Physiognomies of Victor and Flamin.–Boiling-Point of Friendship.–Splendid Hopes for us.

Who would have thought it of Cicero (if he had not read it) that a man of so many years and so much sense would sit down in his St. John's Island, and manufacture beginnings, introductions, pre-existing germs in advance for the market? However, the man had this advantage, that when he wrote a torso on any subject, he had his choice among the heads lying ready made to his hand, of which he could screw one on to the trunk according to the corpuscular philosophy.–As to myself, who have nothing sedate about me, no one can wonder that I on my Moluccian Frascati^[73] have reeled and twisted beforehand whole skeins of beginnings. When Spitz afterward brings a Dog-day, I have already commenced it, and have nothing to do but just to clap the historical remnant on to the introduction.–This very beginning itself I have selected for to-day.

At first, however, I had a mind, to be sure, to take this one:–

Nothing torments me about my whole book except my anxiety as to how I shall be translated. This anxiety is not to be blamed in an author, when one sees how the French translate the Germans, and the Germans the Ancients. At bottom it really amounts to one's being expounded by the lower classes and their teachers. I can compare those readers and these classes, in respect of their spiritual fare, which passes first through so many intermediate members, to nothing, except to the poor people in Lapland. When the rich in that country intoxicate themselves in the tippling-room with a liquor which is decocted out of the costly toadstool, the poor people watch around the house-door, till a Lap in easy circumstances comes out and makes—; this translated beverage, the Vulgate of distilled liquor, the poor devils enjoy greatly.

This beginning, however, I am keeping for the Preface to a translation.

It is one of the juggling tricks and lusus naturÆ of chance, of which there are very many, that I should begin this Book just in the night of St. Philip's and St. James's day, 1793, when Victor undertook the witch's-journey to the Maienthal Blocksberg, into the midst of the enchanters and enchantresses, and when, in 1792, he arrived from GÖttingen.

I cannot say, The reader can easily imagine how Victor lived or grieved through the first May-days; for he hardly can imagine it. Perhaps we all held the bands which bound him to Flamin to be a few thin fibres or unsensitive cords of custom; in fact, however, delicate nerves and firm muscles form the lattice-work^[74] of their souls. He himself knew not how much he loved him, until he was compelled to cease doing so. Into this common error we all fall, hero, reader, and writer, on the same ground: when one has not been able for a long time to give a friend, whom one has long loved, any proof of that love, for want of opportunity, then one torments one's self with the self-accusation of growing cold towards him. But this accusation is itself the finest proof of love. With Victor yet more things conspired to persuade him that he was becoming a colder friend. The vesper-tilts about Clotilda, those disputations pro loco, did, besides, their part; but he was always afflicting himself with the self-criticism that he had sometimes refused his friend little sacrifices; e. g. the neglecting of a pleasure-party on his account, the staying away from certain too distinguished houses which Flamin hated. But in friendship great sacrifices are easier than small ones,–one would often rather sacrifice to it life than an hour, a piece of property than the gratification of some petty bad habit, just as many people would rather present you a bill of exchange than a piece of blank paper of the same size. The secret is, great sacrifices inspiration makes, but little ones, reason. Flamin, who himself never made little ones, demanded them of others with heat, because he took them for great ones. Victor had less to reproach himself with on this point; but Clotilda shamed him, for her longest and shortest days, as is the case with most of her sex, were nothing but sacrificial days.–Then, too, his natural delicacy, which had now gained by his court-life the addition of the conventional kind, was wounded more deeply than ever by his friend's sharp corners.–The fine people give to their inner man (as to their outer) by bran of almonds and night-gloves soft hands, merely for the sake of feeling better the under side of the cards, and for the sake of giving neat ladylike half-boxes-in-the-ear, but not in order, like the surgeons, to handle wounds with them.

Unfortunately this delusion about his growing cold prescribed to him a friendly external effort to show warmth when with Flamin. Now as the Regency-Councillor did, not consider that even constraint may full as often arise from sincerity, as unconstraint from falseness: accordingly the Devil had more and more his game of Bestia (in which a friendship was the high stake) till on witches' day he actually won it.

But on the 4th of May he is to lose all again, I think. For Victor, whose heart at the least motion bled through the bandage again, undertook not only, on the 4th of May, to be present at the birth-festival of the Court-Chaplain in St. Luna, but also to celebrate a birthday of renewed friendship with Flamin. He would gladly take the first, second, third, tenth step, if his friend would only stop where he was, and not take a step backward. For he cannot forget him, he cannot get over a compulsory renunciation, however easy for him generally the voluntary one was. He pressed every evening Flamin's fair image, which was made out of his love for him, out of his incorruptible honesty, his rock-like courage, his love for the state, his talents, even his excitability, which originated in the double feeling of injustice and of his own innocence,–this glowing image he pressed to his lacerated heart, and when in the morning he saw him going to his public duties, his eyes ran over, and he congratulated the servant who carried his papers behind him. Had not the 4th of May, the great day of reconciliation, been so near with its expiatory offering, he would have been obliged to accustom little Julia to himself, as a third estate between the two others, as a key-note between conflicting tones. Only the hope of May applied to his thoughts, instead of burning stings of nettle-points, at least rose-briers.–The friend of thy youth, dear reader, thy school-friend, is never forgotten, for he has something of the brother about him;–when thou enterest the school-yard of life, which is a Schnepfenthal educational institute, a Berlin scientific school,^[75] a Breslau Elisabethanum, a Scheerau Marianum,^[76]–then for the first time thou meetest friends, and your youthful friendship is the morning divine service of life.

