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 WIT, WISDOM, AND PHILOSOPHY 
 
 Edited by Gilbb P. Hawlbt. 
 
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 nothing but destroy. Some of the ablest thinkers of the century have been eager 
 "■■ tt.0£iles3 their debt to him for inspiration, rich, suggest! veness, and subtle analy- 
 
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Wit, Wisdom, asd Philosopht 
 
 JEAN PAUL FRED. RICHTER 
 
 EDITED BT 
 
 GILES P. HAWLET 
 
 NEW TOEK 
 
 fUNK: & WAG-NALLS, Publisheks 
 
 10 AND 12 Det Street 
 
 1884 
 
A 1 r 
 
 Entered, according to Act of Congress, in the year 18&1, by 
 
 FUNK & WAGNALLS, 
 
 In the Office of the Mbrarian of Congress at Washington, D. C. 
 
 ALL BIGHTS IIES£RV£D. 
 
 
 tr fc 
 
b those who enjoy the companionship of great minds as 
 yit is found in iooJcs, and who appreciate the 
 pure and lofty intellects ly which the 
 spiritual horizon of the world 
 has been expanded. 
 
" Printing ink now is like sympathetic ink, it becomes as 
 quickly invisible as visible ; ■wherefore it is good to repeat old 
 thoughts in the newest books, because the old works in vf hich they 
 stand are not read. New translations of many truths, as of for- 
 eign standard v^orks, must be given forth every half century. 
 And, indeed, I wish that old German standard books were turned 
 into new German from time to time, and so could find their way 
 into the circulating libraries. 
 
 "Why are there flower and weed gleanings of everything, but 
 no wine or corn gleanings of the innumerable works on education ? 
 Why should one single good observation or rule be lost because it 
 is imprisoned in some monstrous folio, or blown away in some 
 single sheet ? For dwarfs and giants, even in books, do not live 
 long. Our age, this balloon or air-ship, which, by simultaneous 
 lighting of now lamps and throwing out of old ballast, has con- 
 stantly mounted higher and higher, might now, I should think, 
 cease to throw out, and rather lovingly endeavor to collect than 
 to disperse the old." — Richtek, 
 
PEEFxiOE. 
 
 The works of Jean Paul Eiehter are very little read 
 in America. To the majority, even of educated men, 
 he is only a famous name. " Thought treasuries" and 
 books of quotations abound with his wise and pungent 
 sayings, and from these sources he is often quoted. 
 The books from which they come are little known. One 
 reason for this is to be found in the fact which Carlyle 
 alleges — that " probably there is not in any modern lan- 
 guage so intricate a writer." The compiler of this vol- 
 ume believes that there are many well-informed people 
 who cannot find time for the laborious task of reading 
 this voluminous author, and yet who would gladly know 
 more about a man whose fame has spread so widely 
 tlu-ough the world, and whose works are conceded to be 
 classic. 
 
 The editor believes that he has done the reading pub- 
 lic a vahiable service in carefully studying the works of 
 Jean Paul, and selecting out of so much that goes almost 
 unread the gems of thought and brilliant analects that 
 no one can afford not to read. This labor itself has been 
 to him a source of great enjoyment and profit. Ameri- 
 can readers need to get a larger taste of the inimitable 
 Jean Paul, whereupon it will not be surprising if his 
 works are in increased demand. 
 
 These selections are gathered from " Fruit, Flower, and 
 Thorn Pieces," " Campaner Thai," "Autobiography," 
 
VI PllEFACE. 
 
 "Levana," "Titan," "Hesperus," "The Invisible 
 Lodge," " Quintus Fixlein," " Schmekle's Journey to 
 Flatz," "Dream of the TJniverse," and other short 
 readings. The volume is commended to the public 
 in the humble hope that the thoughts it contains may 
 as deeply impress and as gi'aciously bless many others as 
 they have the editor. It cannot possibly have a more 
 appropriate benediction than the one which Kichter him- 
 self pronounced upon his "Hesperus": "So would I 
 follow thee on thy way, my book, with the author's 
 wishes of years ago for every soul which thou canst glad- 
 den. . . . Into the torture-chambers and through the 
 prison-gratings of forsaken souls throw thou a cheering 
 radiance ; and for him whose blessed island has sunk 
 away from him to the bottom of the sea of eternity, 
 transfigure thou the low, dark region ; and whoever 
 looks round and looks up in vain in a dismantled Para- 
 dise, to him may a little ray from thee show, down on 
 the ground, under the yellow leaves, some hidden sweet 
 fruit or other of a former time ; and if there is any eye 
 to which thou canst show nothing, draw it softly up- 
 ward toward Heaven. Nay, and if ever 1 gi-ow too old, 
 then comfort me also !" 
 
 Giles P. Hawlet. 
 
OOIsTTENTS. 
 
 PREFACE. 
 
 INTKODUCTOET. 
 
 1. BXTBAOTS FROM < 
 
 Jabltle's Essays on Eichtbk xl 
 
 2. Extracts fbom Longfellow's '" jiyperion " svi 
 
 1. Natuee. 
 
 1. Sunrise 31 
 
 8. Nature an iBoIian Harp.... SI 
 
 3. Morning 21 
 
 4. Night 23 
 
 B. Sympathy witli Nature 23 
 
 6. How to take a Walk 23 
 
 7. Transmigration of the Souls 
 
 ofElowers 28 
 
 8. Solace in Nature 23 
 
 9. First Feeling for Nature... 23 
 
 10. Consolations of Nature 34 
 
 11. The Nameless Wish and the 
 
 Nameless Dread 84 
 
 13. Nature a permanent Re- 
 source 25 
 
 13. Description of u Summer 
 
 Day 25 
 
 14. The Gladness of Spring 26 
 
 15. The Flower Clock 28 
 
 n. Am. 
 
 16. Why Italians are not good 
 
 Landscape Painters 30 
 
 17. One great Mind directs 80 
 
 18. Apostrophe to Music 30 
 
 19. Thoughts . only expressed 
 
 in Poetry 30 
 
 20. Influence of Rome 31 
 
 21. St. Peter's Church 81 
 
 23. Description of Rome 83 
 
 83. The Coliseum 85 
 
 84. The Pantheon 87 
 
 PAGE 
 
 25. Sunrise from St. Peter's 
 
 Dome 39 
 
 HI. SocrETT. 
 
 36. National Characteristics. .. 43 
 
 87. Conservatism 43 
 
 28. War and the Promised Land 48 
 
 39. Dead and Forgotten 43 
 
 30. Society and Solitude 44 
 
 31. Politic Silence 44 
 
 33. Contentment 44 
 
 33. Maxims 44 
 
 34. Military Courage 45 
 
 35. History compared to a 
 
 Forest 45 
 
 36. Anxiety of the Poor 45 
 
 87. Idealism 46 
 
 38. Nameless Heroes 47 
 
 39. The Golden Age to come... 47 
 
 IV. Fbiendship. 
 
 40. Our Friend's Sister 49 
 
 41. Companionship 49 
 
 43. Times of Sympathy 49 
 
 43. Influence of Nohle Compan- 
 
 ionship 49 
 
 44. Dancing Maidens 49 
 
 45. Too much Nearness 50 
 
 46. Love in j ures Heroes 50 
 
 47. Taking a second Farewell . . 60 
 
 48. Maxims 61 
 
 49. Beauty of Reconciliation... 61 
 
VUl 
 
 CONTENTS. 
 
 PAGE 
 V. LOTB. 
 
 BO. Poverty 53 
 
 51. Trying to kill Love 53 
 
 52. Pardoning Rivals 53 
 
 53. Need of Love 53 
 
 64. Love but One 53 
 
 56. Sacrifice 54 
 
 56. Too fine Feeling 54 
 
 57. Jealousy 54 
 
 68. Love-letter Sermons 64 
 
 59. Masculine and Feminine 
 
 Honor 54 
 
 60. Humility of Love 55 
 
 61. The Sadness of Love 55 
 
 62. Anticipation 65 
 
 63. Significance of a Sigh 55 
 
 64. Love wins at Last 56 
 
 63. Waxing and waning of 
 
 Love 56 
 
 66. A Mother's Love 56 
 
 67. Feminine Jealousy 57 
 
 68. The Kiss of Love 57 
 
 69. Selfishness of Love 57 
 
 70. Estrangement and Union... 53 
 
 71. Sympathy in Separation 58 
 
 72. Aspirations of the cheated 
 
 Heart 59 
 
 73. Unrequited Love 59 
 
 74. Distance and Ideals of the 
 
 Heart 60 
 
 75. Sympathy with Lovers 60 
 
 76. Love for the Dead 61 
 
 77. Changeableness of Woman. 61 
 73. Awkward Lovers 63 
 
 79. Love deifies its Object 63 
 
 80. Maxims 64 
 
 81. Fixlein's Courtship 65 
 
 82. Fixlein's Betrothal-Night.. 66 
 
 83. Fixlein's Wedding-day 69 
 
 84. Jean Paul's Parting from 
 
 Fixlein 74 
 
 VI. Makeiaqe. 
 
 85. Marriage without Love 78 
 
 86. Acknowledging Fault 78 
 
 87. Betrothal-days 78 
 
 88. After the .Wedding 78 
 
 89. The Bridegroom's Kespon- 
 
 sibility 79 
 
 90. Tenderness to Wives 79 
 
 91. Sulking Wives 79 
 
 PAGZ 
 
 92. Estrangement 79 
 
 93. Reconciliation 80 
 
 94. Conjugal Discord 80 
 
 95. Wifely Solicitude 80 
 
 96. Compliments - ■ 81 
 
 97. Eichter's ideal Wife 81 
 
 98. Motherhood 82 
 
 99. Marriage Contracts repul- 
 
 sive 82 
 
 100. Pathos of the Wedding-Hour 83 
 
 101. Honeymoon Happiness 84 
 
 102. The Green-Market of Daugh- 
 
 ters 84 
 
 Vn. Happiness. 
 
 103. City and Country Life 90 
 
 104. Tranquillity 90 
 
 105. OldAge 90 
 
 106. Maxims 90 
 
 107. Tears of Joy 91 
 
 108. Unsatisfied Ideals 91 
 
 109. Man made for Happiness... 92 
 
 110. Enjoying the passing Mo- 
 
 ments ^ 93 
 
 111. Consolations of Philosophy. 93 
 
 112. The Campan Vale 93 
 
 113. Rules lor the Enjoyment of 
 
 Life 94 
 
 114. Fate and the Cheated Heart. 95 
 
 115. Teaming of a Warm Heart 
 
 for Friendship 97 
 
 116. Three Ways for becoming 
 
 happier 99 
 
 Vin. SOKKOW. 
 
 117. Sympathy in Danger 103 
 
 118. Remembrance 103 
 
 119. Death of Feeling 103 
 
 130. Concealed Sorrow 103 
 
 131. Noble Feeling 103 
 
 122. Concealed Feeling of Wom- 
 
 en 104 
 
 123. Melancholy of noble Minds. 104 
 
 124. Domestic Happiness of the 
 
 Poor 104 
 
 125. Tears only given to Human 
 
 Eyes 106 
 
 IX. DlSCIPLTNE. 
 
 126. Repining 106 
 
 127. The Flight of Pain 106 
 
 138. Weakness of Resolutions... 100 
 
CONTBJrTS. 
 
 PAGB 
 
 139. Discipline of Poverty 106 
 
 130. Trials 106 
 
 131. Self-Keliance 107 
 
 133. The First Trouble 107 
 
 133. Parlfied by parental Stern- 
 
 ness 107 
 
 134. Poverty 107 
 
 135. Chastening 108 
 
 130. Profiting by Sad Experience 108 
 
 137. Bravery in Sorrow 109 
 
 138. New Tear's Night of an Un- 
 
 happy Man 109 
 
 X. Chabacter. 
 
 139. Eesolutiori 112 
 
 140. Poverty and Faint-hearted- 
 
 ness 113 
 
 141. Description of a Lady- 
 
 Killer 112 
 
 143. Sballow Brooks 113 
 
 143. Kespect for Women 112 
 
 144. Gormandizers 113 
 
 145. Floctnations of Feelings... 113 
 
 146. Albano's Besolution 113 
 
 147. Lociuacity 113 
 
 148. Conventionalities 113 
 
 149. Sincerity 114 
 
 150. Chastisement 114 
 
 151. Mediocrity and Uncommon 
 
 Worth 114 
 
 152. Hypocrisy 114 
 
 153. An Imperious Spirit 115 
 
 154. City and Country Bringing- 
 
 np 115 
 
 155. Self-Knowledge 115 
 
 156. Self-Government 115 
 
 157. Hero-Worship 116 
 
 158. Characteristics of Tenth... 116 
 
 159. Intrinsic Worth 116 
 
 160. Dreams of Toung Ambition. 117 
 
 161. Crocodile Tears 117 
 
 162. Ruins of a Srcat Boul 117 
 
 163. Not letting Oneself be Bu- 
 
 ried 118 
 
 164. Conscionsness of Ego 118 
 
 165. Woman's Sphere 119 
 
 166. Wives and Maidens 119 
 
 167. Self-Hatred 119 
 
 168. Insensibility 120 
 
 169. An Analysis of Character... 121 
 
 170. The Comparative Virtue of 
 
 the Sexes 123 
 
 PAGE 
 
 171. Maxims 124 
 
 178. Description of a Burnt-out 
 
 Heart 126 
 
 XL Edtjoation. 
 
 173. Everything educates 128 
 
 174. Grafting the Tree of Enovd- 
 
 edge on the Tree of Life.. 128 
 
 175. Birth of Self-Conecionsncss. 138 
 
 176. Mystery in the Origin of 
 
 Ideas 129 
 
 177. Educating Power of Writing 129 
 
 178. Maxims 129 
 
 179. Why Children obey Fathers 
 
 better than Mothers 130 
 
 180. Influence of Germany on 
 
 Education 130 
 
 181. Importance of Primary Edu- 
 
 cation 131 
 
 183. Consolations of Learning. . . 133 
 
 183. Ideals of Touth 132 
 
 181. Impressibility of Childhood. 13.3 
 
 185. Forced Education 134 
 
 186. Variance of Parental In- 
 
 struction... 134 
 
 187. Words and Deeds 135 
 
 188. Teaching Moral Pbilosophy. 136 
 
 SII. Authorship. 
 
 180. Critics 137 
 
 190. Culture 137 
 
 191. Mental Tumult of a Toung 
 
 Author 137 
 
 192. Immortality of Authors 1.37 
 
 193. Authors' Wives 138 
 
 194. Dread of Criticism 138 
 
 195. Eichter's Thoughta on his 
 
 OwnLife 138 
 
 196. The First Sermon 139 
 
 197. Maxims 139 
 
 198. Men of Letters 139 
 
 199. First Love for Truth 140 
 
 200. Dedication of the Titan.... 141 
 
 Xin. Satirical. 
 
 201. About not being understood. 143 
 
 202. Praying for Gold and re- 
 
 ceiving Wisdom 143 
 
 203. Wives compared to the four 
 
 Evangelists 143 
 
 304. Advantage of marrying a 
 
 Beauty 144 
 
CONTEHTS. 
 
 PAOB 
 
 205. Militiamen 144 
 
 206. Legal Procrastination 145 
 
 20T. PayingDebts 146 
 
 208. Saints and Apostles as Pash- 
 
 ion-figurea 146 
 
 209. Eemedies for Anger 146 
 
 210. Female Locinacity 148 
 
 211. Adam's Address to Eve 160 
 
 XTV. Chakitt. 
 
 212. Growth of Compassion 158 
 
 213. Sympathy 158 
 
 S14. Hatred hlinds us to good 
 
 Qnalities 168 
 
 215. Too hard on Vanity 159 
 
 216. Loving those who will weep 
 
 for US when Bead 159 
 
 217. How to get rid of Hatred... 160 
 
 XV. Time. 
 
 218. Old Tear 161 
 
 219. New Tear and new Hopes. . 161 
 
 220. Imperishable Days 161 
 
 221. The Old Man's Thought of 
 
 Childhood 162 
 
 222. The New Year 162 
 
 823. Kiverof Time 163 
 
 XVI. Imagination. 
 
 224. Influence of Shakespeare... 165 
 
 225. Our own Age always the 165 
 
 Greatest 
 
 226. Sleep 165 
 
 227. Dreams 165 
 
 228. The finest Ways of Dying.. 165 
 
 PAGE 
 
 229. Levitation 166 
 
 230. Living in astate of Fear.... 167 
 
 231. OnDeath 167 
 
 232. Dream on the Death of a 
 
 Mother 169 
 
 233. Dream of a Fever-patient... 170 
 2-34. Dream on the Universe 172 
 
 235. Death of an Angel 177 
 
 XVn. Eeligion. 
 
 236. Humiliatedby Sight of Sin. 183 
 
 237. Madam Gnyon and Love .... 183 
 
 238. Deathbed Religion 183 
 
 239. Sinner and Saint 183 
 
 240. Exalted Meditation 184 
 
 241. The Thought of Death...... 184 
 
 243. Indestrnctlbility of Truth.. 184 
 
 243. The Fifteen Mysteries 184 
 
 244. The Prophetic Dew-drop.. 185 
 
 245. Conversion 1S5 
 
 246. Gratitude 186 
 
 247. The Mystic's Love 187 
 
 248. Providence in History 187 
 
 249. Atheism 188 
 
 250. Power of Eeligion 189 
 
 251. Jean Paul's first Lord's Sup- 
 
 per 191 
 
 252. Dream of a World without 
 
 God 195 
 
 253. Conversation on Immortal- 
 
 ity 200 
 
 254. Keminiscences of the best 
 
 Hours of Life for the Hour 
 ofDeath 809 
 
INTEODirOTOET. 
 
 I. 
 
 EXTEACTS FROM THOMAS CAELTLb's ESSAYS ON EICHTEE. 
 
 If the spectacle of a great man struggling with adver- 
 sity be a fit one for the gods to look down on, much 
 more must it be so for mean fellow-mortals to look up 
 to. . . . 
 
 In looking over those sixty volumes of his, we feel as 
 if Eichter's history must have another, much deeper in- 
 terest and worth than outward incidents could impart to 
 it. For the spirit which shines more or less completely 
 through his writings is one of perennial excellence ; rare 
 in all times and situations, and perhaps nowhere and in 
 no time more rare than in literary Europe at this era. 
 
 We see in this man a high, self-subsistent, original, 
 and, in many respects, even great character. He shows 
 himself a man of wonderful gifts, and with, perhaps, a 
 still happier combination and adjustment of these ; in 
 whom Philosophy and Poetry are not only reconciled, but 
 blended together into a pure essence, into Religion ; 
 who, with the softest, most universal sympathy for out- 
 ward things, is inwardly calm, impregnable ; holds on 
 his way through all temptation and affliction, so quietly, 
 yet so inflexibly ; the true literary man among a thou- 
 sand false ones, the Apollo among neat herds ; in one 
 
XU INTIIODUCTOEY. 
 
 word, a man nnderstanding the nineteentli centnry, and 
 living in the midst of it, yet whose life is, in some meas- 
 ure, a heroic and devout one. No character of this 
 kind, we are aware, is to be formed without manifold 
 and victorious struggling with the world ; and the narra- 
 tive of such strtiggling, what littlis of it can be narrated 
 and interpreted, will belong to the highest species of his- 
 tory. ... 
 
 There are men with whom it is as with Schiller's 
 Friedland : "Night must be ere Friedland's star will 
 beam." On this forsaken youth Fortune seemed to have 
 let loose her bandogs, and hungry Kuin had him in the 
 wind ; without was no help, no counsel ; but there lay a 
 giant force within ; and so from the depths of that sorrow 
 and abasement his better soul arose purified and invinci- 
 ble, like Hercules from his long Labors. A high, cheer- 
 ful stoicism grew up in the man. Poverty, Pain, and 
 all Evil, he learned to despise them, nay in kind toockery 
 to sport with them, as with bright spotted wild-beasts 
 which he had tamed and harnessed. . . . There is 
 scarcely one that we remember who has drawn from pov- 
 erty and suffering such unmixed advantage as Jean Paul : 
 acquiring under it not only Herculean strength, but the 
 softest, tenderest soul ; a view of man and man's life 
 not less cheerful, even sportful, than it is deep and calm. 
 To fear he is a stranger ; not only the rage of men, " the 
 ruins of nature would strike him fearless ;" yet he has a 
 heart vibrating to all the finest thrills of Mercy, a deep 
 loving sympathy with all created things. 
 
 There is, we must say, something old-Grecian in this 
 form of mind ; yet old-Grecian under the new conditions 
 of our own time ; not an Ethnic, but a Christian great- 
 ness. Eichter might have stood beside Socrates, as a 
 faithful though rather tumultuous disciple ; or, better 
 
llfTEOD-pCTOKT. XIU 
 
 still, he might have bandied repartees with Diogenes, 
 who, if he could nowhere find men, must at least have 
 admitted that this too was a Spartan Boy. Diogenes 
 and he, much as they differed, mostly to the disadvan- 
 tage of the former, would have found much in common : 
 above all, that resolute self-dependence and quiet settled 
 indifference to the " force of public opinion." . . . 
 
 Come of it what might, he determined, on his own 
 strength, to try issues to the uttermost with Fortune ; 
 nay, while fighting like a very Ajax against her, to 
 ' ' keep laughing in her face till she too burst into laughter, 
 and ceased frowning at him.". . . . 
 
 Kichter has been called an intellectual Colossus ; and 
 in truth it is somewhat in this light that we view him. 
 His faculties are all of gigantic mould ; cumbrous, awk- 
 ward in their movements ; large and splendid, rather 
 than harmoniouB or beautiful ; yet joined in living 
 union ; and of force and compass altogether extraordi- 
 nary. He has an intellect vehement, rugged, irresisti- 
 ble ; crushing in pieces the hardest problems ; piercing 
 into the most hidden combinations of things, and grasp- 
 ing the most distant ; an imagination vague, sombre, 
 splendid, or appalling ; brooding over the abysses of 
 Being ; wandering through Infinitude, and summoning 
 before us, in its dim religious light, shapes of bi-illiancy, 
 solemnity, or terror ; a fancy of exuberance literally 
 unexampled : for it pours its treasures with a lavishness 
 M'hich knows no limit, hanging, like the sun, a jewel on 
 every grass-blade, and sowing the earth at large with 
 orient pearl. 
 
 But deeper than all these lies Humor, the ruling qual- 
 ity with Kichter : as it were the central fire that per- 
 vades and vivifies his whole being. He is a humorist 
 from his inmost soul : he thinks as a humorist, he feels, 
 
XIV IKTEODUCTOKT. 
 
 imagines, acts as a humorist ; sport is the element in 
 which his nature lives and works. A tumultuous ele- 
 ment for sucli a nature, and wild work he makes in it ! 
 A Titan in his sport as in his earnestness, he oversteps 
 all bound and riots without law or measure. He heaps 
 Pelion upon Ossa, and hurls the universe together and 
 asunder like a case of playthings. The Moon " bom- 
 bards" the Earth, being a rebellious satellite ; Mars 
 "preaches" to the other planets, very singular doc- 
 trine ; nay, we have Time and Space themselves playing 
 fantastic tricks ; it is an infinite masquerade : all nature 
 Is gone forth mumming in the strangest guises. 
 
 Yet the anarchy is not without its purpose : these viz- 
 ards are not mere hollow masks ; there gf e living faces 
 under 'them, and this mumming has its significance. 
 Eichter is a man of mirth, but he seldom or never con- 
 descends to be a merry-andrew. Nay, in spite of its 
 extravagance, we should say that his humor is of all his 
 gifts intrinsically the finest and most genifine. It has 
 such witching turns ; there is something in it so capri- 
 cious, so quaint, so heartfelt. From his Cyclopean work- 
 shop, and its fuliginous limbecs, and huge imwieldy 
 machinery, the little shrivelled twisted Figure comes 
 forth at last, so perfect and so living, to be forevei 
 laughed at and forever loved 1 Wayward as he seems, 
 ho works not without forethought ; like Rubens, by a 
 single stroke he can change a laughing face into a sad 
 one. But in his smile itseK a touching pathos may be 
 hidden, a pity too deep for tears. He is a man of feel- 
 ing, in the noblest sense of that word ; for he loves all 
 living with the heart of a brother ; his soul rushes forth, 
 in sympathy with gladness and sorrow, with goodness oi 
 grandeur, over all creation. Every gentle and generous 
 afi^ection, every thrill of mercy, every glow of nobleness, 
 
IKTTEODUCTOEY. XV 
 
 awakens in liis bosom a response ; nay, strikes liis spirit 
 into harmony ; a wild music as of wind-harps, floating 
 round ns in fitful swells, but soft sometimes, and pure and 
 soul-entrancing as the song of angels ! . . .. The reader 
 has heard much of Eichter's Dreams, with what strange 
 prophetic power he rules over that chaos of spiritual 
 Nature, bodying forth a whole world of Darkness broken 
 by pallid gleams or wild sparkles of light, and peopled 
 with huge, shadowy, bewildered shapes, full of gran- 
 deur and meaning. No Poet known to us, not Milton 
 himself, shows such a vastness of Imagination ; such a 
 rapt, deep Old-Hebrew spirit as Eichter in these 
 scenes. . . . 
 
 Richter's Philosophy, a matter of no ordinary interest 
 both as it g,grees with the common philosophy of Ger- 
 many and disagrees with it, must not be touched on for 
 the present. One only observation we shall make : it is 
 not mechanical, or sceptical ; it springs not from the 
 forum or the laboratory, but from the depths of the 
 human spirit ; and yields as its fairest product a noble 
 system of Morality, and the finest conviction of Keligion. 
 In this latter point we reckon him pecuUarly worthy 
 of study. . . . Such, seen through no xmcolored me- 
 dium, but in dim remoteness, and sketched in hurried, 
 transitory outline, are some features of Jean Paul Fried- 
 rich Richter and his Works. Germany has long loved 
 him ; to England also he must one day become known ; 
 for a man of this magnitude belongs not to one people, 
 but to the world. "What our countrymen may decide of- 
 him, stiU more what may be his fortune with posterity, 
 we will not try to foretell. Time has a strange con- 
 tracting influence on maay a widespread fame ; yet of 
 Richter we will say that he may survive much. There 
 is in him that which does not die ; that Beauty and Ear- 
 
XTl ISTTEODUCTOKY. 
 
 nestness of soul, that spirit of Humanity, of Love am 
 mild Wisdom, over which the vicissitudes of mode hav 
 no sway. This is that excellence of the inmost natur 
 which alone confers immortality on writings. . . . 
 
 He died while engaged, under recent and almost tot£ 
 blindness, in enlarging and remodelling liis " Campane 
 Thai ;" the unfinished manuscript was borne upon h: 
 coffin to the burial vault ; and Klopstock's hymr 
 " Auferstehen wirst du" — Thou shalt arise, my soul- 
 can seldom have been sung with more appropriate appl 
 cation than over the grave of Jean Paul. 
 
 II. 
 
 In my mind, the man and the author are close! 
 united. I never read a page of his writings withoi 
 hearing his voice, and seeing his form before me. Thei 
 he sits, with his majestic, mountainous forehead, h 
 mild blue eyes, and finely cut nose and mouth ; h 
 massive frame clad loosely and carelessly in an old gree 
 frock, from the pockets of which the corners of books pr( 
 jcct, and perhaps the end of a loaf of bread and the nos 
 of a bottle ; a straw hat, lined with green, lying ne; 
 •him ; a huge walking-stick in his hand, and at his feet 
 white poodle, with pink eyes, and a string round h 
 neck. You would sooner have taken Mm for a mast( 
 carpenter than for a poet. . . . 
 
 The character of Kichter is too marked to be easil 
 misunderstood. Its.prominent traits arc tenderness an 
 
INTKODUCTOET. XVH 
 
 manliness — qualities which are seldom found united in so 
 high a degree as in him. Orer all he sees, over all he 
 writes, are spread the sunbeams of a cheerful spirit — the 
 light of inexhaustible human love. Every sound of hu- 
 man joy and of human sorrow finds a deep-resounding echo 
 in his bosom. In every man he loves his humanity only, 
 not his superiority. The avowed object of all his liter- 
 ary labors was to raise up again the down-sunken faith in 
 God, virtue, and immortality, and in an egotistical, revo- 
 lutionary age, to warm again our human sympathies, 
 which have now grown cold. And not less boundless is 
 his love for nature — for this outward, beautiful world. 
 He embraces it all in his arms. . . . 
 
 Yet the spirit of love was not weakness, but strength. 
 It was united in him with great manliness. The sword 
 of his spirit had been forged and beaten by poverty. 
 Its temper had been tried by a thirty years' war. It 
 was not broken, not even blunted, but rather strength- 
 ened and sharpened, by the blows it gave and received. 
 And, possessing this noble spirit of humanity, endur- 
 ance, and self-denial, he made literature his profession, 
 as if he had been divinely commissioned to write. He 
 seemed to have cared for nothing else, to have thought 
 of nothing else, than living qnietly and making books. 
 He says that he felt it his duty, not to enjoy, nor to ac- 
 quire, but to write ; and boasted that he had made as 
 many books as he had lived years. " And what do 
 you Germans consider the prominent characteristics of 
 his genius ?" 
 
 Most undoubtedly, his wild imagination and his play- 
 fulness. He throws over all things a strange and magic 
 coloring. You are startled at the boldness and beauty of 
 his figures and illustrations, which are scattered every- 
 where with a reckless prodigahty ; multitudinous, like 
 
INTIIODUCTOR-Y. 
 
 the blossoms of early summer, and as fragrant and bea 
 tiful. With a thousand extravagances are mingled t 
 thousand beauties of thought and expression, whi 
 kindle the reader's imagination, and lead it onward ir 
 bold flight, through the glow of sunrise and sunset, ai 
 the dewy coldness and starlights of summer nights. 3 
 is difficult to understand — intricate, strange, drawi: 
 his illustrations from every by-corner of science, a: 
 and nature— a comet among the bright stars of Germ 
 literature. When you read his works, it is as if y 
 were climbing a high mountain, in merry company, 
 see the sun rise. At times you are enveloped in mii 
 the morning vsrind sweeps by you with a shout, y 
 hear the far-off muttering thunders. "Wide benea 
 you spreads the landscape — field, meadow, town, a: 
 winding river. The ringing of distant church-bells 
 the sound of solemn village clock reaches you ; th 
 arises the sweet and manifold fragrance of flowers ; t 
 birds begin to sing ; the vapors roll away ; up com 
 the glorious sun ; you revel like a lark in the sunshi 
 and bright blue heaven, and all is a delirious dream 
 soul and sense — when suddenly a friend at your elb( 
 laughs aloud and offers you a piece of Bologna sausa^ 
 As in real life, so in his writings : the serious and t 
 comic, the sublime and the grotesque, the pathetic a 
 the ludicrous, are mingled together. At times he is se 
 tentious, energetic, simple ; then, again, obscui-e a 
 diffuse. His thoughts are like mummies embalmed 
 spices and wrapped about with curious envelopment 
 but within these the thoughts themselves are kinj 
 At times glad, beautiful images, airy forms, move 
 you, graceful, harmonious ; at times the glaring, wi] 
 looking fancies, chained together by hyphens, bracke 
 and dashes, brave and base, high and low, in all thi 
 
INTRODUCTOEY. XIX 
 
 motley dresses, go sweeping down the dusty page, like 
 the galley-slaves that sweep the streets of Rome, where 
 you may chance to see the nobleman and the peasant 
 manacled together. " Better an outlaw than not free !" 
 These are his own words. And thus he changes at his 
 will. Like the god Thor of the Northern mythology, 
 he now holds forth the seven stars in the bright heavens 
 above us, and now hides liimself in clouds and pounds 
 away with his great hammer. 
 
 " And yet this is not affectation in him," rejoined the 
 German. "It is his nature, it is Jean Paul. And the 
 figures and ornaments of his style, wild, fantastic, and 
 of ttimes startling, like those in Gothic cathedrals, are not 
 merely what they seem, but massive coigns and buttresses 
 which support the fabric. Remove them, and the roof . 
 and walls fall in. And through these gargoyles, these 
 wild faces, these images of beasts and men carved upon 
 spouts and gutters, flow out, like gathered rain, the 
 bright, abundant thoughts that have fallen from heaven. 
 And all he does is done with a kind of serious playful- 
 ness. He is a sea-monster, disporting himself on the 
 broad ocean ; his very sport is earnest ; there is some- 
 thing majestic and serious about it. In everything there 
 is strength, a rough good-nature, all sunshine overhead, 
 and underneath the heavy moaning of the sea. Well 
 may he be called Jean Paul, the Only One." 
 
WIT, WISDOM, AND PHILOSOPHY 
 
 JEA.'N PAUL FEED. RICHTER 
 
 I. 
 
 NATURE. 
 
 1. eUNEISE ONCE MOEB. 
 
 Teult, were I every evening to depict sunrise, and 
 every morning to see it, still I should cry, like the chil- 
 dren, Once more, once more ! 
 
 2. NATUEE AN jEOLIAN HAEP. 
 
 There are but few souls that know how far the har- 
 mony of the outward nature with oar own reaches, and 
 in how very great a degree the whole creation is but 
 an ^olian harp, with longer and shorter strings, with 
 slower and swifter vibrations, passive before a divine 
 breath, 
 
 8. MOENING. 
 
 And now the solar flames shot higher and higher up 
 upon the unkindled morning clouds, till at length hun- 
 dreds of suns rose in an instant in the sky, in the 
 streams and pools, and in the dew-cups of the flowers, 
 while thousands of varied colors went flowing athwart 
 the face of the earth, and one bright whiteness brote 
 from the skv. 
 
22 JEAN PAUL KICHTEE. 
 
 4. NIGHT. 
 
 They went out. The broad heaven, with the stre 
 of the City of God all lit with the lamps which are su 
 drew them on, out beyond the narrow crossways of 1 
 town, and into the great spectacle hall of night, win 
 we breathe the blue of heaven and drink the east bree 
 We should conclude and sanctify all our chamber fee 
 by "going to church" in that cool, vast temple, t. 
 great cathedral whose dome is adorned with the sac] 
 picture of the Most Holy, portrayed in a mosaic of sta 
 
 5. SYMPATHY WITH NATITEE. 
 
 These tinted stars began strangely to sway his so 
 making it sad, as if he saw in them the reflected imi 
 of his own dim, pale, shattered life. For to man, wl 
 swayed by emotion, Nature is ever a great mirror, 
 emotion too ; it is only to him who is satisfied and 
 rest that she seems nothing but a cold, dead window 
 tween him and the world beyond. 
 
 6. HOW TO TAKE A WALK. 
 
 The fewest persons possible comprehend that i1 
 only with the fewest persons possible — properly o 
 with two — ^the most intimate and like-minded fri( 
 and the beloved object — one can bear to take a w£ 
 Verily, 1 had as lief kneel down to make a declarat 
 of love openly, in the face of a whole court, on 
 birthday of a princess, as to gaze on thee, Nature, 
 beloved, through a long vanguard and rear-guard of \ 
 nesses to my enraptured attitude ! 
 
 7. TEAKBMIGEATION OF THE SOULS OF FLOWEES. 
 
 " Nadiae and I once painted to ourselves an elysi 
 for the souls of faded flowers." " I believe in a mid 
 path for flowers after their death," said Wilhel 
 
KATUEE. 23 
 
 seriously ; " the souls of lilies probably go into woman's 
 forehead ; hyacinth and forget-me-not souls into woman's 
 eyes, and rose souls into lips and cheeks." 1 added, 
 " It is a fortimate" coincidence for this hypothesis, that 
 a girl has perceptibly more color from the departing soul 
 at the moment when she breaks or kills a rose." 
 
 8. SOLACE IN NATUBE. 
 
 His heart — one educated to be loving — could always 
 fly for rest from his satires and from dry details of 
 business duty, sometimes, too, from Lenette's indiffer- 
 ence and lack of sympathy, to the warm breast of the 
 eternal goddess Nature, ever ready to take us to her 
 heart. Into the free, unveiled, and blooming out-door 
 world, beneath the grand wide sky, he loved to repair 
 with all his sighs and sorrows, and in this great 'garden 
 he made all his graves (as the Jews made them in smaller 
 ones). And when our fellows forsake and wound us, the 
 sky and the earth, and the little blooming tree, open 
 their arras and take us into them ; the flowers press 
 themselves to our wounded hearts, the streams mingle in 
 our tears, and the breezes breathe coolness into our sighs. 
 
 9. riEST FEELING EOK NATUEB. 
 
 Ah, as if he had found his mother, so did he now flnd 
 Nature — now for the first time he knew what spring 
 was, and the moon, and the ruddy dawn, and the starry 
 night. . . . Ah, we have all once known it, we have 
 all once been tinged with the morning-redness of life ! 
 . . . Oh, why do we not regard all _firsi stirrings of 
 human emotion as holy, as firstlings for the altar of 
 God ? There is truly nothing purer and warmer than 
 our first friendship, our first love, our first striving after 
 truths, our first feeling for Nature : like Adam, we are 
 
24 JEAN PAUL KICHTEK. 
 
 made mortals out of immortals ; like Egyptians, we 
 governed earlier by gods than by men. 
 
 10. CONSOLATIONS OF NATUEE. 
 
 Ah ! there, in the free air, close to the ocean of 
 which stretches on into the invisible distance of infin 
 near to the lofty heavens, the blue coal-smoke of 
 stifling, suffocating dwelling of our daily life cannot 
 to us, we see its wreaths hanging far down beneath ; 
 sorrows drop, like leeches, from our bleeding boso 
 and raised, for the time, above our woes, we stretch 
 arms — no fetters on them now, though sore and marl 
 and bruised with the galling iron — we stretch them 
 as if to soar in the pure bright ether ; we stretch tl 
 out, and fain would take to our bosom the peaceful 
 verse above us ; we stretch them to the invisible ete 
 Father, like children hastening home to Him — and 
 open them wider yet to clasp our visible mother, crei 
 Nature, crying, " Oh take not this solace, this comf 
 away from me, when I am down there again among 
 fog and the sorrow." 
 
 11. THE NAMELESS WISH AND THE NAMELESS DKEA] 
 
 There is in man a mighty wish which was never 
 filled : it has no name, it seeks its object, though all 
 thou namest it and all joys are not its reality ; br 
 recurs when in a summer night thou lookest to the Ji' 
 or toward distant mountains, or when moonlight is 
 the earth, or the heavens are studded with stars, or w 
 thou art very happy. 
 
 This great, vast wish lifts our soul aloft, but with 
 row : ah ! here below we are thrown upward in a p 
 trate position, like epileptics. But this wish to wl 
 nothing can give a name, — our strings and tones nan 
 
UATUEE. 35 
 
 to the hiiman spirit ; the yearning soul then weeps more 
 profusely and can no longer comprehend itself, and calls 
 inward in rapture of lamentation between the tones : 
 "Ay, all that ye name to me is what 1 want!". . . 
 Mortal man, the enigmatical creature, has also a name- 
 less, monstrous dread, which has no object, which 
 awakes at hearing of spiritual apparitions, and which one 
 sometimes feels when one only speaks of it. 
 
 12. NATUBE A PEEMAHENT EESOUBCE. 
 
 Exalted Nature ! when we see and love thee, we love 
 our fellow-men more warmly ; and when we must pity 
 or forget them, thou still remain est with us, reposing 
 before the moist eye like a verdant chain of mountains 
 in the evening red. Ah ! before the soul in whose sight 
 the morning dew of its ideals has faded to a cold, gray 
 drizzle ; and before the heart, which, in the subten-a- 
 nean passages of this life, meets no longer men, but 
 only dry, crooked-up mummies on crutches in cata- 
 combs ; and before the eye which is impoverished and 
 forsaken, and which no human creature will any longer 
 gladden ; and before the proud son of the gods whom 
 his unbelief and his lonely bosom, emptied of humanity, 
 rivet down to an eternal, unchangeable anguish — before 
 all these thou remainest, quickening Nature, with thy 
 flowers and mountains and cataracts, a faithful com- 
 forter ; and the bleeding son of the gods, cold and 
 speechless, dashes the drop of anguish from his eyes, 
 that they may rest, far and clear, on thy volcanoes, and 
 on thy springs, and on thy suns ! 
 
 13. DESCRIPTION OE A SUMMER DAT. 
 
 Beloved, the earth is to-day so beautiful ! that indeed 
 makes man more tender : heaven rests with a caress and 
 
26 JEAN PAUL EICHTEE. 
 
 kiss of love on tho earth, as a father on a mother •• 
 her children- — the flowers and beating hearts fall i 
 the embrace and nestle around, the mother. The t 
 gently rocks its singer up and down, the flower crac 
 its bee, the leaf its fly and its drop of honey : in 
 open flower-cups hang the warm tears, into which 
 clouds dissolve themselves, as if in eyes, and my flov 
 beds bear the rainbow, which is built up on them, w: 
 out sinking. The woods lie nursing themselves at 
 breast of heaven, and having drunken deeply of 
 clouds, all summits stand fixed in silent bliss, 
 zephyr, not stronger than a warm sigh of love, breat 
 along by our cheeks among the streaming corn-blossoi 
 and lifts clouds of seed-dust, and one little breeze a: 
 another plays its antics with the flying harvests of 
 lands ; but it lays them at our feet when it has di 
 playing. O beloved, when all is love, all harmony, 
 loves and is loved, all meadows one intoxicating blossc 
 chahce, then indeed in man also does the lofty sp 
 stretch out its arms, and long to embrace with the] 
 spirit, and then, when it folds its arms only aroi 
 shadows, then it grows very sad for a minute, inexpi 
 Bible longing after love. 
 
 14. THE GLADNESS 0¥ SPRING. 
 
 And then with what a burst of power the life wit 
 him began, under this new impetus, to boil and seet 
 as, issuing from a diamond-mine of a valley all shade : 
 dew-drops, he walked a pace or two up through 
 heaven-gate of the spring. It was as if some great eaj 
 quake had upheaved a new created flowery plain, 
 dripping from the ocean, stretching farther than the 
 could reach, all rich in youthful powers and impuL 
 The fire of earth glowed beneath the roots of this o-t 
 
KATUEE. 27 
 
 hanging garden,, and the fire of heaven flamed above it, 
 burning the colors into the trees and flowers. Between 
 the white mountains, as between porcelain towers, stood 
 the bright tinted, flowery slopes, like thrones for the 
 fruit goddesses. And all over the face of this great 
 camp of gladness, the cups of the flowers and the heavy 
 dew-drops were pitched, like peopled tents. The earth 
 teemed with young broods, and sprouting grasses, and 
 countless little hearts ; and heart after heart, life after 
 life, burst forth into being from out the warm brooding- 
 cells of Mother Nature — burst forth with wings, or 
 silken threads, or delicate feelers — ^and hummed, and 
 sucked, and smacked its lips and sang ! And for every 
 one of these countless honey-sucking trunks a cup of 
 gladness had long since been filled and ready. 
 
 In this great market-place of this living city of the 
 sun, so full of glory and sounding life, the pet child of 
 the infinite Mother stood solitary — gazing, with bright 
 and happy eyes, delighted, around him into all its in- 
 numerable streets. But his eternal Mother wore her veil 
 of immeasurable immensity, and it was only the warmth 
 which pierced to his heart which told him that he was 
 lying upon her breast. Firmian reposed from this two 
 hours' intoxication of heart in a peasant's hut. The 
 foaming spirit of a cup of joy like this went quicker to 
 the heart of a sick man such as he than to those of the 
 commoner run of sufferers. 
 
 When he went out again the glory had sobered down 
 into brightness, and his enthusiasm into simple happi- 
 ness. Every red lady-bird fluttering on its way, every red 
 church-roof, and every sparkling stream as it glittered 
 and glistened with dancing stars, shed joyous lights and 
 brilliant colors upon his soul. When he heard the cries of 
 the charcoal-burners in the wood, the resounding cracking 
 
28 JEAK PAUL EIOHTEK. 
 
 of whips, and the crash of falling trees, and then, wh 
 coming out into the open, he saw the white chatea 
 and roads standing out against the dark-green backgrou 
 like constellations and milky-ways, and above the shi 
 ing cloud-specks in the deep blue sky ; while ligl 
 flashed and darted everywhere — now down from tre( 
 now up from streams, now athwart saws in the distan 
 — there was no such thing as a foggy corner left 
 his soul, nor a single spot in it all unpeneti-ated by t 
 spring sunshine : the moss of gnawing, corroding cai 
 Avliich can grow only in damp shade, fell from his brea 
 trees and trees of liberty out here in the glad, free a 
 and his soul could not but join in the great chorus 
 flying and humming creatures which was rising 
 round him, singing, " Life is beautiful, and youth 
 lovelier still ; but spring is loveliest of all." 
 
 15. THE FLOWEE CLOCK. 
 
 ... A delightful, ready -timed harmony between t 
 flower clock in the garden and the mankind clock in t 
 market-place. 
 
