M.

Maidens.--Young maidens are like young turkey-hens, that thrive poorly, if one touches them often; and mothers keep these soft creatures, made of floating pollen, like _pastel-pictures_, under window-glass--because everything is afraid of us princess-stealers and fruit-thieves--until they are fixed. Meanwhile the proper crown-guard around a female heart is neither solitude,--which leads only to an untried innocence,[229] that falls, to be sure, not before the debauchee, but yet before the hypocrite,--nor society, nor hard labor,--otherwise no country girl would ever fall,--nor good teachings,--for these are to be had in every mouth and in every circulating library; but these four first and last things do it all at once, and they are at once superseded, united, and replaced by a wise and virtuous mother.

N.

Names of the Great.[230]--When I see, as I do, how they scatter their productions for the Fair, occasional writings and fugitive pieces (children born out of wedlock) as anonymously as if they were reviews, then I say: "Herein I recognize genuine modesty; for natural children are precisely their best and their own, and can, besides, be acknowledged by the Prince _as_ genuine; whereas their supernatural [or extra-natural] ones born in wedlock have to do without the certification; and yet they will not let the world know the name of the benefactor, but quite as often (nay, oftener) get people _into it_ as _out of it_ secretly. What the child in other cases first learns to pronounce, such parents speak to him last,--their name. Methinks they follow herein Goethe's fine ear; for they hide themselves, while they fill the orchestra of the world with children's voices and with _vingt-quatre_,[231] and with alarm-works and repeating-works, (what a juxtaposition of unlike things!) just as Goethe demands of the playing musical artist that he shall work for the ears, but hide himself for the sake of sparing the eyes. Quite as beautifully do they do the thing when they finally adopt as children, and show to the world, their children by the thirtieth marriage (often after the five or twenty years' limitation), and thus imitate the greenfinches, which, it is said, make their nest and its inmates invisible by means of the so-called greenfinch-stone, till the latter are fledged."

O.

Ostracism.--It was among the Greeks, as is well known, no punishment. Only people of great merits achieved it; and so soon as this banishment from the country was lavished upon bad men, it went entirely into disuse. An imperial citizen must lament that we, who have a similar public educational institution,--namely, banishment,--squander it often upon the very wretchedest rascals, and therefore--with the design of making one circle or country the spit-box and secreting-vessel of another--drive out of the country scoundrels who are hardly fit to stay in it. Thereby is this clearing of the country deprived for the most part of the honorable and distinguishing feature which it might have for the man of merit, and an honest man--e. g. a Bahrdt[232]--is almost ashamed to be invested with such an honor. There should, therefore, be an imperial police-regulation that only ministers, professors, and officers of decided worth, like important documents, should be dismissed and banished. To similar men I would also limit hanging. With the Romans, in truth, only great heads and lights were interred on the _way_[233] at the expense of a whole state; but what shall I think of the Germans, with whom seldom serviceable subjects, but mostly finished rogues, are buried at public expense, which they call hangman's fees, having been previously hanged on the gallows by the roadside?--Not even in his lifetime can a man, unless he has extraordinary, and often _eccentric_ merits,--although eccentric men fall back into the truth, as _comets_ do into the _sun_, as fuel,--make his calculations upon being, in some manner, as the ancients duplicated their noble men in statues and pictures, hung up in _effigy_ in a thick stone frame.... Let me have an answer; I allow myself to be talked with.

P.

Philosophy.--Some critical philosophers have now borrowed from the algebra a mathematical method, without which one cannot for a single minute--not so much think as--write philosophically. The algebraist, by the transposition of mere _letters_, catches truths which no chain of reasoning could ever draw out of the deep. In this the critical philosopher has imitated him, but with greater advantage. As he cleverly mixes together, not letters, but whole _technical words_, there rises from the alliteration of the same a cream of truths which he could hardly have dreamed of. Such philosophers are forbidden, and rightly, like the preachers of Gotha (Goth. Public Ordinances, P. III. p. 16), to use allegories, or any flower of speech, which, as other flowers do for the drawing-hounds, would spoil the scent.--Properly, however, the picturesque style is more definite than the technical word-style, which finally, as all _abstract words are pictures_, is also itself a picturesque style, only one full of pictures that have run out and faded. Jacobi is not obscure in consequence of his _images_, but in consequence of the new _ideas_ which through them he would communicate to us.

I have lately been looking over the birth-lists of the learned and teaching republic, and counting up the young little Kants whom the old Kant--otherwise unmarried, like his cousin Newton--has for the last ten Fairs begotten. Demetrius Magnus, who wanted to make a book of authors of the same name, must have been very stupid, if he had undertaken to write in our times, and yet at the same time, though he nevertheless communicated that there had been sixteen Platos, twenty Socrateses, twenty-eight Pythagorases, thirty-two Aristotles, had very sinfully omitted to say that there are now as many philosophers and philosophists as those make when reckoned all together--namely, ninety-six--who could bear the name of Kant,--that is, if they chose to. Such mechanics--thus may I call the magisters, because formerly the mechanics, inversely, were called magisters, and the upper master arch-magister--one should take into account as the best propaganda which bulky books can have. They are, at best, competent to diffuse the system, because they know how to separate from it the incomprehensible, the spiritual, and to extract what is popular and palpable, i. e. the words for readers, who, otherwise simple, nevertheless would not die without a critical philosophy. The most miserable theological and æsthetic stone receives now a Kantian setting in words. Although every new system introduces a certain _one-sidedness_ of view into all heads,--especially as every cold philosopher has so much the more _one-sidedness_, precisely as he has the more _insight_,--still that is no matter; for great bars of truth come forth through the joint digging of the whole thinking-works.[234] Whoever has seen Kant standing on his mountain among his learned fellow-laborers, is reminded with pleasure of a similar incident in Peru, which Buffon communicates. When Condamine and Bouger were measuring there the equatorial degrees of the earth (as Kant did of the intellectual world), whole troops of apes appeared as coadjutors, put on spectacles, looked at the stars and down at the clocks, and reduced one thing and another to writing, although without salary, which is their only distinction from the vicariate Kants.

Every man of genius is a philosopher, but not the reverse. A philosopher without fancy, without history, and without a _general knowledge_ of the most important things, is more one-sided than a politician. Whoever has adopted, rather than discovered, a system; whoever has not had beforehand dark presentiments thereof; whoever has not at least pined for it beforehand; in short, whoever does not bring with him a soul like a full, warm, ground filled with germs, which waits only for its summer,--such a one may indeed be a teacher, but not a scholar of the philosophy which he degrades to a mercenary profession; and, briefly, it is all one what place one climbs as his philosophical observatory,--a throne, or a Pegasus, or an Alp, or a Cæsar's-couch, or a bier,--and they are almost all higher than the desk in a lecture-room and hall of disputation.

Q (_see_ K).

R.

Reviewers.--An editor of a review should have six tables. At the first should sit and eat the advertisers of the _existence_ of a book; at the second, the wholesale appraisers of its _value_; at the third, the epitomists of it; at the fourth, the grammarians and philologists, who distribute to the public _catalogues raisonnés_ of other men's grammatical blunders; at the fifth, the fighters, who refute a new book, not by a new book, but by a sheet; at the sixth should stand the critical, princely bench, on which might sit Herder, Goethe, Wieland, and perhaps yet another, who survey a book as a human life, who apprehend its _individuality_, indicate at once the spirit of the literary creation and creator, and separate that incarnation and embodiment of the divine beauty which takes the form of an individual _from_ the beauty, and then disclose and pardon it.

These six critical benches, which might edit six different literary periodicals, are now thrown over each other, and form _one_.--Frankly, however, as I come out against this jumbling together of learned (1) advertisements, (2) reviews, (3) extracts, (4) verbal and (5) real criticisms, and (6) artistic judgments, still I am ready and glad to admit that the critical _Fauna_ and _Flora_ of the first _five_ tables root out, perhaps, full as many shoots of weeds as they put forth themselves from their own germs; and I therefore appeal to a private letter of my own, which is beyond the suspicion of flattery, and wherein I associate it with a toadstool, which, although it produces, itself, upon an affusion (in this case, of ink), whole hosts of insects, nevertheless eradicates the flies.--But as among the reviewers there are also authors, like myself; as among the Portuguese inquisitors there are Jews; and, in fact, as I should want to talk whole intercalary years on the subject,--why talk a whole intercalary day?

S.

Stripes.--"He that knoweth his Lord's will, and doeth it not, shall receive double stripes."--Who, then, gets the single ones? Not he, surely, who knows not the will and does it not?--It follows, therefore, that greater knowledge, not _aggravates_, but itself _creates_, moral guilt; for in so far as I absolutely do not discern a moral obligation, my offence against it is surely not less, but none at all.

I will be my own Academy of Sciences, and assign to myself the following prize-question, which I will myself answer in a prize essay: "Since only such actions are virtuous as proceed from love for goodness, it follows that only those can be sinful which proceed from mere love of evil, and reference to self-interest must lessen the degree of a sin, as well as that of a virtue. But, on the other hand, what could there be but self-interest in our nature, which should impel us to what is bad? And if evil were done from a pure propensity to evil, then there would be a second, although opposite, autonomy[235] of the will."

T.

Trouble, Tribulation.--Now, as I write these distressful sounds, which announce to me that Nature makes only _thorn-hedges_, but men _crowns of thorns_, all pleasure in lashing about me with the thorns of satire dies away, and I would rather draw some thorns out of your hands or feet.

21. DOG-POST-DAY.

Victor's Professional Visits.--Concerning Houses full of Daughters.--The Two Fools.--The Carrousel.

The following remark comes not from the dog's knapsack, but from my own head: One needs not to be a panegyrist of our times, to see with pleasure that authors, princes, women, and others have now mostly laid aside the unnatural _false_ masks of virtue (e. g. bigotry, pietism, ceremonial behavior), and have entirely assumed instead the _genuine_ tasteful _show_ of virtue. This improvement of our character-masks, whereby we hit more finely the exterior of virtue, is contemporaneous with a similar one on the stage, where they play their antics and their tragics no longer, as once, with _paper_ clothes and badly imitated laces, but with the _true_ ones.--

"The Princess wanted you yesterday," said the Prince to the Court-Physician, almost as soon as he had entered with his exhausted face. The inflammation of Agnola's eyes had, in consequence of the autumn weather, night-feasts, and Culpepper's bold practice and her own--for the red capital letters of beauty (namely, painted cheeks) she was always putting on afresh--very much increased. Properly, Victor was too proud to let himself be sent for as a mere physician; nay, he was too proud to let himself be in demand for anything else (and though it were philosophy or beauty) than his character; for his father, who had just as much delicate pride, had taught him that we must not serve any one who does not respect us, or whom we ourselves do not respect,--nay, that one must not accept a favor from any one to whom one can only return outward, but not inward thanks. But this tender sense of honor, which never came into an unequal conflict with his self-interest, though it might well with his humanity, could never bind the hands wherewith he might relieve an unhappy Princess--unhappy, like himself, from a famine of love--at least of the pains of her eyes; perhaps, also, of _younger_ pangs; for his good-heartedness suggested to him nothing but reconciliations,--of the Prince with Le Baut, with the Princess, with the Minister. Nothing is more dangerous than to reconcile two persons,--unless, indeed, one is himself one of them; to set them at variance is much safer and easier.

He found Agnola, even in the afternoon, still in her chamber, because its green tapestries flattered (not the face, to be sure, but) the hot eye. A thick veil over the face was her screen from daylight. When she, like a sun, lifted her veil, he could not comprehend how in Tostato's shop he could make, out of this Italian fire and these quick court-eyes, the face, red with weeping, of a blonde. A part of this fire belonged, to be sure, to her sickness. Her first word was a decided disobedience to his first; meanwhile she flew in the face of the Messrs. _Pringle_ and _Schmucker_, as well as himself; for the whole triune College advised leeches round the eyes; but those were disgusting to her. The medicus then suggested cupping-glasses at the back of the head; but her hair was more precious to her than her eyes.

"Must, then, everything be bought with blood?" said she, with Italian vivacity.

"Realms and religions ought not to be, but health should," said he, with English freedom of speech.

Once more he demanded her blood. She would not give it to him, however, until he changed the sacrificial knife, and proposed opening a vein in the eye. Persons of rank, like learned men, are often ignorant of the commonest things: she thought the Doctor would open the vein. And as she thought so, he did it, with a hand trained by the couching-needle.

Meanwhile, if (according to Pliny) a kiss on the eye is one on the soul, the opening of a vein in that organ is no joke; but one may, while he inflicts a wound, himself get one. The poor Court-Medicus must, with his swimming, friendly eye, from which only within a few days the tear of love has been dried away, boldly gaze into the sun pent up in an eye-socket, and, what is more, softly rest his finger on the warm face, and from the fountain of tears make bright blood spurt out.... One ought, before undertaking such an operation, to have a similar one performed on himself, for the sake of the cooling. But, in truth, fate had given him nothing this week but lancet-cuts into his heart's arteries. Let one, further, represent to himself how the whole female sex appeared to him like a magic, far-receded shape, which had once gleamed near to him in a dream, and as a paled moon by day, which he had worshipped in a bright night; and then will one have opened his good innocent heart to behold therein, beside a great ever-active sorrow, a thousand sympathetic wishes for the compassionated Princess. Despite her singular mixture of pride, liveliness, and refinement, he still thought he discovered a change in her, which he could explain

## partly by his to-day's assiduity and partly by his influence on the

Prince, which had been thus far so favorable to her,--a change which would have given him greater courage, had he not insisted upon being threatened with special drafts upon his courage by the billet above the imperator of the compass-watch. At the former and first visit his courage was lamed, because he thought himself avoided, as the son of a father who seemed to fortify his influence by his care for natural children; for a man full of love beside one full of hatred is dumb and stupid.

What put him most in heart to-day, next to the quarrels in which he was defeated (as the one about leeches, &c.), was the last and following, in which he conquered (one grows more courageous and prosperous when one contradicts a proud woman than when one flatters her): He saw a mask lying there; now, as he knew that in Italy ladies wore them in bed, as ours do gloves, using them as a sort of glove to the face, he straightly forbade her the mask, as being tinder to the inflammation of her eyes. It was no flattery when he said to her that the mask might take from her more than it gave. In short, he insisted upon it.--

He was, perhaps, too tolerant towards the doubt which only a woman could make _endurable_ and _enduring_,--the doubt which one she mistook for the other, the Court-Physician or the favorite; for at last--though not without a fear of saying too much, which, with people of his fiery temperament, is a sign that the thing has already happened--he told her, what he had in the beginning kept back, that the sympathy (_empressement_) of the Prince had sent him to her; and he extolled the latter at his own expense, and so much the more, as he had nothing further of an extraordinary nature to adduce with regard to him, but only that he had--sent him to her.

Then he went. With the Prince he bestowed on her as many _beatifications_ and as many _canonizations_ (two contrarieties on this earth) as decorum and his humor (two still greater contrarieties) would allow. Singular! she had, for all her fire, no humor. He knew January succumbed, not merely to the slanderer, but also to the flatterer. The crowned theatre-managers of the earth have determinations put into their hearts, and decrees into their mouths; they know what they mean and what they say two or three days later than their throne-prompter. A favorite is a Shakespeare and poet, who, from behind the persons he makes act and speak, never peeps or coughs out himself, but is a ventriloquist, and gives _his_ voice the sound of another's.

When he visited his patient the next day, the eye-sockets were cooled down, though not the eyes. Agnola sat convalescent in a cabinet full of images of the saints. With the indisposition of her eyes had been taken away, at the same time, a source of conversation; and her pride blocked up the way at once to his sensibility and to his humor. Although he said to her a hundred times in his innermost heart, "Torment not thyself, proud soul; I am no favorite; I will not rob thee of anything, least of all of thy pride or another's love,--oh, I know what it is to win none,"--nevertheless he remained (in _his_ opinion) cold before her, and retired with the annoying prospect that his successful cure had cut off his return; for the other court visits were, after all, no confidential visits to the sick. Of the plaguy compass-watch he stood daily less and less in terror, except just when he was happier than usual.

--Many people would sooner live without houses than without building-schemes; Victor, sooner without air to breathe than without castles in the air. He must always have on hand the lottery-chance and stocks of some plan or other for the future; and a woman was, in most cases, the partner in this grand-adventure trade. This time he was keenly bent upon the reconciliation of January and Agnola. He reasoned thus:--"It is easy on both sides. January will now always seek Agnola's society, though merely out of cunning, for the sake of getting with more decency into that of her future maid-of-honor, Clotilda, whom, in her condition of singleness, he can, according to his _vow_, still love with impunity. As he can neither withstand a long praise nor a long intercourse, this will imperceptibly accustom him to Agnola. She, who is now left alone on the side of the Minister Schleunes, will not reject the united regards of Victor and January," &c.... But whether only the beauty of the action, and not also the beauty of the Princess, incited him to this mediatorial office, that is what the Twenty-First

## Chapter cannot yet know; meanwhile, so far as I am concerned, let the

following stand: his cold inner man, exhausted by bleeding, from which the harpsichord and the name of Clotilda and the awaking at morning still draw bloodless daggers, needs so much indeed the din of the world and everything that may benumb its wounds!

With the design of such preliminaries to a peace, he excused his future disobedience to his father, who had counselled him against frequenting the house of Schleunes; for as the Princess always went there, it was the fittest neutral place for the peace-congress. Oh for only half an----

EXTRA-LEAF ON HOUSES FULL OF DAUGHTERS!

The house of Schleunes was an open bookstore, whose works (the daughters) one could read there, but not carry home. Although the five other daughters stood in five private libraries as wives, and one, under the earth at Maienthal, was sleeping away the child's plays of life, there were, nevertheless, in this warehouse of daughters, three free copies left for sale to good friends. The Minister, at the drawings of the lottery of offices, loved to give his daughters as premiums for great winnings and prizes. To whom God gives an office, to him he gives, if not understanding, yet a wife. In a house rich in daughters, as in St. Peter's Church, there must be confession-pews for all nations, for all characters, for all faults, that the daughters may sit therein as mother-confessors, and absolve from everything, celibacy alone excepted. I have, as naturalist, often admired the wise arrangement of Nature for the propagation as well of daughters as of vegetables. Is it not a wise provision, I said to the natural historian Goetze, that Nature gives precisely to those maidens who need for their life a rich mineral fountain something _attaching_, by which they may fasten on to miserable nuptial finches, who shall carry them to fat places? Thus Linnæus[236] observes, as you know, that those kinds of seeds which only thrive in rich earth have little hooks on them, in order to hang the more easily on the cattle which carry them to the stable and manure-heap. Wonderfully does Nature scatter about by the wind--father and mother must make it--daughters and pine-seeds into the arable places of the forests. Who does not observe the final cause why many daughters receive from Nature certain charms in designated numbers, that some canon or other, a German Herr, a cardinal-deacon, an appanaged prince, or a mere country squire, may come along and take the aforesaid charmer, and, as groomsman or English bride's-father, hand her over, ready finished, to some blockhead or other, in a distant place, as a ready-made wife on sale? And do we find in the case of bilberries any less precaution on the part of Nature? Does not the same Linnæus observe, in the same treatise, that they are enveloped in a nutritious juice, that they may attract the fox to eat them, whereupon the knave--he cannot digest the berries--becomes, for all he knows, the sower of them?--

Oh, my innermost spirit is more serious than you think. I am vexed with those parents who are traders in souls; I pity the daughters who are negro slaves. Ah! is it any wonder, then, if the daughters who were obliged to dance, laugh, talk, and sing at the West Indian market, in order to be carried home by the master of a plantation, if they, I say, are treated just as much like slaves as if they were sold and bought? Ye poor lambs!--and yet ye are quite as hard as your sheep mothers and fathers. What shall one do with his enthusiasm for your sex, when one travels through German cities, where every richest or most distinguished man, and though he were a distant relation of the Devil himself, can point with his finger to thirty houses, and say: "I don't know,--shall I pick out and marry one from the pearl-colored, or from the nut-colored, or perhaps from the steel-green house? The shops are all open for purchasers."--What, ye maidens! is, then your heart so little worth that you can cut it down, like old clothes, to suit any fashion, any breast? and is it, then, like a Chinese ball, now great, now tiny, in order to fit into the ball-form and wedding-ring case of a man's heart?--"It must indeed be so, unless one will continue to sit alone, like the Holy Virgin over yonder," is the reply of those to whom I make no reply, because I turn away from them with contempt, in order to say to the so-called Holy Virgin: "Forlorn, but patient one! Unappreciated and withered one! remember not the times when thou still didst hope for better ones than the present, and never repent the noble pride of thy heart! It is not always a duty to marry, but it is always a duty not to forgive one's self anything, never to be happy at the expense of honor, and not to avoid celibacy by infamy. Unadmired, solitary heroine! In thy last hour, when the whole of life and the former goods and scaffoldings of life, crushed into ruins, sink beforehand,--at that hour thou wilt look out over thy emptied life; thou wilt see there, it is true, no children, no husband, no wet eyes; but in the vast, void twilight a great, saintly form; angelically smiling, radiant, godlike, and soaring to the divine ones, will hover, and beckon to thee to ascend with her. Oh, ascend with her; that form is thy _virtue_."

