Hesperus or Forty-Five Dog-Post-Days Volume I Part 8

Flamin entered with some coldness, which was increased by the sight of the letter. Victor was not to be made cold; only when, down below, no one reminded him by a word of his yesterday's Dithyrambics, then did he, from fear of being betrayed, make an angry, covert oath, if _she_ came, not to come,--which could be kept, too, for she did not come. She had still to bring away luggage from Maienthal, to besprinkle her friends.h.i.+ps, and once more to set foot in the magic circle of her beloved teacher; and had, therefore, gone off.

The following weeks danced now like just so many hours in Anglaises and Cotillons before Sebastian. His forenoons hung full of fruits, his afternoons full of flowers; for in the morning his soul with its exertions lived in his head, towards evening in his heart. In the evening one loves cards, poems, confidential talk, woman, music, very much; in the morning, very little; in the spirit-hour is that love at its highest strength.

Except two other doubts that troubled him,--the first was, whether his Emanuel would write to him soon enough to enable him to visit him before he should be harnessed to the pole of the court and state-carriage; the second was the fear of being so too soon,--now he had hardly anything to do except to be happy or to make others so; for precisely in these weeks fell his holy or Sabbatical weeks...

I know not whether the reader is yet acquainted with them; they are not found in the improved almanac; but they occur regularly (with some men) either immediately after the vernal equinox or in the after-summer.

With Victor the first alternative was the one,--exactly in the middle of spring. I need not inquire whether it is the body, the weather, or who or what, that rings in this truce of G.o.d in our breast; but I must describe how they look, the Sabbatical weeks. Their form is precisely this: in a holy or Sabbatical week, many--e. g. I--are put off with mere Sabbatical days or hours. At first, one slumbers lightly, as on balanced clouds,--one awakes like a serene day. At evening one had made a firm resolve beforehand, and had therefore written it down in ciphers on the door, to grow better, and to apply the weeding-knife every day to one bed of weeds at least,--on awaking one is still so minded, and in fact carries it out. The gall, that excitable spirit, which usually, when it is poured, instead of into the duodenum, into the heart or heart's blood, sends up boiling and hissing clouds, is now in a few seconds absorbed or precipitated, and the exalted mind _feels calmly the bodily effervescence_ without any of its own. In this lull of the wings of our lungs, one utters only soft, low words, one clasps lovingly the hand of every one with whom he speaks, and one thinks, with melting heart, "Ah! I could not begrudge it to one of you, if you were still happier than I." On the clean, healthy, tranquil heart, as on the Homeric G.o.ds, light wounds immediately close. "No!" thou keepest saying in the Sabbatical week, "I must for some days to come maintain this tranquillity." Thou requirest, as material for joy, hardly anything but existence; nay, the sun-sting of a rapture would condense this cool, magical, transparent morning haze into a tempest. Thou lookest up steadily into the blue, as if thou wouldst fain give thanks and weep, and around upon the earth as if thou wouldst say, "Wherever I might be to-day, there I should be happy!" and a heart full of sleeping storms thou carriest, as a mother does her child sunk into slumber, shyly and watchfully over the soft flowers of joy.... But the storms start up, nevertheless, and a.s.sail the heart!...

Ah, what must we not all already have lost, if the pictures of blissful days win from us nothing but sighs! O tranquillity, tranquillity, thou evening of the soul, thou still Hesper of the weary heart, which always abides beside the sun of virtue, if at thy very name our inner being is dissolved into tears, ah, is not that a sign that we seek thee, but have thee not?

