Hesperus or Forty-Five Dog-Post-Days Volume I Part 17

"Yes, indeed,--what one? but I mean this of to-day,--namely, that my eyes--thou mayst boldly ascribe it merely to a too feeble _tear-siphon_, under which head Pet.i.t comprehends all absorbing tear-ducts--run over, when, e. g., any one does me an injustice, or when I merely desire anything too strongly, or imagine to myself an approaching pleasure, or only, in fact, a strong sensation, or human life, or the mere weeping itself." ...

His good-natured eye stood full of water as he said it, and justified all.

"Dear Flamin, I wish I had been a lady, or a Moravian, or a player;--truly, if I wanted to make the spectators believe I was going about it (namely, weeping), it would be actually a fact, too, on the spot."--

And here he fell softly and fondly, with tears which had an excuse for flowing, upon the beloved breast.... But for the viper-cure and iron-cure of his manliness he needed nothing but a "Hm!" and a shrug of the whole body; thereupon the youths went back as men to the arbor.

There was nothing left there: the girls had stolen away to the meadows, where nothing was to be avoided, except high gra.s.s and bedewed shadows.

The empty arbor was the best absorbing tear-siphon for his eyes; nay, I gather from reports of the epistolary Spitz that he was vexed. As the sister came back by-and-by alone, his companion was vexed too. In fact, if somehow or other my hero--which would be a misfortune for me and him--should in time fall in love with Clotilda, then will the heroine make us both warm enough,--him in acting, me in copying,--for the very reason that she herself will _not_ be warm, because she has neither superfluous warmth nor superfluous coldness, but always the alternating temperature which changes with the subject of conversation, but not with the speaker; because she takes away from a tenderly disposed fellow-man all pleasure in praising her, as she pays out no t.i.the thereof, or at least in offending her, as she issues no letters of indulgence; and because one really, in his agony, a.s.sumes at last that one can commit no other sins against her except such as are sins against the Holy Ghost. Jean Paul, who has been in such cases, and has often stood for whole years in one spot before such mountain-fortresses with his storming-ladders and labarums and trumpeters, and, instead of the garrisons, taken _himself_ off by an honorable retreat,--this Paul, I say, can form a conception of what an amount of parchment, time, and printer's ink may have to be used up in the case of Sebastian _contra_ Clotilda, before we get things even to a _war-footing_. In fact, with a perfectly _rational_ woman a man never feels himself quite well; and only with a merely fine, fanciful, ardent, capricious one is he truly at home. One like Clotilda can make the best man, from mere distress and respect, frosty, stupid, and enraptured; and in most cases there comes in the additional misfortune, that the poor, worn-out, fond fool, by whom such an earthly angel absolutely will not let herself be wors.h.i.+pped, as the Apocalyptic one would not by the disciple John, can still seldom muster courage to say to the angel,--somewhat as one might to an angel of an opposite nature with the kingdoms of the world, demanding to be wors.h.i.+pped,--"Take thyself out of my sight!" Paul always in such cases takes himself away.----

Victor did not do this; he absolutely now could not get away from the house, i. e. from the village. The summer days seemed to him to rest in St. Luna, softly breathing, fragrant, blissful; and he was going to be cast out of this softly straying gondola into the slave-s.h.i.+p of the Court,--out of the milk-house of the Parsonage into the princely a.r.s.enic-house,--out of the _kindergarten_ of household love into the ice-field of court love. That was a sore thing to him here in the arbor,--and so sweet a thing in Tostato's shop!--When man's wishes and situations exchange places, he accuses the situations, not the wishes.

He could laugh at himself for it, he said, but he had a hundred reasons for lingering in St. Luna from one day to another: he was so much disgusted now with his intention of pleasing a man (the Prince) from any other motive than love; it was still more improbable that he should himself please than that he should be pleased; he would rather humor his own whims than those of crowned heads, and he knew for certain that in the first month he should tell the Minister von Schleunes satirical things to his very face, and in the second even the Prince; and, in fact, now in midsummer he should just be fit to act the complete court-knave, whereas in winter, &c.

Beside these hundred reasons, he had still weaker ones which he did not at all mention,--for instance, some such as these: He would gladly be about Clotilda, because he must necessarily, as it were, to justify his conduct,--but which, then, my dear, thy past or thy future?--disclose to her his knowledge about her consanguinity to his friend. To this disclosure there was wanting, what in Paris is dearest, _place_,--and then, too, the exordium. Clotilda was nowhere to be met alone.

