Transcriber's Note:

1. Page scan source: http://www.archive.org/details/invisiblelodge00paulgoog

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TRANSLATOR'S PREFACE.

This work was the forerunner (and, according to its Author's nephew and biographer, the cradle), of some of his principal subsequent Romances, especially Hesperus and Titan. "The Invisible Lodge," says Spazier, "is, in more than one sense, the Genesis of Jean Paul's poetic world and its inhabitants--the birth history of his first Romances." It is peculiarly interesting as containing, both in spirit and in incident, a good deal of Richter's own biography. It was written in 1792, when the Author was 29 years old, and is the work which decided, if not his reputation, at least his determination to make his countrymen appreciate his work and his worth. It was the first of his productions which, he felt, was somewhat munificently paid for, as it gave him the joy of bursting in upon his poor old mother and pouring some 250 dollars into her lap.

The date of this work is the transition period in the Author's life, when (in his own words) he came out of the "vinegar manufactory," where he had concocted his "Greenland Law-suits," and "Papers of the Devil," and passed through the "honey-sour" interval which gave birth to the Idyl of the "Contented Little Schoolmaster, Wutz," into the happier and more harmonious period which began with the "Invisible Lodge."

In this Romance, says Mrs. Lee, "the different epochs in the history of his soul are embodied." "To Ottomar he has given his dreams and aspirations; to Fenk his satire and comic humor; and in Gustavus the events of his autobiography are clothed in a poetic garment."

A few weeks before his death, which took place in November 1825, (and of which he seems to have had a singular presentiment not long before this book was written), referring to its abrupt ending he says: "What life in the world do we see that is not interrupted and incomplete? And if we complain that a Romance is left unfinished--that it does not even inform us what came of Kunz's second courtship and Elsie's despair on the occasion--how Hans escaped the claws of the sheriff, and Faust those of Mephistopheles--still let us console ourselves with the reflection that man, in his present existence, sees nothing on any side but knots, that only beyond his grave lie the solutions, and that all History is to him an unfinished Romance.

"Baireuth, Oct. 1825."

On the 14th of the month following, the hand that penned these lines was cold in death.    C. T. B.

Newport, Oct. 1882.

FIRST SECTION.

Courting by Chess.--Graduated Recruit.--Copulative Cat

In my opinion, what made the Head-forester Von Knör so incredibly sharp-set upon chess was, that from one year's end to the other, he had nothing to do but to be, once during that time, the guest, the Santa Hermandad or Holy Brotherhood and the Dispenser of Bulls to the rangers.

The reader can surely never have heard of an amateur with so extravagant a passion as his. The least he could do was to send for all his servants to the village of Strehpcnik, (where one gains as much immunity from taxation by chess as a nobleman does by a Saxon Diet,) in order that he might (though in a different sense from that of Cato) have as many opponents as servants. For another instance, he and a nobleman of Upper Yssel in Zwoll spent more postal money in writing than in riding, inasmuch as they played chess at a distance of 250 miles, not with fingers, but with pens. Still another fact may satisfy the reader, viz., that he and Kempele's Automaton Chess-player corresponded with each other, and that the fellow-lodger and adjutant of the wooden Moslem, Herr von Kempele, once in my presence wrote back to him from Hay street in Leipsic, in the name of the Mussulman, that the latter castled. The reader will have his own reflections on the subject, when told that the man, within two years, traveled away to Paris, to go to the Palais Royal and to the Société du Salon des Echecs, and to sit down there as chess-combatant, and jump up again as chess-conqueror, although he was afterward cudgeled much too severely in a democratic street, for having cried out in sleep: Gardez la Reine! It may simply seem striking to one and another that his daughter never could win a new hat from him or a new dressing-maid (soubrette) to put it on for her, except by winning at the same time a game of chess. But one thing will astonish and vex all who read me, of either sex and of every age, namely, that the Head-forester had sworn he would give his daughter to no other beast in the whole knightly circle but the one who should win not only her heart but at the same time the victory over her in a game of chess--and that in seven weeks.

The ground he took, and his chain of reasoning, was this: "A good mathematician is a good chess-player; therefore, vice-versâ--a good mathematician knows the Differential Calculus ten times better than a poor one,--and a good master of Differentiation understands himself as well as any one in the matter of wheeling and deploying,[2] and consequently can command his company (and his wife, in fact,) at any hour--and why then should not one give so accomplished, so experienced an officer, his only daughter?" My reader would certainly have seated himself forthwith at the chess-board and thought to himself: the drawing of such a quaternion[3] from the board as the daughter of a Head-forester, is an extraordinarily easy matter; but it is confoundedly hard when the father himself watches behind her chair, and prompts the daughter in every move whereby she is to guard her king and the maiden-queen (herself) from my reader.

No one who had heard of it could comprehend why the Forester's Lady, who had long been the Maid of Honor to a Countess von Ebersdorf, with her fine feelings and her piety, could tolerate such a hunter's-whim; but the truth is, she had a Moravian fancy of her own to carry out, namely, that the first child of her daughter Ernestina should be trained for Heaven; that is to say eight years under the

earth--"eighty years for all me!" said the old man.

Now, although in any case one has a plaguey hard time with a daughter, whether one would draw subscribers (i. e. suitors) to her or drive them away, nevertheless Knör found in this case his true heaven upon earth--among so many Knights of Chess, all fighting for his Ernestina and losing her and the game. For she, with a head into which her father had poured light, and a heart into which her mother had infused virtue, could conquer more easily than be conquered; hence a whole brigade of youthful suitors vexed and played themselves almost to death. And yet there were some among them who in all castles round about claimed the name of sweet gentlemen because they had not sailors' manners, as, in comparison with briny and bitter sea-water, we call our flat, fresh water sweet.

But the reader and I will jump over the whole company of players, and place ourselves beside the Cavalry Captain, von Falkenberg, who is standing by the father and who is also bent upon marriage. This officer--a man of courage and good nature, without any principles, except that of honor; who, in order not to "write any thing behind his ears" as the phrase is, i. e., not to lay up any grudge against another (the ears, especially when of some length, being generally the black-board and tally-stick of received offences), would rather box those of other Christians; who acted more finely than he spoke, and whose full-length portrait[4] I have not room enough to spread out between these two dashes--had continued enlisting recruits in this part of the country so long that at last his affections were enlisted by Ernestina. There was nothing he hated so much as chess and Moravianism; meanwhile Knör said to him: At twelve o'clock tonight the seven tournament-weeks of the game were to begin, and if at twelve o'clock, seven weeks hence, he had not sent his antagonist from the battle-field to the bridal chamber he should be heartily sorry, and all the eight years' education would then go for nothing.