Victor owed the _siesta_ of his heart to the sciences,[87] particularly _Poetry_ and _Philosophy_, which two move, as do _comets_ and _planets_, around the _same sun_ (that of Truth), and differ only in the _shape_ of their orbits, as comets and poets have the _greater ellipse_. His training and talents had accustomed him to the vital air and oxygen of the study, which is also the only dormitory of our pa.s.sions, and that only cloister and haven of bliss for men who would escape the broad whirlpool of the senses and fas.h.i.+ons. The sciences are, more than virtue, their own reward, and they make one a partaker of happiness,--she only makes him worthy of it; and the prize-medals, pensions, and positive rewards, and the _patent_ which many scholars would fain get for their studying, belong at most to the literary apprentice-brethren, who make it a penance and a torture, but not to the masters of the chair, who make it a pleasure and a delight. A scholar has no _ennui_; only a throne-inc.u.mbent has to prescribe for himself, against this nervous consumption, a hundred court-festivals, cavaliers of honor, whole countries, and human blood!

Good heavens! a reader who, in Victor's Sabbatical weeks, should have taken a ladder and climbed up to his window,--would he have espied anything there but a jubilant thing, that went gliding about over the fields of learning as among islands of the blest?--a thing which, in its ecstasy, knew not whether it should think or compose or read, and particularly _what_ or _whom_, out of the whole _high_ n.o.bility of books ranged before it. In this bridal chamber of the mind (such are our study-chambers), in this concert-hall of the finest voices gathered from all times and places, the aesthetic and philosophical enjoyments almost overpowered his faculty of choice. Reading hurried him into writing, writing to reading, thinking to sentiment, and the latter to the former.

I could go on with more satisfaction in this description, if I had previously written how he studied; namely, that he never wrote without having read himself full[88] on the subject, and the reverse, that he never read without having first _thought_ himself _hungry_. One should, he said, without an intense occasion and impulse from without, i. e.

from within, not only not make verses, but even a philosophical paragraph; nor should any one set himself down and say: "Now, at three o'clock on this Bartholomew's day, I will go at it, and cleverly prove the following proposition." I can now proceed.

Now when, in this mental laboratory, which served less for a.n.a.lytic chemistry than for synthetic science, he ascended from the turmaline which attracts grains of ashes to the sun which attracts worlds, and even to the unknown sun toward which solar systems fly; or when the anatomical charts were to him the perspective sketch of a divine architecture, and the dissecting-knife became the gnomon of his favorite truth: that, in order to believe in a G.o.d, there was need of nothing more than two men, of whom the one might be dead, too, that the living one could study him, and turn over his leaves[89]; or when Poetry, as a second nature, as a second music, wafted him upward softly on her invisible ether, and he chose undecidedly between the pen and the keys, when he wanted to communicate aloft; ... when, in short, in his heavenly sphere, supported on a human cervical-vertebra, the nebula of ideas gradually resolved itself into bright and dark parts, and beneath an unseen sun filled itself more and more with ether,--when one cloud became conductor to another,--when at last the gleaming ma.s.s of cloud came together,--then did the inner heaven (as the outer one often does), by eleven o'clock in the forenoon, grow from all the flashes into one sun, from all the drops into one flood, and the whole heaven of the upper faculties came down to the earth of the lower ones, and ... some blue patches of the second world were for a flying moment open.

We cannot delineate our inner states more philosophically and clearly than by metaphors, i. e. by the colors of related states. The narrow defamers of metaphors, who, instead of the brush, would rather give us the black-lead, ascribe to the _coloring_ the unrecognizableness of the _drawing_; but they ought to charge it merely on their non-acquaintance with the original subject. Verily, nonsense plays hide-and-seek more easily in the roomy, abstract, artificial words of the philosophers--since words, like Chinese shadows, increase with their circ.u.mference at once the obscurity and the emptiness of their contents--than in the narrow green hulls of the poets. From the Stoa and the Portico of thought one must have an outlook into the Epicurean gardens of poetry.

In three minutes I shall come back to my story. Victor said, he must have mountain-, garden-, and swamp-meadows, because he possessed _three_ different whimsical souls, which he must drive to pasture on three sorts of grounds. He meant by that, not, as the scholastics do, the vegetative, animal, and intellectual souls, nor, as the fanatics do, the three parts of man, but something very like,--his _humorous_, _sentimental_, and _philosophical_ souls. Whoever should take away from him one of these, he said, might as well strip him of the remaining ones. Nay, sometimes, when the humorous soul happened at the moment to be sitting uppermost on the revolving cross-bench, he carried his levity so far as to express the wish that a joke might be made even in Abraham's bosom, and that he might with his three souls sit down at once on the twelve thrones.

