D.

Divine Poet.--The Poet, although he paints the passions, nevertheless will hit them best at that period of life when his own, have slackened,--just as convex mirrors, precisely in those summers when the sun burned the faintest, have acted the most intensely, and in the hot ones the least so. The flowers of poesy are like other flowers, which (according to Ingenhouse) thrive best in a dim, hazy sunlight.

E.

Emotion (Sentimental).--Sentimentality often imparts to the inner man, as apoplexy to the outer, greater sensibility and yet paralysis.

F (_see_ Ph)

G.

Goddess.-As the Romans would rather recognize their monarchs as gods than as masters, so do men like to call the directress of their heart _goddess_ rather than mistress,--because it is easier to adore than to obey.

H.

H.--I have often seen people who had the wherewithal of living and knew how to live,--which are not two different things,--first, flutter about the best and most superior women and suck from the honey-cup of their hearts; and, secondly, I have seen them on the same day fold their wings and light on a miserable ninny, that the ninny might inherit their--heirs. But never have I compared these butterflies to anything but butterflies, which all day long visit and rifle flowers, and yet spawn their eggs on a dirty cabbage-stump.

H.

Holbein's Leg.--I prefer repeating the H in the place of I, because under the Rubric of the I would come the _Invalides_, of whom I had meant to assert, that, as people who have had limbs taken off become full-blooded, so they have the less bread handed to them the more limbs they have had shot or cut off, and that this is called the Physiology and Dietetics of the military chest.--But I have pitied these (half) poor devils too much to do it.

The famous legs of Holbein afford a better joke than legs that have been taken off. That is to say, this painter used his brush in Basle only upon Basle itself; and the self-same circumstance that drove his genius to this architectural dyeing-business compelled it often to hold recess-hours therein,--namely, he guzzled terribly. A house owner, whose name is wanting in history, often came to the house-door, and swore up at the scaffolding, when the house-stainer's legs--for that was all of the painter that could be seen--were standing or staggering in the neighboring wine-cellar. Then when Holbein by-and-by came stalking along with them across the street, a quarrel came to meet him and went with him up the scaffold. This irritated the painter, who made a study even of his cups, and he proposed to himself to reform the owner. That is to say, as he owed his misfortune wholly to his legs, whose festoons the man wanted to see under the scaffolding, he resolved to make a second edition of his legs, and paint them on the house in a hanging posture, so that the man, when he looked up from the house-door below, should get the idea that the two legs and their boots were painting away up there busily. And the owner took this idea, too; but, as he observed at last that the counterfeit foot-works hung all day in one spot and never moved along, he wanted to see what kept the master so long improving and retouching at one part, and so up he went. Up there in the vacuum he easily saw that the painter ceased where the knee-pieces began, at the knee, and that the trunk, which was wanting, was again guzzling in an _alibi_.

I do not blame the owner for not at once on the scaffolding drawing a moral from the leg-works; he was too furious.

I meant to have appended a further history of the princely portraits which hang there behind the President in the Session-Chambers instead of the originals, by way of casting-votes,--but I should disturb the connection; here, too, was formerly the end of the First Part.

17. DOG-POST-DAY.

The Cure.--The Prince's Palace.--Victor's Visits.--Joachime.-- Copperplate Engraving of the Court.--Cudgellings.

When I was in Breslau, I said, "I wish I were the Fetzpopel!"[191] just as I was devouring the portrait of that personage. The Fetzpopel is a silly woman whose face is stamped on the Breslau ginger-cookies. I say what follows not merely on my own account, for the sake of getting my own head on to such gingerbread paste, but also for the sake of other literati, whom Germany honors with monuments as little as it does me,--for instance, Lessing and Leibnitz. As one must always feel so disagreeably in the German circles, until half a rod of stones, at least, are got together for the monument of a Lessing or other magnate, (the most that we have as yet is what few stones good reviewers throw at a literary man, as the ancients did upon graves,)--accordingly, I expressed myself freely in the Breslau market-place before I had bitten into the Fetzpopel: "Either the temple of fame and the bed of honor for German authors are on this gingerbread here, or else there is no fame at all. When will it be the time, if it is not now, to expect of the Germans that they shall take the faces of their greatest men and emboss them upon eatables? because, certainly, the stomach is the most important German member. If the Greek lived only among statues of great men, and thereby became great himself, then surely would the Viennese, if he had the greatest heads always before his eyes and on his plate, fall into enthusiasm and an emulous desire to promote himself and his face also on to gingerbread, and other cakes, pies, and cracknels. Meusel's learned Germany might be copied in baker's-work,--one might emboss great heroes upon army-biscuit, in order to set on fire the common soldiery and make them hunger for glory,--great poets I would sketch on bridal-cakes in inlaid sculpture, and heraldic geniuses on oatmeal bread,--of authors for women sweet box-pictures might be designed for sugar-work. If this were done, then would heads like Hamann or Liskov meet more generally the German _taste_ in such dress; and many a scholar who had not a loaf of bread to eat would at least ornament one; and we should have, beside the paper nobility, a baked one also." As regards myself, who up to this time never saw my face anywhere except in the shaving-glass, they shall mould me (for I am least known in Westphalia) on Westphalia rye-bread.

Now to the story again. A tall, curly-haired man stands in the night before the many-colored house of the apothecary Zeusel, peeps up at the lighted third story, which he is about to occupy, and at last opens, instead of the wooden door, the glass one of the apothecary's shop. O my good Sebastian! a blessing on thy entry! May a good angel give thee his hand, to lift thee over boggy roads and man-traps; and when thou hast fallen into a snare and been wounded, then may he fan the wound with his wing, and a kind man cover it with his heart!

In the apothecary's shop, which blazed like a ballroom, one of the fattest court-lackeys was begging of one of the leanest dispensers a maniple more and a little pugillus[192] of moxa[193] for his Highness. But the lean man took behind his scales a half-open handful of moxa, and four finger-tipfuls more (for in fact a little pugillus amounts to only three finger-tips), and sent it all to the feet of the Prince. "When we have burnt all this," said he, pointing to the moxa, "his Highness will soon have a podagra as good as can be found in the country."

The reason why the dispenser gave more than the recipe said was that he also wished to have his pew in the Temple of Fame; therefore he would first think over a recipe that was handed to him until he approved it, and then he always weighed out 1/11 or 1/17 of a scruple too much or too little, in order to take off from the doctor's head the civic crown of the recovery and put it on his own. "Only with such gifts can I work my cures," said he. Victor did not begrudge him the illusion. "A dispenser," said he, "who leads the whole column of convalescents, and turns over to the doctor merely the rearguard of corpses, has already laurels enough for this short life _under_ his brain-pan."

The apothecary Zeusel has good breeding enough not to bore his tenant by forcing upon him a reception-dinner, and merely gave him _this_ newspaper article from his oral _Morning Chronicle_ of the city, that the Prince had not so much got the gout as that he was trying to get it and settle it. He also gave him the Italian servant whom his Lordship had hired for him, and his chamber.

--And therein Sebastian is now sitting alone on the window-seat, and seriously considering, without glancing at the beauties of the room or the prospect, what he properly shall have to do here to-morrow, and day after tomorrow, and longer. "To-morrow, I blaze away at once," said he, and twirled the tassel of the curtain-cord; "I and the gout must settle ourselves down with the Prince. It is hard when a man has to use the gouty matter of a Regent for water to turn his mill: a polypus in the _heart_ or dropsy on the _brain_ would annoy me less as a courtier; either would be respectable _means of grace_ and fins for swimming upward. No, I will stand straight and firm, entirely upright; from the very first I will not yield an inch, so that they shall always find me the same. Not so much as quartering and anchoring in antechambers is to be thought of." (Indeed, his Lordship had already stipulated to the soliloquist an exemption from the annoyance of court etiquette.) "Ah, ye fair spring-years! Ye are now flown away over my head, and with you peace and mirth and studies and sincerity, and none but good, genial hearts!" (He suddenly twirled the curtain-tassel up shorter.) "But, thou good father, thou hast not even had such good years,--thou roamest over the earth and givest up thy days to the welfare of men! No, thy son shall not spoil nor embitter for thee thy sacrifices,--he shall conduct himself here discreetly enough,--and then, when thou comest back again and findest here at court an obedient, favored, and yet uncorrupted son..." When the son actually thought to himself, that, if he should thus culminate in a right ascension at court, he might win the heart of the Chaplaincy, the heart of Le Baut, that of his father, those of his whole kindred, and (provided he thought of _that_) even the heart of Clotilda,--by that time he had twisted off the curtain-tassel and held it like a tuberose in his hand, ... and so he thought best to lay himself quietly down in his bed.

--Get up, my hero! The morning sun already reddens thy balcony,--jump up amidst the ringing of the bells for the week-day sermon, and amidst the din of this market-day, and look round on thy bright chamber! Thy father, of whom thou hast been dreaming all night, has furnished it full of musical and artistic instruments and apparatus, and thou wilt think of him the whole morning; and yet the balcony offers thee still more,--the sight of a green strip of fields, and, toward the west, of the heights of Maienthal, the whole market-place, the private residence of the senior parson of the city opposite, into all the rooms of which, that he lets to thy Flamin, thou canst look!

Flamin, however, is not in there just now: for it was he who had already laid hold of my hero, and accosted him in those words of mine, "Get up!" A new situation is a spring-cure for our hearts, and takes away from them the oppressive feeling of our transitoriness; and beneath such a cheerful sky of life my Victor to-day dances with everything and everybody,--with the forenoon hours,--with the Regency-Counsellor,--with the apothecary,--out through the apothecary's shop right before the dispenser, on his way up to the palace to make a few passages with the gouty Januarius.

--He has hardly been at the Prince's half an hour, when Zeusel sees him running back again into his medicinal warehouse.... "Heigh! heigh!" thinks the apothecary.

But it was quite different from what he thought. Through an abatis of uniforms--for the entrances to princes' apartments are almost like lanes of tents, and rulers cause themselves to be guarded as anxiously as if they feared they might be the _first_ or the _last_--Victor made his way into the sick-chamber. Before a patient who lies in a horizontal position one can keep a perpendicular one more easily. Great folk often confound the effect of their apartment and furniture with their own: if the _savant_ could come upon them on a common, in a wood, in a cabbage-field, he would know how to deport himself. Victor, however, had himself been brought up in apartments that were embroidered, and furnished with gold corner-clips. So when he found his father's friend in pain and with his legs packed up, he exchanged his English composure for the professional, and, instead of awaiting haughty princely questions, began to propose medical ones. When the doctor's medical confessional session was at an end, he laid his hand, instead of on the head of the penitent, on the Bible which lay by it, and was going to swear, but gave that up because a better idea had occurred to him, and he opened--this was what had come into his head--the gospel of the paralytic: "For the podagra in this case is not to be thought of," said he. He showed him that his whole complaint was--wind (figuratively and literally speaking),--that it lodged itself in the relaxed vessels of the system, and insinuated itself, like the Jesuits, under every different form, through all the members,--even his pain in the calf was nothing more than that displaced human or intestinal ether. The physician in ordinary, Culpepper, is to be excused for his error in regard to the Prince; for every physician must make his selection of some universal malady, into which he resolves all others, which he treats _con amore_, in which, as the theologue does in Adam's sin, or the philosopher in his first principle, he detects all the rest. It rested, therefore, with the free will of Culpepper, whether to pick out for himself as the radical malady, to be the nest-egg and mother-bulb of his pathology, the podagra in the case of men, with women the flux, or not. When he has once made his choice, then he is obliged to endeavor to fix it upon his Highness, like pastel or quicksilver. January had never, even from his chapel, heard anything more agreeable than Victor's assertion, which set him free from the prostration, dosing, and starving which he had had to go through. Victor, in his joy at the lightness of the malady, hurried away to give his recipe for it, after he had asserted, by way of consolation, that "an _ethereal_ body was still to be taken along with him, and would serve the soul, not indeed for a heavenly Graham's-bed,[194] but still for an air-bed, which made itself up. Only poor women's-souls--if one rightly regarded their bodies--might be said to lie on thorny straw sacks, smooth hussars'-saddles, and sharp sausage-sledges[195]; whereas shaven and tattooed spirits (monks and savages) wrapped themselves up with such fine bodies stuffed with whalebone shavings."[196]

Away he flew; and I have already reported that the apothecary presently thought to himself: "Heigh! heigh!" In the apothecary's shop Victor said to the dispenser, at whom he flew like saltpetre: "Sir colleague, what think you about it, if we should have nothing to cure in the case of his Highness but wind? You must advise me. For my part, I should prescribe:--

_Pulv. Rhei Orient_. _Sem. Anisi Stellati_ ----_F[oe]niculi_ _Cort. Aurant. immat_. _Sal. Tart. [=a][=a] dr. I_. _Fol. Senn. Alexandr. sine Stipit. dr. II_. _Sacchar. alb. unc. sem_.--

"If you agree with me, I have nothing more to say, except, _C. C. M. f. p. Subt. D. ad Scatulam, S_. Colic-powders, one teaspoonful as often as occasion requires."[197]

As the dispenser looked at him seriously, he looked at him still more seriously; and the medicine was prepared without a change in the dose. When he had gone, the dispenser said to his two startled pages: "You couple of stupid epiglottises, don't you suppose he has sense enough to ask?"

The biographer has no need whatever to justify the circumstance--since the powder and the hero justify it--that January got upon his legs the very same day.

As princes feel no pressure of the atmosphere, except that of the air which is in their bodies, January's gratitude for his deliverance from this pressure, was so unbounded that for the whole day he would not let the Doctor go from his side. He must dine,--sup,--ride,--play with him. In the palace it was tolerable; it was not like Nero's, a city within a city, a Flachsenfingen in Flachsenfingen, but merely barracks and a kitchen full of soldiers and cooks. For before every mouldy archive, before every room where lay genuine diamonds, before every door-lock, and before every stairway a bayonet was planted, with the protector and patron who was attached to it. The numerous crew of kitchen-servants lived and fired up in the palace, because his Highness was continually eating. By this continual eating he would make his fasting easier for him; for at the three ritual mealtimes of men he touched--because Culpepper would so have it--desperately little, and could not wholly contradict the courtiers who praised his strict diet. A watchmaker from London had done the most to help him out in this moderation by contriving for him a servant's bell, and a spring-work whose index stood upon a great dial-plate in the servants' apartment; the margin of the dial-plate was encircled, instead of the hours and the days of the month, with the names of viands and wines. January had only to ring the bell and press the spring, and the household immediately knew whether the tongue and the victual-index pointed to pastry or to Burgundy. In this way, by tinkling like a mill when his inner man had nothing more to grind, he was most easily enabled to observe a stricter diet than physicians and moralists could well demand, and he shamed more than one grandee, whom, after eviscerating in death, they were obliged to lay out upon the bed of state with the hungry stomach under one arm and the thirsty liver under the other, as they give to capons also their two viscera as a body-guard between their two wings.

Victor was as much at home in the palace as in the parsonage; for the court proper, the proper courtly worms'-nest and frog-spawn, was resident merely in the palace of the actual minister, Von Schleunes, because he had to do the _honneurs_ of the throne, to invite ambassadors, strangers, &c. The Princess resided in the large old palace, which was called the Paullinum. Thus, then, did January spend his days without pomp, but with comfort and convenience, in the true solitude of a philosopher, and passed them away in eating, drinking, and sleeping; hence could the Flachsenfingen Prorector compare him, without flattery, to the greatest of the old Romans, in whom we admire a similar hatred of show and state. January had, in fact, no court, but went himself to the court of his actual minister; with extreme reluctance, however: he could not love anything there,--neither the Princess, who was always there, nor Schleunes's unmarried daughters, which would have been against his London vow.