For the first fourteen days the playing and--loving went on in fact too negligently. But at that time neither I nor other clever people had written those ardent romances, wherewith--a serious thing for us to answer for--we transform young people into crackling, roaring, rotatory stoves of love, which burst with the heat and become calcined, and after marriage can no more be heated. Ernestina was one of those daughters who are on hand when one gives the order: "Next Sunday, God willing, at four o'clock, when Herr A. or Z. comes, you are to fall in love with him." The Captain, in the article of love, bit neither into the fermenting pumpernickel or rye-bread of the physical sensation, nor into the white, weak flour-bread of the Parisian sentiment, nor into the quiddany (the quince marmalade) and heaven's bread of the Platonic, but into a fine slice of the home-made brown-bread of conjugal affection; he was thirty-seven years old. Sixteen years before he had cut off a bit of the aforesaid pumpernickel: his mistress and his and her son were afterward married by the respectable commercial agent, Röper.

We Belletrists, on the contrary, can make it of great practical use in our romances, that it agrees right well with our maw and the coat of our stomach, when in the same afternoon we cut for ourselves from those four sorts of bread at once; for we must ourselves be old Harrys to depict old Harrys; how could we manage it otherwise, when, in the self-same month, out of the self-same heart, as well as the self-same bookstore (I shall be vexing Herr Adelung[5] here by the word "self-same"--nämlich), we have to issue satires and eulogies--night-thoughts--night-scenes--war-songs--idyls--bawdy ditties and solemn dirges, so that behind and before us people stand astonished to see Pantheon and Pandemonium under one roof--more than they were over the postmortem stomach of the galley-slave Bazile, in which was found a household property of thirty-five effects, such as pipe-heads, leather, and bits of glass.

When the two young people sat down at the chessboard, which was to be either their partition-wall or their bridge, the father stood by all the time as marker; it was, however, quite unnecessary--not merely because the Captain played so miserably and his antagonist so Philidorically; but for the additional reason, that the female laws of etiquette forbade her to be mated or to fall in love (for women and oarsmen always turn their backs to the shore toward which they are seeking to propel themselves)--but for a still more remarkable reason the auxiliary forester might have been dispensed with, namely, that Ernestina wanted above all things to be checkmated, and for that very reason she played so well. For out of spite against dilatory fate, one sets himself on purpose to work against the very things that depend upon him, and desires them nevertheless. The two warring powers grew, indeed, more and more fond of each other, even in proportion as they were afraid of forfeiting each other; nevertheless it was not in the power of the female party to omit a single move which contravened her two-fold desire: in five weeks the recruiting officer could not once say: Check to the queen! Besides, women play this king's game admirably well (as they do other games of kings).... But as this seems to be a digression of nature, though it is none; still an authorial one can be made out of it, only not until the Twentieth Sector; because I must first have written two or three months, till I have so spun up the reader into my web, that I can pluck or pull him just as I please.

Had the Captain's love been of the modern gigantic sort, which, not like a gently unfolding zephyr, but like a shaking tempest, grasps the green, thin flowrets, that cannot at all adapt themselves to the belletrical hurricane, then the least he could have done would have been to be at once a very devil; but as it was he was merely angry, not with the father, but with the daughter; and that not because she did not make the chess-board a presentation-dish of her hand and heart, or because she played well against him, but because she played so very well. Such is man! and I beseech fellow-men not to laugh at my Captain. To be sure, if I had had the female charms of Ernestina, and had looked into his puzzled face, as he meditated his counter-approaches, and seen how on its rounded mouth stood that pain at undeserved affliction which wears such a touching aspect in men of spirit, where it is not distorted by the arthritic knots and cutaneous eruptions of revenge, I should have grown red and should verily have plunged with my queen, (and myself too), into check: for what could I have loved in that case but a stern self-sacrifice?

By the 16th of June, Ernestina could herself almost have delighted in such sacrifice, as will presently be seen from a letter of hers. For a woman is certainly capable of maintaining for twice 24 hours one and the same sentiment towards a man (though not towards any other object), provided she has nothing of this man before her but his image in her fair little head; but, let the man himself, uncopied, stand, five feet high, before her, she can no longer achieve it; her feelings, playing like a column of gnats in a sunbeam, the merest trifle about the aforesaid man will chase them away from each other, and against each other, in among each other, e. g., a thimble-full too much or too little of powder upon him, a stoop of the upper part of his body, a finger-nail cut to the quick,

a scurfy, self-peeling under-lip, the powder-margin and play-ground of the queue on the back of his coat, long side-whiskers--in fact anything. I have a hundred reasons for breaking open here before the eyes of the indiscreet reader Ernestina's letter to a retired court-lady in the residence-city of Scheerau; she had to write to her every week, because there was an expectation of inheriting in that quarter, and because Ernestina herself had once been with her and in the city long enough to be well able to bring away with her eleven thousand city notions--that is, three weeks.

"Last week I had really nothing to write you but the old song. Our playing is infinitely tedious to me and I only pity the Captain; but no talking avails anything with my father, so long as he can have any one to see play. Were it not better, the good Captain should wake up his coachman, who sits snoring all day long in the servants' room, and harness up and drive off? Ever since Sunday we have been in one round of torment over a single game, and I have already leaned one elbow sore--to night must end it.

"Twelve o'clock at night.--He loses his knights every time and by my queen. When he has once married, I will show him his mistakes and my strokes of art, I am bored to death, gracious Aunt.

"June 16th.--In four days I am free from my player and chess-board, and I will not seal this, till I can write you how he behaved towards his tired and innocent basket-maker. To-day we played up in the little Chinese pavilion. As the ruddy evening-twilight, which fell directly into his face, threw confused shadows among the pieces, and as I looked with pity at his right fore-finger, which had a red line left by a sabre-stroke and which lay on the rim of the chess-board; in my absence of mind I actually lost my queen, and the abominable baptismal tolling of the Chinese chime almost deprived me of the power of forming a plan--fortunately my father came back and helped me a little. Afterward I took him round through the improvements in our grove and he told me, I fancy, the history of his marked finger; he is very wild towards his equals, but withal uncommonly obliging to ladies.

