Chapter VI: Part 6

Before I properly explain why the Rittmeister's Lawyer, the framer of the Presentation, had so designated a Subrector--we two, the reader and myself, will keep an eye for a moment on Fixlein's joyful salutations--on his gratefully-streaming eyes--on his full hands so laden with bounty--on the present of two ducats, which he drops into the hands of the mitre-bearer, as willingly as he will soon drop his own pedagogic office. Could he tell what to think (of the Rittmeister), or to write (to the same), or to table (for the lackey)? Did he not ask tidings of the noble health of his benefactor over and over, though the servant answered him with all distinctness at the very first? And was not this same man, who belonged to the nose-upturning, shoulder-shrugging, shoulder-knotted, toad-eating species of men, at last so moved by the joy which he had imparted, that he determined, on the spot, to bestow his presence on the new clergyman's School-Actus, though no person of quality whatever was to be there? Fixlein, in the first place, sealed his letter of thanks; and courteously invited this messenger of good news to visit him frequently in the Parsonage; and to call this evening, in passing, at his mother's, and give her a lecture for not staying last night, when she might have seen the Presentation from his Lordship arrive to-day.

The lackey being gone, Fixlein for joy began to grow sceptical--and timorous (wherefore, to prevent filching, he stowed his Presentation securely in his coffer, under keeping of two padlocks); and devout and softened, since he thanked God without scruple for all good that happened to him, and never wrote this Eternal Name but in pulpit characters, and with colored ink; as the Jewish copyists never wrote it except ornamental letters and when newly washed;[55]--and deaf also did the parson, grow, so that he scarcely heard the soft wooing-hour of the Actus--for a still softer one beside Thiennette, with its rose-bushes and rose-honey, would not leave his thoughts. He who of old, when Fortune made a wry face at him, was wont, like children in their sport at one another, to laugh at her so long till she herself was obliged to begin smiling--he was now flying as on a huge seesaw higher and higher, quicker and quicker aloft.

But before the Actus, let us examine the Schadeck Lawyer. _Fixlein_ instead of _Fuechslein_[56] he had written from uncertainty about the spelling of the name; the more naturally as in transcribing the Rittmeisterinn's will the former had occurred so often. _Von_, this triumphal arch, he durst not set up before Fuechslein's new name, because Aufhammer forbade it, considering Hans Fuechslein as a mushroom, who had no right to _vons_ and titles of nobility, for all his patents. In fine, the Presentation-writer was possessed with Campe's[57] whim of Germanizing everything, minding little though when Germanized it should cease to be intelligible;--as if a word needed any better act of naturalization than that which universal unintelligibility imparts to it. In itself it is the same--the rather as all languages, like all men, are cognate, intermarried and intermixed--whether a word was invented by a savage or a foreigner; whether it grew up like moss amid the German forests, or like street-grass, in the pavement of the Roman Forum. The Lawyer, on the other hand, contended that it was different; and accordingly he hid not from any of his clients that _Tagefarth_ (Day-turn) meant _Term_, and that _Appealing_ was _Berufen_ (Becalling). On this principle, he dressed the word _Subrector_ in the new livery of _School-undergovernor_. And this version further converted the Schoolmaster into Parson; to such a degree does our _civic_ fortune--not our _personal_ well-being, which supports itself on our own internal soil and resources--grow merely on the _drift-mould_ of accidents, connections, acquaintances, and Heaven or the Devil knows what!--

By the by, from a Lawyer, at the same time a Country Judge, I should certainly have looked for more sense; I should (I may be mistaken) have presumed he knew that the _Acts_, or Reports, which in former times (see Hoffmann's _German or un-German Law-practice_) were written in Latin, as before the times of Joseph the Hungarian,--are now, if we may say so without offence, perhaps written fully more in the German dialect than in the Latin; and in support of this opinion, I can point to whole lines of German language to be found in these Imperial-Court-Confessions. However, I will not believe that the Jurist is endeavoring, because Imhofer declares the Roman tongue to be the mother tongue in the other world, to disengage himself from a language, by means of which, like the Roman _Eagle_, or later, like the Roman _Fish-heron_ (Pope), he has clutched such abundant booty in his talons.----

Toll, toll your bell for the Actus; stream in, in to the ceremony; who cares for it? Neither I nor the Ex-Conrector. The six pygmy Ciceros will in vain set forth before us in sumptuous dress their thoughts and bodies. The draught-wind of Chance has blown away from the Actus its powder-nimbus of glory; and the Conrector that was has discovered how small a matter a cathedra is, and how great a one a pulpit. "I should not have thought," thought he now, "when I became Conrector, that there could be anything grander, I mean a parson." Man, behind his everlasting blind, which he only colors differently, and makes no thinner, carries his pride with him from one step to another; and on the higher step, blames only the pride of the lower.

The best of the Actus was, that the Regiments-Quartermaster and Master Butcher, Steinberg, attended there, embaled in a long woollen shag. During the solemnity, the Subrector Hans von Fuechslein cast several gratified and inquiring glances on the Schadeck servant, who did not once look at him. Hans would have staked his head, that, after the Actus, the fellow would wait upon him. When at last the sextuple cockerel-brood had on their dunghill done crowing, that is to say, had perorated, the scholastic cocker, over whom a higher banner was now waving, himself came upon the stage; and delivered to the School-Inspectorships, to the Subrectorship, to the Guardianship, and the lackeyship, his most grateful thanks for their attendance; shortly, announcing to them at the same time, "that Providence had now called him from his post to another; and committed to him, unworthy as he was, the cure of souls in the Hukelum parish, as well as in the Schadeck chapel of ease."