_End of the Extra-Leaf_.

Some days after the Princess gave the Prince an _eye en médaillon_ with the fine conceit: she gave this _votive-tablet_ to the saint (this was so much the more _apropos_ as the Prince was named _Januarius_) who had sent her his wonder-worker, and who now received that which he had caused to be healed. January said to Victor, to whom he showed the eye, "She confounds St. Januarius with you, with St. Ottilia,"--who, as is well known, is the patroness of eyes.

Victor was glad that Matthieu came to him to go with him to St. Luna; for the latter begged him, because this was done without him, to go with him to his mother's, "because to-day at the Princess's there was a great _souper_, but at his mother's not a soul,"--that is, hardly more than nine persons. Victor therefore--it mattered not to-day that the distinguished and interesting eye-sufferer was absent--gladly followed into Schleunes's Nuremberg _Exchange Library_ of daughters behind the tender Jonathan-Orestes-Mat, whom he, in fact, out of forbearance towards their mutual friend Flamin, treated now with more toleration. _Men_, like _ideas_, are associated together quite as often on the principle of _simultaneousness_ as on that of _similarity_; and as little can be inferred from the choice of _acquaintances_ as to the character of a youth, as in regard to that of a woman from her choice of a husband. Matthieu introduced him to his mother in the reading cabinet, just as she was hearing an English author read, with the words, "I bring you here a real live Englishman." Joachime was reading in a catalogue,--it was not a catalogue of books, but of stock-gillyflowers,--in order to select some gillyflowers for herself, not for the purpose of planting, but of imitating them--in silk. She hated flowers that grew. Her brother said, ironically, "She hated changeableness, even in a flower." For the truth was, she loved it even in lovers, and was quite different from April, which, like women, is in our climate far more steady than is pretended. In the cabinet there were also two fools, whom my correspondent does not so much as name to me, because he thinks they would be adequately designated and distinguished, if I should call the one the fragrant fool, and the other the fine one.

Both fools were buzzing round the beauty. In fact, whenever I have wanted to study fools at great parties, I have always looked round regularly for a great beauty; they gather round such a one like wasps around a fruit-woman. And if I had no other reason--I have, however--for marrying the handsomest woman, I would do it for this reason, if for no other, that I might always have the queen-bee sitting in the hollow of my hand, after whom the whole foolish bee-swarm would come buzzing. I and my wife would then be like the fellows in Lisbon, who, having in their hands a pole of parrots strung together, and at their feet a leash of _monkeys_ skipping after them, trudge through the streets, and offer their crazy _personæ_ for sale.

The fragrant fool, who was to-day on the _sunny side_ of Joachime, was reading to the mother; the fine one, who was on the _weather-side_, stood near Joachime, and seemed not to trouble himself about her _cooling of the temperature_. Victor stood there as transition from the torrid zone to the frigid, and represented the temperate; Joachime played three parts with one face. The fragrant fool shot, with his left hand, the swivel-gun of a silver _joujou_. This hanging seal of a fool he kept in motion, either, as the Greenlander does a block with his feet, for the sake of keeping himself warm,--or he did it, as the grand sultan for similar reasons must always be whittling with a jackknife, in order not to be always having somebody killed out of love,--or in order, as the stork always holds a stone in his claws, to have all the time an Ixion's-wheel in his hands, as a rowel on his heels,--or for the sake of health, in order to counteract the _globulus hystericus_[237] by the motion of an external one,--or as rosary bead,--or because he didn't know why.

Each was satisfied with himself. When the mother begged our Englishman to read to her with his native accent, the _fine_ fool said, "The English, like certain sentiments, is easier to understand than to pronounce." That is to say, this fine sheep had universally the habit of being metaphorical. If a maiden said to him, "I cannot keep myself from feeling cold to-day," he made out of it coldness of the heart. One could not say, "It is cloudy, warm, the needle has pricked me," &c., without his taking this as a ball-drawer, to extract his heart from the fire-arm of his breast, and exhibit it. It was impossible in his hearing not to be fine, and from your good-morning he twisted a _bon-mot_. Had he read the Old Testament, he would not have been able to admire sufficiently the fine turns that occur there. On the other hand, the _fragrant_ fool limited his whole wit to a lively face. He unfolded before you this bill of invoice and insurance-policy of a thousand bright conceits, and held it up to you, but nothing came. You could have sworn by the advertising-poster of wit in his fiery eye, "Now he is going to blaze out,"--but not in the least! He used the weapon of satire, as the grenadiers do hand-grenades, which they no longer throw, but only wear imitated on their caps.

When the fine one had said his erotic _bon-mot_, Joachime looked at our hero, and said, with an ironical glance at the fine one, "_J'aime les sages à la folie_."

The pride of the fragrant one in his to-day's superiority, and the apparent indifference of the fine fool to his own neglect, proved that neither was often in to-day's ease, and that Joachime coquetted in a peculiar style. She always made fun of us stately male persons, when two were with her at once,--of one alone less so; her eyes left it to our self-love to ascribe the fire in them more to love than to wit; she seemed to blab out what came into her head, but many things seemed not to come into her head; she was full of contradictions and follies, but her _intentions_ and her inclination nevertheless remained doubtful to every one; her answers were quick, but her questions still quicker. To-day, in the presence of the three gentlemen,--at other times she did it in the presence of the whole _bureau d'esprit_,--she stepped up to the looking-glass, took out her paint-box, and retouched the gay box-piece of her cheeks. One could not possibly think how she would look if she were embarrassed or ashamed.

The virtue of many a lady is a thunder-house, which the electric spark of love shatters to pieces, and which they put together again for new experiments; to our hero, spoiled by the highest female perfection, it appeared as if Joachime must be classed among those thunder-houses. Coquetry is always answered with coquetry. Either this latter it was, or too feeble a respect for Joachime, which led Victor to make the two adorers ridiculous in the eyes of the goddess. His victory was as easy as it was great; he encamped on the foe's position,--in other words, Joachime took an increased liking to him. For women cannot bear him who, before their eyes, succumbs to another sex than their own. They _love_ everything that they _admire_; and one would not have made such satirical explanations of their predilection for physical courage, if one had considered that they feel this predilection for everything that is distinguished,--for men distinguished by wealth, renown, learning. The dry and wrinkled Voltaire had so much fame and wit, that few Parisian hearts would have rejected his satirical one. Add to this, that my hero expressed his regard for the whole sex with a warmth which the individual appropriated to herself; then, too, his favorite universal-love, furthermore his eye swimming in sorrow over a lost heart, and finally his infectious human tenderness, secured him an attention from Joachime which excited his to the degree, that he proposed to himself the next time to investigate what it might signify.----

The next time soon came. So soon as the advent of the Princess was predicted by the Apothecary,--for _he_ was for the little future of the court his witch of Endor and of Cumæ, and his Delphic cave,--he went thither; for he did not drive. "So long as there is still a shoe-black and a pavement," said he, "I do not drive. But as to the more distinguished gentry, I wonder that they even travel on foot from one wing of the palace to the other. Could not one, just as they have a penny-post for a city, introduce a conveyance for the interior of the palace? Might not every chair be a sedan-chair, if a lady were less afraid of an Alpine tour from one apartment to another? And various circumnavigatresses of the world would even venture to make a pleasure-tour through a large garden in a close litter."--Victor's own journey lay straight through one,--namely, that of Schleunes. It was too bright and pleasant as yet to let him screw himself like a sewing-cushion to the card-table. He saw in the garden a gay little party strolling about, and Joachime among them. He joined them. Joachime expressed an artist's pleasure at the groupings of the clouds, and it was becoming to her beautiful eyes when she lifted them in that direction. As they had nothing clever to say, they sought to do something clever, so soon as they came to the _carrousel_.[238] They seated themselves in it, and caused it to be set agoing. Many of the ladies had absolutely not the courage to climb this potter's-wheel; some ventured into the seats; only Joachime, who was full as daring as she was timid, mounted the wooden tourney-steed, and took the lance in hand, to spear away the ring, with a grace which was worthy of finer rings. But in order not to expose herself to being thrown by the whirling Rosinante, Joachime had set my hero beside her as a banister, that she might hold on to him in time of need. The revolution of the axle grew more rapid, and her fear greater; she clung to him more and more firmly, and he clasped her more firmly in order to anticipate her effort. Victor, who understood very well the legerdemain and hocuspocus of women, easily saw through Joachime's Wiegleb's-natural-magic and "Trunkus Plempsum Schallalei";[239] besides, the reciprocal pressure had passed to and fro so rapidly, that one could not tell whether it had an originator or an originatress....

As they are now all within doors, and I stand alone in the garden by the horse-mill, I will reflect ingeniously on the subject, and remark that great people, like women and the French and the Greeks, are great--children. All great philosophers are the same, and, when they have almost destroyed themselves with thinking, revive themselves by child's fooleries, as, e. g., Malebranche did; even so do great people refresh themselves for their more serious, noble diversions by true childish ones; hence the hobby-horse chivalry, the swing, the card-houses (in Hamilton's _mémoires_), the cutting out of pictures, the _joujou_. With this passion for amusing themselves, they are in

## part infected by the custom of amusing their superiors, because the

latter resemble the ancient gods, who, according to Moritz, were appeased, not by atonement, but by joyous festivals.

As he was acquainted with the whole theatre-company of the Minister, and, secondly, as he was no longer a lover,--for such a one has a thousand eyes for _one_ person, and a thousand eyelids for the rest,--he was not embarrassed at the Minister's, but actually enjoyed himself. For he had, to be sure, his plan to carry through there; and a plot makes a life entertaining, whether one _reads_ or _executes_ it.

He was successful to-day in having a tolerably long talk with the Princess, and, to be sure, not about the Prince,--she avoided that subject,--but about her trouble of the eyes. That was all. He felt it was easier to play off an exaggerated regard than to express a real. The apprehension of appearing false _makes_ one appear so. Hence a sincere man has the look, with a suspicious one, of being half false. Meanwhile, with Agnola, who, in spite of her temperament, was coy,--hence a peculiar, lowered tone reigned in her presence at Schleunes's,--every step sufficed which he did not take backward.

But toward the sprightly Joachime he took half a step forward. Not so much she, as the house, seemed to him to be coquettish; and the daughters therein--they constitute the house--he found to resemble the old Litones,[240] or people of the Saxons, who were one third free and two thirds serf, and who therefore could mortgage a third of their estate. Each had still a third, a ninth, a segment, of her heart left to her own free disposal. In fact, whoso has ever seen codfishing can learn the thing here from metaphor,--the three daughters hold long fishing-rods over the water (father and mother splash, and drive the codfish along), and have their hooks baited with state-uniforms or their own faces,--with hearts,--with whole men (as luring rivals),--with hearts which have already been once taken out of the stomach of another captured codfish;--from this, I say, one can see in some sort how they catch the other cod in the sea, precisely as they do the stock-fish on land,--namely, besides what has been mentioned (now let one read back again), with bits of red rag, with glass-pearls, with birds' hearts, with salted herrings and bleeding fishes, with little cods themselves, with fishes which one has taken out, half digested, from stock-fish formerly caught.----Victor thought to himself, "Joachime may be only lively or coquettish for all me; I can easily skip over marten-traps which I can see set right before my nose." Well, run, Victor; the _visible_ steel shall lead thee precisely upon that which is _concealed_. One may observe in the same person coquetry towards every other, and yet overlook it toward himself, as the fair one believes the flatterer whom she sets down as a consummate flatterer of all others.--He observed that Joachime had somewhat oftenish looked up at the new ceiling this evening, and he could not rightly tell why it pleased her. At last he saw that she was only pleased with herself, and that raising her eyes was more becoming to them than looking down. He undertook presumptuously to investigate this, and said to her, "It is a pity the painter of the Vatican had not made it, that you might look up at it oftener."--"Oh," said she, in a tone of levity, "I never would look up with others; I do not love admiration." By and by she said, "Men dissemble, when they wish to, better than we; but I tell you just as few truths as I hear from you." She confessed outright that coquetry was the best remedy against love; and with the observation that his frankness pleased her, but hers must please him too, she ended the visit and the Post-Day.

22. DOG-POST-DAY.

Gun-Foundery of Love; e. g. Printed Gloves, Quarrels, Dwarf-Flasks, and Stabs.--A Title from the Digests of Love.--Marie.--Court-Day.-- Giulia's dying Epistle.

The reader will be vexed with this Dog-Post-Day; I, for my part, have already been vexed about it. My hero is evidently becoming entangled in the meshes of two female trains, and even in the bonds of the princely friendship... Nothing more is wanting than that Clotilda should actually be joined to the hurly-burly.----And something of this kind it becomes necessary for a mining-superintendent, an islander, to communicate confidentially to the people on the mainland.

Besides, it must be done chronologically. I will dissect this Dog-Post-Day, which reaches from November to December, into weeks. Thereby more order will be observed. For I understand the Germans. They want, like the metaphysician, to know everything from the beginning onward, very exactly, in royal octavo, without excessive brevity, and with some _citata_. They furnish an epigram with a preface, and a love-madrigal with a table of contents; they determine the zephyr by compass and the heart of a maiden by conic sections; they mark everything, like merchants, in black-letter, and prove everything, like jurists; their cerebral membranes are living parchments, their legs private surveyors'-poles and pedometers; they cut up the veil of the Nine Muses, and apply to the hearts of these damsels turners'-compasses, and insert gauging-rods in their heads; poor Clio (the muse of history) looks, for all the world, like the Consistorial Counsellor Büsching, who trudges along slowly, bent up under a land freight of surveyors'-chains, clocks to calculate _thirds_, and Harrison's longitude-watches, and interleaved writing-almanacs, so that I specially weep for the poor Büsching as often as I see him striding along, since all Germany, (from which I should have expected something different,)--every magistrate, every stupid justice of the peace, (only we of Scheerau have never saddled him,)--has loaded down the good topographical carrier and Christopher (cross-bearer), like a statue hung with pledges, from knee to nostril, (so that the good man is hardly to be seen, and I wonder how he stays on his feet,)--has palisaded, I say, and built him in with all sorts of cursed devil's whisks, with village inventories, with advertising sheets, with heraldic works, with books of ground-plats and perspective plans of pigsties.

They have even--that I may only _relate_ an example out of my own history of the German statistic stupidity, although in the very doing of it I _give one_--infected Jean Paul. Is it not an old story that he has approximately assigned in degrees, by means of a Saussure's cyanometer,[241] the blueness of the fairest eyes into which an _amoroso_ ever looked, and inspected the fairest drops that fell from them during the measurement, correctly enough, with a dew-measurer?--And has not his attempt to catch and prove female sighs by a Stegmann's measurer of the purity of the atmosphere found more than too many imitators among us?----

WEEK OF THE 22D POST-TRINITATIS, OR FROM NOV. 3d to 11th (EXCLUSIVE).

Almost the whole of this week he sat out at the Minister's. Many people, when they have been only four times in a house, come again daily, like the quotidian fever,--in the beginning, like the spring sun, every day earlier; afterward, like the autumn sun, every day later. He saw, indeed, that he could not contribute anything at this court-and-ministerial party, either a mystery, or property, or a heart, because it would resemble honest courts of justice, which--just as the monks call their property a deposit, and say nothing belongs to them--inversely promote every deposit into a piece of property, and say all belongs to them. But he made no account of that. "I come indeed only for fun," thought he, "and no harm can be done to me."----

The Minister, whom he met only over the table, had all the civility towards him which can be united with a face full of persiflage, and with a class of society in whose eyes all the world is divided into spies and thieves; but Sebastian perceived, nevertheless, that he looked upon him as a smatterer in medicine and the serious sciences,--as if they were not all serious,--and as an adept merely in wit and in the liberal arts. He was, however, too proud to turn to him any other than the empty new-moon-side, and concealed from him all that might convert him. Consequently, Victor must needs, in the eyes of the stupidest government-officer who had seen it, have deprived himself of all respect by the fact that, when the Minister started an interesting conversation with his brother, the Regency-President, about imposts, alliances, or the exchequer, he either did not attend, or ran off, or looked up the women.----Then, too, he loved in the Prince only the man; the Minister loved only the Prince. Victor could himself, when with January, deliver discourses on the advantages of republics, and the latter would often, in his enthusiasm, (if the supreme courts and his stomach had allowed it,) gladly have raised Flachsenfingen to a free state, and himself to the President of Congress therein. But the Minister hated all this with a mortal hatred, and fastened on all political free-thinkers--on a Rousseau, on all Girondists, all Feuillants, all Republicans, and all philosophers--the name of _Jacobin_, as the Turks call all foreigners, Britons, Germans, Frenchmen, etc., _Franks_. Meanwhile this was a reason why Victor now took a greater liking to Mat, who thought better on this subject, and why he fled from the father to the daughter.

This week he got into Joachime's good graces. She gave to the fine and fragrant duo of fools, as we do to _virtue_, only the second prize, and to my hero, as we do to _inclination_, the prize-medal. But as he respected, at most, merely a certain sentimentalism in friendship and in love, he could, he thought, have ridden through the moon with this waggish girl, without sighing _for_ her (though he might, indeed, _over_ her). But these jolly ones, my Bastian, have seen the old Harry; for whenever they change to anything else, one changes with them to the same thing. She told him she wanted to give _pleasure_, like a Lutheran holy picture, but she would not be _adored_, like a Catholic one. She prepossessed him most by the gift peculiar to her sex, of understanding tender allusions,--women are so easy at guessing the meaning of others, because they always oblige others to guess their meaning, and _complete_ and _conceal_ each _half_ with equal success. But among her attractions I reckon also her constraint before the Princess, and before those who listened with their--eyes. For the rest, his heart, which Clotilda had rejected, was now in the situation of children who have made a bet that they will receive blows upon their hands without crying, and who still continue to smile when the tears already flow.

WEEK OF THE 23d POST-TRINITATIS, OR 46th OF THE YEAR 179-.

Now he is there even in the forenoon. It is worthy of notice, that on St. Martin's day he scraped her powdered forehead with the powder-knife, and that he applied to her for some court offices in connection with the toilet. "I can be your rouge-box bearer, as the Great Mogul has tobacco-pipe and betel-bearers, or else your _cravatier ordinaire_, or your _sommier_ (i. e. prayer-cushion-bearer).--I would, if you did not kneel yourself on the cushion, myself do it before you.----I knew in Hanover a handsome Englishman who had his left knee stuffed and padded, because he did not know whom he should to-day have to adore, and how long."

It is something quite as important, that on St. Jonas's day he forced her to accept a pair of fine gloves, on which a very simple face was painted. "It was his own," he said; "she should have the face only by night, in bed, in, or on, her hand, that it might look as if he kissed her hand through the whole November night."

I go on with my pragmatic extracts from this siege-journal, and find recorded on Leopold's day that, as early as in the forenoon, Joachime said she would have her parrot, if she kept a master of languages for him, repeat nothing out of the whole dictionary except the word _perfide_! "Every lover," said she, "should keep a poll for himself, which should incessantly cry out to him, _perfide_!"--"The ladies," said my hero, "are alone to blame: they want to be loved too long; often whole weeks, whole months. The like of that is beyond our powers. Have not the Jesuits made even love to God periodical? Scotus limits it to Sunday, others to the festival days.--Coninch says, it is enough if one loves Him once every four years.--Henriquez adds a year more to it.--Suarez says, it is enough if it is only done before one's death.----To many ladies the intermediate times have hitherto fallen; but the hours of the day, the seasons of the year, the days of betrothal, of burial, form just as many different sects among the Jesuits of Love."--Joachime made a beginning of putting on an angry look. The court-physician loved nothing better with a fair one than a quarrel, and added: "_C'est à force de se faire haïr qu'elles se font aimer--c'est aimer que de bouder--ah, que je vous prie de vous fâcher!_"--His humor had carried him beyond the mark.--Joachime had reason enough to fulfil his prayer for her wrath.--He wanted to continue the quarrel in order to settle it, but as there are cases where the _aggravation_ of an offence brings about forgiveness quite as little as the _taking of it back_ step by step, he did wisely in coming away.

He wondered that he should think of her all day long. The feeling of having done her wrong brought her face with a suffering expression before his softened soul, and all her features were at once ennobled. Tacitus says, we hate another when we have offended him; but good men often love another merely on that account.

The day following, Ottomar's day,--_Ottomar_! great name, which makes the long funeral procession of a great past sweep by all at once before me in the dark,--he found her serious, neither seeking nor shunning him. The two fools remained in her eyes the two fools, and gained nothing in any way. As, therefore, he clearly perceived that out of a transient resentment there had grown true repentance for her previous openness,--of which he seemed to have made too free a use and too selfish an interpretation,--it was now his duty to do in earnest that which he had hitherto done in joke, namely, to seek her and get her to be reconciled.