"June 18th.--Since yesterday we have all been somewhat merrier. In the evening two under-officers brought five recruits, and as we were told that there was a man among them who could set a whole defeated army to laughing, we all went down in a body. Down below there the man was just whispering half aloud into another recruit's ear that he had a row of false teeth set in his jaw and they all fell out except a corner tooth when he bit off a cartridge; but all he wanted was to secure the bounty money. At our request he screwed the hat off of his head, but a white cap, which reached down so as to cover the eyebrows, he pulled down still lower. If he should take that off, he said, he should never in his life get to the command of a regiment. One of the subalterns began to laugh, and said, he does it merely because he has, underneath, three abominable birthmarks, nothing more--and a comrade stepped up behind him and slyly whisked off the cap from his head. Hardly had there sprung forth, to our astonishment, a head which showed on both temples two flaming birthmarks, a silhouette with a natural queue, and, opposite, two pole-cats' tails, when to our still greater astonishment the Captain clasped the figured head and kissed it as passionately as if it were his own bodily brother, and seemed as if he would laugh himself to death for joy. 'Thou art forever Dr. Fenk and nobody else!' said he. He must be very intimate with the Captain and comes direct from Upper-Scheerau. Don't you know him? The Prince has him travel to Switzerland and Italy as botanist and companion to his natural son, Captain Von Ottomar, as you will have already known. He perpetrates crazy jokes, if it is true, as he swears, that this is his 21st disguise and that he is just so many years old. He looks badly; he says himself, his broad chin turns up like a beaver's tail and that the barber really shaves the half wilderness for him gratis, equal to two beards--his lips are slit away to the wisdom teeth and his little eyes sparkle all day long. For people, too, who are not his equals, his jokes are much too free."

Ernestina here cuts a silhouette of the Doctor's outer man, which, like many Indian trees, under external spines and thorny foliage concealed the soft and precious fruit of the most humane heart. I, however, shall be able to draw him quite as well as our correspondent can. As humorists like him are seldom handsome--female humorists still less so--and as the spirit travesties itself and the face, of course (he said) the finest dress could be of no service to any man--to himself and the handsome ones least of all--but only to the drapers. Hence his pieces of uniform were divided into two departments,--the splendid ones (that people might see he did not wear the poor ones from poverty) and these same poor ones, which he generally had on at the same time with the others. Were not the sail-flaps of the handsomest embroidered waistcoat all the time sticking out from under a fox-brown overcoat, which was almost lost at the top in his hair-bag? Had he not, under a 1½ Louis d'or hat, hung on a disgraceful queue, for which he had given no more than six farthings of our present money? To be sure, it was half out of exasperation against this so tasteless crab's-tail of the head, against this telescope-like shortening and elongating spinal pendent to the fourth, thought-full cerebral chamber. His writing-set had to be much more elegant than his dinner-set and his paper whiter than his linen; he could never tolerate poor little pens or pen-feathers anywhere except on his hat, which his bed--and the disorder, natural to him as a bachelor--improved, so to speak, into a nobleman's plumed hat; meanwhile, to keep the bed feathers in his hair company he placed behind his ears good sea-quills--the chief commissary might have worn them behind his at the Diet with honor.

But not to make himself a mere oddity in dress, a separatist in his attire, he had a counterfeit presentment of himself taken from year to year after the best styles of the Journal of Follies, and pretended that he must, after all, show the people that he or his knee-piece knew how to keep up side by side perhaps with the latest exquisites. The lower rim of his overcoat, like man himself, was often made out of earth; but he insisted upon it, that one should tell him what harm it would do if he should, in his own person, carry things to the extent that a stocking maker did--whose history I will at once relate, in order not to write without any moral. The man referred to had the good and droll habit when he brought his stockings to town on his back to deliver them, of never brushing or rubbing off the border of dirt with which his surtout fringed itself. He simpler took a large pair of shears and carefully cut off each time the newly formed miry margin and filthy horizon. Now, the longer it rained the shorter the dimensions to which his frock shrunk up, and on the shortest day the epitomizer, by reason of the unprecedented weather, went round in the shortest surtout--in a neat 16mo edition of the former folio edition. The moral I would draw from this is the following question: Should not a wise State, which is certainly seventy times shrewder than all stocking weavers put together, who are themselves, indeed, only members of it, take the best course to imitate the fringed stocking weaver; namely, instead of wasting the time rubbing and scrubbing its filthy members (thieves, adulterers, etc.), to cut them off with the sword, or otherwise make short work with them?

Doctor Fenk diverted and dissipated by whimsical consolation the solitary curses which his friend the Captain vented instead of sighs. He said he had remarked in Ernestina more than once, at some specially good move of his making, no other start than one of

pleasure. He would stake his traveling money upon it that she, as she loved him, was nursing some trick in her head which would pave his way or frame his staircase to the bridal chamber. He advised him to appear distrait and inattentive, so as not to detect and disturb her in the hatching of her secret plan. He asked him: "Do you understand perfectly the minor offices of love?" No German comprehended metaphors less than the Captain. "I mean," he continued, "can you not, then, be out and out the most crafty vocativus? Can you not retain hold for a long time of the piece you mean to move, so as to keep your hand a long time over your chess-militia, and with your hand make the Generalissima fall into agitation and love? Can you not change every minute your attitudes towards this fair foe, and especially contrive to lift yourself up, because a man standing seems better looking to a woman who is sitting than to one who stands? I and she should see you now leaning back in your chair, now stretching forward, now to the left, now to the right, now in the shade, now with your eyes fixed on her hand, now on her lips, during the game. Nay, you should knock three or four pawns over on to the floor merely that you may have to stoop over to pick them up, so that your swelling facial veins might make an impression on her heart, and that you might drive the blood up into your own head and hers at the same time. Let your queue be buckled an eighth of an ell nearer the occiput or farther from it, in case such buckling and such distance has hitherto counteracted your marriage prospects." The poor Captain neither understood nor performed a single iota of the whole service-regulation, and the Doctor was quite as well satisfied, for it was a part of his humor that he loved no party to talk to better than the wind.

Ernestina goes on with her letter:

"To-morrow, thank God, my Passion weeks come to an end; and it is fortunate for the Captain, who grows daily more sensitive, that no one is present but the Doctor, who has a pat joke for every move that is made. His wit, he says, proves he himself is a miserable player, because good players never make a bonmot upon or during their play.

"June 20, 3 o'clock.--This evening at 12 o'clock I shall be unlocked from the foot-block of the chess-board. He will play all day at the rubber, the Definitive match--Fenk calls it--but at night, as he guesses from his day's campaign the result of the nightly one, he has ordered his coachman to drive up with his carriage, so that, like a corpse, he may mournfully depart. Only he should not expect me to play as badly as he does. But he is in all things so hasty, and stops his ears against all remonstrances.

