Transcriber's Note:
1. Page scan source: Making of America http://www.archive.org/details/hesperusorforty01paulgoog
2. Greek words are transliterated within brackets, e.g. [Greek: naos].
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 phœnix 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 diarrhœa.—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 assafœtida 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 assafœtida 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 assafœtida 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 Phœnix) 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: ναος, 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
—Fœniculi
Cort. Aurant. immat.
Sal. Tart. āā 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."

++++[326=361

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....