But she stood all the time by the Princess, and nothing was done.

I have not said it myself, because I knew the reader would see it without me,--that my hero thinks Joachime regards him as the image-worshipper of her charms, and as the moon-man, or satellite attracted by her. My hero has, therefore, long since made up his mind to leave her in this error. As to removing such an error,--for _that_ a man or a woman seldom has strength enough; but Victor had, besides, several reasons for indulging her with faith in his love (that is, himself, also, with faith in hers). In the first place, he wanted to conceal the reason of his coming; secondly, he knew that in the great world, and among the Joachimes, a lover is sought for only as third man in the game,--with them there is no dying of love, one does not even live on it; thirdly, he reserved for himself in all cases the sheet-anchor of making earnest out of jest; "when the knife is at my throat," thought he, "then I will set myself down and fall truly in love with her, and then all will be well"; fourthly, a coquette makes a _coquet_.[242] ... Here I began already, as is well known, to be vexed about the 22d Post-Day, although I know as well as anybody why all mankind, even the most sincere, even the male kind, incline to little intrigues towards their beloved; that is to say, not merely because they are little and _reciprocated_, but because one thinks by his intrigues to give more than he steals. Only the highest and noblest love is without real trickery.

WEEKS OF THE 24th AND 25th POST-TRINITATIS.

On Sunday there was a ball. "Very naturally," said he, "she will not look on me. In ball-dress the fair sex are more implacable than in morning dress." Hardly had she seen him when she came to meet him, like an agitated heaven, with her fixed stars of brilliants and her pearl-planets, and in this splendor begged of him the forgiveness of her freak. She had at first made believe angry, she said, then had actually become so; and not until the next day had seen that she did wrong to appear so and had a right to be so. This prayer for forgiveness made our Medicus more humble than was necessary. She begged him sportively to beg her pardon, and made him acquainted with her percussion-gold of sudden resentment.

For a space of two days this Westphalian peace was kept.

But one quarrel with a maiden, like one fool, makes ten; and unfortunately one only likes the angry one so much the better (at least, better than the indifferent), just as people run most after _those_ Methodist preachers who damn them the most roundly. Joachime grew daily more susceptible of anger,--which he ascribed to an increasing love,--but so did he, too. Let them have spent the whole visit in the finest imperial and domestic peace, at the leave-taking all was put upon a war-footing again, ambassadors and furloughed ones (if I may be allowed these poetical expressions) recalled. Then with the angry sediments in his heart he withdrew, and could hardly wait for the moment of the next interview,--i. e. of his or her justification. Thus did they spend their hours in the writing of peace-instruments and manifestoes. The matter of dispute was as singular as the quarrel itself: it concerned their demands of friendship; each party proved that the other was the faulty one, and demanded too much. What most enraged our Medicus was, that she allowed the fine and the fragrant fools to kiss her hand, which she forbade him to do, and in truth without any reasons for the decision. "If she would only lie to me, and say, such or such is the reason,--that at least would be something," said he; but she did him not the pleasure. To my sex, refusal without reasons, even conjecturable ones, is a pit of brimstone, a threefold death; upon Joachime, reasons and cabinet-sermons had equal influence.

EXTRA-LEAF ON THE ABOVE.

I have a hundred times, with my legal burden of proof on my back, thought of women who are able, with a certain effort, to act as well as to believe without any reasons. For surely, in the end, everybody must (according to all philosophers) reconcile himself to actions and opinions for which reasons are entirely wanting; for, since every reason appeals to a new one, and this again rests upon one which refers us to one, which again must have its own reason, it follows that (unless we mean to be forever going and seeking) we must finally arrive at one which we accept without any reason whatever. Only the scholar fails in this, that precisely the most important truths--the highest principles of morals, of metaphysics, &c.--are the ones which he believes without reasons, and which, in his agony,--thinking to help himself out thereby,--he names necessary truths. Woman, on the contrary, makes lesser truths--e. g. there must be drives, invitations, washing to-morrow, &c.--the necessary truths, which must be accepted without the insurance and reinsurance of reasons;--and just this it is which gives her such an appearance of soundness. For them it is easy to distinguish themselves from the philosopher, who thinks, and into whose eyes the sun of truth flames so horizontally that he cannot see, for it, either road or landscape. The philosopher is obliged, in the weightiest actions,--the moral,--to be his own lawgiver and law-keeper, without having the reasons therefor given him by his conscience. With a woman, every inclination is a little conscience, and hates _Heteronomies_,[243] and beyond that pronounces no reasons, just as the great conscience does. And it is precisely this gift, of acting more from private sovereignty than from reasons, which makes women so very suitable for men; for the latter would rather give them ten commands than three reasons.

_End of the Extra-Leaf on the above_.

What was full as bad was, that Joachime at last, only for the sake of removing his documentary piles of complaints and imperial grievances, allowed him her fingers, without giving him the least reason for it. He could, therefore, show no title of possession, and, in case of need, would have had no one who could protect him therein.

There is, however, a well-grounded rule of right or Brocardicon[244] for men: that everything grows firmer with women, when one builds upon it, and that a little stolen favor legitimately belongs to us, so soon as we sue for a greater. This rule of right bases itself upon the fact that maidens always abate with us, as one does to Jews in trade, the half, and give only a couple of fingers when we want the hand. But if one has the fingers, then arises, out of the Institutions, a new title, which adjudicates to us the hand: the hand gives a right to the arm, and the arm to everything that is appended to it, as _accessorium_. Thus must these things be managed, if right is to remain right. There will, in fact, have to be a little manual written by me, or some other honest man, wherein one shall expound and elucidate to the female sex with the torch of legal learning the _modos_ (or ways) _acquirendi_ (of winning) them. Otherwise many modi may go out of use. Thus, e. g., according to civil law, I am rightful proprietor of a movable thing, if it was stolen thirty years ago (in fact, it should be further back, and I should not be made to suffer for it, that one began the stealing later); so, too, by prescription of thirty minutes (the time is relative) everything belonging to a fair one lawfully falls to me, which (of a movable nature--and everything about her is movable) I may have purloined from her, and therefore one cannot begin soon enough to steal, because before the theft the prescription cannot begin to take effect.

Specification is a good modus. Only one must be, like me, a Proculian,[245] and believe that a strange article belongs to him who has imparted to it a different form; e. g. to me, the hand which I have put into another shape by pressure.

The late Siegwart said: _Confusio_ (mingling of tears) is my modus. But _commixtio_ (mixture of dry articles, e. g. the fingers, the hair) is now with almost all of us the _modus acquirendi_.

I was going once to treat the whole thing according to the doctrine of the _Servitudes_,[246] where a woman has a thousand things to suffer (though all these servitudes are entirely extinguished by the consolidation[247] of marriage); but I do not myself any longer rightly retain the doctrine of the Servitudes, and would much rather examine any one in them than be examined myself.----

I return to the Medicus. Since, then, he knew that a kissed hand is a warrant to the cheeks,--but the cheeks the sacrificial tables of the lips,--these of the eyes,--the eyes of the neck;--accordingly he would have proceeded exactly according to his text-book. But with Joachime, as with all antipodes of coquettes, _no favor paved the way for another, not even the great one for the small one_; you passed from one antechamber to another,--and what said my hero to this? Nothing but "Thank God that for once there is one better than she seemed, who, under the appearance of being our plaything, plays with us, and makes her coquetry the veil of virtue!"

He felt now, as often as her name was mentioned, a soft warmth breathe through his bosom.

FROM THE END OF THE ECCLESIASTICAL YEAR (DEC. 1) TO THE END OF THE CIVIL (DEC. 31).

Flamin, whose patriotic flames found no air in the session-chamber, and stifled himself first, grew shyer and wilder every day. It was something new to him, that it took whole boards and commissions to do what one person might have done,--that the limbs of the state (as is also the case, indeed, with the limbs of the body) are moved by the _short arm_ of the lever, so as to do less with greater power, and a board, particularly, resembles the body, which, according to Borellus,[248] spends 2,900 times as much strength on a leap as the load which it has to lift requires. He hated all great people, and never went to see any: the page Mat did not even get visits from him. My Sebastian made his visits to _him_ seldomer, because his leisure and his calms of dissipation fell exactly upon Flamin's working hours. This separation, and the eternal sitting at Schleunes's,--which Flamin, from not being acquainted with Joachime's influence, was obliged at all events to ascribe to Clotilda's, for future visits to whom Victor must be creating a pretext by his present ones,--and even the Prince's favor towards the latter, which in Flamin's eyes could not be any result of his spirit of freedom and his sincerity;--all this drew the intertwined bonds of their friendship, which had made life to them hitherto a four-handed piece of music, further and further asunder; the faults and the moral dust which Victor could once brush off from his darling he hardly dared to blow off; they behaved towards each other more delicately and attentively. But my Victor, to whose heart Fate applied so many tongues of vampyres, and who was compelled to shut up in _one_ breast the bitterness of lost love and the woe of failing friendship, was made by it all--really merry. O, there is a certain gayety of stagnation and grief, which is a sign of the soul's exhaustion, a smile like that on men who die of wounds in the diaphragm, or that on the shrivelled, drawn-back lips of mummies! Victor plunged into the stream of amusements, in order, under it, not to hear his own sighs. But often, to be sure, when he had all day long been sprinkling over ruined follies comic salt, which full as often bites the hand of the sower and makes it ache, and when he had not been able all day long to refresh himself with any eye, to which he would have dared to show a tear in his own,--when, thus weary of the present, indifferent to the future, wounded by the past, he had just passed by the last fool, the Apothecary, and when from his bow-window he looked out into the night hanging full of worlds, and into the tranquillizing moon, and upon the eastern clouds over St. Luna,--then were his swollen heart and his swollen eyeball sure to burst, and the tears which night concealed to stream down from his balcony on the hard pavement. "O, only _one_ soul," cried his innermost being with all the tones of melancholy,--"give but _one_ soul, thou eternal, loving, creative nature, to this poor, languishing heart, which seems so hard and is so soft, which seems so joyous and yet is so sad, seems so cold and yet is so warm!"

It was well that, on such an evening, no chamberlain, no man of the world, stood in the balcony, just as poor Marie--on whom her former life has been precipitated like a crushing avalanche--came to desire his breakfast-orders; for he would get up, without wiping away a drop, and advance kindly to meet her, and grasp her soft, but red and hard-worked hand, which from fear she did not draw back,--although from fear she did turn away her face, hardened into stone against hope,--and say, as he softly stroked her eyebrows horizontally, with a voice rising from a heart full of the deepest emotion, "Thou poor Marie, tell me--I am sure thou hast little comfort--is it not so? There seldom comes any longer into thy gentle eyes anything that they love to see, unless it is thy own tears? Dear girl, why hast thou no courage before me? why dost thou not tell me thy woe? Thou good, tortured heart,--I will speak for thee, act for thee: tell me what weighs on thee, and if ever of an evening thy heart is too heavy, and thou mayest not venture to weep down below, then come up to me ... look at me now frankly ... truly I will shed tears with thee, let them say what they will and be hanged." Although she held it to be uncourteous to weep before so distinguished a gentleman, nevertheless, it was impossible for her, by a forcible bending away of her face, to thrust aside all the tears which his voice, full of love, drew in rivers from her eyes.... Take it not ill of his over-boiling soul, that he then pressed his hot mouth to her cold, despised, and unresistingly trembling lips, and said to her: "Oh, why are we mortals so unhappy, when we are too soft-hearted?"--In his chamber she seemed to take all as jest,--but all night long she heard the echo of the humane man;--even as jest, so much love would have been a comfort to her; then her past flowers once more crystallized in the window-frost of her present wintry-time; then she felt as if she were to-day, for the first time, unhappy.--In the morning she said nothing to any one, and towards Sebastian she was merely more devoted, but not more courageous; only, at times, she would concur with the dispenser down below, when he praised him, and say, but without further explanation, "One should cut up one's own heart into little bits, and sacrifice it for the English gentleman."

Poor Marie! my own innermost heart repeats after the Doctor, and adds besides: Perhaps at this very moment, just such an unhappy woman, just such an unhappy man, is reading me. And I feel as if; now that I have struck the funeral bells of their past sad hours, I must also write them a word of consolation. But for one who has to be ever striding across new gaping ice-chasms of life, I know no resource but my own: the moment things grow bad, fling all _possible hopes_ to the Devil, and with utter renunciation fall back upon thyself, and ask, How now, if even the worst should come, what then? Never reconcile thy fancy to the _next_ misfortune, but to the greatest. Nothing relaxes one's spirits more than the alternation of warm hopes with cold anguish. If this method is too heroic for thee, then seek for thy tears an eye that shall imitate them, and a voice that shall ask thee why thou art thus. And reflect: the echo of the next life, the voice of our modest, fairer, holier soul, is audible only in a sorrow-darkened bosom, as the nightingales warble when one veils their cage.

Often did Sebastian worry himself about this, that he could here exert so little his noble powers in behalf of humanity; that his dreams of preventing evil and accomplishing good through the Prince remained fever-dreams, because, e. g., even the best men at the helm of the state filled offices entirely according to circumstances and recommendations merely, and held offices, whether those of others or their own, never as obligations, but as mining-curacies. He was troubled about his uselessness; but he consoled himself with its necessity: "in a year, when my father comes, I set myself free and rise to something better," and his conscience added, that his own personal uselessness was serviceable to the virtue of his father, and that it was better to be, in a wheel, with all one's fitness for a pendulum, a tooth, without which the machinery would stop, than to be the pendulum of a toothless wheel.

In such cases he always asked himself afresh: "Is Joachime, perhaps, like me, better, tenderer, less coquettish than she seems? and why wilt thou condemn her on the strength of an outward appearance, which is, to be sure, the same as thine own?" Her conduct seldom confirmed these favorable suppositions, nay, it often absolutely refuted them; nevertheless, he went on to expose himself to new refutations and to desire confirmation still. The necessity of loving drives one to greater follies than love itself; every week Victor let himself abate one perfection more from the female ideal, for which, as for the unknown god, he had already for years had the altar set up in his brain. During this haggling the whole of December would have slipped away, had it not been for the first day of Christmas.

On that day, when he saw through every window laughing faces and gardens of Hesperides, he too would fain be joyful, and flew amidst the church-chorals to Joachime's toilet-chamber, in order there to make himself a Christmas pleasure. He had brought her for a present, he said, a bottle-case of liqueurs, a whole cellar of Rataffia, because he knew how ladies drank. When, at last, he drew his gantry full of bottles out of his--pocket: it was a miserable little box full of cotton-wool, in which stood imbedded neat little bottles of sweet-smelling waters, almost as long as wrens'-eggs. What is neat always pleases girls--as well as what is splendid. He delivered a long discourse to Joachime upon the temperance of her sex, who ate as little as humming-birds and drank as little as eagles: with a few show-dishes and a smelling-bottle he would feast an army of the female sex five thousand men strong, and there should still be something left. The physicians observed that they who had borne hunger longest had been women,--even in the middle classes the whole bee-flora on which these saints lived consisted of a colored ribbon, which they wore as sash or scarf, by way of a nourishing poultice and portable soup, and to which they attached nothing further, except at most a lover. Joachime, during the eulogy, drew out a bottle, because she thought it wax. Victor, by way of refuting her--or for some other reason--pressed it tightly into her hand, and fortunately crushed it. A mining-superintendent of my disposition would hardly introduce the crushing of a bottle, not big enough to cover one of Eymann's cucumbers with, into his Dog-Post-Days,--because he loves to serve up things of importance,--did not the bottle itself acquire an importance from the fact that it cut the softest hand upon which the hardest jewel ever yet threw lustre, till it ran blood. The Doctor was startled,--the patient smiled,--he kissed the wound, and these three drops fell like Jason's blood, or like a blood rectified by an alchemist, as three sparks into his inflammable veins, and the blood-coal of love assumed three glowing points;--nay, a little more, and he would have obeyed her, when she playfully commanded him (in order to spare him a greater embarrassment than he had) to revive the antiquated fashion of the Parisians, of writing to ladies with rose-colored ink, and here on the spot to despatch three lines to her in her own blood. Thus much is, at least, certain, that he told her he wished he were the Devil. To the last-named personage, as is well known, the warranty-deed or rather

## partition-treaty of the soul is despatched with the blood of the

proprietor as fist-[249]pledge and consideration. Blood is the seed of the Church, the Catholic Church says; and here we are speaking of nothing less than the _temple_ of the fair.

So it was--and so it stood--when the Court of the Princess was announced for to-day. This was, in the first place, plaguily awkward for him, because this evening was spoiled; and, secondly, it was agreeable to him, because Joachime was obliged to-day to put away the hat which he and she so loved. Since, as is customary, ladies had the robes and frisures prescribed to them by the Princess, in which they must celebrate in her presence the court-day, i. e. the incendiary Sunday of their freedom: accordingly, she could not to-day keep on the crape-hat which she so loved, and Victor too, but not on her; for it was just the mate of that which Clotilda had worn when, during the concert, she covered her moist eyes with the black-lace veil, which from that time always hung down over his bereaved eyes.

I will describe the Court-day.

The main object of the Court in setting forth at six o'clock in the evening was, to drive home again at ten o'clock in a right sulky mood. I can, however, deliver this ten times as copiously:--

At six o'clock Victor, with the rest of the communion of brethren and sisters under orders, drove to the Paullinum. He envied, or rather blessed, the weaver, the boot-polisher, the wood-cutter, who had at evening his jug of beer, his prayers, his Johnny-[250]cakes and his trumpeting children; likewise their wives, who already had foretaste of the morrow, namely, of the marbled, speckled dresses which were to array them for the second holiday. In the May-colored atmosphere and zodiac stood the Princess as a sun, full as unhappy as her unhappy planets; _only dream_ (thought he) _can make a king happy or a poor man unhappy_. When he saw how they all, after a scanty frog-rain of words; and after refreshments, i. e. beatings and exhaustions, were harnessed, one post-team after another, according to the Court almanac and directory, to the card-tables,--to every board came the same motley set of old faces,--he wondered first of all at the universal patience; on a negro of the gold coast of the court (he swore to himself) if one only considers what he has to _hear_ and to _endure_, the _ears_ and the _skin_ are certainly, as in the case of roasted sucking-pigs, the best parts. Here the lion must beg _that_ animal to let him have his skin for a domino, which has usually borrowed his of him. Here among these forms bent up by small souls (as leaves also crook up when leaf-lice live on them) no great, no bold thought can be carried: like wheat which is _beaten down_, they can yield only _empty_ grains.

Before the sitting down at table, that part or segment of the--halo[251] encircling the Italian _sun_, which was not invited, drove home, disgusted at the tediousness of play, and still more disgusted that certain persons in particular were honored with the tediousness of a seat at the table.

Joachime, in whom the retiring Agnola found little satisfaction, went away with them, but not the Doctor, nor her brother Mat either, who had the honor of making, behind the chair of the Princess, in the column of march formed by herself, her chamberlain, a page, and a court lackey, exactly the central point; he stood, as every one knows, immediately behind the chamberlain, and was the only one who looked like a legible lampoon upon the _tout ensemble_. About the table, during[252] which there was little said, at most in a very low tone by two neighbors, here also there shall be nothing said.

After dinner the Prince came and disturbed the stiff ceremonial, which he hated from love of comfort, just as Victor despised it on philosophical grounds. "Verily, an archangel," Victor would often say, "who should remark the wisdom and virtue observed by mortals in all trifles at their session-tables, altars, receptions, must needs bet his heaven and his wings that we are worth a farthing--or at least something--in greater things; but we all know where the conclusion limps; and this very disgust at the stiff, pedantic, decent micrology and machinery of men is the humor of the satirist. Moral deterioration comes about, it is true, through trifles, but not improvement: Satan creeps into us through Venetian blinds and _sphincters_[253]; the good angel enters through the front door."--Agnola rewarded our hero to-day for his previous so well meant assiduity with a warmer attention, which was made more beautiful in his eyes by her ornaments--she wore those of the former princess, her own, and those of her mother before her--and by her whole state-attire; for he loved finery on women and hated it on men. His esteem borrowed a tender warmth from the painful fact that she confounded January's selfish intentions in his visits (with reference to the future Clotilda) with fairer ones, and that nevertheless one could not say so to her. How came it that Agnola reminded him then of Joachime; that the latter was the _conductor_ of regard for the former; and that all loving emotions with which the Princess inspired him turned out wishes that Joachime might deserve and receive them?