 At 3 A.M. the yellow meadow goatsbeards awake — a 
 brides — and then, too, the stable-boy begins rattli 
 and feeding the horses under the lodger. At 4 (on Si 
 days) awake the little hawksweed, and ladies who i 
 going to the Holy Communion {chiming clocks thi 
 may be called), and the bakers. At 5, kitchen-ma 
 and dairy-maids awake, and buttercups ; at 6, so 
 thistles and cooks. By 7, a good many of the wardi-c 
 women of the palace, and the salad in the botanical g 
 dens, are awake, as well as several tradeswomen. At 
 all their daughters and the little yellow mouse-ear — all t 
 colleges and leaves of flowers, pie-crust, and law-pape 
 are open. At 9, the female aristocracy begin to st 
 
WATUKE. W 
 
 and tlic marigolds, to say nothing of a number of young 
 ladies from the country, in town on a visit, glance out 
 of their windows. At 10 and 11, the court ladies, the 
 whole staff of lords of the bedchamber, the green cole- 
 wort and pippan of the Alps, and (he princesses' reader, 
 arouse themselves from their morning slumber ; and (bo 
 brightly is the morning sun breaking in through the 
 many-tinted silken curtains) the whole court curtails a 
 morsel or so of its sleep. At 12, the prince ; at 1, his 
 consort, and the carnation in her flower-vase, have their 
 eyes open. "What gets up at later hours in the after- 
 noon — about 4 o'clock, say — is nothing but the red 
 hawksweed and the night watchman (a cuckoo clock), 
 and these two are but evening dials, or moon clocks. 
 From the hot eyes of the poor devil who opens them only 
 at 5 (with the jalap), we turn our own away in sorrow ; 
 he is a sick man, who has takgn some of it (the jalap), 
 and only passes from fever-fancies of being griped with 
 hot pincers to genuine waking spasms. 
 
 Thus may we human creatures serve as flower clocks 
 to higher intelligences when our petals close upon our 
 last bed, or as sand-glasses when our sands of life are run 
 so far out that they are turned over into the other 
 world. On such occasions, when seventy of man's years 
 have ended and passed away, these higher intelligences 
 may say, "Another hour already! Good God! how 
 time flies 1" 
 
II. 
 
 AET. 
 
 16. WHY ITALIANS AEE NOT GOOD LANDSCAPE PAINTEES. 
 
 Eemaeking upon fine landscapes is also a Norther 
 characteristic, because there one can become acquainte 
 with them only through books„ The Italian, whohs 
 them, enjoys them as he enjoys health, and is conscioi 
 only of the deprivation of thern ; for this reason he 
 not even a great landscape painter. 
 
 17. ONE GEBAT MIND DIEECT8. 
 
 The twelve thousand Jews did not design the Col 
 seum which they built, but the idea was, after all, i 
 some time or other, entirely in one man, in Yespasian 
 and so universally must there preside over the concentr 
 directions of little forces some great one, and though 
 were God laimself. 
 
 18. APOSTEOPHE TO MUSIC. 
 
 O Music ! thou that bringest the Past and the Futu: 
 with their flying flames so near to our wounds, art the 
 the evening breath of this life, or the morning air of tl 
 life to come ? Ay, thy sounds are echoes, which angf 
 snatch from the second world's tones of gladness to co 
 vey down into our mute hearts, into our dreary nig 
 the faint spring-melodies of heavens flying far above ui 
 
 19. THOUGHTS ONLY EXPEESSED IN POETEY. 
 
 So many tender and holy sensibilities flutter round 
 
AET. 31 
 
 our inner world, wliieli, like angels, can never assume 
 the bodily form of outward action ; so many rich, full 
 flowers stand therein which bear no seed, that it is lucky 
 poetry has been invented, which easily treasures up all 
 these inborn spirits and the flower f ragi-ance in its limbo. 
 
 20. INFLUENCE OF ROME. 
 
 How a man in Eome, in actual Eome, can merely en- 
 joy and weakly melt away before the fire of art, instead 
 of starting up red with shame, and striving and strug- 
 gling for power and exploits, is what I cannot compre- 
 hend. In painted Eome, in the Eome of poetry, there 
 laziness may luxuriate ; but in the real Eome, wliere 
 obelisks. Coliseum, Capitol, triumphal arches, incessantly 
 behold and reproach thee — where the history of ancient 
 deeds, all day long, like an invisible storm-wind, sweeps 
 and sounds through the city, and impels and lifts thee — 
 O, who can stretch himself out in inglorious ease and con- 
 templation before the magnificent stirring of the world ? 
 The spirits of saints, of heroes, of artists, follow after 
 the living man, and ask, indignantly, " What art thou ?" 
 With far other feelings dost thou go down out of the 
 Vatican of Eaphael, and over the stejjs of the Capitol, 
 than thou comest out of any German picture-gallery or 
 antique cabinet. There thou seest, on all hills, old, 
 eternal majesty. 
 
 21. ST. PETEE'S CH0ECH. 
 
 Eome, like the creation, is an entire wonder, wliicli 
 gradually dismembers itself into new wonders — the Coli- 
 seum, the Pantheon, St. Peter's Church, Eaphael, etc. 
 
 With the passage through the Church of St. Peter 
 the Knight began the fair race through immortality. 
 The princess let herself be bound by the tie of art to the 
 
o2 JEAN PAUL KICHTER. 
 
 circle of the men. As Albano was more smitten wit 
 edifices than with any other work of art, so did he se 
 from afar witli lioly awe the long mountain-chain of ar 
 which again bore npon itself hills ; so did he stan 
 before the plain, around which two enormous colonnadt 
 run like corsos, bearing a people of statues ; in tl: 
 centre shoots up the obelisk, and on its right and left a 
 eternal fountain, and from the lofty steps the prou 
 church of the world, inwardly filled with churchci 
 rearing upon itself a temple toward heaven, looks dow 
 upon the earth. But how enormously, as they dre 
 near, had its columns and its rocky wall mounted up an 
 flown away from the vision ! He entered the mag 
 church, which gave the world blessings, curses, king 
 and popes, with the consciousness that, like the worh 
 edifice, it was continually enlarging and receding moi 
 and more, the longer one remained in it. They wei 
 up to two children of white marble, who held an ii 
 cense nmscle-shell of yellow marble ; the children gre 
 by nearness till they were giants. At length they stoc 
 befoi'e the main altar and its hundred perpetual lamps- 
 what a stillness ! Above them the heaven's arch c 
 the dome, resting on four inner towers ; around them a 
 overarched city, of four streets, in which stood churche 
 The temple became greatest by walking in it, and whe 
 they passed round one column, there stood a new or 
 before them, and holy giants gazed earnestly dowi 
 Here was the youth's large heart, after so long a timi 
 filled. "In no art," he said to his father, "is tl 
 soul so mightily possessed with the sublime as in arch 
 teeture ; in every other the giant stands in it and in tl 
 depths of the soul, but here he stands out of it and cloi 
 before it." Dian, to whom all images were more cle; 
 than abstract ideas, said : " He is perfectly right. 
 
AKT. 33 
 
 Fraischdorfer replied: ''The sublimity here also lies 
 only in the braia ; for the whole church stands, after 
 all, in something greater, namely, in Rome, and under 
 the heavens, in the presence of which latter we certainly 
 should not feel anything." 
 
 22. DESOEIPTION OF ROME. 
 
 Half an hour after the earthquake the heavens 
 swathed themselves in seas and dashed them down in 
 masses and torrents. The naked Campagna and heath 
 were covered with the mantle of rain. Gaspard was 
 silent ; the heavens black ; the great thought stood 
 alone in Albano, that he was hastening on toward the 
 bloody scaffold and the throne scaffolding of humanity, 
 the heart of a cold, dead, heathen world, the eternal 
 Eome ; and when he heard, on the Fonts Molle, that 
 he was now going to cross the Tiber, he felt as if the 
 past had risen from the dead — as if the stream of time 
 ran backward, and he were sailing upon it ; under the 
 streams of heaven he heard the seven old mountain- 
 streams rushing and roaring, which once came down 
 from Rome's hills, and with seven arms uphove the 
 world from its foundations. 
 
 At length the constellation of the mountain city of 
 God, that stood so broad before him, opened out into 
 night ; cities with scattered lights lay up and down, and 
 the bells (which to his ear were alarm-bells) sounded out 
 the fourth hour, when the carriage rolled through the 
 triumphal gate of the city, the Porta del Popolo ; then 
 the moon rent her black heavens, and poured down out 
 of the cleft clouds the splendor of a whole sk^^. There 
 stood the Egyptian obelisk of the gateway, high as the 
 clouds in the night, and three streets ran gleaming apart. 
 "So," said Albano to himself, as they passed through 
 
34: JEASr PAUL EICHTEE. 
 
 the long cor so to the Tenth "Ward, " thon art veritabl, 
 in the camp of the god of war : here, where he graspei 
 the hilt of the monstrous war-sword, and with the poin 
 made the three wounds in three quarters of the world. 
 
 What a broad, dreary plain, loftily encompassed wit 
 ruins, gardens, and temples, covered with prostrate capi 
 tals of columns, and with single upright pillars, and wit 
 trees and a dumb wilderness ! The heaped -up ashes oil 
 of the emptied urn of time, and the potsherds of a grea 
 world flung around ! He passed by three temple col 
 umns, which the earth had drawn down into itself eve 
 to the breast, and along through the broad triumphf 
 arch of Septimius Severus ; on the right stood a chain c 
 columns without their temple ; on the left, attached to 
 Christian church, the colonnade of an ancient heathe 
 temple deep sunk into the sediment of time ; at last tli 
 triumphal arch of Titus, and before it, in the middle c 
 the woody wilderness, a fountain gushing into a granit 
 basin. He went up to this fountain, in order to surve 
 the plain out of which the thunder-months of the eart 
 once arose ; but he went along as over a burnt- out sur 
 hung round with dark dead earths. " O man, O th 
 di-eams of man !" something within him unceasing] 
 cried. He stood on the granite margin turning towar 
 the Coliseum, whose mountain ridges of wall stood big 
 in the moonlight, with the deep gaps which had bee 
 hewn in them by the scythe of Time. Sharply stoo 
 the rent and jagged arches of Nero's golden house liar 
 by, like murderous cutlasses. The Palatine Hill lay fu 
 of green gardens, and on crumbling temple roofs th 
 blooming death-garland of ivy was gnawing, and livin 
 Eanunculse still glowed around sunken capitals. Th 
 fountain murmured babblingly and eternally, and th 
 stars gazed steadfastly down with imperishable ravs upo 
 
ART. 35 
 
 the still battle-fiold, over whicli the ■winter of time had 
 passed without bringing after it a spring ; the fiery soul of 
 the world had ilown up, and the cold, crumbling giant lay 
 around ; torn asunder were the gigantic spokes of the 
 fly-wheel which once the very stream of ages drove. 
 And in addition to all this, the moon shed down her 
 light like eating silver-water upon the naked columns, 
 and would fain dissolve the Coliseum and the temples 
 and all into their own shadows ! Then Albano stretched 
 out his arms into the air, as if he could therewith em- 
 brace and flow away, as with the arms of a stream, and 
 exclaimed : " O ye mighty shades ! you who once strove 
 and lived here, ye are looking down frona heaven, but 
 scornfully, not sadly, for your great fatherland has died 
 and gone after you ! Ah ! had 1 on the insignificant 
 earth (full of old eternity), which you have made great, 
 only done one action worthy of you ! Then were it to 
 mo a sweet privilege to open my heart by a wound, and 
 to mix earthly blood with the hallowed soil, and to 
 hasten away out of the world of graves to you, eternal 
 and immortal ones ! But I am not worthy of it !" 
 
 23. THE COLISEUM. 
 
 On the next moonlight evening Gaspard bespoke 
 torches, in order that the Coliseum with its giant circle 
 might, the first time, stand in fire before them. The 
 Knight would fain have gone around alone with his son 
 dirnly through the dim work, like two spirits of the olden 
 time, bat the Princess forced herself upon him, from a 
 too lively wish to share with the noble youth his 
 moments — and perhaps, in fact, to have her heart and 
 his own common property. Women do not sufiiciently 
 comprehend that an idea, when it fills and elevates 
 man's mind, shuts it up against love, and crowds out 
 
30 JEAN I^UL EICHXEE. 
 
 persons, whereas with woman a]l ideas easily become 
 human beings. 
 
 They passed over the Forara by the Via Sacra to the 
 Coliseum, whose lofty, cloven forehead looked down pale 
 under the moonlight. They stood before the gray rock- 
 walls, which reared themselves on four colonnades, one 
 above another, and the flames shot up into the arches of 
 the arcades, gilding the green shrubbery high overhead ; 
 and deep in the earth had the noble monster already 
 buried his feet. They stepped in, and ascended the 
 mountain full of fragments of rock, from one seat of the 
 spectators to another ; Gasj^ard did not venture to the 
 sixth, or highest, where the men used to stand, but 
 Albano and the Princess did. Then the youth gazed 
 down over the cliffs, upon the round green crater of the 
 burnt-out volcano, which once swallowed nine thousand 
 beasts at once, and which quenched itself with human 
 blood ; the lurid glare of the flames penetrated into the 
 clefts and caverns, and among the foliage of the ivy and 
 laurel, and among the great shadows of the moon, which, 
 like recluses, kept themselves in cells ; toward the south, 
 where the streams of centuries -and barbarians had 
 stormed in, stood single columns and bare arcades — 
 temples and three palaces had the giant fed and lined 
 with his limbs, and still, with all his wounds, he looked 
 out livingly into the world. 
 
 ""What a world!" said Albano. "Here coiled the 
 giant snake five times about Christianity ! Like a smile 
 of scorn lies the moonlight down below there upon the 
 green ai-ena, where once stood the colossus of the sun- 
 god. The star of the north glimmers low through the 
 windows, and the serpent and the bear crouch. "What a 
 world has gone by !" The Princess answered, that 
 twelve thousand prisoners built this theatre, and that a 
 
AKT. 37 
 
 great many more had bled in it. " Oil, we too Lave 
 building prisoners," said slie, "but for -fortifications ; 
 and blood, too, still flows, but with sweat ! ISTo, wo 
 liave no present : the past without it must bring forth a 
 future." 
 
 The Princess went oif to break a laurel-twig and 
 pluck a blooming wall-flower. Albano sank away into 
 musing : the autumnal wind of the past swept over the 
 stubble ; on this holy eminence lie saw the constella- 
 tions, Home's green hills, the glimmering city, the 
 Pyramid of Cestius ; but all became j)ast, and on the 
 twelve hills dwelt, as upon graves, the lofty old spirits, 
 and looked sternly into the age, as if they were still its 
 kings and judges. 
 
 " This in remembrance of the place and the time !" 
 said the Princess, returning and handing him the laurel 
 and the iiower. " Thou mighty one, a coliseum is thy 
 flower-pot ; for thee nothing is too great, and nothing too 
 small !' ' said he, and threw the Princess into consider- 
 able confusion, till she observed that he meant not her, 
 but Nature. 
 
 24. THE PANTHEON. 
 
 The ascent of the dom.e Gaspard recommended to de- 
 fer to a dry and cloudless day, in order that they might 
 behold the queen of the world, Eome, upon and from 
 the proper throne ; he therefore proposed very earnestly 
 the visiting of the Pantheon, because he was eager to let 
 this follow immediately after the impression of St. 
 Peter's Church. They went thither. How simply and 
 grandly the Hall opens upon one ! Eight yellow col- 
 umns sustain its brow, and majestically, as the head of 
 the Homeric Jvipiter, its temple arches itself ! It is 
 the Rotunda or Pantheon. " Oh the pygmies," cried 
 Albano, " who would fain give us new temples ! Kaise 
 
38 JEAN PAUL EICHTEK. 
 
 the old ones higher out of the rubbish, and then you 
 have built enough." They stepped in; there reared 
 itself around them a holy, simple, free world-structure 
 with its heavenly arches soaring and striving upward, an 
 odeum of the tones of the sphere-music, a world in the 
 world ! And overhead the eye-socket of the light and 
 of the sky gleamed down, and the distant rack of 
 clouds seemed to touch the lofty arch over which it shot 
 along ! And round about them stood nothing but the 
 temple-bearers, the columns ! The temple of all gods 
 endured and concealed the diminutive altars of the later 
 ones. 
 
 Gaspard questioned Albano about his impressions. 
 He said lie preferred the larger church of St. Peter. 
 The Knight approved, and said that youth, like nations, 
 always more easily finds and better appreciates the siib- 
 lime than the beautiful, and that the spirit of the young 
 man ripens from strength to beauty, as his body ripens 
 from beauty to strength ; however, he himself preferred 
 the Pantheon. "How codd the. moderns," said the 
 Counsellor of Arts, Fraischdorfer, " build anything, ex- 
 cept some little Bernini's towers?" " That is why," 
 said the offended Provincial Architect, Dian, who de- 
 spised the Counsellor of Arts, because he never made a 
 good figure, except in the esthetic hall of judgment as 
 critic, never in the exhibition-hall as painter, " we mod- 
 erns are, beyond contradiction, stronger in criticism, 
 though in practice we are collectively and individually 
 blockheads." Bouverot remarked, "The Corinthian 
 columns might be higher." The Counsellor of Arts 
 said, after all, he knew nothing more like this fine hemi- 
 sphere than a much smaller one, which he had found in 
 Herculaneum, moulded in ashes — of the bosom of a fair 
 fugitive. The Knight laughed, and Albano turned 
 
ART. 39 
 
 away in disgust, and went to the Princess. He asked 
 lier for her opinion about the two temples. " Here 
 Sophocles, there Shakespeare ; but 1 comprehend and ap- 
 preciate Sophocles more easily," she replied, and looked 
 with new eyes into his new countenance. For the super- 
 natural illumination through the zenith of heaven — not 
 through a lazy horizon — transfigured in her eyes the 
 beautiful and excited countenance of the youth, and she 
 took for granted that the saintly halo of the dome must 
 also exalt her form. When he answei'ed her : " Very 
 good ! But in Shakespeare Sophocles also is contained ; 
 not, however, Shakespeare in Sophocles ; and on Peter's 
 Church stands Angelo's rotunda !" — just then the lofty 
 cloud all at once, as by the blow of a hand out of the 
 ether, broke in two, and the ravished sun, like the eye 
 of a Yenus, floating tlirough her ancient heavens — for 
 she once stood even here — looked mildly in from the 
 upper deep ; then a holy radiance filled the temple, and 
 burned on the porphyry of the pavement, and Albano 
 looked around him in an ecstasy of wonder and delight, 
 and said with low voice, " How transfigured at this 
 moment is everything in this sacred place ! Kaphael's 
 spirit comes forth from his grave in this noontide hour, 
 and everything which its reflection touches brightens into 
 godlike splendor !" The Princess looked upon him ten- 
 derly, and he lightly laid his hand upon hers, and said, 
 as one vanquished, " Sophocles !" 
 
 25. SDNEISE FEOM ST. PETEe's DOME. 
 
 Yet one thing the Princess desired on the evening pre- 
 vious to the departure, namely, Albano's company to 
 the dome of St. Peter's in the morning ; she wished to 
 take Eome once more into her parting soul, when the 
 dawn in its redness and splendor gilded the city. 
 
•iO JKA2S- PAUL lUCHTEK. 
 
 Albano, too, was glad to drink the must of a fiery lionr, 
 ^7llicl^ miglit clear itself up into an eternal wine for tlie 
 whole of life ; for he knew not that the lively Princess- 
 made still more lively by Italy— after waiting so long 
 and impatiently for the fairest word from his lips, at 
 last ventured indignantly upon a parting hour, in which 
 it must escape from him. 
 
 Early before sunrise, when, in Kome, many more go 
 to bed than get up, he waited upon her ; only her faith- 
 ful Haltermann accompanied them. She still glowed 
 with her night-long vigils, and seemed very much 
 moved. Kome still slept ; occasionally they were met 
 by coaches and families, which were just finishing their 
 night. The sky stood cool and blue over the dawning 
 morn, the fresh son of the fair night. 
 
 The wide circus before St. Peter's Church was soli- 
 tary and dumb as the saints upon the columns ; the 
 fountains spoke : one constellation more went out above 
 the obelisk. They went up by the winding stairway of 
 a hundred and fifty steps to the roof of the church, and 
 came out through a street of houses, columns, little cu- 
 polas and towers, through four doors into the monstrous 
 domC' — into a vaulted night. In the depths below the 
 temple rested, like a broad, gloomy, lonesome valley 
 with houses and trees, a holy abyss, and they walked 
 along close by the mosaic-giants, the broad colored 
 clouds on the lieaven of the dome. "While they were 
 ascending in the high vault, Aurora's golden foam glis- 
 tened redder and redder on the windows, and fire and 
 night swam into each other among the arches. 
 
 They hastened yet higher and looked out, just as a 
 single living ray darted upon the world, as out of an eye, 
 from behind the mountains ; around the old Alban moun- 
 tain smoked a hundred glowing clouds, as if his cold 
 
ART. 41 
 
 crater was again bringing forth a flame-day, and the 
 eagles with golden wings baptized in the snn flew along 
 over the clouds. All at once the sun -god stood upon the 
 fair ridge ; he stood erect in heaven, and rent away the 
 network of night from the covered earth ; then burned 
 the obelisks and the Coliseum and Eome from hill to 
 hill, and on the solitary Cainpagna sparkled in manifold 
 windings the yellow giant snake of the world, the Tiber, 
 ■ — all clouds dissipated themselves into the depths of 
 heaven, and golden light ran from Tusculum and from 
 Tivoli, and from the vine-hills into the many-colored 
 plains, over the scattered villas and cottages, into the 
 citron and oak groves ; low in the far west the sea was 
 again as at evening, when the hot god visits it, full of 
 splendor, ever kindled by him, and became his eternal dew. 
 
 In the morning world below lay far and wide the 
 great, still Rome — no living city, a solitary, enormous, 
 enchanted garden of the old, hidden, heroic spirits, laid 
 out on twelve hills. The unpeopled pleasure-garden on 
 spirits announced itself by its green meadows and 
 cypresses between palaces, and by its broad, open stair- 
 ways and columns and bridges, by its ruins and high 
 fountains and garden of Adonis, and its green mouji- 
 tains and temples of the gods ; the broad city avenues 
 had passed away ; the windows were barred up ; on the 
 roofs the stony dead looked steadfastly at each other ; 
 only the glistening fountain waters were awake and alive 
 and active, and a single nightingale sighed, as if she 
 would die at last. 
 
 " That is great," said Albano, at length, " that all is 
 solitary down below and one sees no present. The old 
 heroic spirits can pursue their existence in the vast vacu- 
 ity, and march through their old arches and temples and 
 play, up on the columns with the ivy." • 
 
42 JEAKT PAUL RICHTER. 
 
 " Nothing," repliGfl tlie Princess, " is wanting to tli 
 magnificence but this dome, which from the Capitol w 
 might in fact see besides. But never shall 1 forget thi 
 spot." 
 
 " What were all beside ?" said he. " The flat region 
 of life in general pass by without a memoi'ial ; fror 
 many a long past no echo reverberates, because n 
 mountain breaks the broad surface ! But Rome and thi 
 hour with you will live within us forever." 
 
III. 
 
 SOCIETY. 
 
 26. NATIONAL CHARACTERISTICS. 
 
 Providence has given to the English the empire of 
 the sea ; to the French, that of the land ; to the Ger- 
 mans that of — the air.* 
 
 27. conservatism. 
 In German conntries it takes two centuries thor- 
 oughly to do away a folly — one to recognize it, and 
 one more to do it away. The views of a consistory 
 always become rational a hundred years sooner than its 
 orders. 
 
 28. war and the promised land. 
 
 Through a red sea of blood and war humanity wades 
 toward the promised land, and the wilderness is long ; 
 with gashed liands, gluing themselves in their own blood, 
 they, like the chamois-hunters, climb upward. 
 
 29. DEAD and FOKGOTTEN. 
 
 O Zcsara ! it sank into thy heart, how easily man is 
 forgotten, whether he lies in the urn or in the pyi-amid ; 
 and how our immortal self is regarded, like an actor, as 
 
 * To appreciate the force of this brilliant epigram one needs to 
 recall to mind the time when it was written. It was while the vic- 
 tories of the English navies under Nelson, and of the French armies 
 tinder Napoleon, and the not less significant conquests of Leibnitz, 
 Kant, and Fichte in the world of thought, were still fresh in the 
 world's attention.— Ed. 
 
44 JEAN PAUL BIOHTEE. 
 
 absent, so soon as it is once behind the scenes, and frets 
 and fumes no longer among the players on the stage. 
 
 30. SOCIETY AND SOLITUDE. 
 
 It is easier, pleasanter, and more advantageous for a 
 youngster to go from solitude into society, than the eon- 
 verse — from the market-place into the corner. Unmiti- 
 gated solitude and unmitigated society are both bad ; 
 and, with the exception of their order of succession, 
 nothing is so important as their succession. 
 
 31. POLITIC SILENCE. 
 
 Upon Schoppe's sallies against the constitution, " Sir,'' 
 said he, in an excited manner, " even if there were a 
 flaw anywhere, still a true German would be bound to 
 maintain a profound silence on the subject, unless he can 
 help the matter, especially in such cursed times. ' ' 
 
 32. CONTENTMENT. 
 
 I cannot bring myself to believe that ladies in Paris 
 who wear diamond hairpins, had half such happy lives a; 
 the women there who get their living by picking up old 
 hairpins out of the street sweepings ; and many a one, 
 whose fuel is nothing but dry fir-cones, gathered by him- 
 self as a substitute for fir-fuel, is often quite as well ofl 
 on the whole as people who can preserve green cones in 
 sugar and eat them. 
 
 33. MAXIMS. 
 
 ]N[o one should laugh at men but he who right heartil;y 
 loves them. 
 
 One commits the most follies among people whom one 
 does not respect. 
 
 One keeps a secret better, if only one more person 
 helps him hold his tongue about it. 
 
SOCIETY. 43 
 
 Every action becomes more certainly an eternal 
 mother than it is an eternal daughter. 
 
 34. MILITARY COUEAGE. 
 
 Nothing is rarer than a cowardly peojole. One learns 
 to estimate military conrage very moderately, when one 
 sees that the Roman legions, precisely when they were 
 mercenary, bad, slavish, and half freedmen — namely, 
 under the Triumvirate — fought more courageously than 
 ever. The citizens fought and died to the very last 
 man for that insignificant incendiary, Catiline, and only 
 slaves were made prisoners. 
 
 35. niSTOEY COMPAEED TO A FOEEST. 
 
 Man regards his century or his half-century as the cul- 
 mination of light, as a festal-day, to which all other cen- 
 turies lead only as week-days. He knows only two 
 golden ages — the one at the beginning of the world, and 
 t!ie one at the end of it — by which he understands only 
 his own ; he finds history to be like great woods, in the 
 jniddlo of which are silence, night-birds, and birds of 
 prey, and whose borders only are filled with light and 
 song. 
 
 36. ANXIETY OF THE POOE. 
 
 Ye rich and great ones of the earth, who, helpless in 
 the honeycombs of your pleasures, swimming with clog- 
 ged wings in your melted sugar of roses, do not find it 
 an easy matter to move your hand, put it into your 
 money-bag, and take out the wage of him who helped to 
 fill your honey-cells — an hour of judgment will strike at 
 last for you, and ask you if ye were worthy to live, let 
 alone to live a life of pleasure, when ye avoid even the 
 trifling trouble of paying the poor who have undergone 
 the immense trouble of earning. But ye would be 
 
46 JBAK PAUL RICHTEE. 
 
 better if ye thought what misery your comfortable, indo- 
 lent, indisposition to open a purse, or to read a little ac- 
 count, often inflicts upon the poor ; if ye pictiired to 
 yourselves the backward start of hopeless disappointment 
 of some poor woman whose husband comes home with- 
 out his money — the starvation, the obliteration of so 
 many hopes, and the weary, sorrowful days of a whole 
 family. 
 
 37. IDEALISM. 
 
 In an age like this present, age of ours, when the in- 
 struments of universal world history are only heing tuned 
 in the orchestra before the concert begins, that is to say, 
 are all grumbling and squeaking together in confusion 
 .(which was why on one occasion the tuning of the 
 orchestra pleased a Morocco ambassador at Vienna much 
 better than the opera itself) — in such an age, when it is 
 so hard to tell the coward from the brave man — him who 
 lets everything go as it pleases from him who strives to do 
 something great and good — those who are withering up 
 from those who are flourishing and promising fruit, just 
 as in winter the fruit-bearing trees look much the same 
 as the dead ones — in such an age, there is only one con- 
 solation for an aathor, that, after all, though it be an age 
 in which the nobler kinds of virtue, love, and freedom, 
 are the rarest of Phoenixes and birds of the sun, he can 
 manage to put lip with it, and can go on drawing vivid 
 pictures and writing lively descriptions of all the birds 
 in question, until they wing their way to us in a body. 
 Doubtless, when the originals of the pictures have fairly 
 come and taken up their abode here on earth, then will 
 all our panegyrics of them be out of place, and loath- 
 some to the palate, and a mere thrashing of empty straw. 
 People who are incapaJ)le of husiness can work for the 
 press. 
 
SOCIETY. 47 
 
 38. NAMELESS HEEOES. 
 
 The graves of the best men are like those of the Mora- 
 vians, level and flat, and this earthly sphere of ours is a 
 Westminster Abbey of such levellings and flattenings — 
 ah ! what innumerable drops of tears as well as blood 
 (which are what the three grand trees of this world — the 
 trees of Life, of Knowledge, and Liberty — are watered 
 with) have been shed, but never counted. History, in 
 painting the human race, does not follow the example of 
 that painter who, making a portrait of a one-eyed king, 
 drew only his seeing profile ; what history paints is the 
 blind side, and it needs some grand calamity to bring great 
 men to light — as comets are seen during total eclipses of 
 the sun. Not upon the battle-field only — upon the holy 
 ground of virtue also, and upon the classic soil of truth — 
 the pedestal whereon history raises on high some single 
 hero whose name rings in all men's ears has to be com- 
 posed and built up of thousands of other heroes who 
 have fought and fallen, nameless and unknown. The 
 noblest deeds of heroism are done withia four walls, not 
 before the public gaze ; and as history keeps record only 
 of the men sacrificed, and, on the whole, writes only in 
 spilt blood, doubtless our annals are grander and more 
 beautiful in the eyes of the all-pervading spirit of the 
 universe than in those of the history-writer ; the great 
 scenes of history are estimated according to the numbers 
 of angels or devils on the stage, the men not being' taken 
 into account. 
 
 39. THE GOLDEN AGE TO COME. 
 
 There comes one day a golden age, which every wise 
 and virtuous man even now enjoys, and when men will 
 find it easier to live well because they will find it easier 
 to live indeed — when men will have, not more pleasure 
 
48 JEAN PAUL EICHTER. 
 
 (for this honey they draw from every flower and leaf 
 louse), but more virtue ; when the people will take pari 
 in thinking, and the thinker in working, in order thai 
 he may save himself the need of Helots ; when milita- 
 ry and judicial murder shall be condemned, and onlj 
 occasionally cannon-balls shall be turned up with the 
 plough. "When that times comes, then will a preponder- 
 ance of good no more stop the machine by frictions. 
 When it comes, then will the necessity no longer lie ir 
 human nature of degenerating again and again breeding 
 tempests (for heretofore the noble element has merely 
 kept up a flying fight with the overpowering evil), just 
 as, according to Forster, even on the hot island of St. 
 Helena there are no storms. 
 
 "When this festal day comes, then will our children's 
 children be— no more. We stand now in the evening 
 and see at the close of our dark day the sun go down 
 with a red-hot glory, and promise us behind the last 
 cloud the still, serene Sabbath-day of humanity ; but our 
 posterity have yet to travel through a night full of 
 wind, and through a cloud full of poison, till at last over 
 a happier earth an eternal morning wind full of blossom- 
 spirits, moving on before the sun, expelhng all clouds, 
 shall breathe on men without a sigh. 
 
lY. 
 
 FRIENDSHIP. 
 
 40. ouE fbibnd's sistee. 
 Every one, if it is only half practicable, loves to spin 
 himself into one chrysalis with the sister of his friend. 
 
 41. COMPANIONSHIP. 
 
 'No one could endure and overcome solitude, if it were 
 not for the hope of companionship in the future, or for 
 the belief in invisible companionship in the present. 
 
 42. TIMES OE SYMPATHY. 
 
 There are certain precious minutes of rapture — ah ! 
 why not years ?• — when an inexpressible love toward all 
 human creatures flows through thy whole life, and opens 
 thy arras softly to every brother. 
 
 43. IKFLUENCE OF NOBLE COMPANIONSHIP. 
 
 How is it that there are men who, as Socrates did 
 Aristides, make us better merely by our being with 
 them ?— How do great authors bring it about, that their 
 invisible spirit in their works seizes and holds us fast, 
 without our being able to quote the words and passages 
 whereby they do it, as a thickly leaved forest always 
 murmurs, though not a single branch stirs ? 
 
 44. DANCING MAIDENS. 
 
 I have so often wished that maidens might always 
 dance exactly like the Graces and the Hours — that is to 
 
60 JEAIfr PAUL UICIITER. 
 
 say, only with one another, not with us gentlemen. The 
 present union of the female wave-line with the masculine 
 swallow-like zigzag, as well in dress as in motion, does 
 not remarkably beautify the dance. 
 
 The dancing-floor is to woman's beauty what the 
 horse's back is to ours : on both the mutual enchantment 
 unfolds itself, and only i^ rider can match a dancing 
 maiden. 
 
 45. TOO MUCH WEAKNESS. 
 
 Friends, lovers, and married people must have every- 
 thing else in common, but not a chamber. The gross 
 requisitions and trifling incidents of bodily presence 
 gather as lamp smoke around the pure, white flame of 
 love. As the echo is always of more syllables the 
 farther off our call starts, so must the soul from which 
 we desire a fairer echo not be too near ours ; and hence 
 the nearness of souls increases with the distance of bodies. 
 
 46. LOVE INJURES HEROES. 
 
 When History leads a noble youth to the plains of 
 Marathon, and up to the Capitol, he would fain have at 
 his side a friend, a comrade, a brother-in-arms, but 
 no more than this — no sister-in-arms ; for a heroine in- 
 jures a hero greatly. Into the energetic youth friendship 
 enters earlier than love : the former appears, like the 
 lark, in the early spring of life, and goes not away till 
 late autumn ; the latter comes and flees, like the quail, 
 with the warm season. 
 
 47. TAKING A SECOND FAREWELL. 
 
 If my good reader ever has to take an eternal farewell 
 of a too dear friend, let him take it twice. The first we 
 all understand, as a matter of course, when he sinks in the 
 intoxication of sorrow, in the hemorrhage of heart and 
 
FRIENDSHIP. 51 
 
 eyes, and M-lien the beloved object burns itself witli 
 flames into tbe tender soul ; but then lie will never be 
 able to forget the being thus torn from his heart. 
 Therefore he must take a second farewell, which is 
 colder even for the reason that passionate emotions ad- 
 mit no dalsegno of repetition ; nay (if he will take the 
 wisest course of all), he ni«st endeavoi', after the first 
 tragic leave-taking, to see her in a public place {e.g. at 
 a coronation), where slie must appear cold. Her frosty 
 face will then snow over her glowing one in his brain. 
 
 48. MAXIMS. 
 
 A woman cannot choose for herself a firmer or jDurer 
 friend than another woman's lover. 
 
 It is no virtue, but only luxury, to take away the 
 crown of thorns from a lacerated brow, the prickly girdle 
 from sore nerves. 
 
 A man who travels with his beloved to Italy has in the 
 very fact that he might do without one of the two, both 
 double. 
 
 He who gives up the smallest part of a secret has the 
 rest no longer in his power. 
 
 The feeling for the beloved of a friend carries with it 
 and unspeakable sweetness and moral tenderness. 
 
 Is thy friend angry with thee ? then provide him an 
 opportunity of showing thee a great favor. Over that 
 his heart must needs melt, and he will love thee again. 
 
 49. BEAUTT OF EECONCILIATION. 
 
 Yerily, 1 have often formed the wish — and afterward 
 made a picture of it — that 1 could be present at all rec- 
 onciliations in the world, because no love moves us so 
 deeply as returning love. It must touch Immortals, 
 when they see men, the heavy-laden, and often held so 
 
53 JEAN PAUL RICHTEK. 
 
 widely asimder by fate or by fault, liow, like the Valis- 
 iieria,* tbey will tear themselves away from the marshy 
 bottom and ascend into a fairer element ; and then, in a 
 freer upper air, how they will conquer the distance 
 between their hearts and come together. But it must 
 also pain Immortals when they behold us under the 
 violent tem/pests of life arrayed against each other on the 
 hattle-field of enmity, under double blows, and so mor- 
 tally smitten at once by remote destiny and by that 
 nearer hand which should bind up our wounds ! 
 
 * The female Valisneria lies rolled np under tlie water, out of which 
 it lifts its bud, to bloom in the open air ; the male then loosens itself 
 from the too short stalk and swims to her with its dry blossom-dust. 
 
V. 
 
 LOVE. 
 
 50. POVEETT. 
 
 A EEPEOACH of oar poverty uttered by lips we have 
 loved, darts like red-hot iron into the heart, and scorches 
 it dry with fire. 
 
 51. TETING TO KILL LOVE. 
 
 Everything which Love does, in order to die, is only 
 an expedient for rising again from the dead, and its 
 epilogues are only prologues to the Second Act. 
 
 52. PAEDONING KIVALS. 
 
 Like most men, he could far sooner pardon the rival 
 lover than the unfaithful fair ; women, on the other 
 hand, hate the rival more than the unfaithful lover. 
 
 53. NEED OF LOVE. 
 
 People must love, though they may not be able to see 
 each other ; and, when all's done, it is only Love that 
 we can love after all, and that we can each see in the 
 other every day. 
 
 54. LOVE BUT ONE. 
 
 O love one heart purely and warmly, then tl^ou Ipvest 
 all hearts after it, and the heart in its he3,yeii sees like 
 the journeying sun, from the de^v-drop even to the 
 ocean, nothing but mirrors which it warms and fills. 
 
64 JEAX PAUL RICHTER. 
 
 55. SACRIFICE. 
 
 In no hour is a lovelj face lovelier than at that imme- 
 diately succeeding the bitter one, when tears lor the loss 
 of a heart have passed over it ; for the sight of the love^ 
 liness in its sorrow, during that hour itself, would be too 
 sad to bear. 
 
 56. TOO FINE FEELING. 
 
 Every young man has a fine season in his life when he 
 will accept no office, and every young woman has the 
 same in hers, when she will accept no husband ; by and 
 by they both change, and often take one another into the 
 bargain. 
 
 57. JEALOUSY. 
 
 But must we not, all of us (for 1 don't consider my- 
 self an exception), smite upon our bony, sinful breasts, 
 and confess that we spit fire the moment modest girls re- 
 frain from spitting it instantly at those whom we may 
 have nigrified or excommi^nicated in their presence ? 
 
 58. LOVE-LETTER SERMONS. 
 
 How dear, on the other liand, Peltzstiefel grew to 
 her ; his very sermons became, in the most charming 
 manner, regular love-letters to her heart. And indeed 
 clericality does, at all times, stand in a very close rela- 
 tion to the feminine heart; that's why " hearts" for- 
 merly meant the clergy on German playing-cards. 
 
 59. MASCULINE AND FEMININE HONOR. 
 
 "Women forgive a loved man more stains than we do a 
 loved woman. Hence the romance-writers let the heroes 
 of their quill guzzle, storm, duel, and stay over night 
 anywhere and everywhere, without the least prejudice 
 to the hero. The heroine, on the contrary, must sit at 
 home by her mother and be a little angel. 
 
LOVE. 55 
 
 60. HUMILITY OF LOTE. 
 
 So long as a woman loves, she loves right on, steadily. 
 A man has to do something between whiles. Liana 
 transformed everything into his image and his name. . . 
 She always came back tipon this, that he deserved some- 
 thing better than her ; for love is lowliness : on the wed- 
 ding-ring sparkles no jewel. 
 
 61. THE SADNESS OF LOVE. 
 
 " What dost thou long for, Nathalie ?" " Not love. 
 Oh ! those who press the thorny white rose of love to 
 their hearts draw blood from out them ; the warm tears 
 of bliss which fall into the blossom soon grow cliill, and 
 are dried up amain. Love, all gleam and bloom, hangs 
 on the morning sky of life, like some great rose-red 
 Aurora in the heavens. Ah ! do not enter that bright 
 glittering cloud — it is but mist and tears. 
 
 62. ANTICIPATION. 
 
 Most of man's pleasures are hut preparations for pleas- 
 ure ; he thinks he has attained his ends, when he has 
 merely got hold of his means to those ends. The burn- 
 ing sun of bliss is l)ehe]d of our feeble eyes but in the 
 seventy mirrors of our seventy years. Each of tliese 
 mirrors reflects that sun's image less brightly — more 
 faint and pale — upon the next ; and in the seventieth it 
 shimmers upon us all frozen, and is become a moon. 
 
 63. SIGNIFICANCE OF A SIGH. 
 
 The day came. Albaiio brought with him, unfortu- 
 nately, in his soul, the tone which Liana had given him 
 the last time to carry home with him. His hope had 
 hitherto lived upon this tone. O blame him not for it ! 
 The airy nothing of & sigh beats often a pastoral world 
 
56 JEAN PAUL EICHTEE. 
 
 or an oreus on its epliemeron's-wing. Everything 
 Aveiglity may, like a rock, be placed on a point, where- 
 upon a child's iiuger can set it in rotation. 
 
 64. LOVE WINS AT LAST. 
 
 Ah, what ardent soul has not once uttered the prayer 
 of love in vain, and then, lamed by the chilling poison, 
 like other poisoned victims, not been able any longer to 
 mpve its heavy tongue and heavy heart ! But love on, 
 thou warm soul ! like spring-flowers, like night-butter- 
 fiies, tender love at last breaks through the hard-frozen 
 soil, and every heart, which desires nothing else than a 
 heart, finds at last its bosom ! 
 
 65. WAXING AND WANING OF LOVE. 
 
 Love is the Perihelion of the fair sex ; nay, it is the 
 transit of every one of these Venuses over the sun of 
 the ideal world. At the epoch of this " higher style" 
 of their souls, they love everything that we love, even 
 the sciences, and the whole hest world within the breast 
 — and they despise what we despise, even clothes and 
 news. In this spring of theirs these nightingales go on 
 singing until the summer solstice ; the wedding-day is 
 their longest day. Then the devil runs away with — not 
 exactly everything, but something every day. 
 
 66. A MOTHEe's love. 
 
 Ah, that man should receive the fairest love precisely 
 at the time when he does not yet understand it ! — alas 
 that not until la,te in life's year, as he contemplates with 
 a sigh the love of other parents and children, he should 
 say hopefully to himself, " Ah, thus did mine certainly 
 love me too !" — .alas that then the bosom to which thou 
 would st hasten with thy thanks for half of a life, for a 
 thousand unappreciated anxieties, for an inexTDres.=able. 
 
LOVE. 57 
 
 never-returning love, is already lying cruslied under an 
 old grave, and has lost the warm heart which so long 
 loved thee ! 
 
 67. FEMININE JEALOUSY. 
 
 Every woman is jealous of all other women, because 
 all other men are attracted by them, and are consequently 
 not true to her. Therefore every woman takes the same 
 vow concerning these vice-queens of this earth that 
 Hannibal took concerning the Romans, and keeps it just 
 as religiously. For which reason every woman has the 
 power which Fordyce says all animal bodies possess — 
 that of making all others cold ; and, indeed, every 
 woman must of necessity be an enemy and persecutor of 
 a sex which consists entirely of rivals. 
 
 68. THE KISS OF LOVE. 
 
 And yet, in the depths of this ice-month of his love- 
 imploring heart, and in the wilderness of his loneliness, 
 Firmian still had one living, resplendent llower^and 
 that was Nathalie's parting kiss. Ah ! ye who waste 
 and pine because of our insatiableness, did ye but know 
 how a kiss, which is a first and a last, blossoms and 
 blooms throughout a life — imperishable double-rose of 
 speechless lips and burning souls — ye would search for 
 bliss more enduring — ay, and find it too ! That kiss 
 sealed, in Firmian, and confiiined the spirit-bond im- 
 mortalizing and eternizing love at its loveliest and bright- 
 est hour of bloom. 
 
 69. SELFISHNESS OF LOVE. 
 
 The friendship or love which a woman has for a man 
 is fed by that wliich she sees existing between him and 
 his friends, and grows visibly in consequence — convert- 
 ing it, polyp-fashion, into its own substance. In the 
 
58 JEAN PAUL RIOHTEK. 
 
 case of us masculine lovers again, this sort of electric 
 coating or magnetic armature of our love with the 
 friendship of our beloved object with other women is 
 most uncommon. "What pleases us is to see her shi'ink- 
 ing from everybody else, growing hard and frozen to 
 them on our account, handing them nothing but ices 
 and cold pudding, but serving us with glowing goblets 
 of love. 
 