This little address, to appearance, wellnigh blew up the then Subrector Hans von Fuechslein from his chair; and his face looked of a mingled color, like red bole, green chalk, tinsel-yellow, and _vomissement de la reine_.

The tall Quartermaster erected himself considerably in his shag, and hummed loud enough in happy forgetfulness: "The Dickens!--Parson?"----

The Subrector dashed by like a comet before the lackey; ordered him to call and take a letter for his master; strode home, and prepared for his patron, who at Schadeck was waiting for a long thanksgiving psalm, a short satirical epistle, as nervous as haste would permit, and mingled a few nicknames and verbal injuries along with it.

The courier handed in to his master Fixlein's song of gratitude and Fuechslein's invectives with the same hand. The dragoon Rittmeister, incensed at the ill-mannered churl, and bound to his word, which Fixlein had publicly announced in his Actus, forthwith wrote back to the new Parson an acceptance and ratification; and Fixlein is and remains, to the joy of us all, incontestible ordained parson of Hukelum.

His disappointed rival has still this consolation, that he holds a seat in the wasp-nest of the _Neue Allgemeine Deutsche Bibliothek_.[58] Should the Parson ever chrysalize himself into an author, the watch-wasp may then buzz out, and dart its sting into the chrysalis, and put its own brood in the room of the murdered butterfly. As the Subrector everywhere went about, and threatened in plain terms that he would review his colleague, let not the public be surprised that Fixlein's _Errata_, and his Masoretic _Exercitationes_, are to this hour withheld from it.

In spring, the widowed church receives her new husband; and how it will be, when Fixlein, under a canopy of flower-trees, takes the _Sponsa Christi_ in one hand, and his own _Sponsa_ in the other,--this without an Eighth Letter-Box, which, in the present case, may be a true jewel-box and rainbow-key,[59] can no mortal figure, except the _Sponsus_ himself.

EIGHTH LETTER-BOX.

Instalment in the Parsonage.

On the 15th of April, 1793, the reader may observe, far down in the hollow, three baggage-wagons groaning along. These baggage-wagons are transporting the house-gear of the new Parson to Hukelum; the proprietor himself, with a little escort of his parishioners, is marching at their side, that of his china sets and household furniture there may be nothing broken in the eighteenth century, as the whole came down to him unbroken from the seventeenth. Fixlein hears the School-bell ringing behind him; but this chime now sings to him, like a curfew, the songs of future rest; he is now escaped from the Death-valley of the Gymnasium, and admitted into the abodes of the Blessed. Here dwells no envy, no colleague, no Subrector; here, in the heavenly country, no man works in the _New Universal German Library_; here in the heavenly Hukelumic Jerusalem, they do nothing but sing praises in the church; and here the Perfected requires no more increase of knowledge.... Here, too, one needs not sorrow that Sunday and Saint's day so often fall together into one.

Truth to tell, the parson goes too far; but it was his way from of old never to paint out the whole and half shadows of a situation till he was got into a new one; the beauties of which he could then enhance by contrast with the former. For it requires little reflection to discover that the torments of a Schoolmaster are nothing so extraordinary; but, on the contrary, as in the Gymnasium, he mounts from one degree to another, not very dissimilar to the common torments of Hell, which, in spite of their eternity, grow weaker from century to century. Moreover, since, according to the saying of a Frenchman, _deux afflictions mises ensemble peuvent devener une consolation_, a man gets afflictions enow in a school to console him; seeing out of eight combined afflictions--reckon only one for every teacher--certainly more comfort is to be extracted than out of two. The only pity is, that school-people will never act towards each other as court-people do: none but polished men and polished glasses will readily cohere. In addition to all this, in schools--and in offices generally--one is always recompensed; for, as in the second life a greater virtue is the recompense of an earthly one, so, in the Schoolmaster's case, his merits are always rewarded by more opportunities for new merits; and often enough he is not dismissed from his post at all.--

Eight Gymnasiasts are trotting about in the Parsonage, setting up, nailing to, hauling in. I think, as a scholar of Plutarch, I am right to introduce such seeming _minutiae_. A man whom grown-up people love, children love still more. The whole school had smiled on the smiling Fixlein, and liked him-in their hearts, because he did not thunder, but sport with them; because he said _Sie_ (They), to the Secundaners, and the Subrector said _Ihr_ (Ye); because his uprearing forefinger was his only sceptre and baculus; because in the Secunda he had interchanged Latin epistles with his scholars; and in the Quinta had taught not with Napier's Rods (or rods of a sharper description), but with sticks of barley-sugar.

To-day his churchyard appeared to him so solemn and festive, that he wondered (though it was Monday) why his parishioners were not in their holiday, but merely in their week-day drapery. Under the door of the Parsonage stood a weeping woman; for she was too happy, and he was her--son. Yet the mother, in the height of her emotion, contrives quite readily to call upon the carriers, while disloading, not to twist off the four corner globes from the old Frankish chest of drawers. Her son now appeared to her as venerable as if he had sat for one of the copperplates in her pictured Bible; and that simply because he had cast off his pedagogue hair-cue, as the ripening tadpole does its tail; and was now standing in a clerical periwig before her; he was now a Comet, soaring away from the profane Earth, and had accordingly changed from a _stella caudata_ into a _stella crinita_.

His bride also had, on former days, given sedulous assistance in this new improved edition of his house, and labored faithfully among the other furnishers and furbishers. But to-day she kept aloof; for she was too good to forget the maiden in the bride. Love, like men, dies oftener of excess than of hunger; it lives on love, but it resembles those Alpine flowers which feed themselves by _suction_ from the wet clouds, and die if you _besprinkle_ them.