"12 o'clock at night.--I am beside myself. Who would have believed it of my father? My game could hardly have stood better--by my father's second-hand watch, which lay near the chess-board, it was already considerably more than half-past eleven--he had only two officers and I still had all mine; one flying streak of red after another darted across his whole face. It grew at last really oppressive, and even the Doctor no longer spoke a playful word--only my white pussy marched round purring on the table. Naturally no human being is thinking of the cat, and for the first time in the game he gives me check. Just then he (or was it I, for I sometimes beat such little trills on the table) might have made some such slight drumming with his fingers on the edge of the board. Like lightning the creature flew at it, thinking probably it was a mouse, and knocked our whole game into pi and there we sat. Imagine the scene:--I half glad that this middle person had relieved him of the shame of the formal basket; he with a face full of disconsolateness and wrath; my father with one full of wrath and confusion; and the Doctor looking round the room and snapping his fingers and swearing: 'The Captain would have beaten as sure as Amen!' Not a foot budged from the spot; the Doctor did not stay a minute on his, and finally in a fit of enthusiasm which our embarrassed silence more and more intensified, threw himself on his knees before a white bust of Cupid, before a miniature of my father, and before his own image in the looking-glass, and prayed: 'Holy Herr von Knör! holy Cupid! holy Fenk! pray for the Captain, and strike the cat dead! Ah! were you three images alive, then would Cupid surely assume the form of Dr. Fenk, and Cupid who had thus come to life would grasp the hand of the now animated Knör, and place in it that of the female player; then would his give hers to still a third. Ye saints! pray, I beseech you, for the Captain, who would have won the game!' But that is not true; only, unfortunately, the interval was too short to begin a new one."

Now, as at this point the pole-cat-Doctor (I, as author, resume my narrative) rose up and actually laid Knör's hand in that of Ernestina and said he was Cupid--and inasmuch as, after all, by the assurances of the Doctor and by the uncertainty of the game, the player, teased by men and cats, had quite as much to lose in the matter of honor as in that of love; and as I show in a whole Sector that Falkenberg was of the oldest nobility in the whole land; and as, luckily, in the Head-forester (as with many of the rural nobility) the manners of his rude breeding lay half-hid under the varnish of those derived from his more refined intercourse, just as his old furniture was under that of the new fashion; thus the electric enthusiasm of the Doctor passed over in great sparks into the bosom of the father, and Knör in transport laid the hand of Ernestina, who feigned astonishment, in that of the Captain, who really felt it; and the bridegroom rushed and threw himself in a tempest of gratitude upon the neck of the new-born father-in-law, even before--inasmuch as his honor triumphed more than his love--he somewhat more coldly kissed the clever hand which had hitherto snatched from him this double triumph.

For this the fair possessor of the hand blamed him; but I again impute the blame to her; with what reason can she expect it of the man who never divined a soul, hardly his own, and never that of a woman, that he should have had his wisdom-teeth and his philosophic beard grown as long as the indulgent reader has both, who, of course, does not need to learn for the first time, and to have it printed here beforehand--for he has already remarked it these three good hours--that behind the copulative cat there lay (or lied)[6] something, viz., Ernestina herself.

This is how it was. But I need hardly inform the reader of what he has long since known, that Ernestina had, privatissime, each of four evenings previous, placed the glue-and-stitch cat on the table, and instructed her to dart at the fingers when she heard them drumming; and I am glad the acuteness of the reader is as much above the ordinary as it is, because now he can go on and surmise still more: for she also on the final evening, made the paste-eel of a cat creep after her as a lime-rod, kept her till half-past eleven o'clock down in her lap, and at last with a movement of her knee threw up this feline terminus medius out of her lap on to the table, and the terminus after that did her part. Poor Captain!

But it is a matter for serious reflection. For if, in this way, women can transmute design into accident, and vice versâ--if, even before betrothal (consequently still more afterwards), they know how to place in the front rank against men (as Cambyses did against the Egyptians)[7], confederate cats, who, like

inferior interposing Deities ex-machinâ upset the male game and set up the female--if in a hundred human beings there are only five men who can tolerate bestial cats or, in fact, human ones, and only ten women who can not--if, most manifestly, the best women carry under their arms terrible bundles of man-traps, hares'-nets, lark springes, night-nets, and draw-nets; what shall the uniped or one-leg[8] do who, on the very same day when he has begun writing a romance, begins at the same time to play one, and so would fain carry through both simultaneously as on a double harpsichord? The most remarkable thing for me to do, I see, is to let my wife stand all day by me bear-trap, and throw twigs on it, that I may stumble into it, but absolutely place no bear there, though no ape either. No! ye pliable, oppressed creatures! I once more propose to myself the undertaking, and publicly make the vow to one of you here, in print. Should it happen, nevertheless, that I wanted after the honeymoon to plague the one, then I merely read out aloud this Sector, and move my heart with the coming picture of your connubial Pilatus; which, for that reason, I here bring forward--namely, how the stupidest man accounts himself shrewder than the shrewdest wife; how before him, who, perhaps, out of the house lies on his knee, to be blest, before a goddess or idol, she must sink down on hers, like the camel, to be loaded; how he sweetens his Imperial Chancery decrees, and his Plebiscita, (after the mildest remonstrances have been ventured only in a doubtful and desperate voice of resignation, as if of a lost cause), with nothing better than a "but if I choose to have it so;" how the very tear which fascinated him in the free eye of the bride, now disenchants and makes him quite frantic, when it drops from that of the wedded wife, just as in the "Arabian Nights" all enchantments and disenchantments are effected by sprinkling with water--verily, the only good thing about it after all is just this, that you do really delude him. Ah! and when I once bring it home to myself, how far such a married Bruin must have gone before you went so far as, in order not to be devoured by him, actually to make believe fall in a swoon (as one does with the actual bears in the forest) and Bruin stalked with his idle paws round the seeming corpse! ...

"In my old age the one-leg shall whistle a different tune!" says the married reader; but I am myself already nine years older than he, and still single into the bargain.

SECOND SECTION.

Price-Current of the Wholesale Pedigree-Merchant.--The Stallion and the Patent of Nobility

There is not in the whole known world a more pestilent job than that of writing a first section; and if I were not in all my life to write any other sections, a second, a tenth, a thousandth, I would rather make logarithms or publicistic reports of Circles than a book with æsthetic ones. On the contrary, in the second chapter and sector an author comes to himself again, and knows full well in the most distinguished circle, perhaps, that exists (in mine are nothing but snobs) what he is to set about with his writing-fingers, and with his hat, head, wit, penetration, and everything.

