An old man stood in the New-Year's night at the window, and gazed with a look of restless despair upon the immutable, ever-blooming heaven, and out over the still pure white earth whereupon there was now no one so joyless and sleepless as he. For his grave stood near to him. It was covered only with the snow of age, not with the green of youth; and he brought with him thither out of his whole rich life nothing but errors and sins and sickness; a ruined body, a desolated soul, a breast full of poison, an old age full of remorse. The fair days of his youth wandered about him now like ghosts, and they bore him back again to that clear morning when his father first placed him at the cross-road of life, the right hand leading by the sunny ways of virtue into a wide, peaceful land, full of light and of harvests; the left, down into the mole-ways of vice towards a black cavern, full of down-dropping poison, full of darting serpents and dark sultry damps.
Ah! the serpents hung about his breast, and the poison-drops upon his tongue, and he knew now where he was.
Knowing not what he did, and with unspeakable grief, he cried out to Heaven: "Give me my youth once more! O father, place me again upon the cross-road, that I may choose otherwise!"
But his father and his youth were long gone. He saw wandering lights dancing on the marshes, and dying out upon God's Acre, and he said, "These are my sinful days!" He saw a star fly out from heaven, to glimmer in its fall, and to be extinguished on the earth. "That is I," said his bleeding heart; and the serpent-teeth of remorse gnawed again into his wounds.
His burning fancy showed him creeping night-wanderers upon the roofs, and the windmill threw up its arms threatening to crush him, and a mask left behind in the dead-house assumed by degrees his own feature.
Suddenly, in the midst of this tumult, music for the New Year flowed down from the tower, like distant church-song. He was deeply moved. He looked around the horizon and over the wide earth, and thought of his youthful friends, who now, happier and better than he, were teachers for the world, fathers of happy children, and favored men, and he said, "O, I also could be happy, dear parents, had I fulfilled your New-Year's wishes and instructions."
In the feverish memories of his youth, it seemed to him that the mask with his features raised itself up in the dead-house; finally, through the superstition which discerns spirits and the future on New-Year's night, it became a living youth, in the position of the beautiful boy of the Capitol, pulling out a thorn, and his formerly blooming face danced weird and bitter before him.
He could look no more: he covered his eyes: hot tears streamed down upon the snow;--again he softly sighed, hopeless and unconscious, "Come again, O youth, come again!"
And it came again; for on that New-Year's night he had only dreamed thus fearfully. He was still a youth; yet his errors had been no dream. But he thanked God that he, still young, might turn aside from the foul ways of vice, and could follow the sunny path which leads to the fair land of harvests. Turn aside with him, O youth, if thou standest upon his wandering way. This frightful dream will in future be thy judge; but if thou shouldst one day call out, full of grief, "Come again, O beautiful youth!" so shall it never return again.
The tenderest and kindest angel, the Angel of the last hour, whom we harshly call Death, is sent to us, that he may mildly and gently pluck away the sinking heart of man from life, and bear it unhurt in his warm hands out of the cold breast into high, warming Eden. His brother is the Angel of the first hour, who twice kisses man,--once when he begins this life; and again, when he awakes on high, without wounds, and enters smiling upon the other life, as he came weeping into this.
As the Angel of the last hour saw the battle-fields stretched before him, full of blood and tears, and drew the trembling souls away, his mild eyes melted, and he said: "Ah! I will once die like man, that I may enter into his last agony, and soothe it when I dissolve the ties of life!"
The boundless circle of angels, who love each other above, pressed around the sympathetic one, and promised their beloved to surround him with heavenly rays after the instant of his death; thereby he might know that death had been; and his brother, whose kiss opens our cold lips, as the morning light does the chill flowers, gently touched his forehead, and said: "When I kiss thee again, my brother, thou shalt have died upon the earth, and will be again with us."
Loving and moved, the Angel descended to the battlefield, where only one beautiful, ardent Youth still panted, and heaved his shattered breast. Near the hero stood his Betrothed alone. He could no longer feel her hot tears, and her sorrow passed him unrecognized, like a distant battle-cry.--Then the Angel quickly clothed himself in her dear form, rested by him, drew the wounded soul with one hot kiss out of the cloven breast, and gave it to his brother on high, who kissed it for the second time, when suddenly it smiled.
The Angel of the last hour passed like a lightning-flash into the deserted frame, shone through the body, and stirred the warm life-stream again with the strengthened heart. But how was he affected by this new clothing of the body! His clear eye became confused in the whirl of unwonted, nervous life;--his once flying thought waded now slowly through the atmosphere of his brain,--the moist, faint-hued vapor dried away from all objects which formerly hung, autumnal-like, floating over them; now they pierced him out of the hot air with burning, painful spots of color,--all sensations became more gloomy, yet stormier and more nearly allied to self; and they seemed to him to be like instinct, as those of the beasts appear to us. Hunger tore him, thirst consumed him, pain stabbed him. Alas! his breast, torn and bleeding, heaved upward, and his first breath drawn was his first sigh after the heaven he had left! "Is this the death of man?" he thought; but as he did not see the promised token of death, neither angel nor the surrounding heavenly flame, therefore he perceived this to be only the life of man.