Connoisseurs say that every secret one tells to one of the fair s.e.x is a sticking-plaster which attaches him to her, and often begets a second secret: was it for some such reason that Victor was so eager to contrive a way of showing to Clotilda his acquaintance with her sisterly relation?--

He stayed day after day, as, besides, the b.u.t.ter-week[187] of the marriage must go by first. He had already marriage-medals in his pocket. But he never could see Clotilda except a second at a time; and, according to Bonnet, one needs half a second for a clear idea,--according to Hooke, a whole one, in fact. Therefore, before he could form a complete conception of this still G.o.ddess, she was always gone.

At last more serious arrangements were made, not for departure, but for forming the purpose of it.... The sweetest minutes of a visit are those which once more postpone its close; the sweetest of all, those in which one already has cane or fan in hand, and yet does not go. Such minutes now encircled our Fabius of love; softer eyes said to him, "Hurry not!"

warmer hands drew him back, and the mother's tear asked him, "Wilt thou rob me of my Flamin so soon as to-morrow?"

"By no means," he answered, and kept his seat. Did not, I ask, the Chaplainess thrust for his sake her lingual executioner's sword into its sheath, because there was nothing he so hated as loud or silent defamations of a s.e.x which, more unhappy than ours, sees itself maltreated by two s.e.xes at once? For he often took maidens by the hand, and said: "Woman's faults, particularly _evil_ reports, moodiness, and sensitiveness, are _knot-holes_, which in the _green_ tree please us even into the honeymoon[188] as fine marble-veined _circles_, but which, in the _dry_, in the marriage-furniture, when the plug has shrunk and fallen out, gape open as ugly holes." Agatha now screwed her sewing-cus.h.i.+on to his writing-table and kissed him, whether he chose to look pleasant or sullen; Even the Chaplain sought to sweeten for him, if not the last days, which he dreamed away at his house, yet at least the last _nights_, for which purpose he needed nothing but a drum and a foot. The most fiery nocturnal witch-dances of the mice the Chaplain interdicted with his heel, that they might not wake up his guest; that is to say, he kept up against the foot-board of the bed from time to time a moderate cannonading, which knelled into the ear-trumpets of the dancers the more in proportion as it startled the ears of humanity.

Against the Euler's knight's-moves of the rats he took the field with only a mallet, wherewith, breaking in like a day of judgment on their pleasure-parties and hunting-parties, he merely thumped once or twice on a drum, extemporized out of the bed-quilt.

Matthieu was invisible, and, as courtiers mimic princes in everything, was parodying the nuptial days of his prince at least by little nuptial _hours_ of his own. The powder which issued out of cannons and the cornucopias of the firework-makers, the _vivat_ which was prayed from pulpits and shouted from taverns, and the expenses one incurred for all this, were, I think, so considerable, that the greatest prince need not have been ashamed to ill.u.s.trate therewith his marriage and his--ennui.

Coldness has forever a _speaking-trumpet_, and sensitiveness an _ear-trumpet_. The arrival of an unloved princely corpse or bride is heard of at the polar circles; on the contrary, when we inferiors fill our graves or our arms with loved beings, there fall only a few, unheard tears, disconsolate or blissful.

Flamin pined for the session-table, whose labors were now soon to begin, and he could not comprehend this delay.... At last, for once, and with all seriousness, the day of departure was fixed, the 10th of August; and I am sure Victor would not have been on the 14th still in St. Luna, had not the Devil on the 8th brought along a Tyrolese.

It is the same fellow who day before yesterday made his entry among us at Scheerau, with a wax retinue which he had got together, half from the imperial states and half from among the literati, and with the wax hands of these twin brothers of man took money from our purse. It is stupid, that Spitz did not bring me the present dog's-day the day before yesterday; I could myself have asked the churl, who embossed, in St. Luna, Victor and the Chaplain in wax, what was the real name of Victor, and of Eymann, and of St. Luna itself. The result is, that I am still, with an allowable and biographical curiosity about this carpenter of men, who surrounds us with awful reflections of our little being, following on his heels.

Victor must, therefore, again tarry; for he had himself and the Chaplain baked in wax, in order to give, in the first place, to the latter, who had a childish fondness for all casts, dolls, and puppets, and, secondly, to the family, who longed to quarter the waxen mock-Victor in his vacated chamber, a greater pleasure than to himself.