As the wedded pair, from whose betrothal through chess and cat we have just returned in a body, are to deliver over to me in nine months the hero of this book, I must show beforehand that I do not buy at random, but (to speak commercially) select my goods (i. e., my hero) from a very good house, or, to speak heraldically, from a very old one. For it must, for the benefit of the free knighthood, the feudal landlords and the patricians, be stated and proved here or nowhere, that the purveyor of my hero, Herr von Falkenberg, is of an older nobility than any of them; and, in fact, of an illegitimate one.

Namely, in the year 1625 occurred the Feast of the Immaculate Conception, on which occasion his great-grandfather was unusually intoxicated and nevertheless drew out from the pot of fortune a handful of something extraordinary, a second diploma of nobility. For there sat drinking with him, but seven times deeper, a clever horse jockey from Westphalia, who was also a Herr von Falkenberg, but only a namesake; their two family-trees did not graze nor anastomose with each other, either in roots, fibres, or in leaves. Although, now, the genealogical tree of the Westphalian was so old and had stood so long in the wind and weather of life, that it seemed to have shot up out of the earth simultaneously with many a veteran on Lebanon or Ætna; in short, although the horse-dealer was a man of sixty-four-fold scutcheon, whereas the great-grandfather, to his great shame and that of him who takes him into his romance, really counted as many teeth as ancestors, namely, thirty-two; still the thing could be brought about. That is to say, the old Westphalian was the sole support and concluding vignette and Hogarthian tail-piece of his whole historical picture-gallery; not even in the two Indies, where we all have and inherit our cousins, had he a single one. Upon this the great-grandfather planted himself, and sought to extort from him by curses and prayers his patent of nobility, in order to give it out as his own; "for who the devil will be the wiser?" said he; "it is of no use to you and I can tack it on to mine." Nay, the compiler of ancestors, the great-grandfather, offered to act as a Christian, and to give the dealer in horses and ancestors in exchange for the diploma an unnaturally beautiful stallion, such a grand sultan and connubial master of a neighboring equine harem as one had hardly seen matched. But the last of his line turned his head slowly to and fro, and said coldly, "I would rather not," and drank his Zerbot bottle-beer. When he had merely tried a couple of glasses of Quedlinburg Gose (a light colored beer), he began already to storm and curse at the very supposition, which began to look promising. When he had put down on the top of that some Calktuff from Konigsbutter, I think it was (for Falkenberg had a whole Meibomium de cerevisiis, [Meibom or malt liquors] namely, his beers, in his cellar), then he actually came out with some grounds for his refusal, and things grew very hopeful.

When at last he found how finely the Breslau Scheps foamed in the glass, or in his head, then he ordered the carcass of a miserable stallion to be led into the courtyard, and when he had seen him jump, it may have been two or three times, he gave the great-grandfather his hand and in it the 128 ancestors. Now, when great-grandfather Falkenberg had taken the purchased patent, which had been almost chewed to pieces by some ancestral generation of moths that had a thousand-fold scutcheon each, and, as it was porous as a butterfly's wing, had spread and stuck it with a plaster-knife on new parchment, first of all, however, covering it with bookbinders paste; then, as may easily be imagined, the parchment rendered his whole noble ancestry the same service of ennoblement which the stallion in Westphalia did to the equine posterity, and over a hundred buried men, in whom not a drop of blood was any longer to be ennobled, acquired at least noble bones. Therefore neither I nor any Canoness needs be ashamed of having as much intercourse with the future young Falkenberg as will hereafter occur. For the rest I should be glad if the anecdote went no further, and, in fact, to a reading-public of intelligence this needs hardly to be said.

The nuptial lupercalia, with their longest day and their shortest night, I have never undertaken to reproduce; but the introduction thereto I should be glad to describe. Only, as I unfortunately went to bed last

night with the purpose this morning of transporting the nuptial and chess-playing couple with three strokes of the pen from the bridal to the marriage bed, which is nineteen leagues distant from it, namely in the knightly seat of the Falkenbergs in Auenthal--and as I quite naturally proposed to picture merely with three slight hints the little amount of ceremony, the little fifing, prancing, and powder, wherewith the good Auenthalers received their newly-married graces; accordingly all night the dream went up and down in my head that I was myself a home-returning Imperial Count and the Imperial Hereditary Casperl, and that my subjects, as they had not laid eyes on me for 15 years, almost shot me dead with joy. In my country there were naturally a thousand times more shouts of welcome and honneurs sent up than in the Falkenberg feudality; I will therefore omit the honors paid the Cavalry Captain and present merely my own.

FIRST EXTRA LEAF.

Manifestations of Honor Which Were Made to me by my County on my Return Home from the Grand Tour.

If a Count's subjects take from him his six nonnatural things[9] I know not how they can give him a better reception. Now mine left me not a single non-natural thing.

First of all, they took away from me the most important unnatural thing, sleep. Having traveled or waded, as if I were big with child, from Chalons to Strasburg, only to thunder down from there at such a rate that I rather hopped than sate, so furiously as to knock down my runner--I would for the life of me have gladly flown round Flörzhübel (the first market town in my country) sleeping (and was not that easy to do in dream?); but just at the boundary and bridge, as I opened my eyes in going down hill and closed them in going up, I was fallen upon, not murderously, but musically, by a body of militia sixteen drunken men strong, who had been lying in wait here since seven in the morning with their musical trumpets and ear-breaking tools, in order at the right time to wound me and my horses in the ears with fife and drum. Fortunately the storming-artists had drummed all day long for fun and ennui more vigorously than they did afterwards in earnest and for love. During the whole march, while orchestra and barracks went along beside my horses, I was scolding myself for having, seventeen years before, qualified and graduated Flörzhübel to a city--"I don't mean merely" (I said to myself) "because afterward a Sovereign Rescript stripped Flörzhübel again of city-rights and its Gens d'Armurie of its accoutrements, or merely because we proposed to sell the superfluous equipments at auction in Cassel--but because they will not now let me sleep, which is surely the first non-natural thing."

Eating they absolutely denied me, because that is the second unnatural thing of a reigning lord. Did not the Restaurateur of Flörzhübel, who had set on the fire for me the whole boiled and roasted widow's half of my country, summon me on the very carriage-step to take a bite, and when--for we grandees do not like to excite the populace to a hungry astonishment by despising envied fare--I begged with my own mouth only for a beer-soup, did not the Restaurateur make a sour face and say: "He had none in the whole hotel; and if he had, future hosts should never have it to say of him, that among so many jus and bouillons, he had presented to his most gracious master nothing but a bowl of beer-soup."