At length the Parson is settled, and of course he must--for I know my fair readers, who are bent on it as if they were bridemaids--without delay get married. But he may not; before Ascension-day there can nothing be done, and till then are full four weeks and a half. The matter was this. He wished in the first place to have the murder-Sunday, the Cantata, behind him; not indeed because he doubted of his earthly continuance, but because he would not (even for the bride's sake) that the slightest apprehension should mingle with these weeks of glory.

The main reason was, he did not wish to marry till he were betrothed; which latter ceremony was appointed, with the Introduction Sermon, to take place next Sunday. It is the Cantata-Sunday. Let not the reader afflict himself with fears. Indeed, I should not have molested an enlightened century with this Sunday-_Wauwau_ at all, were it not that I delineate with such extreme fidelity. Fixlein himself--especially as the Quartermaster asked him if he was a baby--at last grew so sensible that he saw the folly of it; nay, he went so far that he committed a greater folly. For as dreaming that you die signifies, according to the exegetic _rule of false_, nothing else than long life and welfare, so did Fixlein easily infer that his death-imagination was just such a lucky dream; the rather as it was precisely on this Cantata-Sunday that Fortune had turned up her cornucopia over him, and at once showered down out of it a bride, a presentation, and a roll of ducats. Thus can Superstition imp its wings, let Chance favor it or not.

A Secretary of State, a Peace-Treaty writer, a Notary, any such incarcerated Slave of the Desk, feels excellently well how far he is beneath a Parson composing his inaugural sermon. The latter (do but look at my Fixlein) lays himself heartily over the paper,--injects the venous system of his sermon-preparation with colored ink,--has a Text-Concordance on the right side, and a Song-Concordance on the left; is there digging out a marrowy sentence, here clipping off a song-blossom, with both to garnish his homiletic pastry;--sketches out the finest plan of operations, not, like a man of the world, to subdue the heart of one woman, but the hearts of all women that hear him, and of their husbands to boot; draws every peasant passing by his window into some niche of his discourse, to co-operate with the result;--and, finally, scoops out the butter of the smooth, soft hymn-book, and therewith exquisitely fattens the black broth of his sermon, which is to feed five thousand men.----

At last, in the evening, as the red sun is dazzling him at the desk, he can rise with heart free from guilt; and, amid twittering sparrows and finches, over the cherry-trees encircling the parsonage, look toward the west, till there is nothing more in the sky but a faint gleam among the clouds. And then when Fixlein, amid the tolling of the evening prayer-bell, _slowly_ descends the stair to his cooking mother, there must be some miracle in the case, if for him whatever has been done or baked, or served up in the lower regions, is not right and good.... A bound, after supper, into the Castle; a look into a pure loving eye; a word without falseness to a bride without falseness; and then under the coverlet, a soft-breathing breast, in which there is nothing but Paradise, a sermon, and evening prayer.... I swear, with this I will satisfy a Mythic God, who has left his Heaven, and is seeking a new one among us here below!

Can a mortal, can a Me in the wet clay of Earth, which Death will soon dry into dust, ask more in one week than Fixlein is gathering into his heart? I see not how. At least I should suppose, if such a dust-framed being, after such a twenty-thousand prize from the Lottery of Chance, could require aught more, it would at most be the twenty-one-thousand prize, namely, the inaugural discourse itself.

And this prize our Zebedaeus actually drew on Sunday; he preached,--he preached with unction,----he did it before the crowding, rustling press of people; before his Guardian, and before the Lord of Aufhammer, the godfather of the priest and the dog;--a flock, with whom in Childhood he had driven out the Castle herds about the pasture, he was now, himself a spiritual sheep-smearer, leading out to pasture;--he was standing to the ankles among Candidates and Schoolmasters, for to-day (what none of them could) at the altar, with the nail of his finger, he might scratch a large cross in the air, baptisms and marriages not once mentioned.... I believe I should feel less scrupulous than I do to checker this sunshiny esplanade with that thin shadow of the grave which the preacher threw over it, when, in the application, with wet, heavy eyes, he looked round over the mute, attentive church, as if in some corner of it he would seek the mouldering teacher of his youth and of this congregation, who without, under the white tombstone, the wrong-side of life, had laid away the garment of his pious spirit. And when he, himself hurried on by the internal stream, inexpressibly softened by the further recollections of his own fear of death on this day, of his life now overspread with flowers and benefits, of his entombed benefactress resting here in her narrow bed,--when he now, before the dissolving countenance of her friend, his Thiennette, overpowered, motionless, and weeping, looked down from the pulpit to the door of the Schadeck vault, and said: "Thanks, thou pious soul, for the good thou hast done to this flock and to their new teacher; and, in the fulness of time, may the dust of thy god-fearing and man-loving breast gather itself, transfigured as gold-dust, round thy reawakened heavenly heart,"--was there an eye in the audience dry? Her husband sobbed aloud, and Thiennette, her beloved, bowed her head, sinking down with inconsolable remembrances, over the front of the seat, like kindred mourners in a funeral train.