Victor was sure beforehand of Flamin's placability; he even saw him very often standing at his window, and glancing across toward the balcony, from which a friendly eye, untroubled by all the misconstructions of the point of honor, looked freely and directly toward the Senior's;–this, however, did not take away his tender yearning, but it was increased by the first returning sight of the face, so fair, so lamented, and so loved. Flamin had a tall, manly form; his compact and receding narrow forehead was the eyrie of spirit; his transparent blue eyes–which his sister Clotilda also had, and which harmonize very well with a fiery soul, as, indeed, the old Germans also and the country people have both–were kindled by a thinking intellect; his compressed, and for that very reason the more darkly red, over-full lips, were settled into the kindly elevation for a kiss; only the nose was not refined enough, but was juristically or Germanly built. The nose of great jurists looks sometimes, in my opinion, as wretchedly as the nose of Justice herself when its flexible material is drawn out and twisted and tweaked under too long fingers. It is not to be explained, by the way, why the faces of great theologians–unless, indeed, they are something else great–have about them somewhat of the typographic magnificence of the Kanstein Bibles. Victor's face, on the contrary, had, less than any other, either these Bursch-like trivial features of many jurists, or the dead-gold of many theologians; his nose–its edge and the indentation of the nasal bridge deducted–descended in Grecian straightness; the angle of the thin, closed lips was (in case he did not happen to be laughing) an acute angle of 1^um, and formed with the sharp nose the order-sign and order-cross, which satirical people often wear;–his broad forehead arched itself to a radiant and roomy choir of a spiritual rotunda, wherein a Socratic equally, illuminated soul dwells, though neither this brightness nor that brow consort with inborn wild tenacity, though they do with that which is acquired;–his fancy, that great prize, had, as often happens, no lottery-device on his face;–his eyes, colored like Neapolitan agate, spoke and sought a loving heart; his soft, white face contrasted, like court with war, against Flamin's brown, elastic countenance, which served as the ground for the two glowing cheeks.–For the rest, Flamin's soul was a mirror which flamed under the sun from only a single point; but on Victor's several powers were ground out into flashing facettes. Clotilda had all this tinder-box and these sulphuric mines of temperament in common with her brother; but her reason covered all up. The rushing blood-stream, which with him dashed from rock to rock, glided along with her still and smooth through flowery meadows.

I should be glad to see it, if he were to renew again with the Regency Councillor the treaty of friendship: I should then get to describe his Whitsuntide journey to Maienthal, which perhaps is the Septleva^[77] and the best thing to which the human understanding has yet attained. But nothing will come of this Septleva, unless they make peace again; by the side of every flower in Maienthal, by the side of every delight, the grief-worn face of his friend would appear and ask, "Canst thou be so happy, while I am so far from it?"

It were a wiser course, if both were monks or courtiers; then they might be expected, as friendship is the marriage of souls, to remain continent in a celibacy of souls....

Just at the very conclusion of this chapter the dog brings the new one, and I simply weave both together and go on:–

Without any remarkable vexation at the delay of the answer from Maienthal, Victor went alone on the 4th of May to St. Luna, and with every step that brought him nearer, his soul grew more soft and placable.–When he arrived:—

There are in every house days, which were forgotten in the Litany,–cursed, devilish, deused days,–when all goes criss-cross,–when everything scolds and growls and wags its tail,–when the children and the dog dare not say, Pugh!^[78] and the liege-and-manor-lord of the house slams-to all the doors and the house-mistress draws the bass-register of moralizing,^[79] and strikes the silvery tone of dishes and the bunch of keys,–when one does nothing but hunt up old grievances, all forest-offences of mice and moths, broken parasols and fan-sticks, and that the gunpowder and the perfume-powder, and the elegant note-paper have become damp, and that the sausage-sledge is worn out by sitting to a wooden hobby-horse, and that the dog and the sofa are shedding hair,–when everything comes too late, everything is roasted to death, everything is over-boiled, and the chamber-donna sticks the pins into my lady's flesh as into a doll,–and when, after they have, in this scurvy sickness where nothing is the matter, vexed themselves to their hearts' content without cause, they become good-natured again without cause.—

When Victor arrived at the parsonage, he heard the birthday hero of the day, the parson, lecturing and screaming in his study. Eymann was pouring out his holy spirit into the long ears of his catechumens, into whom no fiery tongues were to be got. He had in hand a female dunce from a hermitage (a solitary house in the woods), and was trying to explain to her the distinction between the loosing-key and the binding-key. Nothing, however, could be done with her: the chaplain and the convert had already spent a half-hour over the school-time with the explanation; the dunce was constantly confounding the keys, as if she were a–lady of the world. The chaplain had set his head upon illuminating hers;–he set before her every consideration that might have moved iron-wood and iron-stone,–his birthday festival of to-day, the embittering of the general joy, the surplus half-hour,–in order to persuade her, that she must comprehend the difference,–she did not, she could not see it;–he condescended to entreaties and said: "Jewel, Lamb, Beast, daughter penitent, understand it, I beseech thee,–do thy spiritual shepherd the pleasure of repeating to him the extraordinary difference between binding- and loosing-keys. Am I not dealing fairly with thee?–But my office as parson requires of me not to let thee go like a cow, without knowing a key.–Only take courage and just say after me, word for word, dearly-bought christian beast."–She did so at last, and when she had done, he said joyfully, "Now thou pleasest thy teacher, and attend further."–Out of doors she recapitulated it all, and had comprehended it all very well, except that instead of "Bind- und LÖse-SchlÜssel" (keys) she always caught it "Bind- und LÖse-SchÜssel" (dishes).–