About twelve o'clock at night Zeusel would have been glad to find out how all was going on, and brought to the physician in ordinary his niece _Marie_, whom he offered to him as a female lackey. The physician, who could not play the fool with any fool in the world, especially under four eyes, thrust before the slender pike a crateful of the food of truth, which the latter greedily devoured as if it were pine-apple. Marie was a relative and a Catholic, impoverished by a lawsuit, and disappointed in love, who, in the cold, hollow family of the apothecary, received and expected nothing but thrust-wounds of words and shot-wounds of looks; her broken and crushed soul resembled the marsh-willow, of which one can strip down backward all the twigs with the mere hand. She felt no longer pained at any humiliation; she seemed before others to crawl, but in truth she lay continually prostrate on the ground. When the gentle Victor saw this meek, averted form, over which so many tears had flowed, and this once beautiful face, on which, not the sorrows of fancy had laid their charming painter's-touches, but physical pangs had emptied their poison-bags, then did the fate of mortals bring sadness to his heart, and, with the softest of courtesy towards Marie's station, sex, and sorrow, he declined her services. The apothecary would have despised himself if he had taken this politeness for anything else than fine raillery and good breeding. But Victor threw her off once more; and the poor girl withdrew in silence, and, like a maidservant, without spirit enough for courtesy.

Nevertheless, in the morning the rejected one brought him his breakfast with downcast eyes and painfully smiling lips; he had heard in his bed how the apothecary and his hard sprouts of daughters had twitted Marie with her "doleful whining air," and therefrom inferred a "_refusal_ from the jesting gentleman" overhead. His soul bled within him, and at last he accepted Marie;--he made his eye and his voice so soft and sympathetic that he could have lent either to the most tender maiden; but Marie took nothing of it to herself.

January could hardly wait for him to come again.

The third day also it was just so.

And so, too, the next week.

--But I could wish my readers had all ridden in a body, at this time, through the Flachsenfingen gate, and that this learned company had scattered itself through the city in order to institute inquiries about our hero. The reading scouts sent by me to the coffee-houses would learn that the new English doctor had already unseated the old one,--helped the parson's son at St. Luna to the post of Regency-Counsellor,--and that great changes in all departments were at hand. The division which I distributed among the butlers, butchers, fishery-masters, castellans, and valets of the court, would bring me word that the Prince had patted the Doctor, not on the fingers, but on the shoulder,--that he had day before yesterday showed him with his own hand his picture-cabinet, and sent him the best piece out of it,--that in the theatre he had looked out with him from the stage-box,--that he had presented to him a snuff-box rich with jewels (the usual civic crown of rulers, and their calumet, as if we were Greenlanders, who never love to receive any other present so much as snuff),--and that they would travel together. Two of the very finest and most dignified readers whom I had detached from these columns, and of whom I had despatched the one to the Paullinum to the Princess, the other to the actual Minister, would at least report to me the news that Prince and Doctor had called together upon both, and that both had looked upon my hero as a singular, shy, taciturn Englishman, who owed everything to his father.

But the last piece of news which the readers have related to me they cannot, I am sure, possibly know; and I will myself tell it to them.

--Before I deliver this, let me first simply explain in three words how it was that Victor rose so rapidly. There may be Evangelist-Matthieus among my readers who take this sudden rise, like that of the barometer, as the sign of a speedy fall,--who will say that laurels and salad, which have been forced to ripen in twenty-four hours by spirit on a cloth, wither again just as soon,--nay, who will even joke about the matter, and give out that the Prince's intestines, with their ether, are a fish's swimming-bladder to my hero, who only by its inflation mounts upward. Mining-superintendents laugh at such readers, and inform them that men, particularly the occupants of thrones, look upon a new physician as a new specific,--that they are always most ready to obey a new one,--that Sebastian always deported himself towards every one the first time in the finest manner, whereas with old acquaintances he never said unnecessarily anything witty,--that January loved every one whom he could see through, and that he fortunately recognized in my hero merely a gay fellow fond of life, and did not remark around his head any of Bose's Beatifications,[198] which smell of phosphorus and emit painful sparks,--that Victor was not, like Le Baut, a _pot-plant_ in a crown, but a hyacinth hanging in the open air high above it,--that he was cheery, and made every one else so,--and that another mining-superintendent would not have made so much ceremony with his readers as I: _he_ would merely have told them the main circumstance, that in Victor, in his waggery and behavior generally, the Prince had found and fallen in love with an enchanting resemblance to his fifth son, the _Monsieur_ (lost on the Seven Islands), and that he had made this observation even in London, although Victor was five years younger than the latter.

January chose, himself, to present his favorite to everybody, and so to the Princess too. The philosophers have it to explain why Sebastian never once remembered, until he sat beside the princely bridegroom on the coach-cushion, the mad, enamored little strip of paper which, in Kussewitz, he had pasted above the Imperator of the _montre-à-regulateur_, and thrown into the Princess's bargain. He started, and held it to be impossible that he should have been such a fool. But such a thing is easy for a man. His fancy flung back upon every scene, upon every idea, so many focus-lights from a thousand mirrors, and spread around the future, which stretched out beyond, so many colored shadows and so much blue mist, that he was really frightened when a foolish action came into his head; for he knew, that, when he should have rejected it ten times and then thought it over thirty times more, then, after all, he should go and do it.--When the two appeared before the Princess, Victor was in that agreeable frame, which is nothing new to tutors and young scholars, which stiffens the limbs to bone, and sends the heart up into the mouth, and petrifies the tongue;--it was not the certainty that _Agnola_ (that was the name of the Princess) had read the aforesaid advertisement on the watch, which so disconcerted him, but the uncertainty whether she had or not. In his agony he never thought of _this_,--that she, of course, did not even know his handwriting or the authorship of the little slip; and even if one does think of that in his agony, still it does not leave him.

--But all was, at once, above, below, and contrary to his expectation. The Princess had laid aside the face of sensibility with her travelling-dress, and had put on instead a fine, firm gala-face. The crowned bridegroom January was received by her with as much warm decorum as if he were his own ambassador of the first rank. For January, the disk of whose heart charged itself full of sparks on the electrizing-cushion of a fair cheek or a bosom-handkerchief, had for that very reason towards Agnola, with whom merely from policy he had concluded the concordats of marriage, all the warmth of the month after which he was named. Towards Victor, the son of her hereditary foe, the successor to the house-thief of princely favor, she cherished, as is easy to guess, true tenderness. Our poor hero, surprised at January's coldness, which seemed to promise on the part of the wife no special warmth toward himself, demeaned himself as gravely as the elder and younger Cato at once. He thanked God (and so do I) that he came away.

But all the way back he kept thinking: "If I could only have got my missive out of the watch-case! Ah, then I would have done everything, poor Agnola, to reconcile thee to thy fate and thy husband!--Ah, St. Luna," he added, as they passed along before the city parson's house, "thou peaceful spot, full of flowers and of love! The masters of the hunt send thy Bastian from one baiting-house to another!"

For he must also, for politeness' sake, go at least to the actual Minister's, and January took him along with him. Thither he went with gusto, as if into a sea-fight, or into a quarantine hospital, or into the Russian ice-palace.

Furniture and persons in the house of Schleunes were in the finest taste. Victor found there, from the wabble-headed figures[199] and court-people, even to the basaltic busts of old philosophers, and to the dolls in the shape of Schleunes's daughters, from the polished floor to the polished faces, from the powdering cabinet to the reading cabinet,--both of which painted the head in the mere passage through them,--in short, everywhere he found all that the sumptuary laws have ever forbidden. His first embarrassment with the Princess gave him the pitch for a second. It was no longer the old Victor at all. I see beforehand that the worthy schoolmasters at the Marianum in Scheerau will be hard upon him for it,--especially the rector,--that he should have so little knowledge of the world as to be, while in this company, witty without vivacity, constrainedly free without complaisance, too constantly in motion with his eyes, too immovable in his other members. But one must suggest to these courtly and scholarly people, that he could not help it. The rector himself would have been embarrassed as well as Victor before the _bel-esprit_ of a minister's lady, whom, though, to be sure, Meusel has not introduced her into his, the court has into _its_ Learned Germany,--before her quizzing daughters, especially the handsomest, who was named Joachime,--before a number of strangers,--before so many people who hated him on his father's account, and who watched him in order to explain and verify his relations with the Prince,--before the Princess herself, whom the Devil had also brought hither,--before Matthieu, who here was in his element, and in his leading character and bravura air,--and before the Minister,--especially before this last. Victor found in him a man full of dignity, from whom business did not take away politeness, nor thinking wit; and whom a little irony and coldness only the more exalted, but who seemed to despise feeling, scholars, and mankind. Victor generally imagined to himself a minister--e. g. Pitt--as a Swiss glacier, on which the clouds and dew that nourish it freeze overhead, which oppresses the low places, and, in its alternation between melting and congealing, sends out great torrents down below, and out of whose clefts corpses are drifted.

January himself was not quite comfortable among them: what availed him the finest dishes, if they were embittered by the finest conceits? The card-table was, therefore, especially upon the peaceful arrival of his spouse, his quiet place of anchorage; and his Victor was for this once also glad to anchor beside him. My correspondent thinks that the tuning-key to this over-fine, demi-semi-_tone_ was turned by the Minister's lady merely, who had all sciences in her head, and to be sure at-her tongue's end, and for that reason held a weekly _bureau-d'esprit_. In this ridiculous position, Sebastian played away his evening and gobbled down his _souper_; he could tell a good story, but he had no story to tell,--in the few _contes_ which stayed by him all was anonymous, and to the circle about him the names were precisely the things of the first importance; nor could he make use of his humor either, because a humor like his places the possessor himself in a mild comic light, and because, therefore, only among good friends whose respect one cannot lose, but not among bad friends whose respect one must hold by defiance, can it venture out in its sock and harlequin's-collar,--he did not even enjoy the happiness of inwardly laughing at them all, because he had no time for it, and because he never found people ridiculous till their backs were turned.

He was confoundedly badly off. "You'll not catch me here again very soon," he thought to himself; and when, through the two tall glass doors of the balcony, which looked out upon the garden, the moon stole in with its dreamy light, which out there fell upon stiller dwellings, fairer prospects, and calmer hearts,--then he stole out upon the balcony (as his partnership at the card-table was broken up by the Prince after supper), and the night that glistened on the earth and in the heavens exalted his bosom with greater scenes. With what love thought he then of his father, whose philosophic coldness was like the January snow, which covers the seed from the frost, whereas that of the court resembles the snow of March, which devours the buds! How sorely did he reproach himself for every discontented thought about his honest Flamin's slight want of refinement! O, how his inner man erected itself like a fallen and forgiven angel, when he imagined to himself Emanuel leading Clotilda by the hand, and rapturously asking him, "Where hast thou found to-day an image of this my friend?" At this moment he yearned inexpressibly to be back again in his St. Luna....

His quickening heart-beats were all at once checked by _Joachime_, who came out with a burst of laughter directed toward the parlor. As it was a burden to her to sit for a single hour, (I wonder how she could lie in bed a whole night,) she extricated herself as often as she could from the curb-bit of the card-table. The Princess released her this time, who suspended this _night-work_ of great people on account of the weakness of her eyes. Joachime was no Clotilda, but still she had two eyes polished like two rose-diamonds, two lips like painted ones, two hands like casts, and, in fact, all the duplicate members were very pretty.... And with these a court-physician can keep house well enough, though the single ones (heart, head, nose, forehead) are not those of a Clotilda. As now under the open heaven he recovered his spirits, and on the balcony, which for him was always a parlor, the use of his tongue,--as Joachime's tone attuned him again to his own,--as she assailed the taciturnity of the English, and he defended the exceptions,--as he could now run, like a spider, up and down along the thread of the conversation, and was no more to be disturbed by the Princess, who had followed after to cool off in the night-air her inflamed eyes,--and as one complains of feeling ennui only when one himself inflicts it,--and as I transcribe all this, I do enough (I think) for a reviewer, who stands up behind the coach-body of the Prince, and reflects and wonders what he shall have to hold on to (except the footmen's straps), in case Victor, sitting before him in the carriage, does not during the ride home wish the Minister's house at the Devil, but thinks more contentedly,--Well, it's tolerable enough![200]

Victor's society agreed so well with the Prince, that he fancied he could as little do without him as a canoness out of the house can think of taking the badge of her order off her person. He always plunged into the sacred cup and welcome of the warm spring of a new friendship as immoderately as a guest at Carlsbad does into his. When he felt ennui, the Medicus was besought to come and drive it away; when he experienced an inward jubilee, that person was again entreated to appear, that he might participate in the jubilation. Only those times at which January felt neither ennui nor the contrary were left to his friend to spend entirely at his own pleasure. Victor had sworn beforehand to make an easy matter of refusing, and had broken out upon people of easy consent; now, however, he said, "The Devil may say, No! Just let a man find _himself_ in the same situation first!" ... And so must our poor Victor describe nothing but empty, dizzying gyres in the court-circle of the throne, among people for whose tone he could more easily have an _ear_ than a _tongue_, and whom he could read, but could not win.

A youth in whose breast hang the night-pieces of Maienthal and St. Luna,--or one who has just arrived from a watering-village,--or one who has it in mind to fall in love,--or one who, in great cities or in their great circles, must be an _idle_ spectator,--every such one is also, for that very reason, a _dissatisfied_ spectator therein, and blows into his critical pipe against the trifling company, till he himself is drawn in. But when all these causes actually meet in one and the same man, then can he find no relief against his gall-bladder nor any biliary duct, except to take some fine paper and send off to the Eymanns in St. Luna a confounded satirical letter upon what he has seen.

My hero despatched the following to the Parson:--

"MY DEAR SIR AND ADOPTED FATHER:"--

"I have not had hitherto spare time enough to lift my eyes up and see what moon we have. Verily, a court wants time for virtue. The Prince carries me about with him everywhere, like a smelling-bottle, and shows up his foolish Doctor. Erelong they will not be able to endure me: not because I am good for anything,--on the contrary, I am convinced they could bear the most virtuous man in the world quite as well as the worst, and that merely because he would be an Anglicism, an _homme de fantaisie_,[201] a _lusus naturæ_,--but because I do not talk enough. Business-people never trouble themselves about any conversational or epistolary style; but with court-people the tongue is the artery of their withered life, the spiral-spring and flag-feather of their souls; they are all born critics, who look at nothing but fine turns, expression, fire, and speech. This comes of their having nothing to do; their good works are _bon mots_,[202] their exchange business consists in visiting-cards, their housekeeping is a card-party, and their agriculture a hunting-party, and the _minor service_ a physiognomy. Hence they must have other people's faults all day long in their ears as an antidote to tedious leisure, as the physicians inoculate with the itch to counteract stupidity; a court-establishment is the regular penny post-office of the smallest items of news, even about you commoners, when you happen to have done anything really ridiculous. It were to be wished that we had festivals, or card-parties, or plays, or assemblies, or _soupers_, or something good to eat, or some amusement or other; but that is not to be thought of. We have, to be sure, all these things, but only their names; the President of the Exchequer would shrug his shoulders, if we should undertake to be, four times in a year, so brilliantly happy as you are four times a month. As our week consists of seven Sundays, it follows that our amusements are only signs in the calendar, epochs of time, to which no one pays heed; and a festival is nothing but a play-room for the plans which every one has in his head, the boards on which he is to act his leading part, and the season for continuing the intrigue against victims of love and of ambition. Here there is, every minute, a stinging mosquito, and the thistle-seed of beautifully painted trouble flies round far and wide.

