Chapter VII: Part 7

Such a May as the present (of 1794) Nature has not, in the memory of man--begun; for this is but the fifteenth of it. People of reflection have for centuries been vexed once every year, that our German singers should indite May-songs, since several other months deserve such a poetical night-music much better; and I myself have often gone so far as to adopt the idiom of our market-women, and instead of May butter, to say June butter, as also June, March, April songs.--But thou, kind May of this year, thou deservest to thyself all the songs which were ever made on thy rude namesakes!--By Heaven! when I now issue from the wavering, checkered acacia-grove of the Castle-garden, in which I am writing this Chapter, and come forth into the broad, living day, and look up to the warming Heaven, and over its Earth budding out beneath it,--the Spring rises before me like a vast full cloud, with a splendor of blue and green. I see the Sun standing amid roses in the western sky, into which he has thrown his ray-brush, wherewith he has to-day been painting the Earth;--and when I look round a little in our picture-exhibition, his enamelling is still hot on the mountains; on the moist chalk of the moist Earth, the flowers full of sap-colors are laid out to dry, and the forget-me-not with miniature colors; under the varnish of the streams, the skyey Painter has pencilled his own eye; and the clouds, like a decoration-painter, he has touched off with wild outlines and single tints; and so he stands at the border of the Earth, and looks back upon his stately Spring, whose robe-folds are valleys, whose breast-bouquet is gardens, and whose blush is a vernal evening, and who, when she arises, shall be--Summer.

But to proceed! Every spring--and especially in such a spring--I imitate on foot our birds of passage; and travel off the hypochondriacal sediment of winter; but I do not think I should have seen even the steeple-ball of Hukelum, which is to be set up one of these days, to say nothing of the Parson's family, had not I happened to be visiting the Flachsenfingen Superintendent and Consistorialrath. From him I got acquainted with Fixlein's history,--every Candidatus must deliver an account of his life to the Consistorium,--and with his still madder petition for a steeple-ball. I observed, with pleasure, how gayly the cob was diving and swashing about in his duck-pool and milk-bath of life; and forthwith determined on a journey to his shore. It is singular, that is to say, manlike, that when we have for years kept prizing and describing some original person or original book, yet the moment we see such, they anger us; we would have them fit us and delight us in all points, as if any originality could do this but our own.

It was Saturday, the third of May, when I, with the Superintendent, the _Senior Capituli_, and some temporal Raths, mounted and rolled off, and in two carriages were driven to the Parson's door. The matter was, he was not yet--_invested_, and to-morrow this was to be done. I little thought, while we whirled by the white espalier of the Castle-garden, that there I was to write another book.

I still see the Parson, in his peruke-minever and head-case, come springing to the coach-door and lead us out; so smiling--so courteous--so vain of the disloaded freight, and so attentive to it. He looked as if in the journey of life he had never once put on the _travelling-gauze_ of Sorrow; Thiennette again seemed never to have thrown hers back. How neat was everything in the house, how dainty, decorated, and polished! And yet so quiet, without the cursed alarm-ringing of servants' bells, and without the bass-drum tumult of stair-pedalling. Whilst the gentlemen, my road-companions, were sitting in state in the upper room, I flitted, as my way is, like a smell over the whole house, and my path led me through the sitting-room over the kitchen, and at last into the churchyard beside the house. Good Saturday! I will paint thy hours as I may, with the black asphaltos of ink, on the tablets of other souls! In the sitting-room, I lifted from the desk a volume gilt on the back and edges, and bearing this title: "_Holy Sayings, by Fixlein. First Collection_." And as I looked to see where it had been printed, the Holy Collection turned out to be in writing. I handled the quills, and dipped into the negro-black of the ink, and I found that all was right and good. With your fluttering gentlemen of letters, who hold only a department of the foreign, and none of the home affairs nothing (except some other things about them) can be worse than their ink and pens. I also found a little copperplate, to which I shall in due time return.

In the kitchen, a place not more essential for the writing of an English novel than for the acting of a German one, I could plant myself beside Thiennette, and help her to blow the fire, and look at once into her face and her burning coals. Though she was in wedlock, a state in which white roses on the cheeks are changed for red ones, and young women are similar to a similitude given in my Note;[60]--and although the blazing wood threw a false rouge over her, I guessed how pale she must have been; and my sympathy in her paleness rose still higher at the thought of the burden which Fate had now not so much taken from her, as laid in her arms and nearer to her heart. In truth, a man must never have reflected on the Creation-moment, when the Universe first rose from the bosom of an Eternity, if he does not view with philosophic reverence a woman, whose thread of life a secret, all-wondrous Hand is spinning to a second thread, and who veils within her the transition from Nothingness to Existence, from Eternity to time;--but still less can a man have any heart of flesh, if his soul, in presence of a woman, who, to an unknown, unseen being, is sacrificing more than we will sacrifice when it is seen and known, namely, her nights, her joys, often her life, does not bow lower, and with deeper emotion, than in presence of a whole nun-orchestra on their Sahara-desert;--and worse than either is the man for whom his own mother has not made all other mothers venerable.