In the evening, the earthly strength of the Angel declined, and a crushing globe seemed to revolve about his head. Then Sleep sent his messengers. Images of the mind shifted out of the sunshine into a misty fire; the shadows of the day were thrown upon his brain; they came confused, and colossal, one upon another, and the world of sense reared itself uncontrolled and poured in upon him. Then Dream sent his messengers. Finally the funereal veil of Sleep wrapped itself thickly about him, and, sunk in the vault of night, he lay there lonely and motionless, like us poor mortals. But then, thou, heavenly Dream! didst descend, with thy thousand reflecting-glasses before his soul, and didst show in all of them a circle of angels and a radiant heaven; and the earthly body seemed to fall away from him with all its thorns. "Ah!" said he, in vain rapture, "my sleep was also my death." Yet when he awoke again, with his compressed heart full of heavy human blood, and looked out upon the earth and upon the night, he cried, "I saw the angels and the starry heavens; but it was only the image of Death, and not his presence."
The Betrothed of the translated hero did not mark that an angel only dwelt in the breast of her beloved; yet she loved the purified aspect of the wounded soul, and still gladly held the hand of him who had past so far away. But the Angel loved her deceived heart with the love of a man's soul in return; jealous of his own nature, he wished that he might not die before her, but love her so long that she might forgive him, when they met again in heaven, for having clasped together upon her breast an angel and a lover. Yet she died sooner; the late sorrow had bowed the head of this flower too low, and it lay broken upon the grave. She sank before the weeping Angel, not like the sun, who before all-beholding Nature casts himself so gorgeous into the sea that its red waves strike the very heaven, but like the tranquil moon, who, in the midnight, silvers the vaporous air, and sinks down unseen behind its dim veil. Death sent his gentler sister Unconsciousness before; she touched the heart of the Betrothed, and chilled the warm countenance; the flowers of her cheek withered; the pale snow of winter, under which the spring of eternity grows green, clothed her forehead and her hands. Then a burning tear broke from the swelling eye of the Angel, and, while he thought his heart loosed itself in the form of a tear as a pearl from the brittle shell, his Betrothed, awaked to the last delirium, moved her eyes once again, drew him close to her heart, and died as she kissed him, and said, "Now I am with thee, my brother!" Then the Angel believed his heavenly brother had given him the sign of the kiss and death. Yet no radiant heaven surrounded him, nor aught but funereal darkness, and he sighed because this was not his death, only the anguish of man over the death of another.
"O ye afflicted mortals!" he cried, "how can ye weary ones survive this! How can ye become old when the circle of youthful forms breaks and lies at length altogether scattered around,--when the graves of your friends lead down like steps to your own,--and when age becomes like the silent, blank evening hour of a cold battle-field! O ye poor mortals! how can your hearts endure it?"
The body of the translated hero-soul placed the gentle Angel among hard men, their injustice, and the distortions of Vice and of Passion; about his figure, also, was laid the thorny girdle of sceptres bound together, which compresses the hemispheres with its stings, and which is always laced more tightly by the great; he saw the claws of crowned and emblazoned beasts fasten themselves on their displumed prey, and heard it panting with enfeebled beating of the wings; he saw the whole terrestrial globe encircled in the winding swarthy folds of the giant-serpent, Vice, plunging and concealing its poisonous head deep in the breast of man. Then the hot sting of enmity was made to shoot through that tender heart, which, during a long eternity, had lain in the warmth of angelic love, and the holy love-fed spirit was forced to shudder over an inward dissolution. "Ah!" said he, "the death of man is full of woe!" Yet this was not death; for no angel appeared.
Thus in a few days he became weary of this life which we bear for half a hundred years, and he longed to go back. The evening sun attracted his kindred spirit. The wounds of his shattered breast exhausted him with pain. He went out with the evening glow upon his pale cheeks to "God's Acre," that green background of our life, where the forms which he had once stripped of all their beautiful souls were now crumbling away. He placed himself with sorrowful longing upon the bare grave of his unspeakably beloved and departed bride, and looked towards the fading evening sun. Seated on this dear knoll, he regarded his suffering body, and thought: Thou also, tender breast, wouldst be lying here in decay, and wouldst give no more pain, did I not support thee. Then he reflected upon the grievous life of man, and the throbs of the wounded breast showed him the pangs with which mortals purchase their virtue and their death, and which he had joyfully spared the noble soul of this body. Deeply touched by human virtue, he wept out of his boundless love for men, who, amid the craving of their own needs, under low-hung clouds, behind mists which stream over the sharp-cutting paths of life, never turn away from the lofty star of duty, but in their darkness stretch out loving arms towards every suffering breast they encounter, while around them nothing glimmers but the hope of setting like the sun in the old world, in order to arise in the new.