"There are many women here who are good, and disciples of Linnæus, and their eyes classify men botanically, according to his fine and simple _sexual_-system; they make a great distinction between virtuous and vicious love,--namely, that of _degree_, or at least of time; and the _best_ often speaks on the subject like the _worst_, and the worst like the best. Meanwhile we have here female virtue and manly fidelity, in their way,--but no idea of them can be communicated to a parson; for these two jellies are so soft and delicate, that, if I should undertake to carry them down over all the steps of the throne to the parsonage, they would arrive there in such a spoiled and ruined state, that one would give them down below there the two opposite names,--for which, however, we ourselves have up here our special and corresponding objects. Your commoners would find our elderly men ridiculous in matters of love, as _they_ would your daughters. But what often embitters for me this happy court-life is the universal want of dissimulation. For no one believes here what he hears, and no one thinks how he looks; all must, according to the regular laws of the game, like cards, have the upper side uniform, and put on an external stillness of face as a cover to the internal fire, as the lightning destroys only the sword and not the scabbard. Consequently, as a universal dissimulation is none at all, and as every one gives every other credit for poison, no one can _deceive_ another, but only _outwit_ him; only the understanding, not the heart, is taken in. Meanwhile, to speak the truth, that is not truth; for every one has two masks,--the general and the individual. For the rest, the colors which are used upon the scientific, refined, and philanthropic painting of the outer man are necessarily scraped off from the inner man, but advantageously, since there is not much on the inner man, and the study of appearance lessens reality: so have I often seen hares lying in the woods that had not an ounce of flesh or a drop of fat on their bodies, because all had been absorbed by the monstrous fur which had continued to grow after their death.

"If one compares the substantial value of the throne and that of the low ground of the commonalty, the physical and moral exaltation of men appears to bear an inverse relation to that of their soil, just as the inhabitants of marshy lands are larger than mountaineers. But, nevertheless, those elevated people bear the state easily on butterfly-wings, survey its wheel-work with the hundred-eyed papilio's eye, and with a walking-cane defend the people from lions, or chase therewith the lions among the people, as in Africa the children of the herdsmen scare away with a whip the real lions of Natural History from the grazing cattle.... Dear Mr. Court-Chaplain, this satire began to pain me already on the former page; but here one is malicious, just as he is vain, without knowing when: the former, because one is obliged to take too much notice of others; the latter, because he is compelled to think too much of himself. No! Your garden, your sitting-room, are pleasanter; there, is no stony breast on which one _crucifies_ the arms and veins of friendship like a tree trained on an espalier; there, one is not obliged, as I am, to be twice a day under the barber's hands, and three times a day under the hair-dresser's; there, one has leave at least to put on his polished boot. Write soon to your adopted son, for I still deny myself the festival of a visit to you. Are there many baptisms and burials? What is _Fox_[203] doing, and the deaf bellows-blower? At this very moment I hear the mortar, instead of your rat-drum, pounding down below. Farewell.

"And now at last I greet you, beloved mother! My hand is warm, and in my heart a pair of souls are beating; for now your face, full of motherly warmth, shines on all my satirical ice-peaks, and melts them into warm blood, which will throb for you and for you flow. How good it feels to love again! Your second son, Flamin, is well, but too busy, and at present in St. Luna.[204] Greet my sisters and all that love you.

"Sebastian."

He reserved the letter in order to despatch the Regency-Counsellor, who wanted to take his person along with him, with a freight at least.

Meanwhile his and January's joint visits, with their stage entanglements, grew to quite other ones, even a ganglion of friendship between January and himself,--and at the same time gave this friendship increased notoriety. In St. Luna, in Le Baut's house, three times as much was made out of it as there was in it,--in the parsonage, nine times. To this was added a trifle, namely, a scuffle,--properly, two. I have the incident from Spitz,--Victor got it from Flamin,--he from Matthieu,--in whose noble historical style it can here be handed over to posterity. The Evangelist was never ashamed of a commoner, provided he could make a fool of him. Therefore he visited the court-apothecary without scruple. To the latter, who cordially hated the barrack-physician, Culpepper, on account of his coarse arrogance, and on account of the reason given in the note[205] below, Matthieu had long since promised to upset the Doctor. As the latter and the podagra had actually been banished by Victor from January's feet, the Evangelist gave the apothecary to understand that he himself would, without _his_ hint and wishes, have contributed far less to the fall of Culpepper than he had done. Zeusel, especially as he had the successor of the barrack-physician in his house, came after some days to the billiard-table with the certain conviction that he, from his apothecary's-shop, had thrust under Culpepper's posteriors the invisible leg, and hurled him down from the steps of the throne. There were present, unfortunately, the barrack-physician himself, and the noble Mat. Zeusel came upon this stage with the festoons of three watch-chains, with a pair of breeches on whose knees some Arabesques were printed, with a double waistcoat and double neck-tie, and with double signs of exclamation in his face at the barrack-physician;--his money-purse lay exactly under the _os sacrum_, because he, like some Englishmen, had caused his breeches-pocket to be concealed in the region of the breeches buckle. He had with him as his chamber-moor his long, lean dispenser, who in the adjoining drinking-room encountered the very short dispenser of the second apothecary's-shop, or shop of the _canaille_. The short dispenser, out of malice, followed the tall one about everywhere, merely to vex him; but this time he had just come back from the country with some hens'-eggs which he had collected as fees from convalescent patients.

Matthieu, after an exegetic hint to Zeusel, took the liberty of being of Culpepper's opinion in regard to the Prince's gout. Culpepper, who would fain be an old German,--such old Germans can never dissemble when they are angry, though they can very well do so from self-interest,--fired away and said the English doctor was a complete ignoramus. Zeusel displayed with a broad smile, as with a printer's vignette, his contempt for the coarse man. The Medicus looked like the Equator, the apothecary like Spitzbergen. Now the tourney went on merely upon the subject of the gout. The second and umpire, Matthieu, gave it to be understood, that "Zeusel, to be sure, loved his prince and lord, but still he could wish that this love had had the best means and the wholesomest influences. "In bawdy-houses," said Culpepper, "_that fellow there may_ have influence." When the apothecary, at these words, proudly and contemptuously straightened himself up, the Doctor slowly jammed him down on the chair and on his money-purse, and, bringing down his fist upon his shoulder, nailed the little coxcomb with his purse to the seat.

This pinning-down vexed the tailor-bird most of all, and he replied, trying to get up, that "he would this very day, if he were consulted, advise his Highness to adhere to his present better choice." The barrack-physician might perhaps have too hurriedly withdrawn his hand from the shoulder which it covered; for he grazed with it, as with a cannon, the nose of his adversary, whereupon the latter, like Saint Januarius, discharged some blood. The Evangelist was personally grieved "that two such sensible men could not fall out and fight with each other without personal hatred and heat, since they _might_, like princes who go to war, attack each other without either,--but the bleeding too well attested Zeusel's ebullition." ... Zeusel cried out to the Doctor, "You lout!" The latter, in his fury, actually took Matthieu's opinion, that the former bled only from fury, and compared him to those corpses which in old times bled, indeed, at the approach of the murderer, but from none other than quite natural causes. The Medicus, therefore, looked for his cane, which like a prince was gold-headed, and took his leave with the crowned stick, drawing it a few times, as with magnetic passes, across Zeusel's fingers; but I would call the staff, if I were in the place of other people, neither an ear-trumpet for Zeusel, which the physician applied to him, as they often do to persons hard of hearing, that the latter might hear better, nor yet a door-knocker, which he stretched out before the truth, that it might the more easily get admission into the apothecary. What he wanted was merely to oblige him to let his handkerchief drop, in order that he might look him in the face as he bade farewell, which he clothed in the following forbearing and neatly turned remark: "You tell your Doctor that he and you there are the two greatest blockheads in town."

Under these last words both dispensers kept themselves still enough in other respects, though not with their tongues, indeed; for the tall dispenser saluted, as second chorus, the short one with the same war-song, and was a genuine Anti-Podagrist. Whoso considers that the tall one loved my hero on account of his politeness, and could not bear the short one, because Culpepper sent all his prescriptions to _his_ shop,--such a one cannot expect anything less of the couple than a reflection of the scene in the billiard-room; but the tall dispenser was composed, and never, like Portugal, propagated edifying truths with blood, but--the moment the barrack-doctor called the court-physician a blockhead--he quietly took the hat of the short dispenser, who had deposited his income of eggs therein to guard them from being broken, and coolly, without the least resentment, placed the aforesaid hatful of eggs on the head of the professional brother; and by a slight squeeze fitted the Doctor's hat, which sat half an ell too high, upon the head of his friend,--with all the more propriety, as Castor and Pollux also had on egg-shells,[206]--and having effected this promotion, he went his way, without exactly caring to have much thanks for the felt-stuffing and the streaming face-poultice.

Fisticuffs spread abroad lesser truths, as wars do great truths. The Court-Chaplain Eymann sent a long letter of congratulation to Victor, and called him "January's kidney-keeper," and begged for his promised visit. A travelling[207]-advocate knocked at his door as at that of a superior court, and begged him for a princely injunction against the Regency-College. The apothecary, with his application about the _lavement_,[208] still holds back.

Victor still laid up for himself his first visit to St. Luna like a ripening fruit, and thereby vexed the Regency-Counsellor, who wanted to persuade him into it. But he said: "Those who are left behind in a place long indescribably for him who has gone from it, until he has made his first visit; and so, too, with him. After the first, both

## parties wait quite coolly and composedly for the second."--What he

neither said nor thought, but felt and feared, was this: that his demigoddess, Clotilda, who inhabited the most holy place in his breast, and who by her invisibleness had become dearer, more indispensable, and for that very reason more sure to his soul, would, perhaps, at her appearance, take away at once all hopes out of his heart.

It was on the evening of the day when he received Eymann's letter, that he thus fantasied: "Ah, if January would only continue so well! He must have exercise, but of an unusual kind,--the rider must walk, the pedestrian must drive. We ought to travel together on foot through the country, in disguise. Ah, I might, perhaps, be of service to many a poor devil! We would steal homeward through St. Luna,--No, no, no!" ...

He started back himself, affrighted at a certain idea,--for he feared he should, when he had once had it, even execute it; hence he said to it three times, No. The idea was this,--to persuade the Prince to visit Clotilda's parents. But it was of no use; he remembered that his father had held too strict a court of cognizance over the Chamberlain and the Minister. "And yet, what harm can Le Baut do to me? If I should only draw three sun-glances from January upon the poor fool! The wisest thing for me is, not to think any more about it to-day."

The dog will bring us the answer; I, for my part, make a bet--a fine connoisseur of human nature on my island bets the contrary--that he does not carry out this joke.

18. DOG-POST-DAY.

Clotilda's Promotion.--Incognito-Journey.--Petition of the Majors of the Chase.--Consistorial Messenger.--Caricature of the Flachsenfingeners.

To be sure he did--carry out the joke; but still at bottom I do not lose my bet. For it happened in this way. From the day when Doctor Culpepper had made that pass with his coarse hand, as with an electrical discharger, before the full-blooded nose of Zeusel, the man with three watches pressed his company upon my hero, who carried only one, and that, too, the clumsy one of the Bee-father. Zeusel always thanked God, if only a court-courier got drunk at his house, or the court-dentist over-ate himself. He always brought with him, when he came, certain secret items of intelligence, which were to be published. He kept nothing to himself, not though one had threatened to hang him in the cellar of his shop. He told our hero that the Minister was making interest in behalf of his Joachime for the place of second maid-of-honor to the Princess, who could select only the female part of her service for herself,--but that he could not fairly do it, because he, or his son Matthieu, had promised the Chamberlain Le Baut to procure the same place for Clotilda; he therefore begged my hero, who, as he saw, he said, was Matthieu's friend, to spare him the embarrassment, and induce the Prince (which would cost only _one_ word) himself to intercede with the Princess in behalf of Joachime; the Princess, who, besides, patronized the Minister, would, on more than one ground, do it with pleasure, and then the Minister could not help it, if the Chamberlain, the enemy of his Lordship, went away empty.

The simpleton, as one can see, had guessed out, merely from the two accounts, which he had got hold of, of the two office-seekers, the whole of the remaining case; and the very circumstance, which Matthieu disclosed to him, that the Minister was vacating a quarter of a wing of his palace, for a companion of his deceased daughter Giulia, had only strengthened his conviction. To such a degree does malice supply the place, not only of years, but also of information and insight!

My hero could say nothing to him except that--he did not believe a word of it. But after three minutes of private reflection he believed it all: for that was the reason, he saw, why the dear Clotilda had to come back from the seminary just at the arrival of the Princess,--that was the reason why Le Baut built around the Minister's son so many altars of incense and thank-offerings,--that was the reason why the old lady (in the Sixteenth Dog-Post-Day) serenaded, and so loudly, court-life,--in fact, as he further saw, two such outlawed, captive Court-Jews in Babylon must have the live Devil in them, until they are reinstated in the old holy city, and if they happen to have a handsome daughter, they will use her as the relay of their journey, and the Montgolfier of their balloon-ascension....

"O, only come, Clotilda!" he cried, glowingly;--"the court-pool will then be to me an Italian cellar, a flowery parterre. If thou art only once settled at the Minister's, then I shall have spirits enough and sparkle properly. What will my father say, when he sees us stand with two leading-strings, with one of which thou holdest the Princess, and I, with the other, the husband?" ... At this moment, Clotilda's recent objections to court-life fell like ice-flakes into his boiling blood; but he thought to himself: "Women, however, are a little mite more pleased with the court-residence of splendor than they themselves suspect or say, and far more than men are. Cannot he, too, bear, then, with a like soul-edifying position? She, as step-daughter of the Prince, is only half-miserable, compared with him,--and does she know, then, whether she may not some time be recalled from her _field-état_ to the court-garrison by an accident?" By this _accident_ he meant a marriage with Sebastian. Finally, he tranquillized himself with something which I also believe,--namely, that she had at that time, merely out of politeness, made a show of a certain coldness towards her new separation from her parents, and therefore towards the new place also; and then, too, pleasure at such a prospect might have been taken for warmth toward _somebody_ or other at court, e. g. toward her--_brother_, he thought to himself.

And now yesterday's idea, upon which I have lost my wager, came forth again, having shot up astonishingly in _one_ night,--namely, that, if he could persuade the Prince to make the journey and the visit to the Chamberlain, and while they were still on the road, could plead with him for a good word to the Princess in behalf of Clotilda,--then was it, in the first place, impossible for the stepfather to refuse a prayer for the most beautiful stepdaughter,--and, secondly, impossible for the Princess, when her spouse should exercise the privilege of the first petition, not to draw all possible advantage from the first opportunity of laying him under obligations to her.

--Eight days after, just at dusk,--in the autumn days night comes sooner,--the Court--Chaplain Eymann was standing on the observatory and peering at the sun, not for its own sake, but in reference to the evening-redness and the weather, because he wanted to sow the next morning,--when suddenly and with alarm he sprang down from the watch-tower into his house, and delivered the Job's tidings, that the Consistorial Messenger would be there in a moment, together with a French emigrant, and for the one there was not a farthing, and for the other not a bed in the house....

No soul came.

I can easily comprehend it; for the Consistorial Messenger reconnoitred around the parsonage, and so soon as he saw the court-physician, Victor, in wax, sitting up at the window, he marched instanter out of the village, straight back to Flachsenfingen. The emigrant had turned in at his professional cousin's, Le Baut's.

The two travellers were named January and Victor, and were returning this very day from their facetious flying tour.

That is to say, seven days ago, the Prince, who loved mask-dances and incognito-journeys and the ways of the commonalty, and who wished only the Minister's mental masks and incognito _further_, had started off on foot, with Victor, behind a fellow who had sallied forth in advance on horseback with the masquerade dresses and masquerade refreshments. January carried a sword in his hand, which was contained, not in any sheath, but in a walking-cane,--an emblem of court-weapons! He gave himself out in the market-town for the new Regency-Counsellor, Flamin. My hero, who at the outset had passed himself through the mint, and come out stamped as a travelling dentist, recoined himself in the third village into a Consistorial Messenger, simply because the couple met the true Messenger. This financial collector of the Consistory was made to hand over to the physician for this week--it cost the Prince only a princely resolution and an indulgence--his receipt-book and his ecclesiastical robe of office, together with the tin-plate sewed thereto. These plates are attached to Messengers, and the silver stars to coats of distinction, as the leaden ones are to bales of cloth, that one may know what the trumpery is worth.