No fairer forenoon could prepare the way for an afternoon in which a man was to betroth himself forever, and to unite the exchanged rings with the Ring of Eternity. Except the bridal pair, there was none present but an ancient pair; the mother and the long Guardian. The bridegroom wrote out the marriage-contract or marriage-charter with his own hand; hereby making over to his bride, from this day, his whole movable property (not, as you may suppose, his pocket-library, but his whole library; whereas, in the Middle Ages, the daughter of a noble was glad to get one or two books for marriage-portion);--in return for which, she liberally enough contributed--a whole nuptial coach or car, laden as follows: with nine pounds of feathers, not feathers for the cap such as we carry, but of the lighter sort such as carry us;--with a sumptuous dozen of godchild-plates and godchild-spoons (gifts from Schadeck), together with a fish-knife;--of silk, not only stockings (though even King Henry II. of France could dress no more than his legs in silk), but whole gowns;--with jewels and other furnishings of smaller value. Good Thiennette! in the chariot of thy spirit lies the true dowry; namely, thy noble, soft, modest heart, the morning-gift of Nature!

The Parson--who, not from mistrust, but from "the uncertainty of life," could have wished for a notary's seal on everything; to whom no security but a hypothecary one appeared sufficient; and who, in the depositing of every barleycorn, required quittances and contracts--had now, when the marriage-charter was completed, a lighter heart; and through the whole evening the good man ceased not to thank his bride for what she had given him. To me, however, a marriage-contract were a thing as painful and repulsive,--I confess it candidly, though you should in consequence upbraid me with my great youth,--as if I had to take my love-letter to a Notary Imperial, and make him docket and countersign it before it could be sent. Heavens! to see the light flower of Love, whose perfume acts not on the balance, so laid like tulip-bulbs on the hay-beam of Law; two hearts on the cold councillor and flesh-beam of relatives and Advocates, who are heaping on the scales nothing but houses, fields, and tin,--this, to the interested party, maybe as delightful as, to the intoxicated suckling and nursling of the Muses and Philosophy, it is to carry the evening and morning sacrifices he has offered up to his goddess into the book-shop, and there to change his devotions into money, and sell them by weight and measure.----

From Cantata-Sunday to Ascension, that is, to marriage-day, are one and a half weeks--or one and a half blissful eternities. If it is pleasant that nights or winter separate the days and seasons of joy to a comfortable distance; if, for example, it is pleasant that birthday, Saint's-day, betrothment, marriage, and baptismal day, do not all occur on the same day (for with very few do those festivities, like Holiday and Apostle's day, commerge),--then is it still more pleasant to make the interval, the flower-border, between betrothment and marriage, of an extraordinary breadth. Before the marriage-day are the true honey-weeks; then come the wax-weeks; then the honey-vinegar-weeks.

In the Ninth Letter-Box our Parson celebrates his wedding; and here, in the Eighth, I shall just briefly skim over his way and manner of existence till then; an existence, as might have been expected, celestial enough. To few is it allotted, as it was to him, to have at once such wings and such flowers (to fly over) before his nuptials; to few is it allotted, I imagine, to purchase flour and poultry on the same day, as Fixlein did;--to stuff the wedding-turkey with hangman-meals;--to go every night into the stall, and see whether the wedding-pig, which his Guardian had given him by way of marriage-present, is still standing and eating;--to spy out for his future wife the flax-magazines and clothes-press-niches in the house;--to lay in new wood-stores in the prospect of winter;--to obtain from the Consistorium directly, and for little smart-money, their Bull of Dispensation, their remission of the threefold proclamation of banns;--to live not in a city, where you must send to every fool (because you are one yourself), and disclose to him that you are going to be married; but in a little angular hamlet, where you have no one to tell aught, but simply the Schoolmaster that he is to ring a little later, and put a knee-cushion before the altar.----

O, if the Ritter Michaelis maintains that Paradise was little, because otherwise the people would not have found each other,--a hamlet and its joys are little and narrow, so that some shadow of Eden may still linger on our Ball.----

I have not even hinted that, the day before the wedding, the Regiments-Quartermaster came uncalled, and killed the pig, and made puddings gratis, such as were never eaten at any Court.

And besides, dear Fixlein, on this soft, rich oil of joy there was also floating gratis a vernal sun,--and red twilights,--and flower-garlands,--and a bursting half-world of buds!...

How didst thou behave thee in these hot whirlpools of pleasure?--Thou movedst thy Fishtail (Reason), and therewith describedst for thyself a rectilineal course through the billows. For even half as much would have hurried another Parson from his study; but the very crowning felicity of ours was, that he stood as if rooted to the boundary-hill of Moderation, and from thence looked down on what thousands flout away. Sitting opposite the Castle-windows, he was still in a condition to reckon up that _Amen_ occurs in the Bible one hundred and thirty times. Nay, to his old learned laboratory he now appended a new chemical stove; he purposed writing to Nuernberg and Baireuth, and there offering his pen to the Brothers Senft, not only for composing practical _Receipts_ at the end of their _Almanacs_, but also for separate _Essays_ in front under the copperplate title of each Month, because he had a thought of making some reformatory cuts at the common people's mental habitudes ... And now, when in the capacity of Parson he had less to do, and could add to the holy resting-day of the congregation six literary creating-days, he determined (even in these Carnival weeks) to strike his plough into the hitherto quite fallow History of Hukelum, and soon to follow the plough with his drill....

Thus roll his minutes, on golden wheels-of-fortune, over the twelve days, which form the glancing star-paved road to the third heaven of the thirteenth, that is, to the

NINTH LETTER-BOX.

Or to the Marriage.

