in such dress;
+and many a scholar who had not a loaf of bread to eat would at least
+ornament one; and we should have, beside the paper nobility, a baked
+one also." As regards myself, who up to this time never saw my face
+anywhere except in the shaving-glass, they shall mould me (for I am
+least known in Westphalia) on Westphalia rye-bread.
+
+
+Now to the story again. A tall, curly-haired man stands in the night
+before the many-colored house of the apothecary Zeusel, peeps up at the
+lighted third story, which he is about to occupy, and at last opens,
+instead of the wooden door, the glass one of the apothecary's shop. O
+my good Sebastian! a blessing on thy entry! May a good angel give thee
+his hand, to lift thee over boggy roads and man-traps; and when thou
+hast fallen into a snare and been wounded, then may he fan the wound
+with his wing, and a kind man cover it with his heart!
+
+In the apothecary's shop, which blazed like a ballroom, one of the
+fattest court-lackeys was begging of one of the leanest dispensers a
+maniple more and a little pugillus[192] of moxa[193] for his Highness.
+But the lean man took behind his scales a half-open handful of moxa,
+and four finger-tipfuls more (for in fact a little pugillus amounts to
+only three finger-tips), and sent it all to the feet of the Prince.
+"When we have burnt all this," said he, pointing to the moxa, "his
+Highness will soon have a podagra as good as can be found in the
+country."
+
+The reason why the dispenser gave more than the recipe said was that he
+also wished to have his pew in the Temple of Fame; therefore he would
+first think over a recipe that was handed to him until he approved it,
+and then he always weighed out 1/11 or 1/17 of a scruple too much or
+too little, in order to take off from the doctor's head the civic crown
+of the recovery and put it on his own. "Only with such gifts can I work
+my cures," said he. Victor did not begrudge him the illusion. "A
+dispenser," said he, "who leads the whole column of convalescents, and
+turns over to the doctor merely the rearguard of corpses, has already
+laurels enough for this short life _under_ his brain-pan."
+
+The apothecary Zeusel has good breeding enough not to bore his tenant
+by forcing upon him a reception-dinner, and merely gave him _this_
+newspaper article from his oral _Morning Chronicle_ of the city, that
+the Prince had not so much got the gout as that he was trying to get it
+and settle it. He also gave him the Italian servant whom his Lordship
+had hired for him, and his chamber.
+
+--And therein Sebastian is now sitting alone on the window-seat, and
+seriously considering, without glancing at the beauties of the room or
+the prospect, what he properly shall have to do here to-morrow, and day
+after tomorrow, and longer. "To-morrow, I blaze away at once," said he,
+and twirled the tassel of the curtain-cord; "I and the gout must settle
+ourselves down with the Prince. It is hard when a man has to use the
+gouty matter of a Regent for water to turn his mill: a polypus in the
+_heart_ or dropsy on the _brain_ would annoy me less as a courtier;
+either would be respectable _means of grace_ and fins for swimming
+upward. No, I will stand straight and firm, entirely upright; from the
+very first I will not yield an inch, so that they shall always find me
+the same. Not so much as quartering and anchoring in antechambers is to
+be thought of." (Indeed, his Lordship had already stipulated to the
+soliloquist an exemption from the annoyance of court etiquette.) "Ah,
+ye fair spring-years! Ye are now flown away over my head, and with you
+peace and mirth and studies and sincerity, and none but good, genial
+hearts!" (He suddenly twirled the curtain-tassel up shorter.) "But,
+thou good father, thou hast not even had such good years,--thou roamest
+over the earth and givest up thy days to the welfare of men! No, thy
+son shall not spoil nor embitter for thee thy sacrifices,--he shall
+conduct himself here discreetly enough,--and then, when thou comest
+back again and findest here at court an obedient, favored, and yet
+uncorrupted son..." When the son actually thought to himself, that, if
+he should thus culminate in a right ascension at court, he might win
+the heart of the Chaplaincy, the heart of Le Baut, that of his father,
+those of his whole kindred, and (provided he thought of _that_)
+even the heart of Clotilda,--by that time he had twisted off the
+curtain-tassel and held it like a tuberose in his hand, ... and so he
+thought best to lay himself quietly down in his bed.
+
+--Get up, my hero! The morning sun already reddens thy balcony,--jump
+up amidst the ringing of the bells for the week-day sermon, and amidst
+the din of this market-day, and look round on thy bright chamber! Thy
+father, of whom thou hast been dreaming all night, has furnished it
+full of musical and artistic instruments and apparatus, and thou wilt
+think of him the whole morning; and yet the balcony offers thee still
+more,--the sight of a green strip of fields, and, toward the west, of
+the heights of Maienthal, the whole market-place, the private residence
+of the senior parson of the city opposite, into all the rooms of which,
+that he lets to thy Flamin, thou canst look!
+
+Flamin, however, is not in there just now: for it was he who had
+already laid hold of my hero, and accosted him in those words of mine,
+"Get up!" A new situation is a spring-cure for our hearts, and takes
+away from them the oppressive feeling of our transitoriness; and
+beneath such a cheerful sky of life my Victor to-day dances with
+everything and everybody,--with the forenoon hours,--with the
+Regency-Counsellor,--with the apothecary,--out through the apothecary's
+shop right before the dispenser, on his way up to the palace to make a
+few passages with the gouty Januarius.
+
+--He has hardly been at the Prince's half an hour, when Zeusel sees him
+running back again into his medicinal warehouse.... "Heigh! heigh!"
+thinks the apothecary.
+
+But it was quite different from what he thought. Through an abatis of
+uniforms--for the entrances to princes' apartments are almost like
+lanes of tents, and rulers cause themselves to be guarded as anxiously
+as if they feared they might be the _first_ or the _last_--Victor made
+his way into the sick-chamber. Before a patient who lies in a
+horizontal position one can keep a perpendicular one more easily. Great
+folk often confound the effect of their apartment and furniture with
+their own: if the _savant_ could come upon them on a common, in a wood,
+in a cabbage-field, he would know how to deport himself. Victor,
+however, had himself been brought up in apartments that were
+embroidered, and furnished with gold corner-clips. So when he found his
+father's friend in pain and with his legs packed up, he exchanged his
+English composure for the professional, and, instead of awaiting
+haughty princely questions, began to propose medical ones. When the
+doctor's medical confessional session was at an end, he laid his hand,
+instead of on the head of the penitent, on the Bible which lay by it,
+and was going to swear, but gave that up because a better idea had
+occurred to him, and he opened--this was what had come into his
+head--the gospel of the paralytic: "For the podagra in this case is not
+to be thought of," said he. He showed him that his whole complaint
+was--wind (figuratively and literally speaking),--that it lodged itself
+in the relaxed vessels of the system, and insinuated itself, like the
+Jesuits, under every different form, through all the members,--even his
+pain in the calf was nothing more than that displaced human or
+intestinal ether. The physician in ordinary, Culpepper, is to be
+excused for his error in regard to the Prince; for every physician must
+make his selection of some universal malady, into which he resolves all
+others, which he treats _con amore_, in which, as the theologue does in
+Adam's sin, or the philosopher in his first principle, he detects all
+the rest. It rested, therefore, with the free will of Culpepper,
+whether to pick out for himself as the radical malady, to be the
+nest-egg and mother-bulb of his pathology, the podagra in the case of
+men, with women the flux, or not. When he has once made his choice,
+then he is obliged to endeavor to fix it upon his Highness, like pastel
+or quicksilver. January had never, even from his chapel, heard anything
+more agreeable than Victor's assertion, which set him free from the
+prostration, dosing, and starving which he had had to go through.
+Victor, in his joy at the lightness of the malady, hurried away to give
+his recipe for it, after he had asserted, by way of consolation, that
+"an _ethereal_ body was still to be taken along with him, and would
+serve the soul, not indeed for a heavenly Graham's-bed,[194] but still
+for an air-bed, which made itself up. Only poor women's-souls--if one
+rightly regarded their bodies--might be said to lie on thorny straw
+sacks, smooth hussars'-saddles, and sharp sausage-sledges[195]; whereas
+shaven and tattooed spirits (monks and savages) wrapped themselves up
+with such fine bodies stuffed with whalebone shavings."[196]
+
+Away he flew; and I have already reported that the apothecary presently
+thought to himself: "Heigh! heigh!" In the apothecary's shop Victor
+said to the dispenser, at whom he flew like saltpetre: "Sir colleague,
+what think you about it, if we should have nothing to cure in the case
+of his Highness but wind? You must advise me. For my part, I should
+prescribe:--
+
+            _Pulv. Rhei Orient_.
+            _Sem. Anisi Stellati_
+            ----_F[oe]niculi_
+            _Cort. Aurant. immat_.
+            _Sal. Tart. [=a][=a] dr. I_.
+            _Fol. Senn. Alexandr. sine Stipit. dr. II_.
+            _Sacchar. alb. unc. sem_.--
+
+
+"If you agree with me, I have nothing more to say, except, _C. C. M. f.
+p. Subt. D. ad Scatulam, S_. Colic-powders, one teaspoonful as often as
+occasion requires."[197]
+
+As the dispenser looked at him seriously, he looked at him still more
+seriously; and the medicine was prepared without a change in the dose.
+When he had gone, the dispenser said to his two startled pages: "You
+couple of stupid epiglottises, don't you suppose he has sense enough to
+ask?"
+
+The biographer has no need whatever to justify the circumstance--since
+the powder and the hero justify it--that January got upon his legs the
+very same day.
+
+As princes feel no pressure of the atmosphere, except that of the air
+which is in their bodies, January's gratitude for his deliverance from
+this pressure, was so unbounded that for the whole day he would not let
+the Doctor go from his side. He must dine,--sup,--ride,--play with him.
+In the palace it was tolerable; it was not like Nero's, a city within a
+city, a Flachsenfingen in Flachsenfingen, but merely barracks and a
+kitchen full of soldiers and cooks. For before every mouldy archive,
+before every room where lay genuine diamonds, before every door-lock,
+and before every stairway a bayonet was planted, with the protector and
+patron who was attached to it. The numerous crew of kitchen-servants
+lived and fired up in the palace, because his Highness was continually
+eating. By this continual eating he would make his fasting easier for
+him; for at the three ritual mealtimes of men he touched--because
+Culpepper would so have it--desperately little, and could not wholly
+contradict the courtiers who praised his strict diet. A watchmaker from
+London had done the most to help him out in this moderation by
+contriving for him a servant's bell, and a spring-work whose index
+stood upon a great dial-plate in the servants' apartment; the margin of
+the dial-plate was encircled, instead of the hours and the days of the
+month, with the names of viands and wines. January had only to ring the
+bell and press the spring, and the household immediately knew whether
+the tongue and the victual-index pointed to pastry or to Burgundy. In
+this way, by tinkling like a mill when his inner man had nothing more
+to grind, he was most easily enabled to observe a stricter diet than
+physicians and moralists could well demand, and he shamed more than one
+grandee, whom, after eviscerating in death, they were obliged to lay
+out upon the bed of state with the hungry stomach under one arm and the
+thirsty liver under the other, as they give to capons also their two
+viscera as a body-guard between their two wings.
+
+Victor was as much at home in the palace as in the parsonage; for the
+court proper, the proper courtly worms'-nest and frog-spawn, was
+resident merely in the palace of the actual minister, Von Schleunes,
+because he had to do the _honneurs_ of the throne, to invite
+ambassadors, strangers, &c. The Princess resided in the large old
+palace, which was called the Paullinum. Thus, then, did January spend
+his days without pomp, but with comfort and convenience, in the true
+solitude of a philosopher, and passed them away in eating, drinking,
+and sleeping; hence could the Flachsenfingen Prorector compare him,
+without flattery, to the greatest of the old Romans, in whom we admire
+a similar hatred of show and state. January had, in fact, no court, but
+went himself to the court of his actual minister; with extreme
+reluctance, however: he could not love anything there,--neither the
+Princess, who was always there, nor Schleunes's unmarried daughters,
+which would have been against his London vow.
+
+About twelve o'clock at night Zeusel would have been glad to find out
+how all was going on, and brought to the physician in ordinary his
+niece _Marie_, whom he offered to him as a female lackey. The
+physician, who could not play the fool with any fool in the world,
+especially under four eyes, thrust before the slender pike a crateful
+of the food of truth, which the latter greedily devoured as if it were
+pine-apple. Marie was a relative and a Catholic, impoverished by a
+lawsuit, and disappointed in love, who, in the cold, hollow family of
+the apothecary, received and expected nothing but thrust-wounds of
+words and shot-wounds of looks; her broken and crushed soul resembled
+the marsh-willow, of which one can strip down backward all the twigs
+with the mere hand. She felt no longer pained at any humiliation; she
+seemed before others to crawl, but in truth she lay continually
+prostrate on the ground. When the gentle Victor saw this meek, averted
+form, over which so many tears had flowed, and this once beautiful
+face, on which, not the sorrows of fancy had laid their charming
+painter's-touches, but physical pangs had emptied their poison-bags,
+then did the fate of mortals bring sadness to his heart, and, with the
+softest of courtesy towards Marie's station, sex, and sorrow, he
+declined her services. The apothecary would have despised himself if he
+had taken this politeness for anything else than fine raillery and good
+breeding. But Victor threw her off once more; and the poor girl
+withdrew in silence, and, like a maidservant, without spirit enough for
+courtesy.
+
+Nevertheless, in the morning the rejected one brought him his breakfast
+with downcast eyes and painfully smiling lips; he had heard in his bed
+how the apothecary and his hard sprouts of daughters had twitted Marie
+with her "doleful whining air," and therefrom inferred a "_refusal_
+from the jesting gentleman" overhead. His soul bled within him, and at
+last he accepted Marie;--he made his eye and his voice so soft and
+sympathetic that he could have lent either to the most tender maiden;
+but Marie took nothing of it to herself.
+
+January could hardly wait for him to come again.
+
+The third day also it was just so.
+
+And so, too, the next week.
+
+--But I could wish my readers had all ridden in a body, at this time,
+through the Flachsenfingen gate, and that this learned company had
+scattered itself through the city in order to institute inquiries
+about our hero. The reading scouts sent by me to the coffee-houses
+would learn that the new English doctor had already unseated the
+old one,--helped the parson's son at St. Luna to the post of
+Regency-Counsellor,--and that great changes in all departments were at
+hand. The division which I distributed among the butlers, butchers,
+fishery-masters, castellans, and valets of the court, would bring me
+word that the Prince had patted the Doctor, not on the fingers, but on
+the shoulder,--that he had day before yesterday showed him with his own
+hand his picture-cabinet, and sent him the best piece out of it,--that
+in the theatre he had looked out with him from the stage-box,--that he
+had presented to him a snuff-box rich with jewels (the usual civic
+crown of rulers, and their calumet, as if we were Greenlanders, who
+never love to receive any other present so much as snuff),--and that
+they would travel together. Two of the very finest and most dignified
+readers whom I had detached from these columns, and of whom I had
+despatched the one to the Paullinum to the Princess, the other to the
+actual Minister, would at least report to me the news that Prince and
+Doctor had called together upon both, and that both had looked upon my
+hero as a singular, shy, taciturn Englishman, who owed everything to
+his father.
+
+But the last piece of news which the readers have related to me they
+cannot, I am sure, possibly know; and I will myself tell it to them.
+
+--Before I deliver this, let me first simply explain in three words how
+it was that Victor rose so rapidly. There may be Evangelist-Matthieus
+among my readers who take this sudden rise, like that of the barometer,
+as the sign of a speedy fall,--who will say that laurels and salad,
+which have been forced to ripen in twenty-four hours by spirit on a
+cloth, wither again just as soon,--nay, who will even joke about the
+matter, and give out that the Prince's intestines, with their ether,
+are a fish's swimming-bladder to my hero, who only by its inflation
+mounts upward. Mining-superintendents laugh at such readers, and inform
+them that men, particularly the occupants of thrones, look upon a new
+physician as a new specific,--that they are always most ready to obey a
+new one,--that Sebastian always deported himself towards every one the
+first time in the finest manner, whereas with old acquaintances he
+never said unnecessarily anything witty,--that January loved every one
+whom he could see through, and that he fortunately recognized in my
+hero merely a gay fellow fond of life, and did not remark around his
+head any of Bose's Beatifications,[198] which smell of phosphorus and
+emit painful sparks,--that Victor was not, like Le Baut, a _pot-plant_
+in a crown, but a hyacinth hanging in the open air high above it,--that
+he was cheery, and made every one else so,--and that another
+mining-superintendent would not have made so much ceremony with his
+readers as I: _he_ would merely have told them the main circumstance,
+that in Victor, in his waggery and behavior generally, the Prince had
+found and fallen in love with an enchanting resemblance to his fifth
+son, the _Monsieur_ (lost on the Seven Islands), and that he had made
+this observation even in London, although Victor was five years younger
+than the latter.
+
+January chose, himself, to present his favorite to everybody, and
+so to the Princess too. The philosophers have it to explain why
+Sebastian never once remembered, until he sat beside the princely
+bridegroom on the coach-cushion, the mad, enamored little strip of
+paper which, in Kussewitz, he had pasted above the Imperator of the
+_montre-a-regulateur_, and thrown into the Princess's bargain. He
+started, and held it to be impossible that he should have been such a
+fool. But such a thing is easy for a man. His fancy flung back upon
+every scene, upon every idea, so many focus-lights from a thousand
+mirrors, and spread around the future, which stretched out beyond, so
+many colored shadows and so much blue mist, that he was really
+frightened when a foolish action came into his head; for he knew, that,
+when he should have rejected it ten times and then thought it over
+thirty times more, then, after all, he should go and do it.--When the
+two appeared before the Princess, Victor was in that agreeable frame,
+which is nothing new to tutors and young scholars, which stiffens the
+limbs to bone, and sends the heart up into the mouth, and petrifies the
+tongue;--it was not the certainty that _Agnola_ (that was the name of
+the Princess) had read the aforesaid advertisement on the watch, which
+so disconcerted him, but the uncertainty whether she had or not. In his
+agony he never thought of _this_,--that she, of course, did not even
+know his handwriting or the authorship of the little slip; and even if
+one does think of that in his agony, still it does not leave him.
+
+--But all was, at once, above, below, and contrary to his expectation.
+The Princess had laid aside the face of sensibility with her
+travelling-dress, and had put on instead a fine, firm gala-face. The
+crowned bridegroom January was received by her with as much warm
+decorum as if he were his own ambassador of the first rank. For
+January, the disk of whose heart charged itself full of sparks on the
+electrizing-cushion of a fair cheek or a bosom-handkerchief, had for
+that very reason towards Agnola, with whom merely from policy he had
+concluded the concordats of marriage, all the warmth of the month after
+which he was named. Towards Victor, the son of her hereditary foe, the
+successor to the house-thief of princely favor, she cherished, as is
+easy to guess, true tenderness. Our poor hero, surprised at January's
+coldness, which seemed to promise on the part of the wife no special
+warmth toward himself, demeaned himself as gravely as the elder and
+younger Cato at once. He thanked God (and so do I) that he came away.
+
+But all the way back he kept thinking: "If I could only have got my
+missive out of the watch-case! Ah, then I would have done everything,
+poor Agnola, to reconcile thee to thy fate and thy husband!--Ah, St.
+Luna," he added, as they passed along before the city parson's house,
+"thou peaceful spot, full of flowers and of love! The masters of the
+hunt send thy Bastian from one baiting-house to another!"
+
+For he must also, for politeness' sake, go at least to the actual
+Minister's, and January took him along with him. Thither he went with
+gusto, as if into a sea-fight, or into a quarantine hospital, or into
+the Russian ice-palace.
+
+Furniture and persons in the house of Schleunes were in the finest
+taste. Victor found there, from the wabble-headed figures[199] and
+court-people, even to the basaltic busts of old philosophers, and to
+the dolls in the shape of Schleunes's daughters, from the polished
+floor to the polished faces, from the powdering cabinet to the reading
+cabinet,--both of which painted the head in the mere passage through
+them,--in short, everywhere he found all that the sumptuary laws have
+ever forbidden. His first embarrassment with the Princess gave him the
+pitch for a second. It was no longer the old Victor at all. I see
+beforehand that the worthy schoolmasters at the Marianum in Scheerau
+will be hard upon him for it,--especially the rector,--that he should
+have so little knowledge of the world as to be, while in this company,
+witty without vivacity, constrainedly free without complaisance, too
+constantly in motion with his eyes, too immovable in his other members.
+But one must suggest to these courtly and scholarly people, that he
+could not help it. The rector himself would have been embarrassed as
+well as Victor before the _bel-esprit_ of a minister's lady, whom,
+though, to be sure, Meusel has not introduced her into his, the court
+has into _its_ Learned Germany,--before her quizzing daughters,
+especially the handsomest, who was named Joachime,--before a number of
+strangers,--before so many people who hated him on his father's
+account, and who watched him in order to explain and verify his
+relations with the Prince,--before the Princess herself, whom the Devil
+had also brought hither,--before Matthieu, who here was in his element,
+and in his leading character and bravura air,--and before the
+Minister,--especially before this last. Victor found in him a man full
+of dignity, from whom business did not take away politeness, nor
+thinking wit; and whom a little irony and coldness only the more
+exalted, but who seemed to despise feeling, scholars, and mankind.
+Victor generally imagined to himself a minister--e. g. Pitt--as a Swiss
+glacier, on which the clouds and dew that nourish it freeze overhead,
+which oppresses the low places, and, in its alternation between melting
+and congealing, sends out great torrents down below, and out of whose
+clefts corpses are drifted.
+
+January himself was not quite comfortable among them: what availed him
+the finest dishes, if they were embittered by the finest conceits? The
+card-table was, therefore, especially upon the peaceful arrival of his
+spouse, his quiet place of anchorage; and his Victor was for this once
+also glad to anchor beside him. My correspondent thinks that the
+tuning-key to this over-fine, demi-semi-_tone_ was turned by the
+Minister's lady merely, who had all sciences in her head, and to
+be sure at-her tongue's end, and for that reason held a weekly
+_bureau-d'esprit_. In this ridiculous position, Sebastian played away
+his evening and gobbled down his _souper_; he could tell a good story,
+but he had no story to tell,--in the few _contes_ which stayed by him
+all was anonymous, and to the circle about him the names were precisely
+the things of the first importance; nor could he make use of his humor
+either, because a humor like his places the possessor himself in a mild
+comic light, and because, therefore, only among good friends whose
+respect one cannot lose, but not among bad friends whose respect
+one must hold by defiance, can it venture out in its sock and
+harlequin's-collar,--he did not even enjoy the happiness of inwardly
+laughing at them all, because he had no time for it, and because he
+never found people ridiculous till their backs were turned.
+
+He was confoundedly badly off. "You'll not catch me here again very
+soon," he thought to himself; and when, through the two tall glass
+doors of the balcony, which looked out upon the garden, the moon stole
+in with its dreamy light, which out there fell upon stiller dwellings,
+fairer prospects, and calmer hearts,--then he stole out upon the
+balcony (as his partnership at the card-table was broken up by the
+Prince after supper), and the night that glistened on the earth and in
+the heavens exalted his bosom with greater scenes. With what love
+thought he then of his father, whose philosophic coldness was like the
+January snow, which covers the seed from the frost, whereas that of the
+court resembles the snow of March, which devours the buds! How sorely
+did he reproach himself for every discontented thought about his honest
+Flamin's slight want of refinement! O, how his inner man erected itself
+like a fallen and forgiven angel, when he imagined to himself Emanuel
+leading Clotilda by the hand, and rapturously asking him, "Where hast
+thou found to-day an image of this my friend?" At this moment he
+yearned inexpressibly to be back again in his St. Luna....
+
+His quickening heart-beats were all at once checked by _Joachime_, who
+came out with a burst of laughter directed toward the parlor. As it was
+a burden to her to sit for a single hour, (I wonder how she could lie
+in bed a whole night,) she extricated herself as often as she could
+from the curb-bit of the card-table. The Princess released her this
+time, who suspended this _night-work_ of great people on account of the
+weakness of her eyes. Joachime was no Clotilda, but still she had two
+eyes polished like two rose-diamonds, two lips like painted ones, two
+hands like casts, and, in fact, all the duplicate members were very
+pretty.... And with these a court-physician can keep house well enough,
+though the single ones (heart, head, nose, forehead) are not those of a
+Clotilda. As now under the open heaven he recovered his spirits, and
+on the balcony, which for him was always a parlor, the use of his
+tongue,--as Joachime's tone attuned him again to his own,--as she
+assailed the taciturnity of the English, and he defended the
+exceptions,--as he could now run, like a spider, up and down along the
+thread of the conversation, and was no more to be disturbed by the
+Princess, who had followed after to cool off in the night-air her
+inflamed eyes,--and as one complains of feeling ennui only when one
+himself inflicts it,--and as I transcribe all this, I do enough (I
+think) for a reviewer, who stands up behind the coach-body of the
+Prince, and reflects and wonders what he shall have to hold on to
+(except the footmen's straps), in case Victor, sitting before him in
+the carriage, does not during the ride home wish the Minister's house
+at the Devil, but thinks more contentedly,--Well, it's tolerable
+enough![200]
+
+Victor's society agreed so well with the Prince, that he fancied he
+could as little do without him as a canoness out of the house can think
+of taking the badge of her order off her person. He always plunged into
+the sacred cup and welcome of the warm spring of a new friendship as
+immoderately as a guest at Carlsbad does into his. When he felt ennui,
+the Medicus was besought to come and drive it away; when he experienced
+an inward jubilee, that person was again entreated to appear, that he
+might participate in the jubilation. Only those times at which January
+felt neither ennui nor the contrary were left to his friend to spend
+entirely at his own pleasure. Victor had sworn beforehand to make an
+easy matter of refusing, and had broken out upon people of easy
+consent; now, however, he said, "The Devil may say, No! Just let a man
+find _himself_ in the same situation first!" ... And so must our poor
+Victor describe nothing but empty, dizzying gyres in the court-circle
+of the throne, among people for whose tone he could more easily have an
+_ear_ than a _tongue_, and whom he could read, but could not win.
+
+A youth in whose breast hang the night-pieces of Maienthal and St.
+Luna,--or one who has just arrived from a watering-village,--or one who
+has it in mind to fall in love,--or one who, in great cities or in
+their great circles, must be an _idle_ spectator,--every such one is
+also, for that very reason, a _dissatisfied_ spectator therein, and
+blows into his critical pipe against the trifling company, till he
+himself is drawn in. But when all these causes actually meet in one and
+the same man, then can he find no relief against his gall-bladder nor
+any biliary duct, except to take some fine paper and send off to the
+Eymanns in St. Luna a confounded satirical letter upon what he has
+seen.
+
+My hero despatched the following to the Parson:--
+
+
+"MY DEAR SIR AND ADOPTED FATHER:"--
+
+"I have not had hitherto spare time enough to lift my eyes up and see
+what moon we have. Verily, a court wants time for virtue. The Prince
+carries me about with him everywhere, like a smelling-bottle, and shows
+up his foolish Doctor. Erelong they will not be able to endure me: not
+because I am good for anything,--on the contrary, I am convinced they
+could bear the most virtuous man in the world quite as well as the
+worst, and that merely because he would be an Anglicism, an _homme de
+fantaisie_,[201] a _lusus naturae_,--but because I do not talk enough.
+Business-people never trouble themselves about any conversational or
+epistolary style; but with court-people the tongue is the artery of
+their withered life, the spiral-spring and flag-feather of their souls;
+they are all born critics, who look at nothing but fine turns,
+expression, fire, and speech. This comes of their having nothing to do;
+their good works are _bon mots_,[202] their exchange business consists
+in visiting-cards, their housekeeping is a card-party, and their
+agriculture a hunting-party, and the _minor service_ a physiognomy.
+Hence they must have other people's faults all day long in their ears
+as an antidote to tedious leisure, as the physicians inoculate with the
+itch to counteract stupidity; a court-establishment is the regular
+penny post-office of the smallest items of news, even about you
+commoners, when you happen to have done anything really ridiculous. It
+were to be wished that we had festivals, or card-parties, or plays, or
+assemblies, or _soupers_, or something good to eat, or some amusement
+or other; but that is not to be thought of. We have, to be sure, all
+these things, but only their names; the President of the Exchequer
+would shrug his shoulders, if we should undertake to be, four times in
+a year, so brilliantly happy as you are four times a month. As our week
+consists of seven Sundays, it follows that our amusements are only
+signs in the calendar, epochs of time, to which no one pays heed; and a
+festival is nothing but a play-room for the plans which every one has
+in his head, the boards on which he is to act his leading part, and the
+season for continuing the intrigue against victims of love and of
+ambition. Here there is, every minute, a stinging mosquito, and the
+thistle-seed of beautifully painted trouble flies round far and wide.
+
+"There are many women here who are good, and disciples of Linnaeus, and
+their eyes classify men botanically, according to his fine and simple
+_sexual_-system; they make a great distinction between virtuous and
+vicious love,--namely, that of _degree_, or at least of time; and the
+_best_ often speaks on the subject like the _worst_, and the worst like
+the best. Meanwhile we have here female virtue and manly fidelity, in
+their way,--but no idea of them can be communicated to a parson; for
+these two jellies are so soft and delicate, that, if I should undertake
+to carry them down over all the steps of the throne to the parsonage,
+they would arrive there in such a spoiled and ruined state, that one
+would give them down below there the two opposite names,--for which,
+however, we ourselves have up here our special and corresponding
+objects. Your commoners would find our elderly men ridiculous in
+matters of love, as _they_ would your daughters. But what often
+embitters for me this happy court-life is the universal want of
+dissimulation. For no one believes here what he hears, and no one
+thinks how he looks; all must, according to the regular laws of the
+game, like cards, have the upper side uniform, and put on an external
+stillness of face as a cover to the internal fire, as the lightning
+destroys only the sword and not the scabbard. Consequently, as a
+universal dissimulation is none at all, and as every one gives every
+other credit for poison, no one can _deceive_ another, but only
+_outwit_ him; only the understanding, not the heart, is taken in.
+Meanwhile, to speak the truth, that is not truth; for every one has two
+masks,--the general and the individual. For the rest, the colors which
+are used upon the scientific, refined, and philanthropic painting of
+the outer man are necessarily scraped off from the inner man, but
+advantageously, since there is not much on the inner man, and the study
+of appearance lessens reality: so have I often seen hares lying in the
+woods that had not an ounce of flesh or a drop of fat on their bodies,
+because all had been absorbed by the monstrous fur which had continued
+to grow after their death.
+
+"If one compares the substantial value of the throne and that of the
+low ground of the commonalty, the physical and moral exaltation of
+men appears to bear an inverse relation to that of their soil,
+just as the inhabitants of marshy lands are larger than mountaineers.
+But, nevertheless, those elevated people bear the state easily on
+butterfly-wings, survey its wheel-work with the hundred-eyed papilio's
+eye, and with a walking-cane defend the people from lions, or chase
+therewith the lions among the people, as in Africa the children of the
+herdsmen scare away with a whip the real lions of Natural History from
+the grazing cattle.... Dear Mr. Court-Chaplain, this satire began to
+pain me already on the former page; but here one is malicious, just as
+he is vain, without knowing when: the former, because one is obliged to
+take too much notice of others; the latter, because he is compelled to
+think too much of himself. No! Your garden, your sitting-room, are
+pleasanter; there, is no stony breast on which one _crucifies_ the arms
+and veins of friendship like a tree trained on an espalier; there, one
+is not obliged, as I am, to be twice a day under the barber's hands,
+and three times a day under the hair-dresser's; there, one has leave
+at least to put on his polished boot. Write soon to your adopted son,
+for I still deny myself the festival of a visit to you. Are there
+many baptisms and burials? What is _Fox_[203] doing, and the deaf
+bellows-blower? At this very moment I hear the mortar, instead of your
+rat-drum, pounding down below. Farewell.
+
+"And now at last I greet you, beloved mother! My hand is warm, and in
+my heart a pair of souls are beating; for now your face, full of
+motherly warmth, shines on all my satirical ice-peaks, and melts them
+into warm blood, which will throb for you and for you flow. How good it
+feels to love again! Your second son, Flamin, is well, but too busy,
+and at present in St. Luna.[204] Greet my sisters and all that love
+you.
+
+                                                      "Sebastian."
+
+
+He reserved the letter in order to despatch the Regency-Counsellor, who
+wanted to take his person along with him, with a freight at least.
+
+Meanwhile his and January's joint visits, with their stage
+entanglements, grew to quite other ones, even a ganglion of friendship
+between January and himself,--and at the same time gave this friendship
+increased notoriety. In St. Luna, in Le Baut's house, three times as
+much was made out of it as there was in it,--in the parsonage, nine
+times. To this was added a trifle, namely, a scuffle,--properly, two. I
+have the incident from Spitz,--Victor got it from Flamin,--he from
+Matthieu,--in whose noble historical style it can here be handed
+over to posterity. The Evangelist was never ashamed of a commoner,
+provided he could make a fool of him. Therefore he visited the
+court-apothecary without scruple. To the latter, who cordially hated
+the barrack-physician, Culpepper, on account of his coarse arrogance,
+and on account of the reason given in the note[205] below, Matthieu had
+long since promised to upset the Doctor. As the latter and the podagra
+had actually been banished by Victor from January's feet, the
+Evangelist gave the apothecary to understand that he himself would,
+without _his_ hint and wishes, have contributed far less to the fall of
+Culpepper than he had done. Zeusel, especially as he had the successor
+of the barrack-physician in his house, came after some days to the
+billiard-table with the certain conviction that he, from his
+apothecary's-shop, had thrust under Culpepper's posteriors the
+invisible leg, and hurled him down from the steps of the throne. There
+were present, unfortunately, the barrack-physician himself, and the
+noble Mat. Zeusel came upon this stage with the festoons of three
+watch-chains, with a pair of breeches on whose knees some Arabesques
+were printed, with a double waistcoat and double neck-tie, and with
+double signs of exclamation in his face at the barrack-physician;--his
+money-purse lay exactly under the _os sacrum_, because he, like some
+Englishmen, had caused his breeches-pocket to be concealed in the
+region of the breeches buckle. He had with him as his chamber-moor his
+long, lean dispenser, who in the adjoining drinking-room encountered
+the very short dispenser of the second apothecary's-shop, or shop of
+the _canaille_. The short dispenser, out of malice, followed the tall
+one about everywhere, merely to vex him; but this time he had just come
+back from the country with some hens'-eggs which he had collected as
+fees from convalescent patients.
+
+Matthieu, after an exegetic hint to Zeusel, took the liberty of
+being of Culpepper's opinion in regard to the Prince's gout. Culpepper,
+who would fain be an old German,--such old Germans can never
+dissemble when they are angry, though they can very well do so from
+self-interest,--fired away and said the English doctor was a complete
+ignoramus. Zeusel displayed with a broad smile, as with a printer's
+vignette, his contempt for the coarse man. The Medicus looked like the
+Equator, the apothecary like Spitzbergen. Now the tourney went on
+merely upon the subject of the gout. The second and umpire, Matthieu,
+gave it to be understood, that "Zeusel, to be sure, loved his prince
+and lord, but still he could wish that this love had had the best means
+and the wholesomest influences. "In bawdy-houses," said Culpepper,
+"_that fellow there may_ have influence." When the apothecary, at these
+words, proudly and contemptuously straightened himself up, the Doctor
+slowly jammed him down on the chair and on his money-purse, and,
+bringing down his fist upon his shoulder, nailed the little coxcomb
+with his purse to the seat.
+
+This pinning-down vexed the tailor-bird most of all, and he replied,
+trying to get up, that "he would this very day, if he were consulted,
+advise his Highness to adhere to his present better choice." The
+barrack-physician might perhaps have too hurriedly withdrawn his hand
+from the shoulder which it covered; for he grazed with it, as with a
+cannon, the nose of his adversary, whereupon the latter, like Saint
+Januarius, discharged some blood. The Evangelist was personally grieved
+"that two such sensible men could not fall out and fight with each
+other without personal hatred and heat, since they _might_, like
+princes who go to war, attack each other without either,--but the
+bleeding too well attested Zeusel's ebullition." ... Zeusel cried out
+to the Doctor, "You lout!" The latter, in his fury, actually took
+Matthieu's opinion, that the former bled only from fury, and compared
+him to those corpses which in old times bled, indeed, at the approach
+of the murderer, but from none other than quite natural causes. The
+Medicus, therefore, looked for his cane, which like a prince was
+gold-headed, and took his leave with the crowned stick, drawing it a
+few times, as with magnetic passes, across Zeusel's fingers; but I
+would call the staff, if I were in the place of other people, neither
+an ear-trumpet for Zeusel, which the physician applied to him, as they
+often do to persons hard of hearing, that the latter might hear better,
+nor yet a door-knocker, which he stretched out before the truth, that
+it might the more easily get admission into the apothecary. What he
+wanted was merely to oblige him to let his handkerchief drop, in order
+that he might look him in the face as he bade farewell, which he
+clothed in the following forbearing and neatly turned remark: "You tell
+your Doctor that he and you there are the two greatest blockheads in
+town."
+
+Under these last words both dispensers kept themselves still enough in
+other respects, though not with their tongues, indeed; for the tall
+dispenser saluted, as second chorus, the short one with the same
+war-song, and was a genuine Anti-Podagrist. Whoso considers that the
+tall one loved my hero on account of his politeness, and could not bear
+the short one, because Culpepper sent all his prescriptions to _his_
+shop,--such a one cannot expect anything less of the couple than a
+reflection of the scene in the billiard-room; but the tall dispenser
+was composed, and never, like Portugal, propagated edifying truths with
+blood, but--the moment the barrack-doctor called the court-physician a
+blockhead--he quietly took the hat of the short dispenser, who had
+deposited his income of eggs therein to guard them from being broken,
+and coolly, without the least resentment, placed the aforesaid hatful
+of eggs on the head of the professional brother; and by a slight
+squeeze fitted the Doctor's hat, which sat half an ell too high, upon
+the head of his friend,--with all the more propriety, as Castor and
+Pollux also had on egg-shells,[206]--and having effected this
+promotion, he went his way, without exactly caring to have much thanks
+for the felt-stuffing and the streaming face-poultice.
+
+Fisticuffs spread abroad lesser truths, as wars do great truths. The
+Court-Chaplain Eymann sent a long letter of congratulation to Victor,
+and called him "January's kidney-keeper," and begged for his promised
+visit. A travelling[207]-advocate knocked at his door as at that of a
+superior court, and begged him for a princely injunction against the
+Regency-College. The apothecary, with his application about the
+_lavement_,[208] still holds back.
+
+Victor still laid up for himself his first visit to St. Luna like a
+ripening fruit, and thereby vexed the Regency-Counsellor, who wanted to
+persuade him into it. But he said: "Those who are left behind in a
+place long indescribably for him who has gone from it, until he has
+made his first visit; and so, too, with him. After the first, both
+parties wait quite coolly and composedly for the second."--What he
+neither said nor thought, but felt and feared, was this: that his
+demigoddess, Clotilda, who inhabited the most holy place in his breast,
+and who by her invisibleness had become dearer, more indispensable, and
+for that very reason more sure to his soul, would, perhaps, at her
+appearance, take away at once all hopes out of his heart.