Just then the ecstasy opened his wounds, and blood, the tear of the soul, flowed from his heart upon the cherished knoll,--the dissolving body sank quietly towards his beloved,--tears of rapture broke the sunset light into, a rosy, swimming sea,--distant echoing tones, as of the earth passing wide through ringing ether, played in the vaporous lustre. Then a dark cloud or short night shot by the Angel, and was full of sleep; and now a radiant heaven opened and overspread him, and a thousand angels shone around. "Art thou again here, thou deceiving dream?" he said. But the Angel of the first hour stepped through the rays to him, and gave the sign of the kiss, and said: "That was death, thou immortal brother and heavenly friend!"
And the Youth and his beloved softly repeated the words.
Sleep buries the first world, its nights and sorrows, and brings to us a second world, with the forms we have loved and lost, and scenes too vast for this little earth.
I was in the Isle of the Blest, in the second world. This I dreamed. The stars were nearer; the heaven-blue lay on the flowers; all the breezes were melodious tones; and repose and ravishment, which with us are sundered, there dwelt conjoined. And the dead, from around whom had fallen that mist of life which veiled the higher heaven before, rested like mild evening suns in the azure ether.
Then, behold, the earth rose out of the deep beneath, on her course, and the Spring had covered her with his blossoms and buds. As she drew nearer to the Isle of the Blest, a voice full of love cried, "Look down, ye dead, on your old home, and see the beloved who have lost, but not forgotten you."
For in the spring the earth always passes by the eternal World of the Blest, whose off-cast husk sinks into its clods; and therefore it is, that in the spring poor mortals experience such a profound longing, so powerful a presentiment, and so many haunting recollections of their lost beloved.
After the voice, all the Blest stepped forward on the shore of the Supernal Isle, and each one sought on the wan earth the heart which had remembered him. One noble being gazed down, seeking after his spouse and after his children, around whom the glad spring-tide of earth was flowing; but they had no spring.
Alas! the father now saw his wife racked with anguish, and his children dissolved in tears. He discerned, in the strangling hand of Pain, the pallid form whose convulsed heart now reposes, and whose moistened eyes are now shut and cold; and beside it he recognized the loving companion of his former life fatally bleeding on the thorns of earthly martyrdom. And as sorrow, with glowing iron stylus, graved in the crumbling image life's farewell letter, and as she lost hope, but not yet patience, and as her fading eye desired no further happiness save that of her children, and as these could only share, but not remove, the sleepless nights of their mother, the affectionate father sank down, weeping, and prayed: "Eternal One, suffer her to die! Break the agonized bosom, and give me my friend again, and heal the wounded form at last under the earth. Eternal One, suffer her to die!"
And as he prayed, the weary heart here in its martyr-life heard him, and his faithful wife returned forever to his heart. Why weep ye, tender children, that your parents, after the same sufferings, should now have the same joys? that now, after their winter of life, an everlasting May has dawned on their souls? Does the painted spring-house under the earth trouble you, or the black boundary-hill on the earth, or the dread hand of decay, which extinguishes earthly scars and wounds and the whole body?
No, let the Spring scatter his flowers on their cold faces, and dry the tears on yours; and when you think painfully of them, comfort yourselves with saying, "We tenderly loved them, and no one has wounded, save He who now heals them."
In the lives both of men and of women, the period of the deepest happiness will be found to be, not that of childhood, but of youth. The joys of childhood are like the spring flowers,--beautiful, but small; like the tinted forget-me-not,--pretty, but without fragrance. The higher and more brilliant joys of knowledge and the affections are as yet undeveloped; the world of the ideal lies wrapped, as it were, in a dark-green bud.
With what other and what brighter radiance is the period of youth encircled!--that heavenly time of our first friendship and our first love,--of our first poem and our first philosophy,--of our first full enjoyment of nature and music and the drama,--of our first castles in the air, and our first vigorous training for active life. And this period is not simply irrecoverable,--that is the case with all past time,--but for the very reason that in its perfect bloom its only office is to minister to the fruits it so beautifully enfolds, it is the highest and the culminating period; for there is necessarily a greater productive force present in the process than in the results of development, in the flower of youth than in the ripeness of manhood. In his more advanced years, one is seldom led to enter upon a new path of knowledge or a higher moral life; but in his youth, one gives himself up, with inextinguishable fire, to some system of philosophy, or some total change in his moral life. It calls for more strength in a man to be converted than to stand still.
As the highest bodily strength and the most perfect health, the probability of the longest life and the greatest beauty,--in short, the best bodily attributes,--belong to the period of youth, so, and for that very reason, the intellectual wealth which comes not by acquisition, but by inheritance, is the largest. Great attainments, experience, and skill are certainly the fruits of age and of labor; but what are these things, compared with the ideal enjoyments which come of the first sciences we study, when the tree of knowledge, grafted upon the tree of life, puts forth its branches,--compared with the delight with which the new truths of geometry, or of philosophy, or of any favorite science new-born to us, fill the soul? For even in science, however far its limits may be pushed, one is ever descending from the height of the ideal to the vulgar level of reality.