His afternoons he gave up now to a streaming humor which did not even find its proper hearers,--now to the people of the parsonage,--now to all the school-going youth of St. Luna, whose stomachs (to the vexation of every good schoolmaster) he provisioned more than their heads, because he thought that, in the short years when the bib expands to a napkin, enjoyment must find its way over the children's _serviette_, and had no other entrance than the mouth. He never went out without a whole military-chest full of small change in his waistcoat pocket. "I scatter it without thinking," said he; "but if from this metallic seed sowed broadcast whole evenings of joy spring up for the poor devils, and if just the innocent ones so seldom have them, why shall not one do something for the saved virtue and for pleasure at once?"

He said he had heard moral lectures, and desired for his extra-judicial donations and merciful endowments nothing but forgiveness. His Flamin, who p.r.o.nounced him a careless sowing-machine on rocks, spent his little holidays before approaching the session-table in ardent hopes of being serviceable there, and in preparations for being able to be so; often, when the higher patriotism, with saintly halo and Moses'-glory, broke out on the beloved Flamin's face, tears of friendly gladness stood in Victor's eyes, and in the moment of a lyric philanthropy both swore on their hearts for the future a mutual support in well-doing and joint sacrifices for mankind. The difference between them was merely reciprocal exaggeration,--Flamin treated vice too intolerantly, Victor too tolerantly; the former, as administrative counsellor, rejected, like the Anabaptists, all festivals, and, like the first Christians, all flowers (in every sense); the latter, like the Greeks, loved both too much;--the former would have sacrificed to honor human victims; the latter knew no robber of honor but his own heart: he overleaped at the tea-table the paper half-n.o.bility of our miserable points of honor, and, mocking at mockery, submitted himself only to the high n.o.bility of virtue....

Victor sucked, with the feet of a green-frog, on every flower-leaf of joy,--at children, animals, village-Lupercalia, lessons; but dearest of all to him was Sat.u.r.day. Then he made excursions through the glad unrest of the village, along by servant-men, hammering at their scythes, not to magnetize, but to sharpen them, and before the shop-door of the schoolmaster, at which his eye, like a Swiss, often stood for half an hour. For he could very well study the state of St.

Luna's commerce in the little great-adventure-trade of the schoolmaster, who knew no smaller merchants' exchange than the one in his breeches' pocket. From this East India House he saw at a late hour people procuring the cheap pleasures of Sunday,--the wholesale dealer (the schoolmaster is meant), supported by his negro slaves, made the Sunday morning of St. Luna sweet with his syrup and hot with his coffee; and as well by the tobacco-culture of Germany was this tradesman enabled with spiral cables of pigtail to furnish the heads of the pipes, as through the silk culture the daughter's heads with Sabbath-streamers out of his Auerbach's court.... Our hero all knew.

From every kennel a dog came wagging his tail to meet him to whom he had thrown in bread; from every window children screamed after him, whom he had bantered; and many boys, whom he pa.s.sed, counted themselves happy if they had a cap on,--for then they could take it off before their master. For his first growing up in St. Luna was the history of St. Luna, which must have been drawn from the oral blue-books of the historic persons, and from the Imperial Postilion, the Parson's wife.

This last, as a Mrs. Plutarch, always held up two characters, like pieces of cloth, side by side; and her husband read to him according to the best of his science and conscience upon the Church- and Reformation-history of his diocese. Victor devoted himself to this microcosmic world-history from two motives: first, in order--which is the object of professional students with the larger history--to dismiss it again clean from memory; secondly, in order to be as much at home in the village as the constable or the midwife, whence he hoped to derive the advantage of being grieved if a St. Lunite should die, and glad if he had previously married.