+
+It was on the evening of the day when he received Eymann's letter, that
+he thus fantasied: "Ah, if January would only continue so well! He must
+have exercise, but of an unusual kind,--the rider must walk, the
+pedestrian must drive. We ought to travel together on foot through the
+country, in disguise. Ah, I might, perhaps, be of service to many a
+poor devil! We would steal homeward through St. Luna,--No, no, no!" ...
+
+He started back himself, affrighted at a certain idea,--for he feared
+he should, when he had once had it, even execute it; hence he said to
+it three times, No. The idea was this,--to persuade the Prince to visit
+Clotilda's parents. But it was of no use; he remembered that his father
+had held too strict a court of cognizance over the Chamberlain and the
+Minister. "And yet, what harm can Le Baut do to me? If I should only
+draw three sun-glances from January upon the poor fool! The wisest
+thing for me is, not to think any more about it to-day."
+
+The dog will bring us the answer; I, for my part, make a bet--a fine
+connoisseur of human nature on my island bets the contrary--that he
+does not carry out this joke.
+
+
+
+
+                           18. DOG-POST-DAY.
+
+   Clotilda's Promotion.--Incognito-Journey.--Petition of the Majors of
+      the Chase.--Consistorial Messenger.--Caricature of the
+      Flachsenfingeners.
+
+
+To be sure he did--carry out the joke; but still at bottom I do not
+lose my bet. For it happened in this way. From the day when Doctor
+Culpepper had made that pass with his coarse hand, as with an
+electrical discharger, before the full-blooded nose of Zeusel, the man
+with three watches pressed his company upon my hero, who carried only
+one, and that, too, the clumsy one of the Bee-father. Zeusel always
+thanked God, if only a court-courier got drunk at his house, or the
+court-dentist over-ate himself. He always brought with him, when he
+came, certain secret items of intelligence, which were to be published.
+He kept nothing to himself, not though one had threatened to hang him
+in the cellar of his shop. He told our hero that the Minister was
+making interest in behalf of his Joachime for the place of second
+maid-of-honor to the Princess, who could select only the female part of
+her service for herself,--but that he could not fairly do it, because
+he, or his son Matthieu, had promised the Chamberlain Le Baut to
+procure the same place for Clotilda; he therefore begged my hero, who,
+as he saw, he said, was Matthieu's friend, to spare him the
+embarrassment, and induce the Prince (which would cost only _one_ word)
+himself to intercede with the Princess in behalf of Joachime; the
+Princess, who, besides, patronized the Minister, would, on more than
+one ground, do it with pleasure, and then the Minister could not help
+it, if the Chamberlain, the enemy of his Lordship, went away empty.
+
+The simpleton, as one can see, had guessed out, merely from the two
+accounts, which he had got hold of, of the two office-seekers, the
+whole of the remaining case; and the very circumstance, which Matthieu
+disclosed to him, that the Minister was vacating a quarter of a wing of
+his palace, for a companion of his deceased daughter Giulia, had only
+strengthened his conviction. To such a degree does malice supply the
+place, not only of years, but also of information and insight!
+
+My hero could say nothing to him except that--he did not believe a word
+of it. But after three minutes of private reflection he believed it
+all: for that was the reason, he saw, why the dear Clotilda had to come
+back from the seminary just at the arrival of the Princess,--that was
+the reason why Le Baut built around the Minister's son so many altars
+of incense and thank-offerings,--that was the reason why the old
+lady (in the Sixteenth Dog-Post-Day) serenaded, and so loudly,
+court-life,--in fact, as he further saw, two such outlawed, captive
+Court-Jews in Babylon must have the live Devil in them, until they are
+reinstated in the old holy city, and if they happen to have a handsome
+daughter, they will use her as the relay of their journey, and the
+Montgolfier of their balloon-ascension....
+
+"O, only come, Clotilda!" he cried, glowingly;--"the court-pool will
+then be to me an Italian cellar, a flowery parterre. If thou art only
+once settled at the Minister's, then I shall have spirits enough and
+sparkle properly. What will my father say, when he sees us stand with
+two leading-strings, with one of which thou holdest the Princess, and
+I, with the other, the husband?" ... At this moment, Clotilda's recent
+objections to court-life fell like ice-flakes into his boiling blood;
+but he thought to himself: "Women, however, are a little mite more
+pleased with the court-residence of splendor than they themselves
+suspect or say, and far more than men are. Cannot he, too, bear, then,
+with a like soul-edifying position? She, as step-daughter of the
+Prince, is only half-miserable, compared with him,--and does she know,
+then, whether she may not some time be recalled from her _field-etat_
+to the court-garrison by an accident?" By this _accident_ he meant a
+marriage with Sebastian. Finally, he tranquillized himself with
+something which I also believe,--namely, that she had at that time,
+merely out of politeness, made a show of a certain coldness towards her
+new separation from her parents, and therefore towards the new place
+also; and then, too, pleasure at such a prospect might have been
+taken for warmth toward _somebody_ or other at court, e. g. toward
+her--_brother_, he thought to himself.
+
+And now yesterday's idea, upon which I have lost my wager, came forth
+again, having shot up astonishingly in _one_ night,--namely, that, if
+he could persuade the Prince to make the journey and the visit to the
+Chamberlain, and while they were still on the road, could plead with
+him for a good word to the Princess in behalf of Clotilda,--then was
+it, in the first place, impossible for the stepfather to refuse a
+prayer for the most beautiful stepdaughter,--and, secondly, impossible
+for the Princess, when her spouse should exercise the privilege of the
+first petition, not to draw all possible advantage from the first
+opportunity of laying him under obligations to her.
+
+--Eight days after, just at dusk,--in the autumn days night comes
+sooner,--the Court--Chaplain Eymann was standing on the observatory and
+peering at the sun, not for its own sake, but in reference to the
+evening-redness and the weather, because he wanted to sow the next
+morning,--when suddenly and with alarm he sprang down from the
+watch-tower into his house, and delivered the Job's tidings, that the
+Consistorial Messenger would be there in a moment, together with a
+French emigrant, and for the one there was not a farthing, and for the
+other not a bed in the house....
+
+No soul came.
+
+I can easily comprehend it; for the Consistorial Messenger reconnoitred
+around the parsonage, and so soon as he saw the court-physician,
+Victor, in wax, sitting up at the window, he marched instanter out of
+the village, straight back to Flachsenfingen. The emigrant had turned
+in at his professional cousin's, Le Baut's.
+
+The two travellers were named January and Victor, and were returning
+this very day from their facetious flying tour.
+
+That is to say, seven days ago, the Prince, who loved mask-dances and
+incognito-journeys and the ways of the commonalty, and who wished only
+the Minister's mental masks and incognito _further_, had started off on
+foot, with Victor, behind a fellow who had sallied forth in advance on
+horseback with the masquerade dresses and masquerade refreshments.
+January carried a sword in his hand, which was contained, not in any
+sheath, but in a walking-cane,--an emblem of court-weapons! He gave
+himself out in the market-town for the new Regency-Counsellor, Flamin.
+My hero, who at the outset had passed himself through the mint, and
+come out stamped as a travelling dentist, recoined himself in the third
+village into a Consistorial Messenger, simply because the couple met
+the true Messenger. This financial collector of the Consistory was made
+to hand over to the physician for this week--it cost the Prince only a
+princely resolution and an indulgence--his receipt-book and his
+ecclesiastical robe of office, together with the tin-plate sewed
+thereto. These plates are attached to Messengers, and the silver stars
+to coats of distinction, as the leaden ones are to bales of cloth, that
+one may know what the trumpery is worth.
+
+For Busching such a Rekahn's journey would be a windfall,--to me it is
+a true torment; for my manuscript is, besides, so large already, that
+my sister sits on it when she plays the piano-forte, because the seat
+is not high enough without the addition of the Dog-Post-Days.
+
+What did January see, and what Victor? The Regency-Counsellor, January,
+saw among the public servants nothing but crooked backs, crooked ways,
+crooked fingers, crooked souls. "But a bow is crooked, and the bow is a
+sector of the circle, that emblem of all perfection," said the
+Consistorial Messenger, Victor. But what vexed January most was, that
+the officials respected him so exceedingly, when after all he gave
+himself out only for a regency-counsellor, and not for a regent. Victor
+replied: "Man knows only two neighbors: the neighbor at his head is his
+master, the one at his feet is his slave; what lies out beyond either
+of these two is to him God or beast."
+
+What did January see still further? Untaxed knaves he saw, who enriched
+themselves at the expense of taxed poor men,--honest advocates he
+heard, who did not, like his courtiers or the English highwaymen, steal
+under the mask of virtue, but without any mask, and to whom a certain
+remoteness from enlightenment and philosophy and taste will not after
+death be prejudicial, because they can then in their own defence set up
+against God the exception of their ignorance, and represent to Him,
+"that no other laws but those of their own sovereign and of Rome can
+bind them, and that neither is God Justinian, nor is Kant
+Tribonian."[209] He saw hanging from the heads of his country-justices
+bread-baskets, and from those of their subjects muzzle-baskets; he saw,
+that, if (according to Howard) it takes two men to support one
+prisoner, here there must be given twenty incarcerated ones, that one
+city-magistrate may live.
+
+He saw cursed stuff. But, on the other hand, as an offset, he saw on
+pleasant nights the cattle in fair groups feeding in the fields,--I
+mean the republican ones, namely, stags and wild boars. The
+Consistorial Messenger, Victor, said to him, that he had to thank the
+masters of the chase for this romantic spectacle, whose tender hearts
+had been as little able to execute the princely order of shooting wild
+game as were the Egyptian midwives to execute that of slaughtering the
+Jewish male children. Nay, the Financial Messenger at an alehouse had
+some yellow ink and black paper brought to him, and there,--while the
+slater drummed away on the roof to get some more slates brought to him,
+and the guests knocked on the pitchers to get them replenished, and the
+tavern-boy _tooted_ in at the window through a beer-siphon,--amidst
+this Babylonian din the Consistorial Tithingman drew up one of the best
+petitions that the noble gentlemen of the chase ever yet despatched to
+the Prince.
+
+               A PLAIN RELATION, FROM THE PETITION OF THE
+                      CHIEF MASTERS OF THE CHASE.
+
+"That, as the wild game could neither read nor write, it was the
+bounden duty of the masters of the chase, who could, to write for them,
+and on conscience report that all the wild game of Flachsenfingen was
+pining under the tyranny of the peasant, as well the red game as the
+black.[210] That it made a chief-forester's heart bleed, to stand out
+of doors at night and see how the country-folk, out of an incredible
+ill-will to the deer, all night long, in the coldest weather, kept up
+on the borders of the fields a noise and fire, whistling, singing,
+shooting, so that the poor game might not be able to eat. To such hard
+hearts it was not given to reflect, that, if one should station around
+their potato-tables, as they do around their potato-fields, just such
+shooters and pipers, who should shoot away every potatoe from their
+mouths, that then they would necessarily grow lean. From just this
+cause the game was so haggard, because it could but slowly accustom
+itself to such treatment, as cavalry-horses learn to eat their oats
+from a beaten drum. The deer had often to go miles away, like one who,
+in Paris, picks up his breakfast at the inns,--in order, at last, to
+dash into a cabbage-field, which was beset by no such coast-guards
+and adversaries of the wild game, and there get a good bellyful. The
+dog-boys, therefore, said justly, that they trampled down in _one_
+stag-hunt more grain than the game got to eat the whole week. These,
+and none other, were the reasons which had moved the chief masters of
+the chase to appear before his Highness with the humble prayer--
+
+"That your Highness would be pleased to enjoin it upon the
+country-people to stay at night in their warm beds, as thousands of
+good Christians do, and as the game itself does by day.
+
+"Thereby--the majors of the chase were emboldened to promise--a lift
+would be given at once to the country-folk and the stags, the latter
+could then graze the fields in peace, like the day-cattle, and would
+certainly leave the countryman the gleanings, while they contented
+themselves with the first-fruits. The country-folk would be happily
+freed from the ailments which come of night-vigils, from chills and
+exhaustions. But the greatest advantage would be this,--that, whereas
+hitherto peasants had grumbled at the hunting-socages (and not wholly
+without justice), because they delayed the time of the harvest, that
+then the deer in their place would undertake the harvest in the night,
+as the young men in Switzerland took upon themselves to cut the grain
+over night in the place of their sweethearts, so that the latter, when
+they came to their work in the morning, should find none there,--and
+thus would the hunting-socages no longer disturb any one in the matter
+of the harvest, except at most--the game," &c.
+
+
+But what have we to tell of the Consistorial Fee-Messenger, Victor?
+That ecclesiastical collecting-servant astonished all parsons by his
+drollery, and all parsons' wives by his readiness, and nothing but his
+tin and his papers could adequately certify the genuineness of such a
+specimen of a Messenger. He collected all that the Consistorial
+Secretary had liquidated, and excused himself by the plea that it
+became neither him nor the Secretary in this case to be conscientious.
+In his brief administration, he bagged without shame all back-standing
+marriage-pledges of the smallest value, ("We in the College," said he,
+"are greedy for a half-bats,"[211])--moneys, when parties were
+divorced,--moneys, when marriages were concluded by councils, whether
+by indulgences for mourning-time, for blood-relationship, or for want
+of parental consent,--moneys, when the moneys were only once (_or
+twice_) paid, but not yet for the second (or third) time, although the
+Consistory always required this after-ring or resonance of the money in
+the single case where people had lost the receipt,--moneys which the
+parsons had to pay down merely for decrees wherein they were _exempted_
+from payment.----
+
+Thereupon he emptied his bag before the Prince, and flattened down the
+billow of money, and began:--
+
+
+"Your Highness!
+
+"The Devil is in the Consistory: it might be a Lutheran _Penitentiaria_
+for all the Commandments, and is so only for the sixth. What an honest
+Consistorial administration has been able to scrape together lies there
+on the table. The pile might be as broad again, if the Consistory had
+sense enough to say, 'Who buys? fresh, new letters of indulgence for
+everything!'--It has shown, that, beyond certain degrees of
+relationship, it can grant bulls of dispensation as well as the Pope:
+why will it not, then, apply its indulgence to any nearer degrees? It
+would be able to dispense from great as well as from small, if it
+really set about it, and just as well from fast-day penances as from
+mourning, and thrice publishing, that erotic fast-time. By Heaven!
+if a single man, like the Pope, can be the spiritual washing-machine
+of whole continents, and can clean souls in bundles in the year
+of jubilee, then surely we all in the College may serve for the
+washing-machine of a single country. If that is not done, then we
+take--for we mean to live--sin-money and perquisites for the few things
+which we have graciously to wink at; and if in Sparta the _judges_
+worshipped the goddess of Fear, so with us the _parties_ revere this
+fair _ens_.[212]--Had we only, at least, power to absolve from five or
+six great sins,--only, e. g., from a murder,--then could we allow
+divorces and expeditings of marriages, (these wholly opposite
+operations we perform successfully, just as the Karlsbad water at the
+same time dissolves the stone in the bladder and petrifies what is
+dipped into the well,) and do it for half the money."
+
+Then, after a long pause,--"Your Excellency, it is, after all,
+impracticable, because the Devil has the secular counsellors mixed in
+among the ghostly; a half-_profane session-table_ cannot by any
+cabinet-making process be made over into a _holy chair_; there is,
+therefore, nothing to be wished--except a good digestion[213]--but a
+spirit of concord, that clerical and secular counsellors may properly
+feed upon the parties around which they sit, saving a couple of bones,
+that shall fall to us scribes and messengers. So have I often seen on
+the carcass of a dead horse starlings and ravens at once, in a motley
+row, sitting amicably together, and pecking away and devouring."----
+
+My correspondent assures me that by these addresses the Court-Physician
+effected more with January than the Court-Chaplain by his. Many parties
+got their money, and some judges a most gracious letter, from the
+Prince's own hand.
+
+Before I arrive with our disguised span in the suburbs of St. Luna,
+one or two things are still to be mentioned. To January's soul more
+knee-pedals were attached than to a pianoforte, which the favorite's
+knee, while it seemed to bend itself, moved at its pleasure. He was
+always the son of the present moment, and the reflection of his
+company. If he read in Sully, then he did not neglect for a week at a
+time the Regency-College, and sent for the President of Finance. If he
+read in Frederick II., then he was for furnishing the imperial
+contingent and himself commanding it, and went forenoons to the parade.
+He contemplated with pleasure the ideal of a good government, whether
+in print or in a speech, and often attempted approximations to it,
+reformations, investigations, and compensations, for whole weeks,--with
+the exception of _retrenchments_, which, after all, are the only merit
+a prince can earn without the help of others. During the whole crusade
+he was a true Philosopher Antoninus, and stood ready everywhere to
+reward and to punish and to enact; he felt, too, that he could make it
+practicable, if one only did not absolutely require him to _labor_ and
+to _abstain_; under _that_ the other part also went to the Devil.
+
+In the beginning, he was pleased with the sentimental journey; when it
+was over, he was so again; but in the midst of it, all that was pressed
+out after the first runnings grew more and more bitter, and he wished
+for himself, instead of the country bill-of-fare, his dietetic
+dial-plate. Then, too, he had accustomed himself so much to valor,
+that, for want of it,--i. e. of his body-guard,--he was, so to speak,
+timid; hence, on one occasion, in the dark, at the tavern, he was while
+in bed, about to run through a young weaver with his cane-sword,
+because the weaver had confounded at night the princely bed with one of
+more peaceful contents. For the rest, all the rays of his favor now
+converged to a focus upon the single man of rank, the only courageous
+and confidential friend whom he had,--his Victor.
+
+But my hero had everywhere something to enjoy,--at least, the thought
+of St. Luna; everywhere something to eat,--at least, when they came to
+a fruit-tree; everywhere something to read,--and though it were only
+charms against fires on the house-doors, old calendars on the walls,
+exhortations to charity on the alms-boxes; everywhere something to
+think of,--of the travelling pair, of the four acts of Nature's
+seasons, which are annually given over again, of the thousand acts in
+man, which never return; and everywhere something to love and to dream
+of,--for this was the very road which Clotilda had so often gone over
+on her journeys between Maienthal and St. Luna, and the friend of her
+rich heart found on this classic avenue nothing but great remembrances,
+magic passages, and a long, quiet, homelike bliss....
+
+"St. Luna!" cried January, delighted at the mere thought of seeing once
+more a man of the world,--Le Baut. The mask of an emigrant was a
+thought he had himself hit upon, the better to draw out the
+Chamberlain, with whom he meant finally to give himself out as an
+hereditary foe of the Prince. Had there been in Le Baut's soul a higher
+nobility than the heraldic, or had Victor but known that the
+Chamberlain would recognize the Prince at the first glance, and that he
+would be able to do so for the very reason that the genuine suspended
+Consistorial Messenger had probably before this whispered the whole
+secret in the ear of the city of Flachsenfingen, he would have
+dissuaded him from the _noble masque_.
+
+Sebastian, as we have mentioned, stayed back and in the open air,
+probably out of shame at his part, and evidently from a longing to look
+upon Clotilda's sunny face, which for so long a time had not risen upon
+him, in a scene more convenient and congenial to his heart. "And the
+parents will be glad to see me again," he thought beside, "when they
+have something to thank me for,"--namely, Clotilda's place at court.
+More than once did he start, as he stood watching there behind the
+blanket of the dark, to hear his name called out of the Parsonage, and,
+in fact, with such love and such longings for his answer that he could
+almost have given one. But it was only the people of the Parsonage
+talking with his little godson, and saying to him, "Dearest good
+Sebastian! Just see here: what have I got for you?" How the veiled
+paradise of to-day's spring lay in old relics around him! How he envied
+the shadowy heads in the palace, which he saw moving about the lights,
+and the old Parson's pug-dog, who would fain wag him in to the
+Parsonage-inmates, and who continued in there to perform his part on
+the stage of so sweet a past! But when some thistles round the palace
+reminded him of the mosaic ones on the floor within-doors, then was the
+envier to be envied, and, with the fairest dreams that were ever traced
+over the ground of his dark life, he went back to the Apothecary's.
+
+The next day January followed, delighted with the parents, enraptured
+with the daughter, because they were so fine and she so fair. It cost
+my hero nothing but a word to move the step-father to the intercession
+for the appointment of the step-daughter, which our hero and the father
+had so often longed to see; and it cost the step-father, too, only a
+word with the Princess to get his and their petition granted....
+Clotilda became maid-of-honor.
+
+Immediately upon that, the Minister von Schleunes, in a congratulatory
+letter, pressed upon Clotilda's parents the quarter-wing of his house,
+and was happy, in the epistle, "that a higher petition had _repeated_
+his own with such effect." I set up this nobleman as a model to all
+people of the world; although, at present, all writes itself _noble_ in
+the _moral_, as the Viennese do in the _heraldic_ sense.
+
+Victor, who with his soul's eyes was peeping all day long into the
+Chamberlain's window, could hardly wait to see Clotilda, first in St.
+Luna, and next at court. He put off the visit from day to day, and
+night after night made it in dream. Not even his visiting-card--his
+letter to the Parson--had he sent off; he wanted, not only to carry it,
+but actually to supersede it, himself. But this, last thought--of
+suppressing the letter, for fear Clotilda might possibly get hold of
+this malicious conduct-list of courts, and therefrom contract a
+repugnance to the new office--he hurled forthwith out of his soul, as
+Paul did the viper from his hand. Woe to the heart that is not sincere
+towards a sincere one, is not great towards a great one, and warm
+towards a warm one, when it should be all this even towards one that is
+nothing of it all!
+
+For the rest, he needed such a visit, and such a reciprocal visit,
+every day more and more; for he was not happy; and for this there were,
+besides himself, to blame, first, the Prince, secondly, Flamin,
+thirdly, nine thousand and thirty-seven persons. The Prince could not
+well help it; he poured out the whole cornucopia of his love on the
+Doctor, and took away from him all the freedom which the latter had
+been minded in the beginning so sacredly to maintain. Victor shook his
+head as often as he wrote in his journal, or log-book of his voyage of
+life, (at his father's behest,) and saw by his chart that he had passed
+over quite other seas and degrees of latitude and longitude than he or
+his father had desired. "However, I shall land right, at least," said
+he.--
+
+But his Flamin brought still more sadness to his soul, which everywhere
+at once sought and bestowed love. He wanted to impart to the
+Counsellor, with the news of Clotilda's appointment, a joy like
+his own; but his friend received it as coldly as he did its bearer.
+The dust of law-papers lay thick on the organ-pipes of his
+spirits.--Chained to the session- and writing-tables, he was now, like
+chained dogs, wilder than he had been before when unfettered.--The
+efforts of his colleagues to dislocate the body politic into an anagram
+did not get from him the approbation which they deserved.--Then, too,
+there lodged itself in his soul the leaven of the jealousy of
+friendship, which could not feel it right that his Victor should see
+him seldomer and others oftener.[214]--But most was he affronted by
+Victor's refusal, when he besought his company to St. Luna.... In a
+word, he was vexed.
+
+The nine thousand and thirty-seven men who were to my hero nine
+thousand and thirty-seven tormenting spirits are the gentlemen of
+Flachsenfingen jointly and severally, by means of their absurd
+character, which deserves not to be sketched here, but in an extra
+flyleaf.
+
+
+                            EXTRA FLY-LEAF,
+
+_Wherein is sketched the Ridiculous Character of the People of
+   Flachsenfingen,--or Perspective Plan of the City of Little Vienna_.
+
+Little Vienna is the name many give to my Flachsenfingen, just as we
+have a Little Leipsic, Little Paris,[215] &c. There can hardly,
+however, be two cities wider apart in manners than Flachsenfingen,
+where one gluts and drowns his life and his soul, and Vienna, where
+one, perhaps, does not sufficiently shun the opposite fault of a
+Spartan asceticism. The Little-Viennese, or Flachsenfingeners, open
+their hearts to the enjoyment of Nature far less than the orifice of
+the stomach.--Pastures are the kitchen-pieces of their cattle, and
+gardens those of the owners thereof; the Milky Way does not chain and
+satisfy their spirits half so much (though it is longer) as the
+Koenigsberg sausage of 1583 would have done, which was five hundred and
+ninety-six ells long, and four times as heavy as the learned man
+himself who has portrayed it to posterity,--Herr Wagenseil.[216]--Are
+these the traits upon which carriers ground the name of Little Vienna?
+I have often been in Great Vienna, and am personally acquainted with
+the grand crosses, little crosses, and commanders of the Order of
+Temperance, which is there so common. I can certainly, therefore,
+represent a valid witness, and must be believed, when I say, that,
+while in Little Vienna they guzzle extraordinarily, of Great Vienna,
+and emphatically of its cloister-people, I can and must maintain
+something very different: they have not only all the time the greatest
+thirst,--which certainly must needs be gone, if they quenched it,--but
+they also make use, against drunkenness, of a fine method of Plato's.
+That ancient advises us, in case of drunkenness, to look into a glass,
+in order, by the distorted figure therein which reminds us of our
+desecration, to be forever warned away from the vice. Hence whole
+chapters, the dean, the sub-senior, the junior canons, &c., often set
+vessels full of wine or beer before them, and lift them to their eyes,
+and in this _metamorphotic_ or caricaturing glass, which, by shaking,
+distorts still more the distorted features, contemplate themselves,
+according to the philosopher's advice, a good long while. I ask whether
+people who peer so deeply into the glass can love drinking?--
+
+It does not, however, follow from this, that I deny the Great-Viennese
+a resemblance to the Flachsenfingeners, in such traits as do honor.
+Thus, for example, I must gladly allow a similarity of the former to
+the latter in this respect, that they, neither of them, are ever down
+with the disease of poetry or enthusiasm or sentimentalism,--which are
+all one. Victor would make this eulogy sound in his language somewhat
+thus: "The Viennese authors (even the best of them, only Denis and
+hardly three others excepted) give the reader no wings to bear him up
+over the whole world of the actual by that nobility of soul, by that
+contempt of the earth, by that reverence for old virtue and freedom and
+the higher love, wherein other German geniuses shine as in holy
+rays."[217] And he would refer for proof to the "Vienna Sketches," to
+"Faustin,"[218] to Blumauer,[219] and to the "Vienna Almanac of the
+Muses." This reproach even a Viennese would accept and turn to
+his credit, by asking us whether we have to show (like him) a
+"Musen-Almanach," with a sediment of filth, whereupon one might write,
+"With approbation of the brothel."--This feeling of literary difference
+compelled even a Nicolai,--otherwise no special _amoroso_ of the Vienna
+authors,--in his "Universal German Library," to build up for them a
+separate side-box, although he throws writers of all other German
+circles together into _one parterre_, or pit. In like manner have I
+seen in Bavaria, on the gallows, beside the usual post for the three
+Christian fellow-confessors, a special schismatic cross-beam attached,
+to which only the Jew tribe were strung up.
+
+The Flachsenfingener knows that there is nothing in poets; and in
+books, where rills of verse run through the prose, he skips clean over
+the rills, just as certain people come late to church in order to
+escape the singing. He is a true servant of the state, who knows of
+what use the poetic golden vein is in the revision-, commission-,
+relation-, and enrolling-systems,--none at all; meanwhile, although he
+cannot appreciate a Klopstock or a Goethe, nevertheless he will not, in
+his leisure hours, despise a doggerel verse or crambo-rhyme. A soul of
+such a fortunate, robust nature, wherein one aims less to exalt his
+spirit than his income, makes it, to be sure, comprehensible how there
+may be a kine-pox, by means of which the Flachsenfingener has been
+able, like Socrates, to wander round alone in the plague of
+sentimentalism without being infected. The full moon produced with them
+full crabs, but no full hearts; and what they planted under it, that it
+might favor the growth, was not love, but--turnips. The genuine
+Little-Viennese shoots at much nearer targets than that white one over
+yonder. They marry there with true gusto, without having first shot
+themselves or sighed themselves to death,--they know no obstacles to
+love but ecclesiastical,--female virtue is a belt-buckle, which must
+hold as long as the surname of the daughter,--the hearts of daughters
+are there like letter-envelopes, which, when they have once been
+superscribed to one lord, can easily be turned so as to be addressed to
+another man,--the girls love there, not from coquetry, but from
+simplicity, any devil, except poor devils....
+
+In short, my correspondent, from whom I have all this, is almost
+prepossessed in favor of Little Vienna, and therefore contradicts
+vehemently the author of the "Travelling Frenchman," who is said to
+have said somewhere--if I had him in the house, I should know how
+Little Vienna is properly named--that the Flachsenfingener has not
+energy enough to be at least a highwayman. Knef says, however, he will
+not give up the hope that they have been thieves, and backs himself by
+the cases of those that have been hung.
+
+    _End of the Extra Fly-Leaf, wherein was sketched the Ridiculous
+         Character of the People of Flachsenfingen,--or of the
+             Perspective Plan of the City of Little Vienna_.
+
+But among such people my hero, with all his toleration, could not take
+any comfort whatever,--he who so hated all selfishness, especially in
+the sensual form, and who would gladly have attended Dr. Graham's
+lectures, wherein he taught men to live without eating,--he who so
+gladly opened his heart to the seed of truth winged by poesy,--who
+bore an Emanuel in his heart, and held the want of poetic feeling
+even as a sign that the _moral_ man had not yet laid aside all
+caterpillar-skins,--he who looked upon this whole life and the whole
+body politic as the hull in which the kernel of the next life
+ripens,--O, whoever thinks this is too lonely among them that think
+otherwise!--
+
+So it stood with the world around him, when he got a line from the good
+wife of the Parson:--
+
+
+"The general talk here is that you are dead. But I express my mind
+against people, that, as you let so little be heard from you, and have
+forgotten all the world, you must, for that very reason, be still
+alive. Do confirm my proposition! We all have a fond and foolish
+longing for you, and I should like to beg you to come on the
+twenty-first (if the wedding at the senior Parson's hinders you no more
+than it does my Flamin). We have nothing to offer you here, but the
+birthday of our Clotilda. O good my Lord, and my beloved Lordship, how
+has it been possible for you hitherto to remain so long mute and
+invisible? A true friend, who has nothing at all of the ladies of your
+court about her, not even their fickleness, wishes heartily to have you
+before her eyes and beside her ears,--and that lady is myself,--and
+when I see you come, I shall certainly weep for joy, let me laugh or
+pout the while as I will.
+
+                                                     "E."
+
+
+When did he receive this letter, so full of soul? And what answer did
+his make to it?--
+
+It was on the loveliest evening, which announced the coming of the
+loveliest Sunday morning and of the magic after-summer,--he looked at
+the evening red under which lay Maienthal's mountains, and his heart
+beat heavily within him,--he looked toward the dawning red of the full
+moon which kindled over St. Luna, and his yearning thitherward became
+inexpressible,--he thought of Clotilda, whose birthday fell upon
+to-morrow,--and so, very naturally, as to-day closed, he went--to bed.
+
+
+
+
+                           19. DOG--POST-DAY.
+
+   The Hair-Dresser with a (musical) Disease of the Lungs.--Clotilda in
+     Victor's Dream.--Extra Lines on Church-Music.--Garden Concert by
+     Stamitz.--Quarrel between Victor and Flamin.--The Heart without
+     Solace.--Letter to Emanuel.
+
+
+The October Sunday with which I fill up this Dog-Post-Day was,
+even at nine and a half o'clock in the morning, such a glad,
+glistening day in St. Luna, that the whole Parsonage thought of the
+Court-Physician.--"Ah, he ought to come to the concert this evening!"
+The _virtuoso_ Stamitz was to give one in Le Baut's garden.--"O, better
+earlier, even to dinner!"--"And to my forenoon sermon, if he will not
+come to the children's catechizing." Eymann, as he said this, had, more
+than anything else, his newly dressed peruke in his head, which Herr
+Meuseler had to-day placed _on_ it. This clever peruke-maker visited
+those of his diocesans (the parsons) who wore no hair of their own,
+often and with greater benefit to their heads than the Superintendent
+himself, that _Commander of the Faithful_, to whom most chaplains said,
+Your Excellency! If he could only have weaned himself from singing,
+lying, and drinking too much,--the _friseur_,--most of the clergy would
+have ordered their toupees--those artistic cock's-combs--of him; but as
+it was, they did not.
+
+As the Chaplain loved to make the _confitures_ of Fate, among which
+false hair is to be reckoned, bitter in some way, and to give them, as
+it were, an infusion of hops, he naturally sought to embitter to-day's
+peruke (for whose false curls he gave, in place of payment, genuine
+hair cut off from his people's heads) by the misgivings which he
+conjured up about the long staying away of Victor. He bethought
+himself: "We must have affronted him in some way,--he does not even
+write,--he has, perhaps, fallen out with my son,--something has
+occurred,--and then, too; the old Lord no longer gives us a
+side-glance,--our rats, also, had a hand (or a foot) in helping drive
+him away."
+
+By such elegies he threw at first himself, and at last even his
+hearers, into agony. He was not to be refuted in any way, except by
+one's bringing out some new subject of distress. The breaking-away spot
+in his cloud, or his _little book for help in distress_, was this time
+a literal book, the "Anecdotes for Preachers," by Teller, of Zeitz,
+which he to-day received through the peruke-maker from the clerical
+reading-circle. Clergymen, especially country clergymen, carry
+everything out with a minute, punctilious solicitude, into which they
+are partly scared by their reigning bugbear and dragon of a Consistory.
+Now in this book-club there was a law current--commentators and editors
+keep it--that every member who should find a grease-spot or ink-stain
+or rent in the book he was reading should enter it on the fly-leaf in
+an index and inventory of spots, together with the number of the page
+"where." Very naturally, every one who was even half-way an honest
+Lutheran would deny the _immaculate re_-(or _con_-)_ception_ of it, and
+the freckles were therefore all regularly registered, but nobody fined.
+Only the conscientious Court-Chaplain took upon himself, as scapegoat,
+the punishment of other people's sins; for he never could sleep a wink
+the whole night, when he found in a book more blots than in the
+sin-register, because he clearly saw that he should be made adoptive
+father of the anonymous smutch and buyer of the book.--Now Teller's
+Anecdotes for Black-Coats was a complete pile of linen for the wash,
+black with dirt. Was there not one dog's-ear upon another,--compound
+dog's-ears,--blot upon blot? were not the leaves regular
+_proof-sheets_,--and, in fact, speaking _without metaphor_? Eymann
+began, "And if money should come flying in to me through the
+window"....
+
+Just then Victor's letter flew in at the window, and its--author
+through the door.
+
+But, of course, the case was this:--Victor, before pleasant weather,
+had pleasant dreams; before bad weather, Satan and his kin appeared to
+him. The beautiful weather of Saturday, and the thought of Clotilda's
+birthday and of the after-summer, gave him a morning dream, which, in
+turn, gave him a stage on which only her sweet image played. A person
+whom he had seen behind the veil of dream stood before him all the next
+day in a magic reflection. With him dreams,--those night-moths of the
+spirit,--like the real moths, strayed out beyond the bounds of night
+and sleep; at least for the forenoon, he went on loving, awake, every
+person whom he had begun to love in dream. This time, by an exactly
+reverse process, waking love flowed on into dreaming love, and the
+actual Clotilda coincided with the ideal to form one saintly image, so
+radiant that any one who knows his dream will easily enter into the
+rest. Therefore must the dream be given to the readers, the poetic ones
+especially: for others I should be glad to prepare an expurgated
+edition of the Dog-Post-Days, in which it should be left out; for
+unpoetic souls that have no dreams themselves should not read any.
+
+But to you, ye good, seldom requited female souls,--ye who have
+a second conscience of your own, beside the first, for pure
+manners,--whose single virtue, when one looks at it nearly, is seen to
+bloom up into one wreath made of all the virtues, as nebulous stars,
+seen through glasses, fall into millions,--ye who, so changeable in all
+purposes, so unchangeable in the noblest one, go from the earth with
+unrecognized wishes, with forgotten worth, with eyes full of tears and
+love, with hearts full of virtue and grief,--to you, dear ones, I
+gladly tell the little dream and my long story!...
+
+"A hand which Horion did not see laid hold of him; lips which he saw
+not spake to him, 'Let thy heart now be clean and holy, for the genius
+of female virtue resides in this region.'--Lo! there stood Horion on a
+field clothed with forget-me-nots, over which the sky like a blue
+shadow fell; for all the stars had been withdrawn from it, only the
+_evening star_ stood gleaming alone up in the place of the sun. White
+ice-pyramids, streaked with down-trickling lines of evening redness,
+closed in, as with a wall of gold and silver ore, the whole dark
+horizon.----Therein Clotilda passed by, sublime as one dead, serene as
+a human being in the next world, conducted now by winged children, now
+by a veiled nun, now by an earnest angel, but she passed forever by
+before Horion; she smiled upon him in blissful lovingness while thus
+passing, but she passed by.--Flowery hillocks, almost like graves, rose
+and sank, for every one was stirred by the breathing of a bosom
+slumbering beneath it; a white rose stood over the heart that lay
+veiled below; two red ones grew over the cheeks, where tender blushes
+hid themselves in the earth; and overhead in the night-blue of heaven
+the white and red reflections of the hill-flowers glided fitfully into
+each other as often as the roses of the heart and the cheeks swayed
+with the hillock.--Dying echoes, awakened, however, by unheard voices,
+gave answer to each other behind the mountains; each echo lifted the
+little hills of slumber still higher, as if a deep sigh or a bosom full
+of rapture heaved them; and Clotilda smiled more blissfully, sinking at
+every resonance more deeply into the flowery earth.--The tones were too
+full of ecstasy, and the dissolved heart of man was fain to die
+therein. Clotilda sank now into the graves up to her heart; only her
+silent head still smiled above the meadow; the forget-me-nots at last
+reached up to the sunken eyes that were full of blissful tears, and
+bloomed over them.--Then suddenly a hill of slumber crept over the
+saint, and from beneath the flowers her words came up, 'Rest thou, too,
+Horion!'--But the sounds, growing more distant, transformed themselves
+during the burial into dim harmonica-tones.... And lo! as they sank
+into silence, there came up a great shadow like Emanuel, and stood
+before him like a short night, and covered the unknown moment as with a
+hand from a higher world. But when the moment and the shadow had passed
+away, then had all the hills sunk.--Then the reflections of the
+flowers, flowing together, gilded over the undulating heavens.--Then
+were seen _white_ butterflies, _white_ doves, _white_ swans, climbing
+up to the purple peaks of the ice-mountains with outstretched wings as
+with arms, and behind the mountains, as if by an uncontainable
+transport, blossoms were flung up, and stars and garlands.--And there
+on the highest ice-mountain, as it rose tranquil in clear radiance and
+purple blaze, stood Clotilda, glorified, consecrated, radiant with
+supernatural rapture, and on her heart fluttered a nebulous globe,
+which consisted of little vaporized tears, and on which Horion's pallid
+form was delineated, and Clotilda spread wide her arms."----
+
+But to embrace? or to soar away? or to pray?... Ah! he awoke too soon,
+and his eyes streamed down in greater tears than the nebulous ones, and
+a sinking voice cried incessantly all around him, "Rest thou, too!"
