Instalment in the Parsonage.

On the 15th of April, 1793, the reader may observe, far down in the hollow, three baggage-wagons groaning along. These baggage-wagons are transporting the house-gear of the new Parson to Hukelum; the proprietor himself, with a little escort of his parishioners, is marching at their side, that of his china sets and household furniture there may be nothing broken in the eighteenth century, as the whole came down to him unbroken from the seventeenth. Fixlein hears the School-bell ringing behind him; but this chime now sings to him, like a curfew, the songs of future rest; he is now escaped from the Death-valley of the Gymnasium, and admitted into the abodes of the Blessed. Here dwells no envy, no colleague, no Subrector; here, in the heavenly country, no man works in the New Universal German Library; here in the heavenly Hukelumic Jerusalem, they do nothing but sing praises in the church; and here the Perfected requires no more increase of knowledge.... Here, too, one needs not sorrow that Sunday and Saint's day so often fall together into one.

Truth to tell, the parson goes too far; but it was his way from of old never to paint out the whole and half shadows of a situation till he was got into a new one; the beauties of which he could then enhance by contrast with the former. For it requires little reflection to discover that the torments of a Schoolmaster are nothing so extraordinary; but, on the contrary, as in the Gymnasium, he mounts from one degree to another, not very dissimilar to the common torments of Hell, which, in spite of their eternity, grow weaker from century to century. Moreover, since, according to the saying of a Frenchman, deux afflictions mises ensemble peuvent devener une consolation, a man gets afflictions enow in a school to console him; seeing out of eight combined afflictions--reckon only one for every teacher--certainly more comfort is to be extracted than out of two. The only pity is, that school-people will never act towards each other as court-people do: none but polished men and polished glasses will readily cohere. In addition to all this, in schools--and in offices generally--one is always recompensed; for, as in the second life a greater virtue is the recompense of an earthly one, so, in the Schoolmaster's case, his merits are always rewarded by more opportunities for new merits; and often enough he is not dismissed from his post at all.--

Eight Gymnasiasts are trotting about in the Parsonage, setting up, nailing to, hauling in. I think, as a scholar of Plutarch, I am right to introduce such seeming minutiÆ. A man whom grown-up people love, children love still more. The whole school had smiled on the smiling Fixlein, and liked him-in their hearts, because he did not thunder, but sport with them; because he said Sie (They), to the Secundaners, and the Subrector said Ihr (Ye); because his uprearing forefinger was his only sceptre and baculus; because in the Secunda he had interchanged Latin epistles with his scholars; and in the Quinta had taught not with Napier's Rods (or rods of a sharper description), but with sticks of barley-sugar.

To-day his churchyard appeared to him so solemn and festive, that he wondered (though it was Monday) why his parishioners were not in their holiday, but merely in their week-day drapery. Under the door of the Parsonage stood a weeping woman; for she was too happy, and he was her--son. Yet the mother, in the height of her emotion, contrives quite readily to call upon the carriers, while disloading, not to twist off the four corner globes from the old Frankish chest of drawers. Her son now appeared to her as venerable as if he had sat for one of the copperplates in her pictured Bible; and that simply because he had cast off his pedagogue hair-cue, as the ripening tadpole does its tail; and was now standing in a clerical periwig before her; he was now a Comet, soaring away from the profane Earth, and had accordingly changed from a stella caudata into a stella crinita.

His bride also had, on former days, given sedulous assistance in this new improved edition of his house, and labored faithfully among the other furnishers and furbishers. But to-day she kept aloof; for she was too good to forget the maiden in the bride. Love, like men, dies oftener of excess than of hunger; it lives on love, but it resembles those Alpine flowers which feed themselves by suction from the wet clouds, and die if you besprinkle them.

At length the Parson is settled, and of course he must--for I know my fair readers, who are bent on it as if they were bridemaids--without delay get married. But he may not; before Ascension-day there can nothing be done, and till then are full four weeks and a half. The matter was this. He wished in the first place to have the murder-Sunday, the Cantata, behind him; not indeed because he doubted of his earthly continuance, but because he would not (even for the bride's sake) that the slightest apprehension should mingle with these weeks of glory.

The main reason was, he did not wish to marry till he were betrothed; which latter ceremony was appointed, with the Introduction Sermon, to take place next Sunday. It is the Cantata-Sunday. Let not the reader afflict himself with fears. Indeed, I should not have molested an enlightened century with this Sunday-Wauwau at all, were it not that I delineate with such extreme fidelity. Fixlein himself--especially as the Quartermaster asked him if he was a baby--at last grew so sensible that he saw the folly of it; nay, he went so far that he committed a greater folly. For as dreaming that you die signifies, according to the exegetic rule of false, nothing else than long life and welfare, so did Fixlein easily infer that his death-imagination was just such a lucky dream; the rather as it was precisely on this Cantata-Sunday that Fortune had turned up her cornucopia over him, and at once showered down out of it a bride, a presentation, and a roll of ducats. Thus can Superstition imp its wings, let Chance favor it or not.