The third thing, combining both motion and rest, I came within a hair of losing through the triumphal arch of my place of burial, because it and the musical gallery upon it tumbled down close at the heels of my last servant, but to the joy of the country, harmed nothing belonging to any man, except the barber's cupping-glasses, which he had attached to the triumphal gate, projecting in such a manner as to have something hung upon them wherein was to be stuck the not bad illumination. I was going to be properly mad about the satirical cupping-vessels, which I was fain to take for satirical types and emblems of my Countly cupping of the full veins of my tenants and vassals, and I asked the Mayor whether he thought I was utterly devoid of wit; but they all in a body swore that in the whole getting up of the triumphal arch wit had not been once thought of.

Air, the fourth non-natural thing of an Imperial Hereditary Casperl, I might by this time have had; for not merely on account of the short misuse which the instruments and lungs of my vassals made of so glorious an element, should I have shut myself up and the sector of air around me so closely as I in fact did, into my carriage--that I must say expressly, so that the good Kelzheim Chorister may not imagine I was displeased because his musical fire-arm, his trumpet, from the double sound-hole of his belfry and his body, stuck out towards me to such an extent that the melodious air-waves from the two came to meet me four acres off, while below in the steeple his wife also milked the bells, as if I were being buried and receiving not so much a reception as a requiem--I say, not on account of the musical married pair would I have shut the carriage, but it was on account of the danger of life; for a joyous picket of peasants discharged at me out of seventeen fowling-pieces and two or three pocket-pistols, not only salvos, but a few ramrods into the bargain.

Now, when a Count sits there deprived of four nonnatural things, he may not venture to think of the fifth, of evacuation. The sphincter of every, even the greatest, pore remains closed, as well as the coach-door; no wonder then, that, as I could not say to a single pore--Ephphatha: be opened!--I started up crying "Deil a bit do I gain by my sitting on the bench of Counts at Ratisbon, if here I must squat on the coach-cushion and not be able to do anything, even."

Genuine Passion, which is the sixth non-natural thing of man, is stifled by nothing so easily as by a satin dog's-pillow, on which the parsons, schoolmasters and magistrates, whom an Imperial Hereditary Casperl has under him, deliver to him the Carmina which they have caused to be composed in his honor; for they can neither be laughed at nor wept over, nor scolded at nor spoken of.

My tenants and vassals, after filching from me so much of my six non-natural things, gave me back in the very act half of the first, namely, wakefulness; but they had worked themselves into such a sweat on my account, that I was thrown into one on theirs. When I woke up, I thought at first I had been dreaming; but upon becoming more wide awake I observed that, with the exception of names, it was the stolen history of my own neighborhood. To be sure it vexes me just as much as if the illuminations and the musical uproar had been arranged expressly on my account, that the subjects make both merely with the malicious intention of driving their great or little Regent from disgust and torture to betake himself to his tour again; which they have evidently learned from the Oriental caravans, which, in like manner, by drumming and lighting fires keep off wild beasts from their bodies.

THIRD SECTION.

Underground Education.--The Best of Moravians and the Best of Poodles

Here my story properly begins; the scene lies in Auenthal, or rather at the mountain-castle of the Falkenbergs, which stood some acres distant from it. The first child of the Chess-Amazon and the Dying Gladiator and Captain in Check was Gustavus--not the illustrious Swedish hero, but mine. My

greeting to thee, little darling! here on the scene of this rag-paper and this ragged life! I know thy whole life beforehand, therefore it is that the wailing voice of thy first minute moves me so sorely: I see on so many a year of thy life tear-drops hanging, that is why I am so touched with compassion, as I look at thy eye, which is as yet tearless because it is merely thy body that pains thee;--man comes without a smile, without a smile he goes, for a space of three fleeting minutes he was happy. I have therefore with wise forethought, dear Gustavus, saved up the fresh May of thy youth, of which I am to print a landscape-piece upon poor blotting-paper, against the May of the natural year, in order now, when every day is a creation day of nature, to make each day of mine such; in order that now, when every breath one draws is a steel-cure, every step four inches longer and the eye less curtained by the overhanging eyelid, I may write with a flying hand and with an elastic bosom full of breath and blood.

Fortunately, from the 2d to the 27th of May, (and that is all my description covers) we have a steady spell of fine weather; for I am something of a meteorological clairvoyant and my short leg and my long face are the best weather cards and hygrometers in this part of the country.

Since education has far less effect upon the inner man (and far more on the outer) than tutors imagine, one will be surprised that with Gustavus exactly the opposite occurred; for his whole life echoed the choral tone of his superterrestrial, i. e., subterranean training. For the reader must still remember being told in the 1st Section, that the Moravianly disposed wife of the Head-forester von Knör refused to let her daughter Ernestina play herself away at chess except on consideration that the winning bridegroom should promise in the marriage contract to educate and conceal their first child for eight years under the earth, in order to save him from being hardened at once to the beauties of Nature and the distortions of humanity. In vain did the Captain protest to Ernestina, that "in this way his mother-in-law would reduce the soldier to a mere lady's night-cap, and they should rather wait until a girl came." He, too, like many other men vented his vexation with the mother-in-law wholly upon his wife. But the old lady had already, before the baptism, bespoken a young man of heavenly beauty from Barby. The Captain, like all energetic people, could not endure the Moravian Diminuendo; he talked most about their talking so little; it even annoyed him that the Moravian inn-keepers did not overreach him far enough.

But our Genius--this fine name he shall keep for the present on every page--did not succumb and sicken under those heart-cramping spasms of Moravianism; he took from it only its softness and simplicity. Above his dreamy, enthusiastic eye rose a smooth, peaceful, guiltless forehead, which the fortieth year left as unruled[10] and unmarked as the fourteenth. He bore a heart which vices, as poisons do precious stones, would have crumbled to pieces; even another's face ploughed or sowed with sins oppressed and stifled his breast, and his inner man turned pale in the presence of filthy souls, as the sapphire on the finger of an unchaste man is said to lose its azure glow.

Still a sacrifice of so many years' duration for a child must have weighed hard and heavily even upon so fair a soul as the Moravian's; but he said: "O what heavenly opportunities it also afforded him, which, however, he promised only in the future to his Gustavus, who, surely, with God's help, would bloom up as he hoped, and no one ought certainly to wonder at his seeming self-sacrifice to a true and profound earthly life." And I hope, in fact, my more refined readers, whose thought is far-reaching, will not wonder, but rather will act as if they counted such an educational heroism simply quite natural. To be sure, meanwhile the virtue of most men is rather only an extra leaf and occasional poem in their common-place, newspaper life; only there are still two, three or more geniuses surely extant, in whose epic life Virtue is the heroine, and all else only by-play and episode, and whose upward course the people cannot so much wonder at as gaze upon with admiration.