+
+O thou soul of woman,--thou that goest, weary and unrewarded, wounded
+and bleeding, but great and unspotted, up from the smoking battle-field
+of life,--thou angel, whom the heart of man, reared by storms, soiled
+by the world's dealings, can respect and love, but cannot reward or
+reach,--how does my soul at this moment bow down before thee! how do I
+wish thee now the soothing balm of Heaven, the requiting goodness of
+the Eternal! And thou, Philippina, precious soul, glide away into a
+secret cell, and, amidst the tears which thou hast already so often
+shed, lay thy hand upon thy soft, rich heart, and swear, "Forever shalt
+thou continue consecrated to God and virtue, even if not to repose!" To
+thyself swear it,--not to me, for I believe it without an oath.----
+
+What a parade-night, full of stars and dreams, was that! and what a
+gala-day of Nature followed upon it! In Victor's brain stood nothing
+but St. Luna, veiled in blue, bespangled with silver dew-drops, and
+graced by the loveliest angel, who to-day raised moist, glad eyes to
+the friendly heaven, and thought, "How beautiful art thou to-day, just
+upon my birthday festival!"--Even the Senior Pastor and his daughter,
+who both made a wedding,--the former an anniversary second wedding with
+his Senioress, the latter a first one with the preacher of the Orphan
+Asylum,--slipped themselves into the procession of his joyous thoughts
+as two new couples.
+
+He did not mean to go to St. Luna, but he said; "I will dress myself up
+just for a little walk."--
+
+"It is all one where I go to-day," he said, when he was out of doors;
+and so he took the St. Luna road.--
+
+"I can turn round at any time," he said, when he had gone half-way.--
+
+"But it would be something still more ridiculously funny, if I should
+be at once correspondent and postman, and deliver my own letter," said
+he, and drew it out.--
+
+"And answer my good mother's orally by the same opportunity," he
+continued, half in dream, and full of greater love towards her who had
+sent him the sweet nocturnal one by the intelligence of the birthday.--
+
+----But when he heard the first bells of St. Luna ringing for church,
+then he sprang up, and said, "Now I will no longer embitter the way by
+further scruples, but will march boldly and decidedly into the
+village."
+
+And so, taking the hand of Fortune, with all Nature smiling after him,
+with dreams in his heart, with innocent hope in his freshly blooming
+countenance, he entered into the Eden of his soul.
+
+Flamin he had not asked to go with him, in order not to rob the Senior
+Pastor of his wedding-guest, and because he did not know, himself, that
+he should reach St. Luna, and perhaps, too, because he did not want to
+have his fantasying attention to the sparkling morning disturbed by any
+news about juristic cases. In fact, he would rather take a walk with a
+woman than with a man. Men are almost ashamed, beside one another, of
+any except silent emotions; but womanly souls love to unfold to each
+other their bashful sensibilities; for they cover up the naked heart
+with maternal warmth, that it may not become chilled during the
+unveiling.
+
+As Victor passed round the Parsonage below, he saw himself up at the
+window, in his _second edition for a few good friends_; but the wax
+Victor had forthwith to be banished behind a false partition, that it
+might not frighten the fleshly one. The reception of the latter, and
+the feast of jubilee thereupon, need not be described by me in a more
+lively manner than by my saying that the pug-dog was almost crushed
+underfoot, the bulfinch hopped round in vain for his breakfast, nor did
+the Parson's wife offer any to the guest, in her joy at staring at him,
+and church did not begin till after the double usance of half an hour;
+so that this time more parishioners went to church drunk than usual.
+
+Victor, too, went thither intoxicated, but with joy. There is nothing
+more agreeable than to be a parson's wife, and to say to one's husband,
+while putting on his clerical bands, "Make the service a little longer
+to-day, else the mutton will not be quite roasted through."--Domestic
+trifles gratified my hero full as much as courtly ones provoked him.
+
+He went with the Parson and with the Parson's wife, who abridged all
+the processes of kitchen and toilet in a summary and manlike way. His
+toleration for the faults of the clerical order had nothing in common
+with that of the distinguished people who are fit for high dignities
+and dinners, which arises from supreme contempt, and which can endure a
+Christian priest as easily as an Egyptian; but it grew out of his
+opinion that the churches are still the only Sunday-Schools and Spartan
+school-gates for the poor commoners, who cannot hear their _cours de
+morale_ from the _state_. Besides, he loved, as a youth, the favorites
+of his childhood.
+
+Many preachers try to combine the rule of Quintilian, who requires that
+_bad_ arguments should be put forward in the earlier part of the
+discourse, with that of Cicero, who is for keeping them back till the
+latter part, by posting them in _both_ places; but Eymann held good
+feelings to be better than bad reasons, and wound around the peasants
+chains, not of reasoning, but of flowers.
+
+The _friseur_ above-mentioned, at first, would not go to church,
+because it was beneath his dignity, but afterward he could not do
+otherwise; for, on account of the court stranger present to-day,
+church-music was to be made.
+
+It is the only fault of the peruke-maker Meuseler, that he loves to
+sing too well, and is too fond of intruding his natural pipes into all
+church-music that is made in his perukial diocese, especially on Holy
+Whitsuntide. The St. Luna chorister could never bear this; but how to
+cheat him and feast a thousand ears? Simply thus: He frizzled out
+to-day what was still to be frizzled, (not to-day alone, but it was
+always so,) and merely glided up the choir-steps. Here he leaned add
+watched, till the chorister, seated on the musical sausage-sledge,
+struck with his finger the first note of the church-music. Then, like a
+sunbeam, he darted up into the choir, and filched away from the young
+counter-tenor his part, and sang it into the ears of the congregation,
+but with much whining and puffing, as if he were chanting his
+manuscript to the reviewers. For one must now, once for all, make it
+known to the world, that the enraged musician at the clavichord had,
+with a sharp-cornered triangle of elbows, furiously thrust back at the
+frizzling counter-tenor, in order to push the strange singing-bird out
+of the bird-house of the choir. But as the singer made his right arm
+the firm note-desk of his text, and the other a war-club,--like the
+Jews, who built up Jerusalem with one hand full of building-tools and
+the other full of weapons,--one sees that the peruke-maker, even
+amidst this continuance of fighting and fa-sol-la-ing, could do his
+very best, and execute somewhat during the musical truce of God. But
+so soon as the music had drawn its last breath, then the harmonious
+bird-of-passage and stormy-petrel skipped nimbly out across the choir,
+accompanied by the memory of a thousand ears and a single elbow. The
+chorister could not catch him, nor get scent of him.
+
+If, on the contrary, he had the good fortune to be passing with his
+bandboxes through a village just as parson and schoolmaster and
+pedagogic frog-spawn were quacking and croaking[220] round a deaf
+corpse,--all which many name, more concisely, a dirge,--then could the
+_virtuoso_, without the counter-prop of elbows, spring gayly with both
+feet into the motet,[221] work out the funeral serenade given to the
+dead man by his heirs, throw in gratis some final cadences to the
+funeral procession, and yet have time to offer in the village to the
+bailiff an entirely new bag-wig.--
+
+To our hero the music in country churches gave the greatest satirical
+pleasure. But little should we get by it, had I not the forethought to
+beg leave just for one poor little extra-syllable--one shall hardly see
+it--upon church-music.
+
+              POOR LITTLE EXTRA-SYLLABLE ON CHURCH-MUSIC.
+
+It always gives me pleasure to see the people keep their seats during
+church-music, because it is a proof that no one is bitten by the
+tarantula; for, if they should run out, one would see that they could
+not endure any discords, and so had been bitten. I, as profane
+music-master, compose for few churches,--that is to say, only
+the consecration-noise for new ones, or old ones that have been
+repaired,--and therefore, in truth, I understand nothing of the matter
+whereupon, in passing, I purpose to express myself; but thus much let
+me still be allowed to assert, that the Lutheran church-music is good
+for something,--in the country, not in the capitals, where, perhaps,
+the fewest discords are correctly delivered. Verily, a miserable,
+sottish, blue chorister, who in bravura-airs sings himself brown
+and beats others brown,--there are, therefore, two kinds of
+_bravura_-airs,--is able, with a few mechanics who on Sundays work at
+the fiddle, with a trumpeter who might blow down without an instrument
+the walls of Jericho, with a smith who lays about him with the sticks
+of the kettle-drums, with a few spasmodic youngsters that do not yet
+even understand singing, and still resemble a female singer, who
+labors, not, like the fine arts, for _ear_ and _eye_ alone, but also
+(only in a worse acceptation than the youngsters) for a third sense,
+and with the little wind which he draws from the lungs of the organ and
+his own lungs,--such a thumper, I say, is able, with so extraordinarily
+little musical rubbish, nevertheless, to get up a much louder
+thundering and fiddle-rosin-lightning around the pulpit Sinai--I mean,
+to draw a far more vehement and discordant church-music out of his
+choir--than many much better sustained theatre-orchestras and
+chapels, with whose harmonies temples are so often desecrated. Hence
+such a noisy man is pained afterward, when people misunderstand and
+falsely judge his church scraping and squeaking and groaning. Shall,
+then, the soft, low Moravian music steal into all our provincial
+churches?--Fortunately, however, there are still city choristers who
+are working against this, and who know wherein pure choral tone and
+discord are to be distinguished from court-tone.
+
+I expect, not readers, but organists, to know why mere dissonances--for
+consonances are to be endured only among the voices of the
+instruments--belong to the choir. Dissonances--according to Euler and
+Sulzer--are relations of tones which are expressed in high numbers;
+they displease us, therefore, not on account of their incongruity, but
+on account of our inability to reduce them rapidly to an equation.
+Higher minds would find the near relations of our harmonies too easy
+and monotonous,--the larger ones of our discords, on the contrary,
+charming and not above their comprehension. Now, as divine service is
+held more in honor of higher beings than for the profit of men, the
+church style must insist upon this, that a music shall be made,
+suitable for higher beings,--namely, of discords,--and that precisely
+that which is the most abominable to our ears shall be chosen as most
+appropriate for the temple.
+
+If we once open the church-doors to the instrumental music of the
+Moravians, then we shall at last be infected with their singing, and by
+degrees all that vocal bleating and bellowing will be lost which makes
+our churches so lively, and which to castrated ears is such a
+disagreeable hammer of the law, but for us so good a proof that we
+resemble the swine, which the Abbe de Baigne, at the command of Louis
+XI., arranged according to the scale, goaded with jacks, and set to
+squealing.--These are my thoughts on church-music, or modern German
+battle-song.
+
+              _End of the Extra-Syllable on Church-Music_.
+
+
+I should not have let the hair-dresser sing and strut so long, if my
+hero had been available for anything else, all this Sunday, than
+a supernumerary; but he did nothing of consequence the whole day,
+except, that, out of a sort of humanity, by unpacking, himself; her
+chests-of-drawers and bandboxes, he compelled old Appel, who would
+rather dress hams than her person, to prepare the usual Sabbath edition
+of the latter, printed with typographic splendor, as early as three
+o'clock in the afternoon; otherwise she would not have delivered the
+same till after supper. The Jews believe that they get, on the Sabbath,
+a new Schabbes-[222] or Sabbath-Soul: into maidens there enters one at
+least; into the Appels, two or three.
+
+But why do I expect my hero to make any more active demonstration
+to-day,--him who, to-day, buried in that dream-night and in the coming
+evening, his emotions stirred by every kindly eye, and by the
+_rudera_[223] and urns of a spring which he had dreamed away,--softly
+dissolved by the calm, bland summer, which still lay smiling and dying
+on the incense-altars of the mountains, on the crape-clad fields, and
+amidst the mute funeral escort of birds, and at the rising of the first
+cloud would pass away from the boughs,--Victor, I say, who to-day,
+greeted with a melancholy smile by nothing but tender remembrances,
+felt that he had hitherto been too mirthful? He could only look upon
+the good souls around him with glistening eyes of love, then turn them
+away, more intensely glistening, and go out. Over his heart and all
+its notes stood written, _Tremolando_. No one is more profoundly sad
+than he who laughs too much; for when this laughter ceases, everything
+has power over the exhausted soul, and a meaningless lullaby, a
+flute-concert,--whose D sharp and F sharp keys and mouthpieces are
+merely the two lips wherewith a young shepherd whistles,--opens the
+flood-gates of the old tears, as a whisper loosens the poised and
+trembling avalanche. He felt as if his dream of this morning absolutely
+did not allow him to address Clotilda; she seemed to him too holy, and
+still escorted by winged children, and placed upon icy thrones. As,
+upon the whole, he had to-day neither a tongue nor an ear for Le Baut's
+conversations in the realm of the morally dead, he preferred to listen
+unseen in the great leafy garden to this Stamitz concert, and at the
+farthest let himself be introduced to the company by accident. His
+second reason was, that his heart was made for a sounding-board of
+music, and gladly drank in the fleeting tones without disturbance, and
+loved to conceal their effects upon him from ordinary men, of the
+world, who can truly quite as little do without Goethe's, Raphael's,
+and Sacchini's things (and for not a whit inferior reasons) as without
+Loeschenkohl's own. Emotion, it is true, raises one above being ashamed
+to show emotion; but while his emotions lasted, he hated and shunned
+all attention to another's attention, because the Devil smuggles in
+vanity among the best feelings, often one knows not how. In the night,
+in a shady nook, tears fall more gracefully, and by-and-by evaporate.
+
+In all this he was strengthened by the Parson's wife; for she had
+secretly sent to town and invited her son, and artistically prepared in
+the garden a surprise.
+
+The Parson's family repaired at last to the embowered concert-hall, and
+gave not a thought to the consideration how much they were despised by
+Le Baut's household, who held only noble metals and noble birth, never
+noble deeds, to be cards of admission, and who, highly valuing the
+people of the Parsonage as friends of his Lordship and of Matthieu,
+would, however, have valued them still higher as lap-dogs of either.
+
+Victor kept back a little in the Parsonage garden, because it was
+still too light, and also because he pitied poor Apollonia, who was
+peering solitary and unseen, in full finery, from the window of the
+summer-house, out into the air, and dandling perpendicularly the little
+god-son, whom she hung now over her head, now under her stomach. After
+the manner of a cit, he did not put on his hat in the summer-house, in
+order to strengthen her spirit by courtesy. An infant is, as it were,
+prompter and bellows-blower to the nurse: the young Sebastian sent
+Appel timely and sufficient succor under the siege by the elder one,
+and she undertook at last to speak, and remark that the god-son was a
+dear, good, beautiful, little "Basty." "But," she added, "the young
+leddy (Clotilda) must not hear that: she will have it that we should
+call him Victor, when she hears father call him Basty." Now she began
+to magnify how Clotilda loved his godchild, how often she would snatch
+the little monkey and smile on him and hug and kiss him; and the
+eulogist repeated on a small scale everything that she praised. Nay,
+the grown-up Sebastian did it after her, but he sought on the little
+lips only the kisses of _others_; and perhaps, in Appel's case, again,
+_his_ were among the things which are sought. Made happier himself, he
+left one whom he had made happier; for Love despatched now one gayly
+attired hope after another as messengers to his heart, and all said,
+"Truly, we do not deceive thee: trust us!"
+
+At last Stamitz began to tune up, about whom the stiff family of the
+Lord Chamberlain would certainly not have concerned themselves, because
+to-day there were no strangers present, had not Clotilda begged for
+this garden-concert as the only festival of her birth-night. Stamitz
+and his orchestra filled a lighted bower,--the noble audience sat in
+the next brightest niche, and wished the thing were already over,--the
+commonalty sat farther off, and the Chaplain, for fear of the
+catarrhal, dewy floor, twisted one leg round the other above the
+thighs,--Clotilda and her Agatha reclined in the darkest leafy box.
+Victor did not steal in, till the overture announced to him the seats
+and the seating of the company: in the remotest arbor, in a true
+aphelion, this comet took its place. The overture consisted of that
+musical scrawling and flourishing, of that harmonious phraseology, that
+crackling of fire-works produced by the mutual contact of sounding
+passages, which I so extol, when it is nowhere but in the overture.
+There it is in place; it is the sprinkling rain which softens the heart
+for the great drops of the simpler tones. All emotions in the world
+need _exordia_; and music paves the way, or the tear-ways, (lachrymal
+ducts,) for music.
+
+Stamitz--after a dramatic plan which not every conductor marks out for
+himself--gradually descended from the ears into the heart, and from
+allegros to adagios: this great composer sweeps in ever-narrowing
+circles around every bosom in which there is a heart, until at last he
+reaches it and folds it in a rapturous embrace.
+
+Horion trembled alone, without seeing his loved ones, in a gloomy
+arbor, upon which a single withered twig let in the light of the moon
+and of its pursuing clouds. Nothing ever stirred him more during music
+than to look at the chase of the clouds. When he accompanied with his
+eyes and with the tones these nebulous streams in their everlasting
+flight around our shadowy globe, and when he imparted to them all his
+joys and his wishes, then he thought, as in all his joys and sorrows,
+on other clouds, of another flight, of other shadows, than those above
+him,--then did his whole soul pine and languish; but the strings
+stilled the panting bosom, as the cold leaden bullet in, the mouth
+allays thirst, and the tones discharged the heavy tears from the full
+soul.
+
+Dear Victor! there is in man a mighty wish which was never fulfilled:
+it has no name, it seeks its object, though all that thou namest it and
+all joys are not its reality; but it recurs, when in a summer night
+thou lookest to the north or towards distant mountains, or when
+moonlight is on the earth, or the heavens are studded with stars, or
+when thou art very happy. This great, vast wish lifts our soul aloft,
+but with sorrow: ah! here below we are thrown upward in a prostrate
+position like epileptics. But this wish, to which nothing can give a
+name,--our strings and tones name it to the human spirit; the yearning
+soul then weeps more profusely and can no longer comprehend itself, and
+calls inward in rapture of lamentation between the tones: "Ay, all that
+ye name to me is what I want!" ...
+
+Mortal man, the enigmatical creature, has also a nameless, monstrous
+dread, which has no object, which awakes at hearing of spiritual
+apparitions, and which one sometimes feels when one only speaks of
+it....
+
+Horion yielded up his bruised heart, with quiet tears which no one saw
+flow, to the high adagios which laid themselves with warm wings of
+eider-down over all his wounds. All that he loved entered now into
+his shady arbor,--his oldest friend and his youngest; he hears the
+thunder-storm-bells of life toll, but the hands of friendship stretch
+forth to meet each other, and they clasp each other, and even in the
+second life they hold each other fast in withering grasp. All tones
+seemed the unearthly echoes of his dream, sent back by beings whom one
+neither saw nor heard....
+
+He could not possibly stay longer in this dark inclosure with his
+burning fancies, at this too great distance from the Pianissimo. He
+went--almost too boldly and too closely--through a leafy avenue up to
+the tones, and pressed his face far through the leaves, in order at
+last to see Clotilda in the dim and distant green glimmer....
+
+Ah, and he saw her! But in too angelic, too paradisiacal a form! He saw
+not the thinking eye, the cold mouth, the calm person, that forbade so
+much and desired so little; but he saw for the first time her mouth
+encircled by a sweet harmonious sorrow, with an inexpressibly touching
+smile,--for the first time her eye weighed down under a brimming tear,
+as a forget-me-not bows itself beneath a tear-drop of rain. O, this
+good soul surely concealed her fairest feelings most of all! But the
+first tear in a beloved eye is too mighty for a soft heart.... Victor
+knelt down, overpowered by reverence and rapture, before the noble
+soul, and lost himself in the darkling, weeping form, and in the
+weeping tones. And when he saw at length her features turned to
+paleness, because the green foliage overspread her lips and cheeks with
+a deathly hue from the reflection of the lamps,--and when his dream
+came back to him, with Clotilda sunk under the flowery hill,--and when
+his soul, dissolved into dreams, into sorrows, into joys, and into
+wishes for her who consecrated her birthday festival with devout
+tears,--oh, was there then any need, for the completion of his
+euthanasia, that the violin should die away, and that the second
+harmonica, the _viole d'amour_, should send its music-of-the-spheres to
+his naked, enkindled, palpitating heart? O, the pang of bliss quieted
+him, and he thanked the Creator of this melodious Eden, that He, with
+the _highest_ tones of His harmonica, which with unknown forces shiver
+the heart of man to tears, as high tones shatter glasses, had at last
+exhausted his bosom, his sighs, and his tears: amidst these tones,
+after these tones, there were no more sounds; the full soul was wrapped
+up in foliage and night and tears; the speechless swelling heart drank
+the tones into itself, and took the outer ones for inner ones; and at
+last the tones played like zephyrs around the head that was drowsy with
+bliss, and only in the innermost part of the dying soul still stammered
+the too happy wish: "Ah, Clotilda, could I surrender to thee to-day
+this mute, glowing heart!--ah, that I might on this imperishable
+heavenly evening, with this trembling soul, sink dying at thy feet, and
+say the words, 'I love thee!'"
+
+And as he thought of her festive anniversary, and of her letter to
+Maienthal, which had given him the greatest praise, that of being a
+scholar of Emanuel, and of little tokens of her regard for him, and of
+the sweet fraternization of his heart with hers,--ay, then did the
+heavenly hope of winning this ennobled heart for the first time draw
+near to him amidst the music, and that hope caused the sounds of the
+harmonica, like dying echoes, to float far and wide over the whole
+future of his life....
+
+"Victor!' said some one, in a slowly lengthened tone. He sprang up and
+turned his exalted features toward the--brother of his Clotilda, and
+embraced him with joy. Flamin, into whom all music flung war-flames and
+more open sincerity, looked at him wonderingly, inquiringly, and with
+an imperceptible suspicion, and with that friendliness which resembled
+scorn, but which was never anything but the smarting of injuries
+received.
+
+"Why didst thou not take me, too, with thee to-day?" said Flamin, in a
+friendly tone.
+
+Victor pressed his hand, and was silent.
+
+"No! speak!" said he.
+
+"Let it be for to-day, my Flamin; I'll tell thee some time," replied
+Victor.
+
+"I will tell it to thee myself," Flamin began, more quickly and warmly.
+"Thou thinkest, perhaps, I shall be jealous. And look thou, did I not
+know thee, I should be so: truly, another would be so, if he had thus
+lighted upon thee here, and put all things together,--thy late retreat
+from our summer-house out into the foliage, thy writing without a
+light, and thy singing of love"----
+
+"To Emanuel," said Victor, softly.
+
+"Thy sending off that leaf to her"----
+
+"It was another from her album," said he.
+
+"Still worse; _that_ I did not even know. Thy lingering in St. Luna,
+and a thousand other signs, which do not immediately occur to me,--thy
+going off alone today"----
+
+"O my Flamin, this is going too far! thou seest with other eyes than
+those of friendship."--
+
+Here Flamin, who never could dissemble without immediately becoming
+what he assumed, and who could never recount an offence without
+falling into the old anger, grew warmer, and said, in a less friendly
+manner,--
+
+"And others, too, see it,--even the Chamberlain, and the Chamberlain's
+wife."
+
+This tore Victor's heart.
+
+"Thou dear old friend of my youth! so, then, we are to be drawn and
+torn asunder, bleed we ever so much; so, then, this Matthieu is to
+succeed (for all comes from him, not from thee, thou good soul!) in
+getting thee to torment thyself, and me to torment thee. No, he shall
+not succeed; thou shalt not be taken from me. See, by Heaven!" (and
+here the feeling of his innocence stood in Victor erect and sublime,)
+"and though thou shouldst for years misunderstand me, still the time
+will come when thou shalt start back, and say to me, 'I have done thee
+wrong!'--But I shall gladly forgive thee."
+
+This touched the jealous one, who to-day, indeed, (for a special
+reason,) was more composed.
+
+"See," said he, "I believe thee always: say, dost thou never do
+anything against me?"
+
+"Never, never, my dear fellow!" answered Victor.
+
+"Now, then, forgive my heat," the other continued. "Thus have I
+already, with my cursed jealousy, once tormented Clotilda herself in
+Maienthal. But wrong not Matthieu; it is he, rather, who tranquillized
+me. He told me, to be sure, what Clotilda's parents thought they
+observed; nay, still more,--see, I tell thee everything,--he said they
+had even, on account of thy presumed liking and thy present influence,
+which the Chamberlain would fain avail himself of for his
+reinstatement, spoken of a possible betrothal to their daughter, and
+had even spoken to her and sounded her on the subject; but (to thee,
+however, this is a matter of indifference) my beloved remained true to
+me, and said, No."
+
+Now was the hitherto so happy heart of our friend broken: that hard No
+had never yet been uttered to him. With an inexpressible, crushing, but
+meek woe, he said, softly, to Flamin,--
+
+"Be thou, too, always true to me, for I have very little; and never
+torment me more as thou hast to-day."
+
+He could say no more; the stifled tears stormed surging up over his
+heart, and painfully collected themselves under the pupil; he must
+needs now have a still, dark place, where he could weep to his heart's
+content; and in his lacerated and smarting bosom there remained only
+one soft and balmy thought: "Now, in the night, I can weep as much as I
+will, and no one can see my shattered face, my shattered soul, my
+shattered fortune."
+
+And when he thought, "Ah, Emanuel, if thou shouldst see me as I am
+to-day!" he could hardly any longer contain himself.
+
+He fled, with suppressed tears, unconcerned who saw it or did not see
+it, out of the garden, over which a dark angel let float a great
+funereal banner and the music of a dirge. He bruised himself against
+a stone garden-roller which was used to crush the _sprinkled_
+grass-blades and _flowerets_,--he wept not yet, but on the observatory
+there would he satisfy himself and steep himself in abundant
+sorrow,--he kept repeating, "But she remained true, and said, No, no,
+no!"--the concert-tones glided after, like fire after the conjurer,--he
+waded through moist, slumbering lawns, which concealed their flowers,
+and, swifter than he, swept over the earth the shadowy outlines of the
+clouds overhead chased by the wind,--he stood at the foot of the
+observatory, still held back every tear, and hurried up,--he threw
+himself on the bench where he had seen Clotilda for the first time afar
+off, in a white dress,--"Rest thou, too, Horion!" she had called to
+him out of his dream from under the flowery hill, and he heard it
+again.----
+
+Here he tore open joyfully all his wounds, and let them bleed out
+freely in tears; they overspread with mournful streams the face which
+once had often smiled, but always good-naturedly, and which from other
+eyes had never wrung any, but only wiped them away; every flood was a
+load taken off, but the heart grew heavy again upon it, and poured out
+a fresh one.--At last he could hear the tones again; most of them sank
+and were lost before they were wafted to the tower; little ones arrived
+dying, and expired in his darkling heart; every tone was a falling
+tear, and made him lighter, and expressed his anguish. The garden
+seemed to consist of softly resounding, dark-green waves of shadow,
+veiled under a broken twilight. Stung by memory, he tore his eye away
+from it: "What does it concern me any longer?" he thought. But at last
+from this shadowy Eden and from the _viole d'amour_ came up the song,
+"Forget me not," to his weary heart, and gave him back the softer pang
+and the past love. "No," said he, "I never will forget thee, though
+thou hast not loved me! thy form will assuredly forever move me, and
+remind me of my dreams! ah, thou heavenly one, it is, indeed, now, the
+only thing that does not pain me, to think I forget thee not!"
+
+All was silent and extinguished; he was alone in the presence of night.
+At length, after remaining a long time in silence, he went down and
+back to Flachsenfingen, exhausted with weeping, and a poor man. And as,
+on the way, he cast a hurried glance up at the dark-blue heaven, in
+which floating clouds lay flung around the moon like _scoriae_, and a
+hurried glance again over the half-annihilated shadowy landscape, over
+the shadow-hills and shadow-villages, all appeared to him dead, empty,
+and vain, and it seemed to him as if, in some brighter world, there
+were a magic-lantern, and through the lantern glasses moved on which
+earth and springs and human groups were painted, and we called the
+descending, dancing images of these glasses _us_ and an earth and a
+life; and _after all that was bright and many-colored, a great shadow
+followed on_.----
+
+Ah, I stir up, perhaps, once more, in many a breast, long-forgotten
+troubles! But it is good for us--since sorrows occupy so large a place
+in our memory--that this bitter winter-fruit should grow mild by lying,
+and that there is but a small difference between a past sorrow and a
+present bliss.
+
+Poor Victor arrived after midnight, with a pale face and burning eyes,
+at the house of the Apothecary. He asked for nothing, that he might not
+betray his broken voice. When he saw his every-day overcoat hanging in
+the moonbeams, and when he imagined himself a strange person to whom
+the coat belonged, and who took it off so joyfully in the morning and
+now would put it on again so sorrowfully, then did a certain compassion
+which he had for himself seize again with too strong an impression his
+exhausted heart. Marie came, and he turned not away from her even the
+signs of this compassion. She stood surprised; he said to her with the
+softest voice, woven of sighs, that he wanted nothing; and the good
+soul went slowly out without courage to console or to weep, but all
+night long she shed invisible tears for those of another, and for a woe
+which had not been whispered in her ear.
+
+Why did Fate to-day, of all days, open all the veins of his heart? Why
+must the Senior Pastor's silver wedding and the first marriage of his
+daughter to the preacher of the Orphan-House fall just on this day?
+Why, if indeed the two nuptial feasts had to coincide on this day, must
+they last till after midnight, when they gave poor Victor occasion to
+gaze into all the mouldering scenes of his burnt-up hopes, when he
+could see from his dark chamber, in a brilliantly lighted room, the
+love which linked hand in hand, pressed lips to lips, and mingled eyes
+and souls? At another time he would have smiled at the Orphan-House
+preacher and at two catechists of the poor; but tonight he could only
+sigh over them,--and it is a soft line of beauty on his inner man, that
+he did not grudge, but felicitated, the poor people's possession of
+what he was deprived of himself. "Ah, you are happy!" said he. "O, love
+each other truly, press your throbbing, transitory hearts ardently to
+each other, ere the wing of Time shatters them, and glow on each
+other's bosoms during the short minute of life, and exchange your tears
+and kisses ere eyes and lips freeze in the grave! Ye are happier than
+I,--I, who can give my heart full of love to no one but the worms of
+the grave, and on whose coffin a joiner shall paint the inscription,
+which like myself shall be buried in the earth: 'Ye good children of
+men, you loved me not, and yet I loved you so well!'"
+
+Every happy smile, every fleeting touch of the violin, every thought,
+became now, to his soft tear-bathed heart, a hard, sharp corner,--just
+as a hand which dips itself under the water feels everything hard to
+the touch.
+
+His unbounded sincerity, his unbounded tenderness, he could now satisfy
+in no other way than by a letter to Emanuel, into which he let his
+whole soul overflow.
+
+
+"O Dearly Loved Friend!
+
+"Ought I to hide it from thee, when griefs or follies unman me? Ought I
+to show thee the faults I have repented of, and never my present ones?
+No, come hither, dear one, to my wounded breast! I will lay open to
+thee the heart therein, let it bleed and beat under the exposure as it
+will. Thou wilt, perhaps, still cover it up again with thy fatherly
+love, and say, 'I love thee still.'
+
+"Thou, my Emanuel, reposest in thy lofty solitude, on the Ararat of the
+saved soul, on the Tabor of the shining One: there thou gazest, softly
+dazzled, into the sun of Deity, and seest calmly the cloud of death
+swim in over the sun; it veils the orb: thou growest blind under the
+cloud; it melts away, and again thou standest before God. Thou lovest
+men as children who cannot offend,--thou lovest earthly enjoyments as
+fruits, which one plucks for refreshment, but without hungering for
+them; the storms and earthquakes of life pass by thee unheard, because
+thou liest in a life-dream full of tones, full of songs, full of
+meadows,--and when death awakes thee, thou art still smiling over the
+bright dream.
+
+"But, ah! more than one tempest thunders into the life's-dream of the
+rest of us, and makes it distressful. If a higher being could enter
+into the hurly-burly of ideas which encompasses our spirit, and from
+which it must draw its breath, as we breathe in an air composed of all
+kinds of gases poured together,--if he were to see what kinds of
+nutriment pass through our inner man, from which it has to extract its
+chyle: that medley of comic operas,--Bayle's Dictionaries,--concerts of
+Mozart,--Messiahs,--military operations,--Goethe's poems,--Kant's
+writings,--table-talks,--lunar observations,--vices and virtues,--men
+and sicknesses and sciences of all sorts:--if the Being should examine
+this _olla-podrida_ of life, would he not be curious to know what
+heterogeneous and mutually repulsive juices thereby run together in the
+poor soul, and would he not wonder that anything settled and uniform is
+left as a residuum in man? Ah, Emanuel! if thy friend is now in a fine
+banquet-hall, now in a garden, now in an opera-box, now under the
+great night-heavens, now in the presence of a coquette, and now before
+thee,--surely, this ambiguous alternation of scenes must bring him
+sorrows, and perhaps leave stains....
+
+"No, I will not deceive my Emanuel----O, are, then, the trifles and
+the pebbles of this life worth our choosing crooked paths to avoid
+them, as the sapping-caterpillar submits to winding courses through the
+twig-work of its leaf? No, all that I have said is true; but I should
+not have said it, had not other sorrows led me to speak of these also;
+and yet, thou innocently, simple-heartedly, sublimely trusting teacher,
+thou wouldst have believed me! Ah, thou hast too good an opinion of
+me!... O, it is a long and weary step from admiration to imitation! But
+now look into my open heart!
+
+"Since I have, here in the charnel-house of my childish joys, in the
+beds where my childhood's years bloomed and faded, been conversing with
+perhaps too many dreams of the past,--and, still more, from the day
+when thou gavest my heart the provocative to the fever-stroke which has
+shaken my whole life,--since thou disclosedst to me the life wherein
+man exfoliates, and the thin, sharp moment whereon he so painfully
+stands,--since that farewell-night when my soul was great and my tears
+inexhaustible,--an eternal wound has been running within me, and the
+sigh of a longing which nothing can name but dreams and tears and
+love has lain like a stagnant vein, oppressive and consuming in my
+breast.----Ah! I still smile as ever, I still philosophize as ever, but
+my innermost heart only the beloved friend sees to whom I now lay it
+bare.
+
+"O Fate, why dost thou strike in man the spark of a love which must be
+smothered in his own heart's blood? Have we not all, abiding within us,
+the sweet image of a beloved, of a friend, before whom we weep, after
+whom we seek, for whom we hope,--ah, and so vainly, so vainly? Does not
+man stand before a human bosom, as the turtle-dove before a mirror,
+and, like her, coo himself hoarse before a dead, flat image therein,
+which he takes for the sister of his complaining soul? Why is it, then,
+that every fair spring-evening, every melting lay, every overflowing
+rapture, asks us, 'Where dost thou find the beloved soul to which
+thou wilt tell and impart thy bliss?' Why does music give the
+tempest-stricken heart, instead of peace, only greater waves,--as the
+tolling of bells, instead of dispelling, draws down the thunder-storms?
+And why is it, that out of doors, on a fair, still, bright day, when
+thou lookest over the whole unrolled picture of a landscape, over the
+seas of flowers that tremble upon it, over the shadows flung down by
+the clouds which fly from one hill to another, and over the mountains
+which stretch like shores and walls round our flowery circle,--why does
+then a voice within thee cry incessantly, 'Ah! behind the smoking[224]
+mountains, beyond the clouds that repose upon them, there rests a
+fairer land, there dwells the soul thou seekest, there heaven lies
+nearer to the earth'? But behind the mountain and behind the cloud
+there sighs also an unappreciated heart, that looks over towards this
+thy horizon, and thinks, 'Ah, in that far region I should doubtless be
+happier!'
+
+"Are we _not_, then, all happy?----Do not assert it, nor say to me,
+Emanuel, that, in the winter of this life, the few warm sunbeams that
+interrupt it burst and destroy the better man like a vegetable; say not
+that every year steals away something from our heart, and that, like
+ice, it grows less and less, the farther it drifts down the stream of
+Time; only say not that the wandering Psyche, though she hears her
+second self in her prison, yet can never get into its arms.----But thou
+hast already somewhere said: 'All loving souls on earth dwell apart
+from each other in two bodies, as on two hills; a waste lies between
+them, as between solar systems; they see each other, speak across by
+distant signs; at last they hear each other's voices from hill to hill;
+but they never touch each other, and each embraces only its thought.
+And yet this poor love crumbles like an old corpse, when it is
+exhibited; and its flame flickers like a burial-lamp, when it is
+uncovered.'
+
+"Are we, then, all not happy?--Do not say so!--Ah, man, who, even from
+childhood up, has been calling after an unknown soul that grew up in
+_one_ heart with his own,--that entered into all the dreams of his
+years, and therein gleamed from afar, and, after his waking, started
+his tears,--that in spring sent him nightingales, that he might think
+of her and long for her,--that in every tender hour visited his soul,
+with so much virtue, so much love, that he would so gladly have offered
+in his heart, as in a sacrificial chalice, all his blood to the
+beloved,--but who, alas! never, appeared, and only sent her image in
+every fair form, but forever kept back her heart;--oh, if at last, oh,
+if suddenly, oh, if blissfully, her heart beats against his heart, and
+the two souls embrace each other forever, he can no longer say it, but
+we can: 'This man, indeed, is happy, and is loved.' ...
+
+"Good Emanuel, thou forgivest me the pain of the fear that I may never
+be the happy man,--no, never!--Oh, even for this earth, broken up into
+graves, I should be perhaps too happy, I should be permitted to enjoy,
+perhaps, too great an Eden for so young a life, and one justified by
+such slight merits, if my too soft soul, which even now gives way under
+three happy minutes, which loves every human being, and hangs with the
+arms of a child on the heart of the whole creation,--oh, which is
+already made too blissful by this mere dream of love, and is
+overpowered by this description!--no, it were too blessed, such a soul,
+long since dissolved by melancholy and humanity, if it should once,
+after such a long, deathly yearning, at last, at last--O Emanuel, I
+tremble again for joy, and yet it can never, never be!--if it should
+find all its wishes, its whole heaven, so much love, accumulated in one
+dear, dear soul; if in the presence of great Nature, and before the
+face of Virtue, and before God himself, who gave love to her and to me,
+I could dare to say, weeping, to this only, this sweet, this beloved--O
+God, how shall I name her? this fore-loved one, whom in my frenzy I
+would now name: 'At last my heart has thee, thou good soul! to-day God
+gives us to each other, and we remain together through all eternity!'
+No, I would not say it; I should for ecstasy be dumb and die!
+
+"--Lo! it seemed to me just now as if a form passed across my chamber,
+and called, 'Victor!' I looked round, and beheld my empty room, and the
+Sunday clothes which I had taken off, and now, for the first time, I
+remembered that I was unhappy and not loved.
+
+"But thou, irreplaceable friend, misunderstand me not. I swear to thee
+that I will give thee these sheets unaltered, though to-morrow, when
+the whirlpools of to-night flow stiller and smoother, I should find all
+sorts of alterations necessary. Thy foolish friend remains,
+nevertheless, thy friend forever.