"It is little serviceable to thee, poor Thiennette," thought I, "that now, when thy bitter cup of sickness is made to run over, thou must have loud festivities come crowding round thee." I meant the Investiture and the Ball-raising. My rank, the diploma of which the reader will find stitched in with the _Dog-post-days_, and which had formerly been hers, brought about my ears a host of repelling, embarrassed, wavering titles of address from her; which people, to whom they have once belonged, are at all times apt to parade before superiors or inferiors, and which it now cost me no little trouble to disperse. Through the whole Saturday and Sunday I could never get into the right track either with her or him, till the other guests were gone. As for the mother, she acted, like obscure ideas, powerfully and constantly, but out of view; this arose in part from her idolatrous fear of us; and partly also from a slight shade of care (probably springing from the state of her daughter), which had spread over her like a little cloud.

I cruised about, so long as the moon-crescent glimmered in the sky, over the churchyard; and softened my fantasies, which are at any rate too prone to paint with the brown of crumbling mummies, not only by the red of twilight, but also by reflecting how easily our eyes and our hearts can become reconciled even to the ruins of Death; a reflection which the Schoolmaster, whistling as he arranged the charnel-house for the morrow, and the Parson's maid singing, as she reaped away the grass from the graves, readily enough suggested to me. And why should not this habituation to all forms of Fate in the other world, also, be a gift reserved for us in our nature by the bounty of our great Preserver?--I perused the gravestones; and I think even now that Superstition[61] is right in connecting with the reading of such things a loss of _memory_; at all events, one does _forget_ a thousand things belonging to this world....

The Investiture on Sunday (whose Gospel, of the Good Shepherd, suited well with the ceremony) I must despatch in few words; because nothing truly sublime can bear to be treated of in many. However, I shall impart the most memorable circumstances, when I say that there was--drinking (in the Parsonage),--music-making (in the Choir),--reading (of the Presentation by the Senior, and of the Ratification-rescript by the lay Rath),--and preaching, by the Consistorialrath, who took the soul-curer by the hand, and presented, made over, and guaranteed him to the congregation, and them to him. Fixlein felt that he was departing as a high-priest from the church which he had entered as a country parson, and all day he had not once the heart to ban. When a man is treated with solemnity, he looks upon himself as a higher nature, and goes through his solemn feasts devoutly.

This indenturing, this monastic profession, our Head-Rabbis and Lodge-masters (our Superintendents) have usually a taste for putting off till once the pastor has been some years ministering among the people, to whom they hereby present him; as the early Christians frequently postponed their consecration and investiture to Christianity, their baptism namely, till the day when they died. Nay, I do not even think this clerical Investiture would lose much of its usefulness, if it and the declaring-vacant of the office were reserved for the same day; the rather, as this usefulness consists entirely in two items; what the Superintendent and his Raths can eat, and what they can pocket.

Not till towards evening did the Parson and I get acquainted. The Investiture officials and elevation pulley-men had, throughout the whole evening, been very violently--breathing. I mean thus; as these gentlemen could not but be aware, by the most ancient theories and the latest experiments, that air was nothing else than a sort of rarefied and exploded water, it became easy for them to infer, that, conversely, water was nothing else than a denser sort of air. Wine-drinking, therefore, is nothing else but the breathing of an air pressed together into proper spissitude, and sprinkled over with a few perfumes. Now, in our days, by clerical persons too much (fluid) breath can never be inhaled through the mouth; seeing the dignity of their station excludes them from that breathing through the _smaller_ pores which Abernethy so highly recommends under the name of _air-bath_; and can the Gullet in their case be aught else than door-neighbor to the Windpipe, the _consonant_ and fellow-shoot of the Windpipe?--I am running astray; I meant to signify that I this evening had adopted the same opinion; only that I used air or ether, not like the rest for loud laughter, but for the more quiet contemplation of life in general. I even shot forth at my gossip certain speeches which betrayed devoutness. These he at first took for jests, being aware that I was from Court, and of quality. But the concave mirror of the wine-mist at length suspended the images of my soul, enlarged and embodied like spiritual shapes, in the air before me.--Life shaded itself off to my eyes like a hasty summer night, which we little fireflies shoot across with transient gleam;--I said to him that man must turn himself like the leaves of the great mallow, at the different day-seasons of his life, now to the rising sun, now to the setting, now to the night, towards the Earth and its graves;--I said, the omnipotence of Goodness was driving us and the centuries of the world towards the gates of the City of God, as, according to Euler, the resistance of the _Ether_ leads the circling Earth towards the Sun, &c., &c.

On the strength of these entremets, he considered me the first theologian of his age; and had he been obliged to go to war, would previously have taken my advice on the matter, as belligerent powers were wont of old from the theologians of the Reformation. I hide not from myself, however, that what preachers call vanity of the world is something altogether different from what philosophy so calls. When I, moreover, signified to him that I was not ashamed to be an Author; but had a turn for working up this and the other biography; and that I had got a sight of his _Life_ in the hands of the Superintendent; and might be in case to prepare a printed one therefrom, if so were he would assist me with here and there a tint of flesh-color,--then was my silk, which, alas! not only isolates one from electric fire, but also from a kindlier sort of it, the only grate which rose between his arms and me; for, like the most part of poor country parsons, it was not in his power to forget the rank of any man, or to vivify his own on a higher one. He said: "He would acknowledge it with veneration, if I should mention him in print; but he was much afraid his life was too common and too poor for a biography." Nevertheless, he opened me the drawer of his Letter-boxes, and said, perhaps he had hereby been paving the way for me.