Now the story strides forward again, from one day to another, as if on the stones of the stream of time.

So sweetly then had the spring pa.s.sed along before him with Sabbatical weeks, with Whitsuntides, with white blossoms, which fell gradually, like b.u.t.terflies' wings, from the flying season. Victor had postponed the visit to Le Baut, thinking, "I shall have, at all events, to budge soon enough down out of the soft lap of Nature, and up to the court wire-bench and the object-holder (the throne) of the court-microscope";--he had, to be sure, daily exhorted himself, now, soon, before Clotilda's arrival, to start so as not to draw any suspicion upon his intentions, but always in vain, ... when suddenly (for the day before it was the 13th of July) the 14th appeared, and with it Clotilda's luggage without her. Now he actually (according to the official dog-reports) crossed on the 15th the Brook of St. Luna,[90] pa.s.sed the Alps of the Chamberlain's steps, and pitched his Caesar's tent on Le Baut's sofa. He knew that to-day no one was there, not even Mat.

"Heaven keep our politeness safe and sound," said he; "without it there were not only no holding out among a set of knaves, but it pays also minute-tributes of pleasure, whereas benevolence pays only quarterly a.s.sessments and exchequer-instalments, and charitable contributions."

Mr. and Mrs. Le Baut were as courteous as never before (I could swear, they had nosed out something of Victor's court-doctor's hat and Doctor's crown); only they knew not what sort of a mouth-piece they should screw on to such a whimsically twisted instrument as Victor was.

Like all study-inhabiting crustacea, he would rather talk of things than of persons; Flamin, however, the reverse. For the married pair, there was nothing in any Messiad more sublime than that now, on St.

John's day, the Italian Princess would be coming: of that no mortal could talk enough, especially in the village. I know not to what slip of Victor's it was owing, that he led most women into the notion that he loved them. Suffice it, the Chamberlain's wife, who at her years demanded no longer _love_, but the _show_ of love, thought, "Perhaps!"

Let no one mistake her, she, to be sure, always spent the first hour with a man on the _watch-tower_ of observation; but the second, then, only on the _hunting-screen_, if the first had been fortunate, and she was cool enough not to hope more than she saw: she even made a jest of every one who, in view of her vanity--a womanly vanity, however--of too easily presuming upon conquests, should think to flatter her otherwise than openly. Suffice it, she judged our Victor to-day too favorably, in her sense, or too unfavorably in ours; as, in general, mere courtiers can see through only mere courtiers. Of Clotilda not a word was said, not even of the time of her return.

In fact, the Le Baut had a monstrous pride in herself to contend with towards her step-daughter,--of which my correspondent should have informed me what it rested upon, whether on relations or on merits; for of both there was an ample supply, inasmuch as the Chamberlain's wife had been the w----, that is, the mistress, of the present Prince's deceased father. I and a clever man have considered the question _pro_ and _con_, whether she resembled Caesar in love or in ambition. The clever man says, "In love," because a woman never forgets love, when a prince has been her teacher therein. The ill.u.s.trious deceased father's heart had adored two beauties in her particularly, which aforetime the Scots[91] used to be so fond of eating, namely, the bosom and the rump.

The great have their peculiar _grossieretes_, which the little dream not of. I would not print it, but it was known to the whole court, and therefore to many of my readers also. Well, the Devil brought along Time, who whetted his scythe and mowed away all of each of these charms which _hung over_ in his territory. Now with women at courts--or in the courtyard[92] of a school, or a warehouse, or in a cow-yard--vanity, so soon as old Saturn (i. e. Time) attacks it with his scythe-chariot and with the small shot from his hour-gla.s.s, makes one of the most skilful retreats that I know of. Vanity lets itself be driven from one work or member after another; but at last it throws itself out of the weak parts into _strongholds_, e. g. into finger-nails, foreheads, feet, &c., and from there the Devil himself cannot dislodge it. The Chamberlain's wife had first to make herself such a part, namely, a _gorge de Paris_ and a _cul de Paris_; these four _boundary hills_ of her kingdom had daily to be restored, and raised, out of respect for property, against the s.h.i.+fting of boundaries produced by years. From this, now, my clever man concludes that her soul is always writing letters of marque to her body.