+
+                                                   "S. V. H."
+
+
+
+
+                           20. DOG-POST-DAY.
+
+  Letter from Emanuel.--Flamin's Fruit-Pieces on the Shoulders.--Walk
+                              to St. Luna.
+
+
+"Poor Sebastian!" said I, as I opened to-day's letter-bag, "before I get
+it open, I know already beforehand, that, after such a night, thou must
+have shut thyself up all day, to turn thy pale, exhausted face toward
+the garden of sorrow, that thou to-day lovest these poison-drops better
+than the vulnerary balsam, and that thou lookest into the glass to weep
+for this still, innocent form which it shows thee with its gashes, as
+if it were the form of a stranger.--Oh, when man has nothing more to
+love, he embraces the gravestone of his love, and sorrow becomes his
+loved one! Forgive one another the short delusion of mourning; for,
+among all the weaknesses of man, this is the most innocent, when,
+instead of soaring away like the bird of passage above winter, and
+flying to warmer zones, he sinks before it, and helplessly stiffens in
+his cold grief."
+
+Victor coffined himself, so to speak, that day in his chamber, which he
+opened to no one but a next-door neighbor of sorrows,--Marie,--whose
+form affected him as softly as an evening sun. Every other female face
+on the street gave him stings; and the brother of the lost Clotilda,
+whom he saw at the window, and to-day would gladly have embraced, lent
+to the remembrance which tears had dimmed, new colors.... Reader!--my
+female reader will be, of herself, more reasonable,--laugh not at my
+good hero, who _is_ none precisely where the strength of the soul
+becomes the strength of sorrow: at least, let me not hear it. Whoever
+has the sympathetic nerve of life--love--tied up or cut asunder, can
+well, if for no other reason, sigh and say, "Anything on earth can man
+lose more patiently than fellow-men."
+
+And yet at evening an accident--namely, a letter--made all his
+sorrows pass once more through his weary heart. A short letter from
+Emanuel--not, however, an answer to the one just sent to him--arrived.
+
+
+"My ever-loved one!
+
+"I have learned the day of thy entrance upon a new scene of tumultuous
+life, and I have said,' May my beloved still continue happy! may the
+tranquillity of virtue wall in his heart as with a breast against the
+frosts and storms of his new life! may neither his sorrows nor his
+raptures be loud! may he mourn softly and silently as a princess in
+soft white! may he enjoy softly and silently, and in the temple of his
+heart may Pleasure play only as a noiseless fluttering butterfly in a
+church! and may Virtue float before him in the higher heaven above our
+sun, and warm and irradiate and gradually attract to herself his
+heart!'
+
+"In thy affectionate anxiety for my parting life, thou wilt not have me
+write often: so little, dear one, dost thou believe my hope! Oh, the
+weights of my machine, as they run down, fall slowly and softly upon
+the grave; this earthly life arrays itself to my soul in ever fairer
+colors, and adorns itself for the farewell; this mock-summer around me,
+which stands beside the August summer like a mock-sun,--this and the
+coming spring take me beguilingly out of the arms of Nature.
+
+"So does the All-Gracious overhang with foliage, overspread with
+flowers, the churchyard-wall of life, as we cover the wall of an
+English garden with ivy and evergreen, and gives the end of the garden
+the appearance of a new thicket.--
+
+"So ascends the spirit even here in this _dark_ life, as the barometer
+ascends even during thick weather, and feels the influence of the
+_brighter_ life even under the clouds.
+
+"But I obey thy love, and will write to thee no more, except once in
+winter, when I describe to thee the great night wherein I told my blind
+Julius, for the first time, that there is an Eternal One.--In that
+night, my beloved, rapture and devotion bore me too high, and came near
+to rending my thin life. I bled a long time. In winter, when the charms
+of heaven take the place of those of earth,[225] forbid me not to paint
+the summer picture.
+
+"O my son!--I was compelled, indeed; to write to thee, because my
+friend Clotilda complains that the new year will draw her out of the
+green bower of solitude to the crowded market-place of the court; her
+soul is dark with sorrow, and stretches out its arms after the tranquil
+life which is being taken away from her. I know not what a court is;
+thou wilt know, and, I conjure thee, release my friend, and turn aside
+the hand that would draw her from St. Luna. If thou canst not do it,
+still forsake not at court the beloved soul; be her only, her most
+ardent friend; draw the bee-stings of earthly hours from her gentle
+heart. When cold words, like snow-flakes, fall upon this flower, then
+let the breath of love melt them to tears that shall flow before thy
+sight; when a tempest shall come up, over her life, then show her the
+angel who stands in the sun, and draws over our tempests the rainbow of
+hope. O thou whom _I_ so love, my sister also will so love thee; and
+when my friend discovers to her his gentle heart, his tender eye, his
+virtue, his soul, the home of Nature and of the Eternal, then will he
+see my sister grow happy before him, and the exalted countenance which
+melts into tears and smiles and love before him will remain forever in
+his heart.
+
+                                                  "EMANUEL."
+
+                               *   *   *
+
+Lo! in this glowing moment the exalted form which he had seen yesterday
+appeared again before his heart, with the sadly smiling lips and the
+eyes full of tears; and as the form continued floating before him, and
+gleamed and smiled, his soul rose up before her as before one dead, and
+during the uplifting of himself all his wounds began to bleed again,
+and he cried, "Now, then, never do thou vanish from my heart, thou
+sublime shape, but rest forever on its wounds!" Disconsolateness,
+exhaustion, and sleep overwhelmed his spirit, as well as his latest
+thought,--to go back shortly to St. Luna, and persuade her parents not
+to force her to court...
+
+The long sleep of death closes our _scars_, and the short sleep of life
+our _wounds_. Sleep is the half of time which heals us. On awaking,
+Victor, whose fever of love had yesterday been so aggravated by
+sleeplessness, saw today that his sorrow had been unmoderated
+because his hope had been immoderate. At first he had wished,--then
+observed,--then assumed,--then seen,--then interpreted,--then
+hoped,--then sworn to it. Every little circumstance, even his share in
+Clotilda's nomination as maid-of-honor, had poured mild oil of love
+into his flame. "Oh, fool that I am!" said he, with the three
+swearing-fingers placed upon his forehead; and, like all energetic men,
+he was so much the more spirited in proportion as he had been
+spiritless. Nay, he felt himself all at once too light; for a too
+sudden cure betokens, in the case of souls also, a relapse. A new
+consolation was his yesterday's resolve, that he would render Clotilda
+a service,--namely, save her from the court-service. He still reflected
+upon his determination to see her again.--Feelest thou, haply, Victor,
+that everything which Love does, in order to die, is only an expedient
+for rising again from the dead, and that its epilogues are only
+prologues to the Second Act?
+
+But a basket of apples in the market confirmed him again in his
+resolution. That is to say, Flamin came in. He began immediately with
+questions about the disappearance on Sunday, and with reports of the
+general uneasiness about the dear runaway. Victor, heated again
+by the whole recollection, and almost a little enraged against the
+image-breaker and government-attorney of a vain love, gave him the true
+answer:--"Thou tookest away from me in part my pleasure; and why should
+I, at so late an hour, come upon the stage?" The more vividly Flamin
+painted the affectionate concern of the Parson's wife and Clotilda
+about his disappearing, so much the more painful grew the maze of
+contending feelings within him. But for his conscience calling him
+back, it would now have been easier for him to confess the love that
+was hopeless, than formerly the love that was hopeful.--Accidentally
+Flamin wondered at the ripeness of the apples down below in the market,
+and desired some. A lightning beam now darted before Victor's eye at
+the inherited fruit-pieces on Flamin's shoulders, which always appeared
+in the after-summer at the time of the apples' ripening, but which, in
+the previous whirl of his feelings, he had forgotten. Heaven knows
+whether it has not escaped the reader himself, that Flamin bears this
+winter-fruitage (his maternal mole) on his back, which may become a
+Sodom-apple and Eve's-apple for him. Might not Matthieu, who until now
+could not examine upon Flamin this seal of his princely relationship,
+suddenly become convinced of all that which, with his thievish glances
+at his Lordship's letter, he had only been able to guess? And might he
+not afterward go to the Prince, and there mix for all our friends the
+most poisonous broths?--As, however, the magic image generally faded in
+one week, Victor needed for only so long a time to keep its wearer out
+of sight; he therefore laid before his friend, thus tattooed by Nature,
+the request to take for once a social walk to St. Luna, as they had day
+before yesterday missed each other.
+
+"I can't do it," said Flamin, who had the lesser delicacy not to avail
+himself of the request for company on account of the reproaches in Le
+Baut's garden, and forgot in that the greater delicacy of not imputing
+such a reference to his Victor.
+
+The latter, in a passionate hurry to avert two such evils (Clotilda's
+court-office and Matthieu's inspection), seized upon the singular
+expedient of proposing to the page to share the journey with him.
+
+"With pleasure!" said the Evangelist; "_this_ week I have to do
+cabinet-service, but I can _next_ week."
+
+And it was precisely this week that Victor wanted it to be done.--So
+many sudden miscarriages confounded him to such a degree, that he,
+whose careless and innocent heart was always an open letter with flying
+seal, dissembled now towards his dear, good friend Flamin.--He wanted
+at least to investigate the maternal mole and its distinctness for
+himself, He therefore went to him, and found him bent over his writing,
+and with a glowing work-face. He conjured him to consider that
+recreation and holidays were indispensable to him, and urged it upon
+him that he should work, like a compositor, standing. Then he came
+gradually upon the subject of Flamin's full-blooded chest, and upon the
+question whether it could bear his exertions without stingings and
+oppressions. Then he arrived at the point, and proposed that Flamin
+should, at all events, have a Burgundy-pitch plaster applied as
+lung-conductor to his shoulder-blades; yes, he would himself do it for
+him now, and show him how all was to be prepared. He hoped, besides, to
+draw thereby a curtain around the apple-piece. But he dissembled so
+wretchedly,--for he always succeeded in his innocent intrigues with
+maidens, and comic disguises for satirical purposes, while his
+serious ones always miscarried,--that even Flamin heard him out, and
+dryly replied, he had already had on such a plaster for two days,
+and--Matthieu had advised, and himself applied it.
+
+There was a fix.--Sebastian had nothing further left him than, with a
+singular _sangfroid_, which, on the St. Luna road, was mixed only with
+a few stings from the old thorny latelings of his withered Paradise, to
+go unaccompanied to the Chamberlain Le Baut, to say what was to be
+said, hardly to peep into the Parsonage, and quietly to trudge off
+again without a single--hope.
+
+Dear Fortune! better beheaded than scalped,--better _one_ disaster than
+ten miscarriages; I mean, break man upon thy wheel rather from above
+than from below upward!--
+
+Victor, to be sure, knew as yet not a word of the turn he should give
+to the subject, in order to put two such court-emigrants as the Le
+Bauts, who knew nothing holier than the _Latreia_ towards a prince, the
+_Douleia_ towards his minister, and the _Hyperdouleia_ towards his
+w--, out of humor with Clotilda's promotion; but he thought, "I will do
+what I can."
+
+Clotilda's parents received him with so much civility,--i. e. with so
+much courtesy of the body, with so much powdered sugar on every
+feature, with so much sirup of violets on every word,--in short, he
+found the report which Matthieu had rendered to Flamin of their amiable
+disposition towards him so well grounded,--that he could have selected
+no better opportunity than this to dissuade them from the transplanting
+of their daughter, had they not begun to thank him for having been
+himself the very transplanter. They had learned or guessed all, and
+thanked him for his intercession, to which they probably attached more
+self-interested views than the daughter did. It would have been
+ridiculous, in Clotilda's presence, to advise _her_ against
+Flachsenfingen, and dissuade from that for which they thanked him;
+still, however, he attempted something. He told the Chamberlain "his
+daughter deserved rather to _have_ a court than to adorn one; nay, that
+_he_ deserved at most in the whole matter--an excuse, as Clotilda would
+certainly prefer the society of her parents to the constraint of court;
+in that case, he would promise to put the index back again with the
+Prince, and rectify everything without disadvantage." The father took
+this expression for a strong deprecation of gratitude; the step-mother,
+for some piece of knavery or other; the daughter, for--words. She said,
+a little curtly, "I think it was easy to choose between disobedience
+and absence." For, unbending as she was to her step-mother, she
+willingly followed the hints of her father, whom, with all his
+weaknesses, and as the only soul on the earth attached to him, she
+tenderly loved. Victor, at last, though reluctantly, was forced to give
+it up; but why does man find it harder to resign himself to the future
+than to the past?--The coldness of the daughter was naturally not less
+(but sincerer) than the warmth of the parents.... And this coldness was
+precisely what refreshed his glowing brain. This cold, indifferent form
+was wrapped as a veil about the sublime and loving one, as it ever
+floated before him with that melancholy look which he could not endure.
+Without the consciousness of anything wrong, satisfied with his
+obedience to Emanuel's request, he withdrew, with his feelings
+oppressed by decorum, returning coldness with greater coldness.--He
+would have been a poor lover, if he had known what he wanted; for
+otherwise he never could have desired of Clotilda, even in case of her
+love for him, any extraordinary warmth towards a medicus whom her
+parents forced upon her (which injures a man even more than ugliness),
+who so impolitely took himself out of the garden without a birthday
+_carmen_, and who pressed her into the seven gilded towers of
+court-service, despite her reluctance, despite every probability of her
+future _prison-fever_.--But for the _vacant freehold_ of his heart this
+very vexation was wholesome....
+
+If my good reader ever has to take an eternal farewell of a too dear
+friend, let him take it _twice_.--The _first_ we all understand, as a
+matter of course, when he sinks in the intoxication of sorrow, in the
+hemorrhage of heart and eyes, and when the beloved object burns itself
+with flames into the tender soul; but _then_ he will never be able to
+forget the being thus torn from his heart. Therefore he must take a
+_second_ farewell, which is colder even for the reason that passionate
+emotions admit no _dal segno_[226] of repetition; nay, (if he will take
+the wisest course of all,) he must endeavor, after the first tragic
+leave-taking, to see her in a public place (e. g. at a coronation),
+where she must appear cold. Her frosty face will then snow over her
+glowing one in his brain; and my good reader has, undoubtedly,
+collected together again wits enough to know what he reads in the
+Dog-Post-Days....
+
+--Upon my word, if Jean Paul does not write industriously, then no one
+does; it has already struck one, and he took it for a quarter to
+twelve; my sister will already be folding her hands before the
+tucked-up smoking pike, which, like the serpent of eternity, has his
+tail in his mouth, and saying, incessantly, "It is all growing
+cold!"--"It must be so, after such glowing chapters," say I, "if thou
+meanest the reader and the author."--Already, while I still sit over
+the twentieth chapter, the post-dog is frisking round in the chamber
+with the twenty-first; and yet I will starve myself, unless I can still
+utter before dinner, like the seven wise men, seven golden sayings:--
+
+1. When one who is stung by a bee or by fate does not keep still, the
+sting tears out, and is left behind.
+
+2. Miserable earth, which three or four great or bold men can reform
+and agitate! Thou art a true stage: in the foreground are some fighting
+players and a few canvas-tents; the background swims with painted tents
+and soldiers!
+
+3. States and diamonds are in these days, when they have stains, cut up
+into little ones; and as
+
+4. Men in great states and bees in great hives suffer a loss of courage
+and warmth; accordingly now-a-days they join to small countries other
+small countries, as they do to beehives colony-hives.
+
+5. Man takes _his_ suffering for that of _humanity_, as the bees take
+the dropping of their bee-stand, when the sun already shines out again,
+for rain, and stay in-doors.
+
+6. But he commits daily a _lesser_ error: he regards as an _eternity_
+(that Aristotelian Unity of Time to the drama--of Existence) at first
+his present _hour_,--then his _youth_,--then his _life_,--then his
+_century_,--then the duration of the _globe_,--then that of the
+_sun_,--then that of the _heavens_,--then (this is the least error)
+_time_ itself....
+
+7. There are in man, in the beginning and at the end, as in books, two
+blank bookbinder's leaves,--childhood and old age; and so, too, in the
+Dog-Post-Days: see the end of this day and the beginning of the next.
+
+
+                         FIFTH INTERCALARY DAY.
+
+            _Continuation of the Register of Extra-Sheets_.
+
+                                   K.
+
+Cold.[227]--In our age decrease of _stoicism_ and increase of _egotism_
+are found side by side. The former covers its treasures and germs with
+ice; the latter is itself ice. So, in physics, _mountains_ wear away,
+and _glaciers_ increase.
+
+                                   L.
+
+Library (Circulating) for Reviewers and Young Ladies.--I still always
+adhere to my purpose of having it inserted in the Intelligence-leaf of
+the Literary Gazette, that I shall not destroy the purchase-money which
+I raise upon my _evening star_ [Hesperus], nor, like Musaeus, fritter it
+away in the purchase of summer-houses, but shall lay out the whole
+capital upon a complete collection of all German _prefaces_ and
+_titles_ that appear from fair to fair. I can carry out the plan, if I
+give out a preface a week, on the payment of a penny, to reviewers, who
+do not care to read the book itself when they review it.
+
+That not even the surplus of the aforesaid mintage may lie as dead
+capital in my house, I shall employ it--if I do not change my mind--in
+getting the bookbinder to publish the _heavier_ German masterpieces,--e. g.
+Frederick Jacobi's, Klinger's, Goethe's Tasso,--likewise the better
+satirical and philosophical ones, in a _lighter_ ladies' edition, which
+shall consist wholly of so-called _puzzle-volumes_, which have no book
+slid into them. I shall thereby, methinks, be playing something pithy
+into the hands of my fair readers, which shall be as well bound and
+as well titled as the booksellers' edition, and in which--because the
+hard stone-fruit is already _shelled out_, and there is nothing
+inside--they can lay not only just as much of silk threads and silk
+snippings as in the printed edition, but six ounces more. _Allwill's_
+correspondence--a heavy, two-yolked ostrich's egg of the author's,
+which I have had _blown out_ by the bookbinder in this manner, because
+most of the fair readers are too _cold_ to hatch it--is now quite _light_.
+But of the German romances I shall never prepare such a work-box edition
+of empty state-carriages of the God of the Sun and the Muses, because I
+fear the trade would cry out about _piracy_.--A happy man were I, if
+the joint subscribers to my circulating-capsule-library had only been
+shown round as much as twice in some Italian and Portuguese bookeries:[228]
+they would there, where often only the titles of works--and of the
+stupidest, into the bargain--are daubed on the wall, be astonished to see
+what a miserable figure such useless libraries, beside my bookery of
+regular puzzle-books, which I select from so many departments and with
+some originality, cannot do otherwise than cut.
+
+--Thus, of course, German capsule-readers among the ladies will never
+be overtaken by you Portuguese women! Much rather will the former
+follow in the footsteps even of the men, advocates and business people,
+who subscribe to similar capsule-journalistics, and jointly read and
+circulate the covers of the best German journals,--which latter are
+often annexed as _curiosa_ even to the capsules, and fill them out....
+Such is my plan and sketch; but even sheep would presume I were merely
+playing off a joke here, unless I really carried it through.
+
+                                   M.
+
+Maidens.--Young maidens are like young turkey-hens, that thrive poorly,
+if one touches them often; and mothers keep these soft creatures, made
+of floating pollen, like _pastel-pictures_, under window-glass--because
+everything is afraid of us princess-stealers and fruit-thieves--until
+they are fixed. Meanwhile the proper crown-guard around a female heart
+is neither solitude,--which leads only to an untried innocence,[229]
+that falls, to be sure, not before the debauchee, but yet before the
+hypocrite,--nor society, nor hard labor,--otherwise no country girl
+would ever fall,--nor good teachings,--for these are to be had in every
+mouth and in every circulating library; but these four first and last
+things do it all at once, and they are at once superseded, united, and
+replaced by a wise and virtuous mother.
+
+                                   N.
+
+Names of the Great.[230]--When I see, as I do, how they scatter their
+productions for the Fair, occasional writings and fugitive pieces
+(children born out of wedlock) as anonymously as if they were reviews,
+then I say: "Herein I recognize genuine modesty; for natural children
+are precisely their best and their own, and can, besides, be
+acknowledged by the Prince _as_ genuine; whereas their supernatural [or
+extra-natural] ones born in wedlock have to do without the
+certification; and yet they will not let the world know the name of the
+benefactor, but quite as often (nay, oftener) get people _into it_ as
+_out of it_ secretly. What the child in other cases first learns to
+pronounce, such parents speak to him last,--their name. Methinks they
+follow herein Goethe's fine ear; for they hide themselves, while they
+fill the orchestra of the world with children's voices and with
+_vingt-quatre_,[231] and with alarm-works and repeating-works, (what a
+juxtaposition of unlike things!) just as Goethe demands of the playing
+musical artist that he shall work for the ears, but hide himself for
+the sake of sparing the eyes. Quite as beautifully do they do the thing
+when they finally adopt as children, and show to the world, their
+children by the thirtieth marriage (often after the five or twenty
+years' limitation), and thus imitate the greenfinches, which, it is
+said, make their nest and its inmates invisible by means of the
+so-called greenfinch-stone, till the latter are fledged."
+
+                                   O.
+
+Ostracism.--It was among the Greeks, as is well known, no punishment.
+Only people of great merits achieved it; and so soon as this banishment
+from the country was lavished upon bad men, it went entirely into
+disuse. An imperial citizen must lament that we, who have a similar
+public educational institution,--namely, banishment,--squander it often
+upon the very wretchedest rascals, and therefore--with the design of
+making one circle or country the spit-box and secreting-vessel of
+another--drive out of the country scoundrels who are hardly fit to stay
+in it. Thereby is this clearing of the country deprived for the most
+part of the honorable and distinguishing feature which it might have
+for the man of merit, and an honest man--e. g. a Bahrdt[232]--is almost
+ashamed to be invested with such an honor. There should, therefore, be
+an imperial police-regulation that only ministers, professors, and
+officers of decided worth, like important documents, should be
+dismissed and banished. To similar men I would also limit hanging. With
+the Romans, in truth, only great heads and lights were interred on the
+_way_[233] at the expense of a whole state; but what shall I think of
+the Germans, with whom seldom serviceable subjects, but mostly finished
+rogues, are buried at public expense, which they call hangman's fees,
+having been previously hanged on the gallows by the roadside?--Not even
+in his lifetime can a man, unless he has extraordinary, and often
+_eccentric_ merits,--although eccentric men fall back into the truth,
+as _comets_ do into the _sun_, as fuel,--make his calculations upon
+being, in some manner, as the ancients duplicated their noble men in
+statues and pictures, hung up in _effigy_ in a thick stone frame....
+Let me have an answer; I allow myself to be talked with.
+
+                                   P.
+
+Philosophy.--Some critical philosophers have now borrowed from the
+algebra a mathematical method, without which one cannot for a single
+minute--not so much think as--write philosophically. The algebraist, by
+the transposition of mere _letters_, catches truths which no chain of
+reasoning could ever draw out of the deep. In this the critical
+philosopher has imitated him, but with greater advantage. As he
+cleverly mixes together, not letters, but whole _technical words_,
+there rises from the alliteration of the same a cream of truths which
+he could hardly have dreamed of. Such philosophers are forbidden, and
+rightly, like the preachers of Gotha (Goth. Public Ordinances, P. III.
+p. 16), to use allegories, or any flower of speech, which, as other
+flowers do for the drawing-hounds, would spoil the scent.--Properly,
+however, the picturesque style is more definite than the technical
+word-style, which finally, as all _abstract words are pictures_, is
+also itself a picturesque style, only one full of pictures that have
+run out and faded. Jacobi is not obscure in consequence of his
+_images_, but in consequence of the new _ideas_ which through them he
+would communicate to us.
+
+I have lately been looking over the birth-lists of the learned and
+teaching republic, and counting up the young little Kants whom the old
+Kant--otherwise unmarried, like his cousin Newton--has for the last ten
+Fairs begotten. Demetrius Magnus, who wanted to make a book of authors
+of the same name, must have been very stupid, if he had undertaken to
+write in our times, and yet at the same time, though he nevertheless
+communicated that there had been sixteen Platos, twenty Socrateses,
+twenty-eight Pythagorases, thirty-two Aristotles, had very sinfully
+omitted to say that there are now as many philosophers and
+philosophists as those make when reckoned all together--namely,
+ninety-six--who could bear the name of Kant,--that is, if they chose
+to. Such mechanics--thus may I call the magisters, because formerly the
+mechanics, inversely, were called magisters, and the upper master
+arch-magister--one should take into account as the best propaganda
+which bulky books can have. They are, at best, competent to diffuse the
+system, because they know how to separate from it the incomprehensible,
+the spiritual, and to extract what is popular and palpable, i. e. the
+words for readers, who, otherwise simple, nevertheless would not die
+without a critical philosophy. The most miserable theological and
+aesthetic stone receives now a Kantian setting in words. Although every
+new system introduces a certain _one-sidedness_ of view into all
+heads,--especially as every cold philosopher has so much the more
+_one-sidedness_, precisely as he has the more _insight_,--still that is
+no matter; for great bars of truth come forth through the joint digging
+of the whole thinking-works.[234] Whoever has seen Kant standing on his
+mountain among his learned fellow-laborers, is reminded with pleasure
+of a similar incident in Peru, which Buffon communicates. When
+Condamine and Bouger were measuring there the equatorial degrees of the
+earth (as Kant did of the intellectual world), whole troops of apes
+appeared as coadjutors, put on spectacles, looked at the stars and down
+at the clocks, and reduced one thing and another to writing, although
+without salary, which is their only distinction from the vicariate
+Kants.
+
+Every man of genius is a philosopher, but not the reverse. A
+philosopher without fancy, without history, and without a _general
+knowledge_ of the most important things, is more one-sided than a
+politician. Whoever has adopted, rather than discovered, a system;
+whoever has not had beforehand dark presentiments thereof; whoever has
+not at least pined for it beforehand; in short, whoever does not bring
+with him a soul like a full, warm, ground filled with germs, which
+waits only for its summer,--such a one may indeed be a teacher, but not
+a scholar of the philosophy which he degrades to a mercenary
+profession; and, briefly, it is all one what place one climbs as his
+philosophical observatory,--a throne, or a Pegasus, or an Alp, or a
+Caesar's-couch, or a bier,--and they are almost all higher than the desk
+in a lecture-room and hall of disputation.
+
+                              Q (_see_ K).
+
+                                   R.
+
+Reviewers.--An editor of a review should have six tables. At the first
+should sit and eat the advertisers of the _existence_ of a book; at the
+second, the wholesale appraisers of its _value_; at the third, the
+epitomists of it; at the fourth, the grammarians and philologists, who
+distribute to the public _catalogues raisonnes_ of other men's
+grammatical blunders; at the fifth, the fighters, who refute a new
+book, not by a new book, but by a sheet; at the sixth should stand the
+critical, princely bench, on which might sit Herder, Goethe, Wieland,
+and perhaps yet another, who survey a book as a human life, who
+apprehend its _individuality_, indicate at once the spirit of the
+literary creation and creator, and separate that incarnation and
+embodiment of the divine beauty which takes the form of an individual
+_from_ the beauty, and then disclose and pardon it.
+
+These six critical benches, which might edit six different literary
+periodicals, are now thrown over each other, and form _one_.--Frankly,
+however, as I come out against this jumbling together of learned (1)
+advertisements, (2) reviews, (3) extracts, (4) verbal and (5) real
+criticisms, and (6) artistic judgments, still I am ready and glad to
+admit that the critical _Fauna_ and _Flora_ of the first _five_ tables
+root out, perhaps, full as many shoots of weeds as they put forth
+themselves from their own germs; and I therefore appeal to a private
+letter of my own, which is beyond the suspicion of flattery, and
+wherein I associate it with a toadstool, which, although it produces,
+itself, upon an affusion (in this case, of ink), whole hosts of
+insects, nevertheless eradicates the flies.--But as among the reviewers
+there are also authors, like myself; as among the Portuguese
+inquisitors there are Jews; and, in fact, as I should want to talk
+whole intercalary years on the subject,--why talk a whole intercalary
+day?
+
+                                   S.
+
+Stripes.--"He that knoweth his Lord's will, and doeth it not, shall
+receive double stripes."--Who, then, gets the single ones? Not he,
+surely, who knows not the will and does it not?--It follows, therefore,
+that greater knowledge, not _aggravates_, but itself _creates_, moral
+guilt; for in so far as I absolutely do not discern a moral obligation,
+my offence against it is surely not less, but none at all.
+
+I will be my own Academy of Sciences, and assign to myself the
+following prize-question, which I will myself answer in a prize essay:
+"Since only such actions are virtuous as proceed from love for
+goodness, it follows that only those can be sinful which proceed from
+mere love of evil, and reference to self-interest must lessen the
+degree of a sin, as well as that of a virtue. But, on the other hand,
+what could there be but self-interest in our nature, which should impel
+us to what is bad? And if evil were done from a pure propensity to
+evil, then there would be a second, although opposite, autonomy[235] of
+the will."
+
+                                   T.
+
+Trouble, Tribulation.--Now, as I write these distressful sounds, which
+announce to me that Nature makes only _thorn-hedges_, but men _crowns
+of thorns_, all pleasure in lashing about me with the thorns of satire
+dies away, and I would rather draw some thorns out of your hands or
+feet.
+
+
+
+
+                           21. DOG-POST-DAY.
+
+        Victor's Professional Visits.--Concerning Houses full of
+               Daughters.--The Two Fools.--The Carrousel.
+
+
+The following remark comes not from the dog's knapsack, but from my own
+head: One needs not to be a panegyrist of our times, to see with
+pleasure that authors, princes, women, and others have now mostly laid
+aside the unnatural _false_ masks of virtue (e. g. bigotry, pietism,
+ceremonial behavior), and have entirely assumed instead the _genuine_
+tasteful _show_ of virtue. This improvement of our character-masks,
+whereby we hit more finely the exterior of virtue, is contemporaneous
+with a similar one on the stage, where they play their antics and their
+tragics no longer, as once, with _paper_ clothes and badly imitated
+laces, but with the _true_ ones.--
+
+"The Princess wanted you yesterday," said the Prince to the
+Court-Physician, almost as soon as he had entered with his exhausted
+face. The inflammation of Agnola's eyes had, in consequence of the
+autumn weather, night-feasts, and Culpepper's bold practice and her
+own--for the red capital letters of beauty (namely, painted cheeks) she
+was always putting on afresh--very much increased. Properly, Victor was
+too proud to let himself be sent for as a mere physician; nay, he was
+too proud to let himself be in demand for anything else (and though it
+were philosophy or beauty) than his character; for his father, who had
+just as much delicate pride, had taught him that we must not serve any
+one who does not respect us, or whom we ourselves do not respect,--nay,
+that one must not accept a favor from any one to whom one can only
+return outward, but not inward thanks. But this tender sense of honor,
+which never came into an unequal conflict with his self-interest,
+though it might well with his humanity, could never bind the hands
+wherewith he might relieve an unhappy Princess--unhappy, like himself,
+from a famine of love--at least of the pains of her eyes; perhaps,
+also, of _younger_ pangs; for his good-heartedness suggested to him
+nothing but reconciliations,--of the Prince with Le Baut, with the
+Princess, with the Minister. Nothing is more dangerous than to
+reconcile two persons,--unless, indeed, one is himself one of them; to
+set them at variance is much safer and easier.
+
+He found Agnola, even in the afternoon, still in her chamber, because
+its green tapestries flattered (not the face, to be sure, but) the hot
+eye. A thick veil over the face was her screen from daylight. When she,
+like a sun, lifted her veil, he could not comprehend how in Tostato's
+shop he could make, out of this Italian fire and these quick
+court-eyes, the face, red with weeping, of a blonde. A part of this
+fire belonged, to be sure, to her sickness. Her first word was a
+decided disobedience to his first; meanwhile she flew in the face of
+the Messrs. _Pringle_ and _Schmucker_, as well as himself; for the
+whole triune College advised leeches round the eyes; but those were
+disgusting to her. The medicus then suggested cupping-glasses at the
+back of the head; but her hair was more precious to her than her eyes.
+
+"Must, then, everything be bought with blood?" said she, with Italian
+vivacity.
+
+"Realms and religions ought not to be, but health should," said he,
+with English freedom of speech.
+
+Once more he demanded her blood. She would not give it to him, however,
+until he changed the sacrificial knife, and proposed opening a vein in
+the eye. Persons of rank, like learned men, are often ignorant of the
+commonest things: she thought the Doctor would open the vein. And as
+she thought so, he did it, with a hand trained by the couching-needle.
+
+Meanwhile, if (according to Pliny) a kiss on the eye is one on the
+soul, the opening of a vein in that organ is no joke; but one may,
+while he inflicts a wound, himself get one. The poor Court-Medicus
+must, with his swimming, friendly eye, from which only within a few
+days the tear of love has been dried away, boldly gaze into the sun
+pent up in an eye-socket, and, what is more, softly rest his finger on
+the warm face, and from the fountain of tears make bright blood spurt
+out.... One ought, before undertaking such an operation, to have a
+similar one performed on himself, for the sake of the cooling. But, in
+truth, fate had given him nothing this week but lancet-cuts into his
+heart's arteries. Let one, further, represent to himself how the whole
+female sex appeared to him like a magic, far-receded shape, which had
+once gleamed near to him in a dream, and as a paled moon by day, which
+he had worshipped in a bright night; and then will one have opened his
+good innocent heart to behold therein, beside a great ever-active
+sorrow, a thousand sympathetic wishes for the compassionated Princess.
+Despite her singular mixture of pride, liveliness, and refinement, he
+still thought he discovered a change in her, which he could explain
+partly by his to-day's assiduity and partly by his influence on the
+Prince, which had been thus far so favorable to her,--a change which
+would have given him greater courage, had he not insisted upon being
+threatened with special drafts upon his courage by the billet above the
+imperator of the compass-watch. At the former and first visit his
+courage was lamed, because he thought himself avoided, as the son of a
+father who seemed to fortify his influence by his care for natural
+children; for a man full of love beside one full of hatred is dumb and
+stupid.
+
+What put him most in heart to-day, next to the quarrels in which he was
+defeated (as the one about leeches, &c.), was the last and following,
+in which he conquered (one grows more courageous and prosperous when
+one contradicts a proud woman than when one flatters her): He saw a
+mask lying there; now, as he knew that in Italy ladies wore them in
+bed, as ours do gloves, using them as a sort of glove to the face, he
+straightly forbade her the mask, as being tinder to the inflammation of
+her eyes. It was no flattery when he said to her that the mask might
+take from her more than it gave. In short, he insisted upon it.--
+
+He was, perhaps, too tolerant towards the doubt which only a woman
+could make _endurable_ and _enduring_,--the doubt which one she mistook
+for the other, the Court-Physician or the favorite; for at last--though
+not without a fear of saying too much, which, with people of his fiery
+temperament, is a sign that the thing has already happened--he told
+her, what he had in the beginning kept back, that the sympathy
+(_empressement_) of the Prince had sent him to her; and he extolled the
+latter at his own expense, and so much the more, as he had nothing
+further of an extraordinary nature to adduce with regard to him, but
+only that he had--sent him to her.
+
+Then he went. With the Prince he bestowed on her as many
+_beatifications_ and as many _canonizations_ (two contrarieties on this
+earth) as decorum and his humor (two still greater contrarieties) would
+allow. Singular! she had, for all her fire, no humor. He knew January
+succumbed, not merely to the slanderer, but also to the flatterer. The
+crowned theatre-managers of the earth have determinations put into
+their hearts, and decrees into their mouths; they know what they mean
+and what they say two or three days later than their throne-prompter. A
+favorite is a Shakespeare and poet, who, from behind the persons he
+makes act and speak, never peeps or coughs out himself, but is a
+ventriloquist, and gives _his_ voice the sound of another's.
+
+When he visited his patient the next day, the eye-sockets were cooled
+down, though not the eyes. Agnola sat convalescent in a cabinet full of
+images of the saints. With the indisposition of her eyes had been taken
+away, at the same time, a source of conversation; and her pride blocked
+up the way at once to his sensibility and to his humor. Although he
+said to her a hundred times in his innermost heart, "Torment not
+thyself, proud soul; I am no favorite; I will not rob thee of anything,
+least of all of thy pride or another's love,--oh, I know what it is to
+win none,"--nevertheless he remained (in _his_ opinion) cold before
+her, and retired with the annoying prospect that his successful cure
+had cut off his return; for the other court visits were, after all, no
+confidential visits to the sick. Of the plaguy compass-watch he stood
+daily less and less in terror, except just when he was happier than
+usual.
+
+--Many people would sooner live without houses than without
+building-schemes; Victor, sooner without air to breathe than without
+castles in the air. He must always have on hand the lottery-chance and
+stocks of some plan or other for the future; and a woman was, in most
+cases, the partner in this grand-adventure trade. This time he was
+keenly bent upon the reconciliation of January and Agnola. He reasoned
+thus:--"It is easy on both sides. January will now always seek Agnola's
+society, though merely out of cunning, for the sake of getting with
+more decency into that of her future maid-of-honor, Clotilda, whom, in
+her condition of singleness, he can, according to his _vow_, still love
+with impunity. As he can neither withstand a long praise nor a long
+intercourse, this will imperceptibly accustom him to Agnola. She, who
+is now left alone on the side of the Minister Schleunes, will not
+reject the united regards of Victor and January," &c.... But whether
+only the beauty of the action, and not also the beauty of the Princess,
+incited him to this mediatorial office, that is what the Twenty-First
+Chapter cannot yet know; meanwhile, so far as I am concerned, let the
+following stand: his cold inner man, exhausted by bleeding, from which
+the harpsichord and the name of Clotilda and the awaking at morning
+still draw bloodless daggers, needs so much indeed the din of the world
+and everything that may benumb its wounds!
+
+With the design of such preliminaries to a peace, he excused his future
+disobedience to his father, who had counselled him against frequenting
+the house of Schleunes; for as the Princess always went there, it was
+the fittest neutral place for the peace-congress. Oh for only half
+an----
+
+
+                EXTRA-LEAF ON HOUSES FULL OF DAUGHTERS!