The main point, however, was, he hoped that his _Errata_, his _Exercitationes_, and his _Letters on the Robber-Castle_, if I should previously send forth a Life of the Author, might be better received; and that it would be much the same as if I accompanied them with a Preface.

In short, when on Monday the other dignitaries with their nimbus of splendor had dissipated, I alone, like a precipitate, abode with him; and am still abiding, that is, from the fifth of May (the Public should take the Almanac of 1794, and keep it open beside them) to the fifteenth; to-day is Thursday, to-morrow is the sixteenth and Friday, when comes the Spinat-Kirmes, or Spinage-Wake, as they call it, and the uplifting of the steeple-ball, which I just purposed to await before I went. Now, however, I do not go so soon; for on Sunday I have to assist at the baptismal ceremony, as baptismal agent for my little future godson. Whoever pays attention to me, and keeps the Almanac open, may readily guess why the christening is put off till Sunday; for it is that memorable Cantata-Sunday, which once, for its mad, narcotic hemlock-virtues, was of importance in our History; but is now so only for the fair betrothment, which after two years we mean to celebrate with a baptism.

Truly it is not in my power--for want of colors and presses--to paint or print upon my paper the soft, balmy flower-garland of a fortnight which has here wound itself about my sickly life; but with a single day I shall attempt it. Man, I know well, cannot prognosticate either his joys or his sorrows, still less repeat them, either in living or writing.

The black hour of coffee has gold in its mouth for us and honey; here, in the morning coolness, we are all gathered; we maintain popular conversation, that so the parsoness and the gardeneress may be able to take share in it. The morning service in the church, where often the whole people[62] are sitting and singing, divides us. While the bell is sounding, I march with my writing-gear into the singing Castle-garden; and seat myself in the fresh acacia-grove, at the dewy two-legged table. Fixlein's Letter-boxes I keep by me in my pocket; and I have only to look and abstract from his what can be of use In my own.--Strange enough! so easily do we forget a thing in describing it, I really did not recollect for a moment that I am now sitting at the very grove-table of which I speak, and writing all this.--

My gossip in the mean time is also laboring for the world. His study is a sort of sacristy, and his printing-press a pulpit, wherefrom he preaches to all men; for an Author is the Town-chaplain of the Universe. A man who is making a book will scarcely hang himself; all rich lords'-sons, therefore, should labor for the press; for, in that case, when you awake too early in bed, you have always a _plan_, an aim, and therefore a cause before you why you should get out of it. Better off, too, is the author who collects rather than invents,--for the latter with its eating fire calcines the heart; I praise the Antiquary, the Heraldist, Note-maker, Compiler; I esteem the _Title-perch_ (a fish called _Perca-Diagramma_, because of the letters on its scales), and the _Printer_ (a chafer, called _Scarabaeus Typographus_, which eats letters in the bark of fir),--neither of them needs any greater or fairer arena in the world than a piece of rag-paper, or any other laying apparatus than a pointed pencil, wherewith to lay his four-and-twenty letter-eggs.--In regard to the _catalogue raisonne_, which my gossip is now drawing up of German _Errata_, I have several times suggested to him, "that it were good if he extended his researches in one respect, and revised the rule by which it has been computed, that, e. g. for a hundred-weight of pica black-letter, four hundred and fifty semicolons, three hundred periods, &c., are required; and to recount, and see whether, in Political writings and Dedications, the fifty notes of admiration for a hundred-weight of pica black-letter were not far too small an allowance, and if so, what the real quantity was."

Several days he wrote nothing; but wrapped himself in the slough of his parson's-cloak; and so in his canonicals, beside the Schoolmaster, put the few A-b-c shooters which were not, like forest-shooters, absent on furlough by reason of the spring, through their platoon firing in the Hornbook. He never did more than his duty, but also never less. It brought a soft, benignant warmth over his heart, to think that he, who had once ducked under a School-inspectorship, was now one himself.

About ten o'clock we meet from our different museums, and examine the village, especially the Biographical furniture and holy places, which I chance that morning to have had under my pen or pentagraph; because I look at them with more interest _after_ my description than _before_ it.

Next comes dinner.--

After the concluding grace, which is too long, we both of us set to entering the charitable subsidies and religious donations, which our parishioners have remitted to the sinking or rather rising fund of the church-box for the purchase of the new steeple-globe, into two ledgers; the one of these, with the names of the subscribers, or (in case they have subscribed for their children) with their children's names also, is to be inurned in a leaden capsule, and preserved in the steeple-ball; the other will remain below among the parish Registers. You cannot fancy what contributions the ambition of getting into the Ball brings us in; I declare, several peasants, who had given and well once already, contributed again when they had baptisms; must not little Hans be in the Ball too?

After this book-keeping by double entry, my gossip took to engraving on copper. He had been so happy as to elicit the discovery, that, from a certain stroke resembling an inverted Latin S, the capital letters of our German Chancery-hand, beautiful and intertwisted as you see them stand in Law-deeds and Letters-of-nobility, may every one of them be composed and spun out.

"Before you can count sixty," said he to me, "I take my fundamental-stroke and make you any letter out of it."