I am precisely the antipode of the clever man, and contend that Cupid is only her serving-brother, not the master of the lodge,--her adjutant, not her generalissimo; and this for the reason that she is still always applying either her own or Le Baut's hand to the restoration of the Solomon's Temple wherein she used to be adored as a G.o.ddess, side by side with the G.o.d,--because in marrying him she married nothing but the Chamberlain's key and his _a.s.semblees_ and his hopes of future influence,--because her hostility to Clotilda relates not to the face, but to the brain,--because her love is now without jealousy. That is to say, she stood in a certain amatory relation with the Evangelist Matthieu, which (according to our feeling as common citizens) differs from hatred in nothing but--duration. Persiflages of love were their declarations of love; their glances were epigrams; his hours of a.s.signation he seasoned with comic accounts of his corresponding hours in other places; and at the time of day when a holy man usually prays off his psalm,[93] both were ironical. Such an _erotic_ connection is nothing but the subdivision of a _political_....

But to return to the story.

The Chamberlain proposed now to show his guest something of more interest to a doctor and a scholar. To the chamber wherein the something was, they pa.s.sed through the Chamberlain's wife's, and through Clotilda's. As they made a day of rest[94] in the former, Victor's eyes were fixed dreamily on Clotilda's profile, which Matthieu had lately cut out of nothing, and which the Chamberlain's wife, out of flattery to the profile-cutter, had hung up here under gla.s.s.

Singularly--i. e. accidentally--the gla.s.s at this moment flew to pieces over the fair face, and Victor and the father were startled; for the latter was, like most great folk, for want of time, at once superst.i.tious and sceptical; and it is well known that superst.i.tion regards the flying to pieces of a portrait-gla.s.s as a forerunner of the death of the original. The distressed father reproached himself with the permission he had given Clotilda to stay so long in Maienthal, since she would certainly injure her health there by unprofitable, youthful enthusiasms. He meant her mourning for her buried Giulia; for it was merely from sorrow for her, that, on the first of May, she had hurried hither without any baggage; and even the clothes of the beloved friend she had to-day sent among her own. He broke off in a cheerful tone, for Matthieu came, the brother of this Giulia, who only wanted to show and excuse himself, because, like several of the court church of half-brothers, he was going to meet the Princess.

Victor grew stiller and sadder; his bosom became at once a swelling flood of invisible tears, whose source he could not trace to his heart.

And when next they had to pa.s.s through Clotilda's still and vacant chamber, where order and simplicity too intensely reminded him of the fair soul of the proprietor, his sudden and touching dumbness struck others also. He tore his eyes hurriedly away from some flower-drawings by her own hand, from her white inkstand, and from the beautiful landscape of the oil-tapestry, and stepped up hastily to that which Le Baut was unlocking. It was not any n.o.ble heart which the latter, with his golden key, although bored like a cannon, could fasten,[95]--the t.i.tular Chamberlains in Vienna apply only an hermetically sealed one,--but what he opened was his _Cabinet d'histoire naturelle_. The cabinet contained rare copies and some _curiosa_;--a calculus taken from the bladder of a child, two seventeenths of an inch long and two seventeenths of an inch broad, or the reverse; the hardened _vena cava_ of an old Minister; a pair of American feather-trousers; tolerable Fungites, and better specimens of _Strombi_ (e. g. a staircase-sh.e.l.l, _not genuine_); the model of a midwife's chair and of a sowing-machine; species of gray marble from Hof in Voigtland; and a petrified bird's-nest,--duplicates not included.... Meanwhile I and the reader prefer to all this dead trumpery the living ape who was the cabinet's sole ornament and--owner. Camper should cut off from this living specimen the Chamberlain's head, and dissect it, if only to see how near the monkey borders upon man.