The three-twins had a miserable plan of not coming till after dinner.–The soul of the red Appel was exhaling for this very occasion a wild-game flavor, and smelt like burnt milk-porridge, and complained that she alone had all the labor on her shoulders, and when Agatha offered to fly to her assistance, she said: "I can do it, thank God! as well as thou!" The Regency-Councillor had arrived, but unfortunately had run out into the fields again till dinner-time,–Agatha's face had been crystallized into a rock-cellar by the coldness of her brother towards Victor,–only the parson's wife was the parson's wife; not merely one mother-country, but one breath of love linked her heart to his, and it was impossible for her to be angry with him. She loved a maiden, if he praised her; had she been without a husband, she would have been either his love-letter-writer or his letter-carrier.

–Thus do women love–without measure! often, too, they hate in the same way.–To this my correspondent adds further, that he could draw from the watering-village a whole protocol of depositions in evidence that the Parson's wife not merely always, but even on the present Ventose and Pluviose^[80] day, was able to endure and live through it with the unvarnished composure of a Christian woman, if any one let anything fall, a cup or a word. For such a state of mind,–for apathy under the present, entire loss of a soup-tureen, or rinsing-bowl, or fruit-dish,–there is needed perhaps as much health as reason.

–At last in the evening, the Page came in and said, Flamin was still in the garden. Victor received it, as if it were said to him, and went out carrying his oppressed heart to meet another troubled one: Flamin he found in an embowered nook staring up with all his eyes at the wax-image of the rejected friend; Victor's heart moved heavily as if through tears in his overladen breast. Flamin's face was covered, not with the panoply of wrath, but with the funeral veil of sorrow. For here in the foreground of a bright, warm youth, as it were on the classic soil of a former, irreplaceable love, he became too warm and too tender,–in the village he revoked his hardness in the city,–and what was still more, only friends of his friend, only affectionate eulogies on the despised darling, overwhelmed and warmed his impoverished heart, and he could here still more easily excuse than spare him. Victor welcomed him with the soft voice of a subdued heart, but he only half spoke either his thoughts or his words. Victor gazed deep down into the soul which mourned for friendship; for only a heart sees a heart; so only the great man sees great men, as one sees mountains only from mountains. He held it therefore as no sign of resentment, when Flamin slowly walked away from him; but he must needs, left so alone there, turn away his eyes from the consecrated corner of the garden, where their friendship had once opened its blossoms, and from the sacrificial bower where he had interceded with his father for Flamin's and Clotilda's union, and from the high observatory, the Tabor of friendship's transfiguration, from all these burial-places of a fairer time he must needs avert his eyes, in order to endure the poorer present. But that which he would not look upon, he represented so much the more vividly to his mind.

Now the Vesper-bell extended its melancholy vibrations even to the hearts of men,–past times sent the tones, and the evening-lamentations sank like ardent entreaties into the souls of the sundered friends: "O be reconciled and walk together! Is then life so long that men may venture to be angry with each other? Are then good souls so numerous, that they can fly from each other? O these tones have floated around many a heap of the ashes of mortality, around many a stiffened heart full of love, around many closed lips full of fury,–O transitory creatures, love, love each other!"–Victor followed willingly (for he wept) after his friend, and found him standing by the bed whereon Eymann caused the F of his name to grow green on the cole-rape-plants, and he was silent, because he knew that for all sympathetic cures silence is needed. O, such an hour of deepening silence, when friends stand beside each other like strangers, and compare the silence with the old outpouring, has too many heart-stings, and a thousand smothered tears, and for words sighs!

Victor, so near to his friend, and as during the talking his better soul, like nightingales during concerts, grew louder and louder, would fain, from minute to minute, have fallen upon that noble face, on those lips rounded for the kiss of reconciliation,–but he started back at the thought of the recent repulse. He saw now how Flamin stepped farther and farther into the bed, and slowly trod down the heart leaves of the cole-rape, and crushed them asunder; at last he observed that this trampling out of the blooming name was merely the dumb language of disconsolateness, which wanted to say: "I hate my tormented self, and I could crush it as I do my name here: for whom should it stand here?"–This snatched blood from Victor's heart and from his eye tears which had been brushed away, and he took gently the long withdrawn hand, to lead him away from the suicide of his name. But Flamin turned his quivering face side-wise toward the waxen shadow of his friend and rigidly crooking his head away stared up at it.–"Best Flamin!" said Victor with the tone of the deepest emotion, and pressed the burning hand. Then Flamin tore it out of his, and with his two fists pressed back the tear-drops into his eyes, and breathed loud,–and said in a choked voice, "Victor!" and turned round with great tears and said in a still more muffled tone, "Love me again!"–And they rushed into each other's arms, and Victor answered, "For ever and ever do I love thee, thou hast indeed never offended me"; and Flamin, glowing and dying, stammered, "Only take my beloved, and remain my friend."–For a long time Victor could not speak, and their cheeks and their tears united burned on each other, till at last he was able to say: "O thou! O thou! thou noble man! But thou art in error somewhere!–Now will we forsake each other no more, now will we remain so forever.–Ah, how inexpressibly shall we one day love each other, when my father comes!"