I merely inverted this fundamental-stroke, that is, gave him a German S, and counted sixty till he had it done. This line of beauty, when once it has been twisted and flourished into all the capitals, he purposes, by copperplates which he is himself engraving, to make more common for the use of Chanceries; and I may take upon me to give the Russian, the Prussian, and a few other smaller Courts, hopes of proof impressions from his hand; to under-secretaries they are indispensable.

Now comes evening; and it is time for us both, here forking about with our fruit-hooks on the literary Tree of Knowledge, at the risk of our necks, to clamber down again into the meadow-flowers and pasturages of rural joy. We wait, however, till the busy Thiennette, whom we are now to receive into our communion, has no more walks to take but the one between us. Then slowly we stept along (the sick lady was weak) through the office-houses; that is to say, through stalls and their population, and past a horrid lake of ducks, and past a little milk-pond of carps, to both of which colonies, I and the rest, like princes, gave bread, seeing we had it in view, on the Sunday after the christening, to--take them for bread for ourselves.

The sky is still growing kindlier and redder, the swallows and the blossom-trees louder, the house-shadows broader, and men more happy. The clustering blossoms of the acacia-grove hang down over our cold collation; and the ham is not stuck (which always vexes me) with flowers, but beshaded with them from a distance....

And now the deeper evening and the nightingale conspire to soften me; and I soften in my turn the mild beings round me, especially the pale Thiennette, to whom, or to whose heart, after the apoplectic crushings of a down-pressed youth, the most violent pulses of joy are heavier than the movements of pensive sadness. And thus beautifully runs our pure transparent life along, under the blooming curtains of May; and in our modest pleasure, we look with timidity neither behind us nor before; as people who are lifting treasure gaze not round at the road they came, or the road they are going.

So pass our days. To-day, however, it was different; by this time, usually, the evening meal is over; and the Shock has got the osseous-preparation of our supper between his jaws; but to-night I am still sitting here alone in the garden, writing the Eleventh Letter-Box, and peeping out every instant over the meadows, to see if my gossip is not coming.

For he is gone to town, to bring a whole magazine of spiceries; his coat-pockets are wide. Nay, it is certain enough that oftentimes he brings home with him, simply in his coat-pocket, considerable flesh-tithes from his Guardian, at whose house he alights; though truly, intercourse with the polished world and city, and the refinement of manners thence arising--for he calls on the bookseller, on school-colleagues, and several respectable shop-keepers--does, much more than flesh-fetching, form the object of these journeys to the city. This morning he appointed me regent-head of the house, and delivered me the _fasces_ and _curule chair_. I sat the whole day beside the young, pale mother; and could not but think, simply because the husband had left me there as his representative, that I liked the fair soul better. She had to take dark colors, and paint out for me the winter landscape and ice region of her sorrow-wasted youth; but often, contrary to my intention, by some simple elegiac word, I made her still eye wet; for the too full heart, which had been crushed with other than sentimental woes, overflowed at the smallest pressure. A hundred times in the recital I was on the point of saying: "O yes, it was with winter that your life began, and the course of it has resembled winter!"--Windless, cloudless day! Three more words about thee the world will still not take amiss from me!

I advanced nearer and nearer to the heart-central-fire of the woman; and at last they mildly broke forth in censure of the Parson; the best wives will complain of their husbands to a stranger, without in the smallest liking them the less on that account. The mother and the wife, during dinner, accused him of buying lots at every book-auction; and, in truth, in such places, he does strive and bid, not so much for good or for bad books--or old ones--or new ones--or such as he likes to read--or any sort of favorite books--but simply for books. The mother blamed especially his squandering so much on copperplates; yet some hours after, when the Schultheis, or Mayor, who wrote a beautiful hand, came in to subscribe for the steeple-ball, she pointed out to him how finely her son could engrave, and said that it was well worth while to spend a groschen or two on such capitals as these.

They then handed me--for when once women are in the way of a full, open-hearted effusion, they like (only you must not turn the stop-cock of inquiry) to pour out the whole--a ring-case, in which he kept a Chamberlain's key that he had found, and asked me if I knew who had lost it. Who could know such a thing, when there are almost more Chamberlains than picklocks among us?--

At last I took heart, and asked after the little toy-press of the drowned son, which hitherto I had sought for in vain over all the house. Fixlein himself had inquired for it, with as little success. Thiennette gave the old mother a persuading look full of love; and the latter led me up-stairs to an outstretched hoop-petticoat, covering the poor press as with a dome. On the way thither, the mother told me she kept it hid from her son because the recollection of his brother would pain him. When this deposit-chest of Time (the lock had fallen off) was laid open to me, and I had looked into the little charnel-house, with its wrecks of a childlike, sportful Past, I, without saying a word, determined, some time ere I went away, to unpack these playthings of the lost boy before his surviving brother. Can there be aught finer than to look at these ash-buried, deep-sunk, Herculanean ruins of childhood, now dug up and in the open air?