Youth is the full moon, illumined by the magic light of the sun. Age is the new moon, upon which the day-earth (life) throws a meagre light.
I dreamed that from far off in the darkness I heard groans which seemed to come from every quarter to which I turned. At length they came only out of the gate of a valley which led between two, rocky ridges, where the darkness was illumined only by the red light of a comet, with its sparkling eye, and its tail sweeping back and forth like that of a tiger thirsty for blood. Then several wagons, filled with amputated hands grasping one the other either in prayer or struggle, came softly towards me on unrevolving wheels; and one small wagon also, full of eyes without eyelids, which grimly gazed upon and mirrored one another. A long metal coffin, mounted on the wheels of a gun-carriage, was with difficulty pulled along by iron elephants. On it was inscribed, "The ashes of the tenth army." With frightful exertion it was dragged like a tall tree round the corner of the narrow, rocky valley,--forced to bend by the weight of its contents, and the end of it seeming never to come.
Over the earth, and the sorrow of it, was a round ball of fire like a sun, whence came incessant flashes of lightning. And thirsty people opened vessels full of vipers, which darted out, and stung them to more burning thirst.... A crown, great like a shield, and red-hot, came whirling down with circular motion into a group of soldiers dancing, and scattered them. Upon still-gaping wounds it rained down thistles, which took root quickly and grew; and upon every fallen corpse struck a thunderbolt, and slew it again. I looked up to the heavens for consolation; but there, in the place of the sunset's glow, and the colors of the dawn, and the northern lights, was smoking blood. Swift as an arrow, villages and cities shot through the air like long clouds of ashes; some few streets only, which had been blown up by mining, hanging fast in the sky, with the remnants of houses and of men clinging to them. On a neighboring mountain were glaciers and ice-peaks, upon which children were transfixed; and on the distant summits, whence one could look down upon the battle-field, were parents and children and brides, eagerly gazing upon a mirror held over it.
At length the gate sprang open, and broke in pieces on the battle-field, and the storm of woe burst forth. Then I looked in upon that terrible world, and fell senseless to the earth; for what I saw was too horrible for man to look upon or to remember.
Gradually it seemed to me in my swoon as if this frightful field was moving further and further off, while its sounds of horror died away into songs of swans. And out of the distance floated up to me, on the gentle breezes, the tones of shepherd's flutes,--now far off, now near,--breaking, at length, with full sound upon my ear. And then I was lifted up and borne along on wings of ether, with the light breaking through my closed eyelids. And a creative finger touched me, and high in heaven, upon a green cloud, I opened my eyes. Above me was the blue abyss of the stars; below me stretched a blue ocean, on whose horizon glittered, in the glow of the sunset, the countless islands of the blessed; around me floated scattered cloudlets, tinted with the red and white of roses and of lilies, and with the many colors of manifold flowers.
"Who, O God, has brought me to life out of my woe?" I cried.
"Child of man, it is my Father who has done it," answered a soft voice very near me. But I saw no form of any person; only a halo of glory hovering near me indicated the place of the invisible being.
Under the stare now, on high, rose again, like the songs of the spheres, the old mournful tones. The islands on the horizon began to move, and swim in joy around one another. Many of them dipped into the dark waves, and came up again brilliant as the colors of the morning. Some went down into the sea, and reappeared covered with pearls. But one of them, crowned with cedars and palms and oaks, with strong young giants on its shores, went straight out into the ocean, toward the east.
"Am I upon earth?" I inquired.
"Ask me not," replied the voice, "for I know all thy thoughts, and will answer thee in thy heart. Thou wilt be upon the earth when it rises in the east from the sea; beneath the sea it circles swiftly round the sun. The sea of time is the wave on the ocean of eternity."
As if borne upon a stream, the cedar island came ever nearer to the green cloud. Youths greater than those of earth looked down upon the blue sea, and sang songs of gladness,--or gazed in rapture upon the heavens, and folded their hands in prayer,--or slumbered in arbors of rainbows and tears of joy. Behind them stood lions; above them circled eagles.
"Upon the cedar island dwell men who, like me, have died for the earth; but in earthly faces shall it be revealed to thee how the Infinite Father rewards those who have shed their blood for their country. The youths who are looking down into the waves have a nearer view of their old earth moving in the waters, as the island moves with it. They see only happy countries, and their friends who rejoice in their deeds, and posterity which praises them. And every flower which sprang from their blood is shown to them of God.
"Those who are gazing up to heaven, and praying, see an altar upon every sun,--and greater brethren who make higher sacrifices to the Highest; and they are entreating the Father to summon them also to still higher sacrifices. And when he thunders, he calls them.
"Those who are slumbering in tears of joy are seeing their brother soldiers dying bravely, and are comforting them in death, and welcoming them in tearful recognition as they pass from the earth to the island."
