Christmas Recollections.--New Occurrence.

For all of us the passage to the grave is, alas! a string of empty, insipid days, as of glass pearls, only here and there divided by an orient one of price. But you die murmuring, unless, like the Quintus, you regard your existence as a drum; this has only one single tone, but variety of time gives the sound of it cheerfulness enough. Our Quintus taught in the Fourth Class; vicariated in the Second; wrote at his desk by night; and so lived on the usual monotonous fashion--all the time from the Holidays--till Christmas eve, 1791; and nothing was remarkable in his history except this same eve, which I am now about to paint.

But I shall still have time to paint it, after, in the first place, explaining shortly how, like birds of passage, he had contrived to soar away over the dim, cloudy Harvest. The secret was, he set upon the Hamburg Political Journal, with which the lackeys of Schadeck had been for papering their buttons. He could now calmly, with his back at the stove, accompany the winter campaigns of the foregoing year; and fly after every battle, as the ravens did after that of Pharsalia. On the printed paper he could still, with joy and admiration, walk round our German triumphal arches and scaffoldings for fireworks; while to the people in the town, who got only the newest newspapers, the very fragments of these our trophies, maliciously torn down by the French, were scarcely discernible; nay, with old plans he could drive back and discomfit the enemy, while later readers in vain tried to resist them with new ones.

Moreover, not only did the facility of conquering the French prepossess him in favor of this journal; but also the circumstance that it--cost him nothing. His attachment to gratis reading was decided. And does not this throw light on the fact that he, as Morhof advised, was wont sedulously to collect the separate leaves of wastepaper books as they came from the grocer, and to rake among the same, as Virgil did in Ennius? Nay, for him the grocer was a Fortius (the scholar), or a Frederick (the king), both which persons were in the habit of simply cutting from complete books such leaves as contained anything. It was also this respect for all waste-paper that inspired him with such esteem for the aprons of French cooks, which it is well known consist of printed paper; and he often wished some German would translate these aprons; indeed, I am willing to believe that a good version of more than one of such paper aprons might contribute to elevate our Literature (this Muse À belles fesses), and serve her in place of drivel-bib.--On many things a man puts a pretium affectionis, simply because he hopes he may have half stolen them; on this principle, combined with the former, our Quintus adopted into his belief anything he could snap away from an open Lecture, or as a visitor in class-rooms; opinions only for which the Professor must be paid, he rigorously examined.--I return to the Christmas eve.

At the very first, Egidius was glad, because out of doors millers and bakers were at fisticuffs (as we say of drifting snow in large flakes), and the ice-flowers of the window were blossoming; for external frost, with a snug warm room, was what he liked. He could now put fir wood into his stove, and Mocha coffee into his stomach; and shove his right foot (not into the slipper, but) under the warm side of his Shock, and also on the left keep swinging his pet Starling, which was pecking at the snout of old Schil; and then with the right hand--with the left he was holding his pipe--proceed, so undisturbed, so intrenched, so cloud-capt, without the smallest breath of frost, to the highest enterprise which a Quintus can attempt,--to writing the Class-prodromus of the Flachsenfingen Gymnasium, namely, the eighth part thereof. I hold the first printing in the history of a literary man to be more important than the first printing in the history of Letters. Fixlein could not sate himself with specifying what he purposed, God willing, in the following year, to treat of; and accordingly, more for the sake of printing than of use, he further inserted three or four pedagogic glances at the plan of operations to be followed by his schoolmaster colleagues as a body.

He lastly introduced a few dashes, by way of hooking his thoughts together; and then laid aside the Opus, and would no longer look at it, that so, when printed, he might stand astonished at his own thoughts. And now he could take the Leipzig Fair Catalogue, which he purchased yearly, instead of the books therein, and open it without a sigh; he too was in print, as well as I am.