A Secretary of State, a Peace-Treaty writer, a Notary, any such incarcerated Slave of the Desk, feels excellently well how far he is beneath a Parson composing his inaugural sermon. The latter (do but look at my Fixlein) lays himself heartily over the paper,--injects the venous system of his sermon-preparation with colored ink,--has a Text-Concordance on the right side, and a Song-Concordance on the left; is there digging out a marrowy sentence, here clipping off a song-blossom, with both to garnish his homiletic pastry;--sketches out the finest plan of operations, not, like a man of the world, to subdue the heart of one woman, but the hearts of all women that hear him, and of their husbands to boot; draws every peasant passing by his window into some niche of his discourse, to co-operate with the result;--and, finally, scoops out the butter of the smooth, soft hymn-book, and therewith exquisitely fattens the black broth of his sermon, which is to feed five thousand men.----

At last, in the evening, as the red sun is dazzling him at the desk, he can rise with heart free from guilt; and, amid twittering sparrows and finches, over the cherry-trees encircling the parsonage, look toward the west, till there is nothing more in the sky but a faint gleam among the clouds. And then when Fixlein, amid the tolling of the evening prayer-bell, slowly descends the stair to his cooking mother, there must be some miracle in the case, if for him whatever has been done or baked, or served up in the lower regions, is not right and good.... A bound, after supper, into the Castle; a look into a pure loving eye; a word without falseness to a bride without falseness; and then under the coverlet, a soft-breathing breast, in which there is nothing but Paradise, a sermon, and evening prayer.... I swear, with this I will satisfy a Mythic God, who has left his Heaven, and is seeking a new one among us here below!

Can a mortal, can a Me in the wet clay of Earth, which Death will soon dry into dust, ask more in one week than Fixlein is gathering into his heart? I see not how. At least I should suppose, if such a dust-framed being, after such a twenty-thousand prize from the Lottery of Chance, could require aught more, it would at most be the twenty-one-thousand prize, namely, the inaugural discourse itself.

And this prize our ZebedÄus actually drew on Sunday; he preached,--he preached with unction,----he did it before the crowding, rustling press of people; before his Guardian, and before the Lord of Aufhammer, the godfather of the priest and the dog;--a flock, with whom in Childhood he had driven out the Castle herds about the pasture, he was now, himself a spiritual sheep-smearer, leading out to pasture;--he was standing to the ankles among Candidates and Schoolmasters, for to-day (what none of them could) at the altar, with the nail of his finger, he might scratch a large cross in the air, baptisms and marriages not once mentioned.... I believe I should feel less scrupulous than I do to checker this sunshiny esplanade with that thin shadow of the grave which the preacher threw over it, when, in the application, with wet, heavy eyes, he looked round over the mute, attentive church, as if in some corner of it he would seek the mouldering teacher of his youth and of this congregation, who without, under the white tombstone, the wrong-side of life, had laid away the garment of his pious spirit. And when he, himself hurried on by the internal stream, inexpressibly softened by the further recollections of his own fear of death on this day, of his life now overspread with flowers and benefits, of his entombed benefactress resting here in her narrow bed,--when he now, before the dissolving countenance of her friend, his Thiennette, overpowered, motionless, and weeping, looked down from the pulpit to the door of the Schadeck vault, and said: "Thanks, thou pious soul, for the good thou hast done to this flock and to their new teacher; and, in the fulness of time, may the dust of thy god-fearing and man-loving breast gather itself, transfigured as gold-dust, round thy reawakened heavenly heart,"--was there an eye in the audience dry? Her husband sobbed aloud, and Thiennette, her beloved, bowed her head, sinking down with inconsolable remembrances, over the front of the seat, like kindred mourners in a funeral train.

No fairer forenoon could prepare the way for an afternoon in which a man was to betroth himself forever, and to unite the exchanged rings with the Ring of Eternity. Except the bridal pair, there was none present but an ancient pair; the mother and the long Guardian. The bridegroom wrote out the marriage-contract or marriage-charter with his own hand; hereby making over to his bride, from this day, his whole movable property (not, as you may suppose, his pocket-library, but his whole library; whereas, in the Middle Ages, the daughter of a noble was glad to get one or two books for marriage-portion);--in return for which, she liberally enough contributed--a whole nuptial coach or car, laden as follows: with nine pounds of feathers, not feathers for the cap such as we carry, but of the lighter sort such as carry us;--with a sumptuous dozen of godchild-plates and godchild-spoons (gifts from Schadeck), together with a fish-knife;--of silk, not only stockings (though even King Henry II. of France could dress no more than his legs in silk), but whole gowns;--with jewels and other furnishings of smaller value. Good Thiennette! in the chariot of thy spirit lies the true dowry; namely, thy noble, soft, modest heart, the morning-gift of Nature!

