A happy new year! A happy new year to my dear country, the land of old
integrity and truth! A happy new year to friends and enemies, Christians
and Turks, Hottentots and Cannibals! To all on whom God permits his sun
to rise and his rain to fall! Also to the poor negro slaves who have to
work all day in the hot sun. It's wholly a glorious day, the New Year's
Day! At other times I can bear that a man should be a little bit
patriotic, and not make court to other nations. True, one must not speak
evil of any nation. The wiser part are everywhere silent; and who would
revile a whole nation for the sake of the loud ones? As I said, I can
bear at other times that a man should be a little patriotic: but on New
Year's Day my patriotism is dead as a mouse, and it seems to me on that
day as if we were all brothers, and had one Father who is in heaven; as
if all the goods of the world were water which God has created for all
men, as I once heard it said.
And so I am accustomed, every New Year's morning, to sit down on a stone
by the wayside, to scratch with my staff in the sand before me, and to
think of this and of that. Not of my readers. I hold them in all honor:
but on New Year's morning, on the stone by the wayside, I think not of
them; but I sit there and think that during the past year I saw the sun
rise so often, and the moon,--that I saw so many rainbows and flowers,
and breathed the air so often, and drank from the brook,--and then I do
not like to look up, and I take with both hands my cap from my head and
look into that.
Then I think also of my acquaintances who have died during the year; and
how they can talk now with Socrates and Numa, and other men of whom I
have heard so much good, and with John Huss. And then it seems as if
graves opened round me, and shadows with bald crowns and long gray
beards came out of them and shook the dust out of their beards. That
must be the work of the "Everlasting Huntsman," who has his doings about
the twelfth. The old pious long-beards would fain sleep. But a glad new
year to your memory and to the ashes in your graves!