 70. ESTRANGEMENT AND UNION. 
 
 But a man does not break with a person he loves all 
 in an instant ; the rendings alternate with little rebind- 
 ings with bands of silk and flowers, till at length the long 
 alternation between seeking and shunning ends in com- 
 plete separation ; and it is then, and not till then, that 
 we wretched creatures are at our wretchedest. The 
 same is generally true of the union of souls ; for though 
 at times an unseen infinite Ann seems suddenly to press 
 us upon some new heart, yet we have always long Jctiown 
 this heart, in the Gallery of the Saints of our longing 
 devotion, and often taken the picture down, uncovered, 
 and adored it. 
 
 71. SYMPATHY IN SEPAEATION. 
 
 Always will there remain in our poor human souls, 
 separated from each other by bodies and wildernesses, 
 the longing to be at least doing the same thing at the 
 same time with one another, at one and the same hour to 
 look up at the moon, or (as Addison relates) to send our 
 prayers above it ; and thus is thy wish, Albano, a 
 human, a tender one, to kneel at the same hour with thy 
 invisible Liana, at the steps of the altar, and then to 
 rise fiery and commanding after the coronation of the 
 inner man ! He had in the still country built up the 
 altar of religion high and firm in his soul, as all men of 
 
* LOVE. 59 
 
 lofty fancy do : on mountains are always seen temples 
 and chapels. 
 
 . ASPIEATIONS OF THE CHEATED HEAET. 
 
 O then, then the cheated heart could not but exclaim, 
 in its lonehness, Ah ! where shall I find— where, in the 
 wide regions of space, in this short life — the souls which 
 I love eternally and so profoundly ? Ah, thou dear one ! 
 what is more painfully and longer sought than a heart ? 
 When man stands before the sea, and on mountains, and 
 before pyramids and ruins, and in the presence of mis- 
 fortune, and feels himself exalted, then does he stretch 
 out his arms after the great Friendship. And when 
 music and moonlight and spring and spring tears softly 
 move him, then his heart dissolves, and he wants Love. 
 And he who has never sought either is a thousand times 
 poorer than he who has lost both. 
 
 73. UNREQUITED LOVE. 
 
 O thou soul of woman — thou that goest, weary and 
 unrewarded, wounded and bleeding, but great and un- 
 spotted, up from the smoking battle-field of life — thou 
 angel, whom the heart of man, reared by storms, soiled by 
 the world's dealings, can respect and love, but cannot 
 reward or reach — how does my soul at this moment bow 
 down before thee ! how do I wish thee now the soothing 
 balm of Heaven, the requiting goodness of the Eternal ! 
 And thou, Philippina, precious soul, glide away into a 
 secret cell, and, amid the tears which thou hast already 
 so often shed, lay thy hand upon thy soft, rich heart and 
 swear, " Forever shalt thou continue consecrated to 
 God and virtue, even if not to repose !" To thyself 
 swear it— not to me, for I believe it without an oath. 
 
60 JEAK PAUL EICIITER. * 
 
 74. DISTANCE AND IDEALS OF THE HEART. 
 
 How many blessed Adams of sixteen and a half years 
 will be at this moment enjoying their siesta in the grass 
 of Paradise, and seeing their future bosom- companion 
 created out of the materials of their own hearts ! But 
 they seek her not, like the first Adam, close beside 
 them on the building-spot, but at a good distance from 
 their own couch, because distance of space lends as much 
 enchantment to the view as distance of time. Accord- 
 iugly every youth seats himself in the mail-coach with 
 the full persuasion that in the cities for which he is 
 booked quite different and more divine Madonnas stand 
 at the doors of the houses than in his cursed one ; and 
 the young men of those cities, again, on their part, take 
 passage in the arriving stage-coach, and go riding hope- 
 fully into his. 
 
 75. SYMPATHY WITH LOVERS. 
 
 Every good-hearted man opens his arms in sympathy 
 when he sees friends, brothers and sisters, or parents 
 embrace each other ; but if a couple of monkeys in love 
 dance round before us at the end of Cupid's string, and 
 though it were on the stage, not a devil of us will take 
 any interest in them, unless they dance in a romance. 
 But why ? Because the love of lovers is selfish, we are so 
 too ; and because in a romance it is not so, wo are not so 
 either. 1, for my part, go on in my thinking, and make 
 believe to myself in regard to every span of lovers 1 
 meet, that they were printed and bound, and I had them 
 from the circulating library for paltry reading money. 
 It belongs to the higher disinterestedness to sympathise 
 even with its opposite. And by all means with you, 
 poor women ! Would you or I, then, oftentimes, with 
 
LOVE. 61 
 
 this life of yours so fi-lttered away in sowing, cooking, 
 washing, know that you had a soul, unless it fell in love ? 
 
 76. LOYK FOE THE DEAD. 
 
 But what agonizes us in every grave-hillock is this 
 thought : " Alas ! beloved heart, how I would-have loved 
 you had 1 known you were going to die !" But since 
 none of us can take a corpse's hand and say, " Pale one ! 
 at all events I have sweetened thy transitory life a little • 
 1 have, at any rate, never given tha.t faded heart of thine 
 anything but love and happiness ;" and as when time, 
 sorroM^, and the loveless winter of life have beautified 
 our hearts, at length we must all go up, v/itli unavailing 
 sighs, to the overthrown forms which are lying beneath 
 the landslip of the grave, and say to them, " Oh ! that, 
 now that I am better and gentler, I have thee with me 
 no longer, and can no longer love thee ! Oh ! that the 
 beloved breast is transparent and broken in, and no heart 
 in it which 1 would love more fondly, and gladden as I 
 never did before !" What have we left but an unavail- 
 ing sorrow, a dumb repentance, and never-ending bitter 
 tears ? 
 
 Yes, my Christian, we have something better left still 
 ■ — a warmer, truer, lovelier love for every soul which we 
 have not yet lost. 
 
 77. CHANGEABLENESS OF WOMAN. 
 
 It is here most essential that I should communicate to 
 all and sundry persons one of the most valual^le of all 
 my maxims : in dealing with even the very best woman 
 in the world, it is of the utmost importance that we 
 should make excessively certain and discriminate with 
 the utmost accuracy what it is which she really wants 
 (at the time being), and particularly v^hom (this is not 
 
63 JEAN PAUL RICIITEE. 
 
 always the person who is thus discriminating). There is 
 in the female heart such a rapid coming and going and 
 fluctuation of emotions of every kind, such an efifusion 
 of many-tinted bubbles which reflect everything, but 
 most particularly whatever chances to be nearest, that a 
 woman, under the influence of emotion, shall, while she 
 sheds a tear for you out of her left eye, go on thinking, 
 and drop another for your predecessor or successor (as 
 the case may be) out of lier right. Also a feeling of 
 tenderness for a rival falls half to a husband's share ; 
 and a woman, even the most loyally faithful, weeps more 
 at what she thinks than at what she hears. 
 
 78. AWKWARD LOVEES. 
 
 Nobody has to suffer more anxiety and alarm, com- 
 bined with tedium and ennui, than a portly, energetic, 
 pushing, pompous, ponderous Basso of a " business 
 man," who finds himself (hke the elephants in Rome of 
 old) constrained to dance, on the slack-rope of love ; and 
 whose deportment and play of feature, in the circum- 
 stances, /think more like those of a marmot than any- 
 thing else, when the warmth of a room has awakened 
 him from his winter's sleep, and he finds he can't get 
 properly into the knack of moving. It is only with 
 widoAvs (who wish less to be loved than to be married) - 
 that a weighty ofliee-holder of this sort can begin his 
 romance at the place where all the novel-writers leave 
 theirs off — namely, at the altar steps. A man, built 
 after this simplest of styles, would find a great weight 
 lifted from his heart if anybody would only love his 
 shepherdess for him till such time as he should have 
 nothing to do but go and be married ; and no one would 
 have greater pleasure in taking up this burden, or cross, 
 from them than myself. I have often thought of an- 
 
LOVE. 63 
 
 nouneing in the public newspapers (except tliat 1 was 
 afraid it would be looked upon as a joke) that 1 was pre- 
 pared to swear Platonic, eternal love to any number of 
 endurable girls (whom men of business might not even 
 have time to love), and make them all necessary love- 
 declarations as plenipotentiary of the bridegroom-elect — 
 in a word, to lead them on my arm, as suhstitutus sine 
 sjpe succedendi, or cavalier de sooiete, athwart the whole 
 of the unlevel land of love, till, on the frontier, I should 
 hand over my charge, duly prepared, to the bridegroom. 
 
 79. LOVE DEIFIES ITS OBJECT. 
 
 Ilow such a light Psyche as Liana, so crystallized into 
 solid ether, somewhat like the risen Christ, can at all eat 
 carps and pick the bones out ; or stir the stack of salad 
 in the blue dish with the long, wooden, miniature pitch- 
 fork ; or how it can be that she weighs half a pound 
 more in the sedan than a blue butterfly ; or how she can 
 laugh loud (but that, however, she never did, my 
 friend) — all this, and in general the whole pretty ser- 
 vice of this incarnate earthly life, was, to the winged 
 youth, a riddle and a real impossibility, or at least the 
 reality thereof was a sort of fixed-star occultation ; why 
 shall 1 suppress that he would have been far less aston- 
 ished at a pair of angel's footsteps stamped into Italian 
 rocks than at a pair of Liana's in the ground, and that 
 he would have given for any one single trace or relic of 
 her — 1 mention only a thread-spool or a tambour-flower 
 — nothing less than whole cords of the wood of the holy 
 cross, together with casks of the holy nails and several 
 apostolic wardrobes, together with tlie holy duplicate- 
 bodies into the bargain. 
 
 So have I often longingly wished 1 could have only a 
 pound of earth from the moon, or as much as a horn of 
 
64 JEAN PAUL EICHTER. 
 
 snn-dust from the sun, before me on my table and in my 
 bands. So do most of us aathors of consequence hover 
 before a reader out of our own country in like manner 
 as fine, ethereal images, of whom it is hard to compre- 
 hend how they can eat a slice of bacon, or drink a glass 
 of March beer, or wear a pair of boots ; it seems as if 
 people would collapse when they read anything about 
 Lessing's razor, Shakespeare's English saddle, Rousseau's 
 bearskin cap. Psalmist David's navel, Homer's sleeve, 
 Gellert's queue-tie, Kamler's nightcap, and the bald 
 pate under mine, though that is not of much more con- 
 sequence. 
 
 80. MAXIMS. 
 
 An interrupted influence is as good as lost. 
 
 Love lessens woman's delicacy and increases man's. 
 
 Only the highest and noblest love is without real 
 trickery. 
 
 Sacred to the loving heart is the form that has said to 
 it, I am thine. 
 
 The love which is long overlooked seldom, if ever, 
 becomes a reciprocated love. 
 
 The fair one believes the flatterer whom she sets down 
 as a consummate flatterer of all others. 
 
 Before any mother, it is of itself an impossibility to 
 introduce an edifying conversation with the daughter. 
 
 The conjunction of the upper planets is more easily 
 brought about than that of the upper class of lovers. 
 
 A love which thinks to die at some time or other was 
 already dead, and that which feared to live forever 
 feared in vain. 
 
 Women and oarsmen always turn their backs to the 
 shore toward which they are seeking to propel them- 
 selves. 
 
 Men of qtiick fancy more easily reconcile themselves 
 
LOVE. 65 
 
 to the Joved one ■when she is absent than when she is 
 jjresent. 
 
 Women and Spanish houses have, to begin with, 
 many doors and few windows, and it is easier to get into 
 their hearts than to looh into them. 
 
 We love much more warmly when we are looking 
 forward to making somebody happy than we do half an 
 hour after, when we have done it. 
 
 Has, then, no man ever yet experienced the pain of 
 lost love, that he may know what a thousand times 
 harder desolation it inflicts upon a woman ? 
 
 Nothing makes love sweeter and tenderer than a little 
 previous scolding and freezing, just as the great clusters 
 acquire by a frost before vintage thinner skins and better 
 nmst. 
 
 Why does a blessing, not till it is lost, cut its way like 
 a sharp diamond so deeply into the heart ? Why must 
 we first have lamented a thing before we ardently and 
 painfully love it ? 
 
 81. fixlein's couktship. 
 
 Nothing makes the heart fuller and bolder than walk- 
 ing to and fro in the night. Fixlein now led the Frau- 
 lein in his arm without scruple. By reason of her lan- 
 cet-wound, Thienette coiild only put her hand, in a 
 clasping position, in his arm ; and he, to save her the 
 trouble of holding fast, held fast himself, and pressed 
 her fingers as well as might be with his arm to his heart. 
 It would betray a total want of polished manners to cen- 
 sure his. At the same time, trifles are the provender of 
 love ; the fingers are electric discharges of a fire spark- 
 ling along every fibre ; sighs are the guiding tones of 
 two approximating hearts ; and the worst and most 
 efl'ectual thing of all in such a case is some misfortune ; 
 
66 JEAN PAUL EICnTEE. 
 
 for the fire of love, like that of naphtha, likes to swim 
 on water. Two teardrops, one in another's, one in your 
 own eyes, compose, as with two convex lenses, a micro- 
 scope which enlarges everything and changes alt sorrows 
 into charms. Good sex ! I too consider every sister in 
 misfortune as fair ; and perhaps thou wouldst deserve 
 the name of the Fair, even because thou art the Suffer- 
 ing, sex ! 
 
 82. fixlein's beteothal-night. 
 
 The poet, like Apollo his father, is forever a youth / 
 and is, what other men are only once, namely, in love 
 all his life long. Fixlein, who had been no poet in the 
 morning, now became one at night ; wine made him 
 poetic and soft ; the harmonica-bells in man, which 
 Kound to the tones of a higher world, must, like the glass 
 harmonica-bells, if they are to act, be kept moist. 
 
 He was now standing with her again beside the waver- 
 ing pond, in which the second blue hemisphere of 
 heaven, with dancing stars and amid quivering trees, was 
 playing ; over the green hills ran the white, crooked 
 footpatlis dimly along ; on the one mountain was the 
 twilight sinking together, on the other was the mist of 
 night I'ising up ; and over all these vapoi-s of life hung 
 motionless and flaming the thousand-armed lustre of 
 the starry heaven, and every arm held in it a burning 
 galaxy. . . . 
 
 It now struck eleven. . . . Amid such scenes an 
 unknown hand stretches itself out in man, and writes in 
 foreign language on his heart a dread Mene Mene Tekel 
 JJpharsin. "Perhaps by twelve 1 am dead," thought 
 our friend, in whose soul the Cantata-Sunday, with all 
 its black funeral piles, was mounting up. 
 
 The whole future crucifixion of his friend lay prickly 
 and bethorned before him, and ho saw every bloody 
 
LOVE. 67 
 
 trace from which she lifted her foot — she who had 
 made his own way soft with flowers and leaves. He 
 could no longer restrain himself ; trembling in his whole 
 frame, and with a trembling voice, he solemnly said to 
 her, ' ' If the Lord this night call me away, let the half 
 of my fortune be yours ; for it is your goodness I must 
 thank that 1 am free of debts, as few teachers are." 
 
 Thienette, unacquainted with our sex, naturally mis- 
 took this speech for a proposal of marriage ; and the fin- 
 gers of her wounded arm to-night for the first time 
 pressed suddenly against the arm on which they lay — the 
 only living mortal's arm by which Joy, Love, and the 
 Earth were still united with her bosom. The Conrector, 
 rapturously terrified at the first pressure of a female 
 hand, bent over his right to take hold of her left ; and 
 Thienette, observing his unsuccessful movement, lifted 
 lier fingers and laid her whole wounded arm in his, and 
 her whole left hand in his right. Two lovers dwell in the 
 w^hispering-gallery, where the faintest breath bodies 
 itself forth into a sound. The good Conrector received 
 and returned this blissful love-pressure, wherewith our 
 poor, jjowerless soul, stammering, hemmed in, longing, 
 distracted, seeks for a warmer language, wliich exists 
 not ; he was overpowered ; he had not the courage to 
 look at her ; but he looked into the gleam of the twi- 
 light, and said (and here for unspeakable love the tears 
 were running warm over his cheeks), " Ah, I will give 
 you all — ^fortune, life, and all that I have, my heart and 
 my hand. " 
 
 She was about to answer, but casting a side glance 
 she cried, with a shriek, " Ah, Heaven !" He started 
 round, and perceived the white muslin sleeve all dyed 
 with blood ; for in putting her arm into his she had 
 pushed away the bandage from the open vein. With 
 
68 JEAN- PAUL KICHTER. 
 
 the speed of lightning he hurried her into the acacia- 
 grove ; the blood was already running from the muslin ; 
 he grew paler than she, for every drop of it was coming 
 from his heart. The blue-white arm was bared ; the 
 bandage was put on : he tore a piece of gold from his 
 pocket, clapped it, as one does with open arteries, on 
 the spouting fountain, and bolted with this golden bar, 
 and with the bandage over it, the door out of which her 
 afflicted life was hurrying. 
 
 When it was over she looked up to him ; pale, lan- 
 guid, but her eyes were two glistening fountains of an 
 unspeakable love, full of sorrow and full of gratitude. 
 The exhaiisting loss of blood was spreading her soul 
 asunder in sighs. Thienette was dissolved into inex- 
 pressible softness ; and the heart lacerated by so many 
 years, by so many arrows, was plunging with all its 
 wounds in warm streams of tears, to be healed, as chap- 
 ped fl-utes close together by lying in water and get back 
 their tones. Before such a magic form, before such a 
 pure, heavenly love, her sympathizing friend was 
 melted between the flames of joy and grief, and sank, 
 with stifled voice, and bent down by love and rapture, 
 on the pale, angelic face, the lips of which he timidly 
 pressed, but did not kiss, till all-powerful Love bound its 
 girdles round them, and drew the two closer and closer 
 together, and their two souls, like two tears, melted into 
 one. O now, when it struck twelve, the hour of death, 
 did not the lover fancy that her lips were drawing his 
 soul away, and all the fibres and all the nerves of his life 
 closed spasmodically round the last heart in this world — 
 round the last rapture of existence. . . . Yes, happy 
 man, thou didst express thy love ; for in thy love thou 
 thoughtest to die. . . . 
 
 However, he did not die. After midnight there 
 
LOVE. 69 
 
 floated a balmy morning air througli the shaken flowers, 
 and the whole spring was breathing. The blissful lover, 
 setting bounds even to his sea of joy, reminded his deli- 
 cate beloved, who was now his bride, of the dangers 
 from night-cold, and himself of the longer night-cold 
 of Death, which was now for long years passed over. 
 Innocent and blessed, they rose from the grove of their 
 betrothment, from its dust broken by white acacia- 
 flowers and straggling moonbeams. And without they 
 felt as if a whole wide Past had sunk away in a convul- 
 sion of the woiid ; all was new, light, and young. The 
 sky stood full of glittering dewdrops from the everlast- 
 ing Morning, and the stars quivered joyfully asunder, 
 and sank, resolved into beams, down into the hearts of 
 men. The Moon, with her fountain of light, had over- 
 spread and kindled all the garden, and was hanging 
 above in a starless blue, as if she had consumed the 
 nearest stars ; and she seemed like a smaller wandering 
 Spring, like a Christ's face smiling in love of man. 
 
 Under this light they looked at one another for the 
 first time after the first words of love ; and the sky 
 gleamed magically down on the disordered features with 
 which the first rapture of love was still standing written 
 on their faces. . . . 
 
 Dream, ye beloved, as ye wake, happy as in Para- 
 dise, innocent as in Paradise ! 
 
 83. FIXLBIn's WEDDmO-DAY. 
 
 0, the good Genius of Fair Weather, who deserves 
 many temples and festivals (because without him no fes- 
 tival could be held), lifted an ethereal, azure Day, as it 
 were, from the well-clear atmosphere of the Moon, and 
 sent it down, on blue butterfly-wings, as if it were a 
 Uue Monday, glittering below the sun, in the zigzag of 
 
70 JEAN PADL mCHTEK. 
 
 joyful, quivering descent, upon the narrc^y spot of 
 Earth which our heated fancies are now viewing. . . . 
 And on this bahny, vernal spot stand, amid flowers, over 
 which the trees are shaking blossoms instead of leaves, a 
 bride and a bridegroom. . . . Happy Fixlein ! how 
 shall 1 paint thee without deepening the sighs of longing 
 in the fairest souls ? 
 
 But soft ! we will not drink the magic cup of Fancy 
 to the bottom at six in the morning, but keep sober till 
 toward night ! 
 
 At the sound of the morning prayer-bell the bride- 
 groom, for the din of preparation was disturbing his 
 quiet orison, went out into the churchyard, which (as in 
 many other places), together with the church, lay round 
 his mansion like a court. Here on the moist green, 
 over whose closed flowers the churchyard wall was still 
 spreading broad shadows, did his spirit cool itself from 
 the warm dream of Earth ; here, where the white fl^ 
 gravestone of his teacher lay before him like the fallen-in 
 door on the Janus's temple of Life, or like the wind- 
 ward side of the narrow house turned toward the tem- 
 pests of the world. ; here, where the little shrunk metal- 
 lic door on the grated cross of his father uttered to him 
 the inscriptions of death, and the year when his parent 
 departed, and all the admonitions and mementoes, graven 
 on the lead — ^there, I say, his mood grew softer and more 
 solemn ; and he now lifted up by heart his morning 
 prayer, which usually he read ; and entreated God to 
 bless him in his office, and to spare his mother's life, and 
 to look with favor and acceptance on the purpose of to- 
 day. 
 
 But on returning to the house he was met on all 
 hands by the bell-ringing and the Janizary -music of 
 wadding-gladness ; the marriage-guests had all thrown 
 
LOTE. 71 
 
 off their nigMcaps and were drinking diligently ; there 
 was a clattering, a cooking, a frizzling ; tea-services, 
 coffee-services, and warm beer-services were advancing 
 in succession ; and plates full of bride-cakes were going 
 round like potter's frames or cistern- wheels. The 
 Schoolmaster, with three young lads, was heard rehears- 
 ing from his own house an Arioso, with which, so soon 
 as they were perfect, he purposed to surprise his clerical 
 superior. But now rushed all the arms of the foaming 
 joy-streams into one, when the sky-queen besprinkled 
 with blossoms the bride, descended upon Earth in her 
 timid joy, full of quivering, humble love ; when the 
 bells began ; when the procession-column set forth with 
 the whole village round and before it ; when the organ, 
 the congregation, the officiating priest, and the sparrows 
 on the trees of the church-window struck louder and 
 louder their rolling peals on the drum of the jubilee-fes- 
 tival. . . . The heart of the singing bridegroom was 
 like to leap from its place for joy, " That on his bridal- 
 day it was all so respectable and grand." Not till the 
 marriage benediction could he pray a little. 
 
 StiU. worse and louder grew the business during din- 
 ner, when pastry-work and marchpane-devices were 
 brought forward ; when glasses and slain fishes (laid 
 under the hapldns to frighten the guests) went round ; 
 and when the guests rose, and themselves went round, 
 and at length danced round —for they had instrumental 
 music from the city there. 
 
 One minute handed over to the other the sugar-bowl 
 and bottle-case of joy ; the guests heard and saw less 
 and less, and the villagers began to see and hear more 
 and more, and toward night they penetrated like a 
 wedge into the open-door — nay, two youths ventured 
 even, in the middle of the parsonage-court, to mount a 
 
72 JEAK PAUL RICHTER. 
 
 plank over a beam, and commence see-sawing. Out of 
 doors the gleaming vapor of the departed Sun was en- 
 circling the Earth, the evening star was glittering over 
 parsonage and churchyard : no one heeded it. 
 
 However, about nine o'clock, when the marriage- 
 guests had wellnigh forgotten the marriage-pair, and 
 were drinking or dancing along for their own behoof.; 
 when poor mortals, in the sunshine of Fate, like fishes 
 in the sunshine of the sky, were leaping up from their 
 wet, cold element ; and when the bridegroom, under the 
 star of happiness and love, casting like a comet its long 
 train of radiance over all his heaven, had in secret pressed 
 to his joy-filled breast his bride and his mother — 
 then did he lock a slice of wedding-bread privily into a 
 press, in the old superstitious belief that this residue 
 secured continuance of bread for the whole marriage. 
 As he returned, with greater love for the sole partner of 
 his life, she herself met him with his mother, to deliver 
 him in private the bj'idal night-gown' and bridal-shirt, as 
 is the ancient usage. Many a countenance grows pale 
 in violent emotions, even of joy ; Thienette's waxed face 
 was bleaching still whiter under the sunbeams of Happi- 
 ness. O never fall, thou lily of Heaven, and may four 
 springs instead of four seasons open and shut thy flower- 
 bells to the sun ! All the arms of his soul, as he floated 
 on the sea of joy, were quivering to clasp the soft, warm 
 heart of his beloved, to encircle it gently and fast, and 
 draw it to his own. . . . 
 
 He led her from the crowded dancing-room into the 
 cool evening. Why does the evening, does the night, 
 put warmer love in our hearts ? Is it the nightly press- 
 ure of helplessness, or is it the exalting separation 
 from the turmoil of life, that veiling of the world, in 
 which for the soul nothing more remains but souls — ^is 
 
LOVE, 'J'S 
 
 it, therefore, that the letters in which the lorecl nam^ 
 stands written in our spirit appear, like phosphorus-writ- 
 ing, by night in fire, while by day in their cloudy traces 
 they but smoke ? 
 
 The wind Avhirred like a night-bird, louder through 
 the trees, and gave tones to the acacia-grove, and the 
 tones called to the pair who had first become happy 
 within it : " Enter, new mortal pair, and think of what 
 is past, and of my withering and your own ; and be holy 
 as Eternity, and weep not only for joy, but for grati- 
 tude also !" And the wet-eyed bridegroom led his 
 wet-eyed bride under the blossoms, and laid his soul, like 
 a flower, on her heart, and said : " Best Thienette, I am 
 unspeakably happy, and would say much, and cannot. 
 Ah, thou Dearest, we will live like angels, like children 
 together ! Surely I will do all that is good to thee ; 
 two years ago I had nothing, no nothing ; ah, it is 
 through thee, best love, that 1 am happy. I call thee 
 Thou, now, thou dear good soul !" She drew him 
 closer to her, and said, though without kissing him, 
 " Call me Thou always, Dearest !" 
 
 And as they stepped forth again from the sacred grove 
 into the magic-dusky garden, he took off his hat — first, 
 that he might internally thank God, and secondly, 
 because he wished to look into this fairest evening sky. 
 
 They reached the blazing, rusthng marriage-house, 
 bat their softened hearts sought stillness ; and a foreign 
 touch, as in the blossoming vine, would have disturbed 
 the flower-nnptials of their souls. They turned rather, 
 and winded up into the churchyard to preserve tlieir 
 mood. Majestic on the groves and mountains stood the 
 Night before man's heart, and made it also great. Over 
 the white steeple-obelisk the sky rested Muer and darlcer / 
 
74 JEAN PAUL BICHTEE. 
 
 and behind it wavered the withered summit of the May- 
 pole with faded flag. The son noticed his father's 
 grave, on which the wind was opening and shutting, 
 with liarsh noise, the little door of the metal cross, to let 
 the year of his death be read on the brass plate within. 
 An overpowering sadness seized his heart with violent 
 streams of tears, and drove him to the sunk hillock ; and 
 he led his bride to the grave, and said, " Here sleeps 
 he, my good father ; in his thirty-second year he was 
 carried hither to his long rest. O thou good, dear 
 father, couldst thou to-day but see the happiness of thy 
 son, like my mother ! But thy eyes are empty, and thy 
 breast is full of ashes, and thou seest us not. ' ' He was 
 silent. The bride wept aloud ; she saw the mouldering 
 coffins of her parents open, and the two dead arise and 
 look round for their daughter, who had stayed so long 
 behind them, forsaken on the Earth. She fell upon his 
 heart, and faltered, " O beloved, 1 have neither father 
 nor mother ; do not forsake me !' ' 
 
 thou who hast still a father and a mother, thank God 
 for it, on the day when thy soul is full of joyful tears, 
 and needs a bosom wherein to shed them. . . . 
 
 And with this embracing at a father's grave, let this 
 day of joy be holily concluded. 
 
 84. JEAN Paul's parting feom fixlein and his wife. 
 
 1 took this couple one in each hand, instead of under 
 each arm, and moved with them through the garden to 
 the Flachsenfingen highway. I often abruptly turned 
 roimd my head between them, as if I had heard some 
 one coming after us ; but in reality I only meant once 
 more, though mournfully, to look back into the happy 
 hamlet, whose houses were all dwellings of contented, 
 still Sabbath-joy, and which is happy enough, though 
 
LOVE. 75 
 
 over its wide-parted pavement-stones there passes every 
 week but one barber, every holiday but one dresser of 
 hair, and every year but one hawker of parasols. Then 
 truly 1 had again to turn round my head, and look at 
 the happy pair beside me. 
 
 My otherwise affectionate gossip could not rightly suit 
 himself to these tokens of sorrow ; but in thy heart, 
 thou good, so oft-afflicted sex, every mourning-bell soon 
 iinds its unison ; and Thienette, ennobled with the thin 
 trembling resonance of a reverberating soul, gave me 
 back all my tones with the beauties of an echo. At last 
 we reached the boundary, over which Thienette could 
 not be allowed to walk ; and now must 1 part from my 
 gossip, with whom 1 had talked so gayly every morning 
 (each of us from his bed), and from the stifl circuit of 
 modest hope where he dwelt, and return once more to the 
 rioting, fermenting Court-sphere, where men in bull- 
 beggar tone demand from Fate a root of Life-Licorice, 
 thick as the arm, like the botanical one on the Wolga, 
 not so much that they may chew the sweet bean them- 
 selves, as fell others to earth with it. 
 
 As I thought to myself that I would say. Farewell ! to 
 them, all the coming plagues, all the corpses, and all the 
 marred wishes of . this good pair arose before my heart ; 
 and I remembered that little, save the falling asleep of 
 joy-flowers, would mark the current of their Life-day, as 
 it does of mine and of every one's. And yet it is fairer, 
 if they measure their years not by the ~W ater-oloGk of 
 falhng tears, but by the Flower-clock of asleep-going 
 flowers, whose bells in our short-lived garden are sink- 
 ing together before us from hour to hour. 
 
 I would even now — for I still recollect how 1 hung 
 with streaming eyes over these two loved ones, as over 
 their corpses — address myself, and say ; Far too soft. 
 
70 JEAN PAUL BICHTEB. 
 
 Jean Paul, whose chalk still sketches the models of 
 ISTature on a ground of Melancholy ; harden thy heart 
 like thy frame, and waste not thyself and others by such 
 thoughts. Yet why should I do it, why should 1 not 
 confess directly what, in the softest emotion, I said to 
 these two beings? "May all go right with you, ye 
 mild beings," I said, for 1 no longer thought of 
 courtesies ; " may the arm of Providence bear gently 
 your lacerated hearts, and the good Father above all 
 these suns which are now looking down on us, keep you 
 ever united, and exalt you still undivided to His bosom 
 and His lips !" "Be you, too, right happy and glad !" 
 said Thienette. "And to you, Thienette," continued 
 1, " ah ! to your pale cheeks, to your oppressed heart, 
 to your long cold maltreated youth, I can never, never 
 wish enough. No ! But all that can soothe a wounded 
 soul, that can please a pure one, that can still the hidden 
 sigh — O, all that you deserve — may this be given you ; 
 and when you see me again, then say to me, " I am now 
 much happier !' ' 
 
 We were all of us too deeply moved. "We at last 
 tore ourselves asunder from repeated embraces ; my 
 friend retired with the soul whom he loves ; I re- 
 mained alone behind him with the Night. 
 
 And I walked without aim through woods, through 
 valleys, and over brooks, and through sleeping villages, 
 to enjoy the great Night like a Day. 1 walked, and 
 still looked, like the magnet, to the' region of midnight, 
 to strengthen my heart at the gleaming twilight, at this 
 upstretching Aurora of a morning beneath our feet. 
 White night-butterflies flitted, white blossoms fluttered, 
 white stars fell, and the white snow-powder hung silvery 
 in the high shadow of the Earth, which reaches beyond 
 the Moon, and which is our Night. Then began the 
 
LOVE. 77 
 
 -^olian Hai-p of the Creation to tremble and to sound, 
 blown on from above, and my immortal soul was a string 
 in this Harp. The heart of a brother everlasting Man 
 swelled under the everlasting Heaven, as the seas swell 
 under the Sun and under the Moon. The distant vil- 
 lage-clocks struck midnight, mingling, as it were, with 
 the ever-pealing tone of ancient Eternity. The limbs 
 of my buried ones touched cold on my soul, and drove 
 away its blots, as dead hands heal eruptions of the skin. 
 1 walked silently through little hamlets, and close by 
 their outer churchyards, where crumbled upcast coffin- 
 boards were glimmering, while the once bright eyes that 
 had lain in them were mouldered into gray ashes. Cold 
 thought ! clutch not like a cold spectre at my heart ; 1 
 look up to the starry sky, and an everlasting chain 
 stretches thither, and over and below ; and all is Life, 
 and Warmth, and Light, and all is godlike or God. . . . 
 
VI. 
 
 MAEEIAGE. 
 
 85. MAEEIAGE WITHOUT LOTE. 
 
 Does any one know what purgatorial hours one wades 
 through with a strange heart, which is full without 
 making fuU, and whose love one at last hates ! 
 
 86. ACKNOWLEDGINa FAULT. 
 
 There are very few married women indeed who will 
 put their hand into their husbands', and say, " There, 
 I'm good again," without a very considerable hesitation 
 and delay ; unmarried women are much more ready to 
 do it. 
 
 87. BETEOTHAL-DATS. 
 
 1 confess I can imagine no day on which I regard my 
 friend with deeper emotion than on that never-to-be-for- 
 gotten one, on which Fate gives him the brother kiss, 
 the hand-pressure, the land of love and Philadelphia and 
 Vaueluse's spring, united in one female heart. 
 
 88. AFTEE THE WEDDING. 
 
 The husband and wife, for the first time, were alone 
 in the darkness, hand in hand. 
 
 Oh, hour of beauty ! when in every cloud there stood 
 a smiling angel, dropping flowers instead of rain, may 
 some faint reflection from thee reach even to this page 
 of mine, and shine on there forever ! 
 
MAEEIAGE. 79 
 
 89. THE BEIDEGEOOm's EESPONSIBILITT. 
 
 From the hour when the wish of inclination is exalted 
 into the command of duty, and when the dear soul de- 
 livers herself and all her hopes, and the reins of her 
 whole future, into the beloved hands, there must in 
 every good man's heart be a voice calling : " Now she 
 has no longer any one on earth but thee ; now let her 
 be holy to thee ; O, now spare and guard and reward 
 the dear soul who believes in thee !" 
 
 9J). TENDEENESS TO WIVES. 
 
 A woman has not, as man has, the power of protect- 
 ing the outer side of her inner air-and-magic-castles 
 against rough weather. What, then, is she to hold to ? 
 Her husband. He ought always to stand beside the 
 liquid silver of the female spirit with a spoon, and keep 
 skimming off the scum which gathers on it, that the 
 silver-glittering sheen of the ideal may always keep 
 bright and shining. 
 
 91. SULKING WIVES. 
 
 The fact is, that the very strongest and roughest of 
 men cannot hold out in the long run against the everlast- 
 ing feminine sulking and undermining. For the sheer 
 sake of a little peace and quietness, a man who may have 
 sworn a thousand oaths before marriage that he would 
 have his own way in that condition of life, comes, in the 
 long run, to let his wife have Tiers. 
 
 92. ESTEAITGEMENT. 
 
 When two hearts can no longer be brought together 
 by the influence of some mutual, warm emotion, when 
 the glow of enthusiasm no longer links them together, 
 still less can they mingle and unite when the glow has 
 passed away and chilly reserve has resmned its sway. 
 
80 JEAK PAUL KICHTEB. 
 
 There is a certain half-and-half state of partial reconcilia- 
 tion in which the vertical index of the jewel-balance, in 
 its glass-case, is turned by the lightest breath from the 
 tongue of a third person. 
 
 93. EBCONCILIATION. 
 
 It was foolish, therefore, in him to think that he was 
 going to regain, by means of one grand effusion of the 
 heart, an affection embittered by so many small effusions 
 of gall. The grandest benefits, the loftiest manly en- 
 thusiasm, are incapable of uprooting, all in an instant, 
 a feeling of ill-wiU which has rooted itself all over a 
 person's heart with a thousand little spreading fibres. 
 The affection which we have deprived ourselves of by 
 means of a long-continued, gradual process of chilling, 
 is only to be regained by an equally lengthy process of 
 warming. 
 
 94. CONJUGAL DISCOED. 
 
 I have often seen a guest serve as cement or hefting 
 powder to two better halves in a state of fracture, 
 because shame and necessity compelled them to speak 
 and behave kindly to each other, at all events while the 
 guest was there. Every husband should be provided 
 with two or three visitors of this sort, to come in when 
 he's suffering from an attack of wife-possessed-too-long- 
 with-the-devil-of-dumbness ; as long as the people are 
 there, at all events, she must speak, and take the iron 
 thief-apple of silence— which grows on the same stalk as 
 the apple of discord — out of her mouth. 
 
 95. WIFELY SOLICrrUDE. 
 
 That when he Went out she used to look after him as 
 long as he was in sight, was nothing in comparison to the 
 way in which she used to run out after him with a brush. 
 
MAEEIAGE. 81 
 
 when she noticed from the window- that there was such a 
 quantity of street paving sticking to his coat-tails that 
 nothing would do but she must have him back again into 
 the house, and brush his back as clean as if the Euh- 
 schnappel municipality would charge him paving-tax if 
 any of the mud were found on him. He would take 
 hold of the brush and stop it, and kiss her, and say, 
 " There's a good deal inside as well ; but nobody sees 
 it there ; when 1 come back we'll set to work and scrub 
 some of that away." 
 
 96. COMPLIMENTS. 
 
 The husband should always play the lover by rights — 
 and the lover the husband. It is impossible to describe 
 the amount of soothing influence which little acts of 
 politeness and innocent flatteries exercise upon just the 
 very people who usually expect, and receive, none — 
 wives, sisters, relations — and this even when they quite 
 understand what this politeness really amounts to. "Wo 
 ought to be applying this emollient pomade to our rude 
 rough lips all day long, even if we have only three 
 words to speak ; and wo should have a similar one for 
 our hands, to soften down their actions. I trust that 1 
 shall always keep my resolution never to flatter any 
 woman, not even my own wife, but 1 know 1 shall begin 
 to break it four months and a half after my betrothal, 
 and go on breaking it all my life. 
 
 97. eiohtee's ideal wife. 
 
 It is to be hoped, indeed, that the author of this story, 
 should he ever chance to marry, may meet with a wife 
 to whom he may be able to give readings concerning the 
 more essential principles and dietata of psychology and 
 astronomy without her bringing in the subject of his 
 
82 JEAH PAUL lUCHTER. 
 
 stockings in the middle of his loftiest and fullest flights 
 of enthusiasm ; but yet he will be well content should 
 one possessed of moderate excellences fall to his lot — 
 one whose eyes and heart may be wide enough to take in 
 the blooming earth and the shining heavens in great, 
 grand masses at a time, and not in mere infinitesimal par- 
 ticles ; for whom this universe shall be something 
 higher than a nursery and a ball-room ; and who, with 
 feelings delicate and tender, and a heart both pious and 
 wide, should be continually making her husband better 
 and holier. The author's fondest wishes go not beyond 
 this. 
 
 98. MOTHEEHOOD. 
 
 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 philo- 
 sophic 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 sac- 
 I'ificing 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. 
 
 99. MAREIAGE CONTRACTS EEPULSIVE. 
 
 To me, however, a marriage contract were a thing as 
 painful and repulsive — I confess it candidly, though 
 you should in consequence upbraid me with my great 
 youth — as if I had to take my love-letter to a Notary 
 
MAKTILAGE, 83 
 
 Imperial, and make him docket and countersign it 
 before it could be sent. Heavens ! to see the light flower 
 of Love, whose perfume acts not on the balance, so laid 
 like tulip-bulbs on the hay-beam of Law ; two hearts 
 on the cold councillor and flesh-beam of relatives and 
 advocates, who are heaping on the scales nothing but 
 houses, fields, and tin — this, to the interested party, 
 may be as delightful as, to the intoxicated suckling and 
 nursling of the Muses and Philosophy, it is to carry the 
 evening and morning sacrifices he has offered up to his 
 goddess into the book-shop, and there to change his 
 devotions into money, and sell them by weight and 
 measure. 
 
 100. PATHOS OF THE WEDDING-HOTJE. 
 
 A bride is, it is true, during many days, for every one 
 whom she's not going to marry, a poor meagre piece of 
 shewbread. But I except one hour, namely, that on 
 the morning of the wedding-day, when the girl, whose 
 life has been all freedom hitherto, trembling in her wed- 
 ding-dress, overgrown (like an ivied tree) with flowers 
 and feathers, which, with others like them, fate is soon 
 to pluck away, and with anxious, pious eyes overflowing 
 on her mother's heart for the last and loveliest time — 
 this hour, I say, moves me, in which, standing all 
 adorned on the scaffold of joy, she celebrates so many 
 partings and one single meeting ; when the mother 
 turns away from her and goes back to her other children, 
 leaving her, all faint-hearted, to a stranger. " Thou 
 heart, beating high with happiness," I think then, 
 " not always wilt thou throb thus throughout the sultry 
 years of wedded life ; often wilt thou pour out thine 
 own blood, the better to pass along the path to age, as 
 the chamois- hunter keep his foot from sliding by the 
 blood from his own heel." 
 
84 JEAlfT PAUL KICHTEK. 
 
 101. HONEYMOON HAPPINESS. 
 
 One day when he took a particularly pretty cap which 
 she had tried on with much satisfaction to each of her 
 three cap-blocks, one after another (she would often 
 gently kiss these cap-blocks), and putting it on her own 
 little head before the looking-glass, said, "See how it 
 looks on your own head ; perhaps that's as good a block 
 as the others," she laughed with immense delight, and 
 said, " Now you are always flattering one !" 
 
 Believe me, this naive failure of hers to see his joke so 
 touched him that he made a secret vow never to make 
 another of the kind, except in private to himself. But 
 there was a greater honeymoon pleasure still. This was 
 that, when there came a fast day, Lenette would on no 
 account allow him to kiss her, when she came into the 
 room (ready for church), her white and red bloom of 
 youth shining out with threefold beauty from imder her 
 black lace head-dress and the dark leafage of her dress. 
 
 " Worldly thoughts of that kind," she said, " weren't 
 at all proper before service, when people had on their 
 fast- day things ; people must wait !" 
 
 " By Heaven !" said Siebenkaes to himself, " may 1 
 stick a soup spoon five inches long and three broad 
 through my lower lip, like a North American squaw, and 
 go about with it there, if ever I begin spooning and kiss- 
 ing the pious soul again, when she has a black dress on 
 and the bells are ringing." And though he wasn't 
 much of a churchgoer himself, he kept his word. See 
 how we men behave in matrimonial life, young ladies ! 
 