For Büsching such a Rekahn's journey would be a windfall,--to me it is a true torment; for my manuscript is, besides, so large already, that my sister sits on it when she plays the piano-forte, because the seat is not high enough without the addition of the Dog-Post-Days.

What did January see, and what Victor? The Regency-Counsellor, January, saw among the public servants nothing but crooked backs, crooked ways, crooked fingers, crooked souls. "But a bow is crooked, and the bow is a sector of the circle, that emblem of all perfection," said the Consistorial Messenger, Victor. But what vexed January most was, that the officials respected him so exceedingly, when after all he gave himself out only for a regency-counsellor, and not for a regent. Victor replied: "Man knows only two neighbors: the neighbor at his head is his master, the one at his feet is his slave; what lies out beyond either of these two is to him God or beast."

What did January see still further? Untaxed knaves he saw, who enriched themselves at the expense of taxed poor men,--honest advocates he heard, who did not, like his courtiers or the English highwaymen, steal under the mask of virtue, but without any mask, and to whom a certain remoteness from enlightenment and philosophy and taste will not after death be prejudicial, because they can then in their own defence set up against God the exception of their ignorance, and represent to Him, "that no other laws but those of their own sovereign and of Rome can bind them, and that neither is God Justinian, nor is Kant Tribonian."[209] He saw hanging from the heads of his country-justices bread-baskets, and from those of their subjects muzzle-baskets; he saw, that, if (according to Howard) it takes two men to support one prisoner, here there must be given twenty incarcerated ones, that one city-magistrate may live.

He saw cursed stuff. But, on the other hand, as an offset, he saw on pleasant nights the cattle in fair groups feeding in the fields,--I mean the republican ones, namely, stags and wild boars. The Consistorial Messenger, Victor, said to him, that he had to thank the masters of the chase for this romantic spectacle, whose tender hearts had been as little able to execute the princely order of shooting wild game as were the Egyptian midwives to execute that of slaughtering the Jewish male children. Nay, the Financial Messenger at an alehouse had some yellow ink and black paper brought to him, and there,--while the slater drummed away on the roof to get some more slates brought to him, and the guests knocked on the pitchers to get them replenished, and the tavern-boy _tooted_ in at the window through a beer-siphon,--amidst this Babylonian din the Consistorial Tithingman drew up one of the best petitions that the noble gentlemen of the chase ever yet despatched to the Prince.

A PLAIN RELATION, FROM THE PETITION OF THE CHIEF MASTERS OF THE CHASE.

"That, as the wild game could neither read nor write, it was the bounden duty of the masters of the chase, who could, to write for them, and on conscience report that all the wild game of Flachsenfingen was pining under the tyranny of the peasant, as well the red game as the black.[210] That it made a chief-forester's heart bleed, to stand out of doors at night and see how the country-folk, out of an incredible ill-will to the deer, all night long, in the coldest weather, kept up on the borders of the fields a noise and fire, whistling, singing, shooting, so that the poor game might not be able to eat. To such hard hearts it was not given to reflect, that, if one should station around their potato-tables, as they do around their potato-fields, just such shooters and pipers, who should shoot away every potatoe from their mouths, that then they would necessarily grow lean. From just this cause the game was so haggard, because it could but slowly accustom itself to such treatment, as cavalry-horses learn to eat their oats from a beaten drum. The deer had often to go miles away, like one who, in Paris, picks up his breakfast at the inns,--in order, at last, to dash into a cabbage-field, which was beset by no such coast-guards and adversaries of the wild game, and there get a good bellyful. The dog-boys, therefore, said justly, that they trampled down in _one_ stag-hunt more grain than the game got to eat the whole week. These, and none other, were the reasons which had moved the chief masters of the chase to appear before his Highness with the humble prayer--

"That your Highness would be pleased to enjoin it upon the country-people to stay at night in their warm beds, as thousands of good Christians do, and as the game itself does by day.

"Thereby--the majors of the chase were emboldened to promise--a lift would be given at once to the country-folk and the stags, the latter could then graze the fields in peace, like the day-cattle, and would certainly leave the countryman the gleanings, while they contented themselves with the first-fruits. The country-folk would be happily freed from the ailments which come of night-vigils, from chills and exhaustions. But the greatest advantage would be this,--that, whereas hitherto peasants had grumbled at the hunting-socages (and not wholly without justice), because they delayed the time of the harvest, that then the deer in their place would undertake the harvest in the night, as the young men in Switzerland took upon themselves to cut the grain over night in the place of their sweethearts, so that the latter, when they came to their work in the morning, should find none there,--and thus would the hunting-socages no longer disturb any one in the matter of the harvest, except at most--the game," &c.

But what have we to tell of the Consistorial Fee-Messenger, Victor? That ecclesiastical collecting-servant astonished all parsons by his drollery, and all parsons' wives by his readiness, and nothing but his tin and his papers could adequately certify the genuineness of such a specimen of a Messenger. He collected all that the Consistorial Secretary had liquidated, and excused himself by the plea that it became neither him nor the Secretary in this case to be conscientious. In his brief administration, he bagged without shame all back-standing marriage-pledges of the smallest value, ("We in the College," said he, "are greedy for a half-bats,"[211])--moneys, when parties were divorced,--moneys, when marriages were concluded by councils, whether by indulgences for mourning-time, for blood-relationship, or for want of parental consent,--moneys, when the moneys were only once (_or twice_) paid, but not yet for the second (or third) time, although the Consistory always required this after-ring or resonance of the money in the single case where people had lost the receipt,--moneys which the parsons had to pay down merely for decrees wherein they were _exempted_ from payment.----

Thereupon he emptied his bag before the Prince, and flattened down the billow of money, and began:--

"Your Highness!

"The Devil is in the Consistory: it might be a Lutheran _Penitentiaria_ for all the Commandments, and is so only for the sixth. What an honest Consistorial administration has been able to scrape together lies there on the table. The pile might be as broad again, if the Consistory had sense enough to say, 'Who buys? fresh, new letters of indulgence for everything!'--It has shown, that, beyond certain degrees of relationship, it can grant bulls of dispensation as well as the Pope: why will it not, then, apply its indulgence to any nearer degrees? It would be able to dispense from great as well as from small, if it really set about it, and just as well from fast-day penances as from mourning, and thrice publishing, that erotic fast-time. By Heaven! if a single man, like the Pope, can be the spiritual washing-machine of whole continents, and can clean souls in bundles in the year of jubilee, then surely we all in the College may serve for the washing-machine of a single country. If that is not done, then we take--for we mean to live--sin-money and perquisites for the few things which we have graciously to wink at; and if in Sparta the _judges_ worshipped the goddess of Fear, so with us the _parties_ revere this fair _ens_.[212]--Had we only, at least, power to absolve from five or six great sins,--only, e. g., from a murder,--then could we allow divorces and expeditings of marriages, (these wholly opposite operations we perform successfully, just as the Karlsbad water at the same time dissolves the stone in the bladder and petrifies what is dipped into the well,) and do it for half the money."

Then, after a long pause,--"Your Excellency, it is, after all, impracticable, because the Devil has the secular counsellors mixed in among the ghostly; a half-_profane session-table_ cannot by any cabinet-making process be made over into a _holy chair_; there is, therefore, nothing to be wished--except a good digestion[213]--but a spirit of concord, that clerical and secular counsellors may properly feed upon the parties around which they sit, saving a couple of bones, that shall fall to us scribes and messengers. So have I often seen on the carcass of a dead horse starlings and ravens at once, in a motley row, sitting amicably together, and pecking away and devouring."----

My correspondent assures me that by these addresses the Court-Physician effected more with January than the Court-Chaplain by his. Many parties got their money, and some judges a most gracious letter, from the Prince's own hand.

Before I arrive with our disguised span in the suburbs of St. Luna, one or two things are still to be mentioned. To January's soul more knee-pedals were attached than to a pianoforte, which the favorite's knee, while it seemed to bend itself, moved at its pleasure. He was always the son of the present moment, and the reflection of his company. If he read in Sully, then he did not neglect for a week at a time the Regency-College, and sent for the President of Finance. If he read in Frederick II., then he was for furnishing the imperial contingent and himself commanding it, and went forenoons to the parade. He contemplated with pleasure the ideal of a good government, whether in print or in a speech, and often attempted approximations to it, reformations, investigations, and compensations, for whole weeks,--with the exception of _retrenchments_, which, after all, are the only merit a prince can earn without the help of others. During the whole crusade he was a true Philosopher Antoninus, and stood ready everywhere to reward and to punish and to enact; he felt, too, that he could make it practicable, if one only did not absolutely require him to _labor_ and to _abstain_; under _that_ the other part also went to the Devil.

In the beginning, he was pleased with the sentimental journey; when it was over, he was so again; but in the midst of it, all that was pressed out after the first runnings grew more and more bitter, and he wished for himself, instead of the country bill-of-fare, his dietetic dial-plate. Then, too, he had accustomed himself so much to valor, that, for want of it,--i. e. of his body-guard,--he was, so to speak, timid; hence, on one occasion, in the dark, at the tavern, he was while in bed, about to run through a young weaver with his cane-sword, because the weaver had confounded at night the princely bed with one of more peaceful contents. For the rest, all the rays of his favor now converged to a focus upon the single man of rank, the only courageous and confidential friend whom he had,--his Victor.

But my hero had everywhere something to enjoy,--at least, the thought of St. Luna; everywhere something to eat,--at least, when they came to a fruit-tree; everywhere something to read,--and though it were only charms against fires on the house-doors, old calendars on the walls, exhortations to charity on the alms-boxes; everywhere something to think of,--of the travelling pair, of the four acts of Nature's seasons, which are annually given over again, of the thousand acts in man, which never return; and everywhere something to love and to dream of,--for this was the very road which Clotilda had so often gone over on her journeys between Maienthal and St. Luna, and the friend of her rich heart found on this classic avenue nothing but great remembrances, magic passages, and a long, quiet, homelike bliss....

"St. Luna!" cried January, delighted at the mere thought of seeing once more a man of the world,--Le Baut. The mask of an emigrant was a thought he had himself hit upon, the better to draw out the Chamberlain, with whom he meant finally to give himself out as an hereditary foe of the Prince. Had there been in Le Baut's soul a higher nobility than the heraldic, or had Victor but known that the Chamberlain would recognize the Prince at the first glance, and that he would be able to do so for the very reason that the genuine suspended Consistorial Messenger had probably before this whispered the whole secret in the ear of the city of Flachsenfingen, he would have dissuaded him from the _noble masque_.

Sebastian, as we have mentioned, stayed back and in the open air, probably out of shame at his part, and evidently from a longing to look upon Clotilda's sunny face, which for so long a time had not risen upon him, in a scene more convenient and congenial to his heart. "And the parents will be glad to see me again," he thought beside, "when they have something to thank me for,"--namely, Clotilda's place at court. More than once did he start, as he stood watching there behind the blanket of the dark, to hear his name called out of the Parsonage, and, in fact, with such love and such longings for his answer that he could almost have given one. But it was only the people of the Parsonage talking with his little godson, and saying to him, "Dearest good Sebastian! Just see here: what have I got for you?" How the veiled paradise of to-day's spring lay in old relics around him! How he envied the shadowy heads in the palace, which he saw moving about the lights, and the old Parson's pug-dog, who would fain wag him in to the Parsonage-inmates, and who continued in there to perform his part on the stage of so sweet a past! But when some thistles round the palace reminded him of the mosaic ones on the floor within-doors, then was the envier to be envied, and, with the fairest dreams that were ever traced over the ground of his dark life, he went back to the Apothecary's.

The next day January followed, delighted with the parents, enraptured with the daughter, because they were so fine and she so fair. It cost my hero nothing but a word to move the step-father to the intercession for the appointment of the step-daughter, which our hero and the father had so often longed to see; and it cost the step-father, too, only a word with the Princess to get his and their petition granted.... Clotilda became maid-of-honor.

Immediately upon that, the Minister von Schleunes, in a congratulatory letter, pressed upon Clotilda's parents the quarter-wing of his house, and was happy, in the epistle, "that a higher petition had _repeated_ his own with such effect." I set up this nobleman as a model to all people of the world; although, at present, all writes itself _noble_ in the _moral_, as the Viennese do in the _heraldic_ sense.

Victor, who with his soul's eyes was peeping all day long into the Chamberlain's window, could hardly wait to see Clotilda, first in St. Luna, and next at court. He put off the visit from day to day, and night after night made it in dream. Not even his visiting-card--his letter to the Parson--had he sent off; he wanted, not only to carry it, but actually to supersede it, himself. But this, last thought--of suppressing the letter, for fear Clotilda might possibly get hold of this malicious conduct-list of courts, and therefrom contract a repugnance to the new office--he hurled forthwith out of his soul, as Paul did the viper from his hand. Woe to the heart that is not sincere towards a sincere one, is not great towards a great one, and warm towards a warm one, when it should be all this even towards one that is nothing of it all!

For the rest, he needed such a visit, and such a reciprocal visit, every day more and more; for he was not happy; and for this there were, besides himself, to blame, first, the Prince, secondly, Flamin, thirdly, nine thousand and thirty-seven persons. The Prince could not well help it; he poured out the whole cornucopia of his love on the Doctor, and took away from him all the freedom which the latter had been minded in the beginning so sacredly to maintain. Victor shook his head as often as he wrote in his journal, or log-book of his voyage of life, (at his father's behest,) and saw by his chart that he had passed over quite other seas and degrees of latitude and longitude than he or his father had desired. "However, I shall land right, at least," said he.--

But his Flamin brought still more sadness to his soul, which everywhere at once sought and bestowed love. He wanted to impart to the Counsellor, with the news of Clotilda's appointment, a joy like his own; but his friend received it as coldly as he did its bearer. The dust of law-papers lay thick on the organ-pipes of his spirits.--Chained to the session- and writing-tables, he was now, like chained dogs, wilder than he had been before when unfettered.--The efforts of his colleagues to dislocate the body politic into an anagram did not get from him the approbation which they deserved.--Then, too, there lodged itself in his soul the leaven of the jealousy of friendship, which could not feel it right that his Victor should see him seldomer and others oftener.[214]--But most was he affronted by Victor's refusal, when he besought his company to St. Luna.... In a word, he was vexed.

The nine thousand and thirty-seven men who were to my hero nine thousand and thirty-seven tormenting spirits are the gentlemen of Flachsenfingen jointly and severally, by means of their absurd character, which deserves not to be sketched here, but in an extra flyleaf.

EXTRA FLY-LEAF,

_Wherein is sketched the Ridiculous Character of the People of Flachsenfingen,--or Perspective Plan of the City of Little Vienna_.