Rise, fair Ascension and Marriage day, and gladden readers also! Adorn thyself with the fairest jewel, with the bride, whose soul is as pure and glittering as its vesture; like pearl and pearl-muscle, the one, as the other, lustrous and ornamental! And so over the espalier, whose fruit-hedge has hitherto divided our darling from his Eden, every reader now presses after him!--

On the 9th of May, 1793, about three in the morning, there came a sharp peal of trumpets, like a light-beam, through the dim-red May-dawn; two twisted horns, with a straight trumpet between them, like a note of admiration between interrogation-points, were clanging from a house in which only a parishioner (not the Parson) dwelt and blew; for this parishioner had last night been celebrating the same ceremony which the pastor had this day before him. The joyful tallyho raised our Parson from his broad bed (and the Shock from beneath it, who some weeks ago had been exiled from the white, sleek coverlet), and this so early, that in the portraying tester, where on every former morning he had observed his ruddy visage, and his white bedclothes, all was at present dim and crayoned.

I confess, the new-painted room, and a gleam of dawn on the wall, made it so light, that he could see his knee-buckles glancing on the chair. He then softly awakened his mother (the other guests were to lie for hours in the sheets), and she had the city cook-maid to awaken, who, like several other articles of wedding-furniture, had been borrowed for a day or two from Flachsenfingen. At two doors he knocked in vain, and without answer; for all were already down at the hearth, cooking, blowing; and arranging.

How softly does the Spring day gradually fold back its nun-veil, and the Earth grow bright, as if it were the morning of a Resurrection!--The quicksilver-pillar of the barometer, the guiding Fire-pillar of the weather-prophet, rests firmly on Fixlein's Ark of the Covenant. The Sun raises himself, pure and cool, into the morning-blue, instead of into the morning-red. Swallows, instead of clouds, shoot skimming through the melodious air ... O, the good Genius of Fair Weather, who deserves many temples and festivals (because without him no festival could be held), lifted an ethereal, azure Day, as it were, from the well-clear atmosphere of the Moon, and sent it down, on blue butterfly-wings,--as if it were a _blue_ Monday,--glittering below the Sun, in the zigzag of joyful, quivering descent, upon the narrow spot of Earth, which our heated fancies are now viewing .... And on this balmy, vernal spot stand, amid flowers, over which the trees are shaking blossoms instead of leaves, a bride and a bridegroom.... Happy Fixlein! how shall I paint thee without deepening the sighs of longing in the fairest souls?

But soft! we will not drink the magic cup of Fancy to the bottom at six in the morning; but keep sober till towards night!

At the sound of the morning prayer-bell, the bridegroom, for the din of preparation was disturbing his quiet orison, went out into the churchyard, which (as in many other places), together with the church, lay round his mansion like a court. Here on the moist green, over whose closed flowers the churchyard wall was still spreading broad shadows, did his spirit cool itself from the warm dreams of Earth; here, where the white flat gravestone of his Teacher lay before him like the fallen-in door on the Janus's-temple of Life, or like the windward side of the narrow house, turned towards the tempests of the world; here, where the little shrunk metallic door on the grated cross of his father uttered to him the inscriptions of death, and the year when his parent departed, and all the admonitions and mementos, graven on the lead;--there, I say, his mood grew softer and more solemn; and he now lifted up by heart his morning prayer, which usually he read; and entreated God to bless him in his office, and to spare his mother's life, and to look with favor and acceptance on the purpose of to-day. Then over the graves he walked into his fenceless little angular flower-garden; and here, composed and confident in the Divine keeping, he pressed the stalks of his tulips deeper into the mellow earth.

But on returning to the house, he was met on all hands by the bell-ringing and the Janizary-music of wedding-gladness;--the marriage-guests had all thrown off their nightcaps, and were drinking diligently;--there was a clattering, a cooking, a frizzling;--tea-services, coffee-services, and warm beer-services, were advancing in succession; and plates full of bride-cakes were going round like potters' frames or cistern-wheels.--The Schoolmaster, with three young lads, was heard rehearsing from his own house an _Arioso_, with which, so soon as they were perfect, he purposed to surprise his clerical superior.--But now rushed all the arms of the foaming joy-streams into one, when the sky-queen besprinkled with blossoms, the bride, descended upon Earth in her timid joy, full of quivering, humble love;--when the bells began;--when the procession-column set forth with the whole village round and before it;--when the organ, the congregation, the officiating priest, and the sparrows on the trees of the church-window, struck louder and louder their rolling peals on the drum of the jubilee-festival.... The heart of the singing bridegroom was like to leap from its place for joy, "that on his bridal-day it was all so respectable and grand."--Not till the marriage benediction could he pray a little.

Still worse and louder grew the business during dinner, when pastry-work and marchpane-devices were brought forward,--when glasses and slain fishes (laid under the napkins to frighten the guests) went round;--and when the guests rose, and themselves went round, and at length danced round; for they had instrumental music from the city there.

One minute handed over to the other the sugar-bowl and bottle-case of joy; the guests heard and saw less and less, and the villagers began to see and hear more and more, and towards night they penetrated like a wedge into the open door,--nay, two youths ventured even, in the middle of the parsonage-court, to mount a plank over a beam, and commence seesawing. Out of doors, the gleaming vapor of the departed Sun was encircling the Earth, the evening star was glittering over parsonage and churchyard; no one heeded it.

However, about nine o'clock,--when the marriage-guests had wellnigh forgotten the marriage-pair, and were drinking or dancing along for their own behoof; when poor mortals, in this sunshine of Fate, like fishes in the sunshine of the sky, were leaping up from their wet, cold element; and when the bridegroom, under the star of happiness and love, casting like a comet its long train of radiance over all his heaven, had in secret pressed to his joy-filled breast his bride and his mother,--then did he lock a slice of wedding-bread privily into a press, in the old superstitious belief, that this residue secured continuance of bread for the whole marriage. As he returned, with greater love for the sole partner of his life, she herself met him with his mother, to deliver him in private the bridal-nightgown and bridal-shirt, as is the ancient usage. Many a countenance grows pale in violent emotions, even of joy; Thiennette's wax-face was bleaching still whiter under the sunbeams of Happiness. O never fall, thou lily of Heaven, and may four springs instead of four seasons open and shut thy flower-bells to the sun! All the arms of his soul as he floated on the sea of joy were quivering to clasp the soft, warm heart of his beloved, to encircle it gently and fast, and draw it to his own....