The Parson--who, not from mistrust, but from "the uncertainty of life," could have wished for a notary's seal on everything; to whom no security but a hypothecary one appeared sufficient; and who, in the depositing of every barleycorn, required quittances and contracts--had now, when the marriage-charter was completed, a lighter heart; and through the whole evening the good man ceased not to thank his bride for what she had given him. To me, however, a marriage-contract were a thing as painful and repulsive,--I confess it candidly, though you should in consequence upbraid me with my great youth,--as if I had to take my love-letter to a Notary Imperial, and make him docket and countersign it before it could be sent. Heavens! to see the light flower of Love, whose perfume acts not on the balance, so laid like tulip-bulbs on the hay-beam of Law; two hearts on the cold councillor and flesh-beam of relatives and Advocates, who are heaping on the scales nothing but houses, fields, and tin,--this, to the interested party, maybe as delightful as, to the intoxicated suckling and nursling of the Muses and Philosophy, it is to carry the evening and morning sacrifices he has offered up to his goddess into the book-shop, and there to change his devotions into money, and sell them by weight and measure.----

From Cantata-Sunday to Ascension, that is, to marriage-day, are one and a half weeks--or one and a half blissful eternities. If it is pleasant that nights or winter separate the days and seasons of joy to a comfortable distance; if, for example, it is pleasant that birthday, Saint's-day, betrothment, marriage, and baptismal day, do not all occur on the same day (for with very few do those festivities, like Holiday and Apostle's day, commerge),--then is it still more pleasant to make the interval, the flower-border, between betrothment and marriage, of an extraordinary breadth. Before the marriage-day are the true honey-weeks; then come the wax-weeks; then the honey-vinegar-weeks.

In the Ninth Letter-Box our Parson celebrates his wedding; and here, in the Eighth, I shall just briefly skim over his way and manner of existence till then; an existence, as might have been expected, celestial enough. To few is it allotted, as it was to him, to have at once such wings and such flowers (to fly over) before his nuptials; to few is it allotted, I imagine, to purchase flour and poultry on the same day, as Fixlein did;--to stuff the wedding-turkey with hangman-meals;--to go every night into the stall, and see whether the wedding-pig, which his Guardian had given him by way of marriage-present, is still standing and eating;--to spy out for his future wife the flax-magazines and clothes-press-niches in the house;--to lay in new wood-stores in the prospect of winter;--to obtain from the Consistorium directly, and for little smart-money, their Bull of Dispensation, their remission of the threefold proclamation of banns;--to live not in a city, where you must send to every fool (because you are one yourself), and disclose to him that you are going to be married; but in a little angular hamlet, where you have no one to tell aught, but simply the Schoolmaster that he is to ring a little later, and put a knee-cushion before the altar.----

O, if the Ritter Michaelis maintains that Paradise was little, because otherwise the people would not have found each other,--a hamlet and its joys are little and narrow, so that some shadow of Eden may still linger on our Ball.----

I have not even hinted that, the day before the wedding, the Regiments-Quartermaster came uncalled, and killed the pig, and made puddings gratis, such as were never eaten at any Court.

And besides, dear Fixlein, on this soft, rich oil of joy there was also floating gratis a vernal sun,--and red twilights,--and flower-garlands,--and a bursting half-world of buds!...

How didst thou behave thee in these hot whirlpools of pleasure?--Thou movedst thy Fishtail (Reason), and therewith describedst for thyself a rectilineal course through the billows. For even half as much would have hurried another Parson from his study; but the very crowning felicity of ours was, that he stood as if rooted to the boundary-hill of Moderation, and from thence looked down on what thousands flout away. Sitting opposite the Castle-windows, he was still in a condition to reckon up that Amen occurs in the Bible one hundred and thirty times. Nay, to his old learned laboratory he now appended a new chemical stove; he purposed writing to NÜrnberg and Baireuth, and there offering his pen to the Brothers Senft, not only for composing practical Receipts at the end of their Almanacs, but also for separate Essays in front under the copperplate title of each Month, because he had a thought of making some reformatory cuts at the common people's mental habitudes ... And now, when in the capacity of Parson he had less to do, and could add to the holy resting-day of the congregation six literary creating-days, he determined (even in these Carnival weeks) to strike his plough into the hitherto quite fallow History of Hukelum, and soon to follow the plough with his drill....

Thus roll his minutes, on golden wheels-of-fortune, over the twelve days, which form the glancing star-paved road to the third heaven of the thirteenth, that is, to the