The happy fool, while writing, had shaken his head, rubbed his hands, hitched about on his chair, puckered his face, and sucked the end of his cue.--He could now spring up about five o'clock in the evening to recreate himself; and across the magic vapor of his pipe, like a new-caught bird, move up and down in his cage. On the warm smoke the long galaxy of street-lamps was gleaming; and red on his bed-curtains lay the fitful reflection of the blazing windows and illuminated trees in the neighborhood. And now he shook away the snow of Time from the winter-green of Memory; and beheld the fair years of his childhood, uncovered, fresh, green, and balmy, standing afar off before him. From his distance of twenty years, he looked into the quiet cottage of his parents, where his father and his brother had not yet been reaped away by the sickle of Death. He said to himself: "I will go through the whole Christmas eve, from the very dawn, as I had it of old."

At his very rising he finds spangles on the table; sacred spangles from the gold-leaf and silver-leaf with which the Christ-child^[47] has been emblazoning and coating his apples and nuts, the presents of the night.--On the mint-balance of joy, this metallic foam pulls heavier than the golden cars, and golden Pythagoras-legs, and golden Philistine-mice of wealthier capitalists.--Then came his mother, bringing him both Christianity and clothes; for in drawing on his trousers, she easily recapitulated the Ten Commandments, and in tying his garters, the Apostles' Creed. So soon as candle-light was over, and daylight come, he clambers to the arm of the settle, and then measures the nocturnal growth of the yellow wiry grove of Christmas-Birch; and devotes far less attention than usual to the little white winter-flowerage, which the seeds shaken from the bird-cage are sending forth in the wet joints of the window-panes.--I nowise grudge J. J. Rousseau his Flora Petrinsularis;^[48] but let him also allow our Quintus his Window-flora.--There was no such thing as school all day; so he had time enough to seek his Flescher (his brother), and commence (when could there be finer frost for it?) the slaughtering of their winter-meat. Some days before, the brother, at the peril of his life and of a cudgelling, had caught their stalled-beast--so they called the sparrow--under a window-sill in the Castle. Their slaughtering wants not an axe (of wood), nor puddings, nor potted meat.--About three o'clock the old Gardener, whom neighbors must call the Professor of Gardening, takes his place on his large chair, with his Cologne tobacco-pipe; and after this no mortal shall work a stroke. He tells nothing but lies; of the aeronautic Christ-child, and the jingling Ruprecht with his bells. In the dusk, our little Quintus takes an apple; divides it into all the figures of stereometry, and spreads the fragments in two heaps on the table; then as the lighted candle enters, he starts up in amazement at the unexpected present, and says to his brother, "Look what the good Christ-child has given thee and me; and I saw one of his wings glittering." And for this same glittering he himself lies in wait the whole evening.

About eight o'clock--here he walks chiefly by the chronicle of his letter-drawer--both of them, with necks almost excoriated with washing, and in clean linen, and in universal anxiety lest the Holy Christ-child find them up, are put to bed. What a magic night! What tumult of dreaming hopes!--The populous, motley, glittering cave of Fancy opens itself, in the length of the night, and in the exhaustion of dreamy effort, still darker and darker, fuller and more grotesque; but the awakening gives back to the thirsty heart its hopes. All accidental tones, the cries of animals, of watchmen, are, for the timidly devout Fancy, sounds out of Heaven; singing voices of Angels in the air, church-music of the morning worship.--

Ah! it was not the mere Lubberland of sweetmeats and playthings, which then, with its perspective, stormed like a river of joy against the chambers of our hearts; and which yet in the moonlight of memory, with its dusky landscapes, melts our souls in sweetness. Ah! this was it, that then for our boundless wishes there were still boundless hopes; but now reality is round us, and the wishes are all that we have left!

At last came rapid lights from the neighborhood playing through the window on the walls, and the Christmas trumpets, and the crowing from the steeple, hurries both the boys from their bed. With their clothes in their hands, without fear for the darkness, without feeling for the morning-frost, rushing, intoxicated, shouting, they hurry down-stairs into the dark room. Fancy riots in the pastry and fruit perfume of the still eclipsed treasures, and paints her air-castles by the glimmering of the Hesperides-fruit with which the Birch-tree is loaded. While their mother strikes a light, the falling sparks sportfully open and shroud the dainties on the table, and the many-colored grove on the wall; and a single atom of that fire bears on it a hanging garden of Eden.----

--On a sudden all grew light; and the Quintus got--the Conrectorship, and a table-clock.