The first dark years Gustavus spent as yet with his guardian-angel in a chamber above ground, merely keeping him away from those unwholesome coin-clippers of childhood, whom we have to thank for as many lame limbs as lame hearts--maids and nurses. I would rather these (dis-)Graces should educate us in the second decade than in the second year.

After that the Genius repaired with his Gustavus down into an old walled-up cavern in the castle garden, which the Captain only regretted he had not long ago had demolished. A cellar stairway led down, on the left hand, into the rocky cellar, and on the right into this vault, where stood a Carthusian Monastery with three chambers, which, on account of an old tradition, they called the Monastery of the Three Brothers; on its floor lay three stone monks, with their hewn hands crossed forever on their breasts; and perhaps under the effiges the mute originals themselves lay sleeping with their long-sunk and smothered sighs over a fleeting world. Here the fair Genius alone governed his little charge and bent every budding twig upward to the lofty stature of manhood.

Such miserable circumstantialities as, e. g., the purveying of the wash and matters of bed and board, my female readers will gladly spare me; but they will be more curious to know how the Genius educated. Very well--I say; he did not command, but simply accustomed and narrated. He never contradicted either himself or the child; nay, he had the greatest arcanum for making him good--he was so himself. Without this arcanum one might as well hire the Devil for a preceptor as be one himself, as the daughters of bad mothers prove. For the rest, the Genius was convinced the education of the heart began at the first sacrament (Baptism), that of the head at the second (Communion).

To hear of good men is as much as to live among them, and Plutarch's Lives make a deeper impression than the best text-books of moral philosophy for the use of academic teachers. For children especially there is no other moral teaching than example, related or witnessed; and it is an educational folly to think that in giving children reasons, one gives them anything more than these reasons, namely, the will and the power to follow these reasons. Oh! a thousand times happier than I beside my Tertius and Conrector wast thou, Gustavus, lying in the bosom, in the arms and under the lips of thy precious Genius, like a thirsty Alpine flower under its trickling cloud, drinking in nourishment to thy heart from the stories of good men, whom the Genius called uniformly Gustavuses and Blessed ones, of whom we shall soon see why this designation of them is printed in Italic type! As he was a good draughtsman, he gave him, as Chodowiecky does the romance writer, a drawing of every piece of history, and built around the little one this Orbis Pictus of good men, as the Almighty Genius builds around us the world of great Nature. Only he never gave him the drawing before, but only after the description, because hearing attracts children to seeing more strongly than seeing does to hearing. Another would have taken for this pedagogic lever, instead of the drawing-pen, the fiddle-bow or the piano-key; but not so the Genius; the feeling for painting develops itself, like the taste, very late, and needs, therefore, the help of education. It deserves the earliest unfolding, because it takes away the grating which sunders us from Nature, because it drives the

phantasying soul out again among external things, and because it turns the German eye to the difficult art of apprehending beautiful forms. Music, on the contrary, finds already in the youngest hearts (as with the rudest peoples) responsive chords: nay, its omnipotence is impaired rather by practice and years. Gustavus learned, therefore, as a deaf mute in his deaf and dumb cavern, to draw so well that even in his 13th year, his tutor sat to him, a beautiful man, who must make his appearance further on in this book.

And so, with both, did life glide softly along in the catacomb like a rill. The little one was happy; for his wishes did not reach out beyond his acquisitions of knowledge, and neither a fear nor a murmur distracted his peaceful soul. The Genius was happy; for the execution of this ten years' building plan was easier for him than the resolving upon it; the resolution conjures up at once all difficulties and deprivations before the soul. But the execution puts them far asunder and gives us the first real interest in it through the peculiar pleasure without which, in a thousand things, one's patience would be exhausted--that of seeing something daily growing under one's hands.

For both of them it was a good thing that down below there in this moral forcing-house dwelt also a schoolmate of Gustavus's, who was at the same time a half collaborator and adjutant of the Genius, who, however, by reason of certain defects of his heart derived from the whole education but a slim advantage, although he, as well as Gustavus, belonged to the class of animals with two heart-chambers and with warm blood. If I say that the greatest fault of the fellow-laborer was, that he would not drink brandy, one sees plainly that he had to be, not like Gustavus, trained up, but trained down,[11] because he was the neatest, blackest of--poodles that ever sprang round over the earth with a white breast. This intelligent dog and assistant teacher often relieved and released the head-master in play hours; besides, most of the virtues could be less well practised by him than by Gustavus upon him, and he kept for that purpose the necessary heteronymous vices ready:--in sleep the school-colleague easily snapped about him at living legs, in his waking hours at those which had been plucked off.

In this subterranean America, the three Antipodes had their day, i. e., a lamp lighted, when with us overhead it was night--their night, i. e., sleep, they had when with us the sun shone. The fair Genius had so arranged it on account of external noises and for the sake of his daily excursions. At that time, while his teacher enjoyed air and society, the little one lay down there in his monastery, with bandaged eyes, for chance and the cellar-door were not to be trusted. Sometimes he carried the sleeping veiled angel up into the fresh air and into the inspiring sunshine, as ants submit their larvæ to the brooding wings of the sun. Verily, were I a second or third Chodowiecky, I would at this moment stand up and engrave the scene for my own book in Swedish copper, not merely to depict how our pale red darling brought out into the open air slumbers under his bandage in a latticed rose-shadow, and like a dead angel lies before us in the infinite Temple of Nature, peacefully reposing with little dreams of his little cavern--there is something still more beautiful--thou still hast thy parents, Gustavus, and dost not see them; thy father, who stands beside thee, his eye bedimmed with love, and rejoices over the pure breathing that heaves thy little breast, and forgets in his joy at that how thou art being educated--and thy mother, who presses to thy face, on which lies the two-fold innocence of solitude and childhood, the love-hungering eyes which remain unsatisfied because they must not speak nor fondle. But she is pressing thee out of thy slumber, and thou must after a short time go down again to thy Plato's Cave.

The Genius had long been preparing him for the resurrection from his holy sepulchre. He said to him: "If thou art very good and not impatient, and lovest me and the poodle right well, then thou mayest die. When thou hast died, then I will die too, and we will go to heaven" (by which he meant the surface of the earth); "there it is right beautiful and magnificent. There they kindle no light in the day time, but one as large as my head stands in the air above thee and moves all day around thee beautifully--the roof of the great room is blue, and so high that no man can reach it with a thousand ladders--and the floor is soft and green, and, what is finer still, the poodles are there as large as our chamber. In heaven all is full of blessed ones, and there are all the good people, of whom I have so often told thee, and thy parents" (whose likenesses he had long since given him), "to whom thou art as dear as thou art to me, and who will give thee everything. But thou must be very good." "Ah! when, then, are we going, at last, to die?" said the little one, and his glowing fancy labored within him, and at every such description he ran up to a landscape painting and touched and interrogated every spear of grass.