 102. THE GEEEN-MAEEET OP DATJGHTEES. 
 
 The following is certain : Every owner of a very beau- 
 tiful or very rich daughter keeps, as it were, a Pitt Dia- 
 mond under his roof, which to himself is of no service, 
 
MAEKIAGE. 85 
 
 and which he must put to its first use, after it has long 
 lain idle, by selling it to a Regent. (Duke Kegent of 
 France, to whom the Pitt Diamond was sold.) Strictly 
 and commercially speaking, daughters are not an article 
 of trade. " Je ne vends que mes paysages, et donne les 
 figures par dessus le marche' ' (I sell only my landscapes, 
 and throw in the figures), said Claude Lorraine, like a 
 father ; and could easily say it, because he had the fig- 
 ures painted into his landscapes by others. Even so in 
 the purchase or marriage contract— only the knightly 
 seats are supposed, and the bride who resides upon them 
 is thrown into the bargain. ... It is a common objec- 
 tion of (so-called) sensitive hearts, that this sort of trans- 
 action very much constrains, or in fact crushes love ; 
 whereas nothing perhaps makes so good a preparation 
 for it as this very thing. For when the bargain is once 
 concluded and entered by the bookkeeper (the parson) 
 in his ledger, then does the time truly come on when the 
 daughter can consider and provide for her heart — ^namely, 
 the fair season after marriage, which is universally as- 
 sumed in France and Italy, and is gradually coming to 
 be in Germany also, as the more suitable time for a 
 female heart to choose freely among the hosts of 
 men. . . . The foregoing I wrote for parents who are 
 fond of sporting with children's happiness : I will now 
 out of their and my sport make something serious. I 
 ask you in the first place about your right to prescribe 
 for morally free beings their inclinations, or even the 
 show of inclinations, and by one act of despotism to 
 stretch the poisonous leaden sceptre over a whole free 
 life. Your ten- years or more of apprenticeship to life 
 makes as little difference in the reciprocal liberty as 
 talent or its want. Why do you not as well enjoin upon 
 your daughter&y?■^<^«•<Zs/i^p for life ? Why do you not in 
 
86 JEAN PAUL EICHTER. 
 
 the second marriage exercise tlie same right ? But yon 
 have even no right to reject, except in the age of minor- 
 ity, when the child has not yet any right to choose. Or 
 do you demand, upon their leaving the paternal roof, aa 
 pay for training them up to freedom, the sacrifice of this 
 very freedom itself ? You act as if you had been edu- 
 cators without having been yourselves educated : where- 
 as you are merely paying ofl! to your children a heavy 
 inherited debt to your parents, which you can never pay 
 back to tlieTTi y and 1 know of but one unpaid creditor in 
 this respect, the first man, and of but one insolvent 
 debtor, the last. . . . If- you may, out of love, force 
 children to their happiness, so may they afterward quite 
 as well, out of gratitude, force you to yours. But what 
 is then the happiness for which you are to throw away 
 their whole heart with all its dreams ? Chiefly your 
 own : ■ your glory and aggrandizement, your feuds and 
 friendships, are they to quench and buy with the offering 
 of their iujuost souls. Dare you own aloud your silent 
 presuppositions in regard to the happiness of a forced 
 marriage — for example, the dispensableness of love in 
 wedlock, the hope of a death, the perhaps double infidel- 
 ity, as well toward the connubial merchant as toward the 
 extra-connubial lover ? You must presupposa them sin- 
 ners, in order not to be yourselves robbers. Tell me 
 not that marriages of inclination often turn out ill, and 
 forced marriages often do well enough, as may be seen 
 in the instance of the Moravians, the old G-ermans, and 
 Orientals. ISfame we rather all barbaric times and na- 
 tions in which — for both indeed only reckon the man, 
 never the wife — a happy marriage means nothing more 
 than a happy husband. No one stands by near enough 
 to hear and count a woman's sighs ; the unheard pang be- 
 comes at last speechless : new wounds weaken the bleed- 
 
MARRIAGE. 87 
 
 ing of tlie oldest. Further, the ill-luck of fancy marriages 
 is chargeable upon your very opposition to them, and 
 your war against the married couple. Still further, 
 every forced marriage is, in fact, for the most part, half 
 a marriage of fancy. Finally, the best marriages are in 
 the middling classes, where the bond is more apt to be 
 love : and the worst in the higher, where it is more a 
 mercenary motive ; and as often in these classes a prince 
 should choose merely with his heart, he would get a 
 heart, and never lose nor betray it. 
 
 Now, then, what sort of a hand is that into which 
 you so often force the fairest, finest, richest, but rebel- 
 lious one ? Commonly, a black, old, withered, greedy 
 iist. For decrepit, rich, or aspiring libertines have too 
 much of the connoisseiir, too much society and freedom, 
 to steal any other than the most splendid creatures. The 
 less perfect fall into the hands and homes of mere lovers 
 and amateurs. But how base is a man who, abandoned 
 of his own character, backed merely by the despotic 
 edict of a stranger, paying for his fortune with a stolen 
 one, can now drag away the unprotected soul from the- 
 yearning eyes of a weeping love into a long, cold life, 
 and clasp her to his arms as against the edges of frosty 
 swords, and therein so near to his eye see her bleed and 
 grow pale and quiver. The man of honor even gives 
 with a blush, but he takes not with a blush ; and the 
 better lion, the beast, spares woman. (Yid. Pliny, ISTat. 
 Hist. viii. 16.) 
 
 Mother of the poor heart which thou wilt bless by mis- 
 fortune, hear me ! Suppose thy daughter should harden 
 herself against the misery which is forced upon her, 
 hast thou not reduced her rich dream of hfe to empty 
 sleep, and taken out of it love's island of the blessed, and 
 all that bloomed thereon : the fair days when one roamed 
 
88 JEAK PAUL EICHTER. 
 
 over them, and the perpetual happy retrospect of them 
 when they already lie witli their blooming peaks low 
 in the horizon ? Mother, if this happy time was ever in 
 thy breast, then snatch it not from thy daughter ; and if 
 it was barbarously torn from thee, then think of thy 
 bitter pang, and bequeath it not ! Suppose, further, she 
 makes the kidnapper of her soul happy, reckon now 
 what she might have been to its darling, and whether 
 she does not then deserve any thing better than to 
 gratify a jailer, locked in with her forever by one shut- 
 ting of the prison-door. But it seldom fares so well as 
 this : thou wilt heap a double disaster on thy soul — the 
 long agony of thy daughter and the growing coldness of 
 her husband, who by and by comes to feel and resent re- 
 fusals. Thou hast cast a shadow over the time when 
 man first needs the morning sun — namely, youth. Oh, 
 sooner make all other seasons of the day of life cloudy : 
 they are all alike, the third and fourth and the fifth dec- 
 ades : only at sunrise let it not rain into life ; only this 
 one never- returning, irredeemable time darken not ! 
 
 But how if thou shouldst be sacrificing not merely 
 joys, relations, a happy marriage, hopes, a whole poster- 
 ity, to thy plans and commands, but the very being her- 
 self whom thou constrainest ? (Dr. Edward HiU reck- 
 oned that in England eight thousand die annually of un- 
 happy love — of broken hearts, as the English women 
 touchingly express it.) Who can justify thee, or dry 
 thy tears, when thy best daughter — for she is the very 
 one who will be most likely to obey, be dumb and die, 
 as the monks of La Trappe see their cloisters burn down 
 without one .of them breaking the vow of silence — when 
 she, I say, like a fruit half in the sun and half in the 
 shade, blooms outwardly, and inwardly grows cold and 
 pale ; when she, dying after her lifeless heart, at last 
 
MAKSIAGE. »9 
 
 can no longer conceai anything from thee, but for years 
 bears round the paleness and the p^gs of decline in the 
 very orient of life ; and when thou canst not console 
 her, because thou hast crushed her, and thy conscience 
 cannot suppress the name of infanticide : and when at 
 last the worn-out victim lies there under thy tears, and 
 the wrestling creature, so affrighted and so young, so 
 faint and yet thirsting for life, forgiving and complain- 
 ing, with languishing and longing looks, with painfully 
 confused and conflicting emotions, sinks with her 
 blooming limbs into the bottomless flood of death — 
 oh, guilty mother on the shore, thou who hast pushed 
 her in, who will comfort thee ? But I would call every 
 guiltless one, and show her the bitter dying, and ask her. 
 Shall thy child also perish thus ? 
 
VII. 
 
 HAPPINESS. 
 
 103. CITY AND COITNTEY LIFE. 
 
 Foe people like myself, country life is the lioney where- 
 in they take the pill of city life. Falterle, on the con- 
 trary, could not worry down the bitter country life with- 
 out the silvering over of city life. 
 
 104. TEANQUILLITT. 
 
 tranquillity, tranquillity, thou evening of the soul, 
 thou still Hesper of the weary heart, which alv?ays 
 abides beside the sun of virtue, if at thy very name our 
 inner being is dissolved into tears — ah, is not that a sign 
 that we seek thee, but have thee not ? 
 
 105. OLD AGE. 
 
 What makes old age so sad is, not that our joys, but 
 that our hopes then cease. 
 
 The old age of women is sadder and more solitary than 
 that of men ; spare, therefore, in them their years, their 
 sorrows, and their sex ! 
 
 106. MAXIMS. 
 
 1 can endure a melancholy man, but not a melancholy 
 child. 
 
 No joy in nature is so sublimely affecting as the joy of 
 a mother at the good fortune of a child. 
 
 We must work and look, not upon the future, but. 
 upon the next coming present. 
 
±lAi-i-li( ii&a. — 91 
 
 The sciences arc, more than virtue, their own reward ; 
 a scholar has no ennui. 
 
 Only actions give life strength, only moderation gives 
 it a charm. 
 
 Hope is like a bad clock, forever striking the hour of 
 happiness, whether it has come or not. 
 
 107. TEAES OF JOT. 
 
 Ah, my Victor ! nations and men are only the hest 
 when they are the gladdest, and deserve heaven when 
 they enjoy it. The tear of grief is but a diamond of the 
 second water, but the tear of joy of the first. And 
 therefore fatherly fate, thou spreadest the flowers of joy, 
 as nurses do lilies in the nursery of life, that the awaken- 
 ing children may sleep the sounder ! O, let philosophy, 
 which grudges our pleasures, and blots them out from 
 the plans of Providence, say by what right did torturing 
 pam enter into our frail life ? Have we not already an 
 eternal right to a warm down bed ? 
 
 108. UNSATISFIED IDEALS. 
 
 Yes, O God, Thou wilt and canst give us one day a 
 reality, which shall embody and redouble and satisfy our 
 present ideals, as thou hast, indeed, already proved to 
 us, in our love here below, which intoxicates us with 
 moments in which the inner becomes the outer, and the 
 Ideal, Eeality ; but then — no, for the Then of the life 
 hereafter, this little Now, has no voice ; but if, I say, 
 here below fiction could become fact, and our pastoral 
 poetry pastoral life, and every dream a day — ah, even 
 then would desire still remain enhanced only, not fulfilled : 
 the higher reality would only beget a higher poetry, 
 and higher remembrances and hopes ; in Arcadia we 
 should pine after Utopia, and on every sun we should see 
 
93 . jftA.N PAUL KIGHTEE. 
 
 an unfathomable starry heaven retiring before us, and 
 we should — sigh as we do here ! 
 
 109. MA.N MADE FOE HAPPINESS. 
 
 If we throw away life as too small for our wishes, still 
 do they not belong to life itself, and did they not come 
 from it ? If the crowned earth rears around us such 
 blossoming shores, such sunny mountains, would she fain 
 enclose therewith unhappy beings ? Why is our heart 
 narrower than our eye ? why does a cloud hardly a mile 
 long oppress ns, when that very cloud stands itself under 
 the stars of immensity ? Is not every morning and every 
 hope a beginning of spring ? What are the thickest 
 prison- walls of life but vine-trellises built up for the 
 ripening of the wine-glow ? And as life always cuts 
 itself up into quarters, why must it be merely the last, 
 and not quite as often the first, upon which a full-beam- 
 ing moon follows ? God, never let us ascribe thy eter- 
 nity to any one time, except the most blissful ; joy is 
 eternal, but not pain, for this last Thou hast not created. 
 
 110. ENJOYING THE PASSING MOMENTS. 
 
 Our greatest and most lasting error is that we look 
 for life — that is, its happiness — as the materialist looks for 
 the soul, in the combination of parts, as if the whole or 
 the relation of its component parts could give us any- 
 thing which each individual part had not already. Does 
 then the heaven of our existence, like the blue one over our 
 heads, consist of mere empty air, which, when near to 
 and in little, is only a transparent nothing, and which 
 only in the distance and in gross becomes blue ether ? 
 The century casts the flower-seeds of thy joy only from 
 the porous sowing-machine of minutes, or rather, to the 
 blest eternity itself there is no other handle than the 
 
.tiiLjmjNJiJC)!:::^ 
 
 93 
 
 instant. It is not that life consists of seventy years, but 
 the seventy years consist of a continuous life, and one has 
 lived, at all events, and Hved enough, die when one 
 may. 
 
 111. CONSOLATIONS OF PHILOSOPHY. 
 
 It is true, nature is so constantly drawing tears from 
 our eyes and forcing sighs from our breasts, that a wise 
 man can scarcely ever wholly lay aside his 'body''s garb of 
 mourning ; but let his soul wear none ! For if it is a 
 simple duty or merit to endure minor sorrows with 
 proper cheerfulness, it is likewise a merit, only a greater 
 one, to bear the greatest sorrows bravely, just as the 
 same reason which enjoins the forgiveness of small in- 
 juries is equally valid for the forgiveness of the greatest. 
 
 What we have principally to contend against and 
 treat with due contempt, in sorrow as in anger, is its 
 paralyzing poisonous sweetness, which we are so loath to 
 exchange for the exertion of consoling ourselves and of 
 exercising our reasoning faculties. 
 
 We must not expect Philosophy to produce, with one 
 stroke of the pen, the converse effect to that which 
 Eubens produced, when he converted a smiling child 
 into a weeping one with one stroke of his brush. It is 
 sufficient if she converts the soul's deep mourning garb 
 into half -mourning ; it is enough when I can say to my- 
 self, ' ' I am content to bear that share of my sorrow of 
 which my philosophy has not reheved me." 
 
 112. THE CAMPAN VALE. 
 
 In my distilling processes I frequently precipitated 
 the phlegma of our earthly ball— its polar deserts, its 
 Eussian forests, its icebergs — and from the sediments 
 extracted a beautiful by-earth, a small satellite. If we 
 extract and regulate the charms of this old world, we can 
 
94 JEAH PAUL EICHTEE. 
 
 form a delightful though minutely condensed world. 
 For the caves of this miniature ditto-earth we will take 
 the caves of Antiparos and of Baumann ; for its plains 
 the Rhine provinces ; Hybla, Thabor, and Mont Blanc 
 shall be its mountains ; its islands the Friendly and the 
 Palm Isles. Wentworth's park and Daphne's grotto and 
 some corner-pieces from the Paphian we have for its for- 
 ests ; for a charming valley the Seifer's-dorfer and that 
 of the Campan. Thus we possess, besides this dirty, 
 weary world, the most beautiful by- or after- world. . . . 
 I must take it for granted that in July, 1796, the God- 
 dess of Fortune descended from her throne to our earth, 
 and placed in my hand — not mammon, nor garters, nor 
 golden sheep — nothing but her own, and led me— by 
 this I recognized the Goddess — -to the Campan Yale. 
 Traly, man needs but look into it, and he will have, as 
 1 had, more than the Devil offered to Christ, and 
 Louis XIV., and game to the popes. 
 
 113. EULES FOE THE ENJOYMENT OF LIFE. 
 
 Little joys refresh us constantly like house-bread, and 
 never bring disgust ; and great ones, hke sugar-bread, 
 briefly, and then bring it. Trifles we should let not 
 plague us only, but also gratify us ; we should seize not 
 their poison-bags only, but their honey-bags also ; and 
 if flies often buzz about our room, we should, like Domi- 
 tian, amuse ourselves with flies, or, like a certain still 
 living Elector, feed them. For cimoWiQ and its microl- 
 ogics, for which the Parson has a natural taste, we must 
 acquire an artificial one ; must learn to love without es- 
 teeming it ; learn, far as it ranks beneath hximan hfe, to 
 enjoy it like another twig of this human life, as poeti- 
 cally as we do the pictures of it in romances. The loft- 
 iest mortal loves and seeks the same sort of things with 
 
HAPPINESS. 95 
 
 the meanest, only from higher grounds and by higher 
 paths. Be every minute, Man, a full life to thee ! De- 
 spise anxiety and wishing, the Future and the Past ! 
 If the Second-pointer can be no road-pointer into an 
 Eden for thy soul, the Month-pointer will still less be 
 so, for thou livest not from month to month, but from 
 second to second ! Enjoy thy Existence more than thy 
 Manner of Existence, and let the dearest object of thy 
 Consciousness be this Consciousness itself ! Make not 
 the Present a Means of thy Future ; for this Future is 
 nothing but a coming Present ; and the Present, which 
 thou despisest, was once a Future which thou desiredst ! 
 Stake in no lotteries ; keep at home ; give and accept 
 no pompous entertainments ; travel not abroad every 
 year ! Conceal not from thyself, by long plans, thy 
 hoiisehold goods, thy chamber, thy acquaintance ! De- 
 spise Life, that thou mayst enjoy it ! Inspect the neigh- 
 borhood of thy life : every shelf, every nook of thy 
 abode ; and nestling in, quarter thyself in the farthest 
 and most domestic winding of thy snail-house ! Look 
 upon a capital but as a collection of villages, a village as 
 some blind alley of a capital ; fame as the talk of neigh- 
 bors at the street-door ; a library as a learned conversa- 
 tion, joy as a second, sorrow as a minute, life as a day ; 
 and three things as all in all — God, Creation, Yirtue ! 
 
 114. FATE AND THE CHEATED HEAET. 
 
 O Fate, why dost thou strike in man the spark of a love 
 which must be smothered in his own heart's blood ? 
 Have we not all, abiding within us, the sweet image of 
 a beloved, of a friend, before whom we weep, after 
 whom we seek, for whom we hope — ^ah, and so vainly, 
 so vainly ? Does not a man stand before a human 
 bosom as the turtle-dove before a mirror, and, hke her. 
 
96 JEAK PAUL EICHTER. 
 
 COO himself hoarse before a dead, flat image therein, 
 which he takes foi* the sister of his complaining soul ? 
 Why is it, then, that every fair spring-evening, every 
 melting lay, every overflowing rapture, asks us, " Where 
 dost thou find the beloved soul to which thou wilt tell 
 and impart thy bliss ?" Why does music give the tem- 
 pest-stricken heart, instead of peace, only greater 
 waves — as the tolling of bells, instead of dispelling, 
 draws down the thunder-storms ? And why is it that, 
 out of doors, on a fair, still, bright day, when thou 
 loolcest over the whole unrolled picture of a landscape, 
 over the seas of flowers that tremble upon it, over the 
 shadows flung down by the clouds which fly from one 
 hill to another, and over the mountains which stretch 
 like shores and walls round our flowery circle — why does 
 then a voice within thee cry incessantly, " Ah ! behind 
 the smoking mountains, beyond the clouds that repose 
 upon them, there rests a fairer land, there dwells the 
 soul thou seekest, there heaven lies nearer to the earth"? 
 But behind the, mountain and behind the cloud there 
 sighs also an unappreciated heart, that looks over toward 
 this thy horizon, and thinks, " Ah, in that far region 1 
 should doubtless be happier !" Are we' not, then, all 
 happy ? Do not assert it, nor say to me, Emanuel, that, 
 in the winter of this life, the few warm sunbeams that 
 interrupt it burst and destroy the better man like a vege- 
 table ; say not that every year steals away something 
 from our heart, and that, like ice, it grows less and less 
 the farther it drifts down the stream of Time ; only say 
 not that the wandering Psyche, though she hears her 
 second self in her prison, yet can never get into its arms. 
 But thou hast already somewhere said : " All loving 
 souls on earth dwell apart from each other in two bodies, 
 as on two hills ; a waste lies between them, as between 
 
HAPPINESS. 97 
 
 solar systems ; they see each other, speak across by dis- 
 tant signs ; at last they hear each other's voices from hill 
 to hill ; but they never touch each other, and each em- 
 braces only its thought." 
 
 115. THE TEAENING OF A WARM HEAET FOE FEIENDSHIP. 
 
 Stranger ! At this hour, when, m the dead sea and 
 through our tears, the triumphal columns and thrones of 
 men and their bridge-posts appear to us hrohen, a true 
 heart puts a question to thee frankly, and let thine an- 
 swer it willingly and in truth ! 
 
 Has the longest prayer of man been answered to thee, 
 stranger, and hast thou thy friend ? Do thy wishes and 
 nerves and days grow together with his, like the four 
 cedars on Lebanon, which can bear notliing around them 
 but eagles ? Plast thou two hearts and four arms, and 
 livest thou twice over, as if immortal, in the battling 
 world ? Or standest thou solitary and alone upon a 
 frosty, dumb, slender, glacier-point, having no human 
 being to whom thou canst show the Alps of creation, and 
 with the heavens arching far above thee and abysses 
 yawning below ? "When thy birthday comes, hast thou 
 no being to shake thy hand and look thee in the eye and 
 say. We still cleave together faster than ever ? 
 
 Stranger, if thou hast had no friend, hast thou de- 
 served one ? When'spring kindled into life, and opened 
 all her honey-cups, and her serene heaven, and all the 
 hundred gates of her Paradise, hast thou, like me, bit- 
 terly looked up and begged of God a heart for thine ? 
 O wlien, at evening, the sun went down like a moun- 
 tain, and his flames departed from the earth, and now 
 only his red breath floated upward to the silvery stars, 
 hast thou beheld the brotherly shadows of friendship 
 which sank together on battle-fields, like stars of one 
 
98 JEAN PAUL IJICHTER. 
 
 constellation, stealing forth tlirongh the bloody cloutis 
 of the old world, like giants ; and didst thou think of 
 this — how imperishably they loved each other, and thou, 
 like me, wast alone ? And, solitary one, when night — 
 that season at which the spirit of man, as in torrid 
 climes, toils and travels — reveals her cold suns above 
 thee in a sparkling chain, and when, still, among all the 
 distant forms of the ether there is no dear loved one, 
 and immensity painfully draws thee up, and thou feel- 
 est, upon the cold earth, that thy heart bea.ts against no 
 breast but only thine own — O beloved ! weepest thou 
 then, and most bitterly ? Often have I reckoned up, on 
 my birthday, the increasing years — the feathers in the 
 broad wing of time — and thought upon the sounding 
 flight of youth ; then 1 stretched my hand far out after 
 a friend, who should stick by me in the Charon's skiff 
 wherein we are bom, when the seasons of life's year 
 glide by along the shore before me, with their flowers 
 and leaves and fruits, and when, on the long stream, the 
 human race shoots downward in its thousand cradles and 
 coffins. 
 
 Ah ! it is not the gay, variegated shore that flies by, 
 but man and his stream ; forever bloom the seasons in 
 the gardens up and down along the shore ; only we 
 sweep by once for all before the garden, and never re- 
 turn. 
 
 But our friend goes too. 0, if thou at this hour of 
 death's juggleries art contemplating the pale Prince, 
 with the images of youth on his breast, and thinking of 
 the gray friend who secretly bewails him in Tartarus, 
 then will thy heart dissolve, and in soft, warm flames 
 run round through thy bosom, and softly say, " I will 
 love, and then die, and then love — O Almighty, show 
 me the soul which longs and languishes like mine !" 
 
HAPPINESS. 99 
 
 If thou sayest that, if thoa art thus, then come to my 
 heart : 1 am as thou. Grasp my hand, and hold it till 
 it withers. 
 
 116. TUEEE WATS FOE BECOMING HAPPIEE. 
 
 With this Biography, dear Friends, it is the purpose 
 of the author not so much to procure you a pleasure as 
 to teach you how to enjoy one. In truth, King Xerxes 
 should have offered his prize-medals, not for the inven- 
 tion of new pleasures, but for a good methodology and 
 directory to use the old ones. 
 
 Of ways for becoming happier (not happy) 1 could 
 never inquire out more than three. The lirst, rather an 
 elevated road, is this : to soar away so far above the 
 clouds of life that you see the whole external world, 
 with its wolf-dens, charnel-houses, and thunder-rods, 
 lying far down beneath you, shrunk into a little child's 
 garden. The second is : simply to sink down into this 
 little garden, and there to nestle yourself so snugly, so 
 homewise, in some furrow, that, in looking out from 
 your warm lark-nest, you likewise can discern no wolf- 
 dens, charnel-houses, or thunder-i-ods, but only blades 
 and cars, every one of which, for the nest-bird, is a tree, 
 and a sun screen, and a rain-screen. The third, finally, 
 which 1 look upon as the hardest and cunningest, is that 
 of alternating between the other two. 
 
 This I shall now satisfactorily expound to men at 
 large. The Hero, the Beformer, your Brutus, your 
 Howard, your Republican, he whom civic storm, or 
 genius, poetic storm, impels — in short, every mortal with 
 a great Purpose, or even a perennial Passion (were it bat 
 that of writing the largest folios) — all these men fence 
 themselves in by their internal world against the frosts 
 and heats of the external, as the madman in a worse 
 
100 JEAUr PAUL KICHTEn. 
 
 sense does ; every fixed idea, sucli as rules every genius, 
 every enthusiast, at least periodically, separates and ele- 
 vates a man above the bed and board of this Earth, 
 above its Dog's-grottoes, buckthorns, and Devil's- walls ; 
 ]ike the Bird of Paradise, he slumbers flying ; and, on 
 his outspread pinions, oversleeps unconsciously the 
 eartliquakes and conflagrations of Life, in his long, fair 
 dream of his ideal Motherland. Alas! To few is this 
 dream granted ; and these few are so often awakened by 
 Flying Dogs !* 
 
 This sliyward track, however, is fit only for the 
 winged portion of the human species — for the smallest. 
 What can it profit poor quill-driving brethren, whose 
 souls have not even wing shells, to say nothing of wings ? 
 Or these tethered persons with the best back, breast, and 
 neck fins, who float motionless in the wicker Fish-box 
 of the State, and are not allowed to swim, because the 
 Box or State, long ago tied to the shore, itself swims in 
 the name of the Fishes ? To the whole standing and 
 wi-iting host of heavy-laden State-domestics, purveyors, 
 clerks of all departments, and all the lobsters packed 
 together heels over head into the Lobster-basket of the 
 Government office-rooms, and for refreshments, sprin- 
 kled over with a few nettles — to these persons, what way 
 of becoming happy here can I possibly point out ? My 
 second merely ; and that is as follows : to take, a com- 
 pound microscope, and with 'it to discover and convince 
 themselves that their drop of Burgundy is properly a 
 Eed Sea, that butterfly-dust is peacock feathers, mouldi- 
 ness a flowery fleld, and sand a heap of jewels. These 
 microscopic recreations are more lasting than all costly 
 watering-place recreations. But I must explain these 
 
 * Vnmpiros. 
 
HAPPISTEBS. 101 
 
 metaphors by new ones. The purpose for which I have 
 sent Fixleiri's Life into the Messre. Lilbeck's Ware- 
 house, is simply that in this same Life — therefore in thif 
 Preface it is less needful— I may show to the whole Eartl 
 that we ought to value little joys more than groat ones, 
 the night-gown more than the dress-coat ; that Plutus's 
 Jieaps are worth less than his handfuls, the plum thai 
 the penny for a rainy day ; and that not great but little 
 good-haps can make us happy. Can I accomplish this, 
 I shall, through means of my Book, bring up for Poster- 
 ity a race of men finding refreshment in all things : ir 
 the warmth of their rooms and of their night-caps ; ir 
 their pillows ; in the three II igh Festivals ; in mere Apos- 
 tles' days ; in the Evening Moral Tales of their wives, 
 when these gentle persons have been forth as ambassa- 
 dresses visiting some Dowager Residence, whither the hus- 
 band could not be persuaded. . . . You perceive mj 
 drift is, that man must become a little Tailor-bird, which, 
 not amid the crashing boughs of the storm-tost, roaring, 
 immeasurable tree of Life, but on one of its leaves, sews 
 itself a, nest together, and there lies snug. The most es- 
 sential sermon one could preach to our century were £ 
 sermon on the duty of staying at home. 
 
 The third skyward road is the alternation between the 
 other two. The foregoing second way is not gooc 
 enough for man, who here on Earth should take into hif 
 hand not the Sickle only, but also the Plough. The^si 
 is too good for him. He has not always the force, like 
 Rugendas, in the midst of the battle to compose Battle- 
 pieces ; and, like Backhuisen in the Shipwreck, to clutcl: 
 at no board but the drawing-board to paint it on. And 
 then his pains are not less lasting than his fatigues. 
 Still oftener is Strength denied its Arena ; it is but the 
 smallest poi'tion of life that, to a working soul, offers 
 
103 JEAN PAUL EICHTEK. 
 
 Alps, Eevolutions, Ehine-falls, Worms Diets, and wars 
 with Xerxes ; and for the whole it is better so ; the 
 longer portion of life is a iield beaten flat as a threshing- 
 floor, without lofty Gothard Mountains ; often it is a 
 tedious ice-field, without a single glacier tinged with 
 dawn. But even by walking a man rests and recovers 
 himself for climbing ; by little joys and duties, for great. 
 The victorious dictator must contrive to plough down his 
 battle Mare-fleld into a flax and carrot field ; to transform 
 his theatre of war into a parlor theatre, on which his 
 children may enact some good pieces from the Children's 
 Friend. Can he accomplish this, can he turn so softly 
 from the path of poetical happiness into that of house- 
 hold happiness, then is he little difEerent from myself, 
 who even now, though modesty might forbid me to dis- 
 close it — who even now, 1 say, amid the creation of 
 this Letter, have been enabled to refiect that, when it is 
 done, so also will the Eoses and Elderberries of pastry 
 be done, which a sure hand is seething in butter for the 
 Author of this Work. 
 
VIII. 
 SORROW. 
 
 117. SYMPATHY IN DANQEE. 
 
 All touched each other in friendliness, as strange 
 hands feel after and grasp each other during the ascent 
 of mountains. 
 
 118. EEMEMBEANCE. 
 
 Oh, when man has nothing more to love, he embraces 
 the gravestone of his love, and sorrow becomes his loved 
 one ! 
 
 119. DEATH OF FEELnSTG. 
 
 Oh, it is the gloomy day of mourning, the burial-day 
 of friendship, when the outcast, orphan heart goes home 
 alone, and it sees the death-owl fly screaming from the 
 death-bed of old feeling over the whole creation. 
 
 120. CONCEALED SOEEOW. 
 
 So does the heart which has been born not far from 
 the throne never bleed, except behind the curtain, and 
 never laugh but when it rises ; just as these same dis- 
 tinguished ones were formerly executed only in secret. 
 
 121. NOBLE FEELING. 
 
 When man here, under the j)oor clouds of life, 
 throws away his fortune, because he prizes it less than 
 his heart, then is he as blessed and as great as you. 
 And we are all worthy of a holier earth, because the 
 sight of the sacrifice exalts and dost not oppress us. 
 
104 JEAlSr PAUL KICnXER. 
 
 and because we shed burning tears, not from pity, but 
 from deeiDGst, holiest love and joy. 
 
 122. CONCEALED FEELING OF WOMEN. 
 
 We never make more erroneous conclusions in our 
 opinions on any subject than on woman's cheerfulness. 
 Oh, how many of these charming beings there are, who 
 decay unvalued ; who, Avhile jesting, despair, and while 
 joking, bleed to death ; who hide their merry laughing 
 eyes behind a wall, as behind a fan, to give glad vent to 
 their long-restrained tears ; who pay for a merry day by 
 a tearful night, just as an unusually clear, transparent, 
 and fogless air betokens rain. 
 
 123. MELANCHOLY OF NOBLE MINDS. 
 
 If one could give away his life as a gift, I should be 
 very happy to give mine to any dying person who would 
 care to accept it. At the same time, let nobody suppose 
 that because there chances to be a total eclipse of the 
 sun above my head, 1 think, for a moment, that there 
 must be one in America as well ; or that I imagine the 
 Gold Coast must be snowed up for the winter because a 
 snowflake or two happen to be falling in front of my 
 own nose. Life is warm and beautiful ; even mine was 
 so once. . . . 
 
 The satirist is sadder than the jester, for the same 
 reason that the orang-outang is more melancholy than the 
 ape, namely, because he is nobler. 
 
 124. THE DOMESTIC HAPPINESS OF TUB POOK. 
 
 It is a soft line of beauty on his inner man, that he did 
 not grudge, but felicitated, the poor people's possession 
 of what he was deprived of himself. " Ah, you are 
 happy," said he. " Oh, love each other truly, press your 
 throbbing, transitory hearts ardently to each other, ere 
 
SORROW. 105 
 
 the wing of Time shatters them, and glow on each 
 other's bosoms during the short minute of life, and ex- 
 change your tears and kisses ere eyes and lips freeze in 
 the grave ! Ye are happier than I — I, who can give 
 my heart full of love to no oae but the worms of the 
 grave, and on whose coffin a joiner shall paint the in- 
 scription, which like myself shall be buried in the earth : 
 ' Yo good children of men, you love me not, and yet 1 
 loved you so well ! ' " 
 
 125. TEARS ONLY GIVEN TO HUMAN EYES. 
 
 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 phy- 
 sician and a philosopher. Sucli 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 ani- 
 mal 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. 
 
IX. 
 
 DISCIPLINE. 
 
 126. EEPINING. 
 
 We always paint, like Milton, our lost Paradise more 
 glowing than the regained one — like Dante, hell better 
 than piirgatory. 
 
 127. THE FLIGHT OF PAIN. 
 
 Not the struggle, but the flight of pain, beautifies the 
 person ; hence the countenance of the dead is transfig- 
 ured, because the agonies have cooled away. 
 
 128. WEAKNESS OF RESOLUTIONS. 
 
 Excellent men have resolved for many years to rise 
 earlier in a morning, without much coming of it — unless 
 they may perhaps break through the habit at the last 
 day. 
 
 129. DISCIPLINE OF POVEETY. 
 
 A man would be none who should shed a bigger tear 
 over wounds of poverty than a yoang lady drops at the 
 ])iercing of her ears, for in both cases the wounds become 
 points of suspension for jewels. 
 
 130. TEIALS. 
 
 Thou wouldst prove this soul of mine, happy Fort- 
 une, and thou placest it, as men do watches, in all posi- 
 tions — perpendicular and horizontal, (juiet and unquiet 
 — to see if it will go and mark the time correctly in all, 
 or no. Ay, truly ! it shall ! 
 
ISCU'LINB. 107 
 
 131. SELF-EELIANCE. 
 
 The moment things grow bad, flhig all possible hopi 
 to the Devil, and with utter renunciation fall back upon 
 thyself, and ask, How now, if even tlie worst should 
 come, what then ? Never reconcile thj' fancy to the 
 next misfortune, but to the greatest. 
 
 132. THE FIKST TEOUBLE. 
 
 We are all like the Adam of the epic, and take oui 
 first night to be the day of judgment, and the setting oi 
 the sun for the end of the world. We sorrow for oui 
 friends, just as if there were no brighter future yonder. 
 and we sorrow for ourselves, as if there were no brightci 
 future here. For all oiir passions are born atheists and 
 unbelievers. 
 
 133. PUEIFIED BY PATEENAL STEENNESS. 
 
 The hard strata of such connections as those througl 
 which Liana's life-rill must needs filter and force its way. 
 make it purer and clearer, just as all hard strata are fil- 
 tering-stones of water ; and all her charms become, in- 
 deed, through her father's tyranny, torments, but alsc 
 all her torments become, through her own patience, 
 charms. . . . 
 
 134. POVEETY. 
 
 All that is base in man — thoughts, fancies, what we 
 look on as being examples — all join in one chorus iu 
 praise of gold ; why should we desire to deprive poverty 
 of her true reserve force, her chevaliers d'honneur, 
 philosophy, and beggars' pride ? 
 
 The poor hope incredibly more than the rich ; there- 
 fore it is that poor devils ai-e more apt to catch the infec- 
 tion of lotteries than the rich — just as they are to catch 
 the plague and other epidemics. 
 
108 JEAN PAL'L EICHTEE. 
 
 135. CHASTENING. 
 
 For the first day of convalescence of the body, after 
 its winter of sickness, is the blossoming time of a love- 
 lier soul, which issues forth as if transfigured from the 
 earth's cold cinast into a mild warm Eden, longing to 
 press all things to her breast (feeble yet, and short of 
 breath) — mankind, and flowers, and spring breezes, and 
 every other bosom which has sighed for Tier upon her 
 bed of pain. Like all the newly risen from death, she 
 longs to love all things throughout an eternity ; and the 
 whole heart is warm and dewy spring-time, rich in 
 buds, beneath a youthful sun. 
 
 136. TEOFITING BY SAD EXPERIENCE. 
 
 Oh, since all experiences are so dear — since they cost 
 us either our days, or our energies, or our illusions — oh 
 why must man every morning, in the presence of Na- 
 ture, who profits by every dewdrop that stands in a 
 flower-cup, blush with such a sense of impoverishment 
 over the thousand vainly dried tears which he has already 
 shed and caused ! From springs this almighty mother 
 draws summers ; from winters, springs ; from volcanoes, 
 woods and mountains ; from hell, a' heaven ; from this, a 
 greater — and we, foolish children, know not how from 
 a given past to prepare for ourselves a future which 
 shall satisfy us ! "We peck, like the Alpine daw, at 
 everything shiny, and carry the red-hot coals aside as if 
 tliey were gold-pieces, and set houses on fire with them. 
 Ah ! more than one great and glorious world goes down 
 in the heart, and leaves nothing behind ; and it is pre- 
 cisely the stream of the higher geniuses wliich flies to 
 spray and fertilizes nothing, even as high waterfalls break 
 and flutter in thin mist over the earth. 
 
DISCIPLINE. 109 
 
 137. BEAVEEY IN SOEEOW. 
 
 Tralj if, as 1 believe, there be such, a thing as true 
 patience undei' an eternal woe, then, verily, patience 
 under a transitory sorrow is hardly worth the name. 
 
 A great but unmerited national calamity should not 
 humble us, as the theologians would have it — it should 
 make us proud. "When the long, heavy sword of war 
 falls upon mankind, and thousands of blanched liearts 
 are torn and bleeding, or when in the blue, pure even- 
 ing sky the hot cloud of a burning city, smoking on its 
 funeral pyre, hangs dark and lurid, like a cloud of ashes, 
 the ashes of thousands of hearts and joys all burnt to cin- 
 ders and dust, then let thy spirit be lifted up in pride, 
 let it loathe, contemn, and despise tears, and that for 
 which they fall, and let it say : 
 
 " Thou art much too small a thing, thou every-day, 
 common life, that an immortal being should be inconsol- 
 able with regard to thee, thou torn and tattered chance- 
 bargain of an existence. Here upon this earth — the 
 ashes of centuries rolled into a sphere, worked into shape 
 and form from vapor by convulsion — the cry of one dream- 
 ing in a sorrowful dream — ^1 say, it is a disgrace that the 
 sigh should cease only when the breast which gives it 
 utterance is resolved into its elements, and that the tear 
 should cease to flow only when the eye is closed iu 
 death." 
 
 138. THE NEW-YEAe's NIGHT OF AN UNHAPPT MAN. 
 
 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 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 
 
110 JEAN TAUL MGHTER. 
 
 with the gi-cen of yontli ; and lie 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 morn- 
 ing 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, peacef^^l land, full of light and of harvests ; 
 the left, down into the moleways of vice toward a black 
 cavern, full of down-dropping poison, full of darting ser- 
 pents, 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 Ileaven ; '' Give me my youth once 
 more ! O father, place uie once more 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 Grod's Acre, and he said, " These are my sinful 
 days !' ' He saw a star fly out from heaven, to glim- 
 mer in its fall, and to be extinguished on the earth. 
 "That is 1," said his bleeding heart, and the serpent 
 teeth of remorse gnawed again into his wounds. 
 
 His burning fancy showed him creeping night-wanders 
 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 features. Sud- 
 denly, in the midst of this tumult, music for the New 
 Year floated 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, 
 
DISCIPLINE. Ill 
 
 were teachers for the world, fathers of happy children, 
 and favored men, and he said, " Oh, I also could be 
 happy, dear parents, had 1 fulfilled your New-Tear'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 dis- 
 cerns 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-Tear'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. 
 
X. 
 
 CIIAEACTEE. 
 
 139. EESOLtJTION. 
 
 Away from home we are bold and daring : we resolve, 
 and undertake ; at home we pause, and hesitate, and 
 delay. 
 
 140. POVEKTT AND FAXNT-HEAETRDNESS. 
 
 Her wings and her tongue, as well as her hands, were 
 tied and fettered by that faint-hearted incapacity of self- 
 assertion which is born of the sense of poverty. 
 
 141. DESOEIPnOK OF A LADT-KILLEB. 
 
 He had white hair on his head and on his chin, and 
 was soft all over ; and had stuff like milk instead, of 
 blood in his veins, hke the insects, just as poisonous 
 plants have generally white milky juice. 
 
 142. SHALLOW BEOOKS. 
 
 I myself -would rather incline to the opinion that the 
 talking of women is an indication of the cessation of 
 thought and mental activity — as in a good mill the warn- 
 ing bell only rings when there is no corn left in the 
 hopper. 
 
 143. EESl'ECT FOE WOMAN. 
 
 Courage toward women is not inborn, bnt acquired. 
 Firmian had had familiar experience of very few ; 
 wherefore this natural awe made him look upon every 
 feminine body^ — ^particularly if of any standing in society 
 
CHAKACTEB, 113 
 
 — as a kind of saored Ark of tlio Govonaut whereon no 
 linger might be laid. 
 
 144. GOEMANDIZEES. 
 
 He hated gormandizers as men of too gross selfishness, 
 as well as all living larders, where layers of fat crush in the 
 spirit, as masses of snow do a house. The soul, he said, 
 takes an odor from the contents of the body, just as 
 wine does from the fruit which is near it in the cellar. 
 
 145. FLUCTUATIONS OF FEELING. 
 
 She had heard of it (good news) an hour before, and 
 consequently the first feminine mourning over a joy had 
 had time to give place to the joy itself. For women are 
 like thermometers, which on a sudden application of heat 
 sink at firet a few degrees as a preliminary to rising a 
 good many. 
 
 146. ALBANO'S EESOLTJTION. 
 
 1 will in the sea of the world rise like a living man by 
 swimming, and not like a dro-n-ned man by corrujJtion. 
 Yes, father, let Fate cast a gravestone upon this breast, 
 and crush it, when it has lost virtue and the divinity of 
 its-own heart. 
 
 147. LOQUACITY. 
 
 A letter or a book distracts a woman who is in love 
 more than the knitting of a -whole pair of stockings. 
 Savages say that the monkeys refrain from talking that 
 they may not be made to work ; but many a woman 
 talks twice as much when she is working as when she is 
 not. 
 
 148. CONVENTIONALITIES. 
 
 The fine, delicate, womanly sense of the fit, the 
 proper, the becoming, seems to be torn and scratched by 
 the touch of, anything angular and unpolished ; these 
 
114 JEAN PAUL EIOHTBK. 
 
 souls, SO firmly welded on to tlie every-day, common- 
 place, conventional relations of things, cannot under- 
 stand souls which place themselves in antagonism to these 
 relations. 
 
 149. SINOEEITT. 
 
 Upright women must, I think, have some instinct of 
 their own concerning the lightnings of the eye, by means 
 of which they can distinguish between the lurid flashes of 
 hell and the pure coruscations of heaven. Tliis profli- 
 gate was as little aware of the flashes of his eyes as was 
 Moses of the brightness of his countenance. 
 
 150. CHASTISEMENT. 
 
 The cruel, piercing lightning flash of some great 
 minute, the reflection of which stretches gleaming athwart 
 the whole river of our life, is necessary to us to make us 
 blind to the ignesfatvi and glow-worms which meet us, 
 to guide us, every hour ; and frivolous, giddy man needs 
 some powerful shock to counteract his tendency to con- 
 tinual petty naggling. 
 
 151. MEDIOCRITY AND UNCOMMON WOETH. 
 
 Men, like bullets, go farthest when they are smooth- 
 est ; besides, there remained sticking on Zesara diamond- 
 points enough at which mediocrity stumbles and is 
 wounded, and even uncommon worth is an uncommon 
 fault — as high towers, for that very reason, appear lent 
 over. 
 
 152. HYPOCEIST. 
 
 Upon her downcast eyes he now riveted a long gaze of 
 fondness, not withdrawing it, however, when she raised 
 them up ; and, by dint of keeping his eyes very wide 
 open, and thinking with great vividness on pathetic 
 touching subjects, he managed to squeeze out about as 
 
CHARACTER. 113 
 
 much water as would have sufficed to make an end of a 
 humming-bird of the smaller sort. 
 
 153. AN IMPERIOUS SPIRIT. 
 
 A scornful, imperious spirit, who could not love 
 aught, not even his own heart, hardly a higher — one oi 
 those terrible beings who exalt themselves above men, 
 above misfortune, above the earth, and above conscience, 
 and to whom it is all the same whatever human blood 
 they shed, whether another's or their own. 
 
 It was Don Gaspard. 
 
 154. CITY AND COUNTY BRINGING-UP. 
 
 He had the faults of youth in its recluseness ; bul 
 men and winter radishes must be sowed far apart in 
 order that they may grow large : men and trees that 
 stand near together have, it is true, a more slender and 
 tapering trunk, but no power to brave the tempest, noi 
 such a rich crown and branching as those that stand free. 
 
 155. SELF-ICNOWLEDGE. 
 
 To learn to know what your firmly established princi- 
 ples of morality are, with more certainty than you car 
 from your resolves and actions, you have only to notice 
 tlie joy or the sorrow which a moral claim, a piece oJ 
 news, a disappointment, calls up in you with lightm'ng 
 speed, but which disappears again at once under the in 
 fluence of reflection and self-control. What great, rot- 
 ting pieces of the old Adam one finds about one still, 
 now and then ! 
 
 156. SELE-GOVEENMENT. 
 
 There dwelt in him a mighty will, which merely said t( 
 the serving-company of impulses. Let it be ! Such a wil 
 is not stoicism, which rules merely over internal male 
 factors or hnaves, orjyrisoners ofwa/r, or children, bu 
 
116 JEASr PAUL RICHTER. 
 
 it is that generally energetic spirit, wliich conditions and 
 binds the healthy savages of our bosoms, and which 
 says more royally to itself, than the Spanish regent to 
 others, 1, the king ! 
 
 157. HEEO-WOESHIP. 
 
 Every young man and every great man "who looks 
 upon another as great, considers him for that very reason 
 as too great. But in every noble heart burns a perpet- 
 ual thirst for a nobler, in the fair, for a fairer ; it wishes 
 to behold its ideal out of itself, in bodily presence, with 
 glorified or adopted form, in order the more easily to 
 attain to it, because the lofty man can ripen only by a 
 lofty one, as diamond can be polished only by diamond. 
 