With a soul full of such longing, he drove back this very day without ceremony to that Joachime on whose hand, as we know, he had left a slight wound. He said to her, "He must, as murderer and Medicus, look once more to-day after the wound"; but a charming new trouble on Joachime's face fell like sunshine with a warming influence into his soul. He was impatient to go out with her on the balcony, to talk about it. Out there, he in a few minutes made the gash and the December chill a pretext for taking the hand and the gash into his own to warm it. "Cold is bad for wounds," he said; but the fine fool would here have had his own comment on the subject. The vacant evening, the remembrances of the childish joys of Christmas, the starry heaven, looking down from overhead, which magically illuminates all dark wishes of man, like flowers in the night,--these and the silence surcharged and burdened his forlorn soul, and he pressed the only hand which human kind at this moment extended to him. He put the question to her directly about her trouble. Joachime answered more softly than usual, "I was going to ask you the same; but with me it is natural." For she had, she related, on her return found the luggage of Clotilda and the news of her arrival, and--which is the precise point--the clothes of her sister Giulia, which Clotilda had hitherto given a place among her own. This Giulia, it will be remembered, had expired on Clotilda's heart, a day before the latter removed from Maienthal to St. Luna.

A chaos shot through his heart; but out of the chaos only the faded Giulia took shape,--for Clotilda daily receded into a duskier sanctuary of his soul; her pale Luna-like image caressed with rays of another world his sore nerves, and he willingly suffered himself to believe that Joachime had her form. In his poetic exaltation, so seldom intelligible to women, the dead threw the halo which Clotilda diffused over her back again upon her sister. Joachime had to-day read over again the letter which Giulia had dictated to her in her last hour through Clotilda, and she still had it with her. Probably a heart full of unrequited love had borne the fair enthusiast down under the earth. Victor with gleaming eyes begged her for the letter; he opened it in the moonlight, and when he saw the beloved handwriting of his lost Clotilda, his whole heart wept.

"Good sister!--

"Forever farewell! Let me say that first, because I know not what moment may close my lips. The tempests of my life are going home.[254] I speak this farewell and my heartiest wish for thy welfare through my friend Clotilda's pen. Give the enclosed to my dear parents, and join thy prayer to mine, that they will leave me in my beautiful Maienthal, when I am gone. I see now through the window the rose-bush which stands by the sexton's little garden in the churchyard: there a place is given me, which like a scar shall testify that I once existed, and a black cross with the six white letters _Giulia_,--no more. Dear sister, do not, I beseech thee, allow them to confine my dust in a tomb!--O no! it shall flutter in the shape of Maienthal's roses, which I once so loved to sprinkle!--Let this heart, when it shall have dissolved into the pollen of a new eternal heart, play and hover in the beams of the moon, which has so often in my lifetime made my heart sad and soft. If thou ever drivest, dear sister, along by Maienthal, then will the cross peep out upon the road through the roses; and if it does not make thee too sad, then look over to me.

"It seemed to me just now, for some minutes, as if I drew breath in ether,--in little thin draughts. It will soon be over. But tell my playmates, if they ask for me, that I was glad to go, though I was young. Very glad. Our teacher says, the dying are flying clouds, the living stationary ones, beneath which the former glide away, but verily at evening both are gone. Ah, I thought I should have to yearn for death a long time yet, from one year of sorrow to another; ah! I feared these pale cheeks, these eyes sunk with weeping, would not prevail upon death, that he would let me grow superannuated, and not take away my withered heart until it had throbbed itself to exhaustion: but, lo! he comes sooner. In a few days, perhaps in a few hours, an angel will appear before me and smile, and I shall see that it is death, and I, too, shall smile and say most joyfully, Take my beating heart into thy hand, thou ambassador of eternity, and care for my soul.

"'But art thou not young?' the angel will say; 'hast thou not just stept upon this earth? Shall I recall thee so soon, even before it has its spring?'

"But I shall answer: Look on these sunken cheeks, and these exhausted eyes, and only shut them to. O, lay the snake-stone[255] on my bosom, that it may suck out all the wounds, and not fall off till they are healed. Ah! I have haply done no good in the world, but also no evil.

"Then will the angel say: 'If I touch thee, thou becomest stiff,--spring and mankind and the whole earth vanish, and I alone stand beside thee. Is, then, thy young soul already so weary and so sore? What sorrows, then, can there be thus early in thy breast?'

"Only touch me, good angel!--Now he says, 'If I touch thee, thou crumblest to dust, and all thy loved ones see nothing more of thee--'

"O, touch me!..."

Death touched the bleeding heart, and a human being had passed on....

While Victor read the sorrowful sheet, the sister of the dead one had several times wiped her eyes, because she imagined to herself what he was reading, and when he looked up at her, there glimmered therein the seed-pearls of a tender soul. But he wished now that his face could be invisible, or that he could be in the balcony of his chamber, so as to give way to all sighs and emotions unseen. Had he been in a citizen's house, he might now have gone without being derided to the unpacked clothes, and into the future apartments of Clotilda; and he might have seen again, as it were, the green lawns of Maienthal, if he had seen the romantic dresses, wherein Giulia had roamed through them, locked up amidst the last kisses of a sister. But in such a house it was an impossibility.

He could now, as he seldomer had the enjoyment of another's sensibility, easily pardon its even being carried to excess. That it shatters the body was to him the wretchedest objection, because, indeed, everything of a nobler sort, every effort, all thinking, wears it out; in fact, the body and life were only means, but not an end. "Giulia's heart in Giulia's body," said he, "is a pure dew-drop in a tender flower-cup, which everything crushes, chokes, dries up, and which yet has escaped the noonday sun; such souls, too pliable for a world full of storm, which have too many nerves and too few muscles, deserve for their sensibility's sake not the corroding salt of satire, which gnaws them like snails. Earth and we can give them few joys; why will we take from them the rest?"

But the lines of sorrow which sympathy now drew through Joachime's smiles imprinted themselves distinctly in Victor's heart, and that which she would here conceal made her more charming than all that she had ever sought to show.

Nothing is more dangerous than--as he had done some weeks before--to make believe he was in love: one becomes so forthwith in reality. Thus, the voluptuary _Baron_, when he had played one of Corneille's heroes, himself was one for some days. Thus Moliere died of a _malade imaginaire_, and Charles V. of a rehearsal-burial. Thus the paper crown which Cromwell had worn in a school-drama made him covet a harder one.--The second lesson which is to be learned from this (this, however, to be sure, presupposes Joachime's being a coquette) is, that a hero may scent coquetry, and yet run into the trap; a poet, like the nightingale (which he resembles in plumage, throat, and simplicity) sits up on the tree, and sees the snare set, and skips down and--into it.

After some days,--while the question about Joachime's worth and his own love was rising and falling like a wave in Victor's mind,--while he stood on bad terms with Flamin, good ones with the Princess, and better with the Prince, who kept asking every day when Clotilda was coming,--she came.

23. DOG-POST-DAY.

First Visit to Clotilda.--The Paleness.--The Redness.--The Race-Weeks.

"Ay, I must confess," said Victor, as on the day after Clotilda's arrival he ran round in his chamber, "I could look with more courage into a thunder-storm or a tempestuous sea than into that little face,--into a radiant heaven, three noses long." He got relief, however, by striking a detached fortissimo chord on the piano: then he could go to see Clotilda. Only on the way he said: "Nowhere is there so much jangling as within a man. What a devilish uproar in this five-foot Disputatorium about the smallest trumpery, till a bill grows into an act! A portable national convention _in nuce_,[256] that is what I am; I cannot take a step, without the _right_ and _left_ first haranguing on the subject, and the _enragés_ and the _noirs_,[257] and the Duke of Orleans and Marat. The most detestable thing about this interior Ratisbon diet of man is, that Virtue sits therein with ten seats and one voice, but the Devil with one rump and seven votes."--

By these humorous soliloquies he sought to divert himself from the aspect of his confused, stubborn, cold-sore spirit, which was always lifting Joachime to the level of Clotilda. He was finally put in perfect tune again merely by the virtuous resolution not to conceal now his love for Joachime,--"not to be ashamed of her," he had almost thought to himself. "If I _feign_ myself to be somewhat warmer toward Joachime and colder towards the other than I perhaps am, then the Devil must have his game in it, if I do not finally _become_ so."

But the Devil had his game, and in fact a true game of Ombre[258] for _four_ persons,[259] with a dummy:[260] this croupier[261] had made the original vault of playing out the face[262] of Clotilda with a wholly different _color_ from what he had given her in Le Baut's palace. Victor found her, on meeting her again at Schleunes's, infinitely more beautiful than he had left her,--that is to say, more _pale_. As she was no nervous patient, never avoided the cold, even on December evenings walked out alone in the village, her cheeks were usually more like dark rosebuds than opened and whitened rose-leaves. But now the sun had become a moon: she had, in some sorrow or other, like the sapphire in the fire, lost nothing but color; instead of the blood, the soul, grown more still, lovely, and tender, seemed itself to look more nearly through the white crape curtain. All the blood which had receded from her cheeks flowed over into his, and rose like a magic potion into his head; meanwhile he tried to get into the latter the thought, "Probably it is more the quarrel with her parents, and less the affliction of being driven hither, that has made her sick."

When one has once proposed to himself to make believe cold, one becomes still more so when one finds reasons for _not_ being so: Victor was made still colder by Clotilda's parents, who had come with her, and from whose faults the mantle seemed to him to be at once removed. Upon persons whom, for the sake of a third, one has esteemed too highly, one avenges himself, when the third no longer exerts the constraining influence, by a so much the greater depreciation of them. Then, too, he said to himself: "As she now seldom sees her brother Flamin, it would be a piece of simplicity to expose her to a minute's embarrassment by the announcement that I know the relationship." Poor Victor! Nevertheless, it was impossible for him even to charge his heart with so much electrical warmth--though he might rub it with cat-skins and beat it with fox-tails--as would be requisite in order that his pulse should beat full for Joachime, not to say feverishly; but _this very thing_ decided him to conduct himself exactly as if heart and pulse were fuller. "It were ignoble," thought he, "if the good Joachime should be made to atone for it, that I once had other hopes and wishes than my hitherto newest ones." This sacrifice warmed him to a proper degree of regard; this regard gave him the manly pride, which defies with its love and its choice all the four quarters of the world; this pride, again, gave him freedom and joy,--and now he was in a condition to talk with Clotilda like a reasonable man.

All this inner history occupied, of course, twelve times as great a space of time as Mohammed's journey through all the heavens,--almost a good hour. But an accident threw itself into the midst of all his ideas. Namely, as the Minister's lady was a true female philosopher,--she knew that a couple of quartz crystals with some preparations and a drowned f[oe]tus do not make a philosopher, but nothing short of a lecture-room full of natural curiosities, and a reading cabinet,--and as the Chamberlain Le Baut was a philosopher, for his cabinet was quite as large,--the collection was exhibited to the Chamberlain, which he had himself helped to enrich. One would suppose that they must have laughed at each other in their sleeves, and taken each other for fools; but they really held each other for philosophers; for with great folks the fruits of the tree of knowledge grow so into the window and into the mouth,--they have so much facility in gaining knowledge (and therefore a second in showing it),--they so seldom seek in the wells of truth anything else than their own knee-pieces made with water-colors, and to wade into the depths of this fountain would give them such a chill,--and yet, on the other hand, they converse with so many sorts of persons of information in all departments,--that they get a smattering of everything over the table, and by oral tradition, like the disciples of the ancients, become through the ears living cyclopædias. If, afterward, they actually know how to absolutely renounce that which they have never heard, what difference is there, then, between them and the poorest philosopher, except in consciousness?

In the cabinet of books and natural curiosities lay the whole New-Year's freight of buzzing chafers, with golden wing-sheaths minus wings,--I mean the gilt Musen-Almanachs. Matthieu, that mimic of the actual nightingales, was the sworn foe of the human ones, namely, the poets. He said,--what would have suited better for a Review,--"He was a great friend of verses, but only in winter,--for when he went roaming so through the flower-beds of an Annual, he became, like one who walks through a poppy-field, drowsy enough, and could go to sleep. And just as the nights grew longer, and one therefore needed a longer sleep, it was a fine thing that the Annuals should appear, exactly at the beginning of winter, and that these flowers should bloom at the same season of the year with the mosses; in this way one could at least be lulled to sleep beside the brook that murmured in the verses, when there was no more murmuring or sleeping on the frozen meadow."----

Our Victor was as satirical as the Evangelist; he had in Hanover laughed as well as this fellow here,--e. g. he had complained that most Annual-minstrels unfortunately labored more for _connoisseurs_ than for dull readers, and were well contented if they only got the former to sleep,--that a man who could not write prose should try whether he might not make a popular bard, as only those birds can _sing_ who do not learn to talk,--that he could get through a good Annual at the quickest and most agreeable rate, if he only ran over the rhymes,--and that flat heads, like flat diamonds, to which no facettes can be given, became _hearts_, and instead of thoughts gave us tears, in which there swam not so much as the infusorium of an idea....

But he saw still one side more than Matthieu, namely, the noble side. It was his custom to turn this side forward precisely when another had been showing the bad side, and _vice versâ_. His opinion was, that the poets were nothing but intoxicated philosophers,--but whoever could not learn philosophizing from them, would learn it quite as little from the systematicians. That philosophy made only the _silver-wedding_ between ideas, but poetry the first marriage; empty _words_ there might be, but no empty _sensations_. That the poet, in order to move us, has only to take for his lever all of noble that there is on the earth,--Nature, Freedom, Virtue, and God; and the very magic-words, the magic-rings, the magic-lamps wherewith he sways us, react at last upon himself.

He delivered this opinion--when Matthieu had given his and Joachime her own, namely, that there were three or four leaves, at least, in the Musen-Almanachs which pleased her, namely, the smooth parchment leaves--much more briefly than we have put it;--the Minister's lady was of his opinion (for she herself was a versifex);--the Chamberlain said, "Every city and every prince did indeed adore the poets in appropriate temples,--namely, in the play-houses." Clotilda ventured now to join herself to the victors:[263] "When one reads a poet in January, it is as lovely as when one goes to walk in June. I cannot read either philosophers or learned men; there would, therefore, be left to me" (she meant to say, to her sex) "quite too little, if one should take from me the dear poets." "You would at most," said the Minister at last, "find your disciples in them; poets, like the saints, concern themselves little about the world and its knowledge; they can sing of the state, but not instruct it." "O thou grinning mummy!" thought Victor, "a precious stone which thou canst not work into the wall of the state-building is less to thee than a block of sandstone. If thou couldst only install every flaming soul sent into the world as a completion of the republican antiques, in the office of under-clerk, custom-house collector, or warden of the treasury (as the people of Grand Cairo transform their ruins into stables and horse-troughs)!" The noble Mat merely subjoined: "There was a painter in Rome who never talked with any one but by singing; and I knew a great poet who not even in common life could speak prose; but he could not do much beside, and had little of the world, but a great many worlds in his head. When he comes out in print, he will hardly play off more deception on his readers than any one has already played off on him, who chose to."--Victor saw, by Clotilda's downcast eye, that she observed, as well as he, that the Devil meant her Dahore: but he was silent; his soul was sad and embittered: he had, however, long since been hardened by court life to endure those whom he must needs hate.

During this disputation the noble Mat had, unobserved, cut out the whole group in black paper. "Ah!" said Joachime, "this is not the first time that he has given _blackened_ likenesses of companies." But as Victor could never see silhouette-groups, without thinking of us fleeting shadows of mortals, of this dwindling and drying-up dwarf-life, of the night-pieces drawn upon life, and of the shadowy companies called peoples,--and as he was reminded of this not only by his melancholy, and not only by a wax-skeleton, by Madame Biheron,[264] which stood there among the natural curiosities, but still more by the pale form of Clotilda,--and as, casting a glance of comparison at the skeleton and the profile, she said softly to Victor, "So many resemblances might at another time make me sad,"--then was his full heart transpierced with a sharp pang at the thought of his eternal poverty, and at the certainty, "This great, beautiful heart will never stir for thine, and when her friend Emanuel is dead, thou art left forever alone"; and he stepped to the window, threw it open violently, drank in the north-wind, pressed his fist against his two eyeballs, and went back with his former expression of countenance to the rest of the company.

But for to-day such agitations had torn deeply into his heart. And when Clotilda, at a solitary second, said to him that the Parson's wife and Agatha were angry at his staying away, then was he, to whom at these names the whole beclouded past opened like a heaven, in no condition to give an answer.

When he returned home, Clotilda's voice, which he could of all her attractions least forget, kept incessantly speaking, and like the echo of a funeral-song, in his soul.... Reader, when that which thou lovedst has long vanished from the earth or from thy fancy, then will nevertheless the beloved _voice_ come back and bring with it all thy old tears, and the disconsolate heart which has shed them!... But not merely her voice,--everything came thronging back in the darkness upon his fancy: her modest eye, which did not in court-like style sparkle and bid defiance and express desire, as did those of the others,--that watchful delicacy, which since his entrance on court-life no longer appeared to him, either in her or in his father, too great,--to this add the image of Joachime and his chaos of inconsistencies, and the remark that a man whom the most certain proofs have satisfied that he is not loved, still suffers afresh at a _new_ one,--and then one can understand the commotions which sleep, that lull on life's ocean, had in his case to appease.--

"That was the last fever-shake," said he the next morning, relying upon his present heart, whose eruptions, like those of volcanoes, daily burnt out its crater more and more. He enjoined upon himself, therefore, a weekly flight from the too dear soul, with the design that the new resonance of his love might cease its vibrations in his heart, and all become still again within him.

But after a week he saw her again: verily, there sat the Devil again at the card-table, and played another color against him,--the _red_. Clotilda looked, not pale, but, though only slightly, red. This redness made a great blot on his inner man, and adulterated his inner coloring, as black does every color of the painter. For when he found her well again; it was not so much _agreeable_ to him,--for he saw how few claims he any longer had upon her tranquillity,--how she did not so much as distinguish him in this warehouse of human waste-paper, and how stupid he had been in letting himself dream so secretly, so very secretly, that her previous paleness proceeded actually from her vain longing after such a one as he;--at the same time it was not _disagreeable_ to him,--for he would have poured out all his heart's blood, if he could thereby have brought a single artery in her to its old course;--I say it was not so much either agreeable or disagreeable to him, as it was both, as it was unexpected, as it was a hint to--give himself to the Devil. His heart, and the image which had been too long therein, were absolutely crushed in two. "Be it so!" said he, and bit the convulsive lip with which he said it. For some days he cared not even to see Joachime. "Has _she_ then an eye for nature and a heart for eternity?" asked he, and he knew well the answer.

Now came on a time for him, which was the precise opposite of the Sabbatical weeks,[265]--one may call them the _race-weeks_ or the _Tarantula-dancing-hours_ of visiting. It is a cursed time; man knows not where he stands. With Victor it fell just upon the winter-months, when, besides, the honeymoons of city and court occur. I will now portray them regularly.

Victor sought, namely, to drown deeper his unhappy, discordant heart,--not with the drum-roll of amusements; under this it would only bleed the more, just as wounds flow more strongly under the sound of drumming; but with--people; these were the blood-stanching screws which he applied to his soul. His body was now, like the Catholic reliquiary body of an Apostle, in all places; he spent the whole day in running to and fro, now with the Prince and now without him.

At last there was not a lady left in Flachsenfingen whose hand he had not kissed,--nor a toilet-table where he would have been satisfied. He made in the _racing-weeks_ double-knots, French _pas_,--dotted sketches of patterns,--little plays,--charades,--receipts for canary-birds,--verses for fans,--a thousand visits,--and still more, morning notes....

These last, which he received and sent, were written in French and folded French-wise,--namely, crushed into the shape of hair-rollers. "They are," said he, "the hair-rollers of the fibres of the female brain,--the cartridges full of Cupid's powder,--the cocoons of loving butterflies": he spoke of the rise and fall of these female notes, and called them still further the proof-sheets of the female heart, and the outer-title-pages of the coquettish Edicts of Nantes. "I assert this," he added, "to distinguish myself from the page Matthieu, who denies it, because he actually contends, that at first one presses letters upon the fair sex, then things of more cubic contents, e. g. fans, jewels, hands, then finally one's self; just as the mails at first only took letters, then packages, finally passengers."--

He found those women daily more amusing who steal away from us people of understanding the heart out of the breast and the brain out of the head, and, to be sure, (as a certain nobleman did other stuff,) not from love for the stolen goods, but from love of robbery itself; the next morning, like the nobleman, they honestly send the goods back again to the owner. Their refinements,--his own,--his turns to escape theirs,--the attention which one had to bestow upon one's self,--the opportunity of bringing all emotions under the finest dissecting-knives, or solar and lunar microscopes,--the facility of taking away from the most sincere truths the sour taste and from the most agreeable the sickly-sweet,--all this made the toilet-tables of women, particularly of coquettes, to him _Lectisternia_[266] and tables of the gods. "By heaven," said the toilet-table-boarder or pensioner,[267] "a man is merely a Dutchman, at most a German, but a woman is a native Frenchwoman, or in fact a Parisian: man conceals his moral as he does his physical breast: thoughts and flowers, which do not fall through the racks of the four faculties, emotions which cannot be described in the acts or in a physician's report, one must really say only to a woman, and not to a man, especially one of Flachsenfingen"--or Scheerau.