He led her from the crowded dancing-room into the cool evening. Why does the evening, does the night, put warmer love in our hearts? Is it the nightly pressure of helplessness; or is it the exalting separation from the turmoil of life; that veiling of the world, in which for the soul nothing more remains but souls;--is it therefore, that the letters in which the loved name stands written on our spirit appear, like phosphorus-writing, by night _in fire_, while by day in their _cloudy_ traces they but smoke?

He walked with his bride into the Castle-garden; she hastened quickly through the castle, and past its servants'-hall, where the fair flowers of her young life had been crushed broad and dry, under a long, dreary pressure; and her soul expanded, and breathed in the free open garden, on whose flowery soil destiny had cast forth the first seeds of the blossoms which to-day were gladdening her existence. Still Eden! Green flower-checkered _chiaroscuro_!--The moon is sleeping under ground like a dead one; but beyond the garden the sun's red evening-clouds have fallen down like rose-leaves; and the evening-star, the brideman of the sun, hovers, like a glancing butterfly, above the rosy red, and, modest as a bride, deprives no single starlet of its light.

The wandering pair arrived at the old gardener's hut; now standing locked and dumb, with dark windows in the light garden, like a fragment of the Past surviving in the Present. Bared twigs of trees were folding, with clammy, half-formed leaves, over the thick, intertwisted tangles of the bushes.--The Spring was standing, like a conqueror, with Winter at his feet.--In the blue pond, now bloodless, a dusky evening-sky lay hollowed out, and the gushing waters were moistening the flower-beds.--The silver sparks of stars were rising on the altar of the East, and falling down extinguished in the red sea of the West.

The wind whirred, like a night-bird, louder through the trees; and gave tones to the acacia-grove, and the tones called to the pair who had first become happy within it: "Enter, new mortal pair, and think of what is past, and of my withering and your own; and be holy as Eternity, and weep not only for joy, but for gratitude also!"--And the wet-eyed bridegroom led his wet-eyed bride under the blossoms, and laid his soul, like a flower, on her heart, and said: "Best Thiennette, I am unspeakably happy, and would say much, and cannot.--Ah, thou Dearest, we will live like angels, like children together! Surely I will do all that is good to thee; two years ago I had nothing, no nothing; ah, it is through thee, best love, that I am happy. I call thee Thou, now, thou dear good soul!" She drew him closer to her, and said, though without kissing him: "Call me Thou always, Dearest!"

And as they stept forth again from the sacred grove into the magic-dusky garden, he took off his hat; first, that he might internally thank God, and secondly, because he wished to look into this fairest evening sky.

They reached the blazing, rustling marriage-house, but their softened hearts sought stillness; and a foreign touch, as in the blossoming vine, would have disturbed the flower-nuptials of their souls. They turned rather, and winded up into the churchyard to preserve their mood. Majestic on the groves and mountains stood the Night before man's heart, and made it also great. Over the _white_ steeple-obelisk the sky rested _bluer_ and _darker_; and behind it wavered the withered summit of the May-pole with faded flag. The son noticed his father's grave, on which the wind was opening and shutting, with harsh noise, the little door of the metal cross, to let the year of his death be read on the brass plate within. An overpowering sadness seized his heart with violent streams of tears, and drove him to the sunk hillock, and he led his bride to the grave, and said: "Here sleeps he, my good father; in his thirty-second year he was carried hither to his long rest. O Thou good, dear father, couldst thou to-day but see the happiness of thy son, like my mother! But thy eyes are empty, and thy breast is full of ashes, and thou seest us not."--He was silent. The bride wept aloud; she saw the mouldering coffins of her parents open, and the two dead arise and look round for their daughter, who had stayed so long behind them, forsaken on the Earth. She fell upon his heart, and faltered: "O beloved, I have neither father nor mother; do not forsake me!"

O thou who hast still a father and a mother, thank God for it, on the day when thy soul is full of joyful tears, and needs a bosom wherein to shed them....

And with this embracing at a father's grave, let this day of joy be holily concluded.--

TENTH LETTER-BOX.

St. Thomas's-Day and Birthday.

An Author is a sort of bee-keeper for his reader-swarm; in whose behalf he separates the Flora kept for their use into different seasons, and here accelerates, and there retards, the blossoming of many a flower, that so in all chapters there be blooming.

The goddess of Love and the angel of Peace conducted our married pair on tracks running over full meadows, through the Spring; and on footpaths hidden by high corn-fields, through the Summer; and Autumn, as they advanced towards Winter, spread her marble leaves under their feet. And thus they arrived before the low, dark gate of Winter, full of life, full of love, trustful, contented, sound, and ruddy.