 158. CHAEAOTEEI8TIC8 OF YOUTH. 
 
 Our hero had passed over from those childish years 
 in which Hercules strangled the serpents, into the years 
 of confirmation, when he warmed them under his waist- 
 coat to behead them again in later years. Exultingly 
 did his new and old Adam — they flew side by side — flap 
 their wings out there under a blue heaven which had 
 absolutely no anchoring ground. What cared he for 
 meal-time ? All children before and during a journey 
 carry no stomach under their wings, just as that of the 
 butterfly shrinks up when his wings are spread. 
 
 159. INTRINSIC WOETH. 
 
 Nothing awakens our humor more, nor renders us more 
 utterly indifferent to the honor paid to mere rank and 
 worldly position, than our being in any manner compel- 
 led to fall back upon the honor due to ourselves (inde- 
 pendently of our chance ijosition), our own intrinsic 
 worth ; our being compelled to tar over our inner being 
 with philosophy (as if it were a Diogenes' tub), by way 
 
(JMAJiAtJXiiii. 
 
 117 
 
 of protection against injuries from without ; or (in a 
 prettier metaphor) when, like pearl oysters, we have to 
 exude pearls of maxims to fill the holes which worms 
 Lore in our mother-of-pearl ; now pearls are better than 
 uninjured mother-of-pearl, an idea which I should like 
 to have written in letters of gold. 
 
 160. DREAMS OF TOUNO AMBITION. 
 
 The hidden plan of his life, written, however, by en- 
 caustic into his brain, was, as with all such young men, 
 this, to be and do nothing more than — everything ; that 
 is to say, to bless, to glorify, and to enlighten at once 
 himself and a country — to be a Frederick II. upon the 
 throne ; in other words, a storm-cloud, which should 
 contain thunders of excommunication for the sinner, 
 electrical light for the deaf, blind, and lame, showers for 
 the insects, and warm drops for thirsty flowers, hail for 
 enemies, and attraction for everything, for leaves and 
 dust, and a rainbow for the end. 
 
 161. CEOconrLE tears. 
 A man should never weep on his own account, except 
 for ecstasy. But poets and all people of much fancy are 
 magicians who — exact counterparts of the burnt enchant- 
 rosses — weep more easily, although more at images, 
 than at the rough, sore calamity itself, in order to put the 
 poor enchantresses to the worst water-ordeal. Trust 
 them not ! On the machinelle poison-tree the rain-drops 
 are poisonous which roll from its leaves. 
 
 162. EUIN8 OF A GEBAT SOUL. 
 
 Albano was moved by many an unexpected outbreak 
 of the sick man's heart, even to the warmest love. 1:1 
 the ruins of a temple inspire melancholy, thought he, 
 why shall not the ruins of a great soul affect me so still 
 
118 JEAN PAUL EIOHTER. 
 
 more ? There are men full of colossal relics, like the 
 earth itself. In their deep heart, ab-eady grown cold, 
 lie fossil flowers of a fairer period ; they resemble northern 
 rocks, on which are found the impress of Indian flowers. 
 
 163. NOT LETTING ONESELF BE BTJEIED. 
 
 The images of the present and of the near future 
 and of his father had so filled the breast of the Count 
 with greatness and immortality, that he could not com- 
 prehend how any one could let liimseK be buried with- 
 out having achieved both, and that as often as the land- 
 lord brought in anything, he pitied the man, particularly 
 as he was always singing, and, like the Neapolitans and 
 Russians, in the minor key, because he was never to be 
 
 anything, certainly not immortal Honor buried 
 
 in his bosom, he determined to pass through the coming 
 years as through a white colonnade of monumental pil- 
 lars. 
 
 164. CONSCIOUSNESS OF EGO. 
 
 All marked points of time — stanzas as it were, or 
 music phrases, of existence — new-years' days for exam- 
 ple, and birthdays, lift man high out of and up above 
 the waves which are round him ; he clears the water from 
 his eyes, and looks about him, and says, " How the cur- 
 rent has been carrying me along, drowning my hearing, 
 and blinding my sight ! Those are the waves, down 
 there, onward, which have been bearing me along, and 
 these, now coming toward me, when I dip down among 
 them, will whirl me away !" 
 
 Without this clear, distinct consciousness of one's ego, 
 there can be no freedom, and no calm equanimity amid 
 the crowding elbowing tumult of the world. 
 
CHAEACTEE. 119 
 
 A woman's soul is by nature a beautiful fresco painted 
 on rooms, table-leaves, dresses, silver salvers,- and house- 
 bold plenishing in general. A woman has a large stock 
 of virtue, but few virtues ; she needs a confined sphere 
 and social forms, and without these flower-sticks the 
 pure white flowers trail in the dust of the border. A 
 man may be a citizen of the world, and if he has nothing 
 else to put his arms round he can press the entire earthly 
 ball to his bosom, although he can't put his arms round 
 much more of it than will make him a grave. But a citi- 
 zeness of the world is a giantess, and goes througli the 
 world with nothing but spectators, and is nothing but a 
 character on the stage. 
 
 166. MAIDENS AND MOTHEES. 
 
 Young maidens are like young turkey-hens, that 
 thrive poorly if one touches them often ; and mothers 
 keep these soft creatures, made of floating pollen, like 
 pastel-piotures, under window-glass — ^because everything 
 is afraid of us princess-stealersand fruit-thieves — until 
 they are fixed. Meanwhile the proper crown-guard 
 around a female heart is neither solitude — which leads 
 only to an imtried innocence, that falls, to be sure, not 
 before the debauchee, but yet before the hypocrite — nor 
 society, nor hard labor— otherwise no country girl would 
 ever fall — nor good teachings — for these are to be had 
 in every mouth and in every circulating library ; but 
 these four first and last things do it all at once, and they 
 are at once superseded, united, and replaced by a wise 
 and virtuous mother. 
 
 167. SELE-HATEED. 
 
 We never hate ourselves. We despise and pity our- 
 selves, when we have done wrong. Although — I must 
 
120 JEAN PAUL EICHTEB. 
 
 add this — we liate all men, our own selves excepted, for 
 vices. Can this be right ? Self -hatred is not' possible, 
 for hatred is nothing but the wishing of evil to the ob- 
 ject of it^ — i.e. a desire to punish, not for hettering'' s 
 sake, but for punishing'' s. But the most repentant of 
 sinners never can wish himself made the subject of a 
 chastening of this kind ; and even if he could, such a 
 wish would be merely a disguised desire for bettering — 
 i.e. for greater happiness. But to a transgi-essor other 
 than ourselves we hardly can concede rajndity of con- 
 version, not, at all events, until he has gone through a 
 proper expiation. "What distinguishes our feeling con- 
 cerning other people's errors from our feeling concern- 
 ing our own is a sham self-love. The very minutest 
 particle of hatred desires the unhappiness of its object. 
 
 168. INSENSIBILITY. 
 
 Like all the great, to him strength of feeling, even of 
 a loving sort — but still more, of a sorrowful — was an 
 annoyance ; and a strong hand-clasp of friendship was 
 almost as bad as a crunch on the toes. He demanded of 
 pain that it should pass before him with a smile — of 
 wickedness and evil, that they should pass him by laugh- 
 ing, or, at all events, laughed at. He was of a very for- 
 giving nature, especially toward women, and often shed 
 more tears himself in an evening at the theatre than he had 
 caused many whom he had ruined to let fall. His heart 
 was really not made of stone, or lapis infernalis, and if 
 he prayed for a certain time, he grew pious during the 
 process and sought out the most time-honored of relig- 
 ious formularies to give in his adhesion to them then and 
 there. Thunder was to him a watchman's rattle, arous- 
 ing him from the sleep of sin. He loved to take the 
 needy by the hand, especially if the hand was pretty. 
 
CHAKACTEE. 121 
 
 All tilings considered, he may perhaps get to heaven 
 sooner or later ; for, like many debtors in the npper cir- 
 cles of society, he doesn't pay his play-debts, and he also 
 has in his heart an inborn duel-prohibition against shoot- 
 ing and hacking. As yet he is not a man of his word ; 
 and if he were poorer, he would steal without a moment's 
 hesitation. 
 
 169. AN ANALYSIS OF CHAEACTEE. 
 
 There are some vigorous natures which stand exactly 
 on the boundary -line of genius and talent, fitted out, 
 liaH for active, half for ideal efEort, and, withal, of burn- 
 ing ambition. They feel forcibly all that is beautiful 
 and great, and would fain create it again out of them- 
 selves ; but they succeed only very feebly in doing so. 
 They have not, like genius, one direction toward the 
 centre of gravity, but they stand themselves at the gravi- 
 tating point, so that the directions destroy each other. 
 They are now poets, now painters, now musicians ; most 
 of all do they love in youth bodily courage, because in 
 that strength most easily and expeditiously expresses it- 
 self through the arm. Hence in early life everything 
 great which they see enraptures them, because they think 
 to create it anew, but later in life quite annoys them, 
 because, after all, they have not the power. They 
 should, however, perceive that it is just they, if they 
 know early how to guide their ambition, who have 
 drawn the finest lot of various and harmonizing powers. 
 They seem to be rightly fitted for the enjoyment of all 
 that is beautiful, as well as for moral development and 
 for the care of their being, for whole men,- — something 
 like what a prince must be, because in that office one 
 must have for his all-sided destination all-sided directions 
 of efEort and kinds of knowledge. 
 
132 JEAN- PAUL EICHTEK. 
 
 170. THE COMPARATIVE VIRTUE OF THE SEXES. 
 
 Which is more guilty, the serpent on the tree, or Eve 
 under the tree ? And how small and transitory is often 
 the price for which we bargain away the whole happi- 
 ness of a woman's life ! It is like Xerxes, who carried a 
 war into Greece because he liked eating Attic figs. 
 
 Further, a woman's imagination, not worn out like a 
 man's by wine and excitement, must all the more easily 
 burst, on our account, into those flames which consume 
 happiness. 
 
 Hippel remarks, and with justice, that a man over- 
 taken in wrong-doing is ashamed and speechless, but that 
 a woman becomes bold and passionately indignant. And 
 this is the cause of it : the man clearly beholds himself ; 
 not so the woman ; therefore she the more readily 
 makes her innocence appear both to others and herself. 
 In short, our sins are more generally intentional ; hers 
 thoughtless, and therefore the more excusable. 
 
 And finally, there are everywhere more chaste dam- 
 sels than young men, more chaste women than men, 
 more old maids than old bachelors. Man, however, may 
 glorify himself on two accounts. First, his relations to 
 life and the world, and his courage lead him more fre- 
 quently into temptations ; and second, the man who 
 preserves his chastity on principle possesses therein a 
 pretorian - cohort ; but the woman who protects hers 
 with her heart and from regard to social morality has a 
 guardian angel and guard of honor. The cohort, how- 
 ever, is stronger than the angel and the guard. 
 
 171. MAXIMS. 
 
 The bad man is much more deeply and selfishly pro- 
 voked by another's hypocrisy than the good man. 
 
CHAEACTBH. 133 
 
 The greatesb hatred, like the greatest virtue and the 
 worst doge, is quiet. 
 
 Every one is born loith his north or south ; whether in 
 an outer one beside, that is of little consequence. 
 
 There are in man, in the beginning and at the end, 
 as in books, two blank bookbinder's leaves — childhood 
 and old age. 
 
 There is nothing more beautiful than cheerfulness on 
 an old face, and among country people it was always 
 the sign of a well-regulated and pious life. 
 
 When any one remains modest, not after praise, but 
 after censure, then he is really so. 
 
 He who admits that he has a secret to keep has, by 
 doing so, revealed one half of it, and the other will 
 speedily follow. 
 
 In strong men great pains and joys become overlook- 
 ing heights of the whole road of life. 
 
 What best thing has not occurred in a state of enthu- 
 siasm, and what worst thing has not been done in cold 
 blood ? 
 
 The saint never wears a more heavenly smile than on 
 his sick-bed, nor the reprobate a more hard and painful 
 one. 
 
 Trust no one (and though it were a saint) who in the 
 smallest trifle leaves his honor in the lurch ; and a 
 woman of that kind still less. 
 
 It is much better to make presents in articles than in 
 money, because gratitude for the latter is spent as soon 
 as that is. 
 
 One is never colder than after great warmth, just as 
 Avater, after boiling, assumes a greater coldness than it 
 had before. 
 
 Every lie is a happy sign that there is still truth in the 
 world. 
 
134 JEAN PAUL EICnXEE. 
 
 Women who read prefaces and notes are of some sig- 
 nificance. 
 
 Compulsory proposals of pleasure are precisely those 
 to which maidens love best to say yes. 
 
 An emotion, a tear, is an oath before Heaven that one 
 will be good ; but a single sacrifice steels thy soul more 
 than five tears of penitence and ten penitential sermons. 
 
 A rake indicates in a company, like a measurer of the 
 purity of the air, by the different degrees of his bold- 
 ness, the different degrees of female merit, only in in- 
 verse relation. 
 
 Victories beget victories, as defeats do defeats. " After 
 the victory the new situation brings a new struggle." 
 
 [Liana] always regarded only the image in the mirror, 
 not herself, as beautiful. 
 
 He hated from his heart every lie which he did not 
 utter himself ; so he seriously regarded himself as moral, 
 disinterested, and gentle, merely for this reason, that he 
 inexorably insisted upon all this in the case of others. 
 
 Without labor and seriousness, the best good of the 
 world dies. 
 
 Too much accustomed to win men, he too easily 
 brought himself to lose men. 
 
 Painfully does man attain the Alp of ideal love ; 
 still more painful and dangerous — as in the case of other 
 Alps — is the descent from it. 
 
 Excuse children for being children. 
 
 With great trees the seed is smaller, and in the spring 
 the blossoms later than in the case of small bushes. 
 
 A gray head loves to hide itself before it disappears 
 forever, and seeks, like birds, a dark place for going to 
 sleep. 
 
 Verily, an angel and a Satan will come at last to be 
 distinguishable in nothing except the heart. 
 
CHARACTEE. 125 
 
 Do tlie sajnts dwell only upon the palaces, and not 
 in them ? [Referring to statuary on the houses of the 
 nobility.— ^'c?.} 
 
 The crown of thorns easily ennobles a head to a 
 Christ's head. 
 
 Around the greatest of all temples sphinxes lie, and, 
 reversing the case as it was with the Sphinx, ho only 
 solves the riddle who dies. 
 
 172. DESCEIPTION OF A BUENT-OtiT HEAET. 
 
 Koquairol is a child and victim of the age. As the 
 higher youth of our times are so early and richly over- 
 hung with the roses of joy that, like the inhabitants of 
 spice-islands, they lose their smell, and by and by put 
 under their heads a Sybarite-pillow of roses, drink rose- 
 syrup and bathe themselves in rose-oil, until nothing 
 more is left them thereof for a stimulus except the 
 thorns, so are most of them — and often the very same 
 ones — stuffed full in the beginning, by their philan- 
 thropic teachers, with the Jruits of knowledge, so that 
 they come soon to desire only the honey-thick extracts, 
 then the cider and perry thereof, until at last they ruin 
 themselves with the brandy made of that. N"ow if, in 
 addition to this, they have, like Roquairol, a fancy that 
 makes their life a naphtha-soil, out of which every step 
 draws fire, then does the flame, into which the sciences 
 are thrown, and the consumption become still greater. 
 -For these burnt-out prodigals of life there is then no 
 new pleasure and no new truth left, and they have no old 
 one entire and fresh ; a dried-up future, full of arro- 
 gance, disgust with life, unbelief, and contradiction, lies 
 round about them. Only the wing of fancy still con- 
 tinues to quiver on their corpse. 
 
 JSIot merely truths, but feelings also, he anticipated. 
 
126 JEAN PAUL KICHTEE. 
 
 All grand situations of humanity, all emotions to wliich 
 Love and Friendship and Nature exalt the heart, all these 
 he went through in poems earlier than in life, as play- 
 actor and theatre-poet earlier than as man, earlier on the 
 sunny side of fancy than on the stormy side of reality ; 
 hence, when they at last appeared, living, in his breast, 
 he could deliberately seize them, govern them, kill 
 them, and stufi them well for the refrigeratory of future 
 remembrance. . . . He plunged into good and bad dis- 
 sipations and amours, and afterward represented on 
 paper or on the stage everything that he repented or 
 blessed; and every representation made him grow more 
 and more hollow, as abysses have been left in the sun by 
 ejected worlds. His heart could not do without the holy 
 sensibilities ; but they were simply a new luxury, a 
 tonic, at best ; and precisely in proportion to their 
 height did the road run down the more abruptly into 
 the slough of the unhoHest ones. . . . 
 
 Unfortunate is the female soul which loses its way and 
 is caught in one of these great webs stretched out in mid- 
 heaven ; and happy is she, when she tears through them, 
 unpoigoned, and merely soils her bees' -wings. But this 
 all-powerful fancy, this streaming love, this softness and 
 strength, this all-mastering coolness and collectedness, 
 will overspread every female Psyche with webs, if she 
 neglects to brush away the first threads. Oh that 1 could 
 warn you, poor maidens, against such condors, which fly 
 up with you in their claws ! The heaven of our days 
 hangs full of these eagles. They love yon not, though 
 they think so ; because, like the blest in Mahomet's para- 
 dise, instead of their lost arms of love, they have only 
 wings of fancy. They are like great streams, Warm only 
 along the shore, and in the middle cold. 
 
 Now enthusiast, now libertine in love, he ran 
 
CHARACTEB. ISl 
 
 through the alternation between ether and slime more 
 and more rapidly, till he mixed them both. His blos- 
 soms shot up on the varnished flower-staff of the ideal, 
 which, however, rotted, colorless, in the ground. Start 
 with horror, but believe it — he sometimes plunged ou 
 purpose into sins and torments, in order, down there, hy 
 the pangs of remorse and humiliation, to cut into him- 
 self more deeply the oath of reformation. 
 
 So stood, matters in his breast, when he came to 
 Albano's — hunting like an epicure after love, but merely 
 to play with it ; with an untrue heart, whose feehng was 
 more lyric poetry, than real, sound being ; incapable oj 
 being true, nay, hardly capable of being false, because 
 every truth assimilated to the poetic representation, and 
 this again to that ; able much more easily on the stage 
 and at the tragic writing-desk to hit the true language of 
 passion than in life, as Boileau could only imitate dan- 
 cers, but never a dance ; indilferent, contemptuous, and 
 decided against the exhausted, worthless life, wherein all 
 that is settled and indispensable — hearts and joys and 
 truths — melted down and floated about ; with reckless 
 energy, capable of daring and sacrificing anything which 
 a man respects, because he respected nothing, and ever 
 lookinground after his iron patron-saint. Death ; faint- 
 hearted in his resolutions, and even in his errors fluctuat- 
 ing, and y6t devoid only of the tuning-hammer, and not 
 of the tunmg-fork, of the finest morahty. 
 
XI. 
 
 EDUCATION. 
 
 173. EVERYTHING EDUCATES. 
 
 The sclioolliouse of the young soul does not merely 
 consist of lecture and lesson rooms, but also of the school- 
 ground, the sleeping-room, the eating-room, the play- 
 ground, the staircase, and of every place. Heaven ! 
 what intermixture of other influences, always either to 
 the advantage or prejudice of education ! 
 
 174. GEAFTING THE TREE OF KNOWLEDGE ON THE TREE 
 OE LIFE. 
 
 Don Gaspard, in revising a scheme of education for 
 Albano, had chosen that more attention should be paid 
 to his bodily health than to mental superfetation ; he 
 thought the tree of knowledge should be grafted with 
 the tree of life. Ah ! whoever sacrifices health to wis- 
 dom has generally sacrificed wisdom too, and only in- 
 born not acquired sickliness is profitable to head and 
 heart. 
 
 175. BIRTH OF SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS. 
 
 Never shall 1 forget the inner sensation, hitherto 
 untold to any, when I was present at the birth of my 
 self -consciousness, of which I can specify both time and 
 place. One morning when still quite a young child, I 
 was standing under the doorway, and looking toward the 
 woodstack on the left, when suddenly the internal vision, 
 " 1 am an ego," passed before me like a lightning flash 
 
EDUCATION'. 139 
 
 from heaven, and has remained with me shining brightly 
 ever since ; my ego had seen itseH then for the first time 
 and forever. 
 
 176. MTSTEET TS THE OEIGOT OF IDEAS. 
 
 I -fear aad 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 easuality of the creation of ideas in ns, which no wil' 
 and no mind can regulate and create, for any such ar- 
 rangement and intention would presuppose the unborn 
 idea. And in this creation the grand enigma of oui 
 moral freedom is veiled. 
 
 177. EDUCATING #0WEE OF WRITING. 
 
 Now when Albano had read himself to the flaming 
 point upon some great idea or other, as Immortality or 
 Deity, he had then to write upon it ; because the Archi- 
 tect believed, and I too, that in the educational world 
 nothing goes beyond writing — not even reading and 
 speaking ; and that a man may read thirty years with 
 less improvement than he would gain by writing a half. 
 It is just in this way that we authors mount to such 
 heights ; hence it is that even the worst of us, if we hold 
 out, become somewhat, at last, and write ourselves up 
 from Schilda to Abdera, and from there away up to Grub 
 Street. 
 
 178. MAXIMS. 
 
 Each generation of children begins the history of the 
 world anew. 
 
 Tour watch stops while you wind it up, and you ever- 
 lastingly wind up children, and never let them go. 
 
 Forbid in a gentle voice, so that a whole gamut of in- 
 creased force may be open to you, and only once. The 
 last may cost labor. 
 
130 JEAS PAUL EIOHTEK. 
 
 Begin the culture of thy heart, not with the rearing 
 of noble motives, but with the extirpation of bad ones. 
 
 No school is more necessary to children than that of 
 patience, because either the wiU must be broken in 
 childhood or the heart in old age. 
 
 179. WHY CHILDEBN OBEY FATHERS BETTER THAITMOTHEES. 
 
 The child's ear readily distinguishes a decided from an 
 angry tone of voice : the mother easily falls into the latter 
 when she attempts to imitate the father in the former. 
 His commands are better obeyed than hers for three 
 reasons : the first, his decided, though far removed from 
 angry, voice ; the second is, that the man, for the most 
 part, like the warrior, says only one and consequently 
 the same, imperial No ; whereas women can scarcely 
 say to a child. Be quiet ! without colon and semicolon, 
 and most necessary notes of interrogation and exclama- 
 tion. Was there ever in history an instance of a woman 
 training a dog ? Or could a generaless, in commanding 
 her marching army to halt, ever express herself other- 
 wise than thus : " All you people, as soon as 1 have 
 done speaking ; I command you all to stand still in your 
 places; halt, I tell you !" The third is, that the man 
 more rarely withdraws his refusal. 
 
 180. mFLIIENCE OF GEEMANT ON EDUCATION. 
 
 Whence comes it that hitherto no age has spoken, 
 counselled, and done so much about education as our 
 own ; and again, among nations, none so much as Ger- 
 many, into which Eousseau's winged seeds have been 
 blown out of France and ploughed in ? The ancients 
 wrote and did little for it ; their schools were rather for 
 young men than children, and in the philosophical schools 
 of Athens the learner frequently was, or might be, older 
 than the teacher. Sparta was a Stoa, or garrison school, 
 
EDUCATIOK. 13 
 
 at once for parents and children. The Romans ha 
 Grecian slaves for their schoolmasters, and yet thei 
 children became neither Greeks nor slaves. In the age 
 when the great and glorious deeds of Christendom an 
 knighthood and freedom rose like stars on the dark hor 
 zon of Europe, school buildings lay scattered around t 
 mere dull, little, dark, savage huts or monks' cells 
 And what have the political vowels of Europe- — ^th 
 English— whose island is a school of citizens, and whos 
 election every seven years is a wandering seven-da 
 Sunday-school ? what have they hitherto better tha 
 mere establishments for mal-education ? 
 
 181. IMPOETANCE OF PEIMAEY BDTJCATION. 
 
 Our immediate future demands thought ; our earth i 
 filled with gunpowder ; like the age of the migration c 
 nations, ours prepares itself for spiritual and politicj 
 wanderings, and under all state-buildings, professorit 
 chairs, and temples, the earth quakes. Do you kno'i 
 whether the little boy who plucks flowers at your sid 
 may not one day, from his island Corsica, desceud as 
 war-god into a stormy universe, to play with storms an 
 to destroy, or to purify and to sow ? "Would it then b 
 indifferent whether, in educating him, you had been hi 
 Fenelon, his Cornelia, or his Dubois ? For although yo 
 might not be able to break or bend the power of geniu 
 — the deeper the sea, the more precipitous the coast- 
 yet in the most important initiatory decade of life, in th 
 first, at the opening dawn of all feelings, you might sui 
 round and overlay the slumbering lion energies with a; 
 the tender habits of a gentle heart and all the bands o 
 love. Whether an angel or a devil educate that grea 
 genius is of far more importance than whether a learnei 
 doctor or a Charles the Simple teach him. 
 
132 JEAN PAUL EICHTBK. 
 
 182. COirSOLATIONS OF LEAENING. 
 
 When some dunned, needy scholar, some skin-and- 
 bone reading master, a poor curate with five children, or 
 a baited and badgered tutor, is lying woeful and wretched 
 — every nerve quivering under some instrument of torture 
 • — and a brother of his craft, plagued by just as many in- 
 struments of torture as himself, comes and argues and 
 philosophizes vnth him a whole evening, and tells him 
 all the latest opinions of the literary papers, then truly 
 the sand-glass which marks the hours of the torture is 
 laid on its side — Orpheus comes, all bright and shining, 
 with the lyre of knowledge in his hand, into the psychic 
 hell of the two brethren in ofRce, the sad tears vanish 
 from their brightening eyes, the snakes of the furies 
 twine into graceful curls, the Ixion's wheel rolls harmo- 
 niously to the lyre, and these two poor Sisyphuses sit rest- 
 ing quietly on their stones and listen to the music. But 
 the poor curate's, the reading-master's, the scholar's 
 good wife, what is her comfort in her misery ? She has 
 none except her husband, who ought, therefore, to be 
 very tender to all her shortcomings. 
 
 183. THE IDEALS OF TOTTTH. 
 
 Every one of us has within him an ideal man which 
 he strives, from his youth upward, to cherish or to sub- 
 due. This holy soul-spirit every one beholds most clearly 
 in the blooming time of all his powers — in the season of 
 youth. If only every one were distinctly conscious of 
 what he once wished to become, of how different and 
 much nobler a path and goal his opening eye, compared 
 with his fading one, beheld ! For if we believe in any 
 contemporaneous growth of the physical and spiritual 
 man, we must also assume that the blooming season of 
 both occurs simultaneously. Conseqaently his own ideal 
 
EDUCATION. 13 
 
 being will appear most clearly to the man (though it b 
 only in vague desires and dreams) in the full bloom o 
 youth. And does not this show itself in the meanee 
 soul, which, though fallen during its pilgrimage throug 
 sensual and covetous affections, yet once attained 
 higher hope, and stood within the gates of heaven ? A 
 a later period, in the multitude, the ideal being fades da; 
 by day, and the man becomes, sinking and overpowered 
 the mere present, a creature of necessity and neighbor 
 hood. But the universal complaint, " "What might I no 
 have become !" confesses the present existence, or th 
 past existence, of an older Adam in Paradise, along witl 
 and before the old Adam. 
 
 184. IMPEESSIBILITT OF CHILDHOOD. 
 
 The inner man is, like the negro, born white, and onl; 
 colored black by Hfe. If in mature years great example 
 of moral worth pass by without influencing our cours 
 iTLore than a flying comet does that of the earth, yet ii 
 the deep heart of childhood the first inner or outer objec 
 of love, injustice, etc. , throws a shadow or a light im 
 measurably far along its years ; and as, according to th 
 elder theologians, we only inherited Adam's first sin, no 
 his other sins, since in one fall we copied every fall ; s< 
 the first fall and the first flight influence us our whol 
 life long. For in this early moment the Eternal work 
 the second miracle ; the gift of life was the first. It i 
 then that the God-man is conceived and born of humai 
 nature ; that self -consciousness, whereby a responsibl 
 being first appears, may be boldly called a conscienc 
 and a God — and unblessed is the hour in which thi 
 growing human being finds no immaculate conception 
 but in the moment of birth the Saviour and his Juda 
 meet. Too little attention has been paid to this one in 
 
134 JEAK PAUL EIOHTEE. 
 
 valuable moment, its environments and its fruits. There 
 are men who can remember far back to this bounding 
 hour of existence, in which their self-consciousness sud- 
 denly burst tlirough the clouds like a sun, and wonder- 
 fully revealed a beaming universe. Life, especially 
 moral life, has a iiight, then a leap, then a step, then a 
 halt ; each year renders a man less easy to convert. 
 
 185. FOECED EDUCATION. 
 
 Oh, how he pined for lessons and teachers vaguely 
 dreamed of ! But so much the better ! only hunger 
 digests, only love impregnates ; the sigh of longing alone 
 is the animating aura seminalis to the Orpheus egg of 
 knowledge. This you do not consider, you flying teach- 
 ers, who give children the draught earlier than the 
 thirst ; you who, hke some florists, insert into the split 
 stock of the flowers ready-made lac-dyes, and put for- 
 eign musk into their cups, instead of simply giving them 
 morning sun and flower-soil — and who grant young souls 
 no quiet hours, but bustle round them during the dust- 
 ing period of their blooming vine, against all the rules 
 of the vine-dressers, with your hoeing and your dunging 
 and your clipping. Oh, can you ever, when you thus 
 prematurely force them, with their unripe organs, into 
 the great realm of truths and beauties, just as we all, 
 alas ! with our dark senses, creep into lovely Nature, 
 and blunt ourselves to the perception of her beauty — can 
 you ever in any way make good to them the great year 
 which they would have lived to see, had they, growing 
 up like the new-created Adam, been able to turn round 
 with their open, thirsty senses, in the glorious universe 
 of spirits ? 
 
 186. VAEIANCE OF PAEENTAL INSTEUCTIOIT. 
 
 There floats before common parents, instead of one 
 
EDUCATION. 13. 
 
 archetype, a whole picture cabinet of ideals, which the; 
 impart bit by bit and tattoo into their children. If th 
 secret variances of a large class of ordinary fathers wer 
 brought to light, and laid down as a plan of studies am 
 reading catalogue for a moral education, they would rui 
 somewhat aft-er this fashion : In the first hour pure mo 
 rality must be read to the child, either by myself or th 
 tutor ; in the second, mixed morality, or that which ma; 
 be applied to one's own advantage ; in the third, "D 
 you not see that your father does so and so ?" in th 
 fourth, " You are little, and this is only fit for grown U] 
 people ;" in the fifth, " The chief matter is that yoi 
 should succeed in the world and become something ii 
 the state ;" in the sixth, " ISTot the temporary, but th 
 eternal determines the worth of a man ;" in th 
 seventh, " Therefore, rather suffer injustice and bi 
 kind ;" in the eighth, " But defend yourself bravely i 
 any one attacks you ;" in the ninth, " Do not make sue! 
 a noise, dear child ;" in the tenth, "A boy must not sit s( 
 quiet ;" in the eleventh, " You must obey your parent 
 better;" in the twelfth, "and educate yourself." S' 
 by the hourly change of his principles the father conceal 
 their untenableness and one-sidedness. As for his wife 
 she is neither hke him, nor yet like that harlequin wh- 
 came on to the stage with a bundle of papers imder eac] 
 arm, and answered to the inquiry what he had under hi 
 right arm, "Orders," and to what he had under hi 
 left, " Counter-orders ;" but the mother might be mucl 
 better compared to a giant Briareus, who had a hundre( 
 arms and a bundle of papers under each. 
 
 187. WOEDS Airo DEEDS. 
 
 The second mighty power by which the spirit of thi 
 age and people teaches and conquers, is the living action 
 
13C JEAN PAUL BICHTEK. 
 
 Not the cry, says a Chinese author, but the rising of a 
 M'ild duck impels the flock to follow him in upward flight. 
 One war fought against a Xerxes inflames the heart 
 quite difliei-ently, more purely and more strongly, than 
 the perusal of it three times in Cornelius, Plutarch, and 
 Herodotus ; for this last is merely an intellectual imi- 
 tation in cork in order easily to represent ancient tem- 
 ples and magnificent buildings in light cork forms. 
 Tea, the mere ancestral images of deeds in Plutarch's 
 Westminster Abbey cast the seeds of the divine word 
 more deeply into the heart than one, or a few thousand, 
 volumes of sermons full of true pulpit eloquence. 
 Heaven ! if words could be compressed into deeds, only 
 a few thousand to one, could they yet arouse upon an 
 earth in which piilpits, professors' chairs, and libraries 
 of all ages snow down unceasingly their most pure cold 
 exhortations, one single passion to hurl forth volcanic 
 fire ? Would not history then be surrounded with mere 
 snow craters and icebergs ? Ah, most respected teachers, 
 if even we, with our great college libraries that preach to 
 us for tens of years, have never once been brought so far 
 as to become holy men for a month, nay, for a week, 
 what dare we expect from the few volumes of words 
 which we let fall in school hours ? 
 
 188. TEACHING MORAL PHILOSOPHT. 
 
 To hear of good men is as much as to live among 
 them, and Plutarch's Lives make a deeper impression 
 than the best text-books of moral philosophy for the use 
 of academic teachers. For children especially there is 
 no other moral teaching than example, 2'elated or wit- 
 nessed ; and it is an educational folly to think that in 
 giving children reasons, one gives them anything more 
 than reasons. 
 
Xll. 
 
 AUTHORSHIP. 
 
 189. CEITICS. 
 
 Tet it does sometimes happen that some of them ha-v 
 written bad books themselves, and consequently know 
 bad book in a moment when they come across one. 
 
 190. CUL'rUEE. 
 
 To a literary man who is making new arguments an 
 new ink all the year long, it is incomprehensible ho- 
 .those persons who have neither a book, nor a pen, nor 
 drop of ink in the house, can exist at all. 
 
 191. MENTAL TUMULT OE A YOUNG AUTHOE. 
 
 I know of no greater mental tumult — hardly of an 
 sweeter — which can arise in a young man's being, tha 
 that which he experiences when he is walking up an 
 down his room, and forming the daring resolution ihi 
 he will take a book of blank paper and make it into 
 manuscript. 
 
 192. IMMOETALITT OE AUTHOES. 
 
 It is a beautiful thing that all authors, even those wh 
 deny the immortality of their own souls, seldom hav 
 anything to say against that of their names. As Cicer 
 declared that he would believe in the second life eve 
 were there none, they cleave to a behef in the second 
 eternal life of their names, however critics may demor 
 strate the contrary. 
 
138 JEAN PAUL KICHTEE. 
 
 193. AtTTHOES' WrVBS. 
 
 She was like Eaeine's wife, who did not know what a 
 line of poetry or a tragedy was, although she kept house 
 upon them. For my part, however, I should never lead 
 to the altar, or into my home as my wife, any woman 
 who wasn't capable of at least completing any sentence 
 which Death should knock me over with his hour-glass in 
 the middle of. 
 
 19i. DEEAD OF CEITICISM. 
 
 The single voice of one reviewer was, for his ears, 
 multiplied by the echo in the critical judgment hall into 
 a thousand voices. His deluded imagination multiplied 
 the head of one single reviewer into several Lernsean 
 heads, as it was believed of old that the devil used to 
 surround the heads -of sinners with delusive /izfee hea^s, 
 that the executioner might miss his stroke at them. He 
 himself, a very lamb in common life, transformed him- 
 self into a were-wolf in a review article ; which is fre- 
 quently the case with good-tempered men when they 
 write. 
 
 195. eichtee's thoughts oir his own life. 
 In Richter's advanced years, it was happy for him that 
 he could say : " When I look at what has been made 
 out of me, I must thank God that I paid no heed to ex- 
 ternal matters — neither to time nor toil, nor profit nor 
 loss ; the thing is there, and the instruments that did it 
 I have forgotten, and none else knows them. In this 
 wise has the unimportant series of moments been 
 changed into something higher that remains." — " 1 have 
 described so much," says he elsewhere, " and I die 
 without ever having seen Switzerlapd, and the Ocean, 
 and so many other sights. But the Ocean of Eternity I 
 shall in no case fail to see." 
 
AUTHORSHIP. 13i 
 
 196. THE riEST SEEMON. 
 
 In my opinion, wliea a man. preaches on Sunday 
 before all tlie peasants, wlio liad carried him in thei: 
 ai-ms when a gardener's boy ; further, before his mother 
 who is leading off her tears through the conduit of he: 
 satin mufE ; further, before his Lordship, whom he cai 
 positively command to be blessed ; and finally before liii 
 muslin bride, who is already blessed, and changing almosi 
 into stone, to find that the same li])s can both kiss anc 
 preach — in my opinion, 1 say, when a man effects al 
 this, he has some right to require of any biographer wh( 
 would paint his situation, that he — hold his jaw ; anc 
 of the reader who would sympathize with it, that h( 
 open his, and preach himself. 
 
 197. MAXIMS. 
 
 God hath not created anything nobler than a scholai 
 sitting at his writing. 
 
 A diary about an ordinary child would be mucl 
 better than a book upon children by an ordinary writer. 
 
 Never does a man portray his own character mor( 
 vividly than in his manner of portraying another's. 
 
 He never wrote without having read himself full oi 
 the subject ; and the reverse, he never read withSu 
 having first thought himself hungry. 
 
 Every great head goes to the grave with a whole li 
 brary of unprinted thoughts. 
 
 198. MEN" OF LETTEES. 
 
 Firmian understood some individual specimens o: 
 humanity, but not humanity as a class, in its broad sense 
 he was embarrassed with every woman at first, while he] 
 acquaintance was new, though not so afterward when h( 
 came to know her better ; he knew exactly how on( 
 
>) 
 
 140 JBASr PAUL KICHTEE. 
 
 ought to talk, walk, and stand in "society," but 
 he never put this knowledge in practice ; he took accu- 
 rate note of all outward and inward awkwardness of other 
 people, but yet retained all his own ; and after treating 
 liis acquaintances for years with the airs of a superior, 
 experienced man of the world accustomed to " society, 
 he would suddenly find, on some occasion of his being 
 from home, that, unlike a true man of the world, he had 
 no effect or influence whatever on people to whom he 
 was a stranger ; to make a long tale short, he was a man 
 of letters. 
 
 199. FIEST LOVE FOE TEIJTH. 
 
 "What are all Chinese lantern-festivals to the high fes- 
 tival for which an inflamed youth lights up all the 
 chambers of his brain, and in this illumination throws 
 out his first essays ? 
 
 In the fore part and on the very threshold of the es- 
 say perhaps, Albano still crept along step by step, and 
 made use merely of his head ; but as he got further on, 
 and his heart quivered with wings, and like a comet he 
 must needs sweep along before only shimmering constel- 
 lations of great truths, could he then restrain himself 
 from imitating the rosy-red flamingo, who, in his pas- 
 sage toward the sun, seems to paint himself into a flying 
 brand, and to clothe himself in wings of fire ? When 
 at length he reached the practical application, verily 
 every one was like the others ; in each he formed and 
 sowed an Arcadia full of human angels, who in three 
 minutes could cross over on a Charon's pontoon thrown 
 in for the purpose, and land in the Elysium which floated 
 so near : in every one of these practical applications all 
 men were saints, all saints beatified ; 'all mornings blos- 
 soms, and all evenings fruit ; Li ana perfectly well, and he 
 not far from it — her lover — all nations ascended more 
 
AUTHORSHIP. 14] 
 
 easily the noonday heights ; and he upon his own, like mei 
 upon mountains, saw everything good nearer to him 
 Ah ! the whole boggy present full of stumps and blood 
 suckers, had he kicked aside, and was now encircled onli 
 with floating green worlds, full of pastures, which th( 
 sun-ball of his head had projected into the ether. 
 
 Blissful, blissful time ! thou hast long since gone by 
 Oh the years in which man reads and makes his first poem 
 and systems, when the spirit creates and blesses its firs 
 worlds, and when, full of fresh morning-thoughts, it see 
 the first constellations of truth come up bringing an eterna 
 splendor, and stand ever before the longing heart, whic! 
 has enjoyed them, and to which time, by and by, offeri 
 only astronomical newspapers and refraction-tables ot 
 the morning-stars, only antiquated truths and rejuvenat 
 ed lies ! 
 
 200. DEDICATION OF THE TITAN. 
 TO TEE FOUB LOVELY AND NOBLE SI3TEBS ON TEE TBBONE. 
 
 The Dream of Truth. 
 
 Aphrodite, Aglaia, Euphrosyne, and Thalia onC' 
 looked down into the clear-obscure of earth, and, wear; 
 of the ever-bright but cold Olympus, yearned to enter ii 
 beneath the clouds of our world, where the soul love 
 more because it suffers more, and where it is sadde 
 but more warm. They heard the holy tones ascend, witl 
 which Polyhymnia passes invisibly up and down th 
 low, anxious earth, to cheer and lift our hearts ; am 
 they mourned that their throne stood so far from th 
 sighs of the helpless. 
 
 Then they determined to take the earthly veil, and t 
 clothe themselves in our mortal form. They came dow: 
 from Olympus ; Love and little loves and genii fle'^ 
 playfully after them, and our nightingales fiuttered ti 
 
143 JEAN PAUL HICHTEK. 
 
 meet them out of the bosom of May. But as they 
 touched the first flowers of earth, and flung only rays of 
 h'ght and cast no shadows, then the earnest queen of 
 gods and men, Fate, raised her eternal sceptre, and 
 said, " The immortal becomes mortal upon the earth, 
 and every spirit becomes a human being !" 
 
 So they became human beings and sisters, and were 
 called Louisa, Charlotte, Theresa, Frederica ;* the 
 little loves and genii transformed themselves into their 
 children, and flew into their maternal arms, and the 
 motherly and sisterly hearts throbbed full of new love 
 in a great embrace. And when the white banner of the 
 blooming spring fluttered abroad, and more human 
 thrones stood before them ; and when, blissfully softened 
 by love, the harmonica of life, they looked upon each 
 other and their happy children, and were speechless for 
 love and bliss, then did Polyhymnia, invisible, float by 
 over them, and recognize them, and gave them the tones 
 wherewith the heart expresses and awakens love and 
 
 joy- 
 
 And the dream was ended and fulfilled ; it had, as is 
 always the case, shaped itself after waking reality. 
 Therefore, be it consecrated to the four fair and noble 
 sisters, and let all which is like it in Titan be so conse- 
 crated too ! Jean Paul Fjb. Eichtee. 
 
 * The four daughters of the Duke of Mecklenburg. 
 
xiir. 
 
 SATIRICAL. 
 
 201. ABOUT NOT BEING UNDEESTOOD. 
 
 O HEAVENS ! O devils ! I hear in fact thirty thou 
 sand young men and maidens, from one circulating 
 library to another, all with inflated breasts, saying ant 
 groaning round and round, that nobody understand 
 them — neither their grandfather, nor their godparents 
 nor the conrector, when in fact the . . . common 
 place pack does not itseK understand. 
 
 202. PEATING EOE GOLD, AND EECEIVING WISDOM. 
 
 The Yienna master was a vain fool (at least in matter 
 of humility — for example, his pigmy feet, his literature 
 his success with women), and particularly loved, bj 
 f amihar pictures of great ones and ladies, to have inf errec 
 his confederation with the originals. The poor devi 
 was, to be sure, poor, and believed, with many othe: 
 authors, that he — unlike Solomon, who prayed for wisdon 
 and received gold — had inversely had the misfortuni 
 while supplicating for the latter to receive only th* 
 former. 
 
 203- WIVES COMPAEED TO THE EOTTE EVANGELISTS. 
 
 Albina von Wehrfritz, the spouse, promised every 
 thing in the name of all that was sacred : she migh 
 have compared herself to the Evangehsts Mark anc 
 John, because her impetuous husband quite often repre 
 sented the creatures who are pictured as the companions 
 
144 JEAN PAUL KICHTEK. 
 
 of the two saints, those king-beasts, the lion and the 
 eagle ; just as many another wife, in reference to her 
 companion, may be compared with Luke, and mine with 
 Matthew. [With this Evangehst, as is well known, an 
 angel is associated. — Ed. j 
 
 204. ADVANTAGE OF MAEEYINO A BEAUTY. 
 
 "Whenever I have wanted to study fools at great par- 
 ties, I have always looked round regularly for a great 
 beauty ; they gather round such a one like wasps around 
 a fruit-woman. And if I had no other reason — ^I have, 
 however — for marrying the handsomest woman, I would 
 do it for this reason, if for no other, that I might always 
 have the queen bee sitting in the hollow of my hand, 
 after whom the whole foolish bee-swarm would come 
 buzzing. I and my wife would then be like the fellows 
 in Lisbon, who, having in their hands a pole of parrots 
 strung together, and at their feet a leash of monkeys 
 skipping after them, trudge through the streets, and 
 offer their cr&zj personce iov sale. 
 