Little Vienna is the name many give to my Flachsenfingen, just as we have a Little Leipsic, Little Paris,[215] &c. There can hardly, however, be two cities wider apart in manners than Flachsenfingen, where one gluts and drowns his life and his soul, and Vienna, where one, perhaps, does not sufficiently shun the opposite fault of a Spartan asceticism. The Little-Viennese, or Flachsenfingeners, open their hearts to the enjoyment of Nature far less than the orifice of the stomach.--Pastures are the kitchen-pieces of their cattle, and gardens those of the owners thereof; the Milky Way does not chain and satisfy their spirits half so much (though it is longer) as the Königsberg sausage of 1583 would have done, which was five hundred and ninety-six ells long, and four times as heavy as the learned man himself who has portrayed it to posterity,--Herr Wagenseil.[216]--Are these the traits upon which carriers ground the name of Little Vienna? I have often been in Great Vienna, and am personally acquainted with the grand crosses, little crosses, and commanders of the Order of Temperance, which is there so common. I can certainly, therefore, represent a valid witness, and must be believed, when I say, that, while in Little Vienna they guzzle extraordinarily, of Great Vienna, and emphatically of its cloister-people, I can and must maintain something very different: they have not only all the time the greatest thirst,--which certainly must needs be gone, if they quenched it,--but they also make use, against drunkenness, of a fine method of Plato's. That ancient advises us, in case of drunkenness, to look into a glass, in order, by the distorted figure therein which reminds us of our desecration, to be forever warned away from the vice. Hence whole chapters, the dean, the sub-senior, the junior canons, &c., often set vessels full of wine or beer before them, and lift them to their eyes, and in this _metamorphotic_ or caricaturing glass, which, by shaking, distorts still more the distorted features, contemplate themselves, according to the philosopher's advice, a good long while. I ask whether people who peer so deeply into the glass can love drinking?--

It does not, however, follow from this, that I deny the Great-Viennese a resemblance to the Flachsenfingeners, in such traits as do honor. Thus, for example, I must gladly allow a similarity of the former to the latter in this respect, that they, neither of them, are ever down with the disease of poetry or enthusiasm or sentimentalism,--which are all one. Victor would make this eulogy sound in his language somewhat thus: "The Viennese authors (even the best of them, only Denis and hardly three others excepted) give the reader no wings to bear him up over the whole world of the actual by that nobility of soul, by that contempt of the earth, by that reverence for old virtue and freedom and the higher love, wherein other German geniuses shine as in holy rays."[217] And he would refer for proof to the "Vienna Sketches," to "Faustin,"[218] to Blumauer,[219] and to the "Vienna Almanac of the Muses." This reproach even a Viennese would accept and turn to his credit, by asking us whether we have to show (like him) a "Musen-Almanach," with a sediment of filth, whereupon one might write, "With approbation of the brothel."--This feeling of literary difference compelled even a Nicolai,--otherwise no special _amoroso_ of the Vienna authors,--in his "Universal German Library," to build up for them a separate side-box, although he throws writers of all other German circles together into _one parterre_, or pit. In like manner have I seen in Bavaria, on the gallows, beside the usual post for the three Christian fellow-confessors, a special schismatic cross-beam attached, to which only the Jew tribe were strung up.

The Flachsenfingener knows that there is nothing in poets; and in books, where rills of verse run through the prose, he skips clean over the rills, just as certain people come late to church in order to escape the singing. He is a true servant of the state, who knows of what use the poetic golden vein is in the revision-, commission-, relation-, and enrolling-systems,--none at all; meanwhile, although he cannot appreciate a Klopstock or a Goethe, nevertheless he will not, in his leisure hours, despise a doggerel verse or crambo-rhyme. A soul of such a fortunate, robust nature, wherein one aims less to exalt his spirit than his income, makes it, to be sure, comprehensible how there may be a kine-pox, by means of which the Flachsenfingener has been able, like Socrates, to wander round alone in the plague of sentimentalism without being infected. The full moon produced with them full crabs, but no full hearts; and what they planted under it, that it might favor the growth, was not love, but--turnips. The genuine Little-Viennese shoots at much nearer targets than that white one over yonder. They marry there with true gusto, without having first shot themselves or sighed themselves to death,--they know no obstacles to love but ecclesiastical,--female virtue is a belt-buckle, which must hold as long as the surname of the daughter,--the hearts of daughters are there like letter-envelopes, which, when they have once been superscribed to one lord, can easily be turned so as to be addressed to another man,--the girls love there, not from coquetry, but from simplicity, any devil, except poor devils....

In short, my correspondent, from whom I have all this, is almost prepossessed in favor of Little Vienna, and therefore contradicts vehemently the author of the "Travelling Frenchman," who is said to have said somewhere--if I had him in the house, I should know how Little Vienna is properly named--that the Flachsenfingener has not energy enough to be at least a highwayman. Knef says, however, he will not give up the hope that they have been thieves, and backs himself by the cases of those that have been hung.

_End of the Extra Fly-Leaf, wherein was sketched the Ridiculous Character of the People of Flachsenfingen,--or of the Perspective Plan of the City of Little Vienna_.

But among such people my hero, with all his toleration, could not take any comfort whatever,--he who so hated all selfishness, especially in the sensual form, and who would gladly have attended Dr. Graham's lectures, wherein he taught men to live without eating,--he who so gladly opened his heart to the seed of truth winged by poesy,--who bore an Emanuel in his heart, and held the want of poetic feeling even as a sign that the _moral_ man had not yet laid aside all caterpillar-skins,--he who looked upon this whole life and the whole body politic as the hull in which the kernel of the next life ripens,--O, whoever thinks this is too lonely among them that think otherwise!--

So it stood with the world around him, when he got a line from the good wife of the Parson:--

"The general talk here is that you are dead. But I express my mind against people, that, as you let so little be heard from you, and have forgotten all the world, you must, for that very reason, be still alive. Do confirm my proposition! We all have a fond and foolish longing for you, and I should like to beg you to come on the twenty-first (if the wedding at the senior Parson's hinders you no more than it does my Flamin). We have nothing to offer you here, but the birthday of our Clotilda. O good my Lord, and my beloved Lordship, how has it been possible for you hitherto to remain so long mute and invisible? A true friend, who has nothing at all of the ladies of your court about her, not even their fickleness, wishes heartily to have you before her eyes and beside her ears,--and that lady is myself,--and when I see you come, I shall certainly weep for joy, let me laugh or pout the while as I will.

"E."

When did he receive this letter, so full of soul? And what answer did his make to it?--

It was on the loveliest evening, which announced the coming of the loveliest Sunday morning and of the magic after-summer,--he looked at the evening red under which lay Maienthal's mountains, and his heart beat heavily within him,--he looked toward the dawning red of the full moon which kindled over St. Luna, and his yearning thitherward became inexpressible,--he thought of Clotilda, whose birthday fell upon to-morrow,--and so, very naturally, as to-day closed, he went--to bed.

19. DOG--POST-DAY.

The Hair-Dresser with a (musical) Disease of the Lungs.--Clotilda in Victor's Dream.--Extra Lines on Church-Music.--Garden Concert by Stamitz.--Quarrel between Victor and Flamin.--The Heart without Solace.--Letter to Emanuel.

The October Sunday with which I fill up this Dog-Post-Day was, even at nine and a half o'clock in the morning, such a glad, glistening day in St. Luna, that the whole Parsonage thought of the Court-Physician.--"Ah, he ought to come to the concert this evening!" The _virtuoso_ Stamitz was to give one in Le Baut's garden.--"O, better earlier, even to dinner!"--"And to my forenoon sermon, if he will not come to the children's catechizing." Eymann, as he said this, had, more than anything else, his newly dressed peruke in his head, which Herr Meuseler had to-day placed _on_ it. This clever peruke-maker visited those of his diocesans (the parsons) who wore no hair of their own, often and with greater benefit to their heads than the Superintendent himself, that _Commander of the Faithful_, to whom most chaplains said, Your Excellency! If he could only have weaned himself from singing, lying, and drinking too much,--the _friseur_,--most of the clergy would have ordered their toupees--those artistic cock's-combs--of him; but as it was, they did not.

As the Chaplain loved to make the _confitures_ of Fate, among which false hair is to be reckoned, bitter in some way, and to give them, as it were, an infusion of hops, he naturally sought to embitter to-day's peruke (for whose false curls he gave, in place of payment, genuine hair cut off from his people's heads) by the misgivings which he conjured up about the long staying away of Victor. He bethought himself: "We must have affronted him in some way,--he does not even write,--he has, perhaps, fallen out with my son,--something has occurred,--and then, too; the old Lord no longer gives us a side-glance,--our rats, also, had a hand (or a foot) in helping drive him away."

By such elegies he threw at first himself, and at last even his hearers, into agony. He was not to be refuted in any way, except by one's bringing out some new subject of distress. The breaking-away spot in his cloud, or his _little book for help in distress_, was this time a literal book, the "Anecdotes for Preachers," by Teller, of Zeitz, which he to-day received through the peruke-maker from the clerical reading-circle. Clergymen, especially country clergymen, carry everything out with a minute, punctilious solicitude, into which they are partly scared by their reigning bugbear and dragon of a Consistory. Now in this book-club there was a law current--commentators and editors keep it--that every member who should find a grease-spot or ink-stain or rent in the book he was reading should enter it on the fly-leaf in an index and inventory of spots, together with the number of the page "where." Very naturally, every one who was even half-way an honest Lutheran would deny the _immaculate re_-(or _con_-)_ception_ of it, and the freckles were therefore all regularly registered, but nobody fined. Only the conscientious Court-Chaplain took upon himself, as scapegoat, the punishment of other people's sins; for he never could sleep a wink the whole night, when he found in a book more blots than in the sin-register, because he clearly saw that he should be made adoptive father of the anonymous smutch and buyer of the book.--Now Teller's Anecdotes for Black-Coats was a complete pile of linen for the wash, black with dirt. Was there not one dog's-ear upon another,--compound dog's-ears,--blot upon blot? were not the leaves regular _proof-sheets_,--and, in fact, speaking _without metaphor_? Eymann began, "And if money should come flying in to me through the window"....

Just then Victor's letter flew in at the window, and its--author through the door.

But, of course, the case was this:--Victor, before pleasant weather, had pleasant dreams; before bad weather, Satan and his kin appeared to him. The beautiful weather of Saturday, and the thought of Clotilda's birthday and of the after-summer, gave him a morning dream, which, in turn, gave him a stage on which only her sweet image played. A person whom he had seen behind the veil of dream stood before him all the next day in a magic reflection. With him dreams,--those night-moths of the spirit,--like the real moths, strayed out beyond the bounds of night and sleep; at least for the forenoon, he went on loving, awake, every person whom he had begun to love in dream. This time, by an exactly reverse process, waking love flowed on into dreaming love, and the actual Clotilda coincided with the ideal to form one saintly image, so radiant that any one who knows his dream will easily enter into the rest. Therefore must the dream be given to the readers, the poetic ones especially: for others I should be glad to prepare an expurgated edition of the Dog-Post-Days, in which it should be left out; for unpoetic souls that have no dreams themselves should not read any.

But to you, ye good, seldom requited female souls,--ye who have a second conscience of your own, beside the first, for pure manners,--whose single virtue, when one looks at it nearly, is seen to bloom up into one wreath made of all the virtues, as nebulous stars, seen through glasses, fall into millions,--ye who, so changeable in all purposes, so unchangeable in the noblest one, go from the earth with unrecognized wishes, with forgotten worth, with eyes full of tears and love, with hearts full of virtue and grief,--to you, dear ones, I gladly tell the little dream and my long story!...

"A hand which Horion did not see laid hold of him; lips which he saw not spake to him, 'Let thy heart now be clean and holy, for the genius of female virtue resides in this region.'--Lo! there stood Horion on a field clothed with forget-me-nots, over which the sky like a blue shadow fell; for all the stars had been withdrawn from it, only the _evening star_ stood gleaming alone up in the place of the sun. White ice-pyramids, streaked with down-trickling lines of evening redness, closed in, as with a wall of gold and silver ore, the whole dark horizon.----Therein Clotilda passed by, sublime as one dead, serene as a human being in the next world, conducted now by winged children, now by a veiled nun, now by an earnest angel, but she passed forever by before Horion; she smiled upon him in blissful lovingness while thus passing, but she passed by.--Flowery hillocks, almost like graves, rose and sank, for every one was stirred by the breathing of a bosom slumbering beneath it; a white rose stood over the heart that lay veiled below; two red ones grew over the cheeks, where tender blushes hid themselves in the earth; and overhead in the night-blue of heaven the white and red reflections of the hill-flowers glided fitfully into each other as often as the roses of the heart and the cheeks swayed with the hillock.--Dying echoes, awakened, however, by unheard voices, gave answer to each other behind the mountains; each echo lifted the little hills of slumber still higher, as if a deep sigh or a bosom full of rapture heaved them; and Clotilda smiled more blissfully, sinking at every resonance more deeply into the flowery earth.--The tones were too full of ecstasy, and the dissolved heart of man was fain to die therein. Clotilda sank now into the graves up to her heart; only her silent head still smiled above the meadow; the forget-me-nots at last reached up to the sunken eyes that were full of blissful tears, and bloomed over them.--Then suddenly a hill of slumber crept over the saint, and from beneath the flowers her words came up, 'Rest thou, too, Horion!'--But the sounds, growing more distant, transformed themselves during the burial into dim harmonica-tones.... And lo! as they sank into silence, there came up a great shadow like Emanuel, and stood before him like a short night, and covered the unknown moment as with a hand from a higher world. But when the moment and the shadow had passed away, then had all the hills sunk.--Then the reflections of the flowers, flowing together, gilded over the undulating heavens.--Then were seen _white_ butterflies, _white_ doves, _white_ swans, climbing up to the purple peaks of the ice-mountains with outstretched wings as with arms, and behind the mountains, as if by an uncontainable transport, blossoms were flung up, and stars and garlands.--And there on the highest ice-mountain, as it rose tranquil in clear radiance and purple blaze, stood Clotilda, glorified, consecrated, radiant with supernatural rapture, and on her heart fluttered a nebulous globe, which consisted of little vaporized tears, and on which Horion's pallid form was delineated, and Clotilda spread wide her arms."----

But to embrace? or to soar away? or to pray?... Ah! he awoke too soon, and his eyes streamed down in greater tears than the nebulous ones, and a sinking voice cried incessantly all around him, "Rest thou, too!"

O thou soul of woman,--thou that goest, weary and unrewarded, wounded and bleeding, but great and unspotted, up from the smoking battle-field of life,--thou angel, whom the heart of man, reared by storms, soiled by the world's dealings, can respect and love, but cannot reward or reach,--how does my soul at this moment bow down before thee! how do I wish thee now the soothing balm of Heaven, the requiting goodness of the Eternal! And thou, Philippina, precious soul, glide away into a secret cell, and, amidst the tears which thou hast already so often shed, lay thy hand upon thy soft, rich heart, and swear, "Forever shalt thou continue consecrated to God and virtue, even if not to repose!" To thyself swear it,--not to me, for I believe it without an oath.----

What a parade-night, full of stars and dreams, was that! and what a gala-day of Nature followed upon it! In Victor's brain stood nothing but St. Luna, veiled in blue, bespangled with silver dew-drops, and graced by the loveliest angel, who to-day raised moist, glad eyes to the friendly heaven, and thought, "How beautiful art thou to-day, just upon my birthday festival!"--Even the Senior Pastor and his daughter, who both made a wedding,--the former an anniversary second wedding with his Senioress, the latter a first one with the preacher of the Orphan Asylum,--slipped themselves into the procession of his joyous thoughts as two new couples.

He did not mean to go to St. Luna, but he said; "I will dress myself up just for a little walk."--

"It is all one where I go to-day," he said, when he was out of doors; and so he took the St. Luna road.--

"I can turn round at any time," he said, when he had gone half-way.--

"But it would be something still more ridiculously funny, if I should be at once correspondent and postman, and deliver my own letter," said he, and drew it out.--

"And answer my good mother's orally by the same opportunity," he continued, half in dream, and full of greater love towards her who had sent him the sweet nocturnal one by the intelligence of the birthday.--

----But when he heard the first bells of St. Luna ringing for church, then he sprang up, and said, "Now I will no longer embitter the way by further scruples, but will march boldly and decidedly into the village."

And so, taking the hand of Fortune, with all Nature smiling after him, with dreams in his heart, with innocent hope in his freshly blooming countenance, he entered into the Eden of his soul.

Flamin he had not asked to go with him, in order not to rob the Senior Pastor of his wedding-guest, and because he did not know, himself, that he should reach St. Luna, and perhaps, too, because he did not want to have his fantasying attention to the sparkling morning disturbed by any news about juristic cases. In fact, he would rather take a walk with a woman than with a man. Men are almost ashamed, beside one another, of any except silent emotions; but womanly souls love to unfold to each other their bashful sensibilities; for they cover up the naked heart with maternal warmth, that it may not become chilled during the unveiling.

As Victor passed round the Parsonage below, he saw himself up at the window, in his _second edition for a few good friends_; but the wax Victor had forthwith to be banished behind a false partition, that it might not frighten the fleshly one. The reception of the latter, and the feast of jubilee thereupon, need not be described by me in a more lively manner than by my saying that the pug-dog was almost crushed underfoot, the bulfinch hopped round in vain for his breakfast, nor did the Parson's wife offer any to the guest, in her joy at staring at him, and church did not begin till after the double usance of half an hour; so that this time more parishioners went to church drunk than usual.