On St. Thomas's-day was Thiennette's birthday as well as Winter's. About a quarter past nine, just when the singing ceases in the church, we shall take a peep through the window into the interior of the parsonage. There is nothing here but the old mother, who has all day (the son having restricted her to rest, and not work) been gliding about, and brushing, and burnishing, and scouring, and wiping; every carved chair-leg, and every brass nail of the waxcloth-covered table, she has polished into brightness;--everything hangs, as with all married people who have no children, in its right place, brushes, fly-flaps, and almanacs;--the chairs are stationed by the room-police in their ancient corners;--a flax-rock, encircled with a diadem, or scarf of azure riband, is lying in the Schadeck-bed, because, though it is a half-holiday, some spinning may go on;--the narrow slips of paper, whereon heads of sermons are to be arranged, lie white beside the sermons themselves, that is, beside the octavo paper-book which holds them, for the Parson and his work-table, by reason of the cold, have migrated from the study to the sitting-room;--his large furred doublet is hanging beside his clean bridegroom-nightgown; there is nothing wanting in the room but He and She. For he had preached her with him to-night into the empty Apostle's-day church, that so her mother, without witnesses,--except the two or three thousand readers who are peeping with me through the window,--might arrange the provender-baking, and whole commissariat department of the birthday-festival, and spread out her best table-gear and victual-stores without obstruction.

The soul-curer reckoned it no sin to admonish, and exhort, and encourage, and threaten his parishioners, till he felt pretty certain that the soup must be smoking on the plates. Then he led his birthday helpmate home, and suddenly placed her before the altar of meat-offering, before a sweet title-page of bread-tart, on which her name stood baked, in true _monastic characters_, in tooth-letters of almonds. In the background of time and of the room, I yet conceal two--bottles of Pontac. How quickly, under the sunshine of joy, do thy cheeks grow ripe, Thiennette, when thy husband solemnly says: "This is thy birthday; and may the Lord bless thee, and watch over thee, and cause his countenance to shine on thee, and send thee, to the joy of our mother and thy husband especially, a happy, glad _recovery_. Amen!"--And when Thiennette perceived that it was the old mistress who had cooked and served up all this herself, she fell upon her neck, as if it had been not her husband's mother, but her own.

Emotion conquers the appetite. But Fixlein's stomach was as strong as his heart; and with him no species of movement could subdue the peristaltic. Drink is the friction-oil of the tongue, as eating is its drag. Yet, not till he had eaten and spoken much, did the pastor fill the glasses. Then indeed he drew the corksluice from the bottle, and set forth its streams. The sickly mother, of a being still hid beneath her heart, turned her eyes, in embarrassed emotion, on the old woman only; and could scarcely chide him for sending to the city wine-merchant on her account. He took a glass in each hand, for each of the two whom he loved, and handed them to his mother and his wife, and said: "To thy long, long life, Thiennette!--And your health and happiness, Mamma!--And a glad arrival to our little one, if God so bless us!" "My son," said the gardeneress, "it is to thy long life that we must drink; for it is by thee we are supported. God grant thee length of days!" added she, with stifled voice, and her eyes betrayed her tears.

I nowhere find a livelier emblem of the female sex, in all its boundless levity, than in the case where a woman is carrying the angel of Death beneath her heart, and yet in these nine months full of mortal tokens thinks of nothing more important than of who shall be the gossips, and what shall be cooked at the christening. But thou, Thiennette, hadst nobler thoughts, though these too along with them. The still hidden darling of thy heart was resting before thy eyes like a little angel sculptured on a gravestone, and pointing with its small finger to the hour when thou shouldst die; and every morning and every evening thou thoughtest of death with a certainty of which I yet knew not the reasons; and to thee it was as if the Earth were a dark mineral cave, where man's blood, like stalactitic water, drops down, and in dropping raises shapes which gleam so transiently, and so quickly fade away! And that was the cause why tears were continually trickling from thy soft eyes, and betraying all thy anxious thoughts about thy child; but thou repaidst these sad effusions of thy heart by the embrace in which, with new-awakened love, thou fellest on thy husband's neck, and saidst: "Be as it may, God's will be done, so thou and my child are left alive!--But I know well that thou, Dearest, lovest me as I do thee." ... Lay thy hand, good mother, full of blessings, on the two; and thou, kind Fate, never lift thine away from them!--

It is with emotion and good wishes that I witness the kiss of two fair friends, or the embracing of two virtuous lovers; and from the fire of their altar sparks fly over to me; but what is this to our sympathetic exaltation when we see two mortals, bending under the same burden, bound to the same duties, animated to the same care for the same little darlings, fall on one another's overflowing hearts, in some fair hour? And if these, moreover, are two mortals who already wear the mourning weeds of life, I mean old age, whose hair and cheeks are now grown colorless, and eyes grown dim, and whose faces a thousand thorns have marred into images of Sorrow;--when these two clasp each other with such wearied, aged arms, and so near to the precipice of the grave, and when they say or think: "All in us is dead, but not our love--O we have lived and suffered long together, and now we will hold out our hands to Death together also, and let him carry us away together,"--does not all within us cry: O Love, thy spark is superior to Time; it burns neither in joy nor in the cheek of roses; it dies not, neither under a thousand tears nor under the snow of old age, nor under the ashes of thy--beloved. It never dies; and Thou, All-good! if there were no eternal love, there were no love at all....

To the Parson it was easier than it is to me to pave for himself a transition from the heart to the digestive faculty. He now submitted to Thiennette (whose voice at once grew cheerful, while her eyes time after time began to sparkle) his purpose to take advantage of the frosty weather and have the winter meat slaughtered and salted. "The pig can scarcely rise," said he; and forthwith he fixed the determination of the women, further the butcher, and the day, and all _et ceteras_; appointing everything with a degree of punctuality, such as the war-college (when it applies the cupping-glass, the battle-sword, to the overfull system of mankind) exhibits on the previous day, in its arrangements, before it drives a province into the baiting-ring and slaughter-house.