Thiennette sent twice to ask me whether he was come. He and she, precisely because they do not give their love the weakening expression of phrases, but the strengthening one of actions, have a boundless feeling of it towards one another. Some wedded pairs eat each others lips and hearts and love away by kisses; as in Rome, the statues of Christ (by Angelo) have lost their feet by the same process of kissing, and got leaden ones instead; in other couples, again, you may see, by mere inspection, the number of their conflagrations and eruptions, as in Vesuvius you can discover his, of which there are now forty-three; but in these two beings rose the Greek fire of a moderate and everlasting love, and gave warmth without casting forth sparks, and flamed straight up without crackling. The evening-red is flowing back more magically from the windows of the gardener's cottage into my grove; and I feel as if I must say to Destiny: "Hast thou a sharp sorrow, then throw it rather into my breast, and strike not with it three good souls, who are too happy not to bleed by it, and too sequestered in their little dim village not to shrink back at the thunderbolt which hurries a stricken spirit from its earthly dwelling."----

Thou good Fixlein! Here comes he hurrying over the parsonage-green. What languishing looks full of love already rest in the eye of thy Thiennette!--What news wilt thou bring us to-night from the town!--How will the ascending steeple-ball refresh thy soul to-morrow!--

TWELFTH LETTER-BOX.

Steeple-Ball Ascension.--The Toy-Press.

How, on this sixteenth of May, the old steeple-ball was twisted off from the Hukelum steeple, and a new one put on in its stead, will I now describe to my best ability; but in that simple historical style of the Ancients, which, for great events, is perhaps the most suitable.

At a very early hour, a coach arrived, containing Messrs. Court-Guilder Zeddel and Locksmith Waechser, and the new Peter's-cupola of the steeple. Towards eight o'clock the community, consisting of subscribers to the Globe, was visibly collecting. A little later came the Lord Dragoon Rittmeister von Aufhammer, as Patron of the church and steeple, attended by Mr. Church-Inspector Streichert. Hereupon my Reverend Cousin Fixlein and I repaired, with the other persons whom I have already named, into the Church, and there celebrated, before innumerable hearers, a week-day prayer-service. Directly afterwards, my Reverend Friend made his appearance above in the pulpit, and endeavored to deliver a speech which might correspond to the solemn transaction;--and immediately thereafter, he read aloud the names of the patrons and charitable souls, by whose donations the Ball had been put together; and showed to the congregation the leaden box in which they were specially recorded; observing that the book from which he had recited them was to be reposited in the Parish Register-office. Next he held it necessary to thank them and God, that he, above his deserts, had been chosen as the instrument and undertaker of such a work. The whole he concluded with a short prayer for Mr. Stechmann the Slater (who was already hanging on the outside on the steeple, and loosening the old shaft); and entreated that he might not break his neck, or any of his members. A short hymn was then sung, which the most of those assembled without the church-doors sang along with us, looking up at the same time to the steeple.

All of us now proceeded out likewise; and the discarded ball, as it were the amputated cock's-comb of the church, was lowered down and untied. Church-Inspector Streichert drew a leaden case from the crumbling ball, which my Reverend Friend put into his pocket, purposing to read it at his convenience; I, however, said to some peasants: "See, thus will your names also be preserved in the new Ball, and when, after long years, it shall be taken down, the box lies within it, and the then parson becomes acquainted with you all."--And now was the new steeple-globe, with the leaden cup in which lay the names of the by-standers, at length full-laden, so to speak, and saturated, and fixed to the pulley-rope;--and so did this the whilom cupping-glass of the community ascend aloft....

By Heaven! the unadorned style is here a thing beyond my power: for when the Ball moved, swung, mounted, there rose a drumming in the centre of the steeple; and the Schoolmaster, who, till now, had looked down through a sounding-hole directed towards the congregation, now stepped out with a trumpet at a side sounding-hole, which the mounting Ball was not to cross.--But when the whole Church rung and pealed, the nearer the capital approached its crown,--and when the Slater clutched it and turned it round, and happily incorporated the spike of it, and delivered down, between Heaven and Earth, and leaning on the Ball, a Topstone-speech to this and all of us,--and when my gossip's eyes, in his rapture at being Parson on this great day, were running over, and the tears trickling down his priestly garment;--I believe I was the only man--as his mother was the only woman--whose souls a common grief laid hold of to press them even to bleeding; for I and the mother had yesternight, as I shall tell more largely afterwards, discovered in the little chest of the drowned boy, from a memorial in his father's hand, that, on the day after the morrow, on Cantata-Sunday and his baptismal Sunday, he would be--two-and-thirty-years of age. "Oh!" thought I, while I looked at the blue heaven, the green graves, the glittering ball, the weeping priest, "so, at all times, stands poor man with bandaged eyes before thy sharp sword, incomprehensible Destiny! And when thou drawest it and brandishest it aloft, he listens with pleasure to the whizzing of the stroke before it falls!"--

Last night I was aware of it; but to the reader, whom I was preparing for it afar off, I would tell nothing of the mournful news, that, in the press of the dead brother, I had found an old Bible which the boys had used at school, with a white blank leaf in it, on which the father had written down the dates of his children's birth. And even this it was that raised in thee, thou poor mother, the shade of sorrow which of late we have been attributing to smaller causes; and thy heart was still standing amid the rain, which seemed to us already past over and changed into a rainbow!--Out of love to him, she had yearly told one falsehood, and concealed his age. By extreme good luck, he had not been present when the press was opened. I still purpose, after this fatal Sunday, to surprise him with the party-colored relics of his childhood, and so of these old Christmas-presents to make him new ones. In the mean while, if I and his mother can but follow him incessantly, like fishhook-floats, and foot clogs, through to-morrow and next day, that no murderous accident lift aside the curtain from his birth-certificate,--all may yet be well. For now, in truth, to his eyes, this birthday, in the metamorphotic mirror of his superstitious imagination, and behind the magnifying magic vapor of his present joys, would burn forth like a red death-warrant.... But besides all this, the leaf of the Bible is now sitting higher than any of us, namely, in the new steeple-ball, into which I this morning prudently introduced it. Properly speaking, there is indeed no danger.