Victor, too, went thither intoxicated, but with joy. There is nothing more agreeable than to be a parson's wife, and to say to one's husband, while putting on his clerical bands, "Make the service a little longer to-day, else the mutton will not be quite roasted through."--Domestic trifles gratified my hero full as much as courtly ones provoked him.

He went with the Parson and with the Parson's wife, who abridged all the processes of kitchen and toilet in a summary and manlike way. His toleration for the faults of the clerical order had nothing in common with that of the distinguished people who are fit for high dignities and dinners, which arises from supreme contempt, and which can endure a Christian priest as easily as an Egyptian; but it grew out of his opinion that the churches are still the only Sunday-Schools and Spartan school-gates for the poor commoners, who cannot hear their _cours de morale_ from the _state_. Besides, he loved, as a youth, the favorites of his childhood.

Many preachers try to combine the rule of Quintilian, who requires that _bad_ arguments should be put forward in the earlier part of the discourse, with that of Cicero, who is for keeping them back till the latter part, by posting them in _both_ places; but Eymann held good feelings to be better than bad reasons, and wound around the peasants chains, not of reasoning, but of flowers.

The _friseur_ above-mentioned, at first, would not go to church, because it was beneath his dignity, but afterward he could not do otherwise; for, on account of the court stranger present to-day, church-music was to be made.

It is the only fault of the peruke-maker Meuseler, that he loves to sing too well, and is too fond of intruding his natural pipes into all church-music that is made in his perukial diocese, especially on Holy Whitsuntide. The St. Luna chorister could never bear this; but how to cheat him and feast a thousand ears? Simply thus: He frizzled out to-day what was still to be frizzled, (not to-day alone, but it was always so,) and merely glided up the choir-steps. Here he leaned and watched, till the chorister, seated on the musical sausage-sledge, struck with his finger the first note of the church-music. Then, like a sunbeam, he darted up into the choir, and filched away from the young counter-tenor his part, and sang it into the ears of the congregation, but with much whining and puffing, as if he were chanting his manuscript to the reviewers. For one must now, once for all, make it known to the world, that the enraged musician at the clavichord had, with a sharp-cornered triangle of elbows, furiously thrust back at the frizzling counter-tenor, in order to push the strange singing-bird out of the bird-house of the choir. But as the singer made his right arm the firm note-desk of his text, and the other a war-club,--like the Jews, who built up Jerusalem with one hand full of building-tools and the other full of weapons,--one sees that the peruke-maker, even amidst this continuance of fighting and fa-sol-la-ing, could do his very best, and execute somewhat during the musical truce of God. But so soon as the music had drawn its last breath, then the harmonious bird-of-passage and stormy-petrel skipped nimbly out across the choir, accompanied by the memory of a thousand ears and a single elbow. The chorister could not catch him, nor get scent of him.

If, on the contrary, he had the good fortune to be passing with his bandboxes through a village just as parson and schoolmaster and pedagogic frog-spawn were quacking and croaking[220] round a deaf corpse,--all which many name, more concisely, a dirge,--then could the _virtuoso_, without the counter-prop of elbows, spring gayly with both feet into the motet,[221] work out the funeral serenade given to the dead man by his heirs, throw in gratis some final cadences to the funeral procession, and yet have time to offer in the village to the bailiff an entirely new bag-wig.--

To our hero the music in country churches gave the greatest satirical pleasure. But little should we get by it, had I not the forethought to beg leave just for one poor little extra-syllable--one shall hardly see it--upon church-music.

POOR LITTLE EXTRA-SYLLABLE ON CHURCH-MUSIC.

It always gives me pleasure to see the people keep their seats during church-music, because it is a proof that no one is bitten by the tarantula; for, if they should run out, one would see that they could not endure any discords, and so had been bitten. I, as profane music-master, compose for few churches,--that is to say, only the consecration-noise for new ones, or old ones that have been repaired,--and therefore, in truth, I understand nothing of the matter whereupon, in passing, I purpose to express myself; but thus much let me still be allowed to assert, that the Lutheran church-music is good for something,--in the country, not in the capitals, where, perhaps, the fewest discords are correctly delivered. Verily, a miserable, sottish, blue chorister, who in bravura-airs sings himself brown and beats others brown,--there are, therefore, two kinds of _bravura_-airs,--is able, with a few mechanics who on Sundays work at the fiddle, with a trumpeter who might blow down without an instrument the walls of Jericho, with a smith who lays about him with the sticks of the kettle-drums, with a few spasmodic youngsters that do not yet even understand singing, and still resemble a female singer, who labors, not, like the fine arts, for _ear_ and _eye_ alone, but also (only in a worse acceptation than the youngsters) for a third sense, and with the little wind which he draws from the lungs of the organ and his own lungs,--such a thumper, I say, is able, with so extraordinarily little musical rubbish, nevertheless, to get up a much louder thundering and fiddle-rosin-lightning around the pulpit Sinai--I mean, to draw a far more vehement and discordant church-music out of his choir--than many much better sustained theatre-orchestras and chapels, with whose harmonies temples are so often desecrated. Hence such a noisy man is pained afterward, when people misunderstand and falsely judge his church scraping and squeaking and groaning. Shall, then, the soft, low Moravian music steal into all our provincial churches?--Fortunately, however, there are still city choristers who are working against this, and who know wherein pure choral tone and discord are to be distinguished from court-tone.

I expect, not readers, but organists, to know why mere dissonances--for consonances are to be endured only among the voices of the instruments--belong to the choir. Dissonances--according to Euler and Sulzer--are relations of tones which are expressed in high numbers; they displease us, therefore, not on account of their incongruity, but on account of our inability to reduce them rapidly to an equation. Higher minds would find the near relations of our harmonies too easy and monotonous,--the larger ones of our discords, on the contrary, charming and not above their comprehension. Now, as divine service is held more in honor of higher beings than for the profit of men, the church style must insist upon this, that a music shall be made, suitable for higher beings,--namely, of discords,--and that precisely that which is the most abominable to our ears shall be chosen as most appropriate for the temple.

If we once open the church-doors to the instrumental music of the Moravians, then we shall at last be infected with their singing, and by degrees all that vocal bleating and bellowing will be lost which makes our churches so lively, and which to castrated ears is such a disagreeable hammer of the law, but for us so good a proof that we resemble the swine, which the Abbé de Baigne, at the command of Louis XI., arranged according to the scale, goaded with jacks, and set to squealing.--These are my thoughts on church-music, or modern German battle-song.

_End of the Extra-Syllable on Church-Music_.

I should not have let the hair-dresser sing and strut so long, if my hero had been available for anything else, all this Sunday, than a supernumerary; but he did nothing of consequence the whole day, except, that, out of a sort of humanity, by unpacking, himself; her chests-of-drawers and bandboxes, he compelled old Appel, who would rather dress hams than her person, to prepare the usual Sabbath edition of the latter, printed with typographic splendor, as early as three o'clock in the afternoon; otherwise she would not have delivered the same till after supper. The Jews believe that they get, on the Sabbath, a new Schabbes-[222] or Sabbath-Soul: into maidens there enters one at least; into the Appels, two or three.

But why do I expect my hero to make any more active demonstration to-day,--him who, to-day, buried in that dream-night and in the coming evening, his emotions stirred by every kindly eye, and by the _rudera_[223] and urns of a spring which he had dreamed away,--softly dissolved by the calm, bland summer, which still lay smiling and dying on the incense-altars of the mountains, on the crape-clad fields, and amidst the mute funeral escort of birds, and at the rising of the first cloud would pass away from the boughs,--Victor, I say, who to-day, greeted with a melancholy smile by nothing but tender remembrances, felt that he had hitherto been too mirthful? He could only look upon the good souls around him with glistening eyes of love, then turn them away, more intensely glistening, and go out. Over his heart and all its notes stood written, _Tremolando_. No one is more profoundly sad than he who laughs too much; for when this laughter ceases, everything has power over the exhausted soul, and a meaningless lullaby, a flute-concert,--whose D sharp and F sharp keys and mouthpieces are merely the two lips wherewith a young shepherd whistles,--opens the flood-gates of the old tears, as a whisper loosens the poised and trembling avalanche. He felt as if his dream of this morning absolutely did not allow him to address Clotilda; she seemed to him too holy, and still escorted by winged children, and placed upon icy thrones. As, upon the whole, he had to-day neither a tongue nor an ear for Le Baut's conversations in the realm of the morally dead, he preferred to listen unseen in the great leafy garden to this Stamitz concert, and at the farthest let himself be introduced to the company by accident. His second reason was, that his heart was made for a sounding-board of music, and gladly drank in the fleeting tones without disturbance, and loved to conceal their effects upon him from ordinary men, of the world, who can truly quite as little do without Goethe's, Raphael's, and Sacchini's things (and for not a whit inferior reasons) as without Löschenkohl's own. Emotion, it is true, raises one above being ashamed to show emotion; but while his emotions lasted, he hated and shunned all attention to another's attention, because the Devil smuggles in vanity among the best feelings, often one knows not how. In the night, in a shady nook, tears fall more gracefully, and by-and-by evaporate.

In all this he was strengthened by the Parson's wife; for she had secretly sent to town and invited her son, and artistically prepared in the garden a surprise.

The Parson's family repaired at last to the embowered concert-hall, and gave not a thought to the consideration how much they were despised by Le Baut's household, who held only noble metals and noble birth, never noble deeds, to be cards of admission, and who, highly valuing the people of the Parsonage as friends of his Lordship and of Matthieu, would, however, have valued them still higher as lap-dogs of either.

Victor kept back a little in the Parsonage garden, because it was still too light, and also because he pitied poor Apollonia, who was peering solitary and unseen, in full finery, from the window of the summer-house, out into the air, and dandling perpendicularly the little god-son, whom she hung now over her head, now under her stomach. After the manner of a cit, he did not put on his hat in the summer-house, in order to strengthen her spirit by courtesy. An infant is, as it were, prompter and bellows-blower to the nurse: the young Sebastian sent Appel timely and sufficient succor under the siege by the elder one, and she undertook at last to speak, and remark that the god-son was a dear, good, beautiful, little "Basty." "But," she added, "the young leddy (Clotilda) must not hear that: she will have it that we should call him Victor, when she hears father call him Basty." Now she began to magnify how Clotilda loved his godchild, how often she would snatch the little monkey and smile on him and hug and kiss him; and the eulogist repeated on a small scale everything that she praised. Nay, the grown-up Sebastian did it after her, but he sought on the little lips only the kisses of _others_; and perhaps, in Appel's case, again, _his_ were among the things which are sought. Made happier himself, he left one whom he had made happier; for Love despatched now one gayly attired hope after another as messengers to his heart, and all said, "Truly, we do not deceive thee: trust us!"

At last Stamitz began to tune up, about whom the stiff family of the Lord Chamberlain would certainly not have concerned themselves, because to-day there were no strangers present, had not Clotilda begged for this garden-concert as the only festival of her birth-night. Stamitz and his orchestra filled a lighted bower,--the noble audience sat in the next brightest niche, and wished the thing were already over,--the commonalty sat farther off, and the Chaplain, for fear of the catarrhal, dewy floor, twisted one leg round the other above the thighs,--Clotilda and her Agatha reclined in the darkest leafy box. Victor did not steal in, till the overture announced to him the seats and the seating of the company: in the remotest arbor, in a true aphelion, this comet took its place. The overture consisted of that musical scrawling and flourishing, of that harmonious phraseology, that crackling of fire-works produced by the mutual contact of sounding passages, which I so extol, when it is nowhere but in the overture. There it is in place; it is the sprinkling rain which softens the heart for the great drops of the simpler tones. All emotions in the world need _exordia_; and music paves the way, or the tear-ways, (lachrymal ducts,) for music.

Stamitz--after a dramatic plan which not every conductor marks out for himself--gradually descended from the ears into the heart, and from allegros to adagios: this great composer sweeps in ever-narrowing circles around every bosom in which there is a heart, until at last he reaches it and folds it in a rapturous embrace.

Horion trembled alone, without seeing his loved ones, in a gloomy arbor, upon which a single withered twig let in the light of the moon and of its pursuing clouds. Nothing ever stirred him more during music than to look at the chase of the clouds. When he accompanied with his eyes and with the tones these nebulous streams in their everlasting flight around our shadowy globe, and when he imparted to them all his joys and his wishes, then he thought, as in all his joys and sorrows, on other clouds, of another flight, of other shadows, than those above him,--then did his whole soul pine and languish; but the strings stilled the panting bosom, as the cold leaden bullet in, the mouth allays thirst, and the tones discharged the heavy tears from the full soul.

Dear Victor! there is in man a mighty wish which was never fulfilled: it has no name, it seeks its object, though all that thou namest it and all joys are not its reality; but it recurs, when in a summer night thou lookest to the north or towards distant mountains, or when moonlight is on the earth, or the heavens are studded with stars, or when thou art very happy. This great, vast wish lifts our soul aloft, but with sorrow: ah! here below we are thrown upward in a prostrate position like epileptics. But this wish, to which nothing can give a name,--our strings and tones name it to the human spirit; the yearning soul then weeps more profusely and can no longer comprehend itself, and calls inward in rapture of lamentation between the tones: "Ay, all that ye name to me is what I want!" ...

Mortal man, the enigmatical creature, has also a nameless, monstrous dread, which has no object, which awakes at hearing of spiritual apparitions, and which one sometimes feels when one only speaks of it....

Horion yielded up his bruised heart, with quiet tears which no one saw flow, to the high adagios which laid themselves with warm wings of eider-down over all his wounds. All that he loved entered now into his shady arbor,--his oldest friend and his youngest; he hears the thunder-storm-bells of life toll, but the hands of friendship stretch forth to meet each other, and they clasp each other, and even in the second life they hold each other fast in withering grasp. All tones seemed the unearthly echoes of his dream, sent back by beings whom one neither saw nor heard....

He could not possibly stay longer in this dark inclosure with his burning fancies, at this too great distance from the Pianissimo. He went--almost too boldly and too closely--through a leafy avenue up to the tones, and pressed his face far through the leaves, in order at last to see Clotilda in the dim and distant green glimmer....

Ah, and he saw her! But in too angelic, too paradisiacal a form! He saw not the thinking eye, the cold mouth, the calm person, that forbade so much and desired so little; but he saw for the first time her mouth encircled by a sweet harmonious sorrow, with an inexpressibly touching smile,--for the first time her eye weighed down under a brimming tear, as a forget-me-not bows itself beneath a tear-drop of rain. O, this good soul surely concealed her fairest feelings most of all! But the first tear in a beloved eye is too mighty for a soft heart.... Victor knelt down, overpowered by reverence and rapture, before the noble soul, and lost himself in the darkling, weeping form, and in the weeping tones. And when he saw at length her features turned to paleness, because the green foliage overspread her lips and cheeks with a deathly hue from the reflection of the lamps,--and when his dream came back to him, with Clotilda sunk under the flowery hill,--and when his soul, dissolved into dreams, into sorrows, into joys, and into wishes for her who consecrated her birthday festival with devout tears,--oh, was there then any need, for the completion of his euthanasia, that the violin should die away, and that the second harmonica, the _viole d'amour_, should send its music-of-the-spheres to his naked, enkindled, palpitating heart? O, the pang of bliss quieted him, and he thanked the Creator of this melodious Eden, that He, with the _highest_ tones of His harmonica, which with unknown forces shiver the heart of man to tears, as high tones shatter glasses, had at last exhausted his bosom, his sighs, and his tears: amidst these tones, after these tones, there were no more sounds; the full soul was wrapped up in foliage and night and tears; the speechless swelling heart drank the tones into itself, and took the outer ones for inner ones; and at last the tones played like zephyrs around the head that was drowsy with bliss, and only in the innermost part of the dying soul still stammered the too happy wish: "Ah, Clotilda, could I surrender to thee to-day this mute, glowing heart!--ah, that I might on this imperishable heavenly evening, with this trembling soul, sink dying at thy feet, and say the words, 'I love thee!'"