And now white flowers floated up from the earth to the surface of the sea, and all the sleepers awoke. The flowers were the souls of their mothers, who in death were following their sons fallen upon the battle-field; and the flowers became angels and flew towards the youths. It was an endless dying of endless joy. The soft murmurs of love from those who thus again found one another stirred the lilies and the roses to sounds as of harps. But as the mothers breathed the vibrating air and their hearts beat tremulously in harmony with the sound, they died away and exhaled into a flower-cloud. And the cloud arose and floated along the heavens to the distant islands where dwell the good mothers and the happy brides, longing still for the time when all the islands of the blessed were one fixed land of promise.
"Ye sons of men, joy is an eternity older than pain, and ever will be so,--for that has scarcely existed. Sacrifice ye, then, time to eternity."
A noble old man with the martyr's crown on his head looked up to the green cloud and prayed to the voice near me. Then saw I mirrored in the old man's eyes the form of the being near me. And my heart was humbled before the greatest man of earth as he repeated to me again the words, "Sacrifice time to eternity."
And now there came up from the sea near the cedar island a smoke as of a volcano, but throwing out only crowns of oak-leaves and palm-branches and streams of light. And at length a vast altar covered with young men and old, sleeping, rose from the waves. But when the light of heaven touched the sleepers they awoke suddenly, and, rushing upon the island, fell upon the breasts of their old comrades in arms. And the stars of heaven shone over them in glad, undying token of their union. The oak-forests rustled and the lions roared and the eagles, circling in the air, bathed themselves for joy in the fire and the lightning which shot from the stars. And the storm spread itself over the universe, and scattered balls of fire like suns, and thundered as with the noise of many worlds, and mingled its hot tears of joy with those of the heroes. And from below the sea came a dull echo from the earth. Then the cloud sank upon the island, and with a rushing sound received up into itself the heroes who had prayed to the Father to permit them to sacrifice in higher worlds.
When the storm had disappeared with them behind the stars, the vastness of creation appeared. All being rejoiced in eternity. The worlds lay along the heavens like an Alpine chain; the suns encircled the primal source of light; and covering all was the Throne of God.
"Pray before thou wakest, for the earth, too, will disappear," said the voice near me. And my whole heart was filled with prayer by the very nearness of this higher being. But the green cloud now moved more rapidly with me eastward toward the approaching earth; and the cedar island floated with its happy multitudes towards the other islands. The sea glowed in the east as with the colors of the dawn; and deeper and deeper sank the green cloud into the aurora of earth.
Suddenly, then, the halo of glory round the head of the invisible being became as a great rainbow, and was absorbed in an infinite radiance which filled the heavens.
And the earth passed away like a summer night.
I awoke, and instead of the cloud there was a green meadow around me, and above me glittered the stars. The first night of summer had followed the last night of spring. The moon was rising like a silver bow in the ghostly air. And in the north the sunset colors of the spring were changing upon the mountain-tops into the morning glow of the summer. My heart still clung to the eternal stars, where now awake I lingered in my dream, and I sighed, "Alas! each day above is the beginning of spring." Then I heard the voice in me repeat the old words, "Child of man, sacrifice time to eternity,"--and I sighed no more.
Footnote 1: I need not tell any one that the valley itself is situated in the departments of the Upper Pyrenees.
Footnote 2: It is well known that the Symplegadian rocks continually dashed against each other, and destroyed every passing ship, until Orpheus's lyre subdued and tranquillized them.
Footnote 3: Alluding to a painting by Reynolds, in which Garrick, invited by both Muses, follows Thalia.
Footnote 4: A kind of jelly-fish.
Footnote 5: Ten drops of this instantly sweeten half a pound of sour beer.
Footnote 6: The cave is twenty feet high, but the entrance only five feet.
Footnote 7: French miles. The valley is about two German miles--ten English miles--long.
Footnote 8: The Höfersche heaven-path, or how to learn the way to eternal salvation in twenty-four hours.
Footnote 9: A market-place in Rome where deformed beings were sold, and fetched a higher price the uglier they were.
Footnote 10: A Parisian dentist wrote this over his door.
Footnote 11: In the same § Kant says: "Everything that Newton has written in his immortal Principia, though such a large head was required to invent it, can be learned; but to compose spirited poems cannot be taught, however complete the instructions for learning the art may be. The reason is, that Newton can explain all the steps he had to take, from the first elements of geometry to his grandest and most profound inventions; he can explain them, not alone to himself, but to others, even to the remote descendants, while no Homer or Wieland can show how his ideally rich, and yet thoughtful characters, came forth from his brain; for he knows it not himself, and therefore cannot teach it others."