At this moment the Parson's wife, who was perhaps anxious about both, came to call them in, and Flamin in his softened mood honored her, which he seldom did, with a filial embrace; and from four eyes swollen with weeping she read with delight the renewal of their imperishable covenant.

Nothing moves man more than the spectacle of a reconciliation; our weaknesses are not too dearly purchased by the hours of their forgiveness, and the angel, who should never feel wrath, must envy the mortal who conquers it.–When thou forgivest, then is man who inflicts wounds on thy heart the sea-worm that drills through the shell of the mussel, which closes the openings with pearls.

This reconciliation drew after it one with fortune, as it were,–the Brumaire-evening became a FlorÉal^[81] evening,–the three-twins ate of the remains of Appel's roasted glory,–the Parson had nothing to do any longer with any other keys than the loosing-keys, the spiritual music-keys,–and the birthday feast had bloomed out into a feast of the covenant, an opposition club, where all, but in a higher sense than that of Quakers and merchants, called each other friend. The three-twins delivered old-British speeches, which only freemen could understand. Victor wondered at the universal frankness before such a stinging gad-fly as Matthieu,–but the Englishmen cared for nothing. The Parson sent off heart-felt prayers, and said: "He, for his part, took little notice of what they did, and only begged them to harangue more softly, that he might not get the name of allowing pietistic conventicles in his parsonage; meanwhile he relied entirely upon Messrs. the Court-Physician and the Court-Page, who would certainly insure him against a fine; otherwise he would not let wife and son join in the conversation." The Parson's wife preferred reminiscences of her free native land to the best calumnies and fashions. Victor must needs to-day keep his promise of putting his Republican Orthodoxy beyond question; and as he gave the same in our hearing, we will also help see how he keeps it, and whether he is an old-Briton.

He imitated mostly the style which he had last read or–as to-day–heard; therefore he spoke in the sententious manner of the burning-cold Englishman of the three.

"No state is free but that which loves itself; the measure of patriotism is the measure of freedom. What, then, is now this Freedom! History is the Place La-Morgue^[82] where every one seeks the dead kinsmen of his heart: ask the mighty dead of Sparta, Athens, and Rome, what freedom is! Their perpetual festival days, their games, their eternal wars, their constant sacrifices of property and life, their contempt of riches, of trade, and of mechanics, cannot make the fiscal prosperity of a country the goal of freedom. But the logical despot must assiduously promote the material well-being of his negro-plantation. The tyranny or the mildness, the injustice or the virtue of an individual, constitute so little the distinction between a servile and a free form of government, that Rome was a slave under the Antonines, and free under Sulla.^[83]–Not every Union, but the object of the Union, not the uniting under common laws, but the import of those laws, give the soul the wings of patriotism; for otherwise every Hansa, every trade-league, were a Pythagorean Society and would create Spartans. That for which man gives blood and goods must be something higher than either;–not in defence of his own life and property has the good man so much valor as he has when he contends for another's;–the mother risks nothing for herself and everything for her child;–in short, only for what is nobler than self in himself, for virtue, does man open his veins and offer his spirit; only the Christian martyr names this virtue Faith, the Barbarian, Honor, the Republican, Freedom.

"–Take ten men, shut them up in ten different islands: neither of them (I have not selected cosmopolites) will love or defend either of the others, if he meets him in his canoe, but will merely, like an innocent uncultivated beast, let him pass unharmed. But throw them together on one island,^[84] then they will make mutual conditions of living together, of common defence, &c., i. e. laws; now they have more–frequent enjoyment of use and right, consequently of their personality, which distinguishes them from mere tools, consequently of their freedom. Before, on their ten islands, they have been rather unrestrained than free. The more the objects of their laws rise in dignity, the more they see that law concerns the inner man more than the rubbish heap it protects, right more than property, and that the noble man fights for his goods, his rights, his life, not on account of their importance, but on account of his own dignity.–I will look at the matter on another side, in order to defend the proposition with which I began the discourse. When a people hates its constitution, then the object of its constitution, i. e. of its union, is lost. Love of the constitution, and love for one's fellow-citizens as fellow-citizens, are one. I start with this principle: If all men were wise and good, then they would be all alike consequently friendly. As that is not so, accordingly Nature makes up for this goodness by similarity of motives, by community of object, by living together, &c., and by these bonds–of connubial, of brotherly and sisterly and of friendly affection–holds our smooth, slippery hearts together at different distances. Thus she educates our heart to the higher warmth. The State gives it a still greater, for the citizen loves the man even more in the citizen, than the brother loves him in the brother, the father in the son. The love of country is nothing but a restricted cosmopolitan love; and the higher philanthropy is the philosopher's enlarged patriotism for the whole earth. In my younger years the mass of men was often painful to me, because I felt myself incapable of loving 1000 millions at once; but the heart of man takes more into itself than his head, and the better man must needs despise himself, if his arms should reach only round a single planet...."