For he had a horror of these flesh-colored shadows of himself. Even in childhood, among all ghost-stories, those of people who had seen themselves crept with the coldest hand over his heart. Often at evening, before going to bed, he surveyed his trembling body so long, that at last he detached it from himself, and saw it standing thus alone beside his self and gesticulating as a strange form; then he would lay himself down, quaking, with this strange form, in the grave of sleep, and the darkling soul felt itself like a Hamadryad, grown over by the pliant fleshy bark. Hence he felt deeply the difference and the long interval between his self and its bark, when he looked for some time on another's body, and still more deeply when he contemplated his own.

He sat opposite the embossing-stool and the embossing-tools, but fixed his eyes on a book again, so as not to see the corporeal form, in which he carried himself round, distant and duplicated. The reason why he nevertheless could endure the reduplication of his face in the gla.s.s can only be, that he regarded the supernumerary in the gla.s.s either merely as a superficial portrait without cubic contents, or as the only archetype with which we compare other duplicates of our person.... Upon these points I can never speak, myself, without a certain tremor....

The wax-copy of Victor, to express his majority, was arrayed in a _toga virilis_, an overcoat which the original had cast off; likewise the chamber which the living one vacated was cleared out. The Chaplain proposed to himself to place this cheap edition of Horion in the window when the better one was gone, in such a manner that all the school youth, who learned from the chorister manners and _mores_, should doff their hats to it when they came tearing out of the school-house.

Now at last!--For Mat came. The wrung-out cheeks of the latter, and his whole body, which had been under the lemon-squeezers of night-feasts, gave evidence that he did not lie when he said the princely bridegroom looked even eight times wretcheder, and was prostrate with the gout. He added in his bitter way, which Victor little liked, that these pale great people had in fact no blood except the little they cupped from their subjects or what stuck to their hands, as insects carry no red blood about with them, save what they have sucked from other creatures.

This reminded Victor of his medical duties to this prince. Either Mat's wasted form,--for immoral night-life makes features and complexion still more repulsive than the longest confinement to the sick-bed,--or the recollection of his Lords.h.i.+p's warnings, or both, made him quite as odious to our court-physician as the latter through his court-doctors.h.i.+p had become to him: this secret poison of Matthieu's, however, manifested itself, not by an abated, but by an increased, almost ironical courteousness. On the contrary, Mat and Flamin seemed to be more familiar with one another than ever.

In the forenoon, after shaving, Victor jumped up without was.h.i.+ng himself again, and immediately packed up his boot-jack, and burst the suspenders of his pantaloons, and bespoke additional hands to discharge his life-ballast, (on account of his miserable packing,) and then stow it again. For he always gave over the whole trustees.h.i.+p of the lumber of our petty life's furniture to strange hands, and that with such a contempt for the trumpery and such a recklessness of expenditure,--I never mean, indeed, to calumniate my hero, but, notwithstanding, it is proved by Spitz that he never collated the current money of a gold-piece when he changed it into silver, nor ever beat down in trade a Jew, Roman, or Moravian,--to such a degree, I say, did he carry this, that the whole female Hanse in St. Luna cried, "What a fool!" and that the Chaplainess always in the market-square slipped herself into his place. But he was incorrigible, because he made the journey of life, and therefore the luggage of the journey, look so diminutive through his philosophic eyes, and because nothing made him blush like the least appearance of self-interest: he ran off from all arrangements, outriders, and stage-rehearsals, when they appeared on his account; he was ashamed of every pleasure which was not to be divided, at least into two bites, one for a fellow-eater; he said, the forehead of a Hospodar[189] must have a.s.sumed the hardness of his crown, for otherwise such a man could not possibly endure what often, merely on his behalf, was done by a whole county,--the music, the triumphal arches, the odes, the cries of joy in prose, and the frightful cannonades.

He had now nothing more to discharge in St. Luna than a mere flat civility; for thus much may I well a.s.sert without vanity, that a hero whom I have chosen for mine will have, I trust, sufficient good-breeding to go to the Chamberlain Le Baut and say, "_Au revoir!_"

Besides, to such state visits he must now accustom himself.