By way of excusing himself for associating with coquettes on the footing of a general lover, he appealed to his motive,--that of merely wishing to become acquainted with their ways,--and to the excellent Forster, who in Antwerp _knelt down_, as well as any born Catholic, before Rubens's altar-piece of the Virgin Mary ascending to heaven, merely to examine her more nearly.

He had a still more dangerous excuse. "Man," said he, "should be everything, learn everything, try everything,--he should labor for the _union_ of the two _churches_[268] in his soul,--he should, if only for a couple of months, have been a city-musician,[269] grave-digger, gallows-_pater_,[270] an engineer, tragedy-manager, upper-court-marshal, an imperial vicar, deputy sheriff, a reviewer, a lady, in short, everything a man should have been for some days, in order that the hues of the prism might at last melt together into the perfect white."

These principles are the more dangerous with one like him, who, strung with the tense strings of the most dissimilar powers, easily gave every one's note, not from dissimulation, but because his social poetic faculty could transport itself deeply into another's soul; hence he gained, tolerated, and copied the most unlike persons, notwithstanding his sincerity. But I pity him, that he has everywhere so much to suppress, his seeing through the Prince, his state of heart toward Clotilda, his conciliatory intrigues towards Agnola, his knowledge of Flamin's relations, &c. Ah, reserve and dissimulation easily run together; and must not a constant dropping, when one stands directly under it, at last wear scars in the most solid character?

Nothing chills the noblest parts of the inner man more than intercourse with persons in whom one cannot take any interest. This hotel-life at court, this daily seeing people who never even say "I," whose relations one ignores as indifferently as their talents, unless some necessity seeks them,--this snatching only at the next moment, this racing by of the finest and most intellectual strangers and ant-swarms of visitors, who in three days are forgotten,--all this, which makes palaces like Russian ice-palaces, where even the stove full of naphtha flames is a lump of ice, and to which I need not at all add the _comic_ salt, which, besides, chills all warm blood, as that of _Glauber_ does hot water,--all this made his heart desolate, his days bald and burdensome, his nights distressful, his conduct too cold towards the good, too tolerant towards the bad.

In addition to this, his Emanuel was silent, and, like nature, shut up his flowers within himself. He whom nature nourishes and builds up, is not in so good a mood in winter as in summer. The earth had on her powder-mantle of snow, and her night-gown on all day; the trees had wrapped up their buds in fleecy hair-papers, and the twigs looked like hair-pins. Victor's soul was like nature: O may Heaven soon warm in both the flowers of spring!

As the pathological history of my Victor reminds me too painfully of the latent poisons in the human body, it shall soon come to an end. It pleased him that he became, by this fluttering round, more and more gallant and cold towards all women: the cord of love cuts less deeply into the bosom, when, plucked out into threads and floss, it flutters about everybody. He who, like his namesake, Saint Sebastian, looked like one stuck all full with (Cupid's) arrows, shot off arrows of another kind against the whole sex, though never against individuals. In this last circumstance his bitterness differed from Matthieu's, who could say of his own cousin, for example, who had lost her beauty by a late attack of small-pox: "Her beauty held out right valiantly against the small-pox, and brought off from this victory the most glorious _scars_, and all of them indeed, like those of Pompey's knights;[271] in front and in the face."

As assaf[oe]tida is used for _haut gout_, so does one season the finest _savoir vivre_ by sundry bold incivilities. Bastian in the Tarantula-season was not to be embarrassed by anything: he went and came like a Parisian, without ceremony; he sought often bold, but advantageous postures of his body; during the play he made tours through the boxes as the Prince did through the coulisses; five times he carried matters so far (though with difficulty, and always only by means of setting before himself the example of the courtiers), that he listened indifferently, or absolutely looked away, when another was, telling him a story: all which things, if not essential, are nevertheless incidental to true politeness.

Nor will I let it be unnoticed in his praise, that he took to himself the regular _exotic_ and _satirical_ liberties of the _Gallican_ Church toward several women at once, for in the presence of a single one he had still the old veneration of a noble heart. I will give at least one example of that. Once he was among five slanderesses (the company consisted of six females and a male person); the ugliest blackened all maidens, even those in print, e. g. the deceased Clarissa, whom she charged with not having in her intercourse with Lovelace been quite able to _sauver les dehors de la vertu_.[272] One can anticipate how the Königsberg school will receive it in their reviews, that he let himself down on one knee before the calumniatress, and said with some seriousness: "_O Clarisse! voici votre Lovelace; retranchons quatre tomes, commençons comme les faiseurs d'Epopées par le reste_."[273]

To be sure, he frequently during the Tarantula-season reproached himself for the Tarantula-season; and when the Gentile-fore-court of his heart grew so full of women, while in the Holy of Holies there was nothing but mute darkness, and when his brain became an entomological cabinet of court trifles, then, of course, he often sighed in his balcony: "O come soon, good father, that thy sinking son may soar out of this unclean March fog into a clearer life, before he has utterly stained himself, so as no longer even to frame this wish." And as often as he got sight, in Joachime's chamber, of the views of Maienthal,--which Giulia had had taken by the painter of Clotilda's portrait,--then in the midst of his jestings he turned his eye away from them with a sigh.----But he was not healed, until fate said, Now! Then all at once the theatre-key struck, which bids men come and act in the players' rehearsal of life;--the play itself is not given till the next life;--and then transpired something which I shall at once report in the following chapter, when I have done relating in this one how Victor stood with all the people about him.

With many, properly speaking, badly,--in the first place, with Clotilda. She resided, to be sure, at the Minister's; as maid of honor, she would have belonged in the Paullinum, only the Prince had so contrived it for the greater facility of seeing her; but she was always about the Princess, with whom she was soon linked in intimacy by a similarity of seriousness and a similarity of reserve. Her indifference to one who had with her a common friend and teacher inspired this Victor with a still greater, especially as he knew she must feel that, in this cold mountain- and court-air, only a single, though faded, carnation slip of her fair soul bloomed, namely, himself. Then, too, the obligation of decorum, to look upon her coldly, must become a habit. The worst thing for him was that she was indifferent towards him without ill-feeling, and cold towards him with respect. Others were quite furious about the "phlegmatic virtue of this Pygmalion's statue." The noble Mat called her often the _Holy_ Virgin, or the Demoiselle Mother of God. It is made out very clearly by the Dog-documents, which I have opened, that some gentlemen of the Court, after various abortive attempts to explain to themselves a virtue irreconcilable with so much beauty, now on the ground of temperament, now of concealed love, and now of a coquettish coyness, ending at last, like the water at St. Clermont, in petrifying and becoming _its own bridge over itself_,--that these cunning gentlemen most felicitously fell upon the conjecture that Clotilda wore this mask over her face as a copy of the face of the Princess, for the sake of continuing in favor. Hence Clotilda's discreet virtue was judged by most with greater indulgence, while one could excuse it, as an intentional imitation of a similar fault in the Princess, even by the example of like imitations, as courtiers often aped the greatest external natural faults, nay, even the virtues of a prince. So thought at least the more reasonable portion of the Court.

Agnola was assiduous in testifying an ever increasing gratitude to our hero for January's visits, although, as I think, she could detect the faithless intentions of the Prince in the presence of Clotilda full as well as she might sometimes see into Victor's soul in the presence of Joachime.... In fact, I should have begged the reader long since to be on the look-out; I deliver the facts with excusable stupidity, though with historic fidelity; if, now, there are therein fine, knavish, significant, intriguing traits and hints, it is without my knowledge, and therefore I cannot point them out to the reader with an index-hand, or announce them with a fire-drum,[274] but he himself--as he understands court histories--must know what I mean by my hints,--not _I_.

With Joachime Victor would have gone on very well,--as he set down all faults which he found in other women, and not in her, to her credit as virtues, and as he grew more intimate with her personally; for the faults of maidens, like chocolate and tobacco, appear at first the more odd to the palate the better they taste to it afterward: he would have got on very well, but for two sharp corner-stones; but they were there. The first was,--for I will not reckon his slight annoyance at the short duration of her Christmas sentimentality,--that she was always finding fault with Clotilda, particularly with her "affected" virtue. The second was, that Clotilda sought her society quite as little: Victor could love no one whom Clotilda did not love. And now the race-weeks and visiting-Tarantula-dance hours of one man are at an end; but, alas! all posterity must yet cross the same hot _line_ of folly and of youth.

24. DOG-POST-DAY.

Rouge.--Clotilda's Sickness.--The Play Of Iphigenia.--Difference between Plebeian and Patrician[275] Love.

On the 26th of February Victor found in the morning at Joachime's--the proud Clotilda. I know not whether it was by accident that she was here, or from politeness, or for the purpose of meeting more nearly a person whom Victor treated with some interest. But, O heavens! the cheeks of this Clotilda were pallid, her eyes were as if breathed over by an eternal tear, her voice emotional, as it were broken, and the pale marble body seemed only the image standing on the monument of the departed soul. Victor forgot the whole past, and his innermost soul wept for longing to succor her and wipe out from her life all dark winter landscapes. "I am as well as usual to-day," said she to his professional inquiry, and he knew not what to make of this unexpected paleness; he could not, in fact, to-day make anything, not so much as a joke or a piece of flattery; his soul, dissolved into sympathy, would not take any form; then, too, he was embarrassed. Clotilda soon took leave;--and it would not have been possible for him to-day, not for all Great Poland (that ice-floe beautifully ground down under the sledging of emigrating nations and crowns), after she was gone, to stay half an hour longer.

Besides, he would have been obliged to go; for the page Matthieu called him to the Princess. The time was unusual; he could not wait to see, nor could he guess what was the matter. The Evangelist smiled (that he did now somewhat often when the Princess was the subject), and said: "To Princes and Princesses weighty things were trivial and trivial things weighty, as Leibnitz[276] said of himself. When the crown and a hair-pin fall from their heads together, they look first of all for the hair-pin."[277]

By the way! It would be malice on my part toward the noble Matthieu, if I should longer suppress, the fact, that for some time he has been much more tender and ardent towards my hero,--which on any other man than he, I mean on a lurking villain, would be a Cain's-mark, and would have somewhat of the same meaning as the wagging of a cat's tail.

Victor was astonished at the request of the Princess,--that he would cure Clotilda: that is to say, not at the fact of her making a request,--for she often did him that honor,--but at the intelligence that Clotilda, on whose cheeks he had hitherto seen the apple-blossoms of health at his soul's expense in the _race-weeks_, had worn only dead blossoms,--namely, rouge, which the Princess had been obliged to enforce upon her for the sake of having a uniformity of bloom with the remaining red copper-flowers[278] of the court. Agnola, who, like her rank, was quick, besought him further, when he was appointed to the medical upper-examining-commission, to enter on his office as soon as might be, this very day forthwith, at the play, where he would find the candidate for examination.

And he found her. The play was a sparkling brilliant brought from Eldorado,--Goethe's _Iphigenia_. When he saw the patient again with the evening-red of the rouge, wherein she was to glow at another's behest even during her going down,--when he saw this still victim (marked red, as it were, for the altar), which he and others had driven away from its meadows, from its solitary flowers, to the midst of the sacrificial knives of the Court, mutely enduring, the extinction of its wishes, and when he compared with woman's dumb patience man's raging restlessness,--and when it seemed as if Clotilda had lent her sorrow to Iphigenia with the prayer, "Take my heart, take my voice and mourn with it,--mourn with it over thy separation from the fields of youth, over thy separation from a beloved brother,"--and when he saw how she tried to fasten her eyes more steadfastly on Iphigenia, when she pined for her lost brother, in order to control their overflow and their direction (towards her own brother in the Parterre, towards Flamin), O then did such great sorrows and their signs in his eyes and looks need a pretext like the omnipotence of genius, in order to be confounded with pangs growing out of poetic illusion!

Never did a physician question his patient with greater sympathy and forbearance than did he Clotilda in the next interlude: he excused his importunity with the commands of the Princess. I must first state that the fair patient--although he had been hitherto a falling Peter, whom many a cock-crow had brought rather to tears than to repentance--nevertheless remained the _second person_, whom he never denied, ... i. e. whom, he never addressed with the frivolous, whimsical, bold, entrapping turns of conversation now so common with him. The _first person_--whom he esteemed too highly to write to him in the present state of his heart--was his Emanuel.

Clotilda answered him, that "she was as well as ever; the only thing there was sickly about her," she said, smiling, "namely, her color, was already under the hands of a female surgeon, who, against her inclination, healed her only outwardly." This playful allusion to the rouging decreed by the Princess had the double design of excusing her painting and of diverting the Doctor from his tender-hearted seriousness. But the first was unnecessary,--since in the theatre even ladies who never wore rouge put it on as they entered the box and wiped it off on going out, in order not to hang there as the only quinces on a tree full of glowing Stettin-apples, and as, in fact, mineral cheeks were required of the whole female court-retinue as facial court livery. The second was vain; much more likely were the wounds of his heart to be aggravated by two causes: by that cold, almost fanatical resignation to fading away,--and by something inexpressibly mild and tender which, in the female face, often betokens the breaking heart, the failing life, as fruit by _soft_ yielding to _pressure_ announces its ripeness.

O ye good creatures, ye women, while joy already beautifies you, is the reason why sorrow makes you still more beautiful and too touching _this_, that it so often overtakes you, or is it because sorrow borrows the dress of joy? Why must I here confess so passingly my pleasure at your endurance and veiling of sorrows, when at this moment before my fancy so many hearts full of tears sweep by with open countenances full of smiles, and win for your sex the praise of opening its heart as gladly to sorrow as to joy, as flowers, although they *unclose only before the sun, yet also burst open when it is overcast by a cloudy heaven?

Victor, without being led off his track by her answer, continued: "Perhaps you cannot wean yourself from fair nature and from exercise,--these late hours, which I myself feel"----She prevented his finishing the sentence, to remind him that she had, he must remember, brought her present complexion with her from home. One sees, however, in this reminder more forbearance than truth; for she would not complain of her court office before the very one who had helped her gain it.----Victor, who saw her sickliness so clearly, and yet knew not how to propound another question, stood there dumfounded. Their own silence loosens reserved people's tongues: Clotilda began of herself, "As I do not know what harms me here, except the rouge, I beg my physician to prohibit me this dietetic fault," i. e. to persuade the Princess into a revocation of her rouge-edict. "I should be glad," she continued, "to gain some resemblance at least to two such good friends as Giulia and Emanuel,"--i. e. a pale color, or else the notion of a speedy death. Victor threw out a hasty "Yes," and turned his smarting eye toward the rising curtain.

Never, haply, were the scenes of players and hearers more like each other. Iphigenia was Clotilda; the wild Orestes, her brother, was her brother Flamin; the soft, radiant Pylades was his friend Victor. And as Flamin stood below in the pit with his cloudy face,--(he came only for the sake of seeing his sister more conveniently,)--then did it seem to our and his friend as if he were addressed by him, when Orestes said to Pylades:--

"Remind me not of those enchanting days, When a free room thy house afforded me: Thy noble father wisely, tenderly, Nursed the half-stiffened blossoms of my youth; When thou, an ever-gay associate, Even as a motley, light-winged butterfly Plays round a dark-hued flower, day after day Didst dance and hover round me with new life, And win thy bliss a way into my soul."

Clotilda felt quite as painfully that they were playing her life on the stage, and struggled against her eyes.... But when Iphigenia said to her brother Orestes,--

"O hear me! Look on me! See how my heart Opens at last, after so long a time, To the sweet bliss of kissing that dear brow, Most precious treasure earth yet holds for me, .... O let me,--let me--for in brighter waves Not from Parnassus leaps the eternal stream From rock to rock down to the golden vale, Than from my bosom joy outgushing flows And like a sea of bliss enclasps me round";--

and when Clotilda mournfully surveyed the greater interval of sorrows and days between herself and her brother; then gushed up the inner fountains and filled her large eyes, so often fixed upon the heavens, and a quick bending forward hid the sisterly tear from all eyes untouched by emotion. But it did not escape the feeling eyes with which her friend beside her imitated her.... And here a virtuous voice said within Victor: "Disclose to her that thou knowest the secret of her relationship,--lift off from this sorely oppressed heart the load of silence: perhaps she is withering under a grief which a confidant may cool and take away!" Ah, to listen to this voice was indeed the least with which he could content his infinite sympathy! He said in an extremely low tone, and which emotion rendered almost unintelligible to her: "My father has long since disclosed to me, that Iphigenia knows the presence of her brother and of my friend." Clotilda turned suddenly and blushingly towards him; for a more minute explanation he let his eyes glide down to Flamin; turning pale; she looked away and said nothing; but during the whole play her heart seemed to be far more compressed, and she was compelled now to stifle still more tears and sighs than before. At last in the midst of her sadness she gave gratitude its rights, and whispered to him for his sympathy and his confidence, as if with a dying smile, her thanks. He laid upon the distaff of the conversation entirely new and foreign material, because he would fain, during the spinning, get a clearer and more certain light upon the sad impression which his confession seemed to have produced. He inquired after the latest letters from Emanuel. She replied: "I only wrote to him yesterday all through the eclipse of the moon; he cannot answer me often, because writing pains his breast." Now, as the eclipse of the 25th of February began at twenty minutes after ten in the evening, at eleven o'clock and forty-one minutes was at its climax, and at one o'clock and two minutes was over: accordingly Victor, as physician, could fall upon the medical sinner with sermons and hammers of the law and pronounce the verdict; now, it was no wonder. Pass it by, Doctor! These dear creatures can more easily obey a man--the Ten Commandments,--books,--Virtue,--the Devil himself more easily, than the Dietician. Clotilda said: "The midnight hours are simply my only free hours,--and Maienthal, indeed, I can never forget."

"Ah, how could one?" said he.

The music before the last act, and the tragic tone, and the sorrows inspired her, and she continued: "Did not one drink of _Lethe_, when one trod the shores of Elysium and when one left it?" ... She paused. "I would drink of no Lethe, not in the first case, still less in the _last_,--no!" And never was "No" said in a lower, softer, more slow-drawn tone. In Victor's heart a three-edged compassion passed painfully to and fro, as he imagined to himself Clotilda mocked by fate, writing and weeping in the midnight under a moon dismembered and beclouded by earth's shadow; he said nothing, he stared rigidly into the mournful scenes of the stage, and still wept on when the joyous ones had, there, already evolved themselves in their place.

At home he made his brain-fibres Ariadne's threads to extricate himself from the labyrinth of the causes of her trouble, and particularly of the _new_ one which had seemed to come upon her at his disclosure. But he remained in the labyrinth; undoubtedly grief begat the sickness, but who begat the grief? It would be hard for these poor, tender butterflies, if there were more than one mortal affliction; in every lane, in every house, thou wilt find a wife or a daughter who has to go to church or to the Tragedy to sigh, and who must go up into the upper story to weep; but this aggregated trouble is worried away with smiles, and years increase for a long time side by side with the tears. On the contrary, there is a grief which breaks them off,--think of that, dear Victor, in the joyful hours of thy general love,[279] and think of it, all ye who with warm, loving hands draw the throbbing heart of such a delicate creature out of its breast, to take it into your own by the side of your own heart, and warm it forever! When you then throw away this hot heart, which you have torn out like a butterfly's honey-proboscis: still, like that, it continues to quiver, but then it grows cold, and erelong beats no more.