* * * * *

–Now, as in a drama, I set only the names of the players before their remarks. The coldly-philosophical Balthazar: "Then must the whole earth become one day a single state, a universal republic; Philosophy must approve wars, misanthropy, in short all possible contradictions to morality, so long as there are still two states. There must one day be a national convention of Humanity; the kingdoms are the municipalities."

Matthieu: "We are only just living now, then, in the 11th of October and a little in the 4th of August."^[85]

Victor: "We see, like David, our Solomon's Temple only in dreams, and in our waking hours the tabernacles of the Covenant; but it were a sorrowful philosophy which should require nothing of men but what they had hitherto rendered without philosophy. We must fit reality to the ideal, not the reverse."

The ardently-philosophical Melchior: "Most modern movements are only the starts of one sleeping under the ear-wig^[86] and grasping at his bloody scalp.–But the falling stalactite of regentship forms at last with its drops one column with the ascending stalagmite of the people."

Flamin: "But do not Spartans imply Helots, Romans and Germans Slaves, and Europeans Negroes?–Must not always the prosperity of the whole be based upon individual victims, just as one class must devote itself to tilling the soil, that another may apply itself to knowledge?"

Cato the elder: "Then I spit on the whole if I am the victim, and despise myself if I am the whole."

Balthazar: "It is better that the whole suffer voluntarily for the sake of a single member, than that he should against his just vote suffer for the whole."

Matthieu: "Fiat justitia et pereat mundus."

Victor: "In plain English: the greatest physical evil must be preferred to the least moral evil, the least unrighteousness."^[87]–

Melchior: "The physical inequality of men produced by nature no more excuses any political inequality than pestilence does murder, or a failure of crops corn-monopoly. But inversely political equality must be the very compensation for the want of physical. In a despotic state enlightenment as well as prosperity may be greater in inward contents, but in the free state it is greater in outward contents, and is distributed among all; for freedom and enlightenment reciprocally beget each other."–

Victor: "As unbelief and tyranny do. Your assertion shows to nations two ways, one slower, but more just, and one which is neither. Wild clutchings at the dial plate-wheel of Time, which is turned by a thousand little wheels, dislocate more than they expedite it; often they break off its teeth.^[88] Hang thy own weight on the weight of the clock-work, which drives all the wheels; i. e. be wise and virtuous, then wilt thou be, at the same time, great and innocent, and be building up the city of God, without the mortar of blood, and without the stone blocks of death's-heads."–

Here we strike the bell that closes this political sermon, during which Victor, despite his Socratic continence and moderation, made all these wild heads friends of his own. With Matthieu alone jest was the only object, to which he turned everything serious, instead of the reverse. He had in a characteristic degree that shamelessness of rank, at the same time to commit and to ridicule certain follies, to seek and to despise certain fools, and to avoid and praise at once certain philosophers. Wherever he could, he covered the good Prince of Flachsenfingen with satirical cockle-buttons^[89] which he threw at him, and showed hostility to the husband, which is generally the sign of too great a friendship for the wife. Thus he said to-day in reference to Jenner's or January's penchants, which contrasted with those of the month and saint from which he derived his name: "For the St. Januarius in Puzzolo^[90] a fish was the Dr. Culpepper."–

I confess, I have, during the whole session of the Club, again had the freakish thought, which, wild as it is, I have often before been unable to drive out of my head,–for it is, to be sure, a little confirmed by the fact that, like an atheist, I know not whence I am, and that with my French name, Jean Paul, I was impelled by the most wondrous accidents to a German writing-desk, on which I one day will copiously report them to the world,–as I was saying, I hold it myself to be a folly, my sometimes getting the conceit in my head, that it is possible since thousand-fold examples of the kind are extant in Oriental history–that I might be actually the unknown son of a Kniesein Puzzolo^[91] or Shah, or something of the sort, that was trained for the throne, and from whom they concealed his noble birth the better to educate him. The very entertaining of such an idea is of itself folly; but so much is nevertheless correct, that the examples are not to be erased from universal history, in which many a one, even to his twenty-eighth year,–I am two years older,–knew not a word of it, that an Asiatic or some other throne awaited him, wherefrom he afterward, when he came to it, wielded a magnificent sway. But let it be assumed I was changed from a Jean Lack-land to a John With-land,–I should go forthwith to the billiard-room, and tell everybody whom he had before him. Were one of my subjects there joining in the game, I should forthwith govern him on the spot; and if it were a female subject, without scruple. I should proceed with considerateness, and invest only subjects from my billiard-shire with the weightier offices, because the Regent must be acquainted with him whom he appoints, which, as is well known, he can best become at the gaming-tables. I would strictly command my vassals and all by a general rÈglement for all times to be happy and well-off, and whoever was poor, him I would put as a punishment on half-pay; for I think, if I interdicted poverty so emphatically, it would come at last to be the same as if Saturn and I ruled together.–Like a Sultan in his harem, so I in my state, would desire no physical mutes or dwarfs, but, as occasion required, moral ones.–I confess, I should have a peculiar predilection for geniuses, and should appoint to all, even the wretchedest places, the greatest heads. I should fear nothing (enemies excepted) but dropsy on the brain, of which a crowned or mitred head must always be in an agony of dread, if, like me, it has read in Dr. Ludwig's, or else in Tissot's, treatises on the nerves, that it comes on at first with close bindings around the head, which I should fear still more from my crown, especially if the head which was forced into it was thick and it was tight....