+
+The house of Schleunes was an open bookstore, whose works (the
+daughters) one could read there, but not carry home. Although the five
+other daughters stood in five private libraries as wives, and one,
+under the earth at Maienthal, was sleeping away the child's plays of
+life, there were, nevertheless, in this warehouse of daughters, three
+free copies left for sale to good friends. The Minister, at the
+drawings of the lottery of offices, loved to give his daughters as
+premiums for great winnings and prizes. To whom God gives an office, to
+him he gives, if not understanding, yet a wife. In a house rich in
+daughters, as in St. Peter's Church, there must be confession-pews for
+all nations, for all characters, for all faults, that the daughters may
+sit therein as mother-confessors, and absolve from everything, celibacy
+alone excepted. I have, as naturalist, often admired the wise
+arrangement of Nature for the propagation as well of daughters as of
+vegetables. Is it not a wise provision, I said to the natural historian
+Goetze, that Nature gives precisely to those maidens who need for their
+life a rich mineral fountain something _attaching_, by which they may
+fasten on to miserable nuptial finches, who shall carry them to fat
+places? Thus Linnaeus[236] observes, as you know, that those kinds of
+seeds which only thrive in rich earth have little hooks on them, in
+order to hang the more easily on the cattle which carry them to the
+stable and manure-heap. Wonderfully does Nature scatter about by the
+wind--father and mother must make it--daughters and pine-seeds into the
+arable places of the forests. Who does not observe the final cause why
+many daughters receive from Nature certain charms in designated
+numbers, that some canon or other, a German Herr, a cardinal-deacon, an
+appanaged prince, or a mere country squire, may come along and take the
+aforesaid charmer, and, as groomsman or English bride's-father, hand
+her over, ready finished, to some blockhead or other, in a distant
+place, as a ready-made wife on sale? And do we find in the case of
+bilberries any less precaution on the part of Nature? Does not the same
+Linnaeus observe, in the same treatise, that they are enveloped in a
+nutritious juice, that they may attract the fox to eat them, whereupon
+the knave--he cannot digest the berries--becomes, for all he knows, the
+sower of them?--
+
+Oh, my innermost spirit is more serious than you think. I am vexed with
+those parents who are traders in souls; I pity the daughters who are
+negro slaves. Ah! is it any wonder, then, if the daughters who were
+obliged to dance, laugh, talk, and sing at the West Indian market, in
+order to be carried home by the master of a plantation, if they, I say,
+are treated just as much like slaves as if they were sold and bought?
+Ye poor lambs!--and yet ye are quite as hard as your sheep mothers and
+fathers. What shall one do with his enthusiasm for your sex, when one
+travels through German cities, where every richest or most
+distinguished man, and though he were a distant relation of the Devil
+himself, can point with his finger to thirty houses, and say: "I don't
+know,--shall I pick out and marry one from the pearl-colored, or from
+the nut-colored, or perhaps from the steel-green house? The shops are
+all open for purchasers."--What, ye maidens! is, then your heart so
+little worth that you can cut it down, like old clothes, to suit any
+fashion, any breast? and is it, then, like a Chinese ball, now great,
+now tiny, in order to fit into the ball-form and wedding-ring case of a
+man's heart?--"It must indeed be so, unless one will continue to sit
+alone, like the Holy Virgin over yonder," is the reply of those to whom
+I make no reply, because I turn away from them with contempt, in order
+to say to the so-called Holy Virgin: "Forlorn, but patient one!
+Unappreciated and withered one! remember not the times when thou still
+didst hope for better ones than the present, and never repent the noble
+pride of thy heart! It is not always a duty to marry, but it is always
+a duty not to forgive one's self anything, never to be happy at the
+expense of honor, and not to avoid celibacy by infamy. Unadmired,
+solitary heroine! In thy last hour, when the whole of life and the
+former goods and scaffoldings of life, crushed into ruins, sink
+beforehand,--at that hour thou wilt look out over thy emptied life;
+thou wilt see there, it is true, no children, no husband, no wet eyes;
+but in the vast, void twilight a great, saintly form; angelically
+smiling, radiant, godlike, and soaring to the divine ones, will hover,
+and beckon to thee to ascend with her. Oh, ascend with her; that form
+is thy _virtue_."
+
+                        _End of the Extra-Leaf_.
+
+
+Some days after the Princess gave the Prince an _eye en medaillon_ with
+the fine conceit: she gave this _votive-tablet_ to the saint (this was
+so much the more _apropos_ as the Prince was named _Januarius_) who had
+sent her his wonder-worker, and who now received that which he had
+caused to be healed. January said to Victor, to whom he showed the eye,
+"She confounds St. Januarius with you, with St. Ottilia,"--who, as is
+well known, is the patroness of eyes.
+
+Victor was glad that Matthieu came to him to go with him to St. Luna;
+for the latter begged him, because this was done without him, to go
+with him to his mother's, "because to-day at the Princess's there was a
+great _souper_, but at his mother's not a soul,"--that is, hardly more
+than nine persons. Victor therefore--it mattered not to-day that the
+distinguished and interesting eye-sufferer was absent--gladly followed
+into Schleunes's Nuremberg _Exchange Library_ of daughters behind the
+tender Jonathan-Orestes-Mat, whom he, in fact, out of forbearance
+towards their mutual friend Flamin, treated now with more toleration.
+_Men_, like _ideas_, are associated together quite as often on the
+principle of _simultaneousness_ as on that of _similarity_; and as
+little can be inferred from the choice of _acquaintances_ as to the
+character of a youth, as in regard to that of a woman from her choice
+of a husband. Matthieu introduced him to his mother in the reading
+cabinet, just as she was hearing an English author read, with the
+words, "I bring you here a real live Englishman." Joachime was
+reading in a catalogue,--it was not a catalogue of books, but of
+stock-gillyflowers,--in order to select some gillyflowers for herself,
+not for the purpose of planting, but of imitating them--in silk. She
+hated flowers that grew. Her brother said, ironically, "She hated
+changeableness, even in a flower." For the truth was, she loved it even
+in lovers, and was quite different from April, which, like women, is in
+our climate far more steady than is pretended. In the cabinet there
+were also two fools, whom my correspondent does not so much as name to
+me, because he thinks they would be adequately designated and
+distinguished, if I should call the one the fragrant fool, and the
+other the fine one.
+
+Both fools were buzzing round the beauty. In fact, whenever I have
+wanted to study fools at great parties, I have always looked round
+regularly for a great beauty; they gather round such a one like
+wasps around a fruit-woman. And if I had no other reason--I have,
+however--for marrying the handsomest woman, I would do it for this
+reason, if for no other, that I might always have the queen-bee sitting
+in the hollow of my hand, after whom the whole foolish bee-swarm would
+come buzzing. I and my wife would then be like the fellows in Lisbon,
+who, having in their hands a pole of parrots strung together, and at
+their feet a leash of _monkeys_ skipping after them, trudge through the
+streets, and offer their crazy _personae_ for sale.
+
+The fragrant fool, who was to-day on the _sunny side_ of Joachime, was
+reading to the mother; the fine one, who was on the _weather-side_,
+stood near Joachime, and seemed not to trouble himself about her
+_cooling of the temperature_. Victor stood there as transition from the
+torrid zone to the frigid, and represented the temperate; Joachime
+played three parts with one face. The fragrant fool shot, with his left
+hand, the swivel-gun of a silver _joujou_. This hanging seal of a fool
+he kept in motion, either, as the Greenlander does a block with his
+feet, for the sake of keeping himself warm,--or he did it, as the grand
+sultan for similar reasons must always be whittling with a jackknife,
+in order not to be always having somebody killed out of love,--or in
+order, as the stork always holds a stone in his claws, to have all the
+time an Ixion's-wheel in his hands, as a rowel on his heels,--or for
+the sake of health, in order to counteract the _globulus
+hystericus_[237] by the motion of an external one,--or as rosary
+bead,--or because he didn't know why.
+
+Each was satisfied with himself. When the mother begged our Englishman
+to read to her with his native accent, the _fine_ fool said, "The
+English, like certain sentiments, is easier to understand than to
+pronounce." That is to say, this fine sheep had universally the habit
+of being metaphorical. If a maiden said to him, "I cannot keep myself
+from feeling cold to-day," he made out of it coldness of the heart. One
+could not say, "It is cloudy, warm, the needle has pricked me," &c.,
+without his taking this as a ball-drawer, to extract his heart from the
+fire-arm of his breast, and exhibit it. It was impossible in his
+hearing not to be fine, and from your good-morning he twisted a
+_bon-mot_. Had he read the Old Testament, he would not have been able
+to admire sufficiently the fine turns that occur there. On the other
+hand, the _fragrant_ fool limited his whole wit to a lively face. He
+unfolded before you this bill of invoice and insurance-policy of a
+thousand bright conceits, and held it up to you, but nothing came. You
+could have sworn by the advertising-poster of wit in his fiery eye,
+"Now he is going to blaze out,"--but not in the least! He used the
+weapon of satire, as the grenadiers do hand-grenades, which they no
+longer throw, but only wear imitated on their caps.
+
+When the fine one had said his erotic _bon-mot_, Joachime looked at our
+hero, and said, with an ironical glance at the fine one, "_J'aime les
+sages a la folie_."
+
+The pride of the fragrant one in his to-day's superiority, and the
+apparent indifference of the fine fool to his own neglect, proved that
+neither was often in to-day's ease, and that Joachime coquetted in a
+peculiar style. She always made fun of us stately male persons, when
+two were with her at once,--of one alone less so; her eyes left it to
+our self-love to ascribe the fire in them more to love than to wit; she
+seemed to blab out what came into her head, but many things seemed not
+to come into her head; she was full of contradictions and follies, but
+her _intentions_ and her inclination nevertheless remained doubtful to
+every one; her answers were quick, but her questions still quicker.
+To-day, in the presence of the three gentlemen,--at other times she did
+it in the presence of the whole _bureau d'esprit_,--she stepped up to
+the looking-glass, took out her paint-box, and retouched the gay
+box-piece of her cheeks. One could not possibly think how she would
+look if she were embarrassed or ashamed.
+
+The virtue of many a lady is a thunder-house, which the electric spark
+of love shatters to pieces, and which they put together again for new
+experiments; to our hero, spoiled by the highest female perfection, it
+appeared as if Joachime must be classed among those thunder-houses.
+Coquetry is always answered with coquetry. Either this latter it was,
+or too feeble a respect for Joachime, which led Victor to make the two
+adorers ridiculous in the eyes of the goddess. His victory was as easy
+as it was great; he encamped on the foe's position,--in other words,
+Joachime took an increased liking to him. For women cannot bear him
+who, before their eyes, succumbs to another sex than their own. They
+_love_ everything that they _admire_; and one would not have made such
+satirical explanations of their predilection for physical courage, if
+one had considered that they feel this predilection for everything that
+is distinguished,--for men distinguished by wealth, renown, learning.
+The dry and wrinkled Voltaire had so much fame and wit, that few
+Parisian hearts would have rejected his satirical one. Add to this,
+that my hero expressed his regard for the whole sex with a warmth which
+the individual appropriated to herself; then, too, his favorite
+universal-love, furthermore his eye swimming in sorrow over a lost
+heart, and finally his infectious human tenderness, secured him an
+attention from Joachime which excited his to the degree, that he
+proposed to himself the next time to investigate what it might
+signify.----
+
+The next time soon came. So soon as the advent of the Princess was
+predicted by the Apothecary,--for _he_ was for the little future of the
+court his witch of Endor and of Cumae, and his Delphic cave,--he went
+thither; for he did not drive. "So long as there is still a shoe-black
+and a pavement," said he, "I do not drive. But as to the more
+distinguished gentry, I wonder that they even travel on foot from one
+wing of the palace to the other. Could not one, just as they have a
+penny-post for a city, introduce a conveyance for the interior of the
+palace? Might not every chair be a sedan-chair, if a lady were less
+afraid of an Alpine tour from one apartment to another? And various
+circumnavigatresses of the world would even venture to make a
+pleasure-tour through a large garden in a close litter."--Victor's own
+journey lay straight through one,--namely, that of Schleunes. It was
+too bright and pleasant as yet to let him screw himself like a
+sewing-cushion to the card-table. He saw in the garden a gay little
+party strolling about, and Joachime among them. He joined them.
+Joachime expressed an artist's pleasure at the groupings of the clouds,
+and it was becoming to her beautiful eyes when she lifted them in that
+direction. As they had nothing clever to say, they sought to do
+something clever, so soon as they came to the _carrousel_.[238] They
+seated themselves in it, and caused it to be set agoing. Many of the
+ladies had absolutely not the courage to climb this potter's-wheel;
+some ventured into the seats; only Joachime, who was full as daring as
+she was timid, mounted the wooden tourney-steed, and took the lance in
+hand, to spear away the ring, with a grace which was worthy of finer
+rings. But in order not to expose herself to being thrown by the
+whirling Rosinante, Joachime had set my hero beside her as a banister,
+that she might hold on to him in time of need. The revolution of the
+axle grew more rapid, and her fear greater; she clung to him more and
+more firmly, and he clasped her more firmly in order to anticipate her
+effort. Victor, who understood very well the legerdemain and hocuspocus
+of women, easily saw through Joachime's Wiegleb's-natural-magic and
+"Trunkus Plempsum Schallalei";[239] besides, the reciprocal pressure
+had passed to and fro so rapidly, that one could not tell whether it
+had an originator or an originatress....
+
+As they are now all within doors, and I stand alone in the garden by
+the horse-mill, I will reflect ingeniously on the subject, and remark
+that great people, like women and the French and the Greeks, are
+great--children. All great philosophers are the same, and, when they
+have almost destroyed themselves with thinking, revive themselves by
+child's fooleries, as, e. g., Malebranche did; even so do great people
+refresh themselves for their more serious, noble diversions by true
+childish ones; hence the hobby-horse chivalry, the swing, the
+card-houses (in Hamilton's _memoires_), the cutting out of pictures,
+the _joujou_. With this passion for amusing themselves, they are in
+part infected by the custom of amusing their superiors, because the
+latter resemble the ancient gods, who, according to Moritz, were
+appeased, not by atonement, but by joyous festivals.
+
+As he was acquainted with the whole theatre-company of the Minister,
+and, secondly, as he was no longer a lover,--for such a one has a
+thousand eyes for _one_ person, and a thousand eyelids for the
+rest,--he was not embarrassed at the Minister's, but actually enjoyed
+himself. For he had, to be sure, his plan to carry through there; and a
+plot makes a life entertaining, whether one _reads_ or _executes_ it.
+
+He was successful to-day in having a tolerably long talk with the
+Princess, and, to be sure, not about the Prince,--she avoided that
+subject,--but about her trouble of the eyes. That was all. He felt it
+was easier to play off an exaggerated regard than to express a real.
+The apprehension of appearing false _makes_ one appear so. Hence a
+sincere man has the look, with a suspicious one, of being half false.
+Meanwhile, with Agnola, who, in spite of her temperament, was
+coy,--hence a peculiar, lowered tone reigned in her presence at
+Schleunes's,--every step sufficed which he did not take backward.
+
+But toward the sprightly Joachime he took half a step forward. Not so
+much she, as the house, seemed to him to be coquettish; and the
+daughters therein--they constitute the house--he found to resemble the
+old Litones,[240] or people of the Saxons, who were one third free and
+two thirds serf, and who therefore could mortgage a third of their
+estate. Each had still a third, a ninth, a segment, of her heart left
+to her own free disposal. In fact, whoso has ever seen codfishing can
+learn the thing here from metaphor,--the three daughters hold long
+fishing-rods over the water (father and mother splash, and drive the
+codfish along), and have their hooks baited with state-uniforms
+or their own faces,--with hearts,--with whole men (as luring
+rivals),--with hearts which have already been once taken out of the
+stomach of another captured codfish;--from this, I say, one can see in
+some sort how they catch the other cod in the sea, precisely as they do
+the stock-fish on land,--namely, besides what has been mentioned (now
+let one read back again), with bits of red rag, with glass-pearls, with
+birds' hearts, with salted herrings and bleeding fishes, with little
+cods themselves, with fishes which one has taken out, half digested,
+from stock-fish formerly caught.----Victor thought to himself,
+"Joachime may be only lively or coquettish for all me; I can easily
+skip over marten-traps which I can see set right before my nose." Well,
+run, Victor; the _visible_ steel shall lead thee precisely upon that
+which is _concealed_. One may observe in the same person coquetry
+towards every other, and yet overlook it toward himself, as the fair
+one believes the flatterer whom she sets down as a consummate flatterer
+of all others.--He observed that Joachime had somewhat oftenish looked
+up at the new ceiling this evening, and he could not rightly tell why
+it pleased her. At last he saw that she was only pleased with herself,
+and that raising her eyes was more becoming to them than looking down.
+He undertook presumptuously to investigate this, and said to her, "It
+is a pity the painter of the Vatican had not made it, that you might
+look up at it oftener."--"Oh," said she, in a tone of levity, "I never
+would look up with others; I do not love admiration." By and by she
+said, "Men dissemble, when they wish to, better than we; but I tell you
+just as few truths as I hear from you." She confessed outright that
+coquetry was the best remedy against love; and with the observation
+that his frankness pleased her, but hers must please him too, she ended
+the visit and the Post-Day.
+
+
+
+
+                           22. DOG-POST-DAY.
+
+   Gun-Foundery of Love; e. g. Printed Gloves, Quarrels, Dwarf-Flasks,
+      and Stabs.--A Title from the Digests of Love.--Marie.--Court-Day.--
+      Giulia's dying Epistle.
+
+
+The reader will be vexed with this Dog-Post-Day; I, for my part, have
+already been vexed about it. My hero is evidently becoming entangled in
+the meshes of two female trains, and even in the bonds of the princely
+friendship... Nothing more is wanting than that Clotilda should
+actually be joined to the hurly-burly.----And something of this kind it
+becomes necessary for a mining-superintendent, an islander, to
+communicate confidentially to the people on the mainland.
+
+Besides, it must be done chronologically. I will dissect this
+Dog-Post-Day, which reaches from November to December, into weeks.
+Thereby more order will be observed. For I understand the Germans. They
+want, like the metaphysician, to know everything from the beginning
+onward, very exactly, in royal octavo, without excessive brevity, and
+with some _citata_. They furnish an epigram with a preface, and a
+love-madrigal with a table of contents; they determine the zephyr by
+compass and the heart of a maiden by conic sections; they mark
+everything, like merchants, in black-letter, and prove everything, like
+jurists; their cerebral membranes are living parchments, their legs
+private surveyors'-poles and pedometers; they cut up the veil
+of the Nine Muses, and apply to the hearts of these damsels
+turners'-compasses, and insert gauging-rods in their heads; poor Clio
+(the muse of history) looks, for all the world, like the Consistorial
+Counsellor Busching, who trudges along slowly, bent up under a land
+freight of surveyors'-chains, clocks to calculate _thirds_, and
+Harrison's longitude-watches, and interleaved writing-almanacs, so that
+I specially weep for the poor Busching as often as I see him striding
+along, since all Germany, (from which I should have expected something
+different,)--every magistrate, every stupid justice of the peace, (only
+we of Scheerau have never saddled him,)--has loaded down the good
+topographical carrier and Christopher (cross-bearer), like a statue
+hung with pledges, from knee to nostril, (so that the good man is
+hardly to be seen, and I wonder how he stays on his feet,)--has
+palisaded, I say, and built him in with all sorts of cursed devil's
+whisks, with village inventories, with advertising sheets, with
+heraldic works, with books of ground-plats and perspective plans of
+pigsties.
+
+They have even--that I may only _relate_ an example out of my own
+history of the German statistic stupidity, although in the very
+doing of it I _give one_--infected Jean Paul. Is it not an old
+story that he has approximately assigned in degrees, by means of a
+Saussure's cyanometer,[241] the blueness of the fairest eyes into
+which an _amoroso_ ever looked, and inspected the fairest drops that
+fell from them during the measurement, correctly enough, with a
+dew-measurer?--And has not his attempt to catch and prove female sighs
+by a Stegmann's measurer of the purity of the atmosphere found more
+than too many imitators among us?----
+
+
+                WEEK OF THE 22D POST-TRINITATIS, OR FROM
+                      NOV. 3d to 11th (EXCLUSIVE).
+
+Almost the whole of this week he sat out at the Minister's. Many
+people, when they have been only four times in a house, come again
+daily, like the quotidian fever,--in the beginning, like the spring
+sun, every day earlier; afterward, like the autumn sun, every day
+later. He saw, indeed, that he could not contribute anything at this
+court-and-ministerial party, either a mystery, or property, or a heart,
+because it would resemble honest courts of justice, which--just as
+the monks call their property a deposit, and say nothing belongs to
+them--inversely promote every deposit into a piece of property, and say
+all belongs to them. But he made no account of that. "I come indeed
+only for fun," thought he, "and no harm can be done to me."----
+
+The Minister, whom he met only over the table, had all the civility
+towards him which can be united with a face full of persiflage, and
+with a class of society in whose eyes all the world is divided into
+spies and thieves; but Sebastian perceived, nevertheless, that
+he looked upon him as a smatterer in medicine and the serious
+sciences,--as if they were not all serious,--and as an adept merely in
+wit and in the liberal arts. He was, however, too proud to turn to him
+any other than the empty new-moon-side, and concealed from him all that
+might convert him. Consequently, Victor must needs, in the eyes of the
+stupidest government-officer who had seen it, have deprived himself of
+all respect by the fact that, when the Minister started an interesting
+conversation with his brother, the Regency-President, about imposts,
+alliances, or the exchequer, he either did not attend, or ran off, or
+looked up the women.----Then, too, he loved in the Prince only the man;
+the Minister loved only the Prince. Victor could himself, when with
+January, deliver discourses on the advantages of republics, and the
+latter would often, in his enthusiasm, (if the supreme courts and his
+stomach had allowed it,) gladly have raised Flachsenfingen to a free
+state, and himself to the President of Congress therein. But the
+Minister hated all this with a mortal hatred, and fastened on all
+political free-thinkers--on a Rousseau, on all Girondists, all
+Feuillants, all Republicans, and all philosophers--the name of
+_Jacobin_, as the Turks call all foreigners, Britons, Germans,
+Frenchmen, etc., _Franks_. Meanwhile this was a reason why Victor now
+took a greater liking to Mat, who thought better on this subject, and
+why he fled from the father to the daughter.
+
+This week he got into Joachime's good graces. She gave to the fine and
+fragrant duo of fools, as we do to _virtue_, only the second prize, and
+to my hero, as we do to _inclination_, the prize-medal. But as he
+respected, at most, merely a certain sentimentalism in friendship and
+in love, he could, he thought, have ridden through the moon with this
+waggish girl, without sighing _for_ her (though he might, indeed,
+_over_ her). But these jolly ones, my Bastian, have seen the old Harry;
+for whenever they change to anything else, one changes with them to the
+same thing. She told him she wanted to give _pleasure_, like a Lutheran
+holy picture, but she would not be _adored_, like a Catholic one. She
+prepossessed him most by the gift peculiar to her sex, of understanding
+tender allusions,--women are so easy at guessing the meaning of others,
+because they always oblige others to guess their meaning, and
+_complete_ and _conceal_ each _half_ with equal success. But among her
+attractions I reckon also her constraint before the Princess, and
+before those who listened with their--eyes. For the rest, his heart,
+which Clotilda had rejected, was now in the situation of children who
+have made a bet that they will receive blows upon their hands without
+crying, and who still continue to smile when the tears already flow.
+
+
+              WEEK OF THE 23d POST-TRINITATIS, OR 46th OF
+                             THE YEAR 179-.
+
+Now he is there even in the forenoon. It is worthy of notice, that
+on St. Martin's day he scraped her powdered forehead with the
+powder-knife, and that he applied to her for some court offices in
+connection with the toilet. "I can be your rouge-box bearer, as the
+Great Mogul has tobacco-pipe and betel-bearers, or else your _cravatier
+ordinaire_, or your _sommier_ (i. e. prayer-cushion-bearer).--I would,
+if you did not kneel yourself on the cushion, myself do it before
+you.----I knew in Hanover a handsome Englishman who had his left knee
+stuffed and padded, because he did not know whom he should to-day have
+to adore, and how long."
+
+It is something quite as important, that on St. Jonas's day he forced
+her to accept a pair of fine gloves, on which a very simple face was
+painted. "It was his own," he said; "she should have the face only by
+night, in bed, in, or on, her hand, that it might look as if he kissed
+her hand through the whole November night."
+
+I go on with my pragmatic extracts from this siege-journal, and find
+recorded on Leopold's day that, as early as in the forenoon, Joachime
+said she would have her parrot, if she kept a master of languages for
+him, repeat nothing out of the whole dictionary except the word
+_perfide_! "Every lover," said she, "should keep a poll for himself,
+which should incessantly cry out to him, _perfide_!"--"The ladies,"
+said my hero, "are alone to blame: they want to be loved too long;
+often whole weeks, whole months. The like of that is beyond our powers.
+Have not the Jesuits made even love to God periodical? Scotus limits it
+to Sunday, others to the festival days.--Coninch says, it is enough if
+one loves Him once every four years.--Henriquez adds a year more to
+it.--Suarez says, it is enough if it is only done before one's
+death.----To many ladies the intermediate times have hitherto fallen;
+but the hours of the day, the seasons of the year, the days of
+betrothal, of burial, form just as many different sects among the
+Jesuits of Love."--Joachime made a beginning of putting on an angry
+look. The court-physician loved nothing better with a fair one than a
+quarrel, and added: "_C'est a force de se faire hair qu'elles se font
+aimer--c'est aimer que de bouder--ah, que je vous prie de vous
+facher!_"--His humor had carried him beyond the mark.--Joachime had
+reason enough to fulfil his prayer for her wrath.--He wanted to
+continue the quarrel in order to settle it, but as there are cases
+where the _aggravation_ of an offence brings about forgiveness quite as
+little as the _taking of it back_ step by step, he did wisely in coming
+away.
+
+He wondered that he should think of her all day long. The feeling of
+having done her wrong brought her face with a suffering expression
+before his softened soul, and all her features were at once ennobled.
+Tacitus says, we hate another when we have offended him; but good men
+often love another merely on that account.
+
+The day following, Ottomar's day,--_Ottomar_! great name, which makes
+the long funeral procession of a great past sweep by all at once before
+me in the dark,--he found her serious, neither seeking nor shunning
+him. The two fools remained in her eyes the two fools, and gained
+nothing in any way. As, therefore, he clearly perceived that out of a
+transient resentment there had grown true repentance for her previous
+openness,--of which he seemed to have made too free a use and too
+selfish an interpretation,--it was now his duty to do in earnest that
+which he had hitherto done in joke, namely, to seek her and get her to
+be reconciled.
+
+But she stood all the time by the Princess, and nothing was done.
+
+I have not said it myself, because I knew the reader would see
+it without me,--that my hero thinks Joachime regards him as the
+image-worshipper of her charms, and as the moon-man, or satellite
+attracted by her. My hero has, therefore, long since made up his mind
+to leave her in this error. As to removing such an error,--for _that_ a
+man or a woman seldom has strength enough; but Victor had, besides,
+several reasons for indulging her with faith in his love (that is,
+himself, also, with faith in hers). In the first place, he wanted to
+conceal the reason of his coming; secondly, he knew that in the great
+world, and among the Joachimes, a lover is sought for only as third man
+in the game,--with them there is no dying of love, one does not even
+live on it; thirdly, he reserved for himself in all cases the
+sheet-anchor of making earnest out of jest; "when the knife is at my
+throat," thought he, "then I will set myself down and fall truly in
+love with her, and then all will be well"; fourthly, a coquette makes a
+_coquet_.[242] ... Here I began already, as is well known, to be vexed
+about the 22d Post-Day, although I know as well as anybody why all
+mankind, even the most sincere, even the male kind, incline to little
+intrigues towards their beloved; that is to say, not merely because
+they are little and _reciprocated_, but because one thinks by his
+intrigues to give more than he steals. Only the highest and noblest
+love is without real trickery.
+
+
+              WEEKS OF THE 24th AND 25th POST-TRINITATIS.
+
+On Sunday there was a ball. "Very naturally," said he, "she will not
+look on me. In ball-dress the fair sex are more implacable than in
+morning dress." Hardly had she seen him when she came to meet him,
+like an agitated heaven, with her fixed stars of brilliants and her
+pearl-planets, and in this splendor begged of him the forgiveness of
+her freak. She had at first made believe angry, she said, then had
+actually become so; and not until the next day had seen that she did
+wrong to appear so and had a right to be so. This prayer for
+forgiveness made our Medicus more humble than was necessary. She begged
+him sportively to beg her pardon, and made him acquainted with her
+percussion-gold of sudden resentment.
+
+For a space of two days this Westphalian peace was kept.
+
+But one quarrel with a maiden, like one fool, makes ten; and
+unfortunately one only likes the angry one so much the better (at
+least, better than the indifferent), just as people run most after
+_those_ Methodist preachers who damn them the most roundly. Joachime
+grew daily more susceptible of anger,--which he ascribed to an
+increasing love,--but so did he, too. Let them have spent the whole
+visit in the finest imperial and domestic peace, at the leave-taking
+all was put upon a war-footing again, ambassadors and furloughed ones
+(if I may be allowed these poetical expressions) recalled. Then with
+the angry sediments in his heart he withdrew, and could hardly wait for
+the moment of the next interview,--i. e. of his or her justification.
+Thus did they spend their hours in the writing of peace-instruments and
+manifestoes. The matter of dispute was as singular as the quarrel
+itself: it concerned their demands of friendship; each party proved
+that the other was the faulty one, and demanded too much. What most
+enraged our Medicus was, that she allowed the fine and the fragrant
+fools to kiss her hand, which she forbade him to do, and in truth
+without any reasons for the decision. "If she would only lie to me, and
+say, such or such is the reason,--that at least would be something,"
+said he; but she did him not the pleasure. To my sex, refusal without
+reasons, even conjecturable ones, is a pit of brimstone, a threefold
+death; upon Joachime, reasons and cabinet-sermons had equal influence.
+
+
+                        EXTRA-LEAF ON THE ABOVE.
+
+I have a hundred times, with my legal burden of proof on my back,
+thought of women who are able, with a certain effort, to act as well as
+to believe without any reasons. For surely, in the end, everybody must
+(according to all philosophers) reconcile himself to actions and
+opinions for which reasons are entirely wanting; for, since every
+reason appeals to a new one, and this again rests upon one which refers
+us to one, which again must have its own reason, it follows that
+(unless we mean to be forever going and seeking) we must finally arrive
+at one which we accept without any reason whatever. Only the scholar
+fails in this, that precisely the most important truths--the highest
+principles of morals, of metaphysics, &c.--are the ones which he
+believes without reasons, and which, in his agony,--thinking to help
+himself out thereby,--he names necessary truths. Woman, on the
+contrary, makes lesser truths--e. g. there must be drives, invitations,
+washing to-morrow, &c.--the necessary truths, which must be accepted
+without the insurance and reinsurance of reasons;--and just this it is
+which gives her such an appearance of soundness. For them it is easy to
+distinguish themselves from the philosopher, who thinks, and into whose
+eyes the sun of truth flames so horizontally that he cannot see, for
+it, either road or landscape. The philosopher is obliged, in the
+weightiest actions,--the moral,--to be his own lawgiver and law-keeper,
+without having the reasons therefor given him by his conscience. With a
+woman, every inclination is a little conscience, and hates
+_Heteronomies_,[243] and beyond that pronounces no reasons, just as the
+great conscience does. And it is precisely this gift, of acting more
+from private sovereignty than from reasons, which makes women so very
+suitable for men; for the latter would rather give them ten commands
+than three reasons.
+
+                 _End of the Extra-Leaf on the above_.
+
+
+What was full as bad was, that Joachime at last, only for the sake of
+removing his documentary piles of complaints and imperial grievances,
+allowed him her fingers, without giving him the least reason for it. He
+could, therefore, show no title of possession, and, in case of need,
+would have had no one who could protect him therein.
+
+There is, however, a well-grounded rule of right or Brocardicon[244]
+for men: that everything grows firmer with women, when one builds upon
+it, and that a little stolen favor legitimately belongs to us, so soon
+as we sue for a greater. This rule of right bases itself upon the fact
+that maidens always abate with us, as one does to Jews in trade, the
+half, and give only a couple of fingers when we want the hand. But if
+one has the fingers, then arises, out of the Institutions, a new title,
+which adjudicates to us the hand: the hand gives a right to the arm,
+and the arm to everything that is appended to it, as _accessorium_.
+Thus must these things be managed, if right is to remain right. There
+will, in fact, have to be a little manual written by me, or some other
+honest man, wherein one shall expound and elucidate to the female sex
+with the torch of legal learning the _modos_ (or ways) _acquirendi_ (of
+winning) them. Otherwise many modi may go out of use. Thus, e. g.,
+according to civil law, I am rightful proprietor of a movable thing, if
+it was stolen thirty years ago (in fact, it should be further back, and
+I should not be made to suffer for it, that one began the stealing
+later); so, too, by prescription of thirty minutes (the time is
+relative) everything belonging to a fair one lawfully falls to me,
+which (of a movable nature--and everything about her is movable) I may
+have purloined from her, and therefore one cannot begin soon enough to
+steal, because before the theft the prescription cannot begin to take
+effect.
+
+Specification is a good modus. Only one must be, like me, a
+Proculian,[245] and believe that a strange article belongs to him who
+has imparted to it a different form; e. g. to me, the hand which I have
+put into another shape by pressure.
+
+The late Siegwart said: _Confusio_ (mingling of tears) is my modus. But
+_commixtio_ (mixture of dry articles, e. g. the fingers, the hair) is
+now with almost all of us the _modus acquirendi_.
+
+I was going once to treat the whole thing according to the doctrine of
+the _Servitudes_,[246] where a woman has a thousand things to suffer
+(though all these servitudes are entirely extinguished by the
+consolidation[247] of marriage); but I do not myself any longer rightly
+retain the doctrine of the Servitudes, and would much rather examine
+any one in them than be examined myself.----
+
+I return to the Medicus. Since, then, he knew that a kissed hand is a
+warrant to the cheeks,--but the cheeks the sacrificial tables of the
+lips,--these of the eyes,--the eyes of the neck;--accordingly he would
+have proceeded exactly according to his text-book. But with Joachime,
+as with all antipodes of coquettes, _no favor paved the way for
+another, not even the great one for the small one_; you passed from one
+antechamber to another,--and what said my hero to this? Nothing but
+"Thank God that for once there is one better than she seemed, who,
+under the appearance of being our plaything, plays with us, and makes
+her coquetry the veil of virtue!"
+
+He felt now, as often as her name was mentioned, a soft warmth breathe
+through his bosom.
+
+
+                FROM THE END OF THE ECCLESIASTICAL YEAR
+              (DEC. 1) TO THE END OF THE CIVIL (DEC. 31).
+
+Flamin, whose patriotic flames found no air in the session-chamber, and
+stifled himself first, grew shyer and wilder every day. It was
+something new to him, that it took whole boards and commissions to do
+what one person might have done,--that the limbs of the state (as is
+also the case, indeed, with the limbs of the body) are moved by the
+_short arm_ of the lever, so as to do less with greater power, and a
+board, particularly, resembles the body, which, according to
+Borellus,[248] spends 2,900 times as much strength on a leap as the
+load which it has to lift requires. He hated all great people, and
+never went to see any: the page Mat did not even get visits from him.
+My Sebastian made his visits to _him_ seldomer, because his leisure and
+his calms of dissipation fell exactly upon Flamin's working hours. This
+separation, and the eternal sitting at Schleunes's,--which Flamin, from
+not being acquainted with Joachime's influence, was obliged at all
+events to ascribe to Clotilda's, for future visits to whom Victor must
+be creating a pretext by his present ones,--and even the Prince's favor
+towards the latter, which in Flamin's eyes could not be any result of
+his spirit of freedom and his sincerity;--all this drew the intertwined
+bonds of their friendship, which had made life to them hitherto a
+four-handed piece of music, further and further asunder; the faults and
+the moral dust which Victor could once brush off from his darling he
+hardly dared to blow off; they behaved towards each other more
+delicately and attentively. But my Victor, to whose heart Fate applied
+so many tongues of vampyres, and who was compelled to shut up in _one_
+breast the bitterness of lost love and the woe of failing friendship,
+was made by it all--really merry. O, there is a certain gayety of
+stagnation and grief, which is a sign of the soul's exhaustion, a smile
+like that on men who die of wounds in the diaphragm, or that on the
+shrivelled, drawn-back lips of mummies! Victor plunged into the stream
+of amusements, in order, under it, not to hear his own sighs. But
+often, to be sure, when he had all day long been sprinkling over ruined
+follies comic salt, which full as often bites the hand of the sower and
+makes it ache, and when he had not been able all day long to refresh
+himself with any eye, to which he would have dared to show a tear in
+his own,--when, thus weary of the present, indifferent to the future,
+wounded by the past, he had just passed by the last fool, the
+Apothecary, and when from his bow-window he looked out into the
+night hanging full of worlds, and into the tranquillizing moon, and
+upon the eastern clouds over St. Luna,--then were his swollen heart
+and his swollen eyeball sure to burst, and the tears which night
+concealed to stream down from his balcony on the hard pavement. "O,
+only _one_ soul," cried his innermost being with all the tones of
+melancholy,--"give but _one_ soul, thou eternal, loving, creative
+nature, to this poor, languishing heart, which seems so hard and is so
+soft, which seems so joyous and yet is so sad, seems so cold and yet is
+so warm!"
+
+It was well that, on such an evening, no chamberlain, no man of the
+world, stood in the balcony, just as poor Marie--on whom her former
+life has been precipitated like a crushing avalanche--came to desire
+his breakfast-orders; for he would get up, without wiping away a drop,
+and advance kindly to meet her, and grasp her soft, but red and
+hard-worked hand, which from fear she did not draw back,--although from
+fear she did turn away her face, hardened into stone against hope,--and
+say, as he softly stroked her eyebrows horizontally, with a voice
+rising from a heart full of the deepest emotion, "Thou poor Marie, tell
+me--I am sure thou hast little comfort--is it not so? There seldom
+comes any longer into thy gentle eyes anything that they love to see,
+unless it is thy own tears? Dear girl, why hast thou no courage before
+me? why dost thou not tell me thy woe? Thou good, tortured heart,--I
+will speak for thee, act for thee: tell me what weighs on thee, and if
+ever of an evening thy heart is too heavy, and thou mayest not venture
+to weep down below, then come up to me ... look at me now frankly ...
+truly I will shed tears with thee, let them say what they will and be
+hanged." Although she held it to be uncourteous to weep before so
+distinguished a gentleman, nevertheless, it was impossible for her, by
+a forcible bending away of her face, to thrust aside all the tears
+which his voice, full of love, drew in rivers from her eyes.... Take it
+not ill of his over-boiling soul, that he then pressed his hot mouth to
+her cold, despised, and unresistingly trembling lips, and said to her:
+"Oh, why are we mortals so unhappy, when we are too soft-hearted?"--In
+his chamber she seemed to take all as jest,--but all night long she
+heard the echo of the humane man;--even as jest, so much love would
+have been a comfort to her; then her past flowers once more
+crystallized in the window-frost of her present wintry-time; then she
+felt as if she were to-day, for the first time, unhappy.--In the
+morning she said nothing to any one, and towards Sebastian she was
+merely more devoted, but not more courageous; only, at times, she would
+concur with the dispenser down below, when he praised him, and say, but
+without further explanation, "One should cut up one's own heart into
+little bits, and sacrifice it for the English gentleman."