 205. MILITIAMEN. 
 
 Militiamen of this sort (" precious" they are in every 
 sense) are usually posted, for greater security's sake, in 
 public places, where they are safe from injury, such as 
 the gates of towns, where these hai-pooners are protected 
 by the town and gate ; at the same time I have often 
 wished, in passing, that these students of the art mili- 
 tary were provided with a good thick stick, so that they 
 might have something to defend themselves vidth, if any- 
 body should try to take away their muskets. 
 
 The truth is, that even in the very smallest principali- 
 ties the soldiers often possess all the acquirements and 
 accomplishments of real soldiers : they can present arms, 
 stand bolt upright at portals, and smoTce, at all events, if 
 
SATIKICAL. 14 
 
 not fire — matters which a poodle learns with ease, but 
 country bumpkin with more diflSculty. 
 
 206. LEGAL PEOCEASTINATION. 
 
 Philosophers contend for thousands of years ovc 
 philosophical questions ; and it seems an unaecountabl 
 thing, therefore, that advocates should attenipt to en 
 their juristical questions in a space of eighty, or eve 
 sometimes of sixty years. But the professors of Law ai 
 not to blame for this ; on the other hand, as Lessing as 
 sorts of Truth, that not \h.e finding, but iheseeldng of \ 
 profits men, and that he himself would willingly mat 
 over his claim to all truths in return for the sweet labc 
 of investigation, so is the professor of Law not profite 
 by the finding and deciding, but by the investigation o 
 a juridical truth — which is called pleading and praetis 
 ing — and he would willingly consent to approximate t 
 truth forever, like an hyperbola to its asymptote, witl 
 out ever meeting it, seeing he can subsist as an honoi 
 able man with wife and child, let such approximation b 
 as tedious as it likes. 
 
 207. PAYING DEBTS. 
 
 The whole of that forenoon he enjoyed a pleasur 
 which possesses, for the virtuous and right-thinking, a 
 especial charm — that of paying debts. That he does pa 
 his debts is not a circumstance which should lower hii 
 in the opinion of anybody who remembers that he is 
 man of very poor " extraction." 
 
 To place a man of a high and delicate sense of honor, 
 courtier say, under an obligation {e.g. to lend him monej 
 is to wound his feelings to a greater or less extent ; an 
 a wound of this sort to the feelings is a matter whic 
 his refined sensitive nature naturally leads him to en 
 deavor to forgive ; he will, therefore, do his utmost t 
 
146 JEAIT PAUL EICHTEE. 
 
 drive the injury thus done him, with all its attendant 
 circnmstanees, completely out of his mind. Should the 
 person who inflicted this hurt upon his sense of honor 
 remind him of it, he will then, with genuine delicacy of 
 feeling, make as if he were scarcely aware that he had 
 ieen wounded. 
 
 208. SAINTS AND APOSTLES AS FASHION-EIGUKES. 
 
 1 have a notion that, if one should take the images of 
 the Virgin, or even the Saints and the Apostles, which 
 have hitherto in Catholic churches been dressed and 
 undressed without the least profit or taste, and should 
 dress them up more rationally and advantageously — that 
 is, just like the French dolls- — if the church would regu- 
 larly every month receive the Journal of Fashion, and 
 according to its colored patterns re-dress the Marys (as 
 ladies) and the Apostles (as gentlemen), and so set them 
 around the altar, then would these people be imitated 
 and venerated with more zest, and one would know, 
 surely, for what one went to church, and what they wore 
 in Paris and Versailles ; one would learn the fashions in 
 good season, and even the common people would put on 
 something more sensible ; the Apostles would become the 
 file-leaders of dress, and Mary the true Queen of Heaven 
 to women. Thus must ecclesiastical benefits be utilized as 
 state benefits : even so did the Dominican Monk Rocco 
 in Naples apply the extravagance of burning lamps in 
 the streets at the altar of Mary to the multiplication of 
 these altars and — the . lighting of the streets. 
 
 209. EEMEDIES FOE ANGEE. 
 
 Seneca, in his " Remedies for Anger," has omitted 
 the simplest of all—the devil. True, the Kabbalists 
 highly extol the therapeutic powers of the word Shem- 
 Tiam-phorash, which is a name of a diametrically oppo- 
 
SATIRICAL. 14 
 
 site character ; but 1 have observed, for my part, tha 
 the spotted, malignant fever of wrath, so readily diag 
 nosed by the raving delirium of the patient, is instantl 
 relieved, dispersed, and mitigated by invoking the nam 
 of the devil, which is perhaps, indeed, quite as effics 
 cions a remedy as the wearing of amulets. In th 
 absence of this name the ancients, who were altogethe 
 without a Satan, recommended a mere repetition of th 
 ABO, which, it is true, does contain the devil's nam« 
 only too much diluted with other letters. And the wor 
 Abracadabra, spoken diminuendo, was a cure for coi 
 poreal fevers. As regard? the inflammatory fever c 
 anger, however, the greater the quantity of morbi 
 matter which has to be ejected from the system throng 
 the secretions of the mouth, the greater is the numbe 
 of devils necessary to make mention of. For a mer 
 triiling irritation — a mild case of simple anger — " th 
 devil," or perhaps " hell and the devil," will general! 
 be found sufficient ; but for the pleuritic fever of rage 
 should be disposed to prescribe " the devil and his infei 
 nal grandmother ;" strengthening the dose, moreovei 
 with a '■'■ donnerwetter'''' OY two and a few ^' sacrc 
 ments, ' ' as the curative powers of the electric fluid ar 
 now so generally recognized. It is unnecessary to poir 
 out to me that in cases of absolute canine fury or manit 
 eal wrath, doses of the specific, such as the foregoing 
 are of little avail ; 1 should, of course, let a patient in th: 
 condition be " taken and torn by all the devils in hell. 
 Eut what I would fain render clear is that, in all theE 
 remedies, the real specific is the devil ; for as it is h: 
 sting which is the cause of our malady, he himself hi 
 got to be employed as the remedy, just as the stings c 
 scorpions are cured by the application of scorpions i 
 powder. 
 
148 JEAN PAUL BICHTER. 
 
 210. FEMALE LOQUACITY. 
 
 The author of the work on " Marriage" has said " a 
 woman who does not talk is a stupid woman." But it 
 is easier to be his encomiast than his disciple. The 
 cleverest women are often silent with women, and the 
 most stupid and most silent are often both with men. 
 On the whole, this statement, which has been applied to 
 the male sex, is true also of the female, namely, that 
 those who think most have least to say, as frogs cease 
 croaking when a light is brought to the side of their 
 pond. Moreover, the extreme talkativeness of women is 
 a result of the sedentary nature of their occupations. 
 Men whose work is sedentary, such as tailors, shoe- 
 makers, weavers, have, in common with women, not only 
 their hypochondriac fancies, but also their loquacity. 
 
 The little work-tables where feminine fingers are em- 
 ployed are also the playgrounds of the feminine imagina- 
 tion, and their needles become little magic wSnds, 
 wherewith they transform their rooms into isles of spirits 
 filled with dreams. Hence it is that a letter or a book 
 distracts a woman who is in love more than the knitting 
 of a whole pair of stockings. 
 
 Savages say that the monkeys refrain from talking 
 that they may not be made to work ; but many a woman 
 talks twice as much when she is working as when she is 
 not. 1 have devoted much thought to the question, 
 what purpose this peculiarity subserves in the economy 
 of the Universe. At first it might strike us that Nature 
 has ordained these reiterations of that which has been 
 already said with a view to the development of metaphys- 
 ical truths ; for as demonstration, according to Jacobi 
 and Kant, is merely a series or progression of iden- 
 tical propositions, it is evident that women, who 
 always proceed from the same thing to the same 
 
SATIKICAL. 149 
 
 tiling, are continually demonstrating. There can be no 
 doubt, however, that the object which Nature has cliiefly 
 had in view is the following : Accurate observers of 
 Nature have pointed out that the reason why the leaves 
 of trees keep up their constant iiuttering motion is that 
 the atmosphere may be purified by this perpetual flagel- 
 lation. It would, however, be veiy wonderful had 
 Nature, always economizing her forces — Nature who 
 never does anything in vain — ordained this much longer 
 oscillation, this seventy years' wagging of the feminine 
 tongue, to no definite purpose. For the purpose in 
 question, however, we have not far to seek. It is the 
 same as is subserved by the quivering of the leaves of 
 the trees. The endless, regular, unceasing beat of the 
 feminine tongue is to assist in agitating and stirring up 
 the atmosphere, which would otherwise become putres- 
 cent. The moon has her ocean of water, and the 
 feminine head has its ocean of air, to stir into salubrity 
 and to keep in perpetual freshness. Hence a universal 
 Pythagorean novitiate would sooner or later give rise to 
 epidemics, and Chartreuses of nuns would become pest- 
 houses. Hence it is that diseases of the pestiferous type 
 are less frequent among civilized nations who talk the 
 most. And hence Nature's beneficent arrangement that 
 it is exactly in the largest cities, and moreover in the 
 winter, and moreover indoors and in large assemblies, 
 that women talk most, inasmuch as it is exactly in 
 these places and at these periods that the atmosphere is 
 most impure and charged with the largest proportion of 
 carbonic acid and other products of respiration, requir- 
 ing to be thoroughly fanned and set in motion. And 
 indeed Nature here overthrows all artificial barriers and 
 impediments. For although many European women 
 have endeavored to imitate those of America who fill 
 
150 JEAN' PAtri; EICHTEE. 
 
 their moutlis with water in order to keep silence, and 
 while making calls fill their mouths with tea and cofEee, 
 yet these fluids have been found rather to facilitate than 
 to prevent the free flow of feminine speech. 
 
 I trust in this I am far from being like the narrow- 
 minded teleologists who, to every grand sun-path or sun- 
 orbit of Nature, must always be appending and inter- 
 calating little subsidiary foot-tracks and " ends in view." 
 Such persons might permit themselves the supposition 
 (1 should be ashamed to do so) that the oscillation of the 
 female tongue, the use of which is sufficiently apparent 
 in the mobion which it communicates to the atmosphere, 
 may possibly serve to give typical illustration to some 
 thought or idea of a spiritual nature, e.g. the female soul 
 itself perhaps. This belongs to that class of things with 
 respect to which Kant has said that they can neither be 
 proved nor disproved. I myself, however, should 
 rather incline to the opinion that the talking of women 
 is an indication of the cessation of thought and men- 
 tal activity — as in a good mill the warning bell only 
 rings when there is no corn left in the hopper. More- 
 over, every husband knows that tongues are attached to 
 women's heads in order to give due notice by their 
 clanging that some contradiction, something irregular or 
 impossible, is dominating in them. However, it now 
 remains for the natural philosopher to prosecute this 
 inquiry, and to determine to what extent my views may 
 prove to be erroneous. 
 
 211. Adam's address to eve. 
 
 After exjpulsion from, Eden, on the advisability of 
 
 begetting the human race. 
 " Virgin !" (it was thus the sermon delivered outside 
 of Paradise commenced) "it is true we are the first of 
 
satikical: 15: 
 
 parents, and are minded to originate all the subsequen 
 parents ; though all that you think about is stickin| 
 your spoon into a forbidden apple. However, I 
 being a man and protoplast, reflect and ponder, and a 
 we walk to and fro 1 shall undertake the office o 
 preacher of the sermon on this,' the occasion of our enter 
 ing into the bonds of wedlock (not having as yet, un 
 fortunately, begotten anybody else to do it), and in 
 brief wedding exhortation direct your attention to th 
 doubts affecting and reasons deciding the protoplasts o 
 first parents and first of wedded couples (that is to say 
 you and me) in the act of reflecting and considering, am 
 how — 
 
 "/«- tJie first place, they consider the reasons why the; 
 should not people the earth, but emigrate this very day— 
 the one into the old world and the other into the new 
 and, in the second place, the reasons why they should d' 
 nothing of the kind, but marry. 
 
 '■'■ In the first place, my dearly beloved ! Here in m; 
 sheepskin as I appear before you, grave, thoughtful, am 
 wise, it is nevertheless the fact that I am full to the ver 
 brim of — not so much follies as fools, with a good man 
 wise men stuck in here and there between them, by wa; 
 of parentheses. . . . Tor Bonnet, who is in me amouj 
 the rest, will sit down at his desk (when he comes out 
 and prove that they arc all one inside the other, like 
 nest of boxes, that the father contains the son, that th 
 grandfather contains them both, the great-grandfathe 
 consequently the grandfather and all the contents o 
 him, the great-great-grandfather the great-grandfathe 
 and the contents of his contents and all his episodes— a) 
 sitting waiting one inside the other. Are there not thei 
 here embodied in thy bridegroom — this is a point, dea 
 bride, that cannot be made too intelligible to you — al 
 
153 JEAN PAUL BICHTER. 
 
 religious sects, excepting tlie Preadamites, but including 
 the Adamites, and all giants, the great Christopher him- 
 self among them — every individual of every nation of all 
 the earth — all the shiploads of negroes destined for 
 America, and the packets marked with red containing 
 the soldiers promised by England to Anspach and 
 Bayreutli ? Eve, am I not, as I stand here before you, 
 a whole Jews'-quarter, a Louvre of all the crowned 
 heads of the earth, since I can bring them all into exist- 
 ence if 1 please, and if I am not induced by this first 
 head of my discourse to refrain from doing so ? You 
 will admire me, and yet laugh at me at the same time, 
 if you but look at me well, lay your hand on my 
 shoulder, and say to yourself, 'Now in this man and 
 ]Drotoplast are contained all mankind, all the learned 
 faculties, all the schools of philosophy, and of sewing and 
 spinning, cheek by jowl, in peace and harmony, the 
 higjiest and noblest royal families and princely houses, 
 all free imperial orders of knighthood, packed higgledy- 
 piggledy with their vassals, cottiers and tenants, mon- 
 asteries and nunneries next door to each other, baiTacks 
 and members of Parliament, to say nothing of cathedral 
 chapters, with all their provosts, deans, priors, sub- 
 priors, and canons !' What a man ! What an Anak ! 
 you will add. You are right, dear ; I am indeed the 
 very nest-dollar of the human coin-cabinet, the universal 
 court of assembly of all judicatures, with all the mem- 
 bers of all assemblies, not one out of its place, the walk- 
 ing corpus juris of all civil, canon, criminal, feudal, and 
 municipal law. 1 wish I could just let you see Cain, 
 who, if head second of this discourse should determine 
 me, would be our first offshoot and sucker, our Prince 
 of Wales, Calabria, Asturias, and the Brazils. You 
 would see, if he were transparent — as I believe him to 
 
SATIEICAL. 15 
 
 be — how lie contains all the rest, one inside the other 
 like beer-glasses — all oecumenical councils, inquisitions 
 and propagandas, and the devil and his grandmotlier 
 " Bat, loveliest, thou didst not writedown any of th; 
 scientia media before thy fall, as I did, and consequent]; 
 thou starest into the futui-e as blind as a bat. 1, how 
 ever, who see into it quite clearly, am enabled by m; 
 chrestomathy to perceive that where other men bege 
 perhaps some ten fools, 1 shall beget whole millions o 
 tens and units into the bargain, seeing that the Bohe 
 inians, Parisians, Vienese, Leipzigers, Bayreuthere 
 Hofians, Dublinese, Kuhschnappelers (and their wive 
 and daughters over and above) have all got to come int 
 existence through me, and that in every million of thee 
 there will always be at least five hundred who neithe 
 liave nor will listen to reason. Duenna, as yet yoi 
 know little of the human race, but two in fact, for th 
 serpent is not one ; but 1 know what sort of a race 
 am going to produce, and that in opening my limbu 
 infantum I open at the same time a Bedlam. B^ 
 lieaven ! I weep and lament when 1 merely peep i: 
 between the leaves of the centuries in their long course 
 and see nothing there but gouts of gore and congeries o 
 idiots — when I think of the trouble and pain to b 
 undergone before a century shall learn to write a legibl 
 hand, before poor humanity gets through its dame' 
 school, and private tutors, and French governesses, so ast 
 be fit for Latin grammar schools, public schools, Jesiii 
 seminaries, and next for fencing classes, dancing classes 
 dogmatical and clinical courses. By old Harry ! I fee 
 hot. Nobody will think of you as the brood hen of th 
 coming flock of starlings, . . . not you, my little Eve 
 but your husband will get all the blame, who shouL 
 have known better and rather begotten notliing tha 
 
154 JEAN PAUL EICHTER. 
 
 sueh a rabble of thieves and robbers, crowned emperors 
 on the Koman throne and vicegerents on the Roman 
 chair, the former of whom will call themselves after 
 Antonius and Caesar, the latter after Christus and 
 Petrus, and among whom there are men whose thrones 
 shall be Liineburg torture chairs for the human race, if 
 not the converse of a Place de Greve, where the masses 
 shall be put to death, and the single individual feted 
 and amused, and I shall be taken to task on account of 
 Eorgia, Pizarro, St. Dominic, and Potemkin. Even 
 supposing 1 should manage to evade being blamed for 
 black exceptions such as these, I should be obliged to 
 admit that my descendants really cannot get through the 
 space of half an hour without either thinking or doing 
 something foolish ; that the war of giants, waged in 
 them by their passions, is never broken by a peace, 
 seldom even by a truce ; that the greatest of all man's 
 faults is that he has such a number of little ones ; that 
 his conscience serves for scarcely anything but hating 
 his neighbors and being morbidly sensitive to their 
 transgressions ; that he never leaves ofE evil ways till he 
 is on his death-bed ; that he learns and loves the lan- 
 guage of virtue, but is at enmity with the virtuous, just 
 as the English employ French-language teachers, though 
 they detest the French themselves. Eve, Eve, we shall 
 have little to congratulate ourselves upon if we marry. 
 Adam means in the original ' red earth,' and traly my 
 cheeks will consist entirely thereof, and will blush scarlet 
 at the mere thought of the indescribable and unparalleled 
 conceit and vanity of our great-grandchildren, increasing 
 as the centuries go on. Nobody will tweak himself by the 
 nose — unless perhaps when he is shaving. Critics will 
 set themselves up above authors, authors above critics. 
 Ileimlicher von Blaise will give his hand to be kissed by 
 
SATIRICAL. 15 
 
 orphans ; ladies tlieirs to be kissed by all and sundry 
 mighty ones the embroidered hems of their garments 
 Eve,- 1 had only got as far on with my prophetic extraci 
 from the world's history as the sixth century, when yo 
 bit the apple under the tree, and 1, like a fool, did as yo 
 did, and everything slipped out of my head. God onl 
 knows what sort of a set the fools and foolesses of th 
 subsequent centuries may turn out to be. 
 
 " Virgin, wilt thou rrow put into action thy Sternocle'i 
 domastoideum, as Sommering styles the muscle which nod 
 the head, and so express your ' Yes ' when I put to you th 
 question, ' Wilt thon have the marriage-preacher to th 
 wedded husband ? ' 
 
 "You will no doubt reply, 'Let us hear the secon 
 head of the discourse, in which the subject is con 
 sidered from another point of view.' And indeed 
 dearly beloved, we had almost forgotten that w 
 must proceed to the second place, and consider the reason 
 which may persuade first parents to become such, am 
 to marry, and serve Destiny in the capacity of sewin; 
 and spinning machines of linseed, hemp, flax, and tow 
 to be wound by her in endless networks and coils aroun^ 
 the earthly sphere. My strongest reason, and 1 true 
 yours also, is the thought of the Day of Judgment 
 For, in the event of our becoming the entrepreneurs o 
 the human race, 1 shall see all my descendants, whe: 
 they ascend from the calcined earth like a vapor at th 
 last day into the nearest planet, and fall into order fo 
 the last review. And aniong this harvest of children an^ 
 grandchildren I shall hit upon a few sensible people wit' 
 whom one may be able to exchange a rational word or tw 
 —men whose lives were passed, as well as lost, amid thun 
 der and lightning (as, according to the Romans, thos 
 whom the gods loved were killed by lightning), and wh. 
 
156 JEAN PAUL RICHTBB. 
 
 never closed tlieir eyes or their ears, however wild the 
 storm. I see the four heathen evangelists among them too 
 — Socrates, Cato, Epictetus, and Antonius — men who 
 went through the world using their voices, like fire-engine 
 pipes two hundred feet long, to save people from being 
 burnt out of house and home by the fire of their own 
 passions, sluicing them all over with pure, cold Alp- 
 water. And there can be no doubt, after all, "that I 
 may really be the arch-papa and you the arch-mamma 
 of some very great and celebrated people, that is to say, 
 if we choose. 1 tell you, Eve, I have it here in black 
 and white among my excerpts and collectanea that 1 
 shall be the forefather, ancestor, and Bethlehem of an 
 Aristotle, Plato, Shakespeare, Wewton, Eonsseau, 
 Goethe, Kant, Leibnitz — people, take them for all in all, 
 who are as able thinkers as their protoplast himself, if 
 not abler. Eve, thou active and important member of 
 the fruit-bearing joint-stock company, ... I assure 
 you I expect to pass a few hours of exquisite enjoyment, 
 when on that neighboring star I survey in a cursory 
 manner that classic concourse newly risen from the dead, 
 and at length kneel down and cry, ' Good-morning, my 
 children ! ' Such of you as are Jews were wont to utter 
 an ejaculatory prayer when ye met a wise man ; but 
 what such utterance would suffice for me, now that I 
 behold all the wise and all the faculties at once, all of 
 them my own blood relations too, who, amid the wolfish 
 hunger of their desires, have steadfastly refrained from 
 forbidden apples, pears, and pine-apples, . and, deep as 
 their thirst for wisdom might be, committed no 
 orchard-robbery on the tree of knowledge, though their 
 first parents seized upon the forbidden fruit, although 
 they had never known what hunger was, and upon the 
 tree of knowledge, although they possessed all knowl- 
 
SATIRICAL. 157 
 
 edge, except knowledge of the serpent nature. And 
 then I shall arise from the ground, pass into the angelic 
 crowd, fall on the bosom of some distinguished descend- 
 ant, and, throwing my arms around him, say, ' Thoa 
 true, good, contented-minded, gentle son ! If I could 
 just have shown thee only, sitting in thy brood-cell, to 
 my Eve, the queen-bee of this great swarm here present, 
 at the time when I was delivering the second head of 
 my marriage sermon, 1 am sure she would haA'e listened 
 to reason and given a favorable answer. ' " 
 
XI 7. 
 
 CHARITY. 
 
 212. GKOWTH or COMPASSIOH'. 
 
 The last and best fruit, wliicli ripens late in a soul 
 ever warm, is tenderness toward the hard, patience 
 with the impatient, kindly feeling for the selfish, and 
 philanthropy toward the misanthropic. 
 
 213. SYMPATHY. 
 
 Ah ! what a cast-iron sort of fellow were "he who 
 should not soothe and comfort with coohng, healing 
 touch (had he the power) a heart breaking with anguish, 
 a face whereon the worm of suffering was ploughing its 
 tortuous, track ! At the same time, where emotion is 
 concerned, the memory of past errors is not the smallest 
 safeguard against new ones. 
 
 214. HATRED BLINDS FS TO GOOD QUALCTIES. 
 
 We hate as if the object of our hatred had never pos- 
 sessed any virtues, or inclination to them — neither pity 
 nor truthfulness, love of • the young, one single good 
 hour, anything whatever. In brief, since it is with the 
 individuality of the person whose punishment we are 
 decreeing that we are angry (not with its characteristic 
 of the moment), we make him out to be a wholly wicked 
 being. Yet such a being is not conceivable. The voice 
 of conscience speaking in that being would be of itself 
 one goodness in him, even though it spoke in vain ; the 
 
CHARITY. 159 
 
 pain of tliat conscience would be another ; each joy and 
 each impulse of his life another. 
 
 215. TOO HAET) ON VANITY. 
 
 The vain man, and still more the vain woman, hate 
 vain persons much too violently ; for such persons, aftei 
 all, are more diseased in the head than in the will, ] 
 can here cheerfully appeal to every thinking reader, 
 whether he ever, even when he was going about with an 
 uncommonly vain feeling, remembers to have detected 
 any deep qualms of conscience or discords in himself, 
 which, however, were never wanting when he lied verji 
 much or was too hard. Much rather has he, on such 
 occasions, experienced an uncommonly agreeable rocking 
 of his inner man in the cradle of state. Hence a vain 
 man is as hard to cure as a gambler. 
 
 216. LOVING THOSE WHO WILL WEEP FOE US WHEN DEAD. 
 
 Even by a love and a praise in a person's absence we 
 may be won ; how much more, then, if both are thrown 
 to us as farewell kisses after the ascent to Heaven ! 
 Therefore the idea of the future funeral procession 
 behind my gay, richly decorated dust, onion, and relic 
 box, is only another incentive, not only to drug but alsc 
 to absolve myself, for when older we are less missed. 
 And even you, who so seldom hang us, or drive us all tc 
 the devil, I mean, how seldom soever the tempest oi 
 anger sours the beer-barrel of your breast ! Even yon 
 have no more efScaeious morsel of white chalk, no better 
 oleum iartariper deliquium, with which you can sweeter 
 your internal fluids, than the thought how we shall al] 
 turn pale ronnd your death-bed, and be dumb at youi 
 grave-mound, and how none will forget you ! I can- 
 not possibly believe that there exists one being who, when 
 
160 JEAN PAUL KICHT£K. 
 
 death draws liim into the diving-bell of the grave, -will 
 not leave one weeping eye, one bending head behind, and 
 therefore each one can love the soul which will some time 
 weep for him. 
 
 217. HOW TO GET BID OF HATEED. 
 
 I have an admirable sweetener at all times in readiness 
 to apply when a sinner embitters my senses. 1 take 
 him, and (like a victorious enemy) strip all the clothes 
 oil him, not leaving him so much as his hat or his wig. 
 "When once I've got him standing there before me, cold 
 and wretched as any corpse (I niean, of course, in imag- 
 ination), I begin to feel sorry for the scoundrel. But 
 this is not enough. I have got to sweeten myself a "good 
 deal more than this ; BO 1 proceed to slit him up with t 
 long, slicing cut from top to bottom into three cavities 
 (as if he were a carp), so that I can see his heart and 
 brain pulsating. The mere sight of a red human heart 
 (Danaid's bucket for happiness — safe storehouse of so 
 many a sorrow) makes my own soft and heavy ; and I 
 have often not forgiven a street robber till the professor 
 has been showing us his heart and brain in the anatomi- 
 cal theatre. " Thou unhappy, sorrowful heart," I have 
 always found myself thinking, with deep, sympathetic 
 emotion, " how niany a blood-billow has gone surging 
 through thee, glowing and freezing in the same 
 moment." But if all this process failed to have its 
 effect, 1 should proceed to extremities, and smite my 
 enemy dead ; then take the naked, fluttering, trem- 
 bling soul — like an evening moth — out of its brain- 
 chamber chrysalis, and, holding up the quivering night- 
 creature between my forefinger and thumb, gaze at it 
 without a trace of rancor left in me. 
 
XY. 
 
 TIME. 
 
 218. OLD TEAE. 
 
 Akd now twelve o'clock struck, and 1T94, year of war 
 and tumult, fell, with all its rivers of blood, into the 
 ocean of eternity ; the booming after-tone of the bell 
 seemed to say to me, " N'ow has Destiny, with the 
 twelfth stroke of her hammer, knocked down the old 
 year to you, poor perishing mortals, at her auction of 
 minutes. ' ' 
 
 219. NEW YEAK AND NEW HOPE. 
 
 Up to twelve o'clock at night, and until the thirty- 
 first day of the twelfth month, the wintry, nocturnal 
 idea of dissolution and decay oppresses us ; but a§ soon 
 as it is one in the morning, and the first of January, a 
 morning breeze, speaking of new life, moves away the 
 clouds which were lying over our souls, and we begin to 
 look for the dark, pure, morning blue, the rising of the 
 star of morning and of spring. 
 
 220. IMPEEISHABLE DATS. 
 
 Childhood — ah yes, every age — often leaves behind in 
 our hearts imperishable days, which every other heart 
 had forgotten : so did this day never fade from 
 Albano's. Sometimes a child's-day is at once made 
 immortal by a clearer glimpse of consciousness ; in chil- 
 dren, especially such as Zesana, the spiritual eye turns 
 far earlier and more sharply upon the world within the 
 breast than they show or we imagine. 
 
163 JEAlf PAUL EICHTEB. 
 
 221. THE OLD man's THOUGHT OF CHILDHOOD. 
 
 But if we now, even in tlie noonday liours of life, 
 think and sigh, how much more at evening, when man 
 folds np his flower-leaves and becomes undistiuguishable 
 like other flowers — ^at evening, when we stand low in the 
 western horizon and go out — then, when we turn 
 round, and survey the sliort road strewed with trampled- 
 out hopes — oh ! then, how much more sweetly will it 
 not look upon us — the garden of childhood, Ij'ing in 
 the east, low down near the place of our rising, and still 
 suffused with an old, pale redness — how much more 
 magically will it gleam on us, and yet how much more 
 wiU it affect us to tenderness ! And thereupon man 
 lays himself down on the earth not far fi'om the grave, 
 and hopes here below no more. 
 
 222. THE NEW YEAE. 
 
 The distant new year's music flowed around me still. 
 I felt much happier, and far more tender ; I saw the 
 coming sorrows in the new-born year, but they wore 
 such lovely masks that they were more like sorrows that 
 are i^o^st, or like the music around me — just as the rain 
 which falls through the great caverns in the Derbyshire 
 hills sounds in the distance like music. But when 1 
 looked around me, and saw the v/hite earth shining hke 
 a white sun, and the silent deep blue sphere all round, like 
 a household circle of one great family — and as the music, 
 like lovelier sighs, accompanied my thoughts — as 1 fixed 
 my gaze, with grateful heart, upon the starry sky where 
 all these thousands of steadfast witnesses of the beautiful 
 moments — when I thought of the men asleep all round 
 me, and wished that they might all be hapjwer when they 
 opened their eyes in the morning — and when I thought 
 of those awake under me, whose slumbei;y;ig souls stood 
 
TIME. 1 
 
 in the need of such a wish, — my heart, oppressed by t 
 music and by the night, grew heavy and grew full, ai 
 the blue sky, the glittering moon, and the sparklii 
 snow-lieight all melted into one great floating shimme 
 And in the shimmer and amid the music 1 heard voic 
 of mj friends and dear fellow-creatures tenderly a: 
 anxiously wishing their new year's wishes. Th« 
 touched my heart so deeply that I could but bare 
 think my own. " Oh ! may you all be happy all i\ 
 years of your lives." 
 
 223. EIVEE OF TIME. 
 
 In our souls (as in the world without us) sadness ai 
 exaltation were strangely blent : the music on the bai 
 came and went — tones and stars rose and fell. TJ 
 vault of heaven showed in the Ehine like some shattert 
 bell, and np above us the dome of the temple where 
 dwelleth Eternity lay in calm and motionless rest, wil 
 all its unchanging suns. From the eastward the sprir 
 breathed upon us, and the tree skeletons in the chnrcl 
 yard of the winter felt the presage of a near resurrectioi 
 Of a sudden Victor said, " It feels to me as though tl 
 river here were the stream of Time — our fluctuating li: 
 is carried along upon the waves of both toward tl 
 midnight." 
 
 The heart is made of heavy earth, and therefore 
 cannot long endure such moments. 1 passed on to thos 
 sweeter seasons in which the full, tear-in toxicatod hea 
 neither can nor will do aught but simply weep, 
 had not the courage to drag my dear Yictor down froj 
 the sublime region in which he was to my trifling pett 
 nesses, but 1 asked liim to remain beside me for a litt' 
 time in this stillness, which lay so silently upon the dar 
 stream as it went flowing toward midnight and the soutl 
 
164 JEAX PAUL RICHTER. 
 
 Then 1 leant and pressed myself fondly to Lis side, and 
 my little tears fell unseen into the great river, as though 
 it had been the great stream of Time itself, into which 
 all eyes drop their tears, and so many thousand hearts 
 tlieir blood-drops — for all which it neither swells nor 
 flows the faster. 
 
 How straight and immovable the little light within us 
 burns amid the blasts of Nature's storm ! Everything 
 around me contends and clashes together with gigantic 
 might. The stream seizes upon the islands and the chffs 
 — the night- wind comes upon the river, and stalks across 
 it, thrusting its wavelets back, and wages its strife with 
 the forests — even up there in the tranquil blue, worlds 
 are working against worlds- — the eternal, endless mights 
 flowing and rushing, like rivers, one against another, 
 they come together in whirl and roar — and on the face 
 of that eternal whirl the little worlds float eddying round 
 the sun-vortex ; nay, those shimmering constellations 
 themselves rising zenithward with that grand and gentle 
 peace and calm — what are they but mountain ranges of 
 raging sun-volcanoes, stretching into infinity beyond the 
 reach of mind to follow ? And yet the human spirit hes 
 at rest amid this storm, peaceful as a quiet moon above 
 a windy night. In me, at this moment, all is gentle 
 peace. 1 see my own little life-brook running by me, 
 falling, with all the rest, into the river of Time. The 
 clear-eyed soul looks through the raging blood-rivers ■ 
 which are flowing round it and through the storms 
 which darken and obscure it, and sees, beyond them all, 
 quiet meadows, gentle, peaceful waters, moon-shimmer, 
 and a lovely, beautiful, tranquil, placid, peaceful angel 
 slowly wandering there. 
 
XYl. 
 IMAGINATION. 
 
 224. INFLUENCE OF SHAKESPEARE. 
 
 When one dips liis head at niglit under water, there 
 is an awful stillness round about him ; into a similar 
 supernatural stillness of the under- world does Shakespeare 
 introdace us. 
 
 225. OUB OWN AGE ALWAYS THE GREATEST. 
 
 Alas ! e^ery one believes himself to stand so precisely 
 and accurately in the zenith of the universe, that, accord- 
 ing to his- calculation, all suns and nations must culminate 
 over his head ; and he himself, like the countries at the 
 equator, cast no shadow save into himself alone. 
 
 226. SLEj;p. 
 
 Then the Goddess of Peace took from the God of 
 Sleep his poppy garland, and twined it into 'her own 
 olive wreath, and led the v\-edded pair, garlanded and 
 reconciled, hand in hand into the glittering, gleaming 
 ice-fields of the land of dreams — the magic shadowy 
 background of the noisy, jarring, shifting day — our 
 camera obseura full of moving miniature pictures of a 
 world all dwarfed, in which man, like the Creator, 
 dwells alone with his own ci-eations. 
 
 227. DEEAM3. 
 
 Thus does man sleep at the gate behind which the 
 dreams are barred ; but although his dreams are but a 
 step or two — a minute or two — within that gate, he cannot 
 
166 JEAN PAUL JIICHTEK. 
 
 tell wliat dreams await him at its opening ; whether in 
 the brief, unconscious night beasts of prey with glaring 
 eyes are lying in wait to dash upon him, or smiling chil- 
 dren to come trooping round him in their play ; nor if, 
 when the cloudy shapes beyond that mystic door come 
 about him, their clasp is to be the fond embrace of love 
 or the murderous clutch of death. 
 
 228. THE FINEST WAYS OF DYING. 
 
 Albano once disputed with the Vienna gentleman, 
 who had long since let himself down from a school- 
 master to a schoolmate, about the finest ways of dying, 
 and, in opposition to the tender Falterle, who declared 
 himself in favor of the sleeping-potion, declared himself 
 on HoquairoFs side, even with the stronger addition : 
 " Pie should like best of all to stand on the top of a high 
 tower and draw the lighnting on his head!" In this 
 latter article he shows the high feeling of the ancients, 
 who held death by lightning to be no damnation, but a 
 deification ; but might not physical causes also have had 
 something to do with it, for his elbows and his hair often 
 flashed out, in the dark, electric fire, and more than once 
 a holy circle streamed out round his head even in the 
 cradle ? 
 
 229. LEVITATION. 
 
 Whence comes it that these bodily wings lift us like 
 spiritual ones ? Whence had Albano this irrepressible 
 longing for heights, for the slater's weaver-shuttle, for 
 mountain-peaks, for the balloon — just as if these were 
 helpers out of bed to the prisoners of this low earth- 
 couch ? Ah, thou dear deluded one ! Thy soul, still 
 covered with its chrysalis shell, confounds as yet the 
 horizon of the eye with the horizon of the heart, and 
 outer elevation with inner, and soars through the phys- 
 
IMAGINATIOlir. 107 
 
 ical heaven after the ideal one ! For the same power 
 which in the presence of great thoughts hfts our head and 
 our body and expands the chest, raises the body also even 
 with the dark yearning after greatness, and the chrysalis 
 swells with the beating wings of the Psyche ; yes, it must 
 needs be, that by the same band wherewith the soul 
 draws up the body, the body also can lift up the soul. 
 
 230. LIVING IN A STATE OF FEAE. 
 
 According to Borreux, the engineer, literally only 
 every thousandth shot from the small-arms hits. So is 
 it in all cases : fear death, and then there stand flower- 
 pots ready to fall from chamber-windows, lightnings 
 from the blue sky, air-guns going off, polypuses in the 
 heart, mad dogs, robbers, every gash in the finger, aqua 
 toffana, proud flesh, etc. — in short, all nature — that ever- 
 going, crushing cochineal-mill — stands with innumerable 
 open scissors of fate round about thee, and thou hast 
 no consolation, save this, that — nevertheless people 
 grow eighty years old. Fear impoverishment : then fire, 
 flood, famine, and war, banditti and revolutions set up- 
 on thee with greedy claws and fangs ; and yet, thou rich 
 man ! the poor man, creeping along under the same 
 birds of prey, becomes at last as rich as thou. March, 
 therefoi'e, boldly througli the slumbering lion-herd of 
 dangers, lying on the right and left, and go up to the 
 fountain, only do not wantonly Avake them up ; of course 
 a hell-god drags down individuals who feared nothing ; 
 but so, too, does a higher God draw up individuals 
 who expected nothing ; and fear and hope are swallowed 
 in one common night. 
 
 231. ON DEATH. 
 
 We should all think of death as a less hideous object, 
 if it simply untenaiited our bodies of a spirit, without 
 
168 JEAN PAUL EICHTER. 
 
 corrupting tliem ; secondly, if the grief which we ex- 
 perience at the spectacle of our friends' graves were not 
 by some confusion of the mind blended with the image 
 of our own ; thirdly, if we had not in this life seated 
 ourselves in a warm domestic nest, which we are unwill- 
 ing to quit for the cold blue regions of the unfathomable 
 heavens ; finally, if death were denied to us. Once in 
 dreams 1 saw a human being of heavenly intellectual 
 faculties, and his aspirations were heavenly ; but he was 
 chained (methought) eternally to the earth. The im- 
 mortal old man had five great wounds in his happiness — 
 five worms that gnawed forever at his heart : he was 
 unhappy in spring-time, because that is a season of hope, 
 and rich with phantoms of far happier days than any 
 wliich this aceldama of earth can i-ealize. He was un- 
 happy at the sound of music, which dilates the heart of 
 man into its whole capacity for the, infinite, and he cried 
 aloud, " A.way, away ! thou speakest of things which 
 throughout my endless life I have found not, and shall 
 not find !" He was unhaj)py at the remembrance of 
 earthly affections and dissevered hearts ; for love is a 
 plant which may bud in this life, but it must flourish in 
 another. He was unhappy at the glorious spectacle of 
 the starry host, and ejaculated forever in his heart, " So, 
 then, I am parted from you to all eternity by an impassa- 
 ble abyss : the great imi verse of suns is above, below, 
 and round about me ; but I am chained to a little ball of 
 dust and ashes." He was unhappy before the great 
 ideas of virtue, of truth, and of God, because he 
 knew how feeble are the approximations to them which 
 a son of earth can make. But this was a dream : 
 God be thanked, that in reality there is no craving and 
 asking eye directed upward to heaven, to which death 
 will not one d;iy bring answer ! 
 
IMAGINATIONS-. ICfl 
 
 232. DEEAM ON THE DEATH OF A MOTHER EOLLOAVING 
 THAT OF HEE HUSBAND. 
 
 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 oi 
 tlie 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 ]3asses by the eternal World 
 of the Blest, whose offcast husk sinks into its clods, 
 and therefore it is that in the spring poor mortals ex- 
 perience such a profound longing, so powerful a pre- 
 sentiment, and so many haunting recollections of theii 
 lost beloved. After the voice, all the blest stepped for- 
 ward on the shore of the Supernal Isle, and each one 
 sought on the wan earth the heart v/hich had remem- 
 bered 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 
 
170 JEAN PAUL KICHTEK. 
 
 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 failing 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 yom- 
 parents, after the same sufferings, should now have the 
 same joys ? that now, after their winter of life, an ever- 
 lasting 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. ' ' 
 
 233. DEEAM OF A FEVEE PATIENT. 
 
 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 distin- 
 guished ; gazed timidly up to the sky, full of stars, which 
 
IMAGINATION. 171 
 
 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 di-eamed this dream : He 
 was standing at the window looking out into the church- 
 yard ; 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 1 will tap on thy heart with it." The 
 skeleton, thus piled together, now looked for him who 
 
172 JEAN PAUL KICHTEE. 
 
 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, toward 
 him. But as he came nearer his pale bones grew 
 redder, and vapors floated woollj round his haggard 
 form. Flowers started up from the ground ; and he 
 stood transfigured and without the claram of the grave, 
 hovering above them, and the balm-breath from the 
 fiower-cups wafted him gently on ; and as he came 
 nearer, the scythe and clock were gone, and in his. bony 
 breast ho 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 fly- 
 ing 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 ; lie opened his hot eyes, and — his good 
 wife had hold of his feverish hand, and was standing in 
 room of the angel. 
 
 234. DEEAM ON THE FNIVEKSE. 
 
 Methought my body sank down in ruins, and my inner 
 form stepped out apparelled in light ; and by my side 
 there stood another form which resembled my own, ex- 
 cept that it did not shine like mine, but lightened un- 
 ceasingly. " Two thoughts," said the Form, "are the 
 wings with which 1 move — the thought of Here and the 
 
UtAGISTATION. 173 
 
 thought of There. And behold ! 1 am yonder " — 
 pointing to a distant ■world.- " Come, then, and wait on 
 me with thy thoughts and with thy flight, that 1 may 
 show to thee the universe imder a veil." And I flew 
 along with the Form. In a moment our earth fell back, 
 behind our consuming flight, into an abyss of distance ; 
 a faint gleam only was reflected from the summits of 
 the Cordilleras, and soon there remained nothing visi- 
 ble of our system except a comet, which was travelling 
 from our sim with angelic speed in the direction of 
 Sirius. Our flight now carried us so rapidly through 
 the flocks of solar bodies — flocks past counting unless to 
 their heavenly Shepherd — that scarcely could they ex- 
 pand themselves before us into the magnitude of moons 
 before they sank behind us into pale nebular gleams ; 
 and their planetary earths could not reveal themselves for 
 a moment to the transcendent rapidity of our course. 
 At length Siriiis and all the brotherliood of our constella- 
 tions and the galaxy of our heavens stood far below our 
 feet as a little nebula among other yet more distant 
 nebula. Thus we flew on through the starry wilder- 
 nesses : one heaven after another unfurled its immeasur- 
 able banners before us, and then rolled up behind us : 
 galaxy behind galaxy towered up into solemn altitudes 
 before which the spirit shuddered ; and they stood in 
 long array through which the Infinite Beings might pass 
 in progress. Sometimes the Form that lightened would 
 outfly my weary thoughts, and then it would be seen 
 far off before me like a coruscation among the stars, till 
 suddenly I thought again to myself the thought of 
 There, and then 1 was at its side. But as we were thus 
 swallowed up by one abyss of stars after another, and 
 the heavens above our eyes were not emptier^neither 
 were the heavens below them fuller ; and as suns with- 
 
174 JEAN PAUL EICHTER. 
 
 out intermission fell into the solar ocean like water- 
 spouts of a storm which fall into the ocean of waters 
 — then at length the human heart within me was over- 
 burdened and weary, and yearned after some narrow cell 
 or quiet oratory in this metropolitan cathedral of the 
 universe. And 1 said to the Form at my side, " 
 Spirit ! has then this universe no end ?" And the Form 
 answered and said, " Lo ! it has no beginning." Sud- 
 denly, however, the heavens above us appeared to be 
 emptied, and not a star was seen to twinkle in the 
 mighty abyss — no gleam of light to break the unity of 
 the infinite darkness. The starry hosts behind us had 
 all contracted into an obs,cure nebula, and at length 
 that also had vanished. And 1 thought to myself, " At 
 last the universe has ended ;" and 1 trembled at the 
 thought of the illimitable dungeon of pure, pure dark- 
 ness which here began to imprison the creation ; 1 shud- 
 dered at the dead sea of nothing, in whose unfathomable 
 zone of blackness the jewel of the glittering universe 
 seemed to be set and buried forever ; and through the 
 night in which we moved I saw the Form which still 
 lightened as before, but left all around it unilluminated. 
 Then the Form said to me in my anguish, " creature 
 of little faith ! Look up 1 the most ancient light is com- 
 ing !" I looked and in a moment came a twilight — in 
 the twinkling of an eye a galaxy — and then with a 
 choral burst rushed in all the company of stars. For 
 centuries gray with age, for millennia hoary with antiq- 
 uity had the starry light been on its road to us, and at 
 length out of heights inaccessible to thought it had 
 reached us. Now, then, as through some renovated cen- 
 tury, we flew though new cycles of heavens. At length 
 again a starless interval ; and far longer it endured 
 before the beams of a starry host again had reached us. 
 