We come back to the story. The next day Victor and Flamin, in the fair, newly assumed bonds of the covenant of friendship, returned to Flachsenfingen. Now could Victor enter through the heavenly gates of Maienthal, if Clotilda did not bolt them. All depended on Emanuel's answer. The May-airs breathed, the May-flowers exhaled, the May-trees rustled. O how this fanning kindled the longing to enjoy all these blisses in Maienthal, and to get from his friend the admission-ticket to the finest concert-hall of nature. None came; for it had already–come through the Bee-father Lind of Kussewitz, who as feudal-postilion had been sent by Count O. to Matthieu, and had taken the route through Maienthal. It was from Emanuel:–

"Horion!

"Come sooner, beloved! Hasten to our valley of Eden, which is a summer-house of nature, with green-growing walls between nothing but avenues running out of heaven into heaven. The light, flowery hours move by before the eye of man as the stars do before the optic tube of the astronomer. Blossom-snares of honeysuckle are laid for thee, and covered with fragrances; and when thou art caught in them, the up-welling incense envelops thee in a cloud, and unknown arms press through the cloud, and draw thee to three hearts full of love! I have already taken up lilies of the valley out of the wood, and planted them near me.–Thy city is indeed also a wood around thee, still lily of the valley! I have already transplanted two balsamines and five summer carnations; but my first transplanted Balsamine was Clotilda. Thou seest how spring, with its exuberant, swelling juices, penetrates through my budding soul also, and May splits open therein, as I am now doing on the carnations, all the buds.–Appear, appear, ere I become melancholy again, and then tell thy Julius who the angel was that handed him the letter for me.

"Emanuel."

Julius had probably thought on this occasion of that other letter which a hitherto unknown angel had given him to unseal on this Whitsuntide.–But what have I to do here with angels and letters? Write by courier is what I will now do, that so I may have got through the 32d Chapter before the dog appears with his 33d Whitsuntide Chapter, which, not merely because it has thirty-two ancestral chapters, but on account of the probable effusion therein of a holy spirit of joy, or on account of a whole dove-flock of holy spirits, and on account of the historic pictures it will contain,–and by reason of my own exertions,–must be (it is believed) a chapter like which in each Dionysianin Puzzolo^[92] period hardly half a one, and in each Constantinopolitan hardly a whole one, can be written.–The Whitsuntide dog-day may turn out long, but it will be good and divine,–Philippine will shake her brother and say (she loves to flatter): "Paul! St. Paul was also in the third heaven, but he never described it like this in his Epistle to the Romans!" I myself could wish that I might read my 33d dog-day before I had made it....

The much in little which, with my previous haste, I have still to throw out, is, according to the gourd-documents, this: Victor set his heart full as much as I do on the Whitsuntide-gospels. His conscience placed not the thinnest pasture-bars, not the lowest boundary-stone, in the way of his enjoyment, and he could go like an innocent pleasure to the beloved Clotilda, and say to her, Accept me. He paid now his farewell and professional visits regularly at court, and cared nothing for any word full of human caustic, or any eye full of basilisk's poison. He redoubled his fairer visits to Flamin, in order to reward his noble reconciliation with a warmer friendship, and he stamped upon the past history and on the subject of jealousy the privy-seal of forbearing silence. His dreams did not, to be sure, on their stage full of shadow-plays and airy apparitions, present Clotilda's form (the most loved faces are just those dream denies), but by conducting him into the old, dark, rainy months, when he was again unhappy and without love and without the dearest soul, they gave him by means of the rained-out night a brighter day, and redoubled melancholy became redoubled love.–And when in the morning after such dreams of the past dream he walked out through the May-frost, and by the swollen joy-drops of the vine-leaves, and under the morning wind, which rather wafted than cooled him, in order to touch with his yearning eyes as precious relics the fixed western woods, which hung a green curtain before the opera-stage of his hope,—a reviewer, who shall put himself in my place, cannot possibly expect me with this shortness of time, and in my extra post-coach to the carriage of Phoebus (now in the shorter days), to give this long antecedent member of the period its conclusion.

Even the perpendicular climax of the barometer, and the horizontal streams of the east wind, swelled the sails of his hope, and wafted him into the silent sea of the Whitsuntide-future, and into the Almanach of 1793, to see whether the moon fulled on Whitsuntide.–By Heaven, it will at least be half full, which is much better still, because one will have it at hand in the middle of heaven when one is about to begin his evening....