+
+Poor Marie! my own innermost heart repeats after the Doctor, and adds
+besides: Perhaps at this very moment, just such an unhappy woman, just
+such an unhappy man, is reading me. And I feel as if; now that I have
+struck the funeral bells of their past sad hours, I must also write
+them a word of consolation. But for one who has to be ever striding
+across new gaping ice-chasms of life, I know no resource but my own:
+the moment things grow bad, fling all _possible hopes_ to the Devil,
+and with utter renunciation fall back upon thyself, and ask, How now,
+if even the worst should come, what then? Never reconcile thy fancy to
+the _next_ misfortune, but to the greatest. Nothing relaxes one's
+spirits more than the alternation of warm hopes with cold anguish. If
+this method is too heroic for thee, then seek for thy tears an eye that
+shall imitate them, and a voice that shall ask thee why thou art thus.
+And reflect: the echo of the next life, the voice of our modest,
+fairer, holier soul, is audible only in a sorrow-darkened bosom, as the
+nightingales warble when one veils their cage.
+
+Often did Sebastian worry himself about this, that he could here exert
+so little his noble powers in behalf of humanity; that his dreams of
+preventing evil and accomplishing good through the Prince remained
+fever-dreams, because, e. g., even the best men at the helm of the
+state filled offices entirely according to circumstances and
+recommendations merely, and held offices, whether those of others or
+their own, never as obligations, but as mining-curacies. He was
+troubled about his uselessness; but he consoled himself with its
+necessity: "in a year, when my father comes, I set myself free and rise
+to something better," and his conscience added, that his own personal
+uselessness was serviceable to the virtue of his father, and that it
+was better to be, in a wheel, with all one's fitness for a pendulum, a
+tooth, without which the machinery would stop, than to be the pendulum
+of a toothless wheel.
+
+In such cases he always asked himself afresh: "Is Joachime, perhaps,
+like me, better, tenderer, less coquettish than she seems? and why wilt
+thou condemn her on the strength of an outward appearance, which is, to
+be sure, the same as thine own?" Her conduct seldom confirmed these
+favorable suppositions, nay, it often absolutely refuted them;
+nevertheless, he went on to expose himself to new refutations and to
+desire confirmation still. The necessity of loving drives one to
+greater follies than love itself; every week Victor let himself abate
+one perfection more from the female ideal, for which, as for the
+unknown god, he had already for years had the altar set up in his
+brain. During this haggling the whole of December would have slipped
+away, had it not been for the first day of Christmas.
+
+On that day, when he saw through every window laughing faces and
+gardens of Hesperides, he too would fain be joyful, and flew amidst the
+church-chorals to Joachime's toilet-chamber, in order there to make
+himself a Christmas pleasure. He had brought her for a present, he
+said, a bottle-case of liqueurs, a whole cellar of Rataffia, because he
+knew how ladies drank. When, at last, he drew his gantry full of
+bottles out of his--pocket: it was a miserable little box full
+of cotton-wool, in which stood imbedded neat little bottles of
+sweet-smelling waters, almost as long as wrens'-eggs. What is neat
+always pleases girls--as well as what is splendid. He delivered a long
+discourse to Joachime upon the temperance of her sex, who ate as little
+as humming-birds and drank as little as eagles: with a few show-dishes
+and a smelling-bottle he would feast an army of the female sex five
+thousand men strong, and there should still be something left. The
+physicians observed that they who had borne hunger longest had been
+women,--even in the middle classes the whole bee-flora on which these
+saints lived consisted of a colored ribbon, which they wore as sash or
+scarf, by way of a nourishing poultice and portable soup, and to which
+they attached nothing further, except at most a lover. Joachime, during
+the eulogy, drew out a bottle, because she thought it wax. Victor, by
+way of refuting her--or for some other reason--pressed it tightly
+into her hand, and fortunately crushed it. A mining-superintendent
+of my disposition would hardly introduce the crushing of a bottle,
+not big enough to cover one of Eymann's cucumbers with, into his
+Dog-Post-Days,--because he loves to serve up things of importance,--did
+not the bottle itself acquire an importance from the fact that it cut
+the softest hand upon which the hardest jewel ever yet threw lustre,
+till it ran blood. The Doctor was startled,--the patient smiled,--he
+kissed the wound, and these three drops fell like Jason's blood, or
+like a blood rectified by an alchemist, as three sparks into his
+inflammable veins, and the blood-coal of love assumed three glowing
+points;--nay, a little more, and he would have obeyed her, when she
+playfully commanded him (in order to spare him a greater embarrassment
+than he had) to revive the antiquated fashion of the Parisians, of
+writing to ladies with rose-colored ink, and here on the spot to
+despatch three lines to her in her own blood. Thus much is, at least,
+certain, that he told her he wished he were the Devil. To the
+last-named personage, as is well known, the warranty-deed or rather
+partition-treaty of the soul is despatched with the blood of the
+proprietor as fist-[249]pledge and consideration. Blood is the seed of
+the Church, the Catholic Church says; and here we are speaking of
+nothing less than the _temple_ of the fair.
+
+So it was--and so it stood--when the Court of the Princess was
+announced for to-day. This was, in the first place, plaguily awkward
+for him, because this evening was spoiled; and, secondly, it was
+agreeable to him, because Joachime was obliged to-day to put away the
+hat which he and she so loved. Since, as is customary, ladies had the
+robes and frisures prescribed to them by the Princess, in which they
+must celebrate in her presence the court-day, i. e. the incendiary
+Sunday of their freedom: accordingly, she could not to-day keep on the
+crape-hat which she so loved, and Victor too, but not on her; for it
+was just the mate of that which Clotilda had worn when, during the
+concert, she covered her moist eyes with the black-lace veil, which
+from that time always hung down over his bereaved eyes.
+
+I will describe the Court-day.
+
+The main object of the Court in setting forth at six o'clock in the
+evening was, to drive home again at ten o'clock in a right sulky mood.
+I can, however, deliver this ten times as copiously:--
+
+At six o'clock Victor, with the rest of the communion of brethren and
+sisters under orders, drove to the Paullinum. He envied, or rather
+blessed, the weaver, the boot-polisher, the wood-cutter, who had at
+evening his jug of beer, his prayers, his Johnny-[250]cakes and his
+trumpeting children; likewise their wives, who already had foretaste of
+the morrow, namely, of the marbled, speckled dresses which were to
+array them for the second holiday. In the May-colored atmosphere and
+zodiac stood the Princess as a sun, full as unhappy as her unhappy
+planets; _only dream_ (thought he) _can make a king happy or a poor man
+unhappy_. When he saw how they all, after a scanty frog-rain of words;
+and after refreshments, i. e. beatings and exhaustions, were harnessed,
+one post-team after another, according to the Court almanac and
+directory, to the card-tables,--to every board came the same motley set
+of old faces,--he wondered first of all at the universal patience; on a
+negro of the gold coast of the court (he swore to himself) if one only
+considers what he has to _hear_ and to _endure_, the _ears_ and the
+_skin_ are certainly, as in the case of roasted sucking-pigs, the best
+parts. Here the lion must beg _that_ animal to let him have his skin
+for a domino, which has usually borrowed his of him. Here among these
+forms bent up by small souls (as leaves also crook up when leaf-lice
+live on them) no great, no bold thought can be carried: like wheat
+which is _beaten down_, they can yield only _empty_ grains.
+
+Before the sitting down at table, that part or segment of
+the--halo[251] encircling the Italian _sun_, which was not invited,
+drove home, disgusted at the tediousness of play, and still more
+disgusted that certain persons in particular were honored with the
+tediousness of a seat at the table.
+
+Joachime, in whom the retiring Agnola found little satisfaction, went
+away with them, but not the Doctor, nor her brother Mat either, who had
+the honor of making, behind the chair of the Princess, in the column of
+march formed by herself, her chamberlain, a page, and a court lackey,
+exactly the central point; he stood, as every one knows, immediately
+behind the chamberlain, and was the only one who looked like a legible
+lampoon upon the _tout ensemble_. About the table, during[252] which
+there was little said, at most in a very low tone by two neighbors,
+here also there shall be nothing said.
+
+After dinner the Prince came and disturbed the stiff ceremonial, which
+he hated from love of comfort, just as Victor despised it on
+philosophical grounds. "Verily, an archangel," Victor would often say,
+"who should remark the wisdom and virtue observed by mortals in all
+trifles at their session-tables, altars, receptions, must needs bet his
+heaven and his wings that we are worth a farthing--or at least
+something--in greater things; but we all know where the conclusion
+limps; and this very disgust at the stiff, pedantic, decent micrology
+and machinery of men is the humor of the satirist. Moral deterioration
+comes about, it is true, through trifles, but not improvement: Satan
+creeps into us through Venetian blinds and _sphincters_[253]; the good
+angel enters through the front door."--Agnola rewarded our hero to-day
+for his previous so well meant assiduity with a warmer attention, which
+was made more beautiful in his eyes by her ornaments--she wore those of
+the former princess, her own, and those of her mother before her--and
+by her whole state-attire; for he loved finery on women and hated it on
+men. His esteem borrowed a tender warmth from the painful fact that she
+confounded January's selfish intentions in his visits (with reference
+to the future Clotilda) with fairer ones, and that nevertheless one
+could not say so to her. How came it that Agnola reminded him then of
+Joachime; that the latter was the _conductor_ of regard for the former;
+and that all loving emotions with which the Princess inspired him
+turned out wishes that Joachime might deserve and receive them?
+
+With a soul full of such longing, he drove back this very day without
+ceremony to that Joachime on whose hand, as we know, he had left a
+slight wound. He said to her, "He must, as murderer and Medicus, look
+once more to-day after the wound"; but a charming new trouble on
+Joachime's face fell like sunshine with a warming influence into his
+soul. He was impatient to go out with her on the balcony, to talk about
+it. Out there, he in a few minutes made the gash and the December chill
+a pretext for taking the hand and the gash into his own to warm it.
+"Cold is bad for wounds," he said; but the fine fool would here have
+had his own comment on the subject. The vacant evening, the
+remembrances of the childish joys of Christmas, the starry heaven,
+looking down from overhead, which magically illuminates all dark wishes
+of man, like flowers in the night,--these and the silence surcharged
+and burdened his forlorn soul, and he pressed the only hand which human
+kind at this moment extended to him. He put the question to her
+directly about her trouble. Joachime answered more softly than usual,
+"I was going to ask you the same; but with me it is natural." For she
+had, she related, on her return found the luggage of Clotilda and the
+news of her arrival, and--which is the precise point--the clothes of
+her sister Giulia, which Clotilda had hitherto given a place among her
+own. This Giulia, it will be remembered, had expired on Clotilda's
+heart, a day before the latter removed from Maienthal to St. Luna.
+
+A chaos shot through his heart; but out of the chaos only the faded
+Giulia took shape,--for Clotilda daily receded into a duskier sanctuary
+of his soul; her pale Luna-like image caressed with rays of another
+world his sore nerves, and he willingly suffered himself to believe
+that Joachime had her form. In his poetic exaltation, so seldom
+intelligible to women, the dead threw the halo which Clotilda diffused
+over her back again upon her sister. Joachime had to-day read over
+again the letter which Giulia had dictated to her in her last hour
+through Clotilda, and she still had it with her. Probably a heart full
+of unrequited love had borne the fair enthusiast down under the earth.
+Victor with gleaming eyes begged her for the letter; he opened it in
+the moonlight, and when he saw the beloved handwriting of his lost
+Clotilda, his whole heart wept.
+
+
+"Good sister!--
+
+"Forever farewell! Let me say that first, because I know not what
+moment may close my lips. The tempests of my life are going home.[254]
+I speak this farewell and my heartiest wish for thy welfare through my
+friend Clotilda's pen. Give the enclosed to my dear parents, and join
+thy prayer to mine, that they will leave me in my beautiful Maienthal,
+when I am gone. I see now through the window the rose-bush which stands
+by the sexton's little garden in the churchyard: there a place is given
+me, which like a scar shall testify that I once existed, and a black
+cross with the six white letters _Gulia_,--no more. Dear sister, do
+not, I beseech thee, allow them to confine my dust in a tomb!--O no! it
+shall flutter in the shape of Maienthal's roses, which I once so loved
+to sprinkle!--Let this heart, when it shall have dissolved into the
+pollen of a new eternal heart, play and hover in the beams of the moon,
+which has so often in my lifetime made my heart sad and soft. If thou
+ever drivest, dear sister, along by Maienthal, then will the cross peep
+out upon the road through the roses; and if it does not make thee too
+sad, then look over to me.
+
+"It seemed to me just now, for some minutes, as if I drew breath in
+ether,--in little thin draughts. It will soon be over. But tell my
+playmates, if they ask for me, that I was glad to go, though I was
+young. Very glad. Our teacher says, the dying are flying clouds, the
+living stationary ones, beneath which the former glide away, but verily
+at evening both are gone. Ah, I thought I should have to yearn for
+death a long time yet, from one year of sorrow to another; ah! I feared
+these pale cheeks, these eyes sunk with weeping, would not prevail upon
+death, that he would let me grow superannuated, and not take away my
+withered heart until it had throbbed itself to exhaustion: but, lo! he
+comes sooner. In a few days, perhaps in a few hours, an angel will
+appear before me and smile, and I shall see that it is death, and I,
+too, shall smile and say most joyfully, Take my beating heart into thy
+hand, thou ambassador of eternity, and care for my soul.
+
+"'But art thou not young?' the angel will say; 'hast thou not just
+stept upon this earth? Shall I recall thee so soon, even before it has
+its spring?'
+
+"But I shall answer: Look on these sunken cheeks, and these exhausted
+eyes, and only shut them to. O, lay the snake-stone[255] on my bosom,
+that it may suck out all the wounds, and not fall off till they are
+healed. Ah! I have haply done no good in the world, but also no evil.
+
+"Then will the angel say:' If I touch thee, thou becomest
+stiff,--spring and mankind and the whole earth vanish, and I alone
+stand beside thee. Is, then, thy young soul already so weary and so
+sore? What sorrows, then, can there be thus early in thy breast?'
+
+"Only touch me, good angel!--Now he says, 'If I touch thee, thou
+crumblest to dust, and all thy loved ones see nothing more of thee--'
+
+"O, touch me!..."
+
+
+Death touched the bleeding heart, and a human being had passed on....
+
+While Victor read the sorrowful sheet, the sister of the dead one had
+several times wiped her eyes, because she imagined to herself what he
+was reading, and when he looked up at her, there glimmered therein the
+seed-pearls of a tender soul. But he wished now that his face could be
+invisible, or that he could be in the balcony of his chamber, so as to
+give way to all sighs and emotions unseen. Had he been in a citizen's
+house, he might now have gone without being derided to the unpacked
+clothes, and into the future apartments of Clotilda; and he might have
+seen again, as it were, the green lawns of Maienthal, if he had seen
+the romantic dresses, wherein Giulia had roamed through them, locked up
+amidst the last kisses of a sister. But in such a house it was an
+impossibility.
+
+He could now, as he seldomer had the enjoyment of another's
+sensibility, easily pardon its even being carried to excess. That it
+shatters the body was to him the wretchedest objection, because,
+indeed, everything of a nobler sort, every effort, all thinking, wears
+it out; in fact, the body and life were only means, but not an end.
+"Giulia's heart in Giulia's body," said he, "is a pure dew-drop in a
+tender flower-cup, which everything crushes, chokes, dries up, and
+which yet has escaped the noonday sun; such souls, too pliable for a
+world full of storm, which have too many nerves and too few muscles,
+deserve for their sensibility's sake not the corroding salt of satire,
+which gnaws them like snails. Earth and we can give them few joys; why
+will we take from them the rest?"
+
+But the lines of sorrow which sympathy now drew through Joachime's
+smiles imprinted themselves distinctly in Victor's heart, and that
+which she would here conceal made her more charming than all that she
+had ever sought to show.
+
+Nothing is more dangerous than--as he had done some weeks before--to
+make believe he was in love: one becomes so forthwith in reality. Thus,
+the voluptuary _Baron_, when he had played one of Corneille's heroes,
+himself was one for some days. Thus Moliere died of a _malade
+imaginaire_, and Charles V. of a rehearsal-burial. Thus the paper crown
+which Cromwell had worn in a school-drama made him covet a harder
+one.--The second lesson which is to be learned from this (this,
+however, to be sure, presupposes Joachime's being a coquette) is, that
+a hero may scent coquetry, and yet run into the trap; a poet, like the
+nightingale (which he resembles in plumage, throat, and simplicity)
+sits up on the tree, and sees the snare set, and skips down and--into
+it.
+
+After some days,--while the question about Joachime's worth and his own
+love was rising and falling like a wave in Victor's mind,--while he
+stood on bad terms with Flamin, good ones with the Princess, and
+better with the Prince, who kept asking every day when Clotilda was
+coming,--she came.
+
+
+
+
+                           23. DOG-POST-DAY.
+
+       First Visit to Clotilda.--The Paleness.--The Redness.--The
+                              Race-Weeks.
+
+
+"Ay, I must confess," said Victor, as on the day after Clotilda's
+arrival he ran round in his chamber, "I could look with more courage
+into a thunder-storm or a tempestuous sea than into that little
+face,--into a radiant heaven, three noses long." He got relief,
+however, by striking a detached fortissimo chord on the piano: then he
+could go to see Clotilda. Only on the way he said: "Nowhere is there so
+much jangling as within a man. What a devilish uproar in this five-foot
+Disputatorium about the smallest trumpery, till a bill grows into an
+act! A portable national convention _in nuce_,[256] that is what I am;
+I cannot take a step, without the _right_ and _left_ first haranguing
+on the subject, and the _enrages_ and the _noirs_,[257] and the Duke of
+Orleans and Marat. The most detestable thing about this interior
+Ratisbon diet of man is, that Virtue sits therein with ten seats and
+one voice, but the Devil with one rump and seven votes."--
+
+By these humorous soliloquies he sought to divert himself from the
+aspect of his confused, stubborn, cold-sore spirit, which was always
+lifting Joachime to the level of Clotilda. He was finally put in
+perfect tune again merely by the virtuous resolution not to conceal now
+his love for Joachime,--"not to be ashamed of her," he had almost
+thought to himself. "If I _feign_ myself to be somewhat warmer toward
+Joachime and colder towards the other than I perhaps am, then the Devil
+must have his game in it, if I do not finally _become_ so."
+
+But the Devil had his game, and in fact a true game of Ombre[258] for
+_four_ persons,[259] with a dummy:[260] this croupier[261] had made the
+original vault of playing out the face[262] of Clotilda with a wholly
+different _color_ from what he had given her in Le Baut's palace.
+Victor found her, on meeting her again at Schleunes's, infinitely more
+beautiful than he had left her,--that is to say, more _pale_. As she
+was no nervous patient, never avoided the cold, even on December
+evenings walked out alone in the village, her cheeks were usually more
+like dark rosebuds than opened and whitened rose-leaves. But now the
+sun had become a moon: she had, in some sorrow or other, like the
+sapphire in the fire, lost nothing but color; instead of the blood, the
+soul, grown more still, lovely, and tender, seemed itself to look more
+nearly through the white crape curtain. All the blood which had receded
+from her cheeks flowed over into his, and rose like a magic potion into
+his head; meanwhile he tried to get into the latter the thought,
+"Probably it is more the quarrel with her parents, and less the
+affliction of being driven hither, that has made her sick."
+
+When one has once proposed to himself to make believe cold, one becomes
+still more so when one finds reasons for _not_ being so: Victor was
+made still colder by Clotilda's parents, who had come with her, and
+from whose faults the mantle seemed to him to be at once removed. Upon
+persons whom, for the sake of a third, one has esteemed too highly, one
+avenges himself, when the third no longer exerts the constraining
+influence, by a so much the greater depreciation of them. Then, too, he
+said to himself: "As she now seldom sees her brother Flamin, it would
+be a piece of simplicity to expose her to a minute's embarrassment by
+the announcement that I know the relationship." Poor Victor!
+Nevertheless, it was impossible for him even to charge his heart with
+so much electrical warmth--though he might rub it with cat-skins and
+beat it with fox-tails--as would be requisite in order that his pulse
+should beat full for Joachime, not to say feverishly; but _this very
+thing_ decided him to conduct himself exactly as if heart and pulse
+were fuller. "It were ignoble," thought he, "if the good Joachime
+should be made to atone for it, that I once had other hopes and wishes
+than my hitherto newest ones." This sacrifice warmed him to a proper
+degree of regard; this regard gave him the manly pride, which defies
+with its love and its choice all the four quarters of the world; this
+pride, again, gave him freedom and joy,--and now he was in a condition
+to talk with Clotilda like a reasonable man.
+
+All this inner history occupied, of course, twelve times as great a
+space of time as Mohammed's journey through all the heavens,--almost
+a good hour. But an accident threw itself into the midst of all
+his ideas. Namely, as the Minister's lady was a true female
+philosopher,--she knew that a couple of quartz crystals with some
+preparations and a drowned f[oe]tus do not make a philosopher, but
+nothing short of a lecture-room full of natural curiosities, and a
+reading cabinet,--and as the Chamberlain Le Baut was a philosopher, for
+his cabinet was quite as large,--the collection was exhibited to the
+Chamberlain, which he had himself helped to enrich. One would suppose
+that they must have laughed at each other in their sleeves, and taken
+each other for fools; but they really held each other for philosophers;
+for with great folks the fruits of the tree of knowledge grow so into
+the window and into the mouth,--they have so much facility in gaining
+knowledge (and therefore a second in showing it),--they so seldom seek
+in the wells of truth anything else than their own knee-pieces made
+with water-colors, and to wade into the depths of this fountain would
+give them such a chill,--and yet, on the other hand, they converse with
+so many sorts of persons of information in all departments,--that they
+get a smattering of everything over the table, and by oral tradition,
+like the disciples of the ancients, become through the ears living
+cyclopaedias. If, afterward, they actually know how to absolutely
+renounce that which they have never heard, what difference is there,
+then, between them and the poorest philosopher, except in
+consciousness?
+
+In the cabinet of books and natural curiosities lay the whole
+New-Year's freight of buzzing chafers, with golden wing-sheaths minus
+wings,--I mean the gilt Musen-Almanachs. Matthieu, that mimic of the
+actual nightingales, was the sworn foe of the human ones, namely, the
+poets. He said,--what would have suited better for a Review,--"He was a
+great friend of verses, but only in winter,--for when he went roaming
+so through the flower-beds of an Annual, he became, like one who walks
+through a poppy-field, drowsy enough, and could go to sleep. And just
+as the nights grew longer, and one therefore needed a longer sleep, it
+was a fine thing that the Annuals should appear, exactly at the
+beginning of winter, and that these flowers should bloom at the same
+season of the year with the mosses; in this way one could at least be
+lulled to sleep beside the brook that murmured in the verses, when
+there was no more murmuring or sleeping on the frozen meadow."----
+
+Our Victor was as satirical as the Evangelist; he had in Hanover
+laughed as well as this fellow here,--e. g. he had complained that most
+Annual-minstrels unfortunately labored more for _connoisseurs_ than for
+dull readers, and were well contented if they only got the former to
+sleep,--that a man who could not write prose should try whether he
+might not make a popular bard, as only those birds can _sing_ who do
+not learn to talk,--that he could get through a good Annual at the
+quickest and most agreeable rate, if he only ran over the rhymes,--and
+that flat heads, like flat diamonds, to which no facettes can be given,
+became _hearts_, and instead of thoughts gave us tears, in which there
+swam not so much as the infusorium of an idea....
+
+But he saw still one side more than Matthieu, namely, the noble side.
+It was his custom to turn this side forward precisely when another had
+been showing the bad side, and _vice versa_. His opinion was, that the
+poets were nothing but intoxicated philosophers,--but whoever could not
+learn philosophizing from them, would learn it quite as little from the
+systematicians. That philosophy made only the _silver-wedding_ between
+ideas, but poetry the first marriage; empty _words_ there might be, but
+no empty _sensations_. That the poet, in order to move us, has only to
+take for his lever all of noble that there is on the earth,--Nature,
+Freedom, Virtue, and God; and the very magic-words, the magic-rings,
+the magic-lamps wherewith he sways us, react at last upon himself.
+
+He delivered this opinion--when Matthieu had given his and Joachime her
+own, namely, that there were three or four leaves, at least, in the
+Musen-Almanachs which pleased her, namely, the smooth parchment
+leaves--much more briefly than we have put it;--the Minister's lady was
+of his opinion (for she herself was a versifex);--the Chamberlain said,
+"Every city and every prince did indeed adore the poets in appropriate
+temples,--namely, in the play-houses." Clotilda ventured now to join
+herself to the victors:[263] "When one reads a poet in January, it is
+as lovely as when one goes to walk in June. I cannot read either
+philosophers or learned men; there would, therefore, be left to me"
+(she meant to say, to her sex) "quite too little, if one should take
+from me the dear poets." "You would at most," said the Minister at
+last, "find your disciples in them; poets, like the saints, concern
+themselves little about the world and its knowledge; they can sing of
+the state, but not instruct it." "O thou grinning mummy!" thought
+Victor, "a precious stone which thou canst not work into the wall of
+the state-building is less to thee than a block of sandstone. If thou
+couldst only install every flaming soul sent into the world as a
+completion of the republican antiques, in the office of under-clerk,
+custom-house collector, or warden of the treasury (as the people of
+Grand Cairo transform their ruins into stables and horse-troughs)!" The
+noble Mat merely subjoined: "There was a painter in Rome who never
+talked with any one but by singing; and I knew a great poet who not
+even in common life could speak prose; but he could not do much beside,
+and had little of the world, but a great many worlds in his head. When
+he comes out in print, he will hardly play off more deception on
+his readers than any one has already played off on him, who chose
+to."--Victor saw, by Clotilda's downcast eye, that she observed, as
+well as he, that the Devil meant her Dahore: but he was silent; his
+soul was sad and embittered: he had, however, long since been hardened
+by court life to endure those whom he must needs hate.
+
+During this disputation the noble Mat had, unobserved, cut out the
+whole group in black paper. "Ah!" said Joachime, "this is not the first
+time that he has given _blackened_ likenesses of companies." But as
+Victor could never see silhouette-groups, without thinking of us
+fleeting shadows of mortals, of this dwindling and drying-up
+dwarf-life, of the night-pieces drawn upon life, and of the shadowy
+companies called peoples,--and as he was reminded of this not only by
+his melancholy, and not only by a wax-skeleton, by Madame Biheron,[264]
+which stood there among the natural curiosities, but still more by the
+pale form of Clotilda,--and as, casting a glance of comparison at the
+skeleton and the profile, she said softly to Victor, "So many
+resemblances might at another time make me sad,"--then was his full
+heart transpierced with a sharp pang at the thought of his eternal
+poverty, and at the certainty, "This great, beautiful heart will never
+stir for thine, and when her friend Emanuel is dead, thou art left
+forever alone"; and he stepped to the window, threw it open violently,
+drank in the north-wind, pressed his fist against his two eyeballs, and
+went back with his former expression of countenance to the rest of the
+company.
+
+But for to-day such agitations had torn deeply into his heart. And when
+Clotilda, at a solitary second, said to him that the Parson's wife and
+Agatha were angry at his staying away, then was he, to whom at these
+names the whole beclouded past opened like a heaven, in no condition to
+give an answer.
+
+When he returned home, Clotilda's voice, which he could of all her
+attractions least forget, kept incessantly speaking, and like the echo
+of a funeral-song, in his soul.... Reader, when that which thou lovedst
+has long vanished from the earth or from thy fancy, then will
+nevertheless the beloved _voice_ come back and bring with it all thy
+old tears, and the disconsolate heart which has shed them!... But not
+merely her voice,--everything came thronging back in the darkness upon
+his fancy: her modest eye, which did not in court-like style sparkle
+and bid defiance and express desire, as did those of the others,--that
+watchful delicacy, which since his entrance on court-life no longer
+appeared to him, either in her or in his father, too great,--to this
+add the image of Joachime and his chaos of inconsistencies, and the
+remark that a man whom the most certain proofs have satisfied that he
+is not loved, still suffers afresh at a _new_ one,--and then one can
+understand the commotions which sleep, that lull on life's ocean, had
+in his case to appease.--
+
+"That was the last fever-shake," said he the next morning, relying upon
+his present heart, whose eruptions, like those of volcanoes, daily
+burnt out its crater more and more. He enjoined upon himself,
+therefore, a weekly flight from the too dear soul, with the design that
+the new resonance of his love might cease its vibrations in his heart,
+and all become still again within him.
+
+But after a week he saw her again: verily, there sat the Devil again at
+the card-table, and played another color against him,--the _red_.
+Clotilda looked, not pale, but, though only slightly, red. This redness
+made a great blot on his inner man, and adulterated his inner coloring,
+as black does every color of the painter. For when he found her well
+again; it was not so much _agreeable_ to him,--for he saw how few
+claims he any longer had upon her tranquillity,--how she did not so
+much as distinguish him in this warehouse of human waste-paper, and how
+stupid he had been in letting himself dream so secretly, so very
+secretly, that her previous paleness proceeded actually from her vain
+longing after such a one as he;--at the same time it was not
+_disagreeable_ to him,--for he would have poured out all his heart's
+blood, if he could thereby have brought a single artery in her to its
+old course;--I say it was not so much either agreeable or disagreeable
+to him, as it was both, as it was unexpected, as it was a hint to--give
+himself to the Devil. His heart, and the image which had been too long
+therein, were absolutely crushed in two. "Be it so!" said he, and bit
+the convulsive lip with which he said it. For some days he cared not
+even to see Joachime. "Has _she_ then an eye for nature and a heart for
+eternity?" asked he, and he knew well the answer.
+
+Now came on a time for him, which was the precise opposite of the
+Sabbatical weeks,[265]--one may call them the _race-weeks_ or the
+_Tarantula-dancing-hours_ of visiting. It is a cursed time; man knows
+not where he stands. With Victor it fell just upon the winter-months,
+when, besides, the honeymoons of city and court occur. I will now
+portray them regularly.
+
+Victor sought, namely, to drown deeper his unhappy, discordant
+heart,--not with the drum-roll of amusements; under this it would only
+bleed the more, just as wounds flow more strongly under the sound of
+drumming; but with--people; these were the blood-stanching screws
+which he applied to his soul. His body was now, like the Catholic
+reliquiary body of an Apostle, in all places; he spent the whole day in
+running to and fro, now with the Prince and now without him.
+
+At last there was not a lady left in Flachsenfingen whose hand he had
+not kissed,--nor a toilet-table where he would have been satisfied.
+He made in the _racing-weeks_ double-knots, French _pas_,--dotted
+sketches of patterns,--little plays,--charades,--receipts for
+canary-birds,--verses for fans,--a thousand visits,--and still more,
+morning notes....
+
+These last, which he received and sent, were written in French and
+folded French-wise,--namely, crushed into the shape of hair-rollers.
+"They are," said he, "the hair-rollers of the fibres of the female
+brain,--the cartridges full of Cupid's powder,--the cocoons of loving
+butterflies": he spoke of the rise and fall of these female notes, and
+called them still further the proof-sheets of the female heart, and the
+outer-title-pages of the coquettish Edicts of Nantes. "I assert this,"
+he added, "to distinguish myself from the page Matthieu, who denies it,
+because he actually contends, that at first one presses letters upon
+the fair sex, then things of more cubic contents, e. g. fans, jewels,
+hands, then finally one's self; just as the mails at first only took
+letters, then packages, finally passengers."--
+
+He found those women daily more amusing who steal away from us people
+of understanding the heart out of the breast and the brain out of the
+head, and, to be sure, (as a certain nobleman did other stuff,) not
+from love for the stolen goods, but from love of robbery itself; the
+next morning, like the nobleman, they honestly send the goods back
+again to the owner. Their refinements,--his own,--his turns to
+escape theirs,--the attention which one had to bestow upon one's
+self,--the opportunity of bringing all emotions under the finest
+dissecting-knives, or solar and lunar microscopes,--the facility of
+taking away from the most sincere truths the sour taste and from the
+most agreeable the sickly-sweet,--all this made the toilet-tables of
+women, particularly of coquettes, to him _Lectisternia_[266] and tables
+of the gods. "By heaven," said the toilet-table-boarder or
+pensioner,[267] "a man is merely a Dutchman, at most a German, but a
+woman is a native Frenchwoman, or in fact a Parisian: man conceals his
+moral as he does his physical breast: thoughts and flowers, which do
+not fall through the racks of the four faculties, emotions which cannot
+be described in the acts or in a physician's report, one must really
+say only to a woman, and not to a man, especially one of
+Flachsenfingen"--or Scheerau.
+
+By way of excusing himself for associating with coquettes on the
+footing of a general lover, he appealed to his motive,--that of merely
+wishing to become acquainted with their ways,--and to the excellent
+Forster, who in Antwerp _knelt down_, as well as any born Catholic,
+before Rubens's altar-piece of the Virgin Mary ascending to heaven,
+merely to examine her more nearly.
+
+He had a still more dangerous excuse. "Man," said he, "should be
+everything, learn everything, try everything,--he should labor for the
+_union_ of the two _churches_[268] in his soul,--he should, if
+only for a couple of months, have been a city-musician,[269]
+grave-digger, gallows-_pater_,[270] an engineer, tragedy-manager,
+upper-court-marshal, an imperial vicar, deputy sheriff, a reviewer, a
+lady, in short, everything a man should have been for some days, in
+order that the hues of the prism might at last melt together into the
+perfect white."
+
+These principles are the more dangerous with one like him, who, strung
+with the tense strings of the most dissimilar powers, easily gave every
+one's note, not from dissimulation, but because his social poetic
+faculty could transport itself deeply into another's soul; hence he
+gained, tolerated, and copied the most unlike persons, notwithstanding
+his sincerity. But I pity him, that he has everywhere so much to
+suppress, his seeing through the Prince, his state of heart toward
+Clotilda, his conciliatory intrigues towards Agnola, his knowledge of
+Flamin's relations, &c. Ah, reserve and dissimulation easily run
+together; and must not a constant dropping, when one stands directly
+under it, at last wear scars in the most solid character?
+
+Nothing chills the noblest parts of the inner man more than intercourse
+with persons in whom one cannot take any interest. This hotel-life at
+court, this daily seeing people who never even say "I," whose relations
+one ignores as indifferently as their talents, unless some necessity
+seeks them,--this snatching only at the next moment, this racing by of
+the finest and most intellectual strangers and ant-swarms of visitors,
+who in three days are forgotten,--all this, which makes palaces like
+Russian ice-palaces, where even the stove full of naphtha flames is a
+lump of ice, and to which I need not at all add the _comic_ salt,
+which, besides, chills all warm blood, as that of _Glauber_ does hot
+water,--all this made his heart desolate, his days bald and burdensome,
+his nights distressful, his conduct too cold towards the good, too
+tolerant towards the bad.
+
+In addition to this, his Emanuel was silent, and, like nature, shut up
+his flowers within himself. He whom nature nourishes and builds up, is
+not in so good a mood in winter as in summer. The earth had on her
+powder-mantle of snow, and her night-gown on all day; the trees had
+wrapped up their buds in fleecy hair-papers, and the twigs looked like
+hair-pins. Victor's soul was like nature: O may Heaven soon warm in
+both the flowers of spring!
+
+As the pathological history of my Victor reminds me too painfully of
+the latent poisons in the human body, it shall soon come to an end. It
+pleased him that he became, by this fluttering round, more and more
+gallant and cold towards all women: the cord of love cuts less deeply
+into the bosom, when, plucked out into threads and floss, it flutters
+about everybody. He who, like his namesake, Saint Sebastian, looked
+like one stuck all full with (Cupid's) arrows, shot off arrows of
+another kind against the whole sex, though never against individuals.
+In this last circumstance his bitterness differed from Matthieu's, who
+could say of his own cousin, for example, who had lost her beauty by a
+late attack of small-pox: "Her beauty held out right valiantly against
+the small-pox, and brought off from this victory the most glorious
+_scars_, and all of them indeed, like those of Pompey's knights;[271]
+in front and in the face."
+
+As assaf[oe]tida is used for _haut gout_, so does one season the
+finest _savoir vivre_ by sundry bold incivilities. Bastian in the
+Tarantula-season was not to be embarrassed by anything: he went and
+came like a Parisian, without ceremony; he sought often bold, but
+advantageous postures of his body; during the play he made tours
+through the boxes as the Prince did through the coulisses; five times
+he carried matters so far (though with difficulty, and always only by
+means of setting before himself the example of the courtiers), that he
+listened indifferently, or absolutely looked away, when another was,
+telling him a story: all which things, if not essential, are
+nevertheless incidental to true politeness.
+
+Nor will I let it be unnoticed in his praise, that he took to himself
+the regular _exotic_ and _satirical_ liberties of the _Gallican_ Church
+toward several women at once, for in the presence of a single one he
+had still the old veneration of a noble heart. I will give at least one
+example of that. Once he was among five slanderesses (the company
+consisted of six females and a male person); the ugliest blackened all
+maidens, even those in print, e. g. the deceased Clarissa, whom she
+charged with not having in her intercourse with Lovelace been quite
+able to _sauver les dehors de la vertu_.[272] One can anticipate how
+the Koenigsberg school will receive it in their reviews, that he let
+himself down on one knee before the calumniatress, and said with some
+seriousness: "_O Clarisse! voici votre Lovelace; retranchons quatre
+tomes, commencons comme les faiseurs d'Epopees par le reste_."[273]
+
+To be sure, he frequently during the Tarantula-season reproached
+himself for the Tarantula-season; and when the Gentile-fore-court of
+his heart grew so full of women, while in the Holy of Holies there was
+nothing but mute darkness, and when his brain became an entomological
+cabinet of court trifles, then, of course, he often sighed in his
+balcony: "O come soon, good father, that thy sinking son may soar out
+of this unclean March fog into a clearer life, before he has utterly
+stained himself, so as no longer even to frame this wish." And
+as often as he got sight, in Joachime's chamber, of the views of
+Maienthal,--which Giulia had had taken by the painter of Clotilda's
+portrait,--then in the midst of his jestings he turned his eye away
+from them with a sigh.----But he was not healed, until fate said, Now!
+Then all at once the theatre-key struck, which bids men come and act in
+the players' rehearsal of life;--the play itself is not given till the
+next life;--and then transpired something which I shall at once report
+in the following chapter, when I have done relating in this one how
+Victor stood with all the people about him.
+
+With many, properly speaking, badly,--in the first place, with
+Clotilda. She resided, to be sure, at the Minister's; as maid of honor,
+she would have belonged in the Paullinum, only the Prince had so
+contrived it for the greater facility of seeing her; but she was always
+about the Princess, with whom she was soon linked in intimacy by a
+similarity of seriousness and a similarity of reserve. Her indifference
+to one who had with her a common friend and teacher inspired this
+Victor with a still greater, especially as lie knew she must feel that,
+in this cold mountain- and court-air, only a single, though faded,
+carnation slip of her fair soul bloomed, namely, himself. Then, too,
+the obligation of decorum, to look upon her coldly, must become a
+habit. The worst thing for him was that she was indifferent towards him
+without ill-feeling, and cold towards him with respect. Others were
+quite furious about the "phlegmatic virtue of this Pygmalion's statue."