A great person has always some branch or other of science which he cares nothing about, and to which, therefore, he particularly devotes himself. To Le Baut's soul, hungering for knowledge, it was all one whether it were set in a cabinet of seals or of gems or of pistoles.

Were I a great person, I would with the greatest zeal make b.u.t.tons--or deliveries--or books--or Nuremberg wares--or wars--or right good inst.i.tutions, merely from cursed ennui, that _mother of vinegar_ to all vices and virtues which peep forth under ermine and stars of orders.

Nothing is a greater proof of the general growth of refinement than the general growth of ennui. Even the ladies, out of mere flat ennui, a hundred times contrive pastimes for themselves; and the cleverest man utters his greatest number of plat.i.tudes, and the best his greatest number of slanders, merely to a circle that knows how to adequately bore him.

The court-page was the cicerone of the cabinet, perhaps for the sake of going about. Victor wronged him by the medical supposition that he affected a certain loose, unsteady, slouchy gait common to debauchees in high life; for he really had it, and for the reason that he, on quite other grounds than Victor's fine ones, never loved to--sit. But to proceed: Unless the Chamberlain's wife meant to tear aside the curtain from before Victor's soul, and spy out therein his sentiments toward herself and Clotilda by the fright which I am about to relate, then it can have been nothing but a very bad spirit which led the hand of the said Chamberlain's wife to a silver ingot. Behind the ingot lay, perhaps killed by crumbs of a.r.s.enic, a mouse. A female reader, who in similar dangers has suffered as a patient, can imagine how the Chamberlain's wife felt when she grasped, with the hard substance, something soft, and drew it forth, and then saw what it was. A _real_ fainting-fit was inevitable. I confess I should myself hold her swoon merely as a feint, were the occasion less; e. g. had it been, not her senses, but her honor, that was a.s.sailed: but a mouse is a very different matter. In fact, before such malicious spectators as her husband and her Cicisbeo, she must long since have banished from her stage, as the French from theirs, this Fifth Act Murder; nay, I do not believe she could in any way have rendered herself so ridiculous in the eyes of a triumphant enemy of her virtue (except by a real swoon) as by a fict.i.tious one. Terror at the trance[96] deprived the Evangelist of the use of his reason, and left him only the use of his wickedness and his hands, with which he instantly tore open the whole blind- and fence-work of her bosom, in short, the whole optical breast, to get air enough for the true one, on whose board he had a piece,[97] namely, her heart. But Victor pushed him away, and, sprinkling her with a few drops of ice-water, out of tender respect for her charms and her life, soon raised her up again. However, she forgave the page all that she guessed, and thanked the court-physician for all in which she was mistaken....

... Let me look away a moment from this black cobweb, and refresh myself with surveying the fairer world around me on my island, where there is no enemy,--and the flas.h.i.+ng play of fishes and children on the sh.o.r.e,--and the playing mother who flings to them flowers and watchful glances,--and the great maple-trees which, softly murmuring with a thousand leaves and flies, bend downward to meet the foliage that glimmers in mimic dance under the waves,--and how the warm earth and the warm sky rest on each other in slumbering love, and bear one century after another....

Victor, before the end of his rural day, went sadly home. Sat.u.r.day (the 16th of June[98]) sped softly by, and in its flight shook out a whole flower-head of winged seed for new flowers of joy.

The stars glided lightly over its night. A friendly, blue Sunday morning hung floating over the village in its finery, and held its breath lest it should s.n.a.t.c.h off a ripe, linden-blossom, or the down of a marsh-marigold. Victor could hear the forte-pianissimo sounding down from the palace over the reposing village, and must needs sigh with the asthma of blissful longing, "Ah, when shall I have to cease swimming upon this still, s.h.i.+ning sea, over this fair anchorage of life?" ...