THIRTEENTH LETTER-BOX.

Christening.

To-day is that stupid Cantata-Sunday; but nothing now remains of it save an hour.--By Heaven! in right spirits were we all to-day. I believe I have drunk as faithfully as another.--In truth, one should be moderate in all things, in writing, in drinking, in rejoicing; and as we lay straws into the honey for our bees, that they may not drown in their sugar, so ought one at all times to lay a few firm Principles and twigs from the tree of Knowledge into the Syrup of life, instead of those same bee-straws, that so one may cling thereto, and not drown like a rat. But now I do purpose in earnest to--write (and also live) with steadfastness; and therefore, that I may record the christening ceremony with greater coolness,--to besprinkle my fire with the night-air, and to roam out for an hour into the blossom-and-wave-embroidered night, where a lukewarm breath of air, intoxicated with soft odors, is sinking down from the blossom-peaks to the low-bent flowers, and roaming over the meadows, and at last launching on a wave, and with it sailing down the moonshiny brook. O, without, under the stars, under the tones of the nightingale, which seem to reverberate, not from the echo, but from the far-off down-glancing worlds; beside that moon, which the gushing brook, in its flickering, watery band, is carrying away, and which creeps under the little shadows of the bank as under clouds,--O, amid such forms and tones, the heart of man grows serious; and as of old an evening bell was rung to direct the wanderer through the deep forests to his nightly home, so in our Night are such voices within us and about us, which call to us in our strayings, and make us calmer, and teach us to moderate our own joys, and to conceive those of others.

* * *

I return, peaceful and cool enough, to my narrative. All yesternight I left not the worthy Parson half an hour from my sight, to guard him from poisoning the well of his life. Full of paternal joy, and with the skeleton of the sermon (he was committing it to memory) in his hand, he set before me all that he had; and pointed out to me the fruit-baskets of pleasures which Cantata-Sunday always plucked and filled for him. He recounted to me, as I did not go away, his baptisms, his accidents of office; told me of his relatives; and removed my uncertainty with regard to the public revenues--of his parish, to the number of his communicants and expected catechumens. At this point, however, I am afraid that many a reader will in vain endeavor to transport himself into my situation, and still be unable to discover why I said to Fixlein, "Worthy gossip, better no man could wish himself." I lied not, for so it is.... But look in the Note.[63]

At last rose the Sunday, the present; and on this holy day, simply because my little godson was for going over to Christianity, there was a vast racket made; every time a conversion happens, especially of nations, there is an uproaring and a shooting; I refer to the two Thirty Years' Wars, to the more recent one, and to the earlier, which Charlemagne so long carried on with the heathen Saxons; thus, in the _Palais Royal_, the Sun, at his transit over the meridian, fires off a cannon.[64] But this morning the little Unchristian, my godson, was precisely the person least attended to; for, in thinking of the conversion, they had no time left to think of the convert. Therefore I strolled about with him myself half the forenoon; and in our walk, hastily conferred on him a private baptism; having named him _Jean Paul_ before the priest did so. At midday, we sent the beef away as it had come; the Sun of happiness having desiccated all our gastric juices. We now began to look about us for pomp; I for scientific decorations of my hair, my godson for his christening-shirt, and his mother for her dress-cap. Yet before the child's-rattle of the christening-bell had been jingled, I and the midwife, in front of the mother's bed, instituted Physiognomical Travels on the countenance of the small Unchristian, and returned with the discovery, that some features had been embossed by the pattern of the mother, and many firm portions resembled me; a double similarity, in which my readers can take little interest. _Jean Paul_ looks very sensible for his years, or rather for his minutes, for it is the small one I am speaking of.----

But now I would ask, what German writer durst take it upon him to spread out and paint a large historic sheet, representing the whole of us as we went to church? Would he not require to draw the father, with swelling canonicals, moving forward slowly, devoutly, and full of emotion? Would he not have to sketch the godfather, minded this day to lend out his names, which he derived from two Apostles (John and Paul), as Julius Caesar lent out his names to two things still living even now (to a month and a throne)?--And must he not put the godson on his sheet, with whom even the Emperor Joseph (in his need of nurse-milk) might become a foster-brother, in his old days, if he were still in them?--