And as he thought of her festive anniversary, and of her letter to Maienthal, which had given him the greatest praise, that of being a scholar of Emanuel, and of little tokens of her regard for him, and of the sweet fraternization of his heart with hers,--ay, then did the heavenly hope of winning this ennobled heart for the first time draw near to him amidst the music, and that hope caused the sounds of the harmonica, like dying echoes, to float far and wide over the whole future of his life....

"Victor!' said some one, in a slowly lengthened tone. He sprang up and turned his exalted features toward the--brother of his Clotilda, and embraced him with joy. Flamin, into whom all music flung war-flames and more open sincerity, looked at him wonderingly, inquiringly, and with an imperceptible suspicion, and with that friendliness which resembled scorn, but which was never anything but the smarting of injuries received.

"Why didst thou not take me, too, with thee to-day?" said Flamin, in a friendly tone.

Victor pressed his hand, and was silent.

"No! speak!" said he.

"Let it be for to-day, my Flamin; I'll tell thee some time," replied Victor.

"I will tell it to thee myself," Flamin began, more quickly and warmly. "Thou thinkest, perhaps, I shall be jealous. And look thou, did I not know thee, I should be so: truly, another would be so, if he had thus lighted upon thee here, and put all things together,--thy late retreat from our summer-house out into the foliage, thy writing without a light, and thy singing of love"----

"To Emanuel," said Victor, softly.

"Thy sending off that leaf to her"----

"It was another from her album," said he.

"Still worse; _that_ I did not even know. Thy lingering in St. Luna, and a thousand other signs, which do not immediately occur to me,--thy going off alone today"----

"O my Flamin, this is going too far! thou seest with other eyes than those of friendship."--

Here Flamin, who never could dissemble without immediately becoming what he assumed, and who could never recount an offence without falling into the old anger, grew warmer, and said, in a less friendly manner,--

"And others, too, see it,--even the Chamberlain, and the Chamberlain's wife."

This tore Victor's heart.

"Thou dear old friend of my youth! so, then, we are to be drawn and torn asunder, bleed we ever so much; so, then, this Matthieu is to succeed (for all comes from him, not from thee, thou good soul!) in getting thee to torment thyself, and me to torment thee. No, he shall not succeed; thou shalt not be taken from me. See, by Heaven!" (and here the feeling of his innocence stood in Victor erect and sublime,) "and though thou shouldst for years misunderstand me, still the time will come when thou shalt start back, and say to me, 'I have done thee wrong!'--But I shall gladly forgive thee."

This touched the jealous one, who to-day, indeed, (for a special reason,) was more composed.

"See," said he, "I believe thee always: say, dost thou never do anything against me?"

"Never, never, my dear fellow!" answered Victor.

"Now, then, forgive my heat," the other continued. "Thus have I already, with my cursed jealousy, once tormented Clotilda herself in Maienthal. But wrong not Matthieu; it is he, rather, who tranquillized me. He told me, to be sure, what Clotilda's parents thought they observed; nay, still more,--see, I tell thee everything,--he said they had even, on account of thy presumed liking and thy present influence, which the Chamberlain would fain avail himself of for his reinstatement, spoken of a possible betrothal to their daughter, and had even spoken to her and sounded her on the subject; but (to thee, however, this is a matter of indifference) my beloved remained true to me, and said, No."

Now was the hitherto so happy heart of our friend broken: that hard No had never yet been uttered to him. With an inexpressible, crushing, but meek woe, he said, softly, to Flamin,--

"Be thou, too, always true to me, for I have very little; and never torment me more as thou hast to-day."

He could say no more; the stifled tears stormed surging up over his heart, and painfully collected themselves under the pupil; he must needs now have a still, dark place, where he could weep to his heart's content; and in his lacerated and smarting bosom there remained only one soft and balmy thought: "Now, in the night, I can weep as much as I will, and no one can see my shattered face, my shattered soul, my shattered fortune."

And when he thought, "Ah, Emanuel, if thou shouldst see me as I am to-day!" he could hardly any longer contain himself.

He fled, with suppressed tears, unconcerned who saw it or did not see it, out of the garden, over which a dark angel let float a great funereal banner and the music of a dirge. He bruised himself against a stone garden-roller which was used to crush the _sprinkled_ grass-blades and _flowerets_,--he wept not yet, but on the observatory there would he satisfy himself and steep himself in abundant sorrow,--he kept repeating, "But she remained true, and said, No, no, no!"--the concert-tones glided after, like fire after the conjurer,--he waded through moist, slumbering lawns, which concealed their flowers, and, swifter than he, swept over the earth the shadowy outlines of the clouds overhead chased by the wind,--he stood at the foot of the observatory, still held back every tear, and hurried up,--he threw himself on the bench where he had seen Clotilda for the first time afar off, in a white dress,--"Rest thou, too, Horion!" she had called to him out of his dream from under the flowery hill, and he heard it again.----

Here he tore open joyfully all his wounds, and let them bleed out freely in tears; they overspread with mournful streams the face which once had often smiled, but always good-naturedly, and which from other eyes had never wrung any, but only wiped them away; every flood was a load taken off, but the heart grew heavy again upon it, and poured out a fresh one.--At last he could hear the tones again; most of them sank and were lost before they were wafted to the tower; little ones arrived dying, and expired in his darkling heart; every tone was a falling tear, and made him lighter, and expressed his anguish. The garden seemed to consist of softly resounding, dark-green waves of shadow, veiled under a broken twilight. Stung by memory, he tore his eye away from it: "What does it concern me any longer?" he thought. But at last from this shadowy Eden and from the _viole d'amour_ came up the song, "Forget me not," to his weary heart, and gave him back the softer pang and the past love. "No," said he, "I never will forget thee, though thou hast not loved me! thy form will assuredly forever move me, and remind me of my dreams! ah, thou heavenly one, it is, indeed, now, the only thing that does not pain me, to think I forget thee not!"

All was silent and extinguished; he was alone in the presence of night. At length, after remaining a long time in silence, he went down and back to Flachsenfingen, exhausted with weeping, and a poor man. And as, on the way, he cast a hurried glance up at the dark-blue heaven, in which floating clouds lay flung around the moon like _scoriæ_, and a hurried glance again over the half-annihilated shadowy landscape, over the shadow-hills and shadow-villages, all appeared to him dead, empty, and vain, and it seemed to him as if, in some brighter world, there were a magic-lantern, and through the lantern glasses moved on which earth and springs and human groups were painted, and we called the descending, dancing images of these glasses _us_ and an earth and a life; and _after all that was bright and many-colored, a great shadow followed on_.----

Ah, I stir up, perhaps, once more, in many a breast, long-forgotten troubles! But it is good for us--since sorrows occupy so large a place in our memory--that this bitter winter-fruit should grow mild by lying, and that there is but a small difference between a past sorrow and a present bliss.

Poor Victor arrived after midnight, with a pale face and burning eyes, at the house of the Apothecary. He asked for nothing, that he might not betray his broken voice. When he saw his every-day overcoat hanging in the moonbeams, and when he imagined himself a strange person to whom the coat belonged, and who took it off so joyfully in the morning and now would put it on again so sorrowfully, then did a certain compassion which he had for himself seize again with too strong an impression his exhausted heart. Marie came, and he turned not away from her even the signs of this compassion. She stood surprised; he said to her with the softest voice, woven of sighs, that he wanted nothing; and the good soul went slowly out without courage to console or to weep, but all night long she shed invisible tears for those of another, and for a woe which had not been whispered in her ear.

Why did Fate to-day, of all days, open all the veins of his heart? Why must the Senior Pastor's silver wedding and the first marriage of his daughter to the preacher of the Orphan-House fall just on this day? Why, if indeed the two nuptial feasts had to coincide on this day, must they last till after midnight, when they gave poor Victor occasion to gaze into all the mouldering scenes of his burnt-up hopes, when he could see from his dark chamber, in a brilliantly lighted room, the love which linked hand in hand, pressed lips to lips, and mingled eyes and souls? At another time he would have smiled at the Orphan-House preacher and at two catechists of the poor; but tonight he could only sigh over them,--and it is a soft line of beauty on his inner man, that he did not grudge, but felicitated, the poor people's possession of what he was deprived of himself. "Ah, you are happy!" said he. "O, love each other truly, press your throbbing, transitory hearts ardently to each other, ere the wing of Time shatters them, and glow on each other's bosoms during the short minute of life, and exchange your tears and kisses ere eyes and lips freeze in the grave! Ye are happier than I,--I, who can give my heart full of love to no one but the worms of the grave, and on whose coffin a joiner shall paint the inscription, which like myself shall be buried in the earth: 'Ye good children of men, you loved me not, and yet I loved you so well!'"

Every happy smile, every fleeting touch of the violin, every thought, became now, to his soft tear-bathed heart, a hard, sharp corner,--just as a hand which dips itself under the water feels everything hard to the touch.

His unbounded sincerity, his unbounded tenderness, he could now satisfy in no other way than by a letter to Emanuel, into which he let his whole soul overflow.

"O Dearly Loved Friend!

"Ought I to hide it from thee, when griefs or follies unman me? Ought I to show thee the faults I have repented of, and never my present ones? No, come hither, dear one, to my wounded breast! I will lay open to thee the heart therein, let it bleed and beat under the exposure as it will. Thou wilt, perhaps, still cover it up again with thy fatherly love, and say, 'I love thee still.'

"Thou, my Emanuel, reposest in thy lofty solitude, on the Ararat of the saved soul, on the Tabor of the shining One: there thou gazest, softly dazzled, into the sun of Deity, and seest calmly the cloud of death swim in over the sun; it veils the orb: thou growest blind under the cloud; it melts away, and again thou standest before God. Thou lovest men as children who cannot offend,--thou lovest earthly enjoyments as fruits, which one plucks for refreshment, but without hungering for them; the storms and earthquakes of life pass by thee unheard, because thou liest in a life-dream full of tones, full of songs, full of meadows,--and when death awakes thee, thou art still smiling over the bright dream.

"But, ah! more than one tempest thunders into the life's-dream of the rest of us, and makes it distressful. If a higher being could enter into the hurly-burly of ideas which encompasses our spirit, and from which it must draw its breath, as we breathe in an air composed of all kinds of gases poured together,--if he were to see what kinds of nutriment pass through our inner man, from which it has to extract its chyle: that medley of comic operas,--Bayle's Dictionaries,--concerts of Mozart,--Messiahs,--military operations,--Goethe's poems,--Kant's writings,--table-talks,--lunar observations,--vices and virtues,--men and sicknesses and sciences of all sorts:--if the Being should examine this _olla-podrida_ of life, would he not be curious to know what heterogeneous and mutually repulsive juices thereby run together in the poor soul, and would he not wonder that anything settled and uniform is left as a residuum in man? Ah, Emanuel! if thy friend is now in a fine banquet-hall, now in a garden, now in an opera-box, now under the great night-heavens, now in the presence of a coquette, and now before thee,--surely, this ambiguous alternation of scenes must bring him sorrows, and perhaps leave stains....

"No, I will not deceive my Emanuel----O, are, then, the trifles and the pebbles of this life worth our choosing crooked paths to avoid them, as the sapping-caterpillar submits to winding courses through the twig-work of its leaf? No, all that I have said is true; but I should not have said it, had not other sorrows led me to speak of these also; and yet, thou innocently, simple-heartedly, sublimely trusting teacher, thou wouldst have believed me! Ah, thou hast too good an opinion of me!... O, it is a long and weary step from admiration to imitation! But now look into my open heart!

"Since I have, here in the charnel-house of my childish joys, in the beds where my childhood's years bloomed and faded, been conversing with perhaps too many dreams of the past,--and, still more, from the day when thou gavest my heart the provocative to the fever-stroke which has shaken my whole life,--since thou disclosedst to me the life wherein man exfoliates, and the thin, sharp moment whereon he so painfully stands,--since that farewell-night when my soul was great and my tears inexhaustible,--an eternal wound has been running within me, and the sigh of a longing which nothing can name but dreams and tears and love has lain like a stagnant vein, oppressive and consuming in my breast.----Ah! I still smile as ever, I still philosophize as ever, but my innermost heart only the beloved friend sees to whom I now lay it bare.

"O Fate, why dost thou strike in man the spark of a love which must be smothered in his own heart's blood? Have we not all, abiding within us, the sweet image of a beloved, of a friend, before whom we weep, after whom we seek, for whom we hope,--ah, and so vainly, so vainly? Does not man stand before a human bosom, as the turtle-dove before a mirror, and, like her, coo himself hoarse before a dead, flat image therein, which he takes for the sister of his complaining soul? Why is it, then, that every fair spring-evening, every melting lay, every overflowing rapture, asks us, 'Where dost thou find the beloved soul to which thou wilt tell and impart thy bliss?' Why does music give the tempest-stricken heart, instead of peace, only greater waves,--as the tolling of bells, instead of dispelling, draws down the thunder-storms? And why is it, that out of doors, on a fair, still, bright day, when thou lookest over the whole unrolled picture of a landscape, over the seas of flowers that tremble upon it, over the shadows flung down by the clouds which fly from one hill to another, and over the mountains which stretch like shores and walls round our flowery circle,--why does then a voice within thee cry incessantly, 'Ah! behind the smoking[224] mountains, beyond the clouds that repose upon them, there rests a fairer land, there dwells the soul thou seekest, there heaven lies nearer to the earth'? But behind the mountain and behind the cloud there sighs also an unappreciated heart, that looks over towards this thy horizon, and thinks, 'Ah, in that far region I should doubtless be happier!'

"Are we _not_, then, all happy?----Do not assert it, nor say to me, Emanuel, that, in the winter of this life, the few warm sunbeams that interrupt it burst and destroy the better man like a vegetable; say not that every year steals away something from our heart, and that, like ice, it grows less and less, the farther it drifts down the stream of Time; only say not that the wandering Psyche, though she hears her second self in her prison, yet can never get into its arms.----But thou hast already somewhere said: 'All loving souls on earth dwell apart from each other in two bodies, as on two hills; a waste lies between them, as between solar systems; they see each other, speak across by distant signs; at last they hear each other's voices from hill to hill; but they never touch each other, and each embraces only its thought. And yet this poor love crumbles like an old corpse, when it is exhibited; and its flame flickers like a burial-lamp, when it is uncovered.'

"Are we, then, all not happy?--Do not say so!--Ah, man, who, even from childhood up, has been calling after an unknown soul that grew up in _one_ heart with his own,--that entered into all the dreams of his years, and therein gleamed from afar, and, after his waking, started his tears,--that in spring sent him nightingales, that he might think of her and long for her,--that in every tender hour visited his soul, with so much virtue, so much love, that he would so gladly have offered in his heart, as in a sacrificial chalice, all his blood to the beloved,--but who, alas! never, appeared, and only sent her image in every fair form, but forever kept back her heart;--oh, if at last, oh, if suddenly, oh, if blissfully, her heart beats against his heart, and the two souls embrace each other forever, he can no longer say it, but we can: 'This man, indeed, is happy, and is loved.' ...

"Good Emanuel, thou forgivest me the pain of the fear that I may never be the happy man,--no, never!--Oh, even for this earth, broken up into graves, I should be perhaps too happy, I should be permitted to enjoy, perhaps, too great an Eden for so young a life, and one justified by such slight merits, if my too soft soul, which even now gives way under three happy minutes, which loves every human being, and hangs with the arms of a child on the heart of the whole creation,--oh, which is already made too blissful by this mere dream of love, and is overpowered by this description!--no, it were too blessed, such a soul, long since dissolved by melancholy and humanity, if it should once, after such a long, deathly yearning, at last, at last--O Emanuel, I tremble again for joy, and yet it can never, never be!--if it should find all its wishes, its whole heaven, so much love, accumulated in one dear, dear soul; if in the presence of great Nature, and before the face of Virtue, and before God himself, who gave love to her and to me, I could dare to say, weeping, to this only, this sweet, this beloved--O God, how shall I name her? this fore-loved one, whom in my frenzy I would now name: 'At last my heart has thee, thou good soul! to-day God gives us to each other, and we remain together through all eternity!' No, I would not say it; I should for ecstasy be dumb and die!

