Herb-cap, which he had stitched together out of simples for the
strengthening of his memory; "Would to Heaven," said I, "that Princes
instead of their Princely Hats, Doctors and Cardinals instead of theirs,
and Saints instead of martyr-crowns, would clap such memory-bonnets on
their heads!"--Thereupon, till the roasting and cooking within doors
were over, we marched out alone over the parsonage meadows, and talked
of learned matters, we packed ourselves into the ruined Robber-Castle,
on which my gossip, as already mentioned, has a literary work in hand. I
deeply approved, the rather as this Kidnapper-tower had once belonged to
an Aufhammer, his intention of dedicating the description to the
Rittmeister: that nobleman, I think, will sooner give his name to the
Book than to the Shock. For the rest, I exhorted my fellow-craftsman to
pluck up literary heart, and said to him: "A fearless pen, good gossip!
Let Subrector Hans von Fuechslein be, if he like, the Dragon of the
Apocalypse, lying in wait for the delivery of the fugitive Woman, to
swallow the offspring; I am there too, and have my friend the Editor of
the _Litteraturzeitung_ at my side, who will gladly permit me to give an
_anticritique_, on paying the insertion-dues!"--I especially excited
him to new fillings and return-freights of his Letter-Boxes. I have not
taken oath that into this biographical chest-of-drawers, I will not in
the course of time introduce another Box. "Neither to my godson, worthy
gossip, will it do any harm that he is presented, poor child, even now
to the reading public, when he does not count more months than, as
Horace will have it, a literary child should count years, namely,
_nine_."
[68] Thus defined by Adelung in his Lexicon: "_Kraeutermuetze_, in
Medicine, a cap with various dried herbs sewed into it, and which
is worn for all manner of troubles in the head."--ED.
In walking homewards, I praised his wife. "If marriage," said I to him,
"is the madder, which in maids, as in cotton, makes the colours visible,
then I contend, that Thiennette, when a maid, could scarcely be so good
as she is now when a wife. By Heaven! in such a marriage, I should write
Books of quite another sort, divine ones; in a marriage, I mean, where
beside the writing-table (as beside the great voting-table at the
Regensburg Diets, there are little tables of confectionery); where in
like manner, I say, a little jar of marmalade were standing by me,
namely, a sweetened, dainty, lovely face, and out of measure fond of the
Letter-Box-writer, gossip! Your marriage will resemble the Acacia-grove
we are now going to, the leaves of which grow thicker with the heat of
summer, while other shrubs are yielding only shrunk and porous shade."
As we entered through the upper garden-door into this same bower, the
supper and the good mistress were already there. Nothing is more pure
and tender than the respect with which a wife treats the benefactor or
comrade of her husband: and happily the Biographer himself was this
comrade, and the object of this respect. Our talk was cheerful, but my
spirit was oppressed. The fetters, which bind the mere reader to my
heroes, were in my case of triple force; as I was at once their guest
and their portrait-painter. I told the Parson that he would live to a
greater age than I, for that his temperate temperament was balanced as
if by a doctor so equally between the nervousness of refinement, and the
hot thick-bloodedness of the rustic. Fixlein said that if he lived but
as long as he had done, namely, two-and-thirty years, it would amount,
exclusive of the leap-year-days, to 280,320 seconds, which in itself was
something considerable; and that he often reckoned up with satisfaction
the many thousand persons of his own age that would have a life equally
long.
At last I tried to get in motion; for the red lights of the falling sun
were mounting up over the grove, and dipping us still deeper in the
shadows of night: the young mother had grown chill in the evening dew.
In confused mood, I invited the Parson to visit me soon in the city,
where I would show him not only all the chambers of the Palace, but the
Prince himself. Gladder there was nothing this day on our old world than
the face to which I said so; and than the other one which was the mild
reflexion of the former.--For the Biographer it would have been too
hard, if now in that minute, when his fancy, like mirror-telescopes, was
representing every object in a _tremulous_ form, he had been obliged to
cut and run; if, I will say, it had not occurred to him that to the
young mother it could do little harm (but much good), were she to take a
short walk, and assist in escorting the Author and architect of the
present Letter-Box out of the garden to his road.
In short, I took this couple one in each hand, instead of under each
arm, and moved with them through the garden to the Flachsenfingen
highway. I often abruptly turned round my head between them, as if I had
heard some one coming after us; but in reality I only meant once more,
though mournfully, to look back into the happy hamlet, whose houses were
all dwellings of contented still Sabbath-joy, and which is happy enough,
though over its wide-parted pavement-stones there passes every week but
one barber, every holiday but one dresser of hair, and every year but
one hawker of parasols. Then truly I had again to turn round my head,
and look at the happy pair beside me. My otherwise affectionate gossip
could not rightly suit himself to these tokens of sorrow: but in thy
heart, thou good, so oft afflicted sex, every mourning-bell soon finds
its unison; and Thiennette, ennobled with the thin trembling _resonance_
of a reverberating soul, gave me back all my tones with the beauties of
an echo.----At last we reached the boundary, over which Thiennette
could not be allowed to walk; and now must I part from my gossip, with
whom I had talked so gaily every morning (each of us from his bed), and
from the still circuit of modest hope where he dwelt, and return once
more to the rioting, fermenting Court-sphere, where men in bull-beggar
tone demand from Fate a root of Life-Licorice, thick as the arm, like
the botanical one on the Wolga, not so much that they may chew the sweet
beam themselves, as fell others to earth with it.