I had hoped that I could depend upon Kant, who has a million times more intelligence than I have, as upon a mental Chargé d'Affaires; but when I came to this passage (and to those upon repentance, music, the origin of evil, &c), I saw I must myself follow him, and not only pray after him, as I had before done, but reflect. But to return! Certainly Newton's "Principles" can be learned, that is, the new ones may be repeated, but that also can happen to the invented poems; yet you can be taught to invent them as little as Newton's Principles. A new philosophic idea seems, after its birth, to lie more clearly in its former seed-vessels and organic molecules than a poetic one; but why was Newton the first to see it? He and Kant can discover, no better than Shakespeare or Leibnitz, how the beginning of a new idea suddenly bursts from the cloud of old ones; they can show their Nexus (else they would not be human ones) with the old ones, but not their conception from it; the same holds of the poetic. Let Kant teach us to invent systems and truths (not to prove them, though, strictly speaking, the one is closely allied to the other), then he shall be taught to invent epics, and I will be responsible for it. He seems to me to confound the difficulty of forming ideas with the less important one of forming new ones; the difficulty of transition with the inexplicability of the matter. I fear and wonder at the latent almightiness with which man orders, that is, creates his range of ideas. I know no better symbol of creation than the regularity and causality of the creation of ideas in us, which no will and no mind can regulate and create, for any such arrangement and intention would presuppose the unborn idea. And in this creation the grand enigma of our moral freedom is veiled.
Footnote 12: Gold dissolved in strong acid, mixed with a small quantity of quicksilver in a vial, forms a tree with foliage.
Footnote 13: The male glowworms are black.
Footnote 14: Rameses caused his son to be fastened to the topmost point of an obelisk, that they who had to raise it should risk a more valuable life than their own.
Footnote 15: It lives more than two years, though it does not long survive the period of its leaving the grub-state, just as other insects, to whom nature has given the rose period of youth, only after the thorny age of reproduction.
Footnote 16: It is well known that the sight of blood damps courage, and that the Jews are not permitted to eat blood.
Footnote 17: Beauty in this connection, I adopt in the same sense which Schiller gives to it in his æsthetic critique, a prize essay of his genius on Beauty, which here, like Longinus, is at once the subject and the delineator of the exalted.
Footnote 18: If he had been, I would have read page 224 in the third part of Hesperus to him.
Footnote 19: The sun reflected in the water.
Footnote 20: At a circumcision, the Jews place one chair for the operator, and another for the prophet Elias, who is supposed invisibly to occupy it.
Footnote 21: These animals shine by night. Care must be taken not to draw them into the brain from the flower calyxes with the perfume.
Footnote 22: The Guernsey lily from Japan has its name from the Island of Guernsey, on which some roots of it were cast by a wrecked vessel.
Footnote 23: For the climatic dissimilarity of the planets must produce, as the climatic difference between the zones, Negroes, Greeks, Indians, etc., but always human beings.
Footnote 24: One ought, therefore, not to say mundus intelligibilis, but mundus intellectus.
Footnote 25: It may be said, that in this manner every Utopia, which is also a copy, must be realized, for the original of all dreams and Utopias does indeed exist,--though partially and disconnectedly; but the Original of the Eternal cannot exist in pieces and by parcels.
Footnote 26: This applies chiefly to the higher and richer orders, with whom the saturation of the five camel stomachs, the senses, and the starving of Psyche or the soul, at last determines into a horrible horror of life, and into a repulsive mingling of high aspirations and grovelling desires. The savage, the beggar, and the provincialist far surpass the rich and high in spiritual enjoyment, for in these, as in the houses of the Jews, (in memory of the destruction of Jerusalem) there must always be something incomplete, and the poor have too many of their earthly wants assuaged to be overwhelmed and pained by the demands of their ethereal nature.
Footnote 27: The new moon always rises with the sun, although dark and invisible.
Footnote 28: There are three kinds of men. To some, a heaven is granted even on this earth; to others, a limbus patrum in which joy and sorrow reign equally; and, lastly, to some a hell in which grief predominates. Beings who have suffered for twenty years on the sick-bed of bodily pain, which is not, like mental sorrow, worn out by time, have certainly had more unhappiness than happiness, and, but for immortality, would be an eternal reproach to the highest moral being. And if there exists no such unhappy being, it is yet in the power of a tyrant to make one, on a clinical torture-bed, with the assistance of a physician and a philosopher. Such a one, at least, has a right to demand a future indemnity for his sufferings, because the Creator cannot have formed a creature to mourn more than it can rejoice.
Besides, though the object of our grief may seem but a deception in the eyes of the Eternal One, our grief itself cannot. Human suffering is also distinguished from brutish pain, because the animal only feels the wound, as we perhaps do in sleep, but it sees it not. Its pain is not trebled and increased by anticipation, recollection, and sensibility; it is an evanescent sting, and nothing more. Therefore tears were only given to human eyes.
Footnote 29: Ignorance concerning our connection with the body and our connection with the second world.
Footnote 30: The yearly destruction of the slowly developed, beautiful flower-world does not argue against this; for to the tangible world each condition of its parts is as indifferent and perfect as the other, and rose-ashes are as good as rose-buds (without, of course, considering the organic soul). Nothing is beautiful but our appreciation of the beautiful, not the object itself. If it should be said that nature destroys so many developments, for whose growth she had already provided, that she breaks many thousand eggs, tears so many buds, crushes men in all stages of life with her blind tread, I would reply that the interrupted development is yet a condition of the perfected one, and that every position of its parts is indifferent to material objects, and, as coverings of the spiritual being, they still testify to a compensating immortality of the latter.