IMAGINATIOir. 175 
 
 As we thus advanced forever through an interchange of 
 nights and solar heavens, and as the interval grew still long- 
 er and longer before the last heaven we had quitted con- 
 tracted to a point, and as once we issued suddenly from 
 the middle of thickest night into an Aurora Borealis, 
 the herald of an expiring world, and we found 
 throughout this cycle of solar systems that a day of 
 judgment had indeed arrived ; the suns had sickened, 
 and the planets were heaving — rocking, yawning in con- 
 vulsions, the subterraneous waters of the great deeps 
 were breaking up, and lightnings that were ten di- 
 ameters of a world in length ran along from east to 
 west — from zenith to nadir ; and here and there, where 
 a sun should have been, we saw instead through the 
 misty vapor a gloomy, ashy-leaden corpse of a solar 
 body, that sucked in flames from the perishing world, 
 but gave out neither light nor heat ; and as 1 saw, 
 through a vista which had no end, mountain towering 
 above mountain, and piled up with what seemed glitter- 
 ing snow from the conflict of solar and planetary bodies ; 
 then my spirit bent under the load of the universe, 
 and 1 said to the Form, " Rest, rest, and lead ine no 
 farther : I am too solitary in the creation itself, and in 
 its deserts yet more so ; the full world is great, but the 
 empty world is greater ; and with the universe increase 
 its Zaarahs." Then the Form touched me like the flow- 
 ing of a breath, and spoke more gently than before : 
 " In the presence of God there is no emptiness : above, 
 below, between, and round about the stars, in the dark- 
 ness and in the light, dwelleth the true and very Uni- 
 verse, the sum and fountain of all that is. But thy 
 spirit can bear only earthly images of the unearthly ; 
 now then I cleanse thj: sight with euphrasy ; look 
 forth, and behold the images." Immediately my eyes 
 
176 JEAN PAUL RICHTER. 
 
 were opened ; and I looked, and I saw as it were an 
 interminable sea of light — sea immeasurable, sea un- 
 fathomable, sea without a shore. All spaces between all 
 heavens were filled with happiest light ; and there was a 
 thundering of floods ; and there were seas above seas, 
 and seas below seas ; and 1 saw all the trackless regions 
 that we had voyaged over ; and my eye comprehended 
 the farthest and the nearest ; and darkness had become 
 light, and tlie light darkness : for the deserts and wastes 
 of the creation wei-e now filled with the sea of light, and 
 in this sea the suns floated like ash-gray blossoms, and 
 the planets like black grains of seed. Then my heart 
 comprehended that immortality dwelled in the spaces 
 between the worlds, and death only among the worlds. 
 Upon all the suns there walked iipright shadows in the 
 form of men ; but they were glorified when they quitted 
 these perishable woi-lds, and when they sank into the sea 
 of light ; and the murky planets, I perceived, were but 
 cradles for the infant spirits of the universe of light. 
 
 In the Zaarahs of the creation 1 saw, I heard, 
 I felt the glittering, the echoing, the breathing of life 
 and creative power. The suns were but as spinning- 
 wheels, the planets no more than weavers' shuttles, in 
 relation to the infinite web which composes the veil of 
 Isis ; which veil is hung over the whole creation, and 
 lengthens as aiiy finite being attempts to raise it. And 
 in sight of this immeasurability of life, no sadness could 
 endure ; but only joy that knew no limit, and happy 
 prayers. Eut in the midst of this great vision of the 
 Universe the Form that lightened eternally had become 
 invisible, or had vanished to its home in the unseen world 
 of spirits ; 1 was left alone in the centre of a universe of 
 life, and 1 yearned after some sympathizing being. 
 Suddenly fi-om the starry deeps there came floating 
 
IMAGINATIOK. 177 
 
 through the ocean of light a planetary body ; and npon 
 it there stood a woman whose face was as the face of a 
 Madonna ; and by her side there stood a child, whose 
 countenance varied not, neither was it magnified, as he 
 drew nearer. This child was a king, for 1 saw that he 
 liad a crown upon His head, but the crown was a 
 crown of thorns. Then also 1 perceived that the 
 planetary body was our unhappy ea^-th ; and, as the 
 earth drew near, this child who had come forth from 
 the stariy deeps to comfort me tlu-ew upon me a look of 
 gentlest pity and of unutterable love, so that in my heart 
 I had a sudden rapture of joy such as passes all under- 
 standing ; and 1 awoke in the tumult of my happiness. 
 1 awoke ; but my happiness survived my dream, audi 
 exclaimed, " how beautiful is death, seeing that we die 
 in a world of life and of creation without end !" and I 
 blessed God for my life upon earth, but much more for 
 the life in those unseen depths of the universe which are 
 emptied of all but the Supreme Reality, and where no 
 earthly life nor perishable hope can enter. 
 
 235. THE DEATH OE AN ANGEL. 
 
 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 trem- 
 bling souls away,, his mild eyes melted, and he said, 
 
178 JEAK PAUL KICIITER. 
 
 " All ! I will once die like man, that 1 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 
 ilowers, 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 battle- 
 field, 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 him- 
 self 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 a 
 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 ob- 
 jects which foi'merly 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 
 
IMAGINATION. 17£ 
 
 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 per- 
 ceived this to be only the life of man. In the evening 
 the earthly strength of the Angel declined, and a crush- 
 ing 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 re- 
 flecting-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 raptiire, " 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 passed so far away. 
 But the Angel loved her deceived heart with the love of a 
 
180 JEAN PADL KICHTEU. 
 
 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, whea 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 
 heavens, but like the tranquil moon, who in the midnight 
 silvers the vaporous air, and sinks down unseen behind its 
 dim veil. Death sent his gentle sister Unconsciousness be- 
 fore ; she touched the heart of the betrothed, and chilled 
 the warm countenance ; the flowers of her cheek with- 
 ered ; 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, idrew him close to her heart, and died as she 
 kissed him, and said, "Now 1 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 afiiicted 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 alto- 
 gether 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 
 
IMAGIlS'ATIOK. 181 
 
 battle-field ! O ye poor mortals ! how can your hearts 
 endure it V ' 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 compasses 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 wind- 
 ing, 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 
 dissolation. " 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 unspeakable beloved and departed bride, and 
 looked toward 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 support thee. 
 
182 JEAN PAUL EICHTER. 
 
 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 toward 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 toward 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 hy the angel; and was full of 
 sleep ; and now a radiant heaven opened and over- 
 spread him, and a thousand angels shone around. " Art 
 thou again here, thoii 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 
 word. 
 
XYII. 
 
 KELIGION. 
 
 236. HUMILIATED BY SIGHT OF SIN. 
 
 He could never endure another's humiliation, hut, 
 like every strong soul, felt himself bowed down at the 
 same time with any abasement of humanity. 
 
 237. MADAME GUYON AND LOVE, 
 
 The glorious Guyon — she knows what love is — that 
 godlike affection for the godlike, that losing of self in 
 God, that eternal living and abiding steadfast in one 
 great idea — that growing sanctiiication through love, 
 and that growing love through sanctiiication. 
 
 238. DEATHBED EELIGION. 
 
 Of all the hours of a man's life, his last must be the 
 most indifferent as regards religion, inasmuch as it is the 
 most unfruitful, and no seed can sprout in it which will 
 bear any fruit of action. 
 
 239. SINNEE AND SAINT. 
 
 How different are the sufferings of the sinner and 
 those of the saint ! The former are an eclipse of the 
 moon, by which the dark night becomes still blacker and 
 wilder ; the latter are a solar eclipse, which cools off the 
 hot day and casts a romantic shade, and wherein the 
 nightingales begin to warble. 
 
184 JEAK PAUL KICHTER. 
 
 240. EXALTED MEDITATION. 
 
 I shut myself up to-night ; I hear nothing but my 
 thoughts ; 1 see nothing but' the night-suns which move 
 across the heavens ; 1 forget the weaknesses and the 
 stains of my heart, that I may get the courage to Uft up ' 
 my head as if I were good, as if 1 dwelt on the height 
 where around the great man like constellations he only 
 God, eternity, and virtue. 
 
 241. THE THOUGHT OF DEATH. 
 
 Oh, if every one only had a fixed belief that after fifty 
 years, on an appointed day, Nature would lead him to 
 her place of execution, he would be a different man ; but 
 we all banish the image of death out of our souls, as the 
 Silesians on Lsstare-Sunday cast it out of the cities. The 
 thought and the expectation of death improve us as much 
 as the certainty and the choice of it. 
 
 242. INDESTKUCTIBILITY OF TEUTH. 
 
 To die for the truth is a death not for one's country, 
 but for tlie world ; the truth, like the Medicean Yenus, 
 is handed over in thirty fragments to posterity ; but 
 posterity will fit them together again to form a goddess ; 
 and thy temple, eternal Truth, which now stands half 
 under the earth, undermined by the burials of thy 
 martyrs, will at last rear itself above the earth, and 
 stand, made of iron, with every pillar in a precious 
 grave ! 
 
 243. THE FIFTEEN" MYSTEEIES. 
 
 Catholics hold that there were fifteen mysteries in the 
 life of Christ — five of joy, five of woe, five of glory. I 
 have carefully accompanied our hero through the five 
 joyful mysteries of which the Linden honey-month of 
 his marriage has had to tell. 1 now come with him to 
 
RELIGION-. I'BS 
 
 the five mysteries of woe with which the series of the 
 mysteties of most marriages is— concluded. I trust, 
 however, that his may yet bo found to contain the five 
 of glory also. 
 
 244. THE PEOPHETIC DEW-DEOP. 
 
 A delicate child, pale and prematurely wise, was com- 
 plaining on a hot morning that the poor dew-drop had 
 been too hastily snatched away and not allowed to glitter 
 on the flowers like other happier dew-drops that live the 
 whole night through and sparkle in the moonlight, and 
 through the morning onward to noonday. " The sun," 
 said the child, " has chased them away with his heat, or 
 swallowed them in his wrath." Soon after came rain 
 and a rainbow ; whereupon his father pointed upward : 
 " See," said he, " there stand thy dew-drops gloriously 
 re-set — a glittering jewelry — in the heavens ; and the 
 clownish foot tramples on them no more. By this, my 
 child, thou art taught that what withers upon earth 
 blooms again in heaven." Thus the father spoke, and 
 knew not that he spoke prefiguring words ; for soon 
 after the delicate child with the morning brightness of 
 his early wisdom, was exhaled, like a dew-drop, into 
 heaven. 
 
 245. CONVEESION. 
 
 There is — or comes — to every man who is more solar 
 than planetary, a lofty hour when his heart, amid vio- 
 lent commotions and painful rendings, at last, by a lift- 
 ing up, suddenly turns round toward virtue, in an inde- 
 scribable transition like that in which a man lifts himself 
 over from one system of faith . to another, or, suddenly, 
 from the highest point of wrath to a melting forgiveness 
 of all faults — that lofty hour, the birth hour of the vir- 
 tuous life, is also its sweetest hour, because it is to man 
 
166 JEAK PAUL EICHTER. 
 
 as if Ms oppressive body were taken off from lijm ; 
 because he enjoys the bliss of feeling in himself no con- 
 tradiotions ; because all his chains fall ; hecause lie fears 
 iioihing vwre in the awfully sublinae universe. The 
 spectacle is great, when the angel is born in man ; when, 
 thereafter, on the horizon of earth, the wliole solar 
 warmth of virtue falls upon his heart unobstnicted by a 
 cloud. But poor mortal man, the prisoner man, im- 
 mersed in blood, encased in flesh, soon feels the differ- 
 ence between his raptures and his -powers ; he who was 
 going to subdue the promised land, when its clusters of 
 grapes came to meet him, hesitates, when he has to 
 march against its giants (the passions). 
 
 2i6. GEATITUDE. 
 
 It is easier to communicate an impetus and a rapid flow 
 to the slow-gliding blood of a heavy, sorrowful heart, 
 than to moderate and restrain the billowy, surging, 
 foaming current which rushes through the veins in 
 happiness ; but he could always calm himself, even in 
 the wildest joy, by the thought of the inexhaustible 
 Hand which bestowed it, and that gentle tenderness of 
 heart wherewith our eyes are drooped to earth as we 
 remember the inAasible, eternal Benefactor of all hearts. 
 At sucli a time the heart, softened by thankfulness and 
 by joyful tears, wiU speak its gratitude by at least being 
 kindlier toward all mankind, if in no other way. That 
 fierce, untamed delight, which is what Nemesis avenges, 
 can best be kept within due bounds by this sense of 
 gratitude ; and those who have died of joy would either 
 not have died at all, or would have died of a hetter and 
 lovelier joy, if their hearts had first been softened by a 
 grateful heavenward gaze. 
 
RELIGIOK. 18? 
 
 247. THE MrSTIc's LOVE. 
 
 If every one looked upon others as upon himself, 
 there could be no ardent love. But all love demands an 
 object of infinite worth, and dies of every inexplicable 
 and clearly recognized failure ; it projects its objects out 
 of all and above all, and requires a reciprocal love with- 
 out limits, without any selfishness, without division, 
 without pause, without end. Such an object is verily 
 the divine being, but not fleeting, sinful, changeable 
 man. Therefore must the love-sick heart sink into the 
 Giver Himself of this and of all love, into the fulness 
 of all that is good and beautiful, into the disinterested, 
 unlimited, universal love, and dissolve and revive 
 therein, blest in the alternation of contraction and 
 expansion. Then it looks back upon the world and finds 
 everywhere Grod and His reflection ; the worlds are His 
 deeds ; every pious mau is a word, a look, of the All- 
 loving ; for love to God is the divine thing, and the 
 heart yearns for Him in every heart. 
 
 248. PEOVIDENCE IN HISTOKY. 
 
 There were centuries when humanity was led with 
 bandaged eyes, from one prison to another ; there 
 were other centuries when spectres rattled and over- 
 turned all night long, and in the morning nothing was 
 disturbed ; there can be no other centuries except those 
 in which individuals die, but nations rise, and in which 
 nations decay, but mankind rises ; when mankind itself 
 sinks and falls to ruins, and ends with the scattering of 
 the globe in a dust-cloud . . . what shall console us ? 
 
 A veiled eye behind the bounds of time, an infinite 
 heart beyond the world. There is a higher order of 
 thino-s than we can demonstrate ; there is a Providence 
 
188 JEAlf PAUL lUCHTER. 
 
 in the world's liistory and in every one'is life wliicli 
 reason has the boldness to deny, and which the heart has 
 the boldness to believe ; there must be a Providence, 
 which, according to other niles than we have hitherto 
 assumed, links this confused earth as daughter-land to a 
 higher city of God ; there must be a God, a virtue, and 
 an eternity. 
 
 249. ATHEISM. 
 
 I was suddenly horror-struck at the perception of the 
 poison-power of that vapor which strikes with such suffo- 
 cating fumes to the heart of him who enters the school 
 of Atheistic doctrine. It would cause me less pain to 
 deny immortality than to deny God's existence. In 
 the former case, what I lose is but a world hidden by 
 clouds ; but in the latter, I lose this present world, that 
 is to say, its smi. The whole spiritual universe is 
 shattered and shivered by the hand of Atheism, into 
 innumerable glittering quicksilver globules of individual 
 personalities, running hither and thither at random, 
 coalescing, and parting asunder without unity, cohe- 
 rence, or consistency. In all this wide universe there is 
 none so utterly solitary and alone as a denier of God. 
 With orphaned heart — a heart which has lost the Great 
 Father — he mourns beside the immeasurable corpse of 
 Nature, a corpse no longer animated or held together by 
 the Great Spirit of the Universe — a corpse which grows 
 in its grave ; and by this corjJse he mourns nntil he him- 
 self crumbles and falls away from it into nothingness. 
 The wide earth lies before such an one like the great 
 Egyptian sphinx of stone, half buried in the desert 
 sand ; the immeasurable universe has become for him 
 but the cold iron mask x;pon an eternity which is with- 
 out form and void. • 
 
KELIGION'. 189 
 
 250. POWEE OF RELIGION. 
 
 What, then, is reh'gion ? Prayerfully pronounce the 
 answer. The belief in God. It is not only a sense for 
 the holy, and a belief in the invisible, but a presentiment 
 of it, without which no kingdom of the incomprehensible 
 were conceivable. Efface God from the heart, and every- 
 thing which lies above or below the earth is only a rc- 
 -•curring enlargement of it ; that which is above the earth 
 would become only a higher grade of mechanism and, 
 consequently, earthly. 
 
 If the question be put, What do you mean by the word 
 God ? I will let an old German, Sebastian Frank, 
 answer : " God is an unutterable sigh lying in the 
 depths of the soul. " A. beautiful, profound saying ! 
 But as the unutterable dwells in every soul, it must be 
 manifested to every stranger by words. Let me give 
 to the God-fearing spirit of every age the words of our 
 times, and listen to what it says of religion. 
 
 "Religion is, in the beginning, the learning of God 
 — hence the great name Divine, one learned about God 
 — truly religion is the blessedness arising from a knowl- 
 edge of God. Without God we are lonely throughout 
 eternity ; but if we have God we are more warmly, more 
 intimately, more, steadfastly united than by friendship 
 and love. I am then no longer alone with my spirit. 
 Its great first Friend, the Everlasting, whom it recog- 
 nizes, the inborn Friend of its innermost soul will aban- 
 don it as little as it can abandon itself, and in the midst 
 of the impure or empty whirl of trifles and of sins, on 
 the market-place and the battle-field, I stand with closed 
 breast in which the Almighty and All-holy speaks to 
 me, and reposes before me like a near sun, behind which 
 the outer world lies in darkness. 1 have entered into 
 His church, the temple of the universe, and remain 
 
190 JBAK PATJL EICHTEK. 
 
 therein, blessed, devout, pious, even if the temple 
 shonld become dark, or cold, or undermined by graves. 
 What 1 do, or suffer, is no sacrifice for Him, it counts as 
 little as one made to myself ; I love Him whether I 
 suffer or not. The flame from heaven falls on the altar 
 of sacriiice and consuaies the beast, but the flame and the 
 priest remain. If my great Friend demand something 
 from me the heaven and the earth seem glorious to me, 
 and 1 am happj' as He is ; if He deny me anything, it 
 is a storm on the ocean, but it is spanned by rainbows, 
 and I recognize above it the kindly sun which has no 
 tempestuous sides, but only sunshiny ones. A code of 
 morality only rules bad, unloving souls in order that 
 thej' may flrst become better and afterward good. 
 But the loving contemplation of the soul's first Friend, 
 who abundantly animates those laws, banishes not merely 
 the bad thoughts which conquer, but those also which 
 tempt. As the eagle flies high above the highest 
 mountains, so does true love above struggling duty. 
 
 Where religion is, there both men, and beasts, and the 
 whole world are loved. Every being is a moving tem- 
 ple of the Infinite. Everything earthly purifies and 
 suns itself in the thought of Him ; only one earthly 
 thing remains darkly existent, sin, the true annihi- 
 lation of the soul, or the unceasing Tantalus, Satan. 
 
 One may with some right speak to others about that 
 of which one never speaks to oneself ; for within me Ho 
 is so near me that 1 can with difiiculty separate His word 
 and mine ; for from the second self my own is reflected, 
 and I only find Him who illumines myself as well as the 
 dew-drop. But if it be no error to believe all this, how 
 wilt Thou, God ! appear to those who have overcome 
 the agitations of life in the one still hour of death ; then, 
 when world after world, human being after human 
 
EELIGIOS-. 191 
 
 being, has disappeared, and nothing but the Eternal 
 remains with the mortal-immortal ? He who brings God 
 with him into the last darkest night cannot know what 
 it is to die ; for he beholds the Eternal Star in the 
 boundless distance. 
 
 251. JKAN Paul's fiest lord's suppbe. 
 
 The Lord's Supper is considered in the country, or 
 more properly among good Christians, not merely as a 
 Christian moral toga virilis ; not as in towns among 
 girls, less as the putting on the nun's clothing, than the 
 j-oung lady's ; but it is the highest and first spiritual 
 act, the entrance on citizenship in God's city. It is 
 only now that the former water-baptism becomes a real 
 fire-baptism, the first sacrament rises again in the second 
 glorified and more living. The children of a pastor, 
 who have been eye- and ear -witnesses of the preparation 
 of others so often for this Sunday approach it with the 
 greater reverence. This reverence rose still higher in 
 me on account of the postponement of the ceremony for 
 a year, as my father did not consider that the legal ago 
 of twelve years had completely elapsed by the 31st of 
 March. 
 
 Add now to tliese days of religious warmth, a fire- 
 preacher, as was cur rector, who presented to our souls 
 the awful conditions peculiar to this religious act, that 
 the unrepentant who partakes of the sacrament, like a 
 perjurer, eats his Hell instead of Heaven, and that when 
 a Redeemer and Saint enters into the impure sinner, the 
 saving power of liis presence must be turned into a 
 poisoning power. Warm tears, which he, too, shed with 
 us, were the least which his heartfelt words drew forth 
 from myself and the rest ; burning repentance for the 
 past and passionate vows for a blameless future filled 
 
192 JEAN PAUL EICHTEK. 
 
 our breasts and continued their worlc there after he had 
 ceased to speak. How often did 1 go to the garret 
 before the Confession Saturday, and kneel down to re- 
 pent and atone. And liow sweet it was on the Confes- 
 sion day itself to ask forgiveness with stammering lips 
 and overflowing heart for one's faults from all the dear 
 ones, parents, and teachers, and thus to atone for them 
 and absolve oneself. 
 
 On this evening there came, too, a mild, light, clear 
 heaven of peace over my soul, an imutterable never- 
 returning blessedness in feeling myself quite clean, puri- 
 fied and freed from sin ; in having made with God and 
 man a joyful far-reaching peace, and still, from these 
 evening hours of mild- and warm soul-rest, I looked 
 onward to the heavenly enthusiasm and rapture at the 
 altar next morning. 
 
 O blessed time ! when one has stripped off the unclean 
 past, and stands pure and white, free and fresh in the 
 present, and thus steps forth courageously into the 
 future. But to whom but children can this time return ? 
 In the happy time of childhood this complete peace of 
 soul is more easy to gain, because the circle of sacrifices 
 which it demands is smaller and the sacrifices themselves 
 less important, while the complicated and widened cir- 
 cumstances of later years, either through deficiencies or 
 delay in complete resignation, admit the heavenly rain- 
 bow of peace only incomplete and not rounded to a per- 
 fect circle, as in the time of youth. In the twelfth year 
 enthusiasm can render one perfectly pure, but not so in 
 age. The youth, too, and the maiden with all their 
 fiery impulses have less to overcome in their . circle, and 
 have an easier and shorter way to the highest moral 
 purity, than that which the man and woman have to 
 traverse with their colder and more selfish strivings, 
 
KELIGIOISr. 193 
 
 through the wildorness of troubles, cares, and toils. The 
 true man is, at some period in his earliest time, a 
 diamond of the first water, crystal clear, and without 
 color, then ho becomes one of second quality and gUtters 
 with many colors, until at last he darkens into a colored 
 stone. 
 
 On Sunday morning the boys and girls, adorned for the 
 sacrificial altar, met at the parsonage for the solemn en- 
 trance into the church amid singing and bell-ringing. 
 All this, together with the festive attire and the nose- 
 gays, and the darkened fragrant birch-trees, both at 
 home and in the church, became for the young soul a 
 powerful breeze in its outspread wings, which wei-e 
 already raised and in motion. Even during the long 
 sermon the heart expanded with its fire, and inward 
 struggles were carried on against all thoughts which 
 were worldly or not sufficiently holy. 
 
 At length 1 received the bread from my father and 
 the cup from my purely loved teacher, but the ceremony 
 did not receive any additional value from the thought of 
 what these two were to me ; my heart and mind and 
 soul were devoted alone to heaven, to happiness, and to 
 the reception of the Most Holy, which was to unite itself 
 with my being, and my rapture rose to a physical 
 lightning-feeling of miraculous union. 
 
 I thus left the altar with a clear blue infinite heaven in 
 my heart ; this heaven revealed itself to me by an unlimit- 
 ed, stainless, tender love which I now felt for all, all man- 
 kind. To this day I have preserved within mj heart 
 with loving and youthful freshness the remembrance of 
 the happiness when 1 looked on the church members 
 with love, and took them all to my innermost heart. The 
 maiden companions at the holy altar with their bridal 
 wreaths became not only dearer, but also more holy, to 
 
194 JEAN PAUL RICHTER. 
 
 me as the brides of Christ, and 1 included them all in 
 such a wide, pure love, that even my beloved Katharina 
 as far as 1 can remember was not otherwise loved than 
 the rest. 
 
 The whole earth remained for me throughout the day 
 an unlimited love-repast, and the whole tissue and web 
 of life appeared to me to be an ^olian or ethereal harp 
 played by the breath of love. When even the mis- 
 anthrope can extract an artificial delight from his uni- 
 versal dislike, of what indescribably sweet happiness 
 must be a universal love for all hearts in the beautiful 
 time of youth,, untrammelled and untainted by circum- 
 stances, the horizon of which is still limited, the arms 
 short but the ardor so much the more intense. And 
 shall we not allow ourselves the joy of dreaming out the 
 dream of this overflowing heaven, which would receive 
 us if, in a higher and hotter focus of a second youth, we 
 should grasp a larger spiritual world, loving with liigher 
 power, and should widen the heart from life to life for 
 the All. 
 
 But in inconstant man all else remains more easily 
 on the surface than the purest and the best, as in quick- 
 silver all metals remain at the top — the gold alone sinks. 
 Life, like the sun (according to Goethe), admits no 
 white. After a few days this precious consciousness of 
 innocence deserted me, for I thought that I had sinned 
 in throwing a stone and wrestling with a schoolfellow, 
 though I did neither out of ill-feeling, but in harmless 
 love of play. But eternal thanks are due forever to 
 the all -kind spirit. 
 
 Every holiday is followed by working days, but we go 
 into them newly-clad, and the past holiday leads us on 
 over them to a fresh one. Tliis spring festivity of the 
 liearfc returned later i n the vea.rs of_^Miu±h._but onlv as a 
 
KELIGION. 195 
 
 quiet, serene Sabbath, when for the first time the great 
 old stoical spirits of Plutarch, Epictetus, and Antoninus 
 arose and appeared before me, and freed me from all the 
 pains of this earth and all anger ; but from this one Sab- 
 bath I hope 1 have gathei-ed together a whole year of 
 Sabbaths, or am able, to make up that which may still be 
 wanting. 
 
 252. DEEAM OP A WOELD WITHOUT GOD. 
 
 Once on a summer evening I was lying upon a quiet 
 hillside in the sun. I fell asleep, and dreamed that 1 awoke 
 in a churchyard. The rattle of the wheels of the clock 
 running down as it was striking eleven, had awakened 
 me. 1 looked for the sun in the dai'k and void night 
 sky, for I supposed that some eclipse' was hiding it with 
 the moon. And all the graves were open, and the iron 
 doors of the charnel-house kept opening and shutting, 
 moved by invisible hands. Athv/art the walls shadows 
 went flitting ; but no bodies cast those shadows ; and 
 there were others, too, moving about out in the open air. 
 Within the open coffins there were none now asleep, ex- 
 cept the children. Nothing was in tlip sky but sultry 
 fog, heavy and gray, hanging there in great clammy 
 folds ; and some gigantic shadow closed and closed this 
 fog as in a net, and drew it ever nearer, closer, and 
 hotter. Up overhead I heard the thunder of distant 
 avalanches, and beneath ray feet the first footfalls of a 
 boundless earthquake. The church was heaved and 
 shaken to and fro by two territic discords striving in it, 
 beating in stormy effort to attain harmonious resolution. 
 Now and then a grayish glimmer passed with rapid 
 gleam flittering athwart the windows ; but, whenever 
 this glimmer came, the lead and iron of the frames 
 always melted and ran rolling down. The fog's net 
 
196 JEAK PAUL EICHTEE. 
 
 and the quaking of tlie earth drove me into the temple, 
 past gleaming, glittering basilisks, brooding in poison- 
 nests beside the door. T passed among the shadows, 
 strange and unknown to me ; but thej all bore the 
 impress of the centuries. These shadows stood all 
 grouped about the altar, and their breasts quivered and 
 throbbed — their hreasts, but not their hearts. There was 
 but one of the dead still Ijing on his pillow, and he was 
 one who had but just been buried in the church ; he lay 
 at peace, his breast without a throb, a happy dream 
 upon his smiling face. But now, as 1 came in (I, one of 
 the living), his sleep broke ; he av/oke, and smiled no 
 more ; with painful effort he raised his heavy eyelids^ 
 and there was no eye beneath — and in his beating breast 
 there was no heart, but a deep wound instead. He 
 raised his hands, folded as if for prayer ; but- then his 
 arms shot out and came apart from his poor trunk, the 
 folded hands came off and fell away. Upon the dome 
 above there was inscribed the dial of eternity ; but 
 figures there were none, and the dial itself was its own 
 gnomon ; a great black finger was pointing at it, and the 
 dead strove hard to read the time upon it. 
 
 And at this point a lofty, noble form, beai-ing' the 
 impress of eternal sorrow, came sinking down toward 
 our group, and rested on the altar ; whereupon all the 
 dead cried out, " Christ ! is there no God ?" 
 
 He answered, " There is none." 
 
 At this the dead quivered and trembled ; but now it was 
 not their breasts alone that throbbed ; the quivering ran 
 all through the shadows, so that one by one the shudder 
 shook them into nothingness. And Christ spake on, 
 saying, " I have traversed the worlds, I have risen to the 
 suns, with the milky-ways 1 have passed athwart tlie 
 great waste spaces of the sky ; there is no Grod. And I 
 
RELIGION. 197 
 
 descended to where the very shadow cast by Being dies 
 out and ends, and I gazed out into the gulf beyond, and 
 cried, " Father, where art thou ?" But answer came 
 there none, save the eternal storm which rages on, con- 
 trolled by none ; and toward the west, above the chasm, 
 a gleaming rainbow hung, but there was no sun to give 
 it birth, and so it sank and fell by drops into the gulf. 
 And when I looked up to the boundless universe for the 
 Divine eye, behold, it glared at me from out a _ socke t, 
 empty and bottomless. Over the face of chaos bf65ded 
 eternity, chewing it forever, again and yet again. 
 Shriek on, then, discords, shatter the shadows with your 
 shrieking din, for He is not .'" 
 
 The pale and colorless shades flickered away to 
 nothingness, as frosty fog dissolves before warm breath, 
 and all grew void. Ah ! then the dead children, who 
 had been asleep out in the graves, awoke, and came into 
 the temple, and fell down before the noble form (a sight 
 to rend one's heart), and cried, " Jesus, have we no 
 Father ?" He made answer, with streaming tears, 
 ' ' We are orphans all, both I and ye. We have no 
 Father." 
 
 Then the discords clashed and clanged more harshly 
 yet ; the shivering walls of the temple parted asunder, 
 and the temple and the children sank — the earth and 
 sun sank with them — and the boundless fabric of 
 the universe sank down before us, while high on the 
 summit of immeasurable nature Jesus stood and gazed 
 upon the sinking universe, besprent with thousand suns, 
 and like a mine dug in the face of black eternal night ; 
 the suns being miners' lamps and the milky-way the 
 veins of silvery ore. 
 
 And as he gazed upon the grinding mass of worlds, 
 the wild torch-dance of starry will-o'-the-wisps, and all 
 
198 JJSAK PAUL EICHTEK. 
 
 the coral banks of throbbing hearts — and saw how world 
 by world shook forth its glimmering sonls on to the 
 Ocean of Death — then He, sublime, loftiest of finite 
 beings, raised his ejes toward the nothingness and 
 boundless void, saying, " Oh, dead, dumb, nothingness ! 
 necessity endless and chill ! Oh, mad, unreasoning 
 Chance ! when will ye dash this fabric into atoms, and 
 me too ? Chance, knowest thou — thou knowest not — 
 when thou dost march, hurricane-winged, amid the 
 whirling snow of stars, extinguishing sun after sun upon 
 thy onward way, and when the sparkling dew of con- 
 stellations ceases to gleam, as thou dost pass them by ? 
 How every soul in this great corpse-trench of a universe 
 is utterly alone ? I am alone — none by me — O Father ! 
 Father ! where is that boundless breast of thine, that I 
 may rest upon it ? Alas ! if every soul be its own 
 creator and father, why shall it not be its own destroying 
 angel, too % Is this a man still near me % Wretched 
 being ! That petty life of thine is but the sigh of 
 nature, or the echo of that sigh. Your wavering cloudy 
 forms are but reflections of rays cast by a concave mirror 
 upon the clouds of dust which shroud your world — dust 
 which is dead men's ashes. Look ye down into the 
 chasm athwart the face of which the ash-clouds float and 
 fly. A mist of worlds rises iip from the Ocean of 
 Death ; the future is a gathering cloud, the present a 
 falling vapor. Dost thou see and know thy earth ?" 
 
 Here Christ looked downward, and His eyes grew full 
 of tears, and he spake on, 'and said, " Alas ! I, too, was 
 once of that poor earth ; then I was happy, then 1 stiU 
 possessed my infinite Father, and I could look up from 
 the hills with joy to the boundless heaven, and I could 
 cry even in the bitterness of death, " My Father, take 
 thy son from out this bleeding earthly shell, and lift 
 
KELIGION". 199 
 
 Him to thy heart." Alns ! too happy dwellers upon 
 earth, ye still believe in Him. Tour sun, it may be, is 
 setting at this hour, and amid flowers and brilliance, and 
 ■with tears ye sink upon your knees, and, lifting up your 
 hands in rapturous joy, ye cry each one aloud to the 
 open heavens, " O Father, infinite, eternal, hear ! 
 Thou knowest me in all my littleness, even as thou 
 knowest all things, and Thou seest my wounds and sor- 
 rows, and Thou wilt receive me after death and soothe 
 and heal them all !" Alas ! unhappy souls ! For after 
 death these wounds will not be healed. But when the sad 
 and weary lays down his worn and wounded frame upon 
 the earth to sleep toward a fairer, brighter morn, all truth, 
 goodness and joy — behold ! he awakes amid a howling 
 chaos, in a night endless and everlasting ; and no morning 
 dawns, there is no healing hand, no everlasting Father. 
 mortal, who standest near, if still thou breathest the 
 breath of life, worship and pray to Him, or else thou 
 losest Him forevermore. " 
 
 And I fell down and peered into the shining mass of 
 worlds, and beheld the coils of the great serpent of 
 eternity all twined about those worlds ; these mighty 
 coils began to writhe and rise, and then again they tight- 
 ened and contracted, folding round the universe twice as 
 closely as before ; they wound about all nature in thou- 
 sand folds, and crashed the worlds together, and crushed 
 down the boundless temple to the little churchyard 
 chapel. And all grew narrow, and dark, and terrible. 
 And then a great immeasurable bell began to swing in act 
 to toll the last hour of Time, and shatter the fabric of the 
 universe to countless atoms — when my sleep broke up, 
 and 1 awoke. 
 
 And my soul wept for joy that it could still worship 
 God — my gladness, and my weeping, and my faith — 
 
200 JEAN PAUL lUCHTEIl. 
 
 these were my prayer ! And as I rose the sun was 
 gleaming low in the west, behind the ripe purple ears of 
 corn, and casting in peace the reflection of his evening 
 blushes over the sky to where the little moon was rising 
 clear and cloudless in the east. And between the heaven 
 and the earth a gladsome, short-lived world was spread- 
 ing tiny wings, and, like myself, living in the eternal 
 Father's sight. And from all nature round, on every 
 hand, rose music-tones of peace and joy, a rich, soft, 
 gentle harmony, like the sweet chime of bells at evening 
 pealing far away. 
 
 253. OOlSrVEESATION ON IMMOETALITT. 
 
 T said to Karlson, " Pray, prove to us the spiritual 
 mortality, this soul's death." " M. Karlson needs not do 
 that," answered the stupid Pliylax, " only the asserter 
 must prove." 
 
 " Very well, " 1 said ; "I call proofs objections, but I 
 shall certainly give you only two — first, the proof or 
 objection : the simultaneous decay and destruction of 
 the body and of the soul ; secondly, the absolute impossi- 
 bility of ascertaining the mode of life of a future exist- 
 ence, or, as the chaplain would say, to see into the 
 spiritual world from the sensuous one. ITow, M. 
 Karlson, throw your two bombs into the greatest possible 
 angles, which, according to Hennert, is forty degrees, 
 but according to Bezout, forty-three degrees." 
 
 He aimed well. He showed how the spiritual Dryad 
 flowered, burst, and dispersed with the corporeal bark ; 
 how the noblest impulses are chained to the lead-earth, 
 revolving wheel of the body ; how memory, imagina- 
 tion, and madness only feed on the egg-yolk of the 
 brain ; how bravery and mildness stand in as opposite 
 degree to blood as leeches and Jews ; how, in age, the 
 
EELIGIOISr. 301 
 
 inner and outer man together bend toward the grave, 
 together petrify, together, like metal compositions, slowly 
 cool, and at last together die ! 
 
 He then asked why, with l;he continual experience 
 that every bodily down-bending digs a spiritual wound, 
 and witli this unceasing parallel of body and soul, wo 
 give to the latter, after death, everything which we liave 
 seen annihilated in the former. 
 
 Karlson needed little time or power to prove the un- 
 certainty of the next world. The sun-land behind the 
 hillocks of the God's Acre, behind the pest-cloud of 
 Death, is covered by a complete, an impenetrable dark- 
 ness of twelve inches, or of as many holy nights. He 
 showed, and not badly, what an immense leap beyond 
 all terrestrial analogies and experiences it is, to hope 
 for, i.e. to create, a world, a transcendent Arcadia, a 
 world of which we know neither copy nor original, 
 which wants no less than a form and a name, map and 
 globe, another Vespucius Americus, of which neither 
 chemistry nor astronomy can give us the compounds or 
 the quarters ; a universe of air, on which, from the leaf - 
 stripped, faded sou], a new body will bud forth, i.e. a 
 nothing on which nothing is to embody itself. Oh, my 
 good Karlson, how could your noble soul omit a second 
 world which is already contained in this physical iirst 
 one, like bright crystals in dark earth — namely, the sun- 
 world of Virtue, Truth, and Beauty, glowing in our 
 souls, whose golden vein inexplicably extends its ramifi- 
 cation through the dark, dirty clump of the sensuous 
 world ? 
 
 As spiritual exertions are not bodily ones, but only 
 precede ov follow them, and as every spiritual activity 
 leaves traces, not only in the soul, but also in the body ; 
 must, then, if apoplexy or age destroy corporeal activity, 
 
302 JEAK PAUL BICHTBB. 
 
 — must the soul's fire be therefore quenched ? Is there 
 no difference between tlie soul of a childish old man, and- 
 that of a child ? 
 
 On the whole, I find fewer men than one would 
 imagine who decidedly beheve in, or deny, the exist- 
 ence of a future world. Few dare to deny it, as for 
 them this life would then lose all unity, form, peace, 
 and hope ; few dare to believe it, for they are stai'tled 
 at their own purification and at the destruction of the 
 lessened earth. The majority, according to the prompt- 
 ness of alternating feelings, waver poetically between 
 both beliefs. 
 
 " I have a still stronger • reason," 1 continued, 
 "against emigration to and voyage picturesque througli 
 the planets, because wo carry and lock up a heaven of 
 starry light in our own breasts, for which no dirty earth- 
 ball is clean or large enough. 
 
 " There is an inner, heart-contained spirit- v^orld, which 
 breaks through the dark clouds of the body-world as a 
 warm sun. I mean the inner universe of virtue, ieauty, 
 and truth — three soul-worlds and heavens, whicli are 
 neither parts, nor shoots, nor cuttings, nor copies of the 
 outer one. We are less astonished at the inexplicable 
 existence of these three transcendent heavens, because 
 they are ever floating before us, and because we foolishly 
 imagine we create them, wliile we merely recognize 
 them. After which copy, with what plastic material, 
 and of what, could we create and insert in ourselves this 
 same spirit- world ? Let the atheist ask himself how ho 
 conceived the giant ideal of a God, which he either 
 denies or embodies ? An idea which has not been built 
 upon comparative greatness and degrees, for it is the 
 contrary of every measure and of every created great- 
 ness. In short, the atheist denies the great original of 
 
EELIOION. 203 
 
 the copy. As there are idealists of the outer world who 
 believe that perception makes objects, instead of that 
 objects cause perception, so there are idealists of the 
 inner world', who deduct the heiivg from the seeming, the 
 sound frona the eclio, tlie fact from its appearance ; in- 
 stead of, on the contrary, the seeming from the being, 
 our consciousness from the objects of it. "We mistake 
 our power of analyzing our inner world, for its prefor- 
 mation— i.<?. the genealogist tiiinks himself both origi- 
 nator and founder. This inner universe, which is still 
 more glorious and admirable than the outer one, needs 
 another heaven than the one above us, and a higher 
 world than one a sun now shines upon. Therefore we 
 rightly say, not a second earth or globe, but a second 
 world — another beyond the universe." 
 
 Gione already interrupted me : " And every virt- 
 uous and wise being is in himself a proof of immor- 
 tality." "And every one," added Nadine, quickly, 
 " who sutters innocently." 
 
 "Yes, it is that," said I, with emotion, "which ex- 
 tends our line of life through countless ages. The chord 
 of Virtue, Truth, and JBeauty, taken from the music of 
 the spheres, calls us from this dark oppressive earth, and 
 announces to us the nearness of a more melodious exist- 
 ence. Why, andyrcm whence were these svper-earthly 
 wants and longings created in us, if only, like swallowed 
 diamonds, slowly to cut through our earthly shell. Why 
 was a being endowed with wings of light chained to this 
 dirty clump of earth, if it were to rot in its birth-clod, 
 without ever being freed from it by means of its ethereal 
 wings V 
 
 This discrepancy between our wishes and our circum- 
 stances, the heart and the earth, will remain an enigma, 
 if we are immortal, and would be a blasphemy if we 
 
204 JEAN PAUL lUCIITEU. 
 
 decay. Ah I how coiald the beautiful soul be happy ? 
 Strangers, born on mountains and living in lowland 
 places, pine in an incurable homesickness. We belong 
 to a higher place, and therefore an eternal longing con- 
 sumes us, and every music is our soul's Swiss rans 
 des vaches. In the morning of life, the joys whicli 
 heai'ken to the anxious wishes of our hearts are seen 
 blooming for us in later years. When we have attained 
 these years, we turn on the deceitful spot, and see 
 behind us, pleasure blooming in the strong hopeful 
 youth, and we enjoy instead of our hopes, the recollec- 
 tions of our hopes. Joy in this also resembles the rain- 
 bow, which in the morning shines over evening, and 
 in the evening arches over the east. The eye may reach 
 the light, but the arm is short, and holds but the fruit 
 of the soil." 
 
 " And this proves ?" asked the chaplain. 
 
 " Ifot that we are unhappy, but that we are immortal, 
 and that the second world in us demands and proved a 
 second world beyond us. Oh, how much might not be 
 said of this second life whose commencement is so clearly 
 shown in the first one, and which so strangely doubles 
 us ! Why is virtue too exalted to make us, and, what 
 is more, others (sensually) happy ? Why does the 
 incapability of being useful on earth (as the expression is) 
 increase with a certain higher purity of character, as, 
 according to Ilerschel, there are suns which have no 
 earth? Why is our heart tortured, dried, consumed, 
 and at last broken by a slow burning fever of ceaseless 
 love for an unattainable object, only alleviated by the 
 hope that this consumption, like a physical one, must 
 one day be sheltered and raised by the ice cover of 
 death ?" 
 
 "No," said Gione, with more emotion in her eye 
 
RELIGION. 205 
 
 than in lier voice, " it is not ice, but lightning. "When 
 (Kir heart lies a sacrifice on the altar, iirc from heaven 
 consumes it as a proof that the offering is accepted." 
 