Mat, too, was over there, that image of a Cupid with bristly, plucked, drooping wings, tossed to the Chamberlain's lady: the latter joked with him about those vacant looks, which betrayed the intermittent pulse of his love. Le Baut was playing chess with Mat,--Clotilda sat at her little work-table full of silk-flowers, in the midst of this n.o.ble trio.... Ye poor daughters! what people have you not often to welcome and hear through! To Clotilda, however, this family friend was nothing but a stuffed-out mummy, and she knew not whether he came or went.

Sebastian, as adoptive son of Fortune, as heir of the paternal post of favorite, was to-day received at the Chamberlain's with uncommon civility. Verily, if the courtier shuns unfortunates because sympathy for their sufferings comes over him too heavily, so does he gladly seek the society of the fortunate, because he loves to partic.i.p.ate in their joy. The Chamberlain, who even continued to bow before one who, in his fall from a throne, hung midway in the air, naturally bent himself still lower before one who was in the act of making the opposite pa.s.sage.

Victor joined the women, but with an eye that strayed away to the chess-board, in order, if he should be embarra.s.sed, immediately to have at hand a pretext for changing his attention or taking his leave. It was ingenious: for every word which he or the women said was a move at chess; he was obliged to conceal his coldness toward the Le Baut, that is, toward the stepmother,--how much did she know that nothing graces a mother more than a perfect daughter?--and his _warmth_ toward the stepdaughter. The reader must not ask: "What warmth, then, could the old stepmother desire?" For in the higher ranks claims are not altered by blood-relations.h.i.+p or age; merely in the lower is this the case; hence I always fear that what I address to the daughter may weary the mother, and I always cast about, and rightly, when she comes, for a better thread of discourse. Victor easily concealed his _coldness_ by virtue of humanity, which, with him, so often degenerated into a good-natured flattery of immoral hopes; and when a woman wanted to have him fall in love with her, he would say: "I cannot really tell the good little lamb, 'I would rather not.'" His _warmth_ toward Clotilda he concealed--badly, not because it was too strong, but precisely because it was not yet enough so. It is natural: a young man of education can, if he will, conceal and bury in silence his _reciprocated_ love, without making a pulpit announcement, but an _unreturned_ love, one which he himself calls nothing more than mere regard, he lets blaze out from him without cover. For the rest, I beg the world to sit down and consider, that my hero has not the Devil in his skin or sixteen years over his head, but that he cannot possibly feel a love for a person who hangs a Moses' veil over her sentiments and over her charms. Love begins and rises, throughout, only on reciprocal love, and with the lovers' mutual finding-out of each other. He has merely regard, but a very great, a growing and anxious regard; in short, his regard is that cold pulsating point in the yolk of the heart--the metaphor is drawn from an egg--to which the least outward warmth, often after years, imparts growing life and Cupid's wings.

He now at the work-table investigated Clotilda's warmth with the pyrometer; but I cannot go beside myself for joy, that he found, on a scale subdivided into the minutest parts, her warmth to have risen 1/111 of a line. For he is off the track: I would sooner rely on Lavater's forehead-measurer than on the heart- and warmth-measurer of a love-seeking man, who confounds his interpretations with his observations, and accidents with intentions. His pyrometer may, however, be right; for towards good men one is, when bad ones are by, (consider only Mat,) warmer than usual.

Let no one blame Herr Le Baut and Frau Le Baut for congratulating my hero on the good fortune of going to such a court, to see such a prince,--the greatest in Germany, said _he_,--to such a princess,--the loveliest in Germany, said _she_. Mat smiled between Yes and No. The old man went on with his chess, the old woman with her praise. Victor saw with contempt how little possible it would be, in the case of two such souls, who held the steps of the throne for a scale of being, and the glacier of the throne for an Olympus and an Empyraeum, and knew not where, except on this eminence, to find their happiness,--to give them better ideas of happiness, and worse ones of the eminence.

Nevertheless, he was obliged to confess to Clotilda, who had on her face more than a No to the _eulogy_, that he negatived the whole of it as n.o.bly as she. He therefore kneaded praise and blame together, according to an Horatian mixture, in order to make neither satirical nor flattering allusions to two dismissed court-people.

"It is painful to me," said he, "that there are only pleasures there, and no occupations,--mere baskets of confectionery, and not a single work-bag, not to say no work-table like this one."

"Do you think," asked Clotilda, with striking earnestness, "that all court-feasts pay for a single court-service?"