In my chamber, I have a hundred times determined to smile at solemnities, in the midst of which I afterwards, while assisting at them, involuntarily wore a petrified countenance, full of dignity and seriousness. For, as the Schoolmaster, just before the baptism, began to sound the organ--an honor never paid to any other child in Hukelum,--and when I saw the wooden christening-angel, like an alighted Genius, with his painted timber arm spread out under the baptismal ewer, and I myself came to stand close by him, under his gilt wing, I protest the blood went slow and solemn, warm and close, through my pulsing head, and my lungs full of sighs; and to the silent darling lying in my arms, whose unripe eyes Nature yet held closed from the full perspective of the Earth, I wished, with more sadness than I do to myself, for his Future also as soft a sleep as to-day; and as good an angel as to-day, but a more living one, to guide him into a more living religion, and, with invisible hand, conduct him unlost through the forest of Life, through its falling trees, and Wild Hunters,[65] and all its storms and perils.... Will the world not excuse me, if when, by a side-glance, I saw on the paternal countenance prayers for the son, and tears of joy trickling down into the prayer; and when I noticed on the countenance of the grandmother far darker and fast-hidden drops, which she could not restrain, while I, in answer to the ancient question, engaged to provide for the child if its parents died,--am I not to be excused if I then cast my eyes deep down on my little godson, merely to hide their running over?--For I remembered that his father might perhaps this very day grow pale and cold before a suddenly arising mask of Death; I thought how the poor little one had only changed his bent posture in the womb with a freer one, to bend and cramp himself erelong more harshly in the strait arena of life; I thought of his inevitable follies, and errors, and sins; of these soiled steps to the Grecian Temple of our Perfection; I thought that one day his own fire of genius might reduce himself to ashes, as a man that is electrified can kill himself with his own lightning.... All the theological wishes, which, on the godson-billet printed over with them, I placed in his young bosom, were glowing written in mine.... But the white feathered-pink of my joy had then, as it always has, a bloody point within it,--I again, as it always is, went to nest, like a woodpecker, in a skull.... And as I am doing so even now, let the describing of the baptism be over for to-day, and proceed again to-morrow....

FOURTEENTH LETTER-BOX.

Oh, so it is ever! So does Fate set fire to the theatre of our little plays, and our bright-painted curtain of Futurity! So does the Serpent of Eternity wind round us and our joys, and crush, like the royal-snake, what it does not poison! Thou good Fixlein!--Ah! last night, I little thought that thou, mild soul, while I was writing beside thee, wert already journeying into the poisonous Earth-shadow of Death.

Last night, late as it was, he opened the lead box found in the old steeple-ball; a catalogue of those who had subscribed to the last repairing of the church was there; and he began to read it now; my presence and his occupations having prevented him before. O, how shall I tell that the record of his birth-year, which I had hidden in the new Ball, was waiting for him in the old one; that in the register of contributions he found his father's name, with the appendage, "given for his new-born son Egidius?"--

This stroke sunk deep into his bosom, even to the rending of it asunder; in this warm hour, full of paternal joy, after such fair days, after such fair employments, after dread of death so often survived, here, in the bright, smooth sea, which is rocking and bearing him along, starts snorting, from the bottomless abyss, the sea-monster Death; and the monster's throat yawns wide, and the silent sea rushes into it in whirlpools, and hurries him along with it.

But the patient man, quietly and slowly, and with a heart silent, though deadly cold, laid the leaves together; looked softly and firmly over the churchyard, where, in the moonshine, the grave of his father was to be distinguished; gazed timidly up to the sky, full of stars, which a white overarching laurel-tree screened from his sight;--and though he longed to be in bed, to settle there and sleep it off, yet he paused at the window to pray for his wife and child, in case this night were his last.

At this moment the steeple-clock struck twelve; but, from the breaking of a pin, the weights kept rolling down, and the clock-hammer struck without stopping,--and he heard with horror the chains and wheels rattling along; and he felt as if Death were hurling forth in a heap all the longer hours which he might yet have had to live,--and now, to his eyes, the churchyard began to quiver and heave, the moonlight flickered on the church-windows, and in the church there were lights flitting to and fro, and in the charnel-house was a motion and a tumult.

His heart fainted within him, and he threw himself into bed, and closed his eyes that he might not see;--but Imagination in the gloom now blew aloft the dust of the dead, and whirled it into giant shapes, and chased these hollow, fever-born masks alternately into lightning and shadow. Then at last from transparent thoughts grew colored visions, and he dreamed this dream. He was standing at the window looking out into the churchyard; and Death, in size as a scorpion, was creeping over it, and seeking for his bones. Death found some arm-bones and thigh-bones on the graves, and said, "They are my bones"; and he took a spine and the bone-legs, and stood with them, and the two arm-bones and clutched with them, and found on the grave of Fixlein's father a skull, and put it on. Then he lifted a scythe beside the little flower-garden, and cried: "Fixlein, where art thou? My finger is an icicle and no finger, and I will tap on thy heart with it." The Skeleton, thus piled together, now looked for him who was standing at the window, and powerless to stir from it; and carried in the one hand, instead of a sand-glass, the ever-striking steeple-clock, and held out the finger of ice, like a dagger, far into the air....

Then he saw his victim above at the window, and raised himself as high as the laurel-tree to stab straight into his bosom with the finger,--and stalked towards him. But as he came nearer, his pale bones grew redder, and vapors floated woolly round his haggard form. Flowers started up from the ground; and he stood transfigured and without the clamm of the grave, hovering above them, and the balm-breath from the flower-cups wafted him gently on;--and as he came nearer, the scythe and clock were gone, and in his bony breast he had a heart, and on his bony head red lips;--and nearer still, there gathered on him soft, transparent, rosebalm-dipped flesh, like the splendor of an Angel flying hither from the starry blue;--and close at hand, he was an Angel with shut snow-white eyelids....