Unhappy love, then, was the gnawing honey-dew on this flower, Sebastian concluded. Naturally he thought of himself first; but all his nicest observations, his now so familiar _ricochet-glances_ out of the _corner of his eye_ had long since convinced him that he had to ascribe the distinction, which she did not deny him, more to her impartiality than to her inclination. Who else it could be at Court,--that was a thing which he in vain applied one electrometer after another to draw out. And he knew beforehand that he should experiment in vain, since Clotilda would baffle all auscultation of her inner state, if she had an unreciprocated inclination; reason was with her the wax, which they stick to one end of the magnetic needle, in order to obviate or conceal the sinking (_inclination_) of the other. Nevertheless, he made up his mind the next time to hold some divining-rods to her soul.----

I must here utter a thought, which may discover some sense and my general speculation in the matter. My Dog-Post-Master Knef did not probably foresee that I should calculate the year and the duration of this whole story merely from the lunar eclipse of the 25th of February, which he announced, just as, in fact, great astronomers, by means of the moon's phases, found out so much about the earth's geographical longitude. 1793 was the year in which what is related in this chapter occurred: I am good for that; for as, at all events, the whole story, as is well known, takes place in the ninth decade of the eighteenth century, and as no lunar eclipse of a 25th of February is to be found there at all, except in the year 1793, i. e. the present year, my proposition is made out. To make assurance doubly sure, I have compared all the changes of moon and weather occurring in this book with those of 1792 and 1793; and all fitted together beautifully;--the reader should also reckon it after me. It is uncommonly gratifying to me, that, consequently, as I write in July, the history follows in a half-year from my description.--

Victor delayed not his visit to the Princess's, that he might there announce the reserved Clotilda as a complete nervous patient. He himself laughed inwardly at the expression,--and at the Doctors,--and at their nervous cures,--and said, that, as formerly the French kings in their treatment of the goitre had to say, "The King touches thee, but God heals thee," so should physicians say, The city and country physician feels thy pulse, but God works the cure. Here, however, he had three good intentions in giving out that she was a nervous sufferer: first, that of gaining for her the abolition of her Court-vassalage,--at least her deliverance from the precise office of maid of honor, because the splinter of the reproach was continually festering in his heart, "It is my fault that she is obliged to be here"; further, of securing for her in advance permission to take the spring and country air, in case she should by and by sue for it; finally, of releasing her from her compulsory resemblance to those ladies on whose lead-colored faces, as on the leaden soldiers of children, the red daily wears off and is daily renewed. But as Agnola herself painted, he was obliged, out of courtesy, as physician, to forbid it to both at once. The Princess countersigned all his petitions very graciously: only as to the rouge-article she gave, in regard to herself, no resolution at all, and in regard to Clotilda the following: she had nothing to say against her appearing in her presence, except on court days and at the play, without rouge; and she would willingly grant her a dispensation from both, unless her health was restored.

He could hardly wait for the moment of taking leave, so impatient was he to carry this imperial-recess or resolution to the beloved patient. He himself wondered at this complaisance of the Princess, with whom, generally, petitions were sins, and who refused nothing--except what was asked. His perplexity was now only this,--how to communicate to Clotilda the indulgences of the Princess, without the offensive confession of having made a plea of her illness. But out of this slight evil a great one extricated him: when he came into her presence, she looked ten times as sick as she had day before yesterday, at the disclosure of her relationship: her blossoms, heavy with cold dew, drooped to the earth.

Gait and posture were unchanged; there was the same external joyousness, but the glance was often too fluttering, often too fixed; across the lily-cheeks darted often a hectic flush, through the lower lip at one moment a subdued convulsion.... At this point sympathy frightened her friend out of the bounds of courtesy, and he told her outright the consent of the Princess. He summoned to the aid of his burdened heart his previous court-boldness, and commanded her to make the coming spring her apothecary's shop, and the flowers her medicinal herbs, and her--fancy her pharmacy. "You seem," said she, smiling, "to count me among the larks, who must always have _green turf_ in their cage. However, that my Princess and you may not have had your kindness for nothing, I will, finally, do it. I confess to you, I am at least a _valide imaginaire_.[280] I feel myself well." ... She interrupted herself to question him, with the frankness of virtue and with an eye swimming in sisterly love, about her brother, whether he was happy and contented, how he worked, how he filled his position? She told him how sad a burden these questions, hitherto locked up so deeply in her soul, had been to her and she thanked him for the gift of his confidence with a warmth which he took as a delicate reproof of his previous silence. Of old she always loved to stand in a flower-garland of children; but in Flachsenfingen she had gathered still more of these little nebulous stars about her brightness, and indeed for a peculiar reason, namely, to cover the fact, that she drew to herself Giulia, a little five-years-old grandchild of the city Senior, with whom her brother resided, as his unwitting biographer and news-carrier. More than three times he felt as if he must fall at the feet of this lily-white angel, borne higher and higher by her cloud, and say with outspread arms: "Clotilda, be my friend, before thy death,--my old love for thee is long since crushed out, for thou art too good for me and for all of us; but I will be thy friend; my heart will I conquer for thee; for thee will I resign my heaven. O, thou wilt, besides, not live to see the evening dew of age, thou wilt soon close thy eyes, and the morning dew still hangs therein!" For he held her soul to be a pearl, whose mussel-body lies open in the dissolving sun, that the pearl may the earlier be dislodged. On leaving, he could with the frankness of the friend, which had taken the place of the lover's reserve, offer a repetition of his visits. Altogether he treated her now more warmly and unconstrainedly; first, because he had so utterly renounced her noble heart, that he wondered at his former bold claims to it; secondly, because the feeling of his disinterested, self-sacrificing honesty towards her poured balm on his previous stings of remorse.

To this sickness was added an evening or an event, which the reader, I think, will not know how to understand. Victor was to take Joachime to the play, and her brother, was to come and fetch him first. I have already twice set it down, that for some weeks Matthieu had no longer been so repulsive to him as a mouse is to an elephant: he had, after all, found out a single good side, dug out some moral yellow mica attaching to him,--namely, the greatest attachment to his sister Joachime, who alone had the key to his whole heart, closed to his parents, the sole claim on his secrets and his services; secondly, he loved in Matthieu what the Minister condemned,--the spirit-of-salt of freedom; thirdly, it is so with us all: when he have heated our heart for some female one out of a family, we afterwards extend the stove-warmth to the whole kin and trenchership,--brothers, nephews, fathers; fourthly, Matthieu was continually praised and excused by his sister. When Victor arrived at Joachime's, she had with her headache and dressing-maids,--finery and pain were increasing; at last she sent off the live fitting-machines, and so soon as she was hardened into a Venus out of the foam of powder and jewel boxes, rouge-rags and _mouchoirs de Vénus_, _poudres d'odeur_ and lip-pomades, then she sat down and said she should stay at home on account of headache. Victor stayed too, and very gladly. Whoso knows not the framework and cellular work of the human heart will wonder that Victor's friendship for Clotilda brought a whole honey-comb of love for Joachime into his cells; it was delightful to him when they visited and embraced each other; he sought not in the blessing-fingers of the Pope so much healing virtue as in Clotilda's; her friendship seemed to him an excuse for his, and to set Joachime on the pedestal of esteem, to which with all his windlasses he had not been able to raise her. Even the sense of his increasing worth gave him new right to love; and to-day even Clotilda's crape and princely hat would have asserted its helmet ornaments on Joachime's aching and more than commonly patient head. To her continued flirtation with the pair of fools he had long since adapted himself, because he knew very well _which one_ among the three wise men from the East she had not for a fool, but for an adorer. But to return!

Matthieu, who also stayed at home to please his sister,--he and Victor and she made the entire band of this _concert spirituel_. Joachime on the sofa leaned back her delicate, sick head against the wall and looked at the inlaid floor, and her drooping eyelids made her more beautiful. The Evangelist went out and came in. Victor, as he always did, dashed round the chamber. It was a very fine evening, and I wish this of mine were so. The conversation turned upon love; and Victor asserted the existence of two kinds,--the citizenly, and the _distingué_ or French. He loved the French in books and as a general love, but he hated it the moment it was to be the only love; he described it to-day thus: "Take a little ice,--a little heart,--a little wit,--a little paper,--a little time,--a little incense; pour together and put into two persons of rank; in that way you have a good, true French Fontenellian love." "You forgot," added Mat, "one ingredient,--a small amount of senses, at least a _fifth_ or _sixth_ part, which must be added to the medicine as _adjuvans_ or _constituens_.[281] Meanwhile, it has at least the merit of shortness; love, like a tragedy, should be restricted to unity of time, namely, to the space of one day, that it may not take still more resemblance to the tragic. But describe now common love!"

_Victor_: "That I prefer."

_Matthieu_: "Not I. It is merely a longer madness than anger. _On y pleure, on y crie, on y soupire, on y ment, on y enrage, on y tue, on y meurt,--enfin, on se donne à tous les diables, pour avoir son ange_.[282] Our talks are to-day for once full of arabesques and _à la grecque_: I will make you a cookery-book receipt for a good citizenly love: take two young and large hearts,--wash them clean in baptismal water or printer's ink of German romances,--pour on them warm blood and tears,--set them on the fire and under the full moon, and let them boil,--stir them briskly with a dagger,--take them out and garnish them, like crabs, with forget-me-not or other wild-flowers, and serve them up warm: in that way you have a savory citizenly heart-soup."[283]

Matthieu further added, that "in the ardent commonalty-love there was more agony than amusement; in it, as in Dante's poem, the Hell was worked out best, and the Heaven worst. The older a maiden or a pickled herring was, so much the darker was the eye in both, and the eye was made dark by love. Every lady in one of the higher circles ought to be glad that she needs to retain nothing of the man's to whom she is chained but his portrait in the ring, as Prometheus, when Jupiter had once sworn to leave him soldered for thirty thousand years to Caucasus, wore during the whole period only a small bit of this Bastille on his hand in the shape of a finger-ring." Whereupon Matthieu darted out, as he always did after witty explosions. Victor loved the bitterest and most unjust satire in another's mouth, as a work of art; he forgave all, and continued cheerful.

Joachime then said, jestingly: "If, then, no style of love is good for anything, as you two have proved, there is nothing left for us but to hate."

"Surely not," said he, "your respected brother has simply not said a true word. Imagine to yourself, that I were the poor people's catechist[284] and in love. I am in love with the second daughter of the _pastor primarius_; her part is that of a listening-sister;[285] for maidens in citizenly life know not how to talk, at least they can do it better in hatred than in love. The poor's catechist has little _bel esprit_, but much _saint esprit_, much honesty, much truth, too much soft-heartedness, and infinite love. The catechist cannot spin out any gallant intrigue for several weeks or months, still less can he dispute the Pastor's second daughter into love, like a _roué_;--he holds his peace to keep up his hope, but with a heart full of eternal love, full of devoted wishes, trembling and silent, he follows every step of the loved and--loving one; but she guesses not his feelings, nor he hers. And then she dies.... But before she dies, comes the pale catechist disconsolate to the side of her dying bed, and presses her trembling hand ere it relaxes, and gives the cold eye one more tear of joy ere it stiffens, and breaks in even upon the pangs of the wrestling soul with the soft spring sound, 'I love thee.' When he has said it, she dies of the last joy, and then he loves no one on earth any more." ...

The past had come over his soul. Tears hung in his eyes, and confounded in a singular obscurity the image of the sick Clotilda with that of Joachime;--he saw and conceived a form which was not present;--he pressed the hand of the one that looked on him, and thought not that she might refer all to herself.

Suddenly Matthieu entered, smiling, and his sister smiled with him, in order to explain everything, and said, "The court-physician has been taking the trouble to refute thee."

Victor, suddenly chilled, replied ambiguously and bitterly: "You will comprehend, Herr von Schleunes, that it is easiest for me to put you to flight when you are not in the field."

Mat transfixed him with his eyes; but Victor cast his down and repented his bitterness. The sister continued indifferently: "I think my brother is often in the condition of changing with the fashion." He received it with a sunny smile, and thought, as did Victor, that she alluded to his gallant adventures and sham-fights with women of all ranks that sit at the Diet. But when she had sent him off to inquire of her mother who was coming to the _cercle_ this evening, she said to the Medicus: "You do not know what I meant. We have at court a sick lady, who is the very incarnation of _your_ Pastor's daughter,--and my brother has not so much nor so little spirit as to act the poor's catechist." Victor started back, broke off and took his leave.

Why? How so? On what account? But does not the reader perceive, then, that the sick lady must be Clotilda, who seeks to escape Mat's fine approaches within ear-shot and bow-shot of her heart? In fact, Victor had seen well enough that the Evangelist had been hitherto playing a more devoted part towards Clotilda than before her entrance into his Escurial and robber's castle he could carry on; but Victor had ascribed this politeness simply to the fact of her having there her quarters. But now the map of his plan lay open there: he had intentionally met a person who was indifferent towards him with the show of contempt (which, however, he finely directed more at her future small income than at her personal attractions), in order thereby to win her attention,--that next-door neighbor of love,--and afterward, by a sudden change to complaisance, to win something more than attention. "O, thou canst win nothing!" every sigh in Victor exclaimed. And yet it gave him pain, that this noble woman, this angel, must strike such an adversary with her wings. Now there were thirty things at once suspicious to him. Joachime's disclosure and coldness, Matthieu's smile, and--everything.

So far this chapter, to which I have nothing more to append than some mature thoughts. Of course, one sees plainly, that poor Victor mutilates his soul to the size of every female one, as that tyrant did the bedfellows to the length of their bed.[286] To be sure, respect is the mother of love; but the daughter is often some years older than the mother. He takes back one hope of female worth after another. Latest of all, indeed, did he give up his demand or expectation of that sublime _Indian_ sense of eternity, which imparts to us, shadowy figures hanging in the magic smoke of life, an inextinguishable luminous point for self-consciousness, and which lifts us above more than _one_ earth; but as he saw that women, among all resemblances to Clotilda, acquired this last, and as he bethought himself that a worldly life grinds down all the greatness in man, as the weather gnaws away from statues and gravestones precisely the _relieved parts_, there wanted nothing to his handing over to Joachime the declaration of love which had long been fairly written out, nothing except, on her part, a misfortune,--a wet eye, a storm of the soul, a buskin. In more perspicuous words, he said to himself: "I wish she were a sentimental ninny and absolutely intolerable. Then when, some time or other, she had her eyes right full, and her heart too, and then, when I could not tell, for emotion, where my head was standing,--then I could advance and take out my heart and reach it to her and say, It is poor Bastian's, only keep it." It seems to me as if I heard him in thought softly add, "To whom else could I give it?"

That he really had the first thought, we see from the fact that he inserted it in his diary, from which my correspondent draws everything, and which he, with the sincerity of the freest soul, made for his father, in order as it were to atone for his faults by protocolling them. His Italian lackey did hardly anything but engross it.---Did it not depend on the dog and his news-box, his declaration of love should take place this very day: I would break an arm of Joachime's,--or lay her in the sick-bed,--or blow out the Minister's lamp of life, or bring on some disaster or other in her house,----and then I would conduct my hero to the suffering heroine, and say: "When I have gone, kneel down and hand her thy heart." But in this way the chemical process of his love-making may last full as long as a process at law, and I am prepared for three quires.

But here I will confess something which the reader's pride conceals: that he and I, at the entrance of every lady in these Dog-Post-Days, have made a _mis-shot_ of _salute_,--every one of them we have taken for the heroine of the hero,--at first Agatha,--then Clotilda,--then, when he enclosed his declaration of love in the watch of the Princess, said, "I see now beforehand through the whole business." Then we both said, "After all, we were right about Clotilda." Then in distress I laid hold on Marie, and said, "I shall not reveal anything further." At last it turns out to be one whom none of us had thought of (at least not I),--Joachime.--So it may fare with myself, when I marry....

Before passing from the Post-Day to the intercalary day, the following additional minutes are to be passed: Clotilda put off her illegitimate cheeks, her _joues_[287] _de Paris_, her rouge, and seldomer exposed now her withering heart to the shaping of the court napkin-press. The Prince, who for her sake had attended as a transient hearer in the lecture-hall of his consort, stayed away somewhat often, and then called at Schleunes's: nevertheless, the Princess had magnanimity enough not to make our Victor atone, by the taking back of her gratitude, for the withdrawal of January's favor.--In Victor there was a long war, whether he should impart to Clotilda's brother the new proofs of her sisterly love:--at last,--moved by Flamin's suffering, impoverished heart, stung by reports and rascals and suspicion, and by the thought that he had been able hitherto to give so little pleasure to this ingenuous friend,--he told him almost everything (_except_ the relationship).

P. S.--The undersigned testifies, by request, that the undersigned has completed his 24th Post-Day in due order on the last day of July, or Messidor. On the island of St. John's, 1793.

JEAN PAUL,

_Mining-Superintendent of Scheerau_.

SIXTH INTERCALARY DAY.

Concerning the Wilderness and the Promised Land of Humanity.

There are vegetable men, animal men, and divine men.--

When we were to be dreamed, an angel grew drowsy and fell asleep and dreamed. Then came _Phantasus_,[288] and swept broken meteorological, phenomena, things like nights, fragments of chaos, conglomerated plants, before him, and disappeared with them.

Then came _Phobetor_, who drove herds of beasts along before him, that murdered and grazed as they passed, and disappeared with them.

Then came _Morpheus_ and played before him with happy children, with crowned mothers, with shapes that kissed each other, and with fleeting mortals, and when the angel awoke with ecstasy, Morpheus and the human race and the world's history had disappeared....

--At present the angel still sleeps and dreams,--we are still in his dream,--only _Phobetor_ is with him, and Morpheus still waits for Phobetor with his beasts to disappear....

But let us, instead of dreaming, think and hope; and for the present ask: will _vegetable_ men, _animal_ men, at last be succeeded by _divine_ men? Does the _going_ of the world-clock betray as much design as the building of it, and has it a _dial-plate_ wheel and an _index hand_?

One cannot (with a well-known philosopher) reason directly from final causes in _Physics_ to final causes in _History_, any more than I, in the individual, can deduce from the teleological (intentional) structure of a man a teleological biography of the same, or any more than, from the ingenious structure of animals, I call infer a continuous plan in their universal history. Nature is iron, always the same, and the wisdom shown in her framework is never obscured; the human race is free, and, like the infusorial animal, the multiform Vorticelle, assumes every moment, now regular, now anomalous shapes. Every physical disorder is only the hull of an order, every foul spring is the hull of a fair autumn; but are, then, our vices the buds of our virtues, and is the earthly fall of a continually sinking villain nothing but a disguised ascension of his to heaven?--And is there an object in the life of a Nero? Then I could just as well take back and reverse all and make out virtues to be the heart-leaves of disguised vices. But if, as many a one does, we carry the abuse of language so far as to reverse _moral_ height and depth, like _geometrical_, according to the _point of view_, as _positive_ and _negative_ magnitudes; if, therefore, all gouty knobs, spotted fevers, and _lead_-[289] or _silver_-colics of the human race are nothing but a different kind of healthiness: then we certainly need not ask whether man will ever get well; in that case he could never in any possible maladies be anything but well.

If a monk of the tenth century had shut himself up in a fit of melancholy, and meditated on the earth, not however on its end, but on its future: would not, in his dreams, the thirteenth century have been already a brighter one, and the eighteenth merely a glorified tenth?

Our weather-prophesyings from _present_ temperature are logically correct and historically false, because new casualties, an earthquake, a comet, reverse the currents of the whole atmosphere. Can the above-imagined monk correctly calculate, if he does not assume such future magnitudes as America, Gunpowder, and Printer's ink?--A new religion, a new Alexander, a new disease, a new Franklin, can break, swallow up, dam, turn back the forest stream whose course and contents we propose to reduce on our parchment. There lie still four quarters of the globe full of enchained savage races;--their chain daily grows thinner,--time unlooses it;--what desolation, at least what changes, must they not bring about on the little _bowling-green_ of our cultivated countries? Nevertheless, all nations of the earth must one day be fused together and be purified in a common fermentation, if ever this atmosphere of life is to be cleared up.

Can we draw from some miniature earthquakes and volcanoes, which we ourselves have produced with iron-filings and aquafortis, (in this case, types and printer's ink,) conclusions as to the Ætna eruptions, i. e. from the revolutions of the few cultivated peoples as to those of the uncultivated? Since we may assume that the human race lives as many thousands of years as the individual does years, may we venture from the sixth year to set the horoscope of youth and manhood? Add to this that the biography of this childish period is precisely the most meagre, and that awakened nations--almost all quarters of the globe are as yet full of sleeping ones--in _one_ year produce more historical material, and _consequently_ more historians, than a sleep-buried Africa in a century. We shall, therefore, _then_ be best able to prophesy from universal history, when the awaking nations shall have appended to it their million or two supplementary volumes.--All savage nations seem to have been under _one_ stamp; on the contrary, the mint of culture coins each one differently. The North American and the old German resemble each other more strongly than Germans do Germans of neighboring centuries. Neither the Golden Bull, nor the _Magna Charta_, nor the _Code Noir_, could Aristotle inlay into his forms of government and obedience; else he would have extended them; but are we then confident of foreseeing any better the future national convention in Mongolia, or the Decretal Letters and Extravagants of the enlightened Dalai-Lama, or the Recesses of the Arab Imperial Bench of Knights? Since Nature coins no people with _one_ mint-stamp or one hand alone, but with thousands at once,--hence on the German race is there a greater multitude of impressions than on the shield of Achilles,--how do we, who cannot even calculate the past, but simpler, revolutions of the globe, expect to look into the moral ones of its inhabitants?

Of all that follows from these premises I believe the opposite, excepting the necessity of prophetic modesty. Scepticism, which makes us, instead of slow to believe, unbelieving, and instead of the _eyes_ proposes to purge the _light_, becomes nonsense and the most fearful philosophical impotence and atony.