This settled, he began to talk and feel quite joyously about the course of winter, which had commenced to-day at two-and-twenty minutes past eight in the morning; "for," said he, "new-year is close at hand; and we shall not need so much candle to-morrow night as to-night." His mother, it is true, came athwart him with the weapons of her five senses; but he fronted her with his Astronomical Tables, and proved that the lengthening of the day was no less undeniable than imperceptible. In the last place, like most official and married persons, heeding little whether his women took him or not, he informed them, in juristico-theological phrase: "That he would put off no longer, but write this very afternoon to the venerable Consistorium, in whose hands lay the _jus circa sacra_, for a new Ball to the church-steeple; and the rather, as he hoped before new-year's day to raise a bountiful subscription from the parish for this purpose. If God spare us till spring," added he, with peculiar cheerfulness, "and thou wert happily recovered, I might so arrange the whole that the ball should be set up at thy first churchgoing, dame!"

Thereupon he shifted his chair from the dinner and dessert table to the work-table; and spent the half of his afternoon over the petition for the steeple-ball. As there still remained a little space till dusk, he clapped his tackle to his new learned _Opus_, of which I must now afford a little glimpse. Out of doors among the snow, there stood near Hukelum an old Robber-Castle, which Fixlein, every day in Autumn, had hovered round like a _revenant_, with a view to gauge it, ichnographically to delineate it, to put every window-bar and every bridle-hook of it correctly on paper. He believed he was not expecting too much, if thereby--and by some drawings of the not so much vertical as horizontal walls--he hoped to impart to his "_Architectural Correspondence of two Friends concerning the Hukelum Robber-Castle_" that last polish and labor _limae_ which contents Reviewers. For towards the critical Star-chamber of the Reviewers he entertained not that contempt which some authors actually feel--or only affect, as, for instance, I. From this mouldered Robber-_Louvre_, there grew for him more flowers of joy than ever in all probability had grown from it of old for its owners.--To my knowledge, it is an anecdote not hitherto made public, that for all this no man but _Buesching_ has to answer. Fixlein had, not long ago, among the rubbish of the church letter-room, stumbled on a paper wherein the Geographer had been requesting special information about the statistics of the village. Buesching, it is true, had picked up nothing,--accordingly, indeed, Hukelum, in his _Geography_, is still omitted altogether;--but this pestilential letter had infected Fixlein with the spring-fever of Ambition, so that his palpitating heart was no longer to be stilled or held in check, except by the assaf[oe]tida-emulsion of a review. It is with authorcraft as with love; both of them for decades long one may equally desire and forbear; but is the first spark once thrown into the powder-magazine, it burns to the end of the chapter.

Simply because winter had commenced by the Almanac, the fire must be larger than usual; for warm rooms, like large furs and bear-skin caps, were things which he loved more than you would figure. The dusk, this fair _chiaroscuro_ of the day, this colored foreground of the night, he lengthened out as far as possible, that he might study Christmas discourses therein; and yet could his wife, without scruple, just as he was pacing up and down the room, with the sowing-sheet full of divine word-seeds hung round his shoulder,--hold up to him a spoonful of alegar, that he might try the same in his palate, and decide whether she should yet draw it off. Nay, did he not in all cases, though fonder of roe-fishes himself, order a milter to be drawn from the herring-barrel, because his good-wife liked it better?--

Here light was brought in; and as Winter was just now commencing his glass-painting on the windows, his ice flower-pieces, and his snow-foliage, our Parson felt that it was time to read something cold, which he pleasantly named his cold collation; namely, the description of some unutterably frosty land. On the present occasion, it was the winter history of the four Russian sailors on Nova Zembla. I, for my share, do often in summer, when the sultry zephyr is inflating the flower-bells, append certain charts and sketches of Italy, or the East, as additional landscapes to those among which I am sitting. And yet to-night he further took up the _Weekly Chronicle_ of Flachsenfingen; and amid the bombshells, pestilences, famines, comets with long tails, and the roaring of all the Hell-floods of another Thirty Years' War, he could still listen with the one ear towards the kitchen, where the salad for his roast-duck was just a-cutting.

Good-night, old Fixlein! I am tired. May kind Heaven send thee, with the young year 1794, when the Earth shall again carry her people, like precious night-moths, on leaves and flowers, the new steeple-ball, and a thick, handsome--boy, to boot!

ELEVENTH LETTER-BOX.

Spring; Investiture; and Childbirth.

I have just risen from a singular dream; but the foregoing Box makes it natural. I dreamed that all was verdant, all full of odors; and I was looking up at a steeple-ball glittering in the sun, from my station in the window of a little white garden-house, my eyelids full of flower-pollen, my shoulders full of thin cherry-blossoms, and my ears full of humming from the neighboring beehives. Then, methought, advancing slowly through the beds, came the Hukelum Parson, and stept into the garden-house, and solemnly said to me: "Honored Sir, my wife has just brought me a little boy; and I make bold to solicit _your Honor_ to do the holy office for the same, when it shall be received into the bosom of the church."

I naturally started up, and there was--Parson Fixlein standing bodily at my bedside, and requesting me to be godfather; for Thiennette had given him a son last night about one o'clock. The confinement had been as light and happy as could be conceived; for this reason, that the father had, some months before, been careful to provide one of those _Klappersteins_, as we call them, which are found in the aerie of the eagle, and therewith to alleviate the travail; for this stone performs, in its way, all the service which the bonnet of that old Minorite monk in Naples, of whom Gorani informs us, could accomplish for people in such circumstances, who put it on....

--I might vex the reader still longer; but I willingly give up, and show him how the matter stood.