"No," said he, "for one ought to be paid for the feasts themselves. I maintain there is nothing but drudgery there, and no enjoyment: all their amus.e.m.e.nts are only the illumination, the interlude, and the decorations, which please the player, who is thinking of his part, less than the spectator."

"It is, at all events, good _to have been there_," said the old woman.

"Certainly," said he; "for it is good not always to stay there."

"But there are persons," said Clotilda, "who cannot make themselves happy there, simply because they do not love to be there."

That was very fine and forbearing, but intelligible only to Victor's heart.

"I would advise a fine enthusiast" (said he, and made no account, as usual, of the apparent contradiction between Victor's _life_ and Victor's _opinions_) "or a fiery poet to stay at home,--the _flights_ of either, instead of _pas_, would be in court-life what an hexameter is in prose, which the critics cannot bear,--and to the soul with the softest sensibilities I would say, Be off with them! the _heart_ is there treated as a superfluous member, as in the six-fingered family in Anjou the sixth _finger_ is." ...

The old woman shook her head quickly to the left.

"And yet," he continued, "I would take all three for a month to court and make them unhappy, in order to make them wise."

The Chamberlain's family could not accommodate themselves to Victor's style so well as my reader, who to my exceeding delight so cleverly distinguishes humor and the talent of looking at all sides of a thing from flattery and skepticism. Clotilda had slowly shaken her head at the last proposition. In fact, all battled to-day _for_ and _against_ him, in that partial tone which women and relatives always a.s.sume towards a stranger, when an hour before they had carried on the same suit, but with a practical application, with their own kin.

Victor, who had long been fearing: that he should become disconcerted, went off at last to where he had been so often looking,--to the chess-table, where they were playing with the greatest desire to--lose.

The Chamberlain,--we all know how it was with him; he wrote nothing but commendatory letters for the whole world, and the sacramental cup would have been more to his taste, could he have drunk from it a _toast_ to some important man's health,--that personage only promoted as well as he could with the dry chess-statues another's success at the expense of his own; he was glad to lose, provided only Matthieu won. And then, too, he resembled those shamefaced souls who love to bestow their benefits secretly, and he could not find it in his heart to tell his adversary that he was securing him the victory; he took almost greater pains to conceal himself as a courtier than to _conquer himself_ as a Christian. Such a love ought, it would seem, to have been more warmly requited than by open malice; but Mat had the same object in view, and declined the victory which the other threw into his hands, like a real sharper. In vain did Le Baut devise the best moves for checkmating one's self. Mat matched him with still better ones, and threatened every minute to be checkmated too. And every one pities the poor Chamberlain, hunted about on the chess-board, and fearing, like a coquette, that he shall _not_ be conquered. It became at length, for a soft-souled eye, which certainly forgives the weak one sooner than the wicked one, no longer endurable; Victor, with a thousand excuses to the weak one and full of malice toward the malicious one, entered into the steeple-chase, and obliged the Page to accept his advice and his charitable subsidies, and to lay hold of military operations which he proposed of such worth, that the man with the office of Chamberlain's key, at last, in spite of his fears and in spite of the worst prospects,--lost the game. All present saw through all present, as princes do through each other in their public--playbills.

He got at last his farewell audience, but very small solace. The fair form, beneath which all his ideals of beauty stood only as heraldic bearers and caryatides, was even colder than at the reception, and persisted in being only the echo of the parental courtesy. The only thing which still kept him up was a--thistle: namely, an optical one which had been sowed on the mosaic floor. That is to say, he took notice that Clotilda during the farewell avoided with her foot this flower-piece (which she certainly must have known) as if it were the original. In the evening he drew his chains of inferences, as they are taught in the universities; he engrafted upon this mock-thistle all the roses of his destiny. "She was certainly _distrait_, and why? I ask,"

he said, speaking into his pillow; "for, besides, they have not yet detected my feelings over yonder," he a.s.serted, as he laid himself on the second pillow. "O thou sweet eye that went down on the thistle, rise again in my sleep, and be the moon of my dreams!" said he, when he was already half-way into both. It was merely out of modesty that he thought he was not discovered, because he did not look on himself as remarkable enough to be observed.