+The noble Mat called her often the _Holy_ Virgin, or the Demoiselle
+Mother of God. It is made out very clearly by the Dog-documents, which
+I have opened, that some gentlemen of the Court, after various abortive
+attempts to explain to themselves a virtue irreconcilable with so much
+beauty, now on the ground of temperament, now of concealed love,
+and now of a coquettish coyness, ending at last, like the water
+at St. Clermont, in petrifying and becoming _its own bridge over
+itself_,--that these cunning gentlemen most felicitously fell upon the
+conjecture that Clotilda wore this mask over her face as a copy of the
+face of the Princess, for the sake of continuing in favor. Hence
+Clotilda's discreet virtue was judged by most with greater indulgence,
+while one could excuse it, as an intentional imitation of a similar
+fault in the Princess, even by the example of like imitations, as
+courtiers often aped the greatest external natural faults, nay, even
+the virtues of a prince. So thought at least the more reasonable
+portion of the Court.
+
+Agnola was assiduous in testifying an ever increasing gratitude to our
+hero for January's visits, although, as I think, she could detect the
+faithless intentions of the Prince in the presence of Clotilda full as
+well as she might sometimes see into Victor's soul in the presence of
+Joachime.... In fact, I should have begged the reader long since to be
+on the look-out; I deliver the facts with excusable stupidity, though
+with historic fidelity; if, now, there are therein fine, knavish,
+significant, intriguing traits and hints, it is without my knowledge,
+and therefore I cannot point them out to the reader with an index-hand,
+or announce them with a fire-drum,[274] but he himself--as he
+understands court histories--must know what I mean by my hints,--not
+_I_.
+
+With Joachime Victor would have gone on very well,--as he set down all
+faults which he found in other women, and not in her, to her credit as
+virtues, and as he grew more intimate with her personally; for the
+faults of maidens, like chocolate and tobacco, appear at first the more
+odd to the palate the better they taste to it afterward: he would have
+got on very well, but for two sharp corner-stones; but they were there.
+The first was,--for I will not reckon his slight annoyance at the short
+duration of her Christmas sentimentality,--that she was always finding
+fault with Clotilda, particularly with her "affected" virtue. The
+second was, that Clotilda sought her society quite as little: Victor
+could love no one whom Clotilda did not love. And now the race-weeks
+and visiting-Tarantula-dance hours of one man are at an end; but, alas!
+all posterity must yet cross the same hot _line_ of folly and of youth.
+
+
+
+
+                           24. DOG-POST-DAY.
+
+    Rouge.--Clotilda's Sickness.--The Play Of Iphigenia.--Difference
+               between Plebeian and Patrician[275] Love.
+
+
+On the 26th of February Victor found in the morning at Joachime's--the
+proud Clotilda. I know not whether it was by accident that she was
+here, or from politeness, or for the purpose of meeting more nearly a
+person whom Victor treated with some interest. But, O heavens! the
+cheeks of this Clotilda were pallid, her eyes were as if breathed over
+by an eternal tear, her voice emotional, as it were broken, and the
+pale marble body seemed only the image standing on the monument of the
+departed soul. Victor forgot the whole past, and his innermost soul
+wept for longing to succor her and wipe out from her life all dark
+winter landscapes. "I am as well as usual to-day," said she to his
+professional inquiry, and he knew not what to make of this unexpected
+paleness; he could not, in fact, to-day make anything, not so much as a
+joke or a piece of flattery; his soul, dissolved into sympathy, would
+not take any form; then, too, he was embarrassed. Clotilda soon took
+leave;--and it would not have been possible for him to-day, not for all
+Great Poland (that ice-floe beautifully ground down under the sledging
+of emigrating nations and crowns), after she was gone, to stay half an
+hour longer.
+
+Besides, he would have been obliged to go; for the page Matthieu called
+him to the Princess. The time was unusual; he could not wait to see,
+nor could he guess what was the matter. The Evangelist smiled (that he
+did now somewhat often when the Princess was the subject), and said:
+"To Princes and Princesses weighty things were trivial and trivial
+things weighty, as Leibnitz[276] said of himself. When the crown and a
+hair-pin fall from their heads together, they look first of all for the
+hair-pin."[277]
+
+By the way! It would be malice on my part toward the noble Matthieu, if
+I should longer suppress, the fact, that for some time he has been much
+more tender and ardent towards my hero,--which on any other man than
+he, I mean on a lurking villain, would be a Cain's-mark, and would have
+somewhat of the same meaning as the wagging of a cat's tail.
+
+Victor was astonished at the request of the Princess,--that he would
+cure Clotilda: that is to say, not at the fact of her making a
+request,--for she often did him that honor,--but at the intelligence
+that Clotilda, on whose cheeks he had hitherto seen the apple-blossoms
+of health at his soul's expense in the _race-weeks_, had worn only dead
+blossoms,--namely, rouge, which the Princess had been obliged to
+enforce upon her for the sake of having a uniformity of bloom with the
+remaining red copper-flowers[278] of the court. Agnola, who, like her
+rank, was quick, besought him further, when he was appointed to the
+medical upper-examining-commission, to enter on his office as soon as
+might be, this very day forthwith, at the play, where he would find the
+candidate for examination.
+
+And he found her. The play was a sparkling brilliant brought from
+Eldorado,--Goethe's _Iphigenia_. When he saw the patient again with the
+evening-red of the rouge, wherein she was to glow at another's behest
+even during her going down,--when he saw this still victim (marked
+red, as it were, for the altar), which he and others had driven away
+from its meadows, from its solitary flowers, to the midst of the
+sacrificial knives of the Court, mutely enduring, the extinction of its
+wishes, and when he compared with woman's dumb patience man's raging
+restlessness,--and when it seemed as if Clotilda had lent her sorrow to
+Iphigenia with the prayer, "Take my heart, take my voice and mourn with
+it,--mourn with it over thy separation from the fields of youth, over
+thy separation from a beloved brother,"--and when he saw how she tried
+to fasten her eyes more steadfastly on Iphigenia, when she pined for
+her lost brother, in order to control their overflow and their
+direction (towards her own brother in the Parterre, towards Flamin), O
+then did such great sorrows and their signs in his eyes and looks need
+a pretext like the omnipotence of genius, in order to be confounded
+with pangs growing out of poetic illusion!
+
+Never did a physician question his patient with greater sympathy and
+forbearance than did he Clotilda in the next interlude: he excused
+his importunity with the commands of the Princess. I must first
+state that the fair patient--although he had been hitherto a falling
+Peter, whom many a cock-crow had brought rather to tears than to
+repentance--nevertheless remained the _second person_, whom he never
+denied, ... i. e. whom, he never addressed with the frivolous,
+whimsical, bold, entrapping turns of conversation now so common with
+him. The _first person_--whom he esteemed too highly to write to him in
+the present state of his heart--was his Emanuel.
+
+Clotilda answered him, that "she was as well as ever; the only thing
+there was sickly about her," she said, smiling, "namely, her color, was
+already under the hands of a female surgeon, who, against her
+inclination, healed her only outwardly." This playful allusion to the
+rouging decreed by the Princess had the double design of excusing her
+painting and of diverting the Doctor from his tender-hearted
+seriousness. But the first was unnecessary,--since in the theatre even
+ladies who never wore rouge put it on as they entered the box and wiped
+it off on going out, in order not to hang there as the only quinces on
+a tree full of glowing Stettin-apples, and as, in fact, mineral cheeks
+were required of the whole female court-retinue as facial court livery.
+The second was vain; much more likely were the wounds of his heart to
+be aggravated by two causes: by that cold, almost fanatical resignation
+to fading away,--and by something inexpressibly mild and tender which,
+in the female face, often betokens the breaking heart, the failing
+life, as fruit by _soft_ yielding to _pressure_ announces its ripeness.
+
+O ye good creatures, ye women, while joy already beautifies you, is the
+reason why sorrow makes you still more beautiful and too touching
+_this_, that it so often overtakes you, or is it because sorrow borrows
+the dress of joy? Why must I here confess so passingly my pleasure at
+your endurance and veiling of sorrows, when at this moment before my
+fancy so many hearts full of tears sweep by with open countenances full
+of smiles, and win for your sex the praise of opening its heart as
+gladly to sorrow as to joy, as flowers, although they *unclose only
+before the sun, yet also burst open when it is overcast by a cloudy
+heaven?
+
+Victor, without being led off his track by her answer, continued:
+"Perhaps you cannot wean yourself from fair nature and from
+exercise,--these late hours, which I myself feel"----She prevented his
+finishing the sentence, to remind him that she had, he must remember,
+brought her present complexion with her from home. One sees, however,
+in this reminder more forbearance than truth; for she would not
+complain of her court office before the very one who had helped her
+gain it.----Victor, who saw her sickliness so clearly, and yet knew not
+how to propound another question, stood there dumfounded. Their own
+silence loosens reserved people's tongues: Clotilda began of herself,
+"As I do not know what harms me here, except the rouge, I beg my
+physician to prohibit me this dietetic fault," i. e. to persuade the
+Princess into a revocation of her rouge-edict. "I should be glad," she
+continued, "to gain some resemblance at least to two such good friends
+as Giulia and Emanuel,"--i. e. a pale color, or else the notion of a
+speedy death. Victor threw out a hasty "Yes," and turned his smarting
+eye toward the rising curtain.
+
+Never, haply, were the scenes of players and hearers more like each
+other. Iphigenia was Clotilda; the wild Orestes, her brother, was her
+brother Flamin; the soft, radiant Pylades was his friend Victor. And as
+Flamin stood below in the pit with his cloudy face,--(he came only for
+the sake of seeing his sister more conveniently,)--then did it seem to
+our and his friend as if he were addressed by him, when Orestes said to
+Pylades:--
+
+
+     "Remind me not of those enchanting days,
+      When a free room thy house afforded me:
+      Thy noble father wisely, tenderly,
+      Nursed the half-stiffened blossoms of my youth;
+      When thou, an ever-gay associate,
+      Even as a motley, light-winged butterfly
+      Plays round a dark-hued flower, day after day
+      Didst dance and hover round me with new life,
+      And win thy bliss a way into my soul."
+
+
+Clotilda felt quite as painfully that they were playing her life on the
+stage, and struggled against her eyes.... But when Iphigenia said to
+her brother Orestes,--
+
+
+     "O hear me! Look on me! See how my heart
+      Opens at last, after so long a time,
+      To the sweet bliss of kissing that dear brow,
+      Most precious treasure earth yet holds for me, ....
+      O let me,--let me--for in brighter waves
+      Not from Parnassus leaps the eternal stream
+      From rock to rock down to the golden vale,
+      Than from my bosom joy outgushing flows
+      And like a sea of bliss enclasps me round";--
+
+
+and when Clotilda mournfully surveyed the greater interval of sorrows
+and days between herself and her brother; then gushed up the inner
+fountains and filled her large eyes, so often fixed upon the heavens,
+and a quick bending forward hid the sisterly tear from all eyes
+untouched by emotion. But it did not escape the feeling eyes with which
+her friend beside her imitated her.... And here a virtuous voice said
+within Victor: "Disclose to her that thou knowest the secret of her
+relationship,--lift off from this sorely oppressed heart the load of
+silence: perhaps she is withering under a grief which a confidant may
+cool and take away!" Ah, to listen to this voice was indeed the least
+with which he could content his infinite sympathy! He said in an
+extremely low tone, and which emotion rendered almost unintelligible to
+her: "My father has long since disclosed to me, that Iphigenia knows
+the presence of her brother and of my friend." Clotilda turned suddenly
+and blushingly towards him; for a more minute explanation he let his
+eyes glide down to Flamin; turning pale; she looked away and said
+nothing; but during the whole play her heart seemed to be far more
+compressed, and she was compelled now to stifle still more tears and
+sighs than before. At last in the midst of her sadness she gave
+gratitude its rights, and whispered to him for his sympathy and his
+confidence, as if with a dying smile, her thanks. He laid upon the
+distaff of the conversation entirely new and foreign material, because
+he would fain, during the spinning, get a clearer and more certain
+light upon the sad impression which his confession seemed to have
+produced. He inquired after the latest letters from Emanuel. She
+replied: "I only wrote to him yesterday all through the eclipse of the
+moon; he cannot answer me often, because writing pains his breast."
+Now, as the eclipse of the 25th of February began at twenty minutes
+after ten in the evening, at eleven o'clock and forty-one minutes was
+at its climax, and at one o'clock and two minutes was over: accordingly
+Victor, as physician, could fall upon the medical sinner with sermons
+and hammers of the law and pronounce the verdict; now, it was no
+wonder. Pass it by, Doctor! These dear creatures can more easily obey a
+man--the Ten Commandments,--books,--Virtue,--the Devil himself more
+easily, than the Dietician. Clotilda said: "The midnight hours are
+simply my only free hours,--and Maienthal, indeed, I can never forget."
+
+"Ah, how could one?" said he.
+
+The music before the last act, and the tragic tone, and the sorrows
+inspired her, and she continued: "Did not one drink of _Lethe_, when
+one trod the shores of Elysium and when one left it?" ... She paused.
+"I would drink of no Lethe, not in the first case, still less in the
+_last_,--no!" And never was "No" said in a lower, softer, more
+slow-drawn tone. In Victor's heart a three-edged compassion passed
+painfully to and fro, as he imagined to himself Clotilda mocked by
+fate, writing and weeping in the midnight under a moon dismembered and
+beclouded by earth's shadow; he said nothing, he stared rigidly into
+the mournful scenes of the stage, and still wept on when the joyous
+ones had, there, already evolved themselves in their place.
+
+At home he made his brain-fibres Ariadne's threads to extricate himself
+from the labyrinth of  the causes of her trouble, and particularly of
+the _new_ one which had seemed to come upon her at his disclosure. But
+he remained in the labyrinth; undoubtedly grief begat the sickness, but
+who begat the grief? It would be hard for these poor, tender
+butterflies, if there were more than one mortal affliction; in every
+lane, in every house, thou wilt find a wife or a daughter who has to go
+to church or to the Tragedy to sigh, and who must go up into the upper
+story to weep; but this aggregated trouble is worried away with smiles,
+and years increase for a long time side by side with the tears. On the
+contrary, there is a grief which breaks them off,--think of that, dear
+Victor, in the joyful hours of thy general love,[279] and think of it,
+all ye who with warm, loving hands draw the throbbing heart of such a
+delicate creature out of its breast, to take it into your own by the
+side of your own heart, and warm it forever! When you then throw
+away this hot heart, which you have torn out like a butterfly's
+honey-proboscis: still, like that, it continues to quiver, but then it
+grows cold, and erelong beats no more.
+
+Unhappy love, then, was the gnawing honey-dew on this flower, Sebastian
+concluded. Naturally he thought of himself first; but all his nicest
+observations, his now so familiar _ricochet-glances_ out of the _corner
+of his eye_ had long since convinced him that he had to ascribe the
+distinction, which she did not deny him, more to her impartiality than
+to her inclination. Who else it could be at Court,--that was a thing
+which he in vain applied one electrometer after another to draw out.
+And he knew beforehand that he should experiment in vain, since
+Clotilda would baffle all auscultation of her inner state, if she had
+an unreciprocated inclination; reason was with her the wax, which they
+stick to one end of the magnetic needle, in order to obviate or conceal
+the sinking (_inclination_) of the other. Nevertheless, he made up his
+mind the next time to hold some divining-rods to her soul.----
+
+I must here utter a thought, which may discover some sense and my
+general speculation in the matter. My Dog-Post-Master Knef did not
+probably foresee that I should calculate the year and the duration of
+this whole story merely from the lunar eclipse of the 25th of February,
+which he announced, just as, in fact, great astronomers, by means of
+the moon's phases, found out so much about the earth's geographical
+longitude. 1793 was the year in which what is related in this chapter
+occurred: I am good for that; for as, at all events, the whole story,
+as is well known, takes place in the ninth decade of the eighteenth
+century, and as no lunar eclipse of a 25th of February is to be found
+there at all, except in the year 1793, i. e. the present year, my
+proposition is made out. To make assurance doubly sure, I have compared
+all the changes of moon and weather occurring in this book with those
+of 1792 and 1793; and all fitted together beautifully;--the reader
+should also reckon it after me. It is uncommonly gratifying to me,
+that, consequently, as I write in July, the history follows in a
+half-year from my description.--
+
+Victor delayed not his visit to the Princess's, that he might there
+announce the reserved Clotilda as a complete nervous patient. He
+himself laughed inwardly at the expression,--and at the Doctors,--and
+at their nervous cures,--and said, that, as formerly the French kings
+in their treatment of the goitre had to say, "The King touches thee,
+but God heals thee," so should physicians say, The city and country
+physician feels thy pulse, but God works the cure. Here, however, he
+had three good intentions in giving out that she was a nervous
+sufferer: first, that of gaining for her the abolition of her
+Court-vassalage,--at least her deliverance from the precise office of
+maid of honor, because the splinter of the reproach was continually
+festering in his heart, "It is my fault that she is obliged to be
+here"; further, of securing for her in advance permission to take the
+spring and country air, in case she should by and by sue for it;
+finally, of releasing her from her compulsory resemblance to those
+ladies on whose lead-colored faces, as on the leaden soldiers of
+children, the red daily wears off and is daily renewed. But as Agnola
+herself painted, he was obliged, out of courtesy, as physician, to
+forbid it to both at once. The Princess countersigned all his petitions
+very graciously: only as to the rouge-article she gave, in regard to
+herself, no resolution at all, and in regard to Clotilda the following:
+she had nothing to say against her appearing in her presence, except on
+court days and at the play, without rouge; and she would willingly
+grant her a dispensation from both, unless her health was restored.
+
+He could hardly wait for the moment of taking leave, so impatient was
+he to carry this imperial-recess or resolution to the beloved patient.
+He himself wondered at this complaisance of the Princess, with whom,
+generally, petitions were sins, and who refused nothing--except what
+was asked. His perplexity was now only this,--how to communicate to
+Clotilda the indulgences of the Princess, without the offensive
+confession of having made a plea of her illness. But out of this slight
+evil a great one extricated him: when he came into her presence, she
+looked ten times as sick as she had day before yesterday, at the
+disclosure of her relationship: her blossoms, heavy with cold dew,
+drooped to the earth.
+
+Gait and posture were unchanged; there was the same external
+joyousness, but the glance was often too fluttering, often too fixed;
+across the lily-cheeks darted often a hectic flush, through the lower
+lip at one moment a subdued convulsion.... At this point sympathy
+frightened her friend out of the bounds of courtesy, and he told her
+outright the consent of the Princess. He summoned to the aid of his
+burdened heart his previous court-boldness, and commanded her to make
+the coming spring her apothecary's shop, and the flowers her medicinal
+herbs, and her--fancy her pharmacy. "You seem," said she, smiling, "to
+count me among the larks, who must always have _green turf_ in their
+cage. However, that my Princess and you may not have had your kindness
+for nothing, I will, finally, do it. I confess to you, I am at least a
+_valide imaginaire_.[280] I feel myself well." ... She interrupted
+herself to question him, with the frankness of virtue and with an eye
+swimming in sisterly love, about her brother, whether he was happy and
+contented, how he worked, how he filled his position? She told him how
+sad a burden these questions, hitherto locked up so deeply in her soul,
+had been to her and she thanked him for the gift of his confidence with
+a warmth which he took as a delicate reproof of his previous silence.
+Of old she always loved to stand in a flower-garland of children;
+but in Flachsenfingen she had gathered still more of these little
+nebulous stars about her brightness, and indeed for a peculiar reason,
+namely, to cover the fact, that she drew to herself Giulia, a little
+five-years-old grandchild of the city Senior, with whom her brother
+resided, as his unwitting biographer and news-carrier. More than three
+times he felt as if he must fall at the feet of this lily-white angel,
+borne higher and higher by her cloud, and say with outspread arms:
+"Clotilda, be my friend, before thy death,--my old love for thee is
+long since crushed out, for thou art too good for me and for all of us;
+but I will be thy friend; my heart will I conquer for thee; for thee
+will I resign my heaven. O, thou wilt, besides, not live to see the
+evening dew of age, thou wilt soon close thy eyes, and the morning dew
+still hangs therein!" For he held her soul to be a pearl, whose
+mussel-body lies open in the dissolving sun, that the pearl may the
+earlier be dislodged. On leaving, he could with the frankness of the
+friend, which had taken the place of the lover's reserve, offer a
+repetition of his visits. Altogether he treated her now more warmly and
+unconstrainedly; first, because he had so utterly renounced her noble
+heart, that he wondered at his former bold claims to it; secondly,
+because the feeling of his disinterested, self-sacrificing honesty
+towards her poured balm on his previous stings of remorse.
+
+To this sickness was added an evening or an event, which the reader, I
+think, will not know how to understand. Victor was to take Joachime to
+the play, and her brother, was to come and fetch him first. I have
+already twice set it down, that for some weeks Matthieu had no longer
+been so repulsive to him as a mouse is to an elephant: he had, after
+all, found out a single good side, dug out some moral yellow mica
+attaching to him,--namely, the greatest attachment to his sister
+Joachime, who alone had the key to his whole heart, closed to his
+parents, the sole claim on his secrets and his services; secondly, he
+loved in Matthieu what the Minister condemned,--the spirit-of-salt of
+freedom; thirdly, it is so with us all: when he have heated our
+heart for some female one out of a family, we afterwards extend the
+stove-warmth to the whole kin and trenchership,--brothers, nephews,
+fathers; fourthly,  Matthieu was continually praised and excused by his
+sister. When Victor arrived at Joachime's, she had with her headache
+and dressing-maids,--finery and pain were increasing; at last she sent
+off the live fitting-machines, and so soon as she was hardened into a
+Venus out of the foam of powder and jewel boxes, rouge-rags and
+_mouchoirs de Venus_, _poudres d'odeur_ and lip-pomades, then she sat
+down and said she should stay at home on account of headache. Victor
+stayed too, and very gladly. Whoso knows not the framework and cellular
+work of the human heart will wonder that Victor's friendship for
+Clotilda brought a whole honey-comb of love for Joachime into his
+cells; it was delightful to him when they visited and embraced each
+other; he sought not in the blessing-fingers of the Pope so much
+healing virtue as in Clotilda's; her friendship seemed to him an excuse
+for his, and to set Joachime on the pedestal of esteem, to which with
+all his windlasses he had not been able to raise her. Even the sense of
+his increasing worth gave him new right to love; and to-day even
+Clotilda's crape and princely hat would have asserted its helmet
+ornaments on Joachime's aching and more than commonly patient head. To
+her continued flirtation with the pair of fools he had long since
+adapted himself, because he knew very well _which one_ among the three
+wise men from the East she had not for a fool, but for an adorer. But
+to return!
+
+Matthieu, who also stayed at home to please his sister,--he and Victor
+and she made the entire band of this _concert spirituel_. Joachime on
+the sofa leaned back her delicate, sick head against the wall and
+looked at the inlaid floor, and her drooping eyelids made her more
+beautiful. The Evangelist went out and came in. Victor, as he always
+did, dashed round the chamber. It was a very fine evening, and I wish
+this of mine were so. The conversation turned upon love; and Victor
+asserted the existence of two kinds,--the citizenly, and the
+_distingue_ or French. He loved the French in books and as a general
+love, but he hated it the moment it was to be the only love; he
+described it to-day thus: "Take a little ice,--a little heart,--a
+little wit,--a little paper,--a little time,--a little incense; pour
+together and put into two persons of rank; in that way you have a good,
+true French Fontenellian love." "You forgot," added Mat, "one
+ingredient,--a small amount of senses, at least a _fifth_ or _sixth_
+part, which must be added to the medicine as _adjuvans_ or
+_constituens_.[281] Meanwhile, it has at least the merit of shortness;
+love, like a tragedy, should be restricted to unity of time, namely, to
+the space of one day, that it may not take still more resemblance to
+the tragic. But describe now common love!"
+
+_Victor_: "That I prefer."
+
+_Matthieu_: "Not I. It is merely a longer madness than anger. _On y
+pleure, on y crie, on y soupire, on y ment, on y enrage, on y tue, on y
+meurt,--enfin, on se donne a tous les diables, pour avoir son
+ange_.[282] Our talks are to-day for once full of arabesques and _a la
+grecque_: I will make you a cookery-book receipt for a good citizenly
+love: take two young and large hearts,--wash them clean in baptismal
+water or printer's ink of German romances,--pour on them warm blood and
+tears,--set them on the fire and under the full moon, and let them
+boil,--stir them briskly with a dagger,--take them out and garnish
+them, like crabs, with forget-me-not or other wild-flowers, and serve
+them up warm: in that way you have a savory citizenly heart-soup."[283]
+
+Matthieu further added, that "in the ardent commonalty-love there was
+more agony than amusement; in it, as in Dante's poem, the Hell was
+worked out best, and the Heaven worst. The older a maiden or a pickled
+herring was, so much the darker was the eye in both, and the eye was
+made dark by love. Every lady in one of the higher circles ought to be
+glad that she needs to retain nothing of the man's to whom she is
+chained but his portrait in the ring, as Prometheus, when Jupiter had
+once sworn to leave him soldered for thirty thousand years to Caucasus,
+wore during the whole period only a small bit of this Bastille on his
+hand in the shape of a finger-ring." Whereupon Matthieu darted out, as
+he always did after witty explosions. Victor loved the bitterest and
+most unjust satire in another's mouth, as a work of art; he forgave
+all, and continued cheerful.
+
+Joachime then said, jestingly: "If, then, no style of love is good for
+anything, as you two have proved, there is nothing left for us but to
+hate."
+
+"Surely not," said he, "your respected brother has simply not said a
+true word. Imagine to yourself, that I were the poor people's
+catechist[284] and in love. I am in love with the second daughter of
+the _pastor primarius_; her part is that of a listening-sister;[285]
+for maidens in citizenly life know not how to talk, at least they can
+do it better in hatred than in love. The poor's catechist has little
+_bel esprit_, but much _saint esprit_, much honesty, much truth, too
+much soft-heartedness, and infinite love. The catechist cannot spin out
+any gallant intrigue for several weeks or months, still less can he
+dispute the Pastor's second daughter into love, like a _roue_;--he
+holds his peace to keep up his hope, but with a heart full of eternal
+love, full of devoted wishes, trembling and silent, he follows every
+step of the loved and--loving one; but she guesses not his feelings,
+nor he hers. And then she dies.... But before she dies, comes the pale
+catechist disconsolate to the side of her dying bed, and presses her
+trembling hand ere it relaxes, and gives the cold eye one more tear of
+joy ere it stiffens, and breaks in even upon the pangs of the wrestling
+soul with the soft spring sound, 'I love thee.' When he has said it,
+she dies of the last joy, and then he loves no one on earth any more."
+...
+
+The past had come over his soul. Tears hung in his eyes, and confounded
+in a singular obscurity the image of the sick Clotilda with that of
+Joachime;--he saw and conceived a form which was not present;--he
+pressed the hand of the one that looked on him, and thought not that
+she might refer all to herself.
+
+Suddenly Matthieu entered, smiling, and his sister smiled with him, in
+order to explain everything, and said, "The court-physician has been
+taking the trouble to refute thee."
+
+Victor, suddenly chilled, replied ambiguously and bitterly: "You will
+comprehend, Herr von Schleunes, that it is easiest for me to put you to
+flight when you are not in the field."
+
+Mat transfixed him with his eyes; but Victor cast his down and repented
+his bitterness. The sister continued indifferently: "I think my brother
+is often in the condition of changing with the fashion." He received it
+with a sunny smile, and thought, as did Victor, that she alluded to his
+gallant adventures and sham-fights with women of all ranks that sit at
+the Diet. But when she had sent him off to inquire of her mother who
+was coming to the _cercle_ this evening, she said to the Medicus: "You
+do not know what I meant. We have at court a sick lady, who is the very
+incarnation of _your_ Pastor's daughter,--and my brother has not so
+much nor so little spirit as to act the poor's catechist." Victor
+started back, broke off and took his leave.
+
+Why? How so? On what account? But does not the reader perceive, then,
+that the sick lady must be Clotilda, who seeks to escape Mat's fine
+approaches within ear-shot and bow-shot of her heart? In fact, Victor
+had seen well enough that the Evangelist had been hitherto playing a
+more devoted part towards Clotilda than before her entrance into his
+Escurial and robber's castle he could carry on; but Victor had ascribed
+this politeness simply to the fact of her having there her quarters.
+But now the map of his plan lay open there: he had intentionally met a
+person who was indifferent towards him with the show of contempt
+(which, however, he finely directed more at her future small income
+than at her personal attractions), in order thereby to win her
+attention,--that next-door neighbor of love,--and afterward, by a
+sudden change to complaisance, to win something more than attention.
+"O, thou canst win nothing!" every sigh in Victor exclaimed. And yet it
+gave him pain, that this noble woman, this angel, must strike such an
+adversary with her wings. Now there were thirty things at once
+suspicious to him. Joachime's disclosure and coldness, Matthieu's
+smile, and--everything.
+
+So far this chapter, to which I have nothing more to append than some
+mature thoughts. Of course, one sees plainly, that poor Victor
+mutilates his soul to the size of every female one, as that tyrant did
+the bedfellows to the length of their bed.[286] To be sure, respect is
+the mother of love; but the daughter is often some years older than the
+mother. He takes back one hope of female worth after another. Latest of
+all, indeed, did he give up his demand or expectation of that sublime
+_Indian_ sense of eternity, which imparts to us, shadowy figures
+hanging in the magic smoke of life, an inextinguishable luminous point
+for self-consciousness, and which lifts us above more than _one_ earth;
+but as he saw that women, among all resemblances to Clotilda, acquired
+this last, and as he bethought himself that a worldly life grinds down
+all the greatness in man, as the weather gnaws away from statues and
+gravestones precisely the _relieved parts_, there wanted nothing to his
+handing over to Joachime the declaration of love which had long been
+fairly written out, nothing except, on her part, a misfortune,--a wet
+eye, a storm of the soul, a buskin. In more perspicuous words, he said
+to himself: "I wish she were a sentimental ninny and absolutely
+intolerable. Then when, some time or other, she had her eyes right
+full, and her heart too, and then, when I could not tell, for emotion,
+where my head was standing,--then I could advance and take out my heart
+and reach it to her and say, It is poor Bastian's, only keep it." It
+seems to me as if I heard him in thought softly add, "To whom else
+could I give it?"
+
+That he really had the first thought, we see from the fact that he
+inserted it in his diary, from which my correspondent draws everything,
+and which he, with the sincerity of the freest soul, made for his
+father, in order as it were to atone for his faults by protocolling
+them. His Italian lackey did hardly anything but engross it.---Did it
+not depend on the dog and his news-box, his declaration of love should
+take place this very day: I would break an arm of Joachime's,--or lay
+her in the sick-bed,--or blow out the Minister's lamp of life, or bring
+on some disaster or other in her house,----and then I would conduct my
+hero to the suffering heroine, and say: "When I have gone, kneel down
+and hand her thy heart." But in this way the chemical process of his
+love-making may last full as long as a process at law, and I am
+prepared for three quires.
+
+But here I will confess something which the reader's pride conceals:
+that he and I, at the entrance of every lady in these Dog-Post-Days,
+have made a _mis-shot_ of _salute_,--every one of them we have taken for
+the heroine of the hero,--at first Agatha,--then Clotilda,--then, when
+he enclosed his declaration of love in the watch of the Princess, said,
+"I see now beforehand through the whole business." Then we both said,
+"After all, we were right about Clotilda." Then in distress I laid hold
+on Marie, and said, "I shall not reveal anything further." At last
+it turns out to be one whom none of us had thought of (at least not
+I),--Joachime.--So it may fare with myself, when I marry....
+
+Before passing from the Post-Day to the intercalary day, the following
+additional minutes are to be passed: Clotilda put off her illegitimate
+cheeks, her _joues_[287] _de Paris_, her rouge, and seldomer exposed
+now her withering heart to the shaping of the court napkin-press. The
+Prince, who for her sake had attended as a transient hearer in the
+lecture-hall of his consort, stayed away somewhat often, and then
+called at Schleunes's: nevertheless, the Princess had magnanimity
+enough not to make our Victor atone, by the taking back of her
+gratitude, for the withdrawal of January's favor.--In Victor there was
+a long war, whether he should impart to Clotilda's brother the new
+proofs of her sisterly love:--at last,--moved by Flamin's suffering,
+impoverished heart, stung by reports and rascals and suspicion, and by
+the thought that he had been able hitherto to give so little pleasure
+to this ingenuous friend,--he told him almost everything (_except_ the
+relationship).
+
+P. S.--The undersigned testifies, by request, that the undersigned has
+completed his 24th Post-Day in due order on the last day of July, or
+Messidor. On the island of St. John's, 1793.
+
+                                     JEAN PAUL,
+
+                       _Mining-Superintendent of Scheerau_.
+
+
+                         SIXTH INTERCALARY DAY.
+
+      Concerning the Wilderness and the Promised Land of Humanity.
+
+There are vegetable men, animal men, and divine men.--
+
+When we were to be dreamed, an angel grew drowsy and fell asleep and
+dreamed. Then came _Phantasus_,[288] and swept broken meteorological,
+phenomena, things like nights, fragments of chaos, conglomerated
+plants, before him, and disappeared with them.
+
+Then came _Phobetor_, who drove herds of beasts along before him, that
+murdered and grazed as they passed, and disappeared with them.
+
+Then came _Morpheus_ and played before him with happy children, with
+crowned mothers, with shapes that kissed each other, and with fleeting
+mortals, and when the angel awoke with ecstasy, Morpheus and the human
+race and the world's history had disappeared....
+
+--At present the angel still sleeps and dreams,--we are still in his
+dream,--only _Phobetor_ is with him, and Morpheus still waits for
+Phobetor with his beasts to disappear....
+
+But let us, instead of dreaming, think and hope; and for the present
+ask: will _vegetable_ men, _animal_ men, at last be succeeded by
+_divine_ men? Does the _going_ of the world-clock betray as much design
+as the building of it, and has it a _dial-plate_ wheel and an _index
+hand_?
+
+One cannot (with a well-known philosopher) reason directly from final
+causes in _Physics_ to final causes in _History_, any more than I, in
+the individual, can deduce from the teleological (intentional)
+structure of a man a teleological biography of the same, or any more
+than, from the ingenious structure of animals, I call infer a
+continuous plan in their universal history. Nature is iron, always the
+same, and the wisdom shown in her framework is never obscured; the
+human race is free, and, like the infusorial animal, the multiform
+Vorticelle, assumes every moment, now regular, now anomalous shapes.
+Every physical disorder is only the hull of an order, every foul spring
+is the hull of a fair autumn; but are, then, our vices the buds of our
+virtues, and is the earthly fall of a continually sinking villain
+nothing but a disguised ascension of his to heaven?--And is there an
+object in the life of a Nero? Then I could just as well take back and
+reverse all and make out virtues to be the heart-leaves of disguised
+vices. But if, as many a one does, we carry the abuse of language so
+far as to reverse _moral_ height and depth, like _geometrical_,
+according to the _point of view_, as _positive_ and _negative_
+magnitudes; if, therefore, all gouty knobs, spotted fevers, and
+_lead_-[289] or _silver_-colics of the human race are nothing but a
+different kind of healthiness: then we certainly need not ask whether
+man will ever get well; in that case he could never in any possible
+maladies be anything but well.
+
+If a monk of the tenth century had shut himself up in a fit of
+melancholy, and meditated on the earth, not however on its end, but on
+its future: would not, in his dreams, the thirteenth century have been
+already a brighter one, and the eighteenth merely a glorified tenth?
+
+Our weather-prophesyings from _present_ temperature are logically
+correct and historically false, because new casualties, an earthquake,
+a comet, reverse the currents of the whole atmosphere. Can the
+above-imagined monk correctly calculate, if he does not assume such
+future magnitudes as America, Gunpowder, and Printer's ink?--A new
+religion, a new Alexander, a new disease, a new Franklin, can break,
+swallow up, dam, turn back the forest stream whose course and contents
+we propose to reduce on our parchment. There lie still four quarters of
+the globe full of enchained savage races;--their chain daily grows
+thinner,--time unlooses it;--what desolation, at least what changes,
+must they not bring about on the little _bowling-green_ of our
+cultivated countries? Nevertheless, all nations of the earth must one
+day be fused together and be purified in a common fermentation, if ever
+this atmosphere of life is to be cleared up.
+
+Can we draw from some miniature earthquakes and volcanoes, which we
+ourselves have produced with iron-filings and aquafortis, (in this
+case, types and printer's ink,) conclusions as to the AEtna eruptions,
+i. e. from the revolutions of the few cultivated peoples as to those of
+the uncultivated? Since we may assume that the human race lives as many
+thousands of years as the individual does years, may we venture from
+the sixth year to set the horoscope of youth and manhood? Add to this
+that the biography of this childish period is precisely the most
+meagre, and that awakened nations--almost all quarters of the globe are
+as yet full of sleeping ones--in _one_ year produce more historical
+material, and _consequently_ more historians, than a sleep-buried
+Africa in a century. We shall, therefore, _then_ be best able to
+prophesy from universal history, when the awaking nations shall have
+appended to it their million or two supplementary volumes.--All savage
+nations seem to have been under _one_ stamp; on the contrary, the mint
+of culture coins each one differently. The North American and the old
+German resemble each other more strongly than Germans do Germans of
+neighboring centuries. Neither the Golden Bull, nor the _Magna Charta_,
+nor the _Code Noir_, could Aristotle inlay into his forms of government
+and obedience; else he would have extended them; but are we then
+confident of foreseeing any better the future national convention in
+Mongolia, or the Decretal Letters and Extravagants of the enlightened
+Dalai-Lama, or the Recesses of the Arab Imperial Bench of Knights?
+Since Nature coins no people with _one_ mint-stamp or one hand alone,
+but with thousands at once,--hence on the German race is there a
+greater multitude of impressions than on the shield of Achilles,--how
+do we, who cannot even calculate the past, but simpler, revolutions of
+the globe, expect to look into the moral ones of its inhabitants?
+
+Of all that follows from these premises I believe the opposite,
+excepting the necessity of prophetic modesty. Scepticism, which makes
+us, instead of slow to believe, unbelieving, and instead of the _eyes_
+proposes to purge the _light_, becomes nonsense and the most fearful
+philosophical impotence and atony.