When Fate answered, "To-day!" For this very day, on Sunday, there came from the residence-city of Flachsenfingen a light-headed fool (in fact, two) in a no less light-bodied Berlin, and took out of his package a letter to him from his Lords.h.i.+p.

"On the 21st of June (Thursday), the Italian Princess makes her entry into Kussewitz. On Wednesday, I leave here, and present thee in St.

Luna to the Prince, who accompanies me to that place. I pray thee, however, to repair on the Sat.u.r.day following to the _Island of Union_,[99] because the little which, for want of opportunity, I cannot say to thee in St. Luna, I shall reserve for the island. Thou wilt find me there. The bearer of this is our respected court-apothecary _Zeusel_, in whose house thou wilt, as court-physician, have thy future residence. Farewell!" H.

"Zeusel?" asks the reader, and ponders the matter. "I know not the Zeusels." No more do I; but I say to myself, Is not this carrying things too far? And is it not a regular imposition, that the correspondent of this work cannot, by all the representations made to him by me through the dog, be induced even to arrange things in this history in as orderly a manner as they are, indeed, in every wretched romance, and even in--a house of correction, where every new correctioner rehea.r.s.es neatly to the old ones, in the very first hour, his total _Fata_, even to the introductory cudgelling on entering, from which the historian has freshly arrived. By Heaven! people actually rush and leap into my work, as into a pa.s.sengers' room, and neither reader nor Devil knows who their dogs and cats are.

"I wish..." said Victor, and made six circ.u.mflexes upon it as apostrophes of the same number of omitted curses. For he was now to pa.s.s over from the Idyl of country life into the travestied aeneid of city life, and no road is surely more wretchedly paved than that from the study into the court smelting-houses and _chambres ardentes_,[100]

from peace to turmoil. Besides, Emanuel had not yet written. Clotilda, the _Hesper_ of those two fair evenings, was like the Hesperus in the sky, not to be seen over St. Luna. As we said, it was a wretched state for him. And now, in addition to all this, that Zeusel, his future landlord, the Court Apothecary, was, so to speak, a fool, full as light as his Berlin, or as the court-fourier, with whom he came, but fifty-three years older than the carriage, that is to say, fifty-four years old, and, taken for all in all, a human diminutive and vinegar-eel in body and soul, _peaked_ in all respects, in chin, nose, wit, head, lips, and shoulder. This fine vinegar-eel--for the eel contends that he understands a certain refinement, which never could belong to any Roturier,[101] and he does not deny that his great ancestors wrote themselves, not Zeusels, but _Von Swobodas_--was travelling with the court-fourier, who administered the quartermasters.h.i.+p in Kussewitz for the princely bride, toward that place, in order to remain there just so long as he was not wanted.

Zeusel meant absolutely to have influence on the Flachsenfingen court by something beside his clyster-hydraulics, and to work upon the court household with something more than senna-leaves; therefore he bought up at a high price all private intelligence (he improved it forthwith into public) which he could collect of new meteorological phenomena in the court-atmosphere, and then, when certain people turned somersets down from the steps of the throne, he smiled finely enough, and remarked that he hoped such persons had regarded him as their friend, and not noticed the leg which he had thrust out of his shop-door by way of giving them a sly lift. He was, in spite of some good-heartedness, a liar from the beginning, not because he wanted to be malicious, but refined; and he evaporated his sound understanding, that it might drop in wit.

Towards Victor, as future courtier and patron, he knew not, for all that, how to a.s.sume the upright court-dignity which respects at once itself and others; but towards the people of the parsonage he amply observed the regular courtly contempt, and showed them well enough how little, without designs upon the Lord's son, he should have thought of even _looking_ over their garden-wall or window-sill, to say nothing of _coming_ over. Victor never hated anything else in his neighbor but hatred of other neighbors; and his respect for all cla.s.ses, his contempt for all _eminent_ fools, his disgust at ceremonies, and his inclination as a humorist for the little theatres of life, formed the greatest contrast to the pharmaceutic infusorium, and to its disgust with men and deference for grandees.