Footnote 31: Methinks the folly of spiritual mortality has not been sufficiently considered from this point of view. The living or spiritual whole (for the lifeless one has no other object than to be a means for the living), as such, can attain no object which each portion of it does not attain, for each one is one whole, and every other whole can only exist as a collective idea, and not as a reality. To consider the untenability of a progress contained in a course of vanishing shadows more vividly, one might shorten the life of a soul so that he, e. g. could only read one page of Kant's Critic, and then die. For the second page another soul must be created, and so for the new edition 884 souls. The mistake will perhaps become perceptible to most people by the increasing moonlight of liberality which has gradually risen over the past centuries; but the necessity for compensation demands immortality.
Footnote 32: Raphael died when he had finished the painting of the resurrection, and Haman died while his essay on resurrection and disembodiment was being printed.
Footnote 33: So are the Vampires called.
Footnote 34: Fixlein stands in the middle of the volume; preceded by Einer Mustheil für Mädchen (A Jelly-course for young Ladies); and followed by Some Jus De Tablette for Men. A small portion of the Preface relating to the first I have already omitted. Neither of the two have the smallest relation to Fixlein.--Ed.
Footnote 35: J. P. H., Jean Paul Hasus, Jean Paul, &c., have in succession been Richter's signatures. At present even, his German designation, either in writing or speech, is never Richter, but Jean Paul.--Ed.
Footnote 36: For understanding many little hints which occur in this Life of Fixlein, it will be necessary to bear in mind the following particulars: A German Gymnasium, in its complete state, appears to include eight Masters; Rector, Conrector, Subrector, Quintus, Quartus, Tertius, &c., to the first or lowest. The forms, or classes, again, are arranged in an inverse order; the Primaner (boys of the Prima, or first form) being the most advanced, and taught by the Rector; the Secundaner, by the Conrector, &c.; and therefore the Quartaner by the Quintus. In many cases, it would seem, the number of Teachers is only six; but in this Flachsenfingen Gymnasium we have express evidence that there was no curtailment.--Ed.
Footnote 37: A university beer.
Footnote 38: From Peter I will copy one or two of these privileges; the whole of which were once, at the origin of universities, in full force. For instance, a student can compel a citizen to let him his house and his horse; an injury, done even to his relations, must be made good fourfold; he is not obliged to fulfil the written commands of the Pope; the neighborhood must indemnify him for what is stolen from him; if he and a non-student are living at variance, the latter only can be expelled from the boarding-house; a Doctor is obliged to support a poor student; if he is killed, the next ten houses are laid under interdict till the murderer is discovered; his legacies are not abridged by falcidia, &c., &c.
Footnote 39: Literary Germany, a work (I believe of no great merit) which Richter often twitches in the same style.--Ed.
Footnote 40: See Schmelzle's Journey, p. 289--Ed.
Footnote 41: As in the State.--[V. or Von, de, of, being the symbol of the nobility, the middle order of the State.--Ed.]
Footnote 42: In Erlang, my petition has been granted. The Bible Institution of that town have found instead of the 116,301 As, which Fixlein at first pretended with such certainty to find in the Bible-books (which false number was accordingly given in the first Edition of this Work, p. 81), the above-mentioned 323,015; which (uncommonly singular) is precisely the sum of all the letters in the Koran put together. See Lüdeke's Beschr. des Turk. Reichs (Lüdeke's Description of the Turkish Empire. New edition, 1780).
Footnote 43: Paravicini Singularia de viris claris, Cent. I. 2.
Footnote 44: Ejusd., Cent. II. Philelphus quarrelled with the Greek about the quantity of a syllable; the prize or bet was the beard of the vanquished. Timotheus lost his.
Footnote 45: Their prayer-barrel, Kürüdu, is a hollowed shell, a calabash, full of unrolled formulas of prayer; they sway it from side to side, and then it works. More philosophically viewed, since in prayer the feeling only is of consequence, it is much the same whether this express itself by motion of the mouth or of the calabash.
Footnote 46: In German, as in some other languages, the common mode of address is by the third person; plural, it indicates respect; singular, command; the second person is also used; plural, it generally denotes indifference; singular, great familiarity, and sometimes its product, contempt. Dutzenfreund, Thouing-friend, is the strictest term of intimacy; and among the wild Burschen (Students) many a duel (happily however, often ending like the Polemo-Middinia in one drop of blood) has been fought, in consequence of saying Du (thou) and Sie (they) in the wrong place.--Ed.