+
+Man regards his century or his half-century as the culmination of
+light, as a festal-day, to which all other centuries lead only as
+week-days. He knows only two golden ages,--the one at the beginning of
+the world, and the one at the end of it,--by which he understands only
+his own; he finds history to be like great woods, in the middle of
+which are silence, night-birds, and birds of prey, and whose borders
+only are filled with light and song.--Certainly all things serve me;
+but I too serve all. As Nature, who in her eternity knows no loss of
+time, in her inexhaustibleness no loss of power, has no other law of
+frugality assigned her than that of prodigality,--as she, with _eggs_
+and _seed-corns_, ministers equally well to _nourishment_ and to
+_propagation_,[290] and with an undeveloped germ-world sustains half a
+developed one,--as her way leads over no smooth bowling-alley, but over
+alps and seas;--our little heart must needs misunderstand her, whether
+in its hopes or in its fears; it must, as it becomes enlightened,
+reciprocally interchange _morning_ and _evening red_; it must, in
+its contentment, now regard after-summer as _spring_, and now
+_after-winter_ as _autumn_. _Moral_ revolutions mislead us more than
+_physical_, because the former according to their nature occupy a
+_greater_ play-room and space of time than the latter,--and yet the
+Dark Ages are nothing but a dipping into the shadow of _Saturn_, or an
+eclipse of the sun of short duration. A man who should be six thousand
+years old, would say to the six creation-days of the world's history,
+They are very good.
+
+But one should never set _moral_ and _physical_ revolutions and
+developments too near to each other. All Nature has no other motions
+than _former_ ones; the circle is her path, she has no other years than
+Platonic,--but man alone is _changeable_, and the straight line or the
+zigzag describes his course. A sun has its eclipses as well as the
+moon, has its bloom and decay like a flower, but also its
+_palingenesia_ and renovation. But there lies in the human race the
+necessity of an everlasting mutation; yet here there are only
+_ascending_ and _descending_ signs, no culmination; they do not
+necessarily draw one another after them, as in physics, and have no
+extreme limit. No people, no period returns; in physics, all must come
+back again. It is only accidental, not necessary, that nations, at a
+certain age and stage of progress, and on a certain rotten round of the
+ladder, fall again,--one only confounds the _last_ step, from which
+nations fall, with the _highest_; the Romans, with whom not single
+rounds, but the whole ladder broke, were not necessitated to sink by a
+culture which does not equal even our own.[291] Nations have no age, or
+old age with them often precedes youth. Even with individuals the
+crab's-walk of the mind in old age is only accidental; still less has
+virtue in them a summer-solstice. Humanity has then the capacity of an
+endless improvement; but has it the hope also?--
+
+The disturbance of the _equipoise_ of his own faculties makes the
+individual man miserable; the _inequality_ of citizens, the
+_inequality_ of nations, makes the earth miserable; just as lightnings
+arise from the neighborhood of the ebb and flow of the ether, and all
+storms from unequal distributions of air. But fortunately it lies in
+the nature of mountains to fill the valleys.
+
+Not inequality of goods,--for the majority of voices and fists on the
+part of the poor balances in the scale the power of the rich,--but
+inequality of culture, does most to create and distribute the political
+fly-presses and forcing-pumps. The _Lex agraria_ in the fields of
+science passes over at last into the physical fields. Since the tree of
+knowledge has thrust out its branches from the school windows of
+philosophy and the church windows of the priesthood into the common
+garden, all nations have become stronger.--Unequal cultivation chains
+the West Indies to the feet of Europe, Helots to Spartans, and the iron
+hollow-head[292] with the trigger on the negro's tongue presupposes a
+hollow-head of another kind.
+
+With such a frightful disparity among nations in power, wealth,
+culture, only a universal rush of storms from all points of the compass
+can terminate in a lasting calm. A perpetual balance of Europe
+presuppose a balance of the four remaining parts of the world, which
+one may, deducting small librations, promise our globe. In future men
+will quite as little discover a salvage as an island. One people must
+draw another out of pits blundering years. A more equal culture will
+conclude commercial treaties with more equal advantages. The longest
+rainy months of humanity--which always fell upon the time of national
+transplantations, just as one always sets out flowers on cloudy
+days--have spent themselves.
+
+One spectre still remains from the midnight, which reaches far into the
+hours of light,--War. But the claws and bill of the armorial eagle grow
+on, till, like the boar's tusks, they crook up and make themselves
+useless. As it was calculated in regard to Vesuvius, that it contained
+material for only forty-three eruptions more,--so might one also reckon
+the number of future wars. This long tempest, which already for six
+thousand years has been standing over our planet, will continue to
+storm till clouds and earth have charged each other full with an
+_equal_ measure of electric matter.
+
+_All_ nations become illuminated only in joint fermentation; and the
+precipitate is blood and dead men's bones. Were the earth narrowed
+to one half of its size, then would the time of its moral--and
+physical--development be shortened one half.
+
+With wars the strongest drag-chains of the sciences are cut off. Once
+war-machines were the sowing-machines of new knowledges, while they
+crushed old harvests; now it is the press which scatters the pollen
+more widely and gently. Instead of an Alexander, Greece would need now
+to send to Asia nothing but a--compositor; the conqueror grafts, the
+author sows.
+
+It is a characteristic of enlightenment that, although it still leaves
+to individuals the possibility of the illusion and weakening of vice,
+nevertheless it releases nations from company-vices and national
+deceptions,--e. g. from wrecking, piracy. The best and worst deeds we
+do in company; war is an example. The slave-trade must in our days,
+unless indeed the trade in subjects begins, come to an end.[293]
+
+The highest and steepest thrones stand, like the highest mountains, in
+the warmest lands. The political mountains, like the physical, daily
+grow lower (especially when they spout fire), and must at last be with
+the valleys in a common plain.
+
+From all this follows:--
+
+There comes one day a golden age, which every wise and virtuous man
+even now enjoys, and when men will find it easier to live well because
+they will find it easier to live indeed,--when men will have, not more
+pleasure (for this honey they draw from every flower and leaf-louse),
+but more virtue,--when the people Will take part in thinking, and the
+thinker--in working,[294] in order that he may save himself the need of
+Helots,--when military and judicial murder shall be condemned, and only
+occasionally cannon-balls shall be turned up with the plough. When that
+time comes, then will a preponderance of good no more stop the machine
+by frictions. When it comes, then will the necessity no longer lie in
+human nature of degenerating again and again breeding tempests (for
+heretofore the noble element has merely kept up a flying fight with the
+overpowering evil), just as, according to Forster, even on the hot
+island of St. Helena[295] there are no storms.
+
+When this festal day comes, then will our children's children be--no
+more. We stand now in the evening and see at the close of our dark day
+the sun go down with a red-hot glory, and promise us behind the last
+cloud the still, serene sabbath-day of humanity; but our posterity have
+yet to travel through a night full of wind, and through a cloud full of
+poison, till at last over a happier earth an eternal morning-wind full
+of blossom-spirits, moving on before the sun, expelling all clouds,
+shall breathe on men without a sigh. Astronomy promises the earth an
+eternal vernal equinox;[296] and history promises it a higher one;
+perhaps the two eternal springs may coincide.--
+
+Since man disappears among men, we downcast ones must erect ourselves
+before humanity. When I think of the Greeks, I see that our hopes move
+faster than fate.--As one travels by night with lights over the icy
+Alps, in order not to be terrified at the abysses and at the long road,
+so does fate spread night around us, and hands us only torches for the
+way immediately before us, that we may not worry ourselves about the
+chasms of the future, and the distance of the goal.--There were
+centuries when humanity was led with bandaged eyes--from one prison to
+another;--there were other centuries when spectres rattled and
+overturned all night long, and in the morning nothing was disturbed;
+there can be no other centuries except those in which individuals die,
+but nations rise, and in which nations decay, but mankind rises: when
+mankind itself sinks and falls to ruins, and ends with the scattering
+of the globe in a dust-cloud ... what shall console us?--
+
+A veiled eye behind the bounds of time, an infinite heart beyond
+the world. There is a higher order of things than we can
+demonstrate,--there is a Providence in the world's history and in every
+one's life which reason has the boldness to deny, and which the heart
+has the boldness to believe;--there must be a Providence, which,
+according to other rules than we have hitherto assumed, links this
+confused earth as daughter-land to a higher city of God,--there must be
+a God, a Virtue, and an Eternity.
+
+
+
+                               FOOTNOTES:
+
+[Footnote 1: His collected works, Vol. III. p. 68.]
+
+[Footnote 2: In Faust,--Scene of the Easter Holidays.--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 3: A Jew once separated from his wife when she appeared with
+bare arms; but it is difficult to ascribe the present frequent divorces
+in Paris to that cause.]
+
+[Footnote 4: It is amusing to hear Jean Paul call it so, but the German
+diminutive, "Werk_lein_," also expresses attachment to the thing in
+question. Thus children say _Vater-chen_, "Little Papa; Daddy."--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 5: Descriptive of Venus, or written under her
+influence.--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 6: The stick on which a painter rests his arm.--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 7: Similarity of the parts to the whole.--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 8: _Fliegende Blatter_.--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 9: Of course, "Forgive us our debts."--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 10: A city of the Tauric Chersonesus, the modern
+Crimea.--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 11: A Jesuit astronomer, A. D. 1598-1671, who named the
+moon's spots Tycho, Plato, Hercules, St. Catharine, &c.--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 12: He alludes to the chimney-sweeper of his perukes.]
+
+[Footnote 13: The name the Germans give to Death. _Hein_ would seem to
+mean Hal.--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 14: Probably peas, which the children, as now, blew through
+long tubes with great force.--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 15: In Upper Alsace, where every three years only the best
+youth receives the crown and medal, and the jurisdiction of the
+pastures.]
+
+[Footnote 16: A sort of fire-ball, which, as it goes, emits smoke to
+blind the enemy.--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 17: Small balls invented by him to put into a horse's ear,
+and act as a spur.--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 18: An island of the Malay Archipelago, wooded, volcanic, and
+spicy.--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 19: It is notorious how little I know of mining operations;
+I therefore thought I had reason to apply to my superiors for a
+spur which might stimulate me to do something in such a weighty
+science,--and such a spur is certainly the office of mining-superintendent.]
+
+[Footnote 20:  Except the two emperors Silluck and Athnac, and the four
+kings Sgolta, Sakeph-Katon, etc., I never had intercourse with any; and
+that only as upper-class scholar, because we jurists, with the Devil's
+help, had to learn Hebrew, wherein just the above-mentioned six
+potentates appear as the names of the accents on words. Perhaps,
+however, my correspondent means the great, acute, crowned accents of
+nations. [_Sakeph-Katon_ is the only one the translator has not been
+able to verify of these interesting names. _Kauton_ is given among the
+Hebrew accents, but not Sakeph.--Tr.]]
+
+[Footnote 21: Justus Moeser, author of the "Patriotic Fantasies," one of
+Germany's dearest memories, in many respects a Franklin.--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 22: Lane of the mine.--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 23: Ass's Post.--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 24: Instrument for taking the distance of a star north or
+south from the equator.--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 25: Instrument for reckoning the deviation of the hour-circle
+from the meridian.--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 26: Jean Paul seems to indulge here in an hexameter himself:
+"Welches sie auch mehr bedarf, als der harmonische Gessner."--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 27: _Bewahren_ and _bewahren_ are the two German words.--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 28: E. g. their honor suffers, if their carriage does not
+pass ahead of another carriage of rank.]
+
+[Footnote 29: Such letters as David sent by Uriah to Joab. (See 2
+Samuel xi. 14, 15.)--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 30: _Kleeblatt_ (_trefoil_) in the German.--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 31: After an operation for the cataract, the sensitive retina
+represents everything magnified.]
+
+[Footnote 32: A piece of charred bone or horn used by natives of the
+East to absorb the blood from wounds made by the bite of a snake. See
+Tennent's Natural History of Ceylon, p. 312.--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 33: The _Psalter_ in the ox's stomach is the _Blattermagen_
+(lit. _leaf-stomach_), the third stomach of ruminant animals, the
+tripe. So we speak of the _leaves_ of fat.--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 34:
+           "My spirit flew in feathers then,
+              That is so heavy now."--Hood.]
+
+[Footnote 35: Joint-reporter.--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 36: A kind that heads in the form of a capuchin's hood.--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 37: When one's five numbers are all drawn in their order, it
+is a quinterne.--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 38: _Aufgebunden_ may mean either tied up or untied.--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 39: Burlesque and serious operas.--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 40: Or, figure in history.--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 41: The ideal of the beautiful.]
+
+[Footnote 42: As the Rabbins believe, according to Eisenmenger's
+Judaism, Part II. 7.]
+
+[Footnote 43: _Usance_ means the month's grace allowed for the
+payment of a bill of exchange; double usance, of course, allows two
+months.--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 44: Petrarch, like German reviewers, avoided nightingales,
+and sought frogs.]
+
+[Footnote 45: "Schatten_riss_ oder Schatten_schnitt_" is the
+German.--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 46: The literal rendering would be "_cut out of the eyes_,
+or, rather, out of the face." The phrase in Italics is a German idiom
+for expressing an exact likeness.--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 47: The readers of Boswell's Johnson will remember that
+interesting native of the South-Sea Islands.--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 48: Matthieu being the French for _Matthew_.--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 49: _Zeusel_ was a court-apothecary, mentioned on page 7, of
+whom we shall hear more.--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 50: An Italian word, meaning literally gallant, applied to
+those Platonic lovers who, with the connivance of the husbands,
+attended married ladies, and were everywhere seen in confidential chat
+with them.--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 51: La Mettrie was a noted medical man and materialist in his
+day, b. 1709.--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 52: Remember the beautiful passage in Bede's History, where
+the Northumbrian prince compares man's life to the flight of the
+swallow through the lighted hall out of darkness into darkness.--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 53: An allusion, perhaps, to the legend, so lovely to the
+fancy, that a crucifix in Naples, when Alphonso was besieged there, in
+1439, bowed its head before a cannon-ball, which consequently took off
+only the crown of thorns!--_Voyage d'un Francois_, Tom. VI. p. 303.]
+
+[Footnote 54: This clover insures him who accidentally finds it against
+future deception. Hitherto it has been found only by--princes and
+philosophers.]
+
+[Footnote 55: _Matz_, in German, means also both a starling and a
+blockhead.--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 56:  Elegant paper for the upper classes.--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 57: In the original, "hang hares' tails on us," i. e. "make
+fools of us."--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 58: Literally, spit-devils,--a sort of firework.--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 59: I. e. Birthday-festival.--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 60: Not one of the commonplace souls that jog steadily on
+like the hexameter.--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 61: This was a common practice of our old New England Puritan
+parsons.--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 62: Disciples of Kennicott, the well-known English verifier
+of the general accuracy of the Sacred Text.--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 63: A trap extemporized by setting up a heavy book obliquely,
+with one end resting on a stick, and the cheese attached.--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 64: Christina, daughter of Charles XII., abdicated in May,
+1654, at the age of twenty-eight.--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 65: A famous and popular old volume delineating the world of
+nature and life in pictures, with numbers referring to the different
+parts of each picture.--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 66: That is, threw into them, as into scrap-baskets, the bits
+of paper on which he had written his thoughts.--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 67: Allusion to Ezekiel.--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 68: Literally, _God's-box_.--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 69: _Gesprungen_ seems to mean both _vibrated_ and
+_snapped_.]
+
+[Footnote 70: _Haupt_- und _Staat-actionen_, the phrase used by Faust in
+his first dialogue with Wagner. Schlegel says the title was affixed to
+dramas designed for marionettes when they treated heroic and historical
+subjects.--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 71: Epiglottis.--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 72: What has come into the world feet foremost.--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 73: Basselisse (French).--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 74: _Ladenhuter_ (shop-keeper) is the German word,
+meaning goods that keep the store as a sick man keeps his
+bed,--_shop-ridden_.--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 75: A court that decided matters in dispute among the
+sovereigns of the German Confederation.--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 76: A selection of choice learning.--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 77: Midsummer-day.--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 78: A name given by the Greeks to the Hebrew word Jehovah,
+which consists, in the original, of _four letters_.--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 79: The thumb of a hanged thief was considered as a
+lucky-bone.--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 80: Full.--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 81: Or it _went a begging_, as we say.--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 82: "Rara avis."--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 83: See page 67.--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 84: It is precisely the possession of _heterogeneous_
+faculties in _similar_ degree that makes one inconsequent and
+inconsistent; men with one predominant faculty act by it with more
+equableness. In despotisms there is more quiet than in republics; at
+the hot equator there is a more even rate of the barometer than in the
+zones of four seasons.]
+
+[Footnote 85: One of Burns's words.--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 86: The bust of the Vatican Apollo, by which he would learn
+to model no other figure than his own.]
+
+[Footnote 87: There is something in the use and application of the word
+_Wissenschaft_ which requires for its appreciation an understanding of
+the peculiar genius of the German mind.--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 88: Bacon's remark will recur to the reader.--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 89: A solar system is only a dotted profile of the genius of
+the world, but a human eye is his miniature. The _mechanics_ of the
+bodies of the universe the mathematical masters of reckoning may
+calculate, but the _dioptrics_ of the eye, growing bright amidst
+nothing but dull moistures, transcends our algebraic audit-offices,
+which therefore cannot reckon away from the imitated eyes (the glasses)
+the space of diffusion and the narrow field.]
+
+[Footnote 90: Jean Paul would probably have said Rubicon if he had not
+been going to say it elsewhere,--e. g. p. 199.]
+
+[Footnote 91: Hieronym. cont. Jov. L 2.]
+
+[Footnote 92: _Hof_ means in German _both_ court--and yard.--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 93: Bayle's Dictionary, Art. _Francois d'Assise_, Note C.]
+
+[Footnote 94: A half-way house.--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 95: Jean Paul probably means, that such noble hearts as
+Victor's Le Baut might shut up into silence, but could not with his
+Chamberlain's master-key open and find out their secrets.--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 96: In a later edition Jean Paul substitutes for _Schein-tod_
+(sham death) a half French word, _Postiche-tod_ (supposititious
+death).--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 97: "On whose board he had a _stone_," literally,--a proverb
+for being in one's good graces.--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 98: There is an inconsistency in date of month here with p.
+135.--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 99: The dog as well as myself know what island that is, but
+no more.]
+
+[Footnote 100: "Burning-chambers," a name originally given to the place
+for judging criminals of state belonging to illustrious families. The
+room was lined with black, and lighted with flambeaux. Originated with
+Francis I. in 1535, in his persecution of heretics.--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 101: Plebeian.--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 102: One at hearing from Emanuel, the other at seeing
+Clotilda.--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 103: Red drops fall from butterflies in their last
+transformation, which they used to call bloody rain.]
+
+[Footnote 104: When one looks a long time into the blue of heaven, it
+begins to undulate, and these waves in the air one imagines in
+childhood to be angels at play.]
+
+[Footnote 105: This monologue is a fragment from an earlier dark hour,
+such as every heart of sensibility once suffers.]
+
+[Footnote 106: _Noth-munzen_ means originally coin containing alloy,
+struck off in hard times.--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 107: The Hebrew language has but three vowels
+("vowel-points") which, from the assistance they gave in enunciating a
+vast variety of words, were called _matres lectionis_, or mothers of
+the reading.--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 108: I. e. bowing so low.--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 109: Herkommen, as a common noun, means _tradition_ or
+_custom_.--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 110: An infusorial or minute animal, called in natural
+history _rotifera_ (wheel-bearer).--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 111: _Famulus_ is the Latin name in the German. Wagner was
+one in Faust.--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 112: So called in allusion to the _shaking_ they were giving
+it.--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 113: _Kopfstuck_ (lit. _head-piece_), a coin bearing the head
+of the regent.--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 114: The billiard-pockets (like the contribution-bags) used
+to have bells to them.--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 115: Who felt himself to be "a child picking up pebbles on
+the shore of the great ocean of truth."--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 116: A conventual term,--a six.--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 117: God bless you!--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 118: Many thanks!--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 119: Of course a parody on "Verbum sat _sapienti_,"--"A word
+for the _fool_," &c.--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 120: Or reading-_easel_ (the latter word seeming to be an
+English corruption of the German _Esel_, ass),--any book-rest.
+_Maler-esel_ means a painter's easel.--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 121: When they occur in actual life.--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 122: Eclectic or miscellaneous science, not confined to one
+department.--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 123: A King of France once sent a vassal _illum baculum,
+quo se sustentabat, in symbolum traditionis_. (Du Fresne's
+Glossary.) So far as I know, there has never been made a good and
+serviceable--abridgment of this _glossarium_ for ladies.]
+
+[Footnote 124: Just as there are _listening sisters_ (_les Tourieres_
+or _S[oe]urs ecoutes_) who go with the nuns into the conversing room,
+to overhear their talk.]
+
+[Footnote 125: Or absentee-curates.--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 126: Literally _looker-on_,--one admitted to behold the
+secret ceremonies in the Eleusinian mysteries.--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 127: To know how to obey is a glory equal to that of
+commanding.--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 128: "Slaves are accounted nobodies."--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 129: In real life.--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 130: _To make one a queue_ is a proverb for imposing on him
+(like pinning a rag to one's coat-tail?).--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 131: _Diet_ (from _dies_) _implies_ the idea of _day_,
+but the German "Reichs_tag_" makes the pun more palpable in the
+original.--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 132: A lady's watch, as is well known, shaped like a heart,
+provided on the back with a dial-gnomon and magnetic needle. The latter
+points out to the ladies (who hate _cold_) the _south_ also, in fact,
+and the sun-dial-index serves as a moon-dial-index.]
+
+[Footnote 133: "Rome concealed the name of her god, and she was wrong;
+I conceal the name of my goddess, and I am right."]
+
+[Footnote 134: Or _Tensa_, the carriage on which they bore the images
+of the gods in the Circensian games.--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 135: A shrine.--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 136: Properly, a pitcher, or urn.--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 137: Here Jean Paul inserts, after "in die Federn," "(_nicht
+in die Feder_),"--i. e. _not into the pen_ (a German phrase for
+_dictating_). The pun could not be kept.--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 138: A watch that tells only the hours.--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 139: The reference is to Laurence Sterne, and the snuff-box
+he mentions in the early part of the "Sentimental Journey," as given
+him by a monk, and carried ever after as an amulet.--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 140: Ignatius's-plate means probably a breastplate, or
+medallion, consecrated by Ignatius Loyola.--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 141: I. e. to throw light upon it.--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 142: Like John Buncle, who went round, as was said, to
+propagate his faith and his species.--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 143: A fourth reason would be, that now, every time be loves
+another than Clotilda, he seems to earn a new claim to the gratitude of
+his friend.]
+
+[Footnote 144: Italian for everybody.--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 145: May there be a sly allusion--here to the possibility of
+their putting their hair up in papers torn from the leaves of Jean
+Paul's works?--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 146: Schickaneder was the Director of a Theatre in Vienna in
+the time of Mozart, and wrote the text for the _Magic Flute_.--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 147: A wreath given in derision to brides who before marriage
+had been unchaste.--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 148: And then are ready to verify the proverb: _Curses, like
+chickens, come home to roost_.--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 149: Musical interval.--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 150: Old scholastic term for a _past_ eternity, in
+contradiction to a coming eternity, _a parte post_.--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 151: The Invisible Lodge; a Biography in Two Parts. [A work
+of Jean Paul's.--Tr.]]
+
+[Footnote 152: Such was the name of his Lordship's wife, who in her
+twenty-third year sank to rest in the eternal arms.]
+
+[Footnote 153: In the original, _Semper-freie_ (always free,--eligible
+to office).--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 154: Hence too it was, that, so long as Victor was at the
+Parsonage, she avoided Flamin's society.]
+
+[Footnote 155: The reader will remember this same remark, in so many
+words, on p. 223.--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 156: It turned out more fortunately, and without loss of the
+stones, and I had the satisfaction to find that no woman who read the
+first edition of this work has, in her womanlike _castling_ or
+_rotation in office_, at all interchanged the two _thats_. Nay, even
+the female readers of the second edition have remained consistent with
+themselves.]
+
+[Footnote 157: Demoralization.--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 158: The German word _kleiden_; it has a corresponding double
+meaning of _dressing_, and also of _suiting_.--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 159: Science,--Mathematics.--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 160: Step-measurers.--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 161:  Men entitled to lecture in three branches.--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 162: Or disciple of the indifferential calculus.--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 163: Or, in prose, fiery water-wheel.--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 164:
+           "And what if all of animated nature
+            Be but organic harps diversely framed,
+            That tremble into thought, as o'er them sweeps,
+            Plastic and vast, one intellectual breeze,
+            At once the soul of each and God of all?"
+                                     Coleridge, _The AEolian Harp_.]
+
+[Footnote 165: _Fromm_ is the German. It is time the words _religious_
+and _pious_ were redeemed from the base uses of sectarianism and
+bigotry.--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 166: _Enlightenment_ in an _empty_ heart is mere memory-work,
+let it strain the faculty of acumen ever so much. Most men of our day
+resemble the new houses in Potsdam, in which (according to Reichard)
+Frederick the Second caused _lights_ to be placed at night, that every
+one, including Reichard himself, might think they were--_occupied_.]
+
+[Footnote 167: Most men have, perhaps, only an equal number of good
+_thoughts_ and _actions_; but it is still an open question how long the
+virtuous man may interrupt his good thoughts (which have less need than
+good actions of the outer world) by indifferent ones.]
+
+[Footnote 168: For the noblest leans just the most on loving souls, or
+at least on his ideals of them, with which, however, he is only in so
+far satisfied as he regards them as pledges of future prototypes. I do
+not except either the Stoic (that Epicurean God) or the Mystic: both
+love in the Creator only the sum total of his creatures; we the former
+in the latter.]
+
+[Footnote 169: The German _Vorwand_ means literally front wall (not far
+from the etymological meaning of _pretext_); so that there may be a
+figurative element here beyond what appears to the casual reader.--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 170: The reader of this letter will readily presuppose that
+Clotilda, as she does not know into whose hands it may fall,--in fact,
+it is actually in ours,--will have to hurry over her relations and
+mysteries (e. g. respecting Flamin, Victor, &c.) with an obscurity
+which to her proper reader was clear enough.]
+
+[Footnote 171: Let the reader remember that she is master of as much of
+this biography as he, if not more.]
+
+[Footnote 172: She means Giulia, from whose corpse grief had hurried
+her away.]
+
+[Footnote 173:
+
+           "Now spring returns, but not to me returns
+            The vernal joy my better years have known," &c.
+                                                    Michael Bruce.]
+
+[Footnote 174: "Fly not from me, because I am always encompassed by a
+great shadow, which increases till at last it shall wall me up."]
+
+[Footnote 175: Every seven years of human life.--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 176:
+
+           "Or had it drizzled _needle-points of ice_
+            Upon a feverish head made suddenly bald."
+
+                                            Coleridge's _Remorse_.]
+
+[Footnote 177: As the spots in the moon are fields of flowers and
+plants.]
+
+[Footnote 178: Here ended (in the original) the first volume.--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 179: So called, as it was made to answer for both bed and
+board. See the next sentence but one.--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 180: The rudiments of printing.--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 181: He is indignant, it is true, only at the _typographical_
+history of learned works, and despises only the anxious search after
+the birthdays, &c., of deceased and stupid books in the midst of a
+world full of wonders; but here, too, he must needs consider that
+brains which can let nothing _press_ upon them more than operations of
+the _press_ still do better this little something, which saves and
+accumulates most for the better ones, than nothing at all, or anything
+beyond their ability.]
+
+[Footnote 182: A name given to screens used for partitions.--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 183: A well-known good writer on the eyes.]
+
+[Footnote 184: Or crystalline lens?--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 185: Glands in the eyelids, discovered by Meibom in
+1673.--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 186: A glandule at the corner of the eye, which secretes
+moisture.--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 187: Honeymoon. One of Jean Paul's variations on the
+phrase.--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 188: The Germans are peculiarly rich in synonymes for the
+honeymoon. The word used here is _Flitterwochen_ (Spangle-weeks).--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 189: Moldavian or Wallachian governor.--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 190: Some of the German written letters are like the Greek.
+_Alphabet_ (at the end of the sentence) is a printer's term for 23
+sheets.--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 191: The Fetzpopel, or _ragged ninny_, was a sort of
+scarecrow or bugbear.--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 192: A fistful.--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 193: An Indian moss used for the gout.--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 194: An allusion to a scandalous Scotch imposture of
+1780.--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 195: Sledges for riding astraddle.--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 196: The Britons found out that whalebone shavings made the
+softest kind of bed.]
+
+[Footnote 197: The English of this seems to be:--
+
+     "Turkey rhubarb powdered.
+      Starred anise-seed.
+      Fennel   do.
+      Peel of green orange.
+      Carbonate of potash,--equal parts,--1 drachm.
+      Leaves of Alexandrian senna without stalks,--2 drachms.
+      Half an ounce of white sugar."
+
+And the final direction may read, "Of which let him take a mixture,
+finely pulverized, given in sufficient quantity to produce ejection.
+Mark [i. e. on the paper], Wind-powders," &c.--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 198: The name given to the halo about the head, when one is
+electrized.]
+
+[Footnote 199: An allusion, perhaps, to the pasteboard images carried
+about on the heads of Italian peddlers, in which the loose-hung head
+bobs right and left to the spectators.--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 200: The German expression for all this is too elliptical to
+be literally rendered. It is simply "Meinetwegen!" (For all me!)--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 201: Fancy-man.--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 202: Their good works are good words.--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 203: The horse referred to on page 91.--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 204: That is, he would be, when this letter arrived, for he
+was going to carry it.--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 205: Culpepper never did him the pleasure, for which he had
+so often begged him, of prescribing for the Prince a clyster, which
+then the apothecary himself would have administered, in order just for
+once to _get at_ the ruler, and transform _his_ weak side into his own
+sunny side.]
+
+[Footnote 206: When those twins chipped the shell of Leda's egg, out of
+which they were born.--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 207: Literally, "Knapsack."--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 208: French for clyster.--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 209: A Greek jurist, compared by Gibbon to Bacon, of great
+influence in the first half of the sixth century,--dishonest, but
+able.--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 210: The red-deer, and the wild-boar, bear, badger, &c.--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 211: i. e. about two kreutzers.--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 212: Entity.--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 213: "_Gesegnete Mahlzeit_" is the familiar phrase Richter
+uses; it was formerly common, at the close of dinner, to shake hands
+and wish "a blessing on the meal."--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 214:
+
+           "Hast thou a friend, take care to keep him,
+            And often to his threshold wend:
+            Briers and thorns o'ergrow the path
+            On which a man neglects to walk."--_Old Saying_.
+
+                                                            Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 215: Little Britain.--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 216: He with the long shoes, in his "Education of a Young
+Prince, 1705."]
+
+[Footnote 217: Thus did merely the first edition, in 1797, speak of the
+Viennese; a third, improved one, in 1819, acknowledges also an improved
+edition of them, although it retains lively _shadows_ of their former
+times.]
+
+[Footnote 218: A coarse writer no longer known.--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 219: Author of the Burlesque Virgil.--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 220: The author appears to have had in his mind a
+reminiscence of a passage in Burger's "Lenore":--
+
+           "Like croak of frogs in marshy plain,
+            Swelled on the breeze that dismal strain," &c.--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 221: Sacred musical composition of a stylish character.--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 222: The Jewish name for Sabbath in the Middle Ages. See
+Auerbach's Spinoza.--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 223: Latin for ruins, fragments of old buildings, &c.--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 224: "He toucheth the hills, and they smoke."--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 225: December is most favorable to astronomical
+observations.]
+
+[Footnote 226: A musical direction: Go back to the sign; Begin
+again.--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 227: The German word is _Kalte_, which explains the
+incongruity of our English heading.--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 228: A word copied exactly from the German, and well enough
+justified by the analogy of _rookery_, for instance.--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 229: See that noble passage of Milton, beginning
+
+     "I cannot praise a fugitive and cloistered virtue."--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 230: I have wholly recast the letter N, because in the first
+edition I unfortunately had a good idea, which, without recollecting
+its first publication, I gave the world a second time, as a learned
+thief of my own property, in the commentary on the woodcuts. [Probably
+the ones illustrating the Ten Commandments, in the _Campaner Thal_,
+Jean Paul's work on Immortality.--Tr.]]
+
+[Footnote 231: The royal band (of twenty-four).--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 232: A freethinker and Freemason, in the latter half of the
+eighteenth century imprisoned, for a certain comedy, in Magdeburg
+fortress.--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 233: The highway.--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 234: As an example, we have now the First Principle of
+Morals, and that of the Forms of Government.]
+
+[Footnote 235: Self-government.--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 236: See his _Am[oe]n. Acad_., the treatise on the habitable
+globe.]
+
+[Footnote 237: The hysterical ball, i. e. the hysteric morbid feeling,
+as if a ball were rolling up into the throat.]
+
+[Footnote 238: Used here by Jean Paul evidently, with figurative
+freedom, for a Russian swing, but meaning originally a _chariot-race_
+(afterward tournament), and derived from _currus solis_ (chariot of the
+sun).--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 239: Conjurer's jargon.--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 240: "The _Litones_ were slaves among the old Saxons, who
+still possessed a third of their property, and could make contracts for
+it." _Flegeljahre_, No. 8.--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 241: An instrument for determining the blueness of the sky.]
+
+[Footnote 242: French for a male flirt.--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 243: Differing laws.--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 244: Axiom in law; named from Brocard, a Bishop of Worms, who
+made a collection of canons called "Brocardica Juris."--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 245: Proculus and Sabinus were the founders of two rival
+schools of jurisprudence in Rome (Proculians and Sabinians) in the
+first century of our era.--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 246: A term from the Pandects of Justinian, meaning
+liabilities to burdens or duties.--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 247: Alluding to the consolidating of stocks, debts,
+&c.--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 248: An Italian astronomer and anatomist, born in 1602.--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 249: Faust (meaning both fist and the Faust of story) is the
+word in the original.--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 250: Or journey.--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 251: There is a play on words in the original, _Hof_ meaning
+_court_, and also, when applied to the sun or moon, a _circle_ round
+the luminary.--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 252: The original has a slight pun; _uber die Tafel_ meaning
+both _on the subject_ of the table and _during_ the table (or
+dinner).--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 253: A name given to different groups of delicate muscles in
+certain sensitive parts of the human body.--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 254:
+           "But where of ye, O tempests, is the goal!
+            Are ye like those within the human breast,
+            Or do ye find, like eagles, some high nest?"
+                                                  _Childe Harold_.]
+
+[Footnote 255: The snake-stone sucks at the wound till it has sucked
+out all the poison.]
+
+[Footnote 256: In a nutshell.--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 257: The conservative or court party in the French Revolution
+were called the _noirs_ (blacks), from the fact of the emigrant nobles
+wearing black velvet. The _Ensrages_ was the name of a radical
+club.--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 258: Literally, the game of _man_ (_ombre_, Spanish).--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 259: Joachime, Clotilda, Victor, and the Devil.]
+
+[Footnote 260: _Mort_ (French) in the original.--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 261: Manager of the game.--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 262: Or face-card.--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 263: No pun in the original.--Tr.]
+[Footnote 264: A Parisian anatomiste (b. 1719) persecuted by the
+profession to London, where she exhibited her wax-skeleton with
+success.--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 265: Described on pages 127-134.--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 266: Entertainments for the gods, at which their images
+were laid on couches (_lecti_), and food was served up to them in
+public.--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 267: _Panist_ from the Latin _panis_,--an allusion to an old
+class of charity scholars. It might be rendered, _loafer_.--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 268: Alluding to the long attempts in Germany to fuse the
+Calvinistie and Lutheran Churches.--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 269: _Musicus_ here, not _musicant_, which latter means the
+more common performer, fiddler, or whatever else.--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 270: Father confessor.--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 271: Plutarch mentions how vain Pompey's cavaliers were of
+their personal appearance, and that Caesar accordingly directed his
+soldiers to aim at their faces; "for Caesar hoped that those young
+cavaliers who had not been used to wars and wounds, and who set
+a great value on their beauty, would avoid above all things a stroke
+in that part, and immediately give way, as well on account of the
+present danger as the future deformity. The event answered his
+expectation."--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 272: To save the external decencies of virtue.--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 273: I. e., O Clarissa! behold your Lovelace; let us skip the
+first four volumes, and, like the makers of Epics, begin with the
+rest!]
+
+[Footnote 274: A kind of fire-alarm.--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 275: These terms are adopted as the shortest correspondents
+of the German _burgerlich_ and _stiftfahig_.--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 276: He mistakes; Leibnitz only said, everything difficult
+was light to him, and everything light difficult.]
+
+[Footnote 277: As the old fellow who carried his pipe in his boot, when
+his leg was shot off at the battle of Prague, grabbed at his pipe first
+and then at his leg. (See Old Song.)--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 278: "Colors produced on ores by the action of the
+air."--Adler.]
+
+[Footnote 279: _Viel-Liebe_ is Jean Paul's word, to match which, after
+the analogy of Polygamy (marriage to many), we might coin the word
+_Polyagapy_ (love to many).--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 280: Instead of _malade imaginaire_, an imaginary invalid,
+she was an imaginary _convalescent_.--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 281: _Adjuvans_ is the ingredient which strengthens the
+powers of the main ingredients; _constituens_ is what gives the
+medicine the form of pill, electuary or mixture.]
+
+[Footnote 282: One weeps, one cries, one sighs, one lies, one raves,
+one kills, one dies,--in fine, one gives himself to all the devils, in
+order to have his angel.--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 283: As we say _pea-soup_, _vermicelli-soup_.]
+
+[Footnote 284: Referring to the one whose marriage to the Senior
+Parson's daughter Victor witnessed that night from his window.--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 285: See note to page 194.--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 286: Of course, Procrustes.--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 287: Cheeks.--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 288: The God of sleep was attended by three beings:
+_Phantasus_, who could change himself only into lifeless things;
+_Phobetor_, who could assume and conjure up all animal forms; and
+_Moropheus_, who could, all human forms. Metamorph. Lib. II. Fab. 10.]
+
+[Footnote 289: Painter's colics.--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 290: "Seed to the sower and bread to the eater."
+(Isaiah.)--Tr.]
+
+[Footnote 291: Nor yet by a luxury, whose magnitude one exaggerates in
+comparing their outlays with our income, and which injured them only in
+this way, that they inherited the nations like East Indian cousins. It
+was that of a cobbler who has won the highest prize in the lottery; it
+was the squandering of a soldier after the plundering. Hence they had
+luxury without refinement. It could maintain its greatness only by
+growing greater. Had one thrown to them America with its gold bars,
+they might, with greater luxury, have gone on this crutch some
+centuries longer.]
+
+[Footnote 292: It is well known that the head of the poor negro is shut
+up in a hollow one of iron, which presses down his tongue.]
+
+[Footnote 293: Written in the year 1792.]
+
+[Footnote 294: The millionnaire presupposes the beggar, the scholar,
+the Helot; the higher culture of individuals is purchased by the
+degradation of the mass.]
+
+[Footnote 295: Written in 1792. At present the tempest which once stood
+in the heavens over all Europe lies out there in the level earth.]
+
+[Footnote 296: For after 400,000 years the earth's axis, as Jupiter's
+is now, will be perpendicular to the plane of its orbit.]
+
+
+
+                             END OF VOL. I.
+
+
+
+                           *   *   *   *   *
+      Cambridge: Stereotyped and Printed by Welch, Bigelow, & Co.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Hesperus or Forty-Five Dog-Post-Days
+Vol. I., by Jean Paul Friedrich Richter
+
+*** END OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK HESPERUS OR FORTY-FIVE ***
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