Victor gave his landlord thirty greetings to carry with him to the Italian _Tostato_ in Kussewitz, who had travelled with him, laughing and dancing, a day and a half out of Gottingen. The Apothecary, at his departure, left behind in Victor an annoying, sour sediment; even at the organ-blower, who brought up the coffee every Sunday, he could not laugh as usual. I will explain why he used to laugh at him.

On that day the coachman was shaved, and, in fact, at first hand,--namely, by his own. Now the chin of this lazy box-inc.u.mbent had thrown up more mole-hills--so I euphoniously name warts--than are necessary for shaving and mowing. Among these the old man hacked and planed on Sunday morning,--for then it is that the common people put off at once the old Adam and the old s.h.i.+rt, and leave sins and beard to grow only on working-days,--boldly slipping his knife up and down among the warty _chagrin_ and cutting away. Now the man would have looked pitifully, with his ploughed-up facial foreground,--so that one must needs have wept blood at that which ran in red lines down over the chin of this stone river-G.o.d,--if the Prosector, like a Roman, had, out of stupidity, exhibited his wounds. But he showed nothing,--he had more sense than that; he picked tobacco-s.p.u.n.k into small caps, and put the headpieces upon the sore warts, and so made his appearance.

"Let a Spener, a Cato the younger," said Victor, "just come into my study, and not laugh when a bellows-blower follows with coffee-cups, and with sixteen scalped warts and his chin bound up in s.p.u.n.k, looking like a garden-rockery overgrown with beautifully distributed moss,--let a Spener, I say, help laughing, if he can."

To-day he could help it himself. Weary of the day, he went out into the peaceful evening, and laid himself on his back on the summit of a steep hill; and when the sun, dissolved into a cloud of gold, tremulously flowed away over the liquid gloss of the flowers, and swam down on the gra.s.sy sea of the mountains, and as he lay nearer to the warm, throbbing heart of Nature, sunk down upon the soft earth as if in the repose of death, drawing down the clouds into him with sighs, fanned by winds coming from afar, lulled by bees and larks,--then did remembrance, that after-summer of human joy, steal into his soul, and a tear into his eye, and longing into his breast, and he wished that Emanuel might not reject him.--Suddenly slight steps drew nigh to his reclining ears; he started up, alarmed and causing alarm. A heavy travelling carriage came staggering lazily up the hill; behind, instead of servants, three pale foot-soldiers had thrust their hands into the footmen's straps, who had only a single leg among them which was of flesh, while they footed it on five wooden stilt-legs or boot-makers'

signs, which, with something still longer, made of wood,--namely, three well-wrought beggar's staffs,--they had taken from the enemy; a coachman walked beside the carriage, and a gentlewoman, and close by Victor, as he sprang up, stood--Clotilda.

She came from Maienthal. This sudden illumination eclipsed all the tables of the law hung up in his soul, and he could not at once read the tables. She looked upon him with softer rays than ever, and the sun lent some too. With a smile, as if she antic.i.p.ated his first questions, she gave him a--letter from Emanuel. A shrinking "Ah!" was his answer; and before he could accommodate himself to two ecstasies,[102] the carriage was already at the top of the hill, and she in it, and all had gone off.

He hesitated with trembling to gaze, absorbed, into the still, blue paradise of the fairest soul that ever overflowed. At last he looked upon the traces of a beloved human hand which he had not as yet touched, and read:--

"Horion!

"Man climbs a mountain, as the child does a chair, in order to stand nearer the face of the infinite Mother, and to reach her with his puny embrace. Around my height the earth lies sleeping, with all its eyes of flowers under the soft mist; but the heavens already lift themselves up with the sun under the eyelid; under the paled Arcturus mists begin to glow, and colors extricate themselves from colors; the globe of earth rolls, vast and full, to rapture, of blossoms and living creatures, into the burning lap of morning.