Man regards his century or his half-century as the culmination of light, as a festal-day, to which all other centuries lead only as week-days. He knows only two golden ages,--the one at the beginning of the world, and the one at the end of it,--by which he understands only his own; he finds history to be like great woods, in the middle of which are silence, night-birds, and birds of prey, and whose borders only are filled with light and song.--Certainly all things serve me; but I too serve all. As Nature, who in her eternity knows no loss of time, in her inexhaustibleness no loss of power, has no other law of frugality assigned her than that of prodigality,--as she, with _eggs_ and _seed-corns_, ministers equally well to _nourishment_ and to _propagation_,[290] and with an undeveloped germ-world sustains half a developed one,--as her way leads over no smooth bowling-alley, but over alps and seas;--our little heart must needs misunderstand her, whether in its hopes or in its fears; it must, as it becomes enlightened, reciprocally interchange _morning_ and _evening red_; it must, in its contentment, now regard after-summer as _spring_, and now _after-winter_ as _autumn_. _Moral_ revolutions mislead us more than _physical_, because the former according to their nature occupy a _greater_ play-room and space of time than the latter,--and yet the Dark Ages are nothing but a dipping into the shadow of _Saturn_, or an eclipse of the sun of short duration. A man who should be six thousand years old, would say to the six creation-days of the world's history, They are very good.

But one should never set _moral_ and _physical_ revolutions and developments too near to each other. All Nature has no other motions than _former_ ones; the circle is her path, she has no other years than Platonic,--but man alone is _changeable_, and the straight line or the zigzag describes his course. A sun has its eclipses as well as the moon, has its bloom and decay like a flower, but also its _palingenesia_ and renovation. But there lies in the human race the necessity of an everlasting mutation; yet here there are only _ascending_ and _descending_ signs, no culmination; they do not necessarily draw one another after them, as in physics, and have no extreme limit. No people, no period returns; in physics, all must come back again. It is only accidental, not necessary, that nations, at a certain age and stage of progress, and on a certain rotten round of the ladder, fall again,--one only confounds the _last_ step, from which nations fall, with the _highest_; the Romans, with whom not single rounds, but the whole ladder broke, were not necessitated to sink by a culture which does not equal even our own.[291] Nations have no age, or old age with them often precedes youth. Even with individuals the crab's-walk of the mind in old age is only accidental; still less has virtue in them a summer-solstice. Humanity has then the capacity of an endless improvement; but has it the hope also?--

The disturbance of the _equipoise_ of his own faculties makes the individual man miserable; the _inequality_ of citizens, the _inequality_ of nations, makes the earth miserable; just as lightnings arise from the neighborhood of the ebb and flow of the ether, and all storms from unequal distributions of air. But fortunately it lies in the nature of mountains to fill the valleys.

Not inequality of goods,--for the majority of voices and fists on the part of the poor balances in the scale the power of the rich,--but inequality of culture, does most to create and distribute the political fly-presses and forcing-pumps. The _Lex agraria_ in the fields of science passes over at last into the physical fields. Since the tree of knowledge has thrust out its branches from the school windows of philosophy and the church windows of the priesthood into the common garden, all nations have become stronger.--Unequal cultivation chains the West Indies to the feet of Europe, Helots to Spartans, and the iron hollow-head[292] with the trigger on the negro's tongue presupposes a hollow-head of another kind.

With such a frightful disparity among nations in power, wealth, culture, only a universal rush of storms from all points of the compass can terminate in a lasting calm. A perpetual balance of Europe presuppose a balance of the four remaining parts of the world, which one may, deducting small librations, promise our globe. In future men will quite as little discover a salvage as an island. One people must draw another out of pits blundering years. A more equal culture will conclude commercial treaties with more equal advantages. The longest rainy months of humanity--which always fell upon the time of national transplantations, just as one always sets out flowers on cloudy days--have spent themselves.

One spectre still remains from the midnight, which reaches far into the hours of light,--War. But the claws and bill of the armorial eagle grow on, till, like the boar's tusks, they crook up and make themselves useless. As it was calculated in regard to Vesuvius, that it contained material for only forty-three eruptions more,--so might one also reckon the number of future wars. This long tempest, which already for six thousand years has been standing over our planet, will continue to storm till clouds and earth have charged each other full with an _equal_ measure of electric matter.

_All_ nations become illuminated only in joint fermentation; and the precipitate is blood and dead men's bones. Were the earth narrowed to one half of its size, then would the time of its moral--and physical--development be shortened one half.

With wars the strongest drag-chains of the sciences are cut off. Once war-machines were the sowing-machines of new knowledges, while they crushed old harvests; now it is the press which scatters the pollen more widely and gently. Instead of an Alexander, Greece would need now to send to Asia nothing but a--compositor; the conqueror grafts, the author sows.

It is a characteristic of enlightenment that, although it still leaves to individuals the possibility of the illusion and weakening of vice, nevertheless it releases nations from company-vices and national deceptions,--e. g. from wrecking, piracy. The best and worst deeds we do in company; war is an example. The slave-trade must in our days, unless indeed the trade in subjects begins, come to an end.[293]

The highest and steepest thrones stand, like the highest mountains, in the warmest lands. The political mountains, like the physical, daily grow lower (especially when they spout fire), and must at last be with the valleys in a common plain.

From all this follows:--

There comes one day a golden age, which every wise and virtuous man even now enjoys, and when men will find it easier to live well because they will find it easier to live indeed,--when men will have, not more pleasure (for this honey they draw from every flower and leaf-louse), but more virtue,--when the people Will take part in thinking, and the thinker--in working,[294] in order that he may save himself the need of Helots,--when military and judicial murder shall be condemned, and only occasionally cannon-balls shall be turned up with the plough. When that time comes, then will a preponderance of good no more stop the machine by frictions. When it comes, then will the necessity no longer lie in human nature of degenerating again and again breeding tempests (for heretofore the noble element has merely kept up a flying fight with the overpowering evil), just as, according to Forster, even on the hot island of St. Helena[295] there are no storms.

When this festal day comes, then will our children's children be--no more. We stand now in the evening and see at the close of our dark day the sun go down with a red-hot glory, and promise us behind the last cloud the still, serene sabbath-day of humanity; but our posterity have yet to travel through a night full of wind, and through a cloud full of poison, till at last over a happier earth an eternal morning-wind full of blossom-spirits, moving on before the sun, expelling all clouds, shall breathe on men without a sigh. Astronomy promises the earth an eternal vernal equinox;[296] and history promises it a higher one; perhaps the two eternal springs may coincide.--

Since man disappears among men, we downcast ones must erect ourselves before humanity. When I think of the Greeks, I see that our hopes move faster than fate.--As one travels by night with lights over the icy Alps, in order not to be terrified at the abysses and at the long road, so does fate spread night around us, and hands us only torches for the way immediately before us, that we may not worry ourselves about the chasms of the future, and the distance of the goal.--There were centuries when humanity was led with bandaged eyes--from one prison to another;--there were other centuries when spectres rattled and overturned all night long, and in the morning nothing was disturbed; there can be no other centuries except those in which individuals die, but nations rise, and in which nations decay, but mankind rises: when mankind itself sinks and falls to ruins, and ends with the scattering of the globe in a dust-cloud ... what shall console us?--

A veiled eye behind the bounds of time, an infinite heart beyond the world. There is a higher order of things than we can demonstrate,--there is a Providence in the world's history and in every one's life which reason has the boldness to deny, and which the heart has the boldness to believe;--there must be a Providence, which, according to other rules than we have hitherto assumed, links this confused earth as daughter-land to a higher city of God,--there must be a God, a Virtue, and an Eternity.

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 1: His collected works, Vol. III. p. 68.]

[Footnote 2: In Faust,--Scene of the Easter Holidays.--Tr.]

[Footnote 3: A Jew once separated from his wife when she appeared with bare arms; but it is difficult to ascribe the present frequent divorces in Paris to that cause.]

[Footnote 4: It is amusing to hear Jean Paul call it so, but the German diminutive, "Werk_lein_," also expresses attachment to the thing in question. Thus children say _Väter-chen_, "Little Papa; Daddy."--Tr.]

[Footnote 5: Descriptive of Venus, or written under her influence.--Tr.]

[Footnote 6: The stick on which a painter rests his arm.--Tr.]

[Footnote 7: Similarity of the parts to the whole.--Tr.]

[Footnote 8: _Fliegende Blätter_.--Tr.]

[Footnote 9: Of course, "Forgive us our debts."--Tr.]

[Footnote 10: A city of the Tauric Chersonesus, the modern Crimea.--Tr.]

[Footnote 11: A Jesuit astronomer, A. D. 1598-1671, who named the moon's spots Tycho, Plato, Hercules, St. Catharine, &c.--Tr.]

[Footnote 12: He alludes to the chimney-sweeper of his perukes.]

[Footnote 13: The name the Germans give to Death. _Hein_ would seem to mean Hal.--Tr.]

[Footnote 14: Probably peas, which the children, as now, blew through long tubes with great force.--Tr.]

[Footnote 15: In Upper Alsace, where every three years only the best youth receives the crown and medal, and the jurisdiction of the pastures.]

[Footnote 16: A sort of fire-ball, which, as it goes, emits smoke to blind the enemy.--Tr.]

[Footnote 17: Small balls invented by him to put into a horse's ear, and act as a spur.--Tr.]

[Footnote 18: An island of the Malay Archipelago, wooded, volcanic, and spicy.--Tr.]

[Footnote 19: It is notorious how little I know of mining operations; I therefore thought I had reason to apply to my superiors for a spur which might stimulate me to do something in such a weighty science,--and such a spur is certainly the office of mining-superintendent.]

[Footnote 20: Except the two emperors Silluck and Athnac, and the four kings Sgolta, Sakeph-Katon, etc., I never had intercourse with any; and that only as upper-class scholar, because we jurists, with the Devil's help, had to learn Hebrew, wherein just the above-mentioned six potentates appear as the names of the accents on words. Perhaps, however, my correspondent means the great, acute, crowned accents of nations. [_Sakeph-Katon_ is the only one the translator has not been able to verify of these interesting names. _Kauton_ is given among the Hebrew accents, but not Sakeph.--Tr.]]

[Footnote 21: Justus Möser, author of the "Patriotic Fantasies," one of Germany's dearest memories, in many respects a Franklin.--Tr.]

[Footnote 22: Lane of the mine.--Tr.]

[Footnote 23: Ass's Post.--Tr.]

[Footnote 24: Instrument for taking the distance of a star north or south from the equator.--Tr.]

[Footnote 25: Instrument for reckoning the deviation of the hour-circle from the meridian.--Tr.]

[Footnote 26: Jean Paul seems to indulge here in an hexameter himself: "Welches sie auch mehr bedarf, als der harmonische Gessner."--Tr.]

[Footnote 27: _Bewähren_ and _bewahren_ are the two German words.--Tr.]

[Footnote 28: E. g. their honor suffers, if their carriage does not pass ahead of another carriage of rank.]

[Footnote 29: Such letters as David sent by Uriah to Joab. (See 2 Samuel xi. 14, 15.)--Tr.]

[Footnote 30: _Kleeblatt_ (_trefoil_) in the German.--Tr.]

[Footnote 31: After an operation for the cataract, the sensitive retina represents everything magnified.]

[Footnote 32: A piece of charred bone or horn used by natives of the East to absorb the blood from wounds made by the bite of a snake. See Tennent's Natural History of Ceylon, p. 312.--Tr.]

[Footnote 33: The _Psalter_ in the ox's stomach is the _Blättermagen_ (lit. _leaf-stomach_), the third stomach of ruminant animals, the tripe. So we speak of the _leaves_ of fat.--Tr.]

[Footnote 34: "My spirit flew in feathers then, That is so heavy now."--Hood.]

[Footnote 35: Joint-reporter.--Tr.]

[Footnote 36: A kind that heads in the form of a capuchin's hood.--Tr.]

[Footnote 37: When one's five numbers are all drawn in their order, it is a quinterne.--Tr.]

[Footnote 38: _Aufgebunden_ may mean either tied up or untied.--Tr.]

[Footnote 39: Burlesque and serious operas.--Tr.]

[Footnote 40: Or, figure in history.--Tr.]

[Footnote 41: The ideal of the beautiful.]

[Footnote 42: As the Rabbins believe, according to Eisenmenger's Judaism, Part II. 7.]

[Footnote 43: _Usance_ means the month's grace allowed for the payment of a bill of exchange; double usance, of course, allows two months.--Tr.]

[Footnote 44: Petrarch, like German reviewers, avoided nightingales, and sought frogs.]

[Footnote 45: "Schatten_riss_ oder Schatten_schnitt_" is the German.--Tr.]

[Footnote 46: The literal rendering would be "_cut out of the eyes_, or, rather, out of the face." The phrase in Italics is a German idiom for expressing an exact likeness.--Tr.]

[Footnote 47: The readers of Boswell's Johnson will remember that interesting native of the South-Sea Islands.--Tr.]

[Footnote 48: Matthieu being the French for _Matthew_.--Tr.]

[Footnote 49: _Zeusel_ was a court-apothecary, mentioned on page 7, of whom we shall hear more.--Tr.]

[Footnote 50: An Italian word, meaning literally gallant, applied to those Platonic lovers who, with the connivance of the husbands, attended married ladies, and were everywhere seen in confidential chat with them.--Tr.]

[Footnote 51: La Mettrie was a noted medical man and materialist in his day, b. 1709.--Tr.]

[Footnote 52: Remember the beautiful passage in Bede's History, where the Northumbrian prince compares man's life to the flight of the swallow through the lighted hall out of darkness into darkness.--Tr.]

[Footnote 53: An allusion, perhaps, to the legend, so lovely to the fancy, that a crucifix in Naples, when Alphonso was besieged there, in 1439, bowed its head before a cannon-ball, which consequently took off only the crown of thorns!--_Voyage d'un François_, Tom. VI. p. 303.]

[Footnote 54: This clover insures him who accidentally finds it against future deception. Hitherto it has been found only by--princes and philosophers.]

[Footnote 55: _Matz_, in German, means also both a starling and a blockhead.--Tr.]

[Footnote 56: Elegant paper for the upper classes.--Tr.]

[Footnote 57: In the original, "hang hares' tails on us," i. e. "make fools of us."--Tr.]

[Footnote 58: Literally, spit-devils,--a sort of firework.--Tr.]

[Footnote 59: I. e. Birthday-festival.--Tr.]

[Footnote 60: Not one of the commonplace souls that jog steadily on like the hexameter.--Tr.]

[Footnote 61: This was a common practice of our old New England Puritan parsons.--Tr.]

[Footnote 62: Disciples of Kennicott, the well-known English verifier of the general accuracy of the Sacred Text.--Tr.]

[Footnote 63: A trap extemporized by setting up a heavy book obliquely, with one end resting on a stick, and the cheese attached.--Tr.]

[Footnote 64: Christina, daughter of Charles XII., abdicated in May, 1654, at the age of twenty-eight.--Tr.]

[Footnote 65: A famous and popular old volume delineating the world of nature and life in pictures, with numbers referring to the different parts of each picture.--Tr.]

[Footnote 66: That is, threw into them, as into scrap-baskets, the bits of paper on which he had written his thoughts.--Tr.]

[Footnote 67: Allusion to Ezekiel.--Tr.]

[Footnote 68: Literally, _God's-box_.--Tr.]

[Footnote 69: _Gesprungen_ seems to mean both _vibrated_ and _snapped_.]

[Footnote 70: _Haupt_- und _Staat-actionen_, the phrase used by Faust in his first dialogue with Wagner. Schlegel says the title was affixed to dramas designed for marionettes when they treated heroic and historical subjects.--Tr.]

[Footnote 71: Epiglottis.--Tr.]

[Footnote 72: What has come into the world feet foremost.--Tr.]

[Footnote 73: Basselisse (French).--Tr.]

[Footnote 74: _Ladenhüter_ (shop-keeper) is the German word, meaning goods that keep the store as a sick man keeps his bed,--_shop-ridden_.--Tr.]

[Footnote 75: A court that decided matters in dispute among the sovereigns of the German Confederation.--Tr.]

[Footnote 76: A selection of choice learning.--Tr.]

[Footnote 77: Midsummer-day.--Tr.]

[Footnote 78: A name given by the Greeks to the Hebrew word Jehovah, which consists, in the original, of _four letters_.--Tr.]

[Footnote 79: The thumb of a hanged thief was considered as a lucky-bone.--Tr.]

[Footnote 80: Full.--Tr.]

[Footnote 81: Or it _went a begging_, as we say.--Tr.]

[Footnote 82: "Rara avis."--Tr.]

[Footnote 83: See page 67.--Tr.]

[Footnote 84: It is precisely the possession of _heterogeneous_ faculties in _similar_ degree that makes one inconsequent and inconsistent; men with one predominant faculty act by it with more equableness. In despotisms there is more quiet than in republics; at the hot equator there is a more even rate of the barometer than in the zones of four seasons.]

[Footnote 85: One of Burns's words.--Tr.]

[Footnote 86: The bust of the Vatican Apollo, by which he would learn to model no other figure than his own.]

[Footnote 87: There is something in the use and application of the word _Wissenschaft_ which requires for its appreciation an understanding of the peculiar genius of the German mind.--Tr.]

[Footnote 88: Bacon's remark will recur to the reader.--Tr.]

[Footnote 89: A solar system is only a dotted profile of the genius of the world, but a human eye is his miniature. The _mechanics_ of the bodies of the universe the mathematical masters of reckoning may calculate, but the _dioptrics_ of the eye, growing bright amidst nothing but dull moistures, transcends our algebraic audit-offices, which therefore cannot reckon away from the imitated eyes (the glasses) the space of diffusion and the narrow field.]

[Footnote 90: Jean Paul would probably have said Rubicon if he had not been going to say it elsewhere,--e. g. p. 199.]

[Footnote 91: Hieronym. cont. Jov. L 2.]

[Footnote 92: _Hof_ means in German _both_ court--and yard.--Tr.]

[Footnote 93: Bayle's Dictionary, Art. _François d'Assise_, Note C.]

[Footnote 94: A half-way house.--Tr.]

[Footnote 95: Jean Paul probably means, that such noble hearts as Victor's Le Baut might shut up into silence, but could not with his Chamberlain's master-key open and find out their secrets.--Tr.]

[Footnote 96: In a later edition Jean Paul substitutes for _Schein-tod_ (sham death) a half French word, _Postiche-tod_ (supposititious death).--Tr.]

[Footnote 97: "On whose board he had a _stone_," literally,--a proverb for being in one's good graces.--Tr.]

[Footnote 98: There is an inconsistency in date of month here with p. 135.--Tr.]

[Footnote 99: The dog as well as myself know what island that is, but no more.]

[Footnote 100: "Burning-chambers," a name originally given to the place for judging criminals of state belonging to illustrious families. The room was lined with black, and lighted with flambeaux. Originated with Francis I. in 1535, in his persecution of heretics.--Tr.]

[Footnote 101: Plebeian.--Tr.]

[Footnote 102: One at hearing from Emanuel, the other at seeing Clotilda.--Tr.]

[Footnote 103: Red drops fall from butterflies in their last transformation, which they used to call bloody rain.]

[Footnote 104: When one looks a long time into the blue of heaven, it begins to undulate, and these waves in the air one imagines in childhood to be angels at play.]

[Footnote 105: This monologue is a fragment from an earlier dark hour, such as every heart of sensibility once suffers.]

[Footnote 106: _Noth-münzen_ means originally coin containing alloy, struck off in hard times.--Tr.]

[Footnote 107: The Hebrew language has but three vowels ("vowel-points") which, from the assistance they gave in enunciating a vast variety of words, were called _matres lectionis_, or mothers of the reading.--Tr.]

[Footnote 108: I. e. bowing so low.--Tr.]

[Footnote 109: Herkommen, as a common noun, means _tradition_ or _custom_.--Tr.]

[Footnote 110: An infusorial or minute animal, called in natural history _rotifera_ (wheel-bearer).--Tr.]

[Footnote 111: _Famulus_ is the Latin name in the German. Wagner was one in Faust.--Tr.]

[Footnote 112: So called in allusion to the _shaking_ they were giving it.--Tr.]

[Footnote 113: _Kopfstück_ (lit. _head-piece_), a coin bearing the head of the regent.--Tr.]

[Footnote 114: The billiard-pockets (like the contribution-bags) used to have bells to them.--Tr.]

[Footnote 115: Who felt himself to be "a child picking up pebbles on the shore of the great ocean of truth."--Tr.]

[Footnote 116: A conventual term,--a six.--Tr.]

[Footnote 117: God bless you!--Tr.]

[Footnote 118: Many thanks!--Tr.]

[Footnote 119: Of course a parody on "Verbum sat _sapienti_,"--"A word for the _fool_," &c.--Tr.]

[Footnote 120: Or reading-_easel_ (the latter word seeming to be an English corruption of the German _Esel_, ass),--any book-rest. _Maler-esel_ means a painter's easel.--Tr.]

[Footnote 121: When they occur in actual life.--Tr.]