As I thought to myself that I would say, Farewell! to them, all the
coming plagues, all the corpses, and all the marred wishes of this good
pair, arose before my heart; and I remembered that little save the
falling asleep of joy-flowers would mark the current of their Life-day,
as it does of mine and of every one's.--And yet is it fairer, if they
measure their years not by the _Water-clock_ of falling tears, but by
the _Flower-clock_[69] of asleep-going flowers, whose bells in our
short-lived garden are sinking together before us from hour to hour.--
[69] Linne formed in Upsal a flower-clock, the flowers of which, by
their different times of falling asleep, indicated the hours of the
day.
I would even now--for I still recollect how I hung with streaming eyes
over these two loved ones, as over their corpses--address myself, and
say: Far too soft, _Jean Paul_, whose chalk still sketches the models of
Nature on a ground of Melancholy; harden thy heart like thy frame, and
waste not thyself and others by such thoughts. Yet why should I do it,
why should I not confess directly what, in the softest emotion, I said
to these two beings? "May all go right with you, ye mild beings," I
said, for I no longer thought of courtesies, "may the arm of Providence
bear gently your lacerated hearts, and the good Father, above all these
suns which are now looking down on us, keep you ever united, and exalt
you still undivided to his bosom and his lips!"--"Be you too right happy
and glad!" said Thiennette.--"And to you, Thiennette," continued I, "Ah!
to your pale cheeks, to your oppressed heart, to your long cold
maltreated youth, I can never, never wish enough. No! But all that can
soothe a wounded soul, that can please a pure one, that can still the
hidden sigh--O, all that you deserve--may this be given you; and when
you see me again, then say to me, 'I am now much happier!'"
We were all of us too deeply moved. We at last tore ourselves asunder
from repeated embraces; my friend retired with the soul whom he
loves;--I remained alone behind him with the Night.
And I walked without aim through woods, through valleys, and over
brooks, and through sleeping villages, to enjoy the great Night like a
Day. I walked, and still looked like the magnet, to the region of
midnight, to strengthen my heart at the gleaming twilight, at this
upstretching Aurora of a morning beneath our feet. White
night-butterflies flitted, white blossoms fluttered, white stars fell,
and the white snow-powder hung silvery in the high Shadow of the Earth,
which reaches beyond the Moon, and which is our Night. Then began the
Eolian Harp of the Creation to tremble and to sound, blown on from
above, and my immortal soul was a string in this Harp.--The heart of a
brother everlasting Man swelled under the everlasting Heaven, as the
seas swell under the Sun and under the Moon.--The distant village-clocks
struck midnight, mingling, as it were, with the ever-pealing tone of
ancient Eternity.--The limbs of my buried ones touched cold on my soul,
and drove away its blots, as dead hands heal eruptions of the skin.--I
walked silently through little hamlets, and close by their outer
churchyards, where crumbled upcast coffin-boards were glimmering, while
the once bright eyes that had laid in them were mouldered into gray
ashes.--Cold thought! clutch not like a cold spectre at my heart: I look
up to the starry sky, and an everlasting chain stretches thither, and
over and below; and all is Life, and Warmth, and Light, and all is
godlike or God....
Towards morning I descried thy late lights, little city of my dwelling,
which I belong to on this side the grave; I returned to the Earth; and
in thy steeples, behind the by-advanced great Midnight, it struck
half-past two; about this hour, in 1794, Mars went down in the west, and
the Moon rose in the east; and my soul desired, in grief for the noble
warlike blood which is still streaming on the blossoms of Spring: "Ah
retire, bloody War, like red Mars; and thou, still Peace, come forth
like the mild divided Moon!"--
THE END.
Transcriber's Notes
Footnotes in (Schmelzle's Journey to Flaetz) are numbered as in the original.
They are placed at the end of the paragraph, so as not to split the paragraph.
None of these footnotes seem to link directly to the text. This is explained
by the author in the introduction.
The following hyphenated words are used interchangeably with its
non-hyphenated form:
bed-chamber
bed-clothes
bed-room
bed-side
block-head
break-neck
class-room
corn-fields
day-light
dew-drops
down-pressed
down-stairs
good-will
hand-writing
hind-head
Litteratur-zeitung
love-sick
mid-day
re-awakened
Ring-dove
school-man
tear-drops
to-night
train-bearer
up-stairs
water-spouts
week-day
wood-cutter
Page 59
'the keeper had lost its tract,' may be 'the keeper had lost its
track,'. Unchanged.
Page 208
'her blue eye gleamed' may be 'her blue eyes gleamed'. Unchanged.
Page 376
'sheep-smearer' may be 'sheep-shearer'. Unchanged.
Page 408
'without the clam of the grave,' may be 'without the calm of the grave,'.
Unchanged.