Footnote 47: These antique Christmas festivities Richter describes with equal gusto in another work (Briefe und Zukünftige Lebenslemf); where the Christ-child (falsely reported to the young ones to have been seen flying through the air, with gold wings); the Birch-bough fixed in a corner of the room, and by him made to grow; the fruit of gilt sweetmeats, apples, nuts, which (for good boys) it suddenly produces, &c., &c., are specified with the same fidelity as here.--Ed.
Footnote 48: Which he purposed to make for his Island of St. Pierre in the Bienne Lake.
Footnote 49: Borrowed from the "Imperial Mine-product-sale-Commission," in Vienna. In their very names these Vienna people show taste.
Footnote 50: As, by the evidence at present before us, we can found on no other presumption, than that he must die in his thirty-second year; it would follow, that, in case he died two-and-thirty years after the death of the testatrix, no farthing could be claimed by him; since, according to our fiction, at the making of the testament he was not even one year old.
Footnote 51: In St. Paul's Church at London, where the slightest whisper sounds over, across a space of 143 feet.
Footnote 52: So much, according to Political Economists, a man yearly requires in Germany.
Footnote 53: This singular tone of my address to a Prince can only be excused by the equally singular relation wherein the Biographer stands to the Flachsenfingen Sovereign, and which I would willingly unfold here were it not that, in my Book, which, under the title of Dog-post-days, I mean to give to the world at Easter-fair, 1795, I hoped to expound the matter to universal satisfaction.
Footnote 54: His Clerical Law, p. 551.
Footnote 55: Eichhorn's Einleitung ins A. T. (Introduction to the Old Testament), Vol. II.
Footnote 56: Both have the same sound. Füchslein means Foxling, Fox-whelp.--Ed.
Footnote 57: Campe, a German philologist, who, along with several others of that class, has really proposed, as represented in the text, to substitute for all Greek or Latin derivatives corresponding German terms of the like import. Geography, which may be Erdbeschreibung (Earth-description), was thenceforth to be nothing else; a Geometer became an Earth-measurer, &c., &c. School-undergovernor, instead of Subrector, is by no means the happiest example of the system, and seems due rather to the Schadeck Lawyer than to Campe, whom our Author has elsewhere more than once eulogized for his project in similar style.--Ed.
Footnote 58: New Universal German Library, a reviewing periodical, in those days conducted by Nicolai, a sworn enemy to what has since been called the New School.--Ed.
Footnote 59: Superstition declares, that on the spot where the rainbow rises a golden key is left.
Footnote 60: To the Spring, namely, which begins with snow-drops, and ends with roses and pinks.
Footnote 61: This Christian superstition is not only a Rabbinical, but also a Roman one. Cicero de Senectute.
Footnote 62: For, according to the Jurists, fifteen persons make a people.
Footnote 63: A long philosophical elucidation is indispensably requisite; which will be found in this Book, under the title, Natural Magic of the Imagination. [A part of the Jus de Tablette appended to this Biography, unconnected with it, and not given here.--Ed.]
Footnote 64: This pygmy piece of ordnance, with its cunningly devised burning-glass, is still to be seen on the south side of the Paris Vanity-Fair; and in fine weather, to be heard, on all sides thereof, proclaiming the conversion (so it seems to Richter) of the Day from Forenoon to Afternoon.--Ed.
Footnote 65: The Wild Hunter, Wilde Jäger, is a popular spectre of Germany.--Ed.
Footnote 66: Indicating to the congregation what Psalm is to be sung.--Ed.
Footnote 67: Salerno was once famous for its medical science; but here, as in many other cases, we could desire the aid of Herr Reinhold with his Lexicon-Commentary.--Ed.
Footnote 68: This hospitable Potentate is as unknown to me as to any of my readers.--Ed.
Footnote 69: A little work printed in manuscript types; and seldom given by him to any but Princes. This piece of print-writing he intentionally passes off to the great as a piece of hand-writing; these persons being both more habituated and inclined to the reading of manuscript than of print.
Footnote 70: Thus defined by Adelung in his Lexicon: "Kräutermütze, in Medicine, a cap with various dried herbs sewed into it, and which is worn for all manner of troubles in the head."--Ed.
Footnote 71: Linné formed in Upsal a flower-clock, the flowers of which, by their different times of falling asleep, indicated the hours of the day.
Footnote 72: The good Professor of Catechetics is out here. Indignor quandoque bonus dormitat Schmelzle.--Ed.
Footnote 73: Passenger so placed in the huge German Postwagen, that he cannot look out.--Ed.
Footnote 74: Titan is also the title of this Legations-Rath Jean Pierre or Jean Paul (Friedrich Richter)'s chief novel.--Ed.
Footnote 75: Brühl, I suppose; but the historical edition of the matter is, that Brühl's treasonable secrets were come at by the more ordinary means of wax impressions of his keys.--Ed.
Footnote 76: Cities of Richter's romance kingdom. Flachsenfingen he sometimes calls Klein-Wien, Little Vienna.--Ed.
Footnote 77: The campaign of 1813-14 was the holy war of Germany, or Freiheitskampf, to which Jean Paul here alludes.--Translator.