The 20th of August, 179-, was the great day when he took up his march to Flachsenfingen. Flamin had already trotted off at four o'clock in the afternoon, in order to avoid a leave-taking which he hated. But our Victor loved to bid farewell, and loved to tremble in the last silences of parting. "O ye poor, egoistic mortals!" he said,--"besides; this polar life is but so bald and cold; besides, we stand weeks and years near each other without stirring with the heart anything better than our blood,--only two or three glowing moments hiss and go out on the glaciers of life,--why do you still avoid everything that draws you out of your commonplace, and that reminds you how man loves? No! and if I went to the bottom, and if I could thenceforward no longer console myself, I would still, with bare heart and with all my wounds bleeding, dissolved and sinking, I would still press to my bosom the beloved being who must leave me, and would still say, It does me good!" Cold, self-seeking, comfortable persons avoid leave-taking, just as unpoetic ones of too intense sensibilities do; women, on the contrary, who alleviate all their sorrows by talking, and people of poetic temperament, who relieve all theirs by fantasying, court it.

At six o'clock in the evening,--for it was only a skip to Flachsenfingen,--when the cattle came home, he sallied forth, accompanied by the whole family. On his more fortunate arm--mine has to bestir itself only for the good of science--hung the Britoness, and on his left Agatha; to the sister the poor house-poodle (Apollonia) had buckled herself, who thought, nevertheless, she might touch and enjoy, despite the sisterly interpolation and mediating spirit, the dear Doctor. So do the sparks of love, like the electric and magnetic element, dart through a medium of twenty interposed bodies. A philosopher, who sits down and considers that our fingers come not, in fact, a thumb nearer to the beloved soul, whether only the globe of the brain or that of the earth lie between them and it, will of course say, "All very natural!" Hence this sedentary philosopher explains why maidens half-love at the same time the male acquaintances of their beloved,--why the cane-chair of Shakspeare, the clothes-drawer of Frederick II., the bob-wig of Rousseau, content our yearning hearts.----

But no one, except the queen-bee of this streaming swarm, wanted to go back again. "Only just as far as the six trees," said Agatha. When they had arrived at these frontier posts and boundary-trees of to-day's pleasure, there were seven of them, and there was a general agreement that _they_ were not meant, and they must go farther. The one who is escorted grows generally more and more nervous, and the escort more and more delighted, the longer it lasts. "Do let us go as far as that ploughman!" said the sharp-sighted Britoness. But at last our hero observed, that this Pillar of Hercules of their journey was itself a moving column, and that the ploughman was only a wayfarer. "The best thing is," said he, and turned about, "for me to go back, and not start till to-morrow." The Chaplain said: "As far as the old palace" (i. e.

there was still _one_ wall of it remaining); "besides, I usually go there evenings!" But beyond this frontier fort of the loveliest of evenings the chattering column deceptively extended its march, and the eyes were forgotten for the ears. As, consequently, in these boundary disputes, one main article after another was broken by separate articles, there was really nothing further to be done, except to make the following attempt. "Only so far did I mean to have you go," said Victor;--"now you must keep on with me and spend the night at the apothecary's." "In fact," said the Chaplain's wife, coolly, "we'll go along together till sundown; we surely are not going to turn our backs upon this lovely sun." And certainly the evening had kindled nothing but _feux-de-joie_ in the sun, in the clouds, on the earth, and on the water.

On the hill they saw already the spires of the city; the sun, that chosen turnstile of the escort, poured out of his deep hiding-place his gold-trailing purple streams over the beds of shadow. There, on the hill, as the sun vanished, Victor folded his arms round the married couple, and said, "O, make yourselves as happy as you do me, and return to your home in gladness!"--and then he took the sisters to his enraptured heart, and said, "Good, good night! I love you!"--and then he saw them all going back with their hidden sighs and tears; and then he called out, "Truly, I shall soon come back; it is really only a jump from one place to the other"; and then he cried after them, "I shall be a poor devil, if we are separated!"--and then his heavy eye followed them through all branches and hollows, and only when the loving company had sunk into the last valley, as into a grave, did he close his eyes and think on the ceaseless separations of man....

At last he opened his eyes toward the outspread, obscured city, and thought: "Amidst that raised-work, in which men nestle with their little life, thy little days, too, are shut in,--this is the veiled birthplace of thy future tears, thy future raptures;--ah! with what eyes shall I look down again, years hence, over this misty environment,--and ... I am a fool! are, then, 2,300 houses standing only on my account?"

_Postscript_. This sixteenth post-day the Mining-Superintendent has concluded in regular order at the end of June.