[Footnote 122: Eclectic or miscellaneous science, not confined to one department.--Tr.]

[Footnote 123: A King of France once sent a vassal _illum baculum, quo se sustentabat, in symbolum traditionis_. (Du Fresne's Glossary.) So far as I know, there has never been made a good and serviceable--abridgment of this _glossarium_ for ladies.]

[Footnote 124: Just as there are _listening sisters_ (_les Tourières_ or _S[oe]urs écoutés_) who go with the nuns into the conversing room, to overhear their talk.]

[Footnote 125: Or absentee-curates.--Tr.]

[Footnote 126: Literally _looker-on_,--one admitted to behold the secret ceremonies in the Eleusinian mysteries.--Tr.]

[Footnote 127: To know how to obey is a glory equal to that of commanding.--Tr.]

[Footnote 128: "Slaves are accounted nobodies."--Tr.]

[Footnote 129: In real life.--Tr.]

[Footnote 130: _To make one a queue_ is a proverb for imposing on him (like pinning a rag to one's coat-tail?).--Tr.]

[Footnote 131: _Diet_ (from _dies_) _implies_ the idea of _day_, but the German "Reichs_tag_" makes the pun more palpable in the original.--Tr.]

[Footnote 132: A lady's watch, as is well known, shaped like a heart, provided on the back with a dial-gnomon and magnetic needle. The latter points out to the ladies (who hate _cold_) the _south_ also, in fact, and the sun-dial-index serves as a moon-dial-index.]

[Footnote 133: "Rome concealed the name of her god, and she was wrong; I conceal the name of my goddess, and I am right."]

[Footnote 134: Or _Tensa_, the carriage on which they bore the images of the gods in the Circensian games.--Tr.]

[Footnote 135: A shrine.--Tr.]

[Footnote 136: Properly, a pitcher, or urn.--Tr.]

[Footnote 137: Here Jean Paul inserts, after "in die Federn," "(_nicht in die Feder_),"--i. e. _not into the pen_ (a German phrase for _dictating_). The pun could not be kept.--Tr.]

[Footnote 138: A watch that tells only the hours.--Tr.]

[Footnote 139: The reference is to Laurence Sterne, and the snuff-box he mentions in the early part of the "Sentimental Journey," as given him by a monk, and carried ever after as an amulet.--Tr.]

[Footnote 140: Ignatius's-plate means probably a breastplate, or medallion, consecrated by Ignatius Loyola.--Tr.]

[Footnote 141: I. e. to throw light upon it.--Tr.]

[Footnote 142: Like John Buncle, who went round, as was said, to propagate his faith and his species.--Tr.]

[Footnote 143: A fourth reason would be, that now, every time be loves another than Clotilda, he seems to earn a new claim to the gratitude of his friend.]

[Footnote 144: Italian for everybody.--Tr.]

[Footnote 145: May there be a sly allusion--here to the possibility of their putting their hair up in papers torn from the leaves of Jean Paul's works?--Tr.]

[Footnote 146: Schickaneder was the Director of a Theatre in Vienna in the time of Mozart, and wrote the text for the _Magic Flute_.--Tr.]

[Footnote 147: A wreath given in derision to brides who before marriage had been unchaste.--Tr.]

[Footnote 148: And then are ready to verify the proverb: _Curses, like chickens, come home to roost_.--Tr.]

[Footnote 149: Musical interval.--Tr.]

[Footnote 150: Old scholastic term for a _past_ eternity, in contradiction to a coming eternity, _a parte post_.--Tr.]

[Footnote 151: The Invisible Lodge; a Biography in Two Parts. [A work of Jean Paul's.--Tr.]]

[Footnote 152: Such was the name of his Lordship's wife, who in her twenty-third year sank to rest in the eternal arms.]

[Footnote 153: In the original, _Semper-freie_ (always free,--eligible to office).--Tr.]

[Footnote 154: Hence too it was, that, so long as Victor was at the Parsonage, she avoided Flamin's society.]

[Footnote 155: The reader will remember this same remark, in so many words, on p. 223.--Tr.]

[Footnote 156: It turned out more fortunately, and without loss of the stones, and I had the satisfaction to find that no woman who read the first edition of this work has, in her womanlike _castling_ or _rotation in office_, at all interchanged the two _thats_. Nay, even the female readers of the second edition have remained consistent with themselves.]

[Footnote 157: Demoralization.--Tr.]

[Footnote 158: The German word _kleiden_; it has a corresponding double meaning of _dressing_, and also of _suiting_.--Tr.]

[Footnote 159: Science,--Mathematics.--Tr.]

[Footnote 160: Step-measurers.--Tr.]

[Footnote 161: Men entitled to lecture in three branches.--Tr.]

[Footnote 162: Or disciple of the indifferential calculus.--Tr.]

[Footnote 163: Or, in prose, fiery water-wheel.--Tr.]

[Footnote 164: "And what if all of animated nature Be but organic harps diversely framed, That tremble into thought, as o'er them sweeps, Plastic and vast, one intellectual breeze, At once the soul of each and God of all?" Coleridge, _The Æolian Harp_.]

[Footnote 165: _Fromm_ is the German. It is time the words _religious_ and _pious_ were redeemed from the base uses of sectarianism and bigotry.--Tr.]

[Footnote 166: _Enlightenment_ in an _empty_ heart is mere memory-work, let it strain the faculty of acumen ever so much. Most men of our day resemble the new houses in Potsdam, in which (according to Reichard) Frederick the Second caused _lights_ to be placed at night, that every one, including Reichard himself, might think they were--_occupied_.]

[Footnote 167: Most men have, perhaps, only an equal number of good _thoughts_ and _actions_; but it is still an open question how long the virtuous man may interrupt his good thoughts (which have less need than good actions of the outer world) by indifferent ones.]

[Footnote 168: For the noblest leans just the most on loving souls, or at least on his ideals of them, with which, however, he is only in so far satisfied as he regards them as pledges of future prototypes. I do not except either the Stoic (that Epicurean God) or the Mystic: both love in the Creator only the sum total of his creatures; we the former in the latter.]

[Footnote 169: The German _Vorwand_ means literally front wall (not far from the etymological meaning of _pretext_); so that there may be a figurative element here beyond what appears to the casual reader.--Tr.]

[Footnote 170: The reader of this letter will readily presuppose that Clotilda, as she does not know into whose hands it may fall,--in fact, it is actually in ours,--will have to hurry over her relations and mysteries (e. g. respecting Flamin, Victor, &c.) with an obscurity which to her proper reader was clear enough.]

[Footnote 171: Let the reader remember that she is master of as much of this biography as he, if not more.]

[Footnote 172: She means Giulia, from whose corpse grief had hurried her away.]

[Footnote 173:

"Now spring returns, but not to me returns The vernal joy my better years have known," &c. Michael Bruce.]

[Footnote 174: "Fly not from me, because I am always encompassed by a great shadow, which increases till at last it shall wall me up."]

[Footnote 175: Every seven years of human life.--Tr.]

[Footnote 176:

"Or had it drizzled _needle-points of ice_ Upon a feverish head made suddenly bald."

Coleridge's _Remorse_.]

[Footnote 177: As the spots in the moon are fields of flowers and plants.]

[Footnote 178: Here ended (in the original) the first volume.--Tr.]

[Footnote 179: So called, as it was made to answer for both bed and board. See the next sentence but one.--Tr.]

[Footnote 180: The rudiments of printing.--Tr.]

[Footnote 181: He is indignant, it is true, only at the _typographical_ history of learned works, and despises only the anxious search after the birthdays, &c., of deceased and stupid books in the midst of a world full of wonders; but here, too, he must needs consider that brains which can let nothing _press_ upon them more than operations of the _press_ still do better this little something, which saves and accumulates most for the better ones, than nothing at all, or anything beyond their ability.]

[Footnote 182: A name given to screens used for partitions.--Tr.]

[Footnote 183: A well-known good writer on the eyes.]

[Footnote 184: Or crystalline lens?--Tr.]

[Footnote 185: Glands in the eyelids, discovered by Meibom in 1673.--Tr.]

[Footnote 186: A glandule at the corner of the eye, which secretes moisture.--Tr.]

[Footnote 187: Honeymoon. One of Jean Paul's variations on the phrase.--Tr.]

[Footnote 188: The Germans are peculiarly rich in synonymes for the honeymoon. The word used here is _Flitterwochen_ (Spangle-weeks).--Tr.]

[Footnote 189: Moldavian or Wallachian governor.--Tr.]

[Footnote 190: Some of the German written letters are like the Greek. _Alphabet_ (at the end of the sentence) is a printer's term for 23 sheets.--Tr.]

[Footnote 191: The Fetzpopel, or _ragged ninny_, was a sort of scarecrow or bugbear.--Tr.]

[Footnote 192: A fistful.--Tr.]

[Footnote 193: An Indian moss used for the gout.--Tr.]

[Footnote 194: An allusion to a scandalous Scotch imposture of 1780.--Tr.]

[Footnote 195: Sledges for riding astraddle.--Tr.]

[Footnote 196: The Britons found out that whalebone shavings made the softest kind of bed.]

[Footnote 197: The English of this seems to be:--

"Turkey rhubarb powdered. Starred anise-seed. Fennel do. Peel of green orange. Carbonate of potash,--equal parts,--1 drachm. Leaves of Alexandrian senna without stalks,--2 drachms. Half an ounce of white sugar."

And the final direction may read, "Of which let him take a mixture, finely pulverized, given in sufficient quantity to produce ejection. Mark [i. e. on the paper], Wind-powders," &c.--Tr.]

[Footnote 198: The name given to the halo about the head, when one is electrized.]

[Footnote 199: An allusion, perhaps, to the pasteboard images carried about on the heads of Italian peddlers, in which the loose-hung head bobs right and left to the spectators.--Tr.]

[Footnote 200: The German expression for all this is too elliptical to be literally rendered. It is simply "Meinetwegen!" (For all me!)--Tr.]

[Footnote 201: Fancy-man.--Tr.]

[Footnote 202: Their good works are good words.--Tr.]

[Footnote 203: The horse referred to on page 91.--Tr.]

[Footnote 204: That is, he would be, when this letter arrived, for he was going to carry it.--Tr.]

[Footnote 205: Culpepper never did him the pleasure, for which he had so often begged him, of prescribing for the Prince a clyster, which then the apothecary himself would have administered, in order just for once to _get at_ the ruler, and transform _his_ weak side into his own sunny side.]

[Footnote 206: When those twins chipped the shell of Leda's egg, out of which they were born.--Tr.]

[Footnote 207: Literally, "Knapsack."--Tr.]

[Footnote 208: French for clyster.--Tr.]

[Footnote 209: A Greek jurist, compared by Gibbon to Bacon, of great influence in the first half of the sixth century,--dishonest, but able.--Tr.]

[Footnote 210: The red-deer, and the wild-boar, bear, badger, &c.--Tr.]

[Footnote 211: i. e. about two kreutzers.--Tr.]

[Footnote 212: Entity.--Tr.]

[Footnote 213: "_Gesegnete Mahlzeit_" is the familiar phrase Richter uses; it was formerly common, at the close of dinner, to shake hands and wish "a blessing on the meal."--Tr.]

[Footnote 214:

"Hast thou a friend, take care to keep him, And often to his threshold wend: Briers and thorns o'ergrow the path On which a man neglects to walk."--_Old Saying_.

Tr.]

[Footnote 215: Little Britain.--Tr.]

[Footnote 216: He with the long shoes, in his "Education of a Young Prince, 1705."]

[Footnote 217: Thus did merely the first edition, in 1797, speak of the Viennese; a third, improved one, in 1819, acknowledges also an improved edition of them, although it retains lively _shadows_ of their former times.]

[Footnote 218: A coarse writer no longer known.--Tr.]

[Footnote 219: Author of the Burlesque Virgil.--Tr.]

[Footnote 220: The author appears to have had in his mind a reminiscence of a passage in Bürger's "Lenore":--

"Like croak of frogs in marshy plain, Swelled on the breeze that dismal strain," &c.--Tr.]

[Footnote 221: Sacred musical composition of a stylish character.--Tr.]

[Footnote 222: The Jewish name for Sabbath in the Middle Ages. See Auerbach's Spinoza.--Tr.]

[Footnote 223: Latin for ruins, fragments of old buildings, &c.--Tr.]

[Footnote 224: "He toucheth the hills, and they smoke."--Tr.]

[Footnote 225: December is most favorable to astronomical observations.]

[Footnote 226: A musical direction: Go back to the sign; Begin again.--Tr.]

[Footnote 227: The German word is _Kälte_, which explains the incongruity of our English heading.--Tr.]

[Footnote 228: A word copied exactly from the German, and well enough justified by the analogy of _rookery_, for instance.--Tr.]

[Footnote 229: See that noble passage of Milton, beginning

"I cannot praise a fugitive and cloistered virtue."--Tr.]

[Footnote 230: I have wholly recast the letter N, because in the first edition I unfortunately had a good idea, which, without recollecting its first publication, I gave the world a second time, as a learned thief of my own property, in the commentary on the woodcuts. [Probably the ones illustrating the Ten Commandments, in the _Campaner Thal_, Jean Paul's work on Immortality.--Tr.]]

[Footnote 231: The royal band (of twenty-four).--Tr.]

[Footnote 232: A freethinker and Freemason, in the latter half of the eighteenth century imprisoned, for a certain comedy, in Magdeburg fortress.--Tr.]

[Footnote 233: The highway.--Tr.]

[Footnote 234: As an example, we have now the First Principle of Morals, and that of the Forms of Government.]

[Footnote 235: Self-government.--Tr.]

[Footnote 236: See his _Am[oe]n. Acad_., the treatise on the habitable globe.]

[Footnote 237: The hysterical ball, i. e. the hysteric morbid feeling, as if a ball were rolling up into the throat.]

[Footnote 238: Used here by Jean Paul evidently, with figurative freedom, for a Russian swing, but meaning originally a _chariot-race_ (afterward tournament), and derived from _currus solis_ (chariot of the sun).--Tr.]

[Footnote 239: Conjurer's jargon.--Tr.]

[Footnote 240: "The _Litones_ were slaves among the old Saxons, who still possessed a third of their property, and could make contracts for it." _Flegeljahre_, No. 8.--Tr.]

[Footnote 241: An instrument for determining the blueness of the sky.]

[Footnote 242: French for a male flirt.--Tr.]

[Footnote 243: Differing laws.--Tr.]

[Footnote 244: Axiom in law; named from Brocard, a Bishop of Worms, who made a collection of canons called "Brocardica Juris."--Tr.]

[Footnote 245: Proculus and Sabinus were the founders of two rival schools of jurisprudence in Rome (Proculians and Sabinians) in the first century of our era.--Tr.]

[Footnote 246: A term from the Pandects of Justinian, meaning liabilities to burdens or duties.--Tr.]

[Footnote 247: Alluding to the consolidating of stocks, debts, &c.--Tr.]

[Footnote 248: An Italian astronomer and anatomist, born in 1602.--Tr.]

[Footnote 249: Faust (meaning both fist and the Faust of story) is the word in the original.--Tr.]

[Footnote 250: Or journey.--Tr.]

[Footnote 251: There is a play on words in the original, _Hof_ meaning _court_, and also, when applied to the sun or moon, a _circle_ round the luminary.--Tr.]

[Footnote 252: The original has a slight pun; _über die Tafel_ meaning both _on the subject_ of the table and _during_ the table (or dinner).--Tr.]

[Footnote 253: A name given to different groups of delicate muscles in certain sensitive parts of the human body.--Tr.]

[Footnote 254: "But where of ye, O tempests, is the goal! Are ye like those within the human breast, Or do ye find, like eagles, some high nest?" _Childe Harold_.]

[Footnote 255: The snake-stone sucks at the wound till it has sucked out all the poison.]

[Footnote 256: In a nutshell.--Tr.]

[Footnote 257: The conservative or court party in the French Revolution were called the _noirs_ (blacks), from the fact of the emigrant nobles wearing black velvet. The _Ensragés_ was the name of a radical club.--Tr.]

[Footnote 258: Literally, the game of _man_ (_ombre_, Spanish).--Tr.]

[Footnote 259: Joachime, Clotilda, Victor, and the Devil.]

[Footnote 260: _Mort_ (French) in the original.--Tr.]

[Footnote 261: Manager of the game.--Tr.]

[Footnote 262: Or face-card.--Tr.]

[Footnote 263: No pun in the original.--Tr.] [Footnote 264: A Parisian anatomiste (b. 1719) persecuted by the profession to London, where she exhibited her wax-skeleton with success.--Tr.]

[Footnote 265: Described on pages 127-134.--Tr.]

[Footnote 266: Entertainments for the gods, at which their images were laid on couches (_lecti_), and food was served up to them in public.--Tr.]

[Footnote 267: _Panist_ from the Latin _panis_,--an allusion to an old class of charity scholars. It might be rendered, _loafer_.--Tr.]

[Footnote 268: Alluding to the long attempts in Germany to fuse the Calvinistie and Lutheran Churches.--Tr.]

[Footnote 269: _Musicus_ here, not _musicant_, which latter means the more common performer, fiddler, or whatever else.--Tr.]

[Footnote 270: Father confessor.--Tr.]

[Footnote 271: Plutarch mentions how vain Pompey's cavaliers were of their personal appearance, and that Cæsar accordingly directed his soldiers to aim at their faces; "for Cæsar hoped that those young cavaliers who had not been used to wars and wounds, and who set a great value on their beauty, would avoid above all things a stroke in that part, and immediately give way, as well on account of the present danger as the future deformity. The event answered his expectation."--Tr.]

[Footnote 272: To save the external decencies of virtue.--Tr.]

[Footnote 273: I. e., O Clarissa! behold your Lovelace; let us skip the first four volumes, and, like the makers of Epics, begin with the rest!]

[Footnote 274: A kind of fire-alarm.--Tr.]

[Footnote 275: These terms are adopted as the shortest correspondents of the German _bürgerlich_ and _stiftfähig_.--Tr.]

[Footnote 276: He mistakes; Leibnitz only said, everything difficult was light to him, and everything light difficult.]

[Footnote 277: As the old fellow who carried his pipe in his boot, when his leg was shot off at the battle of Prague, grabbed at his pipe first and then at his leg. (See Old Song.)--Tr.]

[Footnote 278: "Colors produced on ores by the action of the air."--Adler.]

[Footnote 279: _Viel-Liebe_ is Jean Paul's word, to match which, after the analogy of Polygamy (marriage to many), we might coin the word _Polyagapy_ (love to many).--Tr.]

[Footnote 280: Instead of _malade imaginaire_, an imaginary invalid, she was an imaginary _convalescent_.--Tr.]

[Footnote 281: _Adjuvans_ is the ingredient which strengthens the powers of the main ingredients; _constituens_ is what gives the medicine the form of pill, electuary or mixture.]

[Footnote 282: One weeps, one cries, one sighs, one lies, one raves, one kills, one dies,--in fine, one gives himself to all the devils, in order to have his angel.--Tr.]

[Footnote 283: As we say _pea-soup_, _vermicelli-soup_.]

[Footnote 284: Referring to the one whose marriage to the Senior Parson's daughter Victor witnessed that night from his window.--Tr.]

[Footnote 285: See note to page 194.--Tr.]

[Footnote 286: Of course, Procrustes.--Tr.]

[Footnote 287: Cheeks.--Tr.]

[Footnote 288: The God of sleep was attended by three beings: _Phantasus_, who could change himself only into lifeless things; _Phobetor_, who could assume and conjure up all animal forms; and _Moropheus_, who could, all human forms. Metamorph. Lib. II. Fab. 10.]

[Footnote 289: Painter's colics.--Tr.]

[Footnote 290: "Seed to the sower and bread to the eater." (Isaiah.)--Tr.]

[Footnote 291: Nor yet by a luxury, whose magnitude one exaggerates in comparing their outlays with our income, and which injured them only in this way, that they inherited the nations like East Indian cousins. It was that of a cobbler who has won the highest prize in the lottery; it was the squandering of a soldier after the plundering. Hence they had luxury without refinement. It could maintain its greatness only by growing greater. Had one thrown to them America with its gold bars, they might, with greater luxury, have gone on this crutch some centuries longer.]

[Footnote 292: It is well known that the head of the poor negro is shut up in a hollow one of iron, which presses down his tongue.]

[Footnote 293: Written in the year 1792.]

[Footnote 294: The millionnaire presupposes the beggar, the scholar, the Helot; the higher culture of individuals is purchased by the degradation of the mass.]

[Footnote 295: Written in 1792. At present the tempest which once stood in the heavens over all Europe lies out there in the level earth.]

[Footnote 296: For after 400,000 years the earth's axis, as Jupiter's is now, will be perpendicular to the plane of its orbit.]

END OF VOL. I.

* * * * * Cambridge: Stereotyped and Printed by Welch, Bigelow, & Co.