I have, after all, by extraordinary racing, brought matters so far, that I have done with the 32d dog-post-day before Spitz with his goblet of joy on his neck has made his way across the Indian Ocean.–And as, besides, according to the capitulatio perpetua with the reader, (at which, notoriously, the benches of princes and cities bite the dust,) I must now make an Intercalary Day: I will spend the Dog's vacation in that way; but I earnestly beg all my day-electors, those of my subscribers who have hitherto skipped across the Intercalary Days on the leaping-pole of the index-finger, not to do it in this case, first, because I agree to be shot, if in this Intercalary Day I in the least exercise my intercalary-day privilege, though confirmed under several governments, of delivering the wittiest and weightiest matters,–and, secondly, because the dog even on the Intercalary day may run into port, and bring me facts which I may serve up not in the 33d Dog-post-day, but already in the—VIIIth Intercalary day, or in the VIIIth Sansculottide.–The contents of this, like the present, are a rambling overture to the Future.–

I must say, if, in the first place, as Bellarmin (the Catholic champion and contradictor) asserts, every man is his own Redeemer,–whence follows, in my judgment, that he is also his own Eve and serpent for his old Adam,–if, secondly, the pen of an extraordinarily good author is the snuffers of truth, just as, inversely, to Herr von Moser in prison the snuffers were a pen,–if, thirdly, Despotism may at last, instead of the living tree-stems (for it saws right into the world as if blind,) saw into the throne-saw-horse itself,–further, I must say, if, fourthly, every action (even the worst) has, like Christ, two unlike genealogies,–if in fact, fifthly, one and another reviewer carries his critical eye, wherewith he surveys everything, not on the apex of his skull (as Mahomet's saints are said to, in order not to see beauties), nor, like Argus, before and behind, but actually in front, under the stomach, over the gut, in the midst of the navel; if this man, in addition thereto, possesses no other heart than the linen one which the seamstress has stitched in the corner of the shirt-frill, and which lies over the pit of the heart, which one would call more sensibly the pit of the stomach,–finally I must say (at least I can do so), if, in the sixth place, true coherence, strict concatenation of paragraphs, is perhaps the greatest ornament and soul of the so-called unbound discourse, or prose, which, however, is like a bound harpsichord, and if, therefore, the sense, like an epic action, must begin at the end of the (rhetorical and temporal) period, because otherwise there would not be any at all....

–But neither will there be any to come.–These four points, however, look like the hare's tracks in the snow.–In short: the Pomeranian dog, my biographical hod-bearer and forwarder, is already lying under the table, and has discharged some Elysian fields and heavenly kingdoms.–As, besides, I did not wholly know in the above paragraph what I was after (I hope not to sit a well man before the public, if I knew)–accordingly the dog did me a true labor of love in actually biting off, so to speak, the tail, or second member. It was, besides, my plan merely to make caprioles in a period of an ell's length until the dog should have removed my anxiety about the doubtfulness of the Whitsuntide journey.–In fact, I never wanted to lay out words and thoughts together, but to save the latter, while I spent the former; Peutzer wrote long ago to the men of Ratisbon and Wetzlar, Many thoughts need a small stream of words, but the greater the brook is, so much the smaller can be the mill-wheel.–An honest reviewer is offended also by a laconic book if only for this reason, (not merely that the public does not understand it but) because a German has in the jurists and theologians the very best models before him for writing prolixly, and indeed with a diffuseness which perhaps–for the thought is the soul, the word the body–establishes among words that higher friendship of men, which, according to Aristotle, consists in this, that one soul (one thought) inhabits several bodies (words) at once.—

–I now begin Victor's vigils, the holy eve of Whitsuntide. It was already Saturday,–the wind (like the sciences) came from the east,–the quicksilver in the barometer-tube (as it does to-day in my nervous-tubes) almost leaped out at the top.–Flamin had parted in peace with his friend on Friday, and was not to return for five days.–Victor will to-morrow, on the first day of Whitsuntide, sally forth before the sun, in order to come back again on the third, when he alights in America.–(I wish he would stay longer.)–It is a fine blue-Mondayin Puzzolo^[93] in the soul (every blue day is one), and a fine dispensation from the mourning of life, when one (like my hero) has the good fortune on a holy even-tide, during the tolling for prayers, and when the moon is already up above the houses, to sit tranquil and innocent in Zeusel's balcony in the presence of the prospects of the fairest Whitsuntide-days and the fairest Whitsuntide-faces, to take a first cut of all the preparatory dishes of hope, to gather all the bosom-roses and signs of the fairest morning, and, amidst the noisy booth-preludes to the Festival, to read the second part of the Mumienin Puzzolo^[94] precisely in the Sectors of joy in which I sketch my own and Gustavus's entrance into the heavenly Jerusalem at Lilienbad.—All this, as was said, my hero had....

But when he who found out so much affinity between his Whitsuntide-journey and that journey to the watering-place in the book, came at last with his agitated soul to the destruction of that Jerusalem; then, with the first sad sigh of to-day, he said: "O thou good Destiny, never lay such a sacrificial knife on the heart of my Clotilda; ah, I should die, if she became so unhappy as Beata."–And he further reflected how the ruddy morning clouds of hope are only high, hovering rain, and how often sorrow is the bitter kernel of rapture, like the golden Imperial Apple of the German Emperor, which, to be sure, weighs three marks and three ounces, but inwardly is filled up with earth....

By Heaven! we are here needlessly embittering with night-thoughts the holy evening, and none of us knows why he sighs so.–I assure the reader I have the whole Whitsuntide-festival before me in copy, and there is not a single misfortune there, unless Victor joins on a fourth Whitsuntide-day as after-summer, and in that there should something be developed. I confess I like to be an Æsthetic frÈre terrible, and to point the sword at the breast of the world, which is reading deep into my Invisible (mother) Lodge, and play other like tricks,–but that comes from the fact that in youth one reads and owns the Sorrows of Werther, of which, like a mass-priest, one prepares a bloodless victim before one enters the Academy. Nay, if I this very day were composing a romance, I should–as the blue-coated Werther has in every young Amoroso and author a quasi-Christ who on Good-Friday puts on a similar crown of thorns, and ascends a cross–myself also do the same over again....