Nothing acts so feebly upon children as a threat or a hope which is not fulfilled before evening. Only so long as one talks to them beforehand of a future examination or of their mature age, is it of any avail; hence many repeat this prefatory talk so often that it no longer leaves even a momentary impression. The Genius therefore constructed the long way to the greatest reward out of lesser ones, all which strengthened the impression and the certainty of the great one, and which will be found in the following section.

Apropos! I must repeat, that of all evils as regards education and children, in comparison with which the so much decried spelling-and-whipping-system is golden, there is none more poisonous, no more unwholesome mispickel, (or arsenical pyrite), and no more consuming pedagogical tape-worm than a French nurse.

FOURTH SECTION.

Lilies--Mountain Bugles--and an Outlook--are Signs of Death

In all the fibres of my memory (those reminder-threads and leaf-skeletons of so much miserable stuff), there rests no lovelier legend than this from the cloister of Corbey--that when the Angel of Death had to take away therefrom a spiritual brother, he laid, as a sign of his coming, a white lily in his pew. Would that I had this superstition! Our gentle Genius imitated the Death-angel and said to the little one: "When we find a lily we shall die soon after." How, after that, did the heaven-longing child, who had never seen a lily, seek everywhere to find one! Once, when his Genius had pictured to him the Genius of the Universe, not as a metaphysical Robinet's puzzle-image, but as the greatest and best man on earth; a fragrance never before present floated around it. The little child feels, but does not see; he stepped out into the cloister and--there lay three lilies. He does not know them, these white June-children; but the Genius, enraptured, takes them from him and says: "Those are lilies, they come from heaven; now we shall soon die." Long years after, the sight of a lily always revived the old thrill of emotion in Gustavus's heart, and surely one day in his actual death hour a lily will hover before him as the last gleaming quarter of the waning moon-earth.

The Genius proposed to himself to let him, on the first of June, his birthday, come up out of the earth. But by way of stimulating his soul to a higher (perhaps too high a) degree, he let him in the last week experience still two holy vigils of death. That is to say, as he had already pictured to

him beforehand the blisses of heaven, i. e., of the earth, with voice and face, especially the glories of the heavenly and spheral music, so now he ended with the intelligence, that often even to dying men, who were not yet gone up, this echo of the human heart sounded down, and that they then died the sooner because those tones dissolved the tender heart. Into the ear of the little one, music, that poesy of the air, had never yet entered. His teacher had long since made a so-called death-song; in this Gustavus naturally referred everything it said of the second life to the first, and they read it often without singing it. But in the last week all at once for the first time the Genius began to transfigure his mild didactic voice into the still softer singing-voice of the Moravian choral music, and to deliver the yearning death-song to the accompaniment of a mountain-bugle--that flute of longing--which he had arranged to have blown overhead; and the long-drawn adagio wails penetrated to their ears and hearts through the muffling earth like a warm rain....

In Gustavus's eye stood the first tear of joy--his heart turned over--he believed, even now he was dying of the tones.

O music! Lingering echo from a remote world of harmony! Sigh of the angel within us! When the word is speechless, and the embrace and the eye, even the weeping one, and when our dumb hearts lie solitary behind the grating of the breast; O, then it is through thee alone they cry to each other in their prisons, and their distant sighs meet and mingle and cheer them in their wilderness!

As at a real death, so in this mimetic one, the Genius led his pupil's approach toward heaven on the step-ladder of the five senses. He invested the semblance of death, to the advantage of the reality, with all possible charms, and Gustavus will certainly die one day more rapturously than one of us. While others bring us to see hell open, he promised him, that, like a Stephen, on his dying day he should see heaven open already, even before he ascended into it. And this actually occurred. Their subterranean valley of Jehoshaphat had beside the afore-mentioned cellar stairs a long, horizontal cross-passage, opening at the foot of the mountain out into the valley and the village which lay therein, and barred up at certain intervals by two doors. In the night before the first of June, when only the white sickle of the moon hung in the horizon, and like an old visage gray with age, turned in the blue night toward the hidden sun, he had arranged that in the midst of a prayer these doors should imperceptibly be thrown open--and now, Gustavus, for the first time in thy life, and on thy knees, thou lookest out into the broad theatre, nine million square miles broad, of human doings and sufferings; but only just as we in the nightly years of childhood and under the veil wherewith a mother guarded us from the flies, so dost thou glance out into the sea of night which spreads out before thee into immensity with swinging blossoms and shooting fire-flies, that seem to move among the stars, and with the whole multitudinous movement of creation! O, thou happy Gustavus! this night-piece shall remain long years after in thy soul, as a green island that has gone down in the sea, it shall lie encamped behind deep shadows and look yearningly at thee as a long past joyous eternity.... But after a few minutes the Genius folded him in his arms and veiled the eager eyes in his bosom; imperceptibly the heavenly gates swung to again and snatched his spring-time away.

In twelve hours he will be standing in the midst of it; but I am already oppressed with suspense as I draw nearer and nearer to this mild resurrection. It moves me, not merely because only one single time in my life can I have such a birthday, worthy of heaven, as Gustavus's, rise and set in my soul, a day whose fire I feel in my pulse, and of which only a faint reflection falls upon this paper--nor yet merely for the reason that presently the Genius withdraws, unknown both to author and to reader; but chiefly on this account, that I am to cast my Gustavus out of the still diamond mine, where the diamond of his heart formed itself so transparent and so brilliant, and so without spot or flaw, into the hot world which will soon hold up to it its concave mirror and crumble it to pieces; from his dead calm of the passions out into the so-called heaven, where by the side of the saints walk fully as many of the reprobate. But as he will then be at liberty also to gaze upon the face of great nature, it is not, after all, his fate alone that makes me anxious, but mine and that of others, for I reflect through how much rubbish our teachers drag our inner man as a malefactor before he is permitted to stand upright! Ah, had a Pythagoras, instead of the Latin one and the Syrian History, let our heart become a softly trembling Æolian Harp, on which Nature should play and express her feelings, and not an alarming fire-drum of all passions--how far--since Genius, but never Virtue, has limits, and everything pure and good can grow still purer--might we not have risen!

Just as Gustavus waits over a night, so will I postpone my picture one night that I may give it to-morrow with full rapture of soul.