The heart of my friend, quivering like a Harmonica-bell, now melted in bliss in his clear bosom;--and when the Angel opened its eyes, his were pressed together by the weight of celestial rapture, and his dream fled away.----

But not his life; he opened his hot eyes, and--his good wife had hold of his feverish hand, and was standing in room of the Angel.

The fever abated towards morning; but the certainty of dying still throbbed in every artery of the hapless man. He called for his fair little infant into his sick-bed, and pressed it silently, though it began to cry, too hard against his paternal, heavy-laden breast. Then towards noon his soul became cool, and the sultry thunder-clouds within it drew back. And here he described to us the previous (as it were, arsenical) fantasies of his usually quiet head. But it is even those tense nerves, which have not quivered at the touch of a poetic hand striking them to melody of sorrow, that start and fly asunder more easily under the fierce hand of Fate, when with sweeping stroke it smites into discord the firm-set strings.

But towards night his ideas again began rushing in a torch-dance, like fire-pillars round his soul; every artery became a burning-rod, and the heart drove flaming naphtha-brooks into the brain. All within his soul grew bloody; the blood of his drowned brother united itself with the blood which had once flowed from Thiennette's arm, into a bloody rain;--he still thought he was in the garden in the night of betrothment, he still kept calling for bandages to stanch blood, and was for hiding his head in the ball of the steeple. Nothing afflicts one more than to see a reasonable, moderate man, who has been so even in his passions, raving in the poetic madness of fever. And yet if nothing save this mouldering corruption can soothe the hot brain; and if, while the reek and thick vapor of a boiling nervous-spirit and the hissing water-spouts of the veins are encircling and eclipsing the stifled soul, a higher Finger presses through the cloud, and suddenly lifts the poor bewildered spirit from amid the smoke to a sun,--is it more just to complain, than to reflect that Fate is like the oculist, who, when about to open to a blind eye the world of light, first bandages and darkens the other eye that sees?

But the sorrow does affect me, which I read on Thiennette's pale lips, though do not hear. It is not the distortion of an excruciating agony, nor the burning of a dried-up eye, nor the loud lamenting or violent movement of a tortured frame, that I see in her; but what I am forced to see in her, and what too keenly cuts the sympathizing heart, is a pale, still, unmoved, undistorted face, a pale, bloodless head, which Sorrow is as it were holding up after the stroke, like a head just severed by the axe of the headsman; for oh! on this form the wounds, from which the three-edged dagger had been drawn, are all fallen firmly together, and the blood is flowing from them in secret into the choking heart. O Thiennette, go away from the sick-bed, and hide that face which is saying to us: "Now do I know that I shall not have any happiness on Earth; now do I give over hoping,--would this life were but soon done!"

You will not comprehend my sympathy, if you know not what, some hours ago, the too loud lamenting mother told me. Thiennette, who of old had always trembled for his thirty-second year, had encountered this superstition with a nobler one; she had purposely stood farther back at the marriage-altar, and in the bridal-night fallen sooner asleep than he; thereby--as is the popular belief--so to order it that she might also die sooner. Nay, she has determined, if he die, to lay with his corpse a piece of her apparel, that so she may descend the sooner to keep him company in his narrow house. Thou good, thou faithful wife, but thou unhappy one!--

CHAPTER LAST.

I have left Hukelum, and my gossip his bed; and the one is as sound as the other. The cure was as foolish as the malady. It first occurred to me, that, as Boerhaave used to remedy convulsions by convulsions, one fancy might in my gossip's case be remedied by another; namely, by the fancy that he was yet no man of thirty-two, but only a man of six or nine. Deliriums are dreams not encircled by sleep; and all dreams transport us back into youth, why not deliriums too? I accordingly directed every one to leave the patient; only his mother, while the fiercest meteors were darting, hissing before his fevered soul, was to sit down by him alone, and speak to him as if he were a child of eight years. The bed-mirror also I directed her to cover. She did so; she spoke to him as if he had the small-pox fever; and when he cried, "Death is standing with two-and-thirty pointed teeth before me, to eat my heart," she said to him, "Little dear, I will give thee thy roller-hat, and thy copy-book, and thy case, and thy hussar-cloak again, and more too if thou wilt be good." A reasonable speech he would have taken up and heeded much less than he did this foolish one.

At last she said,--for to women in the depth of sorrow dissimulation becomes easy,--"Well, I will try it this once, and give thee thy playthings; but do the like again, thou rogue, and roll thyself about in the bed so, with the smallpox on thee!" And with this, from her full apron she shook out on the bed the whole stock of playthings and dressing-ware, which I had found in the press of the drowned brother. First of all his copy-book, where Egidius in his eighth year had put down his name, which he necessarily recognized as his own handwriting; then the black velvet _fall-hat_ or roller-cap; then the red and white leading-strings; his knife-case, with a little pamphlet of tin leaves; his green hussar-cloak, with its stiff facings; and a whole _orbis pictus_ or _fictus_ of Nuernberg puppets....