But it is time I opened my Maienthal, and let every one in. Only I will no longer make a mystery of it that I am minded to present outright this whole Paphos and knightly seat to the reader, as Louis XI. cast the Duchy of Boulogne at the feet of the Holy Mary. I think thereby to tower, perhaps, above other writers, who bestow only their quills upon their readers, full as much as the king does above old Lipsius, who made over to Mary only his silver-pen. In the beginning I meant to retain for myself this Elysium with thrice-mowed meadows and pine-groves, because I am in fact a poor devil, and really have no more income than a Prince of Wurtemberg formerly, namely ninety florins Rhenish of appanage-money, and ten florins for a coat of state, and because, as to the two square miles of land set off to me by God and equity,–for so much does the whole earth at an equal division, according to a good plan, lay off to each man,–verily I make so small account of that, that I would gladly give up my two miles to any one for a miserable sheepfold.–And what most kept me back from making this presentation of my Maienthal to living men, was the fear that I should turn over a feudum to people, readers, provincial deputies, who are possessed of a thousand times greater palatinates and patrimonial estates, and whom one would provoke, if one should make them resemble the holy Mary, who from a Queen of Heaven became a Duchess of Boulogne, or the Roman Emperor who must on the day of his coronation become at the same time a member of the Order of Mary at Aachen.

But what then can all their majorats,–their Teutonic-knights' estates,–their mesne-tenures,–and their patrimonia Petri (an allusion to my patrimonium PAULI),–and their grandfathers' estates and all their cargoes stowed into the ship of earth,–in short, their European possessions on the earth,–what, I say, can all these Dutch farms yield, in the way of products, that could stand even at a distance before those of Maienthal? And do there grow on their crown-estates heavenly blue days, evenings full of blissful tears, nights full of great thoughts? No, Maienthal bears loftier flowers than those which cattle pluck off, fairer apples of the Hesperides than are laid up in fruit-cellars, super-terrestrial treasures on subterranean rival-pieces to Eden, like Clotilda and Emanuel, and all that our dreams paint and our tears of joy bedew.–

And this is just my excuse, if I deny the Maienthal domain of joy to a thousand rival claimants, if I as its fee-provost cannot invest with this Swabian reversionary fief such people as are not fit for a proper feudum, morally blind, lame, minors, eunuchs, &c.–And here I must make myself many enemies, when, from among the vassals and joint subjects of investiture to whom Maienthal, with all its poetic privileges, is given in fee, I expressly exclude old gabblers who can no longer make the knight's leap of fancy,–forty-seven inhabitants of Scheerau and one hundred of Flachsenfingen, whose hearts are as cold as their knee-pans, or as dogs' noses,–the greatest ministers and other grandees, in whom, as in great roasted lumps of meat, only the middle is still raw, namely the heart,–one half billion economists, jurists, exchequer and finance-counsellors, and plus- i. e. minus-makers,in Puzzolo^[95] in whom the soul, as in Adam's case the body, was kneaded out of a clod of earth, who have a pericardium [or heart-bag], but no heart, cerebral-membranes without brain, shrewdness without philosophy, who, instead of the book of nature, read only their papers for law-cases and their tax-books,–finally, those who have not fire enough to kindle at the fire of love, poetry, religion, who for weep say blubber, for poetry, rhyme, for sentiment, craziness....

Am I then crazy that I work myself up here into such a rage, as if I had not before me on the other side the finest college of readers, which I am promoting to the primus adquirens of the freehold and apron-string-hold of Maienthal; a mystical, moral person, who discerns that utility is only an inferior beauty, and beauty a higher utility?–It is peculiar to all emotions (but not to opinions) that one thinks he alone has them. Thus every youth holds his love to be an extraordinary celestial phenomenon which has been only once in the world, as the star of love, the evening star, often looks like a comet. But the world is not all Flachsenfingenites and Dutchmen, who climb the Alps less to have great thoughts and elevations than to get sedes,in Puzzolo^[96] or go to sea, not to throw a poet's glance over the sublime ocean, but to escape consumption.... but there are everywhere to be found, in every market-town, on every island, fair souls who rest in the bosom of nature,–who reverence the dreams of love, though they themselves have awaked from their own,–who are encased with rough men, before whom they have to veil their idyllic fantasies about the second life, and their tears over the first,–who give fairer days than they receive,–to this whole fair society I finally make a present of the Feudum of Maienthal, of which there has been already so much talk, and go in at the head with some friends of both sexes and my sister as investing fief-provost.

Postscript or autograph bull of dispensation:–The Mining Superintendent cannot deny that the S. T. author of this biography, by the fact that the dog is lazy, and that these post-days are more than commonly voluminous, and that in this chapter he has actually melted two into one, is sufficiently excused with those who have the right to ask him why he has not ended the 32d Post-day till the middle of September or Fructidor. He still sits with his description four months distant from the history, 1793.

J. P.

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