roar of the storm, and amidst the falling of the warm rain, and when I weep and when I embrace thee, and when I am dying!'–And thou, my beloved Horion, do so too.

"Emanuel."

* * * * *

The petty woe of earth, the petty thoughts of earth, had now flown away from Horion's soul, and, after a devout look into the open starry heaven, he went, led by the hand of sleep, into the realm of dreams.–Let us imitate him, and come upon nothing further to-day.^[7]

26. DOG-POST-DAY.

Tergemini.–Zeusel and his Twin-Brother.–The Ascending Peruke.–Detection of Knaveries.

If I were in Covent Garden, and had wept over the tragedy, I would still stay to the epilogue, although I should have to laugh over it. Only, however, from tragedy does a cross-lane lead over to comedy, but not from the epic; in short, man can laugh after tender, but not after exalting emotion. I cannot, therefore, allow a fast reader, immediately after the twenty-fifth chapter, to begin this one. In fact, when one sees how they read a book,–namely, even five times as miserably, thoughtlessly, fragmentarily as it is written–(I speak merely of attention; knowledge is, of course, out of the question during the reading, and the author's pen cannot raise the spirits of the reader, any more than the piston can the water, beyond a certain level); how, at the best passages, they turn over two leaves at once,–now grapple two unlike chapters, and now spend four weeks in reading through a chapter which ought to have been finished in one sitting; how such classical readers often just before a visit, or during the twisting on or in fact the heating of the hair-roller, or during the combing out of the hair (which absolutely powders the sublimest chapter) how they take that moment to read one of this last kind, or an affecting one while scolding at the whole room;–when one considers that such readers comprise most of those in Scheerau and Flachsenfingen, those female readers only excepted who know how to hit the way into all books and men, and to whom it is all one what they read or marry,–and when one actually learns by sad observation, that, if not even the reading-penny which they have to pay for the book has power enough to persuade them into the enjoyment of affecting and sublime pages, this long period will still less constrain them to it,–one must congratulate the German public, which is still nourished by works in which, as in turkey-fowls, the best part is the white.

As the Vienna Magazine is also such a turkey-cock, and I had a dream last week that my dog wrote for it, this will be a fitting place to revoke my error. The dream does not strike me as strange,–(since my bestial correspondent is likewise named Hofmann,^[8])–that this same beast was the Professor swaddled and chrysalized into the body of a dog. I certainly never should have hit upon the idea that a Professor of "practical eloquence" would in the form of a dog give the world printed things, had not once in Paris a fellow got himself sewed up with contraband goods in a poodle-skin, in order, thus disguised, to make his way through the gate. I might have known well enough, from the inequality of size between the two creatures, what was in the wind;^[9] but I went so far in my crazy dream as actually to pinch and feel of the dog to probe him, when the Professor, whom I sought behind this mask, himself in person entered the door. He at once removed all confusion; I imposed on myself, however, as it were to give him satisfaction, the penalty of making the whole thing known, and of being, into the bargain, his fellow-laborer, i. e. his monthly pigeon, which hatches every month.... Many are actually said, therefore, to have looked in the Vienna Magazine (for in the first edition I forgot to state that I had only dreamed) for articles by me: is it possible, I ask?—

We left our Victor in suspense under a cloud of dark conjectures: now we meet him again in the presence of an incident that confirms them all.

Whoso knows, though only by hearsay, the Apothecary Zeusel, around whom the whole occurrence revolves, knows that he is a hare's-foot.^[10] The said foot–a hare and the Devil, though the whole skin is stripped off, still retain the foot–was delighted when a gentleman of the court got a dinner out of him and–a laugh upon him; he could not keep within the bounds of modesty, when a distinguished person made a fool of him. The noble Mat, therefore, often took away his modesty. From him he could, like the Flachsenfingeners, bear everything, from Victor nothing. I can explain it only by the fact, that Victor's satires were general and apt, and improving; but men sooner forgive lampoons than satire, slander than admonition, jests upon orthodox and aristocrats than reasonings about them.^[11] Notwithstanding, though Zeusel was again this time the victim of practical jokes^[12] and trouncings at Matthieu's hands, he could not fairly forgive him for it, but got the gout on the subject.

It was, namely, just before the first of April–many have three hundred and sixty-five first of April's every year–when the page made the apothecary an April fool.^[13] In St. Luna three bathing and drinking visitors had already arrived, three wild young Englishmen, who announced themselves as tergemini, but were probably only brothers born in succession, not at once. Only their souls seemed three twins of the spirit of freedom and fraternity; they were so republican, that they did not even appear at court, and, like every Englishman, accounted us all, me and the reader and the Professor of Eloquence, as Christian slaves, and the enfranchised as turnkeys' assistants. The magic influence of a congenial heart soon drew the Regency-Councillor Flamin into their Cartesian vortex; they had hardly been there eight days, when they had held with him a club at the Chaplain's. He promised them for Easter a sight of their countryman Sebastian; and the noble Matthieu he had at the very beginning brought with him. Mat's liberty-tree was merely a satirical thorn-bush; his satires supplied the place of principles. Only a single one of the three twins, whom the very evil one with horns and buck's feet,–namely, the Satyr