"--Lo! it seemed to me just now as if a form passed across my chamber, and called, 'Victor!' I looked round, and beheld my empty room, and the Sunday clothes which I had taken off, and now, for the first time, I remembered that I was unhappy and not loved.

"But thou, irreplaceable friend, misunderstand me not. I swear to thee that I will give thee these sheets unaltered, though to-morrow, when the whirlpools of to-night flow stiller and smoother, I should find all sorts of alterations necessary. Thy foolish friend remains, nevertheless, thy friend forever.

"S. V. H."

20. DOG-POST-DAY.

Letter from Emanuel.--Flamin's Fruit-Pieces on the Shoulders.--Walk to St. Luna.

"Poor Sebastian!" said I, as I opened to-day's letter-bag, "before I get it open, I know already beforehand, that, after such a night, thou must have shut thyself up all day, to turn thy pale, exhausted face toward the garden of sorrow, that thou to-day lovest these poison-drops better than the vulnerary balsam, and that thou lookest into the glass to weep for this still, innocent form which it shows thee with its gashes, as if it were the form of a stranger.--Oh, when man has nothing more to love, he embraces the gravestone of his love, and sorrow becomes his loved one! Forgive one another the short delusion of mourning; for, among all the weaknesses of man, this is the most innocent, when, instead of soaring away like the bird of passage above winter, and flying to warmer zones, he sinks before it, and helplessly stiffens in his cold grief."

Victor coffined himself, so to speak, that day in his chamber, which he opened to no one but a next-door neighbor of sorrows,--Marie,--whose form affected him as softly as an evening sun. Every other female face on the street gave him stings; and the brother of the lost Clotilda, whom he saw at the window, and to-day would gladly have embraced, lent to the remembrance which tears had dimmed, new colors.... Reader!--my female reader will be, of herself, more reasonable,--laugh not at my good hero, who _is_ none precisely where the strength of the soul becomes the strength of sorrow: at least, let me not hear it. Whoever has the sympathetic nerve of life--love--tied up or cut asunder, can well, if for no other reason, sigh and say, "Anything on earth can man lose more patiently than fellow-men."

And yet at evening an accident--namely, a letter--made all his sorrows pass once more through his weary heart. A short letter from Emanuel--not, however, an answer to the one just sent to him--arrived.

"My ever-loved one!

"I have learned the day of thy entrance upon a new scene of tumultuous life, and I have said, 'May my beloved still continue happy! may the tranquillity of virtue wall in his heart as with a breast against the frosts and storms of his new life! may neither his sorrows nor his raptures be loud! may he mourn softly and silently as a princess in soft white! may he enjoy softly and silently, and in the temple of his heart may Pleasure play only as a noiseless fluttering butterfly in a church! and may Virtue float before him in the higher heaven above our sun, and warm and irradiate and gradually attract to herself his heart!'

"In thy affectionate anxiety for my parting life, thou wilt not have me write often: so little, dear one, dost thou believe my hope! Oh, the weights of my machine, as they run down, fall slowly and softly upon the grave; this earthly life arrays itself to my soul in ever fairer colors, and adorns itself for the farewell; this mock-summer around me, which stands beside the August summer like a mock-sun,--this and the coming spring take me beguilingly out of the arms of Nature.

"So does the All-Gracious overhang with foliage, overspread with flowers, the churchyard-wall of life, as we cover the wall of an English garden with ivy and evergreen, and gives the end of the garden the appearance of a new thicket.--

"So ascends the spirit even here in this _dark_ life, as the barometer ascends even during thick weather, and feels the influence of the _brighter_ life even under the clouds.

"But I obey thy love, and will write to thee no more, except once in winter, when I describe to thee the great night wherein I told my blind Julius, for the first time, that there is an Eternal One.--In that night, my beloved, rapture and devotion bore me too high, and came near to rending my thin life. I bled a long time. In winter, when the charms of heaven take the place of those of earth,[225] forbid me not to paint the summer picture.

"O my son!--I was compelled, indeed; to write to thee, because my friend Clotilda complains that the new year will draw her out of the green bower of solitude to the crowded market-place of the court; her soul is dark with sorrow, and stretches out its arms after the tranquil life which is being taken away from her. I know not what a court is; thou wilt know, and, I conjure thee, release my friend, and turn aside the hand that would draw her from St. Luna. If thou canst not do it, still forsake not at court the beloved soul; be her only, her most ardent friend; draw the bee-stings of earthly hours from her gentle heart. When cold words, like snow-flakes, fall upon this flower, then let the breath of love melt them to tears that shall flow before thy sight; when a tempest shall come up, over her life, then show her the angel who stands in the sun, and draws over our tempests the rainbow of hope. O thou whom _I_ so love, my sister also will so love thee; and when my friend discovers to her his gentle heart, his tender eye, his virtue, his soul, the home of Nature and of the Eternal, then will he see my sister grow happy before him, and the exalted countenance which melts into tears and smiles and love before him will remain forever in his heart.

"EMANUEL."

* * *

Lo! in this glowing moment the exalted form which he had seen yesterday appeared again before his heart, with the sadly smiling lips and the eyes full of tears; and as the form continued floating before him, and gleamed and smiled, his soul rose up before her as before one dead, and during the uplifting of himself all his wounds began to bleed again, and he cried, "Now, then, never do thou vanish from my heart, thou sublime shape, but rest forever on its wounds!" Disconsolateness, exhaustion, and sleep overwhelmed his spirit, as well as his latest thought,--to go back shortly to St. Luna, and persuade her parents not to force her to court...

The long sleep of death closes our _scars_, and the short sleep of life our _wounds_. Sleep is the half of time which heals us. On awaking, Victor, whose fever of love had yesterday been so aggravated by sleeplessness, saw today that his sorrow had been unmoderated because his hope had been immoderate. At first he had wished,--then observed,--then assumed,--then seen,--then interpreted,--then hoped,--then sworn to it. Every little circumstance, even his share in Clotilda's nomination as maid-of-honor, had poured mild oil of love into his flame. "Oh, fool that I am!" said he, with the three swearing-fingers placed upon his forehead; and, like all energetic men, he was so much the more spirited in proportion as he had been spiritless. Nay, he felt himself all at once too light; for a too sudden cure betokens, in the case of souls also, a relapse. A new consolation was his yesterday's resolve, that he would render Clotilda a service,--namely, save her from the court-service. He still reflected upon his determination to see her again.--Feelest thou, haply, Victor, that everything which Love does, in order to die, is only an expedient for rising again from the dead, and that its epilogues are only prologues to the Second Act?

But a basket of apples in the market confirmed him again in his resolution. That is to say, Flamin came in. He began immediately with questions about the disappearance on Sunday, and with reports of the general uneasiness about the dear runaway. Victor, heated again by the whole recollection, and almost a little enraged against the image-breaker and government-attorney of a vain love, gave him the true answer:--"Thou tookest away from me in part my pleasure; and why should I, at so late an hour, come upon the stage?" The more vividly Flamin painted the affectionate concern of the Parson's wife and Clotilda about his disappearing, so much the more painful grew the maze of contending feelings within him. But for his conscience calling him back, it would now have been easier for him to confess the love that was hopeless, than formerly the love that was hopeful.--Accidentally Flamin wondered at the ripeness of the apples down below in the market, and desired some. A lightning beam now darted before Victor's eye at the inherited fruit-pieces on Flamin's shoulders, which always appeared in the after-summer at the time of the apples' ripening, but which, in the previous whirl of his feelings, he had forgotten. Heaven knows whether it has not escaped the reader himself, that Flamin bears this winter-fruitage (his maternal mole) on his back, which may become a Sodom-apple and Eve's-apple for him. Might not Matthieu, who until now could not examine upon Flamin this seal of his princely relationship, suddenly become convinced of all that which, with his thievish glances at his Lordship's letter, he had only been able to guess? And might he not afterward go to the Prince, and there mix for all our friends the most poisonous broths?--As, however, the magic image generally faded in one week, Victor needed for only so long a time to keep its wearer out of sight; he therefore laid before his friend, thus tattooed by Nature, the request to take for once a social walk to St. Luna, as they had day before yesterday missed each other.

"I can't do it," said Flamin, who had the lesser delicacy not to avail himself of the request for company on account of the reproaches in Le Baut's garden, and forgot in that the greater delicacy of not imputing such a reference to his Victor.

The latter, in a passionate hurry to avert two such evils (Clotilda's court-office and Matthieu's inspection), seized upon the singular expedient of proposing to the page to share the journey with him.

"With pleasure!" said the Evangelist; "_this_ week I have to do cabinet-service, but I can _next_ week."

And it was precisely this week that Victor wanted it to be done.--So many sudden miscarriages confounded him to such a degree, that he, whose careless and innocent heart was always an open letter with flying seal, dissembled now towards his dear, good friend Flamin.--He wanted at least to investigate the maternal mole and its distinctness for himself, He therefore went to him, and found him bent over his writing, and with a glowing work-face. He conjured him to consider that recreation and holidays were indispensable to him, and urged it upon him that he should work, like a compositor, standing. Then he came gradually upon the subject of Flamin's full-blooded chest, and upon the question whether it could bear his exertions without stingings and oppressions. Then he arrived at the point, and proposed that Flamin should, at all events, have a Burgundy-pitch plaster applied as lung-conductor to his shoulder-blades; yes, he would himself do it for him now, and show him how all was to be prepared. He hoped, besides, to draw thereby a curtain around the apple-piece. But he dissembled so wretchedly,--for he always succeeded in his innocent intrigues with maidens, and comic disguises for satirical purposes, while his serious ones always miscarried,--that even Flamin heard him out, and dryly replied, he had already had on such a plaster for two days, and--Matthieu had advised, and himself applied it.

There was a fix.--Sebastian had nothing further left him than, with a singular _sangfroid_, which, on the St. Luna road, was mixed only with a few stings from the old thorny latelings of his withered Paradise, to go unaccompanied to the Chamberlain Le Baut, to say what was to be said, hardly to peep into the Parsonage, and quietly to trudge off again without a single--hope.

Dear Fortune! better beheaded than scalped,--better _one_ disaster than ten miscarriages; I mean, break man upon thy wheel rather from above than from below upward!--

Victor, to be sure, knew as yet not a word of the turn he should give to the subject, in order to put two such court-emigrants as the Le Bauts, who knew nothing holier than the _Latreia_ towards a prince, the _Douleia_ towards his minister, and the _Hyperdouleia_ towards his w--, out of humor with Clotilda's promotion; but he thought, "I will do what I can."

Clotilda's parents received him with so much civility,--i. e. with so much courtesy of the body, with so much powdered sugar on every feature, with so much sirup of violets on every word,--in short, he found the report which Matthieu had rendered to Flamin of their amiable disposition towards him so well grounded,--that he could have selected no better opportunity than this to dissuade them from the transplanting of their daughter, had they not begun to thank him for having been himself the very transplanter. They had learned or guessed all, and thanked him for his intercession, to which they probably attached more self-interested views than the daughter did. It would have been ridiculous, in Clotilda's presence, to advise _her_ against Flachsenfingen, and dissuade from that for which they thanked him; still, however, he attempted something. He told the Chamberlain "his daughter deserved rather to _have_ a court than to adorn one; nay, that _he_ deserved at most in the whole matter--an excuse, as Clotilda would certainly prefer the society of her parents to the constraint of court; in that case, he would promise to put the index back again with the Prince, and rectify everything without disadvantage." The father took this expression for a strong deprecation of gratitude; the step-mother, for some piece of knavery or other; the daughter, for--words. She said, a little curtly, "I think it was easy to choose between disobedience and absence." For, unbending as she was to her step-mother, she willingly followed the hints of her father, whom, with all his weaknesses, and as the only soul on the earth attached to him, she tenderly loved. Victor, at last, though reluctantly, was forced to give it up; but why does man find it harder to resign himself to the future than to the past?--The coldness of the daughter was naturally not less (but sincerer) than the warmth of the parents.... And this coldness was precisely what refreshed his glowing brain. This cold, indifferent form was wrapped as a veil about the sublime and loving one, as it ever floated before him with that melancholy look which he could not endure. Without the consciousness of anything wrong, satisfied with his obedience to Emanuel's request, he withdrew, with his feelings oppressed by decorum, returning coldness with greater coldness.--He would have been a poor lover, if he had known what he wanted; for otherwise he never could have desired of Clotilda, even in case of her love for him, any extraordinary warmth towards a medicus whom her parents forced upon her (which injures a man even more than ugliness), who so impolitely took himself out of the garden without a birthday _carmen_, and who pressed her into the seven gilded towers of court-service, despite her reluctance, despite every probability of her future _prison-fever_.--But for the _vacant freehold_ of his heart this very vexation was wholesome....

If my good reader ever has to take an eternal farewell of a too dear friend, let him take it _twice_.--The _first_ we all understand, as a matter of course, when he sinks in the intoxication of sorrow, in the hemorrhage of heart and eyes, and when the beloved object burns itself with flames into the tender soul; but _then_ he will never be able to forget the being thus torn from his heart. Therefore he must take a _second_ farewell, which is colder even for the reason that passionate emotions admit no _dal segno_[226] of repetition; nay, (if he will take the wisest course of all,) he must endeavor, after the first tragic leave-taking, to see her in a public place (e. g. at a coronation), where she must appear cold. Her frosty face will then snow over her glowing one in his brain; and my good reader has, undoubtedly, collected together again wits enough to know what he reads in the Dog-Post-Days....

--Upon my word, if Jean Paul does not write industriously, then no one does; it has already struck one, and he took it for a quarter to twelve; my sister will already be folding her hands before the tucked-up smoking pike, which, like the serpent of eternity, has his tail in his mouth, and saying, incessantly, "It is all growing cold!"--"It must be so, after such glowing chapters," say I, "if thou meanest the reader and the author."--Already, while I still sit over the twentieth chapter, the post-dog is frisking round in the chamber with the twenty-first; and yet I will starve myself, unless I can still utter before dinner, like the seven wise men, seven golden sayings:--

1. When one who is stung by a bee or by fate does not keep still, the sting tears out, and is left behind.

2. Miserable earth, which three or four great or bold men can reform and agitate! Thou art a true stage: in the foreground are some fighting players and a few canvas-tents; the background swims with painted tents and soldiers!

3. States and diamonds are in these days, when they have stains, cut up into little ones; and as

4. Men in great states and bees in great hives suffer a loss of courage and warmth; accordingly now-a-days they join to small countries other small countries, as they do to beehives colony-hives.

5. Man takes _his_ suffering for that of _humanity_, as the bees take the dropping of their bee-stand, when the sun already shines out again, for rain, and stay in-doors.

6. But he commits daily a _lesser_ error: he regards as an _eternity_ (that Aristotelian Unity of Time to the drama--of Existence) at first his present _hour_,--then his _youth_,--then his _life_,--then his _century_,--then the duration of the _globe_,--then that of the _sun_,--then that of the _heavens_,--then (this is the least error) _time_ itself....

7. There are in man, in the beginning and at the end, as in books, two blank bookbinder's leaves,--childhood and old age; and so, too, in the Dog-Post-Days: see the end of this day and the beginning of the next.

FIFTH INTERCALARY DAY.

_Continuation of the Register of Extra-Sheets_.

K.

Cold.[227]--In our age decrease of _stoicism_ and increase of _egotism_ are found side by side. The former covers its treasures and germs with ice; the latter is itself ice. So, in physics, _mountains_ wear away, and _glaciers_ increase.