 " I cannot tell you, dearest Victor, how horrible and 
 fearful the eternal snow of annihilating death seemed to 
 me, placed beside the nobie form it should have 
 covered ; how frightful the thought : if Karlson is right, 
 the last day has torn this never happy, innocent soul 
 from the prisons upon the earth to the closer ones 
 beneath it ; man too often carries his errors as his truths 
 only as word arguments, not as feelings. But let the 
 disbeliever of immortality imagine a life of sixty minutes 
 instead of sixty years, and let him try if he carubear to 
 see loved, noble, or wise men only aimless, hour-long air- 
 phantoms, hollow, thin shadows, which fly toward the 
 light and arc consumed by it, and who, without path, 
 trace, or aim, after a short flight dissolve into their former 
 night. No ; even over him steals a supposition of 
 immortality. Else a black cloud would forever hang 
 over his soul, and the earth would quake beneath him 
 when he trod on it, as if he were a Cain. " 
 
 1 continued, but all arguments were poetized into feel- 
 ings. ' ' Yes, if all forests of this earth were pleasure 
 grottoes, all valleys Campan, all islands holy, all fields 
 Elysian, and all eyes sparkling, yes, then — no, even then 
 the Eternal One would have given to our souls the prom- 
 ise of a future life, even in the blessedness of the pres- 
 ent one. But now, O God ! when so many houses are 
 mourning ones, so many fields battle-fields, so many 
 cheeks pale, and when we. pass so many sunken, red, 
 torn, closed eyes — oh, can death be but the last 
 destroying whirlwind ? And when at last, after thou- 
 sand thousand years, our earth is dried up by the sun's 
 heat, and every living sound on its surface silenced, will 
 
20C JEA]Sr PAUL KICHTER. 
 
 an immortal spirit look down on the silent globe, and, 
 gazing on tlie empty hearse moving slowly on, say, 
 ' There the churchyard of humanity flies into the crater 
 of the sun ; on that burning heap many shadows, and 
 dreamers, and wax-figures have wept and bled, but now 
 they are all melted and consumed : fly into the sun, 
 which will also dissolve thee, thou silent desert, with thy 
 swallowed tears, with thy dried-up blood ! ' !No, the 
 crushed worm dares raise himself to his Creator, and 
 say, ' Thou canst not have made me only te suffer ?' " 
 
 " And who gives the worm the right to this demand ?" 
 asked Karlson. 
 
 Giooe answered, gently, '■ The Eternal One Himself, 
 who gives us charity, and who speaks in all our souls to 
 calm us, and who alone has created in us our demands to ' 
 Him and our hope in Him." 
 
 This good sweet word could still not calm all the waves 
 of my excited soul. From a distant house turtle-doves 
 sent after us trembling, soul-felt plaints. About my 
 tear-filled inward eye assembled all those forms whose 
 hearts were without guilt and without joy, who attained 
 no single wish here below, and who, sinking under the 
 frost and snow-storm of fate, only longed, like persons 
 freezing to death, to sleep ; and all those forms who 
 have loved too deeply and lost too much, and whose 
 wounds were never cured until deatli had widened them, 
 like a cracked bell which retains its hollow sound until 
 the crevice is made larger, and the beings nearest me, 
 and many other female ones, whose exquisitely tender 
 souls fate most consecrates to torture, as Narcissus is 
 consecrated to the God of Hell. I also remembered your 
 true remark, that you liad never pronounced the words 
 ^ain and the jpast before a woman, without hearing an 
 almost inaudible sigh at the union of the two words 
 
HELIGION. 207 
 
 from tlie suffering heart ; for -woman, on the narrower 
 Btago of lier plans, witli idealized wishes and desires 
 built on others' worth rather than on her own, has a 
 thousand times more disappointments to suffer than we 
 men. 
 
 The sun sank deeper behind the mountains, and giant 
 shadows, like mighty birds of prey, came coldly down 
 upon us from the eternal snow. I took Karlson's hand 
 in mine, and looked with tearful eyes into his manly, 
 beautiful countenance, and said, " Karlsbn ! on what 
 a blooming, grand world you throw an immeasurable 
 gravestone, which no time can lift ! Are two difficulties, 
 based on the necessary ignorance of man sufficient to over- 
 throw a belief which explains a thousand greater diffi- 
 culties, without which our existence is without aim, our 
 sufferings without explanation, and the holy Trinity in 
 om- breast three furies and three terrible contradic- 
 tions ? A tending God's hand, leading and feeding the 
 inner man (the child of the outer one), teaching him to 
 go and to speak, educating, refining him, is shown in all 
 things, from the shapeless earthworm to the brilliant 
 human face, from the chaotic nations of the primitive 
 ages to the present century, from the first faint pulsation 
 of the invisible heart to its full, bold, throbbing pulse in 
 manhood — and why? That when man stands upright 
 and exalted, a beautiful demigod, even amid the ruins 
 of his old body temple, the club of Death may annihilate 
 the demigod forever ? And on the eternal sea, on 
 which the least drop throws immeasurable rings, on this 
 sea a life-long rising and a life-long falling of the soul 
 sliould have the same termination, namely, the end of 
 all things — annihilation ? And as, from the same cause, 
 the souls of all other worlds must fall and die M'ith ours, 
 and of this shroud and crape-veiled immeasurability 
 
208 JEA.N PAUL EICHTEB. 
 
 nothing remain but the ever-sowing and never-reaping 
 solitary world-spirit, who sees one eternity mourn for 
 another, there can be no aim and no object in the whole 
 spiritual universum, for the purpose of the development 
 of succeeding or successive ephemera is no progress for 
 the vanished ephemera, scarcely even for the last one, 
 which can never exist. And you take for granted all 
 these enigmas and contradictions by which all the strings 
 of creation, not only its harmony, are torn, because two 
 difficulties present themselves to you, which cannot any 
 letter explain mortality. . , . 
 
 "Dearest Karlson, you would bring your eternally 
 jarring discord into this harmony of the spheres ! Sec 
 how calmly the day goes, how grandly the night sets in ; 
 did you not think that our spirit will rise one day from 
 its grave of ashes, when you saw the mild pale moon rise 
 grandly from the crater of Vesuvius ?". . . The sun 
 stood on the mountains, about to plunge into the sea and 
 swim to the new world. iNTadine embraced her sister 
 with emotion, and said, " Oh, we love each other forever 
 and immortally, dearest sister." Karlson accidentally 
 touched the chords of the lyre wliicli he carried ; Gione 
 took it from him with one hand, gave him the other, 
 and said, " Ton are the only one among us who is tor- 
 mented by this melancholy belief — and you deserve to 
 have one so beautiful !" 
 
 This word of concealed love overpowered his long- 
 filled heart, and two burning drops fell from the blinded 
 eyes, and the sun gilded the holy tears, and he said, look- 
 ing toward the mountains, " I can bear no annihilation 
 but my own ; my whole heart is of your opinion, and 
 my head must slowly follow." 
 
RELIGION. 309 
 
 254. EE3IINISCENCES OF THE BEST HOURS OF LIFE FOK 
 THE IIOUK OF DEATH. 
 
 " Give me," said Herder to his son, as he lay in the 
 parched weariness of his Jast illness ; " give me a great 
 thought, that I may quicken myself with it." 
 
 It marks- a strange perversity in human nature, that 
 we are wont to ofEor nothing but images of terror — no 
 stars of cheering light — ^to those who lie imprisoned in 
 the darkness of a sick-bed, when the glitter of the dew 
 of life is waxing gray and dim before them. It is 
 indeed hard that lamentations and emotions are fre- 
 quently vented upon the dying, which would be with- 
 held from the living in all their vigor ; as if the sick 
 patient was to console those in health. There stands no 
 spirit in the closeness of a sick-chamber tx) awaken a 
 cheering smile on that nerveless, colorless coimtenance ; 
 but only confessors, lawyers, and doctors, who order 
 everything, and relatives, who lament at everything. 
 There stands no lofty spirit, elevated above the circum- 
 stance of sorrow, to conduct the prostrate soul of the 
 sufferer, thirsty for the refreshment of joy, back to the 
 old springtide waters of pious recollection, and so to 
 mingle these with the last ecstasies of life as to give the 
 dying man a foreboding of his transition to another state. 
 On the contrary, the death-bed is narrowed into a 
 coffin without a lid. The value of life is enhanced to 
 the departing one by lies which promise cure, or words 
 which proffer consolation ; the bier is represented as a 
 scaffold, the harsh discord of life is trumpeted into the 
 ears, which survive long after the eyes are dead, instead 
 of letting life ebb away like an echo in sounds ever 
 deeper, though fainter. Nevertheless, man has this of 
 good in him, that he recalls the slightest joy which he 
 has shared with a dying pei'son, far rather than a thou- 
 
210 JEAN PAUL RICHTBE. 
 
 sand greater pleasures given to a person in health ; per- 
 haps because, in the latter case, we hope to repeat and 
 redouble our attentions — so little do mortals reflect 
 that every pleasure they give or they receive may be 
 the last. 
 
 Our exit from life would therefore be greatly more 
 painful than our entrance into it, were it not that our 
 good mother Nature had previously mitigated its sufFer- 
 ings by gently bearing her children from one world into 
 another when they are already heavy with sleep. For 
 in the hour before the last she allows a breastplate of 
 indifference toward the survivors to freeze about the 
 heart of the lamented one ; and in the hour immediately 
 preceding dissolution (as we learn from those who have 
 recovered from apparent death, and from the demeanor 
 of many dyiug persons) the brain is, as it were, inun- 
 dated and watered by faint eddies of bliss, comparable 
 to nothing upon earth better than to the ineffable sensa- 
 tions felt by a patient under magnetic treatment. 
 
 We can by no means know how high these sensations 
 of dying may reach, as we have accounts of them from 
 none but those in whom the process has been interrupted ; 
 nor can we ascertain whether it is not these ecstatical 
 transports which exhaust life more than the convulsions 
 of pain, and which loosen the tie of this terrestrial state 
 in some unknown heaven. 
 
 The history of the dying is a serious and prodigious 
 history, but on earth its leaves will never be unrolled. 
 
 In the little village of Heim, Gottreich Hartmann 
 resided with his old father, who was a curate ; and 
 although the old man had wellnigh outlived all those 
 whom he had loved, he was made happy by his son. 
 Gottreich discharged his duties for him in the parish, not 
 
EELIGION. 211 
 
 BO iriueli in aid of liis parent's unflinching vigor, as to 
 satisfy his own energy, and to give his father the ex- 
 quisite gratification of being edified by his child and 
 companion. 
 
 In Gottreich there thrilled a spirit of true poetry ; he 
 was not, like the greater number of poetical young men, 
 a bulbous plant, which, when it has sent forth its own 
 flower, fattens its unseemly fruit underground ; but he 
 was a tree which crowned its variegated blossoms with 
 sweet and beautiful fruits ; and these buds were as yet 
 coiled up from the warmth of the earHest springtide of a 
 poet's life. 
 
 His father had had in his youth a poet's ardor of like 
 intensity, but it was not favored by the times ; for in the 
 last century many a spirit which might have soared was 
 engaged to the pulpit or the law-court, because the old- 
 fashioned middle classes were convinced that their oif- 
 spring would find richer pasture on the meadow and in 
 the valley than on the peaks of the mountain of the 
 Muses. 
 
 Nevertheless, the repressed spirit of a poet, when 
 it cannot exhale itself in creation, recoils but the more 
 closely into the depths of his heart. His unuttered 
 feelings speak in his motions as with a voice, and his 
 actions express his imagery, and in this manner the poet 
 may live as long as the man ; just as the short-lived 
 buttei-fly may last out the long, hard winter in his 
 chrysalis state, if it has not burst its prison in the preced- 
 ing summer. 
 
 Such had been the life of the elder Hartmann ; and 
 yet more beautiful was it because the virginal soul of the 
 poet lives in the offices of religion, as in a nun's cell, 
 and the twin sisters Piety and Poetry are ^7ont to dwell 
 together and stand by one another. 
 
213 JEAN PAUL KIClITEll. 
 
 How beaTitifnl and how pure is the position of God's 
 ministers ! All that is good dwells around them — relig- 
 ion, poetry, and the life of a shepherd of souls ; while 
 other professions oft serve only to choke up this goodly 
 neighborhood. Son and father seemed to live in one 
 another, and on the site of filial and paternal love there 
 arose the structure of a rare and singular friendship. 
 Gottreich not only cheered his father by the now birth of 
 his lost poet's youth, but by the still more beautiful 
 similarity of their faith. In days gone by a minister 
 who sent his son to the public theological schools might 
 expect him to return the sworn antagonist of all that he 
 had himself daily prayed to at the altar in the discharge 
 of his office : the son returned to his father's roof as a 
 missionary sent to convert the heathen, or as an anti- 
 christ. There may have been sorrows of a father, which, 
 though all unspoken, were deeper than a mother's sor. 
 rows. But times are perhaps better now. 
 
 Gottreich, though he entered the high schools with his 
 share of the uppish quibbling of early youth, returned 
 with the faith of his ancestors and of his father. For he 
 had studied under instructors who had taught him to 
 cling rather to the teachings of the old faith than to the 
 ingenious explanations of the commentators, and who 
 had exposed to the light alone what is serviceable to 
 man, as to a plant, and to its outward growth, but not 
 the roots perniciously. Thus the father found again his 
 old Christian -heart sending forth new shoots in the 
 bosom of his Gottreich, and moreover the best justifica- 
 tion of the convictions of his life and of his love. 
 
 If it be pain to us to love and at the same time to con- 
 tradict, to refuse with the head what the heart grants, it 
 is all the sweeter to us to find ourselves and our faith 
 transplanted forward in a younger being. Life is then a 
 
KELIGION'. 213 
 
 beautiful night, in wliicli not one star goes down but 
 another rises in its place. 
 
 Gottreich possessed a paradise, in which ho labored as 
 his father's gardener ; he was at once the wife, the 
 brother, the friend, the all that is to be loved by man, of 
 liis parent. Every Sunday brought him a new pleasure — 
 that of preaching a sermon before his father. He dis- 
 played so much power in his pulpit eloquence that he 
 seemed to labor more for the elevation and edification of 
 liis father than for the enlightenment of the common 
 people ; though he held a maxim, which I take to be far 
 from erroneous, that the highest subjects of intellectual 
 speculation are good' for the people as for children, and 
 that inan can only learn to rise, from the consideration 
 of that which he cann,ot surinoimt. If the eye of the 
 old man was moistened, or if his hands were suddenly 
 folded in an attitude of prayer, the Sunday became the 
 holiest of festiviils ; and many a festival has there been 
 in that quiet little parsonage, whose festivity no one un- 
 derstood and no one perceived. He who ■ looks upon 
 sermon-preaching and sermon -hearing as a dull pleasure, 
 wiU but little understand the zest with which the two 
 friends conversed on discourses delivered, and on those 
 yet to come, as if pulpit-criticism was as engrossing 
 as the criticism of the stage. The approbation and the 
 love of an energetic old man like Hartmann, whose 
 spiritual, limbs had by no means stiffened on the chilly 
 ridge of years, could not but exercise a powerful influ- 
 ence on a young man like Gottreich, who, more tenderly 
 and delicately formed both in body and mind, was wont 
 to shoot forth in loftier and more rapid flame. 
 
 To these two happy men was added a happy woman also. 
 Justa, an orphan, sole mistress of her property, had en- 
 tirely left and sold the trading-house which had beea her 
 
214 JEAN PAUL EIOHTER. 
 
 father's, in the town, and had removed into the tipper 
 part of a good peasant' s cottage, to live entirely in the 
 country. Justa did nothing in the world by halves, but 
 she often did things more than most would deem com- 
 pletely, at least in all that touched her generosity. She 
 had not long resided in the village of Heim, and had 
 seen the meek Gottreich, and listened to some of his 
 springtide sermons, ere she discovered that he had won 
 her heart, filled as it was with the love of virtue ; she 
 nevertheless refused to grant him her hand until the 
 eonclnsion of the great peace, after which they were to 
 be married. She was ever fonder of doing what is diffi- 
 cult than what is easy. 1 wish that it was here the place 
 to tell of the May- time life they led, which seemed to 
 blossom in the low parsonage-house hard by the church- 
 door under Justa's hand ; how she came in the morning 
 from her own cottage, to order matters in the little dwell- 
 ing for the day ; how the evenings were passed in the 
 garden, ornainented with few but pretty flower-beds, 
 and commanding a view of many a well- watered meadow 
 and distant hill, and stars without number ; how these 
 three hearts played into one another, no one of which in 
 this most pure and intimate intercourse knew or f elb any- 
 thing which was not of the fairest ; and how good and 
 gay intention marked the passage of their lives. Every 
 bench was a church chair, all was peaceful and holy, 
 and the firmament above an infinite church dome. 
 
 In many a village and in many a house a true Eden 
 may be hid, which has neither been named nor marked 
 down ; for joy is fond of covering over and concealing 
 her tenderest flowers. Gottreich reposed in such a ful- 
 ness of bliss and love, of poetry and religion, of spring- 
 time, of the past and of the future, that he feared in the 
 bottom of his heart to speak his liaBoines.^ ont_ snvfx in 
 
RELIGIOir. 215 
 
 prayer. In prayer, thought he, man may say all — his 
 happiness and his misery. His father was very happy 
 also ; there came over him a warm old age — no winter 
 night, but a summer evening, without frost or dark- 
 ness, albeit the sun of his life was sank pretty deep 
 below the mound of earth under which his wife was lain 
 down to sleep. 
 
 Nothing recalls the close of life to a nohle-hearted 
 young man so much as precisely the happiest and fairest 
 hours which he passes. Gottreich, in the midst of the 
 united fragrance and beauty of tlie flowers of joy, even 
 with the moming-star of life above him, could not but 
 think on the time when the same should appear to him 
 as the evening star, warning him of sleep. Then said 
 he to himself : " All is now so certain and so clear 
 before me — the beauty and the holiness of life, the 
 splendor of the universe, the Creator, the dignity and 
 the greatness of man's heart, the bright images of eternal 
 truth, the whole starry firmament of ideas, which en- 
 lightens, instructs, and upli olds man ! But when I am 
 grown old, and in the obstruction of death, will not all 
 that now rustles so bloomingly and livingly about me 
 appear gray and dull? Just when man is approaching 
 that lieaven which he has so long contemplated, Deatli 
 holds the telescope inverted before his dim eye, and lets 
 him see only what is empty, distant, shadowy. But is 
 this indeed true ? Shall I be more likely to be right 
 when I only feel and think and hope, with half a life, in- 
 capable of a keen glance or an intense sensation — or am i 
 right now, that my whole heart is warm, that my whole 
 head is clear, and my strength fresh ? I acknowledge 
 that the present is the fittest season, and that precisely 
 because I do acknowledge it to be the fittest. I will 
 then live through this daytime of truth attentively, and 
 
316 JEAN' PAL'L EICHTEK. 
 
 bear it away •with me to the evening dusk, that it may 
 lighten my end." 
 
 In these sweetest May-hours of youth, when heaven 
 and eartla and liis own heart were heating together in 
 harmony, he gave ardent words to his ardent thoughts, 
 and kept them written down under tlie title of ' ' Rem- 
 iniscences of the hest Hours of Life for the Hour of 
 Death.'''' He meant to cheer himself at his last hour 
 with these views of his happy life, and to look back from 
 the glow of the evening to the brightness of the morning 
 of his youth. 
 
 Thus lived these three beings, ever rejoicing more 
 deeply in one another and in their genial happiness, 
 ■when at last the chariots of the struggle and the victories 
 of the holy war* began to roll over the land. 
 
 ISTow Gottreich became another man ; like a young 
 bird of passage, which, though it know nothing of 
 summer climates, frets in its warm cage that it cannot 
 fly away with the older birds of its kind. Tlie active 
 powers of his nature, which had heretofore been the 
 quiet audience of his poetical and oratorical powers, 
 arose ; and it seemed to him as if the spirit of energy, 
 which hitherto had waited itself like the flames of a 
 bituminous soil on the empty air, were now seeking an 
 object to lay hold of. He dared not, however, risk to 
 propose a separation to his father, but he by turns tor- 
 mented and refreshed himself inwardly with the idea of 
 laboring and combating with the rest. To Justa alone 
 he confided his wishes, but she did not give them en- 
 couragement, because she thought the old man's solitude 
 would be too great for him to bear. At last the old 
 
 * The campaign of 1813-14 was the holy war ot Germany, or Frei- 
 iieitskampt', to which Jean Paul here allucles. — Tkanslatob. 
 
RELIGION^. 317 
 
 man himself, inspirited for war by Gottreicli and liis 
 betrothed one, said that his son had better go, tliat he 
 had long desired it, and had only been silent through 
 love for him. He hoped, with God's aid, to be able to 
 discharge his pastoral duties for a twelvemonth, so that 
 he, too, should be doing something for his country. 
 
 Gottreicli departed, trusting to the autumnal strength 
 of liis father's life. lie enlisted as a common soldier, 
 and preached also wherever he was able. The entrance 
 on a new career awakens new energies and powera, 
 which rapidly unfold into life and vigor. Although 
 fortune spared him the wounds which he would so 
 wilhngly have brought back with him into the peaceful 
 future of his life, in memory as it were of the focus of 
 his youth, yet it was happiness enough to take part in 
 the battles, and, like an old republican, to fight together 
 with a whole nation for the connnon cause. 
 
 When at length, in the most beautiful month of May 
 which ever Germany had won by conquest, the festivals 
 of victory and of peace began in more than one nation, 
 Gottreicli was unwilling to pass those days of rejoicing 
 so far from those who were dearest to him ; he longed 
 for their company, that his joy might be doubled : so 
 he took the road to Heim. Thousands, before and after 
 liim, journeyed at that time over the liberated land, from 
 a happy past to a happy future ; but few there were who 
 saw, like Gottreicli, so pure a firmament over the moun- 
 tains of his native valleys, in which not a star was miss- 
 ing, but every one of them was twinkling and bright. 
 Justa had already sent him the little annals of the par- 
 sonage ; had told him how she longed for his return, 
 and how his father rejoiced ; how well the old man stood 
 the labors of his office, and how she had still better 
 secrets of joy in store for him. To these latter belonged, 
 
315 JEAN PAUL EICHTEll. 
 
 perhaps, one which he had not forgotten — namely, hei 
 promise to give him her hand after the great peace. 
 
 With such prospects he enjoyed in thought, ever from 
 Whitsuntide forward, that holy evening when he should 
 iinexpectedly relieve the old man from all his labors, and 
 begin to prepare the tranquil festivities of the village. 
 
 As he was thus thinking upon that day's ]neeting, and 
 as the mountains above his father's village, in which he 
 was so soon to clasp those fond hearts to his own, were seen 
 more and more clearly in relief against the blue sky, his 
 " Reminiscences of the best Hours of Life for the Hour 
 of Death" re-echoed in his soul, and he could not re- 
 frain from noting among them, as he went, along, the 
 joy of the meeting again here below. 
 
 Behind him there was coming up a storm from the 
 cast, in the direction of his home, before which he 
 seemed to come a happy messenger ; for the storms of 
 war, Avhicii he had seen upon the earth, had reconciled 
 to him and made him love those of heaven ; and the 
 parched ground, the dropping flowers, and the ears of 
 corn had long been thirsting for the waters of the wann 
 clouds. A parishioner of Heim, who was laboring in the 
 fields, saluted him as he passed, and expressed his joy 
 that the rain and Gottreich had both come at last 
 together. 
 
 And now he caught sight of the low church-steeple, 
 peeping from the clustered trees, and he entered upon 
 that tract of the valley where the parsonage lay, all 
 reddened by the evening sun. At every window he 
 hoped to see his betrothed one, if perchance she might 
 be looking out on the sunset before the storm came on ; 
 and as he came nearer he hoped to see the lattice 
 open, and Whitsuntide brooms in the chief apartment ; 
 but he found nothing; of " '' " 
 
EELIGIOK. 319 
 
 At last he entered quietly the parsonage-house, and 
 slowly opened the well-known door. The room was 
 empty, but he heard a noise overhead. When he opened 
 the door of his ripper ch.amber, which was tilled with a 
 glow from the west, Jnsta was kneeling before the bed 
 of his father, who, sitting half upright, was looking with 
 a haggard, stiff, and bony countenance toward the setting 
 sun before him. A clasp of her lover to her breast, and 
 one exclamation, was all his reception. But his father 
 stretched his wizened hand slowly out, and said, with 
 difficulty, " Thou art come at the right time !" withoirt 
 adding whether he spoke of the preachings or of their 
 separation. 
 
 Justa hastily related how the old man had overworked 
 liimself, till body and spirit had given way together, so 
 that he no longei' took a share in anything, though he 
 longed to be with the sharers, and how he lay prostrate 
 with broken wings, looking upward like a needy child. 
 The old man was grown hard of hearing, and she could 
 say all this in his presence. 
 
 Gottreicli soon confirmed it to himself. He would 
 fain have infused the fire of conquest, reflected in his 
 own bosom, which, like a red evening cloud, was 
 announcing a fair dawn to Europe, into that old and 
 once strong heart ; but he heard neither wish nor ques- 
 tion of it. The old man gazed steadily upon the sun, 
 until at last it was hid by the storm. Nevertheless the 
 war of the elements seemed to touch him but little ; the 
 glare of life broke dimly through the thickening ice of 
 death. A dying man knows no present — nothing but 
 the future and the past. 
 
 On a sudden the landscape grew dark, all the winds 
 stood pent, the earth oppressed ; then there came a gush 
 of rain and a crash of thunder. The lightning streamed 
 
220 JEAN PAUL EICHTER. 
 
 around the old man, and he looked up altered and aston- 
 ished. " Hist !" said he ; " I hear the rain once more ; 
 speak quickly, children, for I shall soon depart." 
 
 Both his children clung to hiui, but he was too weak 
 to embrace them. 
 
 And now, as the warm, healing springs of the clouds 
 bathed the sick earth, down from the dripping tree to 
 the blades of grass, and as the sky glistened mildly as 
 with a tear of joy, and the thunder went warring away- 
 behind the distant mountains, the sick man pointed 
 upward, and said, " Seest thou the lordliness of God? 
 My son, strengthen now at the last m.y weary soul with 
 something holy, in the spirit of love, and not of pen- 
 ance ; for if our hearts condemn us not, then have we 
 confidence toward God. Say something rich in love to 
 me of God and of His works." 
 
 Then the eyes of his son overflowed to think that he 
 should read the Reminiscences which he had prepared 
 for his own death-bed at the death-bed of his father. 
 When he said this to him, the old man answered, 
 " Hasten, my son !" and with a faltering voice, Gott- 
 reich began to read : 
 
 " Remember, in the darkening hour, that the glow of 
 the universe once filled thy breast, and that thou hast 
 acknowledged the magnitude of existence. Hast thou 
 not looked forth into one half of infinity by night, and 
 into the other half by day ? Think away the nothing- 
 ness of space, and the earth which is around thee ; 
 worlds above, around, and beneath arch thee about as a 
 centre, all impelling and impelled, splendor within 
 splendor, magnitude within magnitude ; all brightness 
 centring in the universal Sun. Garry thy thoughts for- 
 ward through eternity, toward that universal. Sun ; thou 
 shalt not arrive at darkness nor emptiness. What is 
 
EELIGIOSr. 221 
 
 empty dwells only between the worlds, not around the 
 world. 
 
 " Kemember, in the dark hour, those times when thou 
 hast prayed to God in ecstasy, and when thou hast 
 thought on Him — the greatest thought of finite man — 
 the Infinite One !" 
 
 Here the old man clasped his hands, and prayed low. 
 
 " Hast thou not known and felt the existence of that 
 Being, whose infinity consists not only in His strength, in 
 His wisdom, and His eternity, but also in His love and in 
 His justice ? Canst thou forget the time when the blue 
 sky by day and the blue sky by night opened on thee, as 
 if the mildness of God was looking down on thee ? 
 Hast not thou felt the love of the Infinite, when it veiled 
 itself in its image, in loving hearts of men ; as the sun, 
 which casts its light not- on our moon alone, for our 
 nights, but on the morning and evening star also, and on 
 eveiy little twinkler, even to the farthest from the earth ? 
 
 " Remember, in the dark hour, how in the spring of thy 
 life the mounds of earth which are graves appeared to 
 thee only as the mountain-tops of another far and new 
 world ; and how in the midst of the fulness of life thou 
 didst acknowledge the value of death. The snow of the 
 grave shall warm the frost-bitten limbs of age to life 
 again. As a navigator who suddenly disembarks from the 
 cold, wintry, and lonely sea upon a coast which is laden 
 with the warm, rich blossoms of spring, so with one leap 
 from our little bark we pass at once from winter to an 
 eternal spring-time. 
 
 " Rejoice, in this dark hour, that thy life dwells in 
 the midst of a wider and larger life. The earth-clod of 
 the globe has been divinely breathed upon. A world 
 swarms with life — for the leaf of every tree is a land of 
 souls ; and every h'ttle life would freeze and perish, if it 
 
222 JEAN PAUL KICHTER. 
 
 were not warmed and borne up by tbe eddies of life 
 about it. The sea of time glitters, like the sea of space, 
 with countless beings of light ; death and resurrection 
 are the valleys and mountains of the ever-swelling ocean. 
 There exists no dead anatomy ; what seems to be sueh is 
 only another body. Without a universal living exist- 
 ence, there would be nothing but a wide, all-encompass- 
 ing death. We cling like mosses to the Alps of nature, 
 drawing life from the high clouds. Man is the butterfly 
 which flutters up to Chimborazo, but above the butterfly 
 soars the condor ; however many, small or great, the 
 giant and the child are free wanderers in one garden ; 
 and the fly of a day may retrace its infinite series of 
 progenitors to those first beings of its kind which played 
 over the waters of Paradise before the evening sun. 
 
 " Never forget the thought, which is now so clear to 
 thee, that the individuality of man lasts out the greatest 
 suffering and the most entrancing joy alike unscathed, 
 while the body crumbles away in the pains and pleasures 
 of the flesh. Herein are souls like marsh-lights, which 
 shine in the storms and the rain unextiugiiishable. 
 
 " Canst thou forget, in the dark hour, that there have 
 been mighty men among us, and that thou art following 
 after them ? Eaise thyself like the spirits which stood 
 upon their mountains, having the storm of life only 
 about and never above them. Call back to thee the 
 kingly race of sages and of poets, who have inspirited aud 
 enlightened nation after nation." 
 
 " Speak of oar Redeemer !" said the father. 
 
 ' ' Remember Jesus Christ, in the dark hour ; re- 
 member Him who also passed through life ; remember 
 that soft Moon of the infinite Sun, given to enlighten the 
 night of the world. Let life be hallowed to thee, and 
 death also, for He shared both of them with thee. May 
 
RELIGION. 233 
 
 His calm and lofty form look down on tliee in tlie last 
 darkness, and show thee His Father !' ' 
 
 A low roll of thunder was now heard to pass over the 
 dun clouds which the tempest had left, and the setting 
 sun filled the entire vault of heaven with the magnifi- 
 cence of his fire. 
 
 " Eemember, in the last hour, how the heart of man 
 can love. Canst thou forget the love wherewith one 
 heart repays a thousand hearts, and the soul during life 
 is nourished and vivified from another soul, as the oak 
 of a hundred years clings fast to the same spot with its 
 roots, and derives new strength, and sends forth new 
 buds during its hundred springs V ' 
 
 " Dost thou mean me ?" said the father. 
 > " I mean my mother also," replied the son. 
 
 Justa wept, when she heard how her lover would 
 console himself in his last hours with the reminiscence 
 of the days of her love ; and the father said, but very 
 gently, thinking on his wife, " To meet again, to meet 
 again !" 
 
 "Remember then, in the last hour," continued 
 Gottreich, " that pure being with whom thy life was 
 beautiful and great — with whom thou hast wept tears of 
 joy, with whom thou hast prayed to God, and in whom 
 God appeared unto thee, in whom thou didst find the 
 first and last heart of love — and then close thine eyes 
 
 m 
 
 peace 
 
 I" 
 
 On a sudden the clouds were cleft into two huge, 
 black mountains, and the deep sun looked forth from 
 betv/een them, as it were out of a valley between but- 
 tresses of rock, gazing upon the earth with its joy- 
 glistening eye. 
 
 " See !" said the dying man, " what a glare !" 
 
 " It is the evening sun, father." 
 
224 JBAK PAUL lUCHTEE. 
 
 " Ay, this day shall we see one another again !" con- 
 tinued the old man ; but he spoke of his -wife, who was 
 long since dead. 
 
 The son was unable, from his emotion, to paint to his 
 father the blessedness of meeting again upon the earth, 
 which he had that very day enjoyed by anticipation and 
 described upon his journey ; or to say to him how it 
 comes, that meeting again is a renewal of love in a better 
 state ; and that, if the first meeting was apt to overflow 
 into the future, i-eminiscence binds the flowers of the 
 present and the fi'uits of the past upon one stem. 
 
 Who could have courage to speak of the joys of 
 earthly meeting to one who seemed to be already in the 
 contemplation of a meeting in heaven ? 
 
 Startled, he asked, " Father, what ails thee ?" 
 
 " 1 do think thereon in the dark hour ; ay, thereon 
 and thereupon again ; and death is also beautiful, and 
 the parting in Christ," murmured to himself the old 
 man, as he tried to take' Gottreich's hand, which he had 
 not strength to press. It was but the usual nervous 
 snatching of the fingers of the dying. He continued to 
 think that his son was still speaking to him, and said, 
 more and more distinctly and emphatically, " O thou 
 blessed God ! ' ' until all the other luminaries of life were 
 extinguished, and in his soul there stood nothing but the 
 cue sun — God ! At length he raised himself, and, 
 stretching out his ann forcibly, exclaimed, "There are 
 three fair rainbows over the evening sun ; I must go 
 after the sun, and pass through with him !" He then 
 fell back, and all M^as over. At that moment the sun 
 went down, and there glimmered at his setting a broad 
 rainbow in the east. " He is gone !" said Gottreich to 
 Justa, in a voice choked with grief; " but he is gone 
 from us unto his God, in the midst of great, pious, and 
 
EELIGION. 325 
 
 mingled joy : then weep no more, Justa !" At tliat 
 moment his own hitherto restrained tears found a vent, 
 and he pressed the dead hand against his face. It grew 
 dark, and a warm rain distilled gently over the earth. 
 The children left his motionless form alone, and wept 
 more tranquilly for that sun of their love, which, with 
 its pure light, had withdrawn from the clouds and tem- 
 pests of the world to another dawn. 
 
ODEX OF NAMES AND SUBJECTS. 
 
 A. 
 
 ABRAOADAEBAf 147. 
 
 Adam anh Eve, 150. 
 Anticipation, 55. 
 Aspirations, 59. 
 Ambition, 117, 118. 
 Annihilation, 305. 
 Atheism, 188. 
 Anger, remedies for, 146. 
 Anxiety of the poor, 45. 
 Authors, 137 ; their wives, 138 ; max- 
 ims, 139 ; fiist essays, 140. 
 
 Beauty, marrying a, 144. 
 
 Betrothal, 78. 
 
 Bonnet, 151. 
 
 Brideigroom's responeibility, 79. 
 
 Campan Yale. 93. 
 
 Character, 121 • maximw, 122. 
 
 Christ to the dead, 196. 
 
 Christianity in Coliseum, 36. 
 
 Chanoeablene^s of woman, 61. 
 
 Chastening, 106, 114. 
 
 Childhood, 1.33 ; old man's thoughts on, 
 
 162. 
 Church of St. Peter, 31. 
 City and country, 90, 115. 
 Clock, the flower, 28. 
 Coliseum, designed by Vespasian, 30; 
 
 by moonlight, 35. 
 Confession day, 192. 
 Companionship, 49 ; influence of noble, 
 
 49. 
 Compassion, 158. 
 Consciousness of ego, 118, 128. 
 Conservatism, 43. 
 Contentment, 44. 
 conventionalitibs, 113. 
 Conversion, 185. 
 Courage, military, 45. 
 Criticism, 137 ; dread of, 138. 
 
 B. 
 
 Day of Judgment, 1 55. 
 
 Dream, 165; on dcatb, 167, 169; of 
 
 fever-patient, 170 ; on Universe, 172 : 
 
 on death of an angel, 177 ; of a world 
 
 without God, 195. 
 Dying, 1G6; thoughts of, 184; thoughts 
 
 for the hour of, 2u9. 
 
 Education, healtb, 128 ; maxims, 129 ; 
 
 influence of Germany on, 130; pri- 
 
 marj', 131 ; forced, 134. 
 Enjoiment, rules for, 94. 
 Estrangement, 58, 79. 
 Evangelists, four heathen, 156. 
 Experience, profiting by, 108. 
 
 Fear, living in state of, 167. 
 
 Feeling, too fine, 54 ; death of noble, 
 103 ; concealed, 104 : fluctuations of, 
 113. 
 
 FixLEiN, his courtship, 55 ; betrothal- 
 night. 66 ; wedding-day, 69 ; Jean 
 Paul's parting from, 74. 
 
 Flowers, transfiguration of souls of, 
 22. 
 
 Friend's sister, 49. 
 
 Friendship, maxims, 51 : yearning for, 
 97. 
 
 G. 
 
 Golden Ages, 45 ; to come, 47. 
 
 Gratitude, 186. 
 
 Gormandizers, 113. 
 
 GoTTHEicn Hartmann, Story of, 218. 
 
 GuYON, Madame, 183. 
 
 H. 
 
 Happiness, maxims, 00 ; man made for, 
 92; three ways of obtaining, 99; of 
 the i)oor, 104. 
 
 Hatked blinds, 158; how to get rid of, 
 160. 
 
 Hearts, number of broken, 88 ; cheat- 
 ed, 95 ; burnt out, 125. 
 
 Herder, 209. 
 
 Herves, 47 ; worship of, 116. 
 
 Honeymoon, 84. 
 
 Honor, feminine, 54. 
 
 I. 
 
 Ideas, origin of, 129. 
 Idealism, 46. 
 
 Ideals, of the heart, 60 ; unsatisfied, 91. 
 Immortality, prophecy of, 185 ; con- 
 versation on, 200. 
 Insensibility, 120. 
 Imperishable days, 161. 
 Italians as painters, 30. 
 
238 
 
 INDEX OF NAMES AND SUBJECTS. 
 
 Jbaloust, 54, 57. 
 
 Kant, 43, 156. 
 
 Lady-killer, 112. 
 
 Learning, consolations of, 13B. 
 
 Leave-taking, 50. 
 
 Leibnitz, 43, 156. 
 
 Legal procrastination, 145. 
 
 LSVITATION, 16B. 
 
 Literary men, 139. 
 
 Love, injures heroes, 50; trying to kill, 
 53 ; need of, 53 ; humility of ; sadness 
 of, .55 ; wins at last ; waning of ; a 
 mother's, 66 ; kiss of ; selfishness of, 
 57 ; unrequited, 59 ; lor the dead, 61 ; 
 deifies its object, 63 ; maxims, 64 ; for 
 those who will weep for us when dead, 
 159 ; the mystics, 187. 
 
 LovEBS, sympathy with, 60 ; awkward, 
 63. 
 
 Lord's Supper. 191. 
 
 Lorraine, Claude, 85. 
 
 Loquacity of women, 112, 113, 148. 
 
 OT. 
 
 Magnitude of existence, 220, 
 
 Maidens, 119. 
 
 Marriage, without love, 78; discordant, 
 
 80 ; contracts repnl»iive, 82. 
 Ministers, beauty of their position, 212. 
 Milton, 106. 
 Moravians, 86. 
 Morning, 21. 
 Motherhood, 83. 
 Melancholy of noble minds, 104. 
 Militiamen, 144. 
 Music, apostrophe to, 30. 
 Mysteries, the fifteen, 184. 
 
 N, 
 
 Nature, an Eeolian harp, 91 ; sympathy 
 with, 82 ; first feeling for, 23 ; conso- 
 lations of , 24 ; a resource, 25. 
 
 Napoleon, 43. 
 
 Nelson, 43. 
 
 National characteristics, 43. 
 
 Night, 22. 
 
 O. 
 
 Oeediencb, of children, 130. 
 Old age, 90. 
 
 P. 
 
 Pain, flight of, 106 ; influence of the 
 
 word, 206. 
 Pantheon, 37. 
 Paying debts, 145. 
 Phcenixes, 46. 
 
 Philosophy, consolations of, 93. 
 Place de Greve, 154. 
 Poverty, 53, 107, 112. 
 Politic silence, 44. 
 Promised land, 43. 
 Providence, 187. 
 
 R. 
 
 Eedeembr, 222. 
 
 Reconciliation, beauty of, 51, 80. 
 Eeligion, death-bed, 183; power of, 
 
 188. 
 Eesolutions, weak, 106, 1)2 ; Albano's, 
 
 lis. 
 EicHTER, his character, 11 ; ideal wife, 
 
 81 ; thoughts on liis own life, 138 ; 
 
 Longlellow's description of, 16. 
 
 ElVALS, 53. 
 
 EoME, influence of, 31 ; description of. 
 
 Sacrifice, 54. 
 
 Saints, as fashian^flgnres, 146. 
 
 Self-reliance, 107. 
 
 Self-knowledge, 115. 
 
 Self-government, 115. 
 
 Self-hatred. 119. 
 
 Sermon, the first, 1.39. 
 
 Sin, humiliated by sight of, 183. 
 
 Sincerity, 114. 
 
 SiRius, 173. 
 
 Shakespeare, influence of, 165. 
 
 Sleep, 165. 
 
 Society, and solitude, 44 ; maxims, 44. 
 
 Sorrow, concealed, 103 ; bravery in, 
 
 109. 
 Spring, the gladness of, 26. 
 Summer, a day in, 2B. 
 Sunrise from the dome of St. Peter's, 
 
 Sympathy, times of, 49 ; 
 58 ; in danger, 103. 
 
 in separation. 
 
 Tears, 91 ; only given to human eyes, 
 
 105 ; crocodile, 114, 117. 
 Time, river of, 163 ; last hour of, 199. 
 Titan, dedication of, 141. 
 Truth, indestructibility of, 184. 
 
 Vanity, 159. 
 Virtue, of sexes, 122. 
 
 Wedding, after the, 78. 
 
 Wedding-hour, pathos of, 83. 
 
 Wives, tenderness to ; snlkiness of, 79 ; 
 compliments to, 81 ; compared to evan- 
 gelists, 143. 
 
 Wishes, indefinable. 24. 
 
 Wifely solicitude, 80. 
 
 Woman, respect for, 112 ; fear of, 119. 
 
 Words and deeds, 185. 
 
 Xerxes, 122. 
 
 Tear, old and new, 161, 162. 
 Youth, lost, 109 ; characteristics of, 
 116 ; Ideals of, 1.32. 
 
62 
 
 ARCHIBALD MALMAISOISF. 
 A New Novel. By Julian Hawthorne. Price, cloth, . . . 75 cents. 
 
 THE FOREIGN PRESS ON JULIAN HAWTHORNE, 
 
 THE ACADEMY, Mr. Hawthorne has a more powerful imagination than 
 any contemporary writer of fiction. He basthe veryuneommon gift of taking 
 hold of the reader's attention at once, and the still more uncommon gift of 
 maintaining his grasp when it is fixed. If anybody wants to read a good novel 
 let him read Mr. Hawthorne's, and if anybody finds it uninteresting let that 
 booby thencetorward hold it as an indisputable verity that he does not know a 
 good novel when he sees it. 
 
 DUBLm UmVERSITY MAGAZINE. Take what subject he will, Mr. 
 Hawthomealways throws around It the most ensnaring glamour of a charm- 
 ing literary style, ard always exhibits>evea in his lightest writing, the color of 
 a thoughtful and brilliant mmd. 
 
 THE A THENMUM. Mr. Hawthorne's books form a remarkable contrast, 
 in pomt of power and interest, to the dreary mafs of so-called romances. He 
 has contributed to the formation of a more respectful estimate, in England, of 
 his country's literature. There are passages of almost exquisite beauty here 
 and there. 
 
 ^'ARCHIBALD MALMAISON:' 
 
 THE LONDON' TIMES. After perusal of this weird, fantastic tale (Archi- 
 bald Malmaison), it must be admitted that upon the shoulders of Julian 
 Hawthorne has descended in no small degree the mantle of his more illustri- 
 ous father. The climax is so terrible, and so dramatic in its intensity, that it 
 is impossible to class it with any situation of modern fiction. There is much 
 psychological ingenuity shown in some of the more subtle touches that lend 
 an air of reality to this wild romance. 
 
 THE LONDON GLOBE. "Archibald Malmaison" Is one of the most darin? 
 attempts to set the wildest fancy masquerading in the cloak of science, which 
 has ever, perhaps, been made. Mr. Hawthorne has managed to combine the 
 almost perfect consiruction of a typical French novelist, with a more than 
 typically German power of conception. Genius is hereof a kind more artistical- 
 ly self-governed than Hoffman's, and less obviously self-conscious than Poe's, 
 A strange sort of jesting humor gives piquancy to its grimness. 
 
 THE pearl-shell NECKLACE. 
 
 (Ready soon in Standard Library.) 
 
 CONTEMPORARY REVIEW, The « Pearl-Shell Necklace" is a story of 
 permanent value, and quite alone lor subtle blendmg of individual and gen- 
 eral human interest, poetic and psychologic suggestion, and rare humor. 
 
 SPECTATOR. The " Pearl-Shell Necklace," wherever found, would stan-p 
 its author as a man of genius. Even the elder Hawthorne never produced 
 more weird effects within anything like the same compass. And yet there is 
 absolutely no imitation. 
 
63 
 
 Life of Cromwell. 
 
 OLIVER CROMWELL, his Life, Times, Battlefields, and 
 Contemporaries; with copious Index. By Paxton Hood, author 
 of " Christmas Evans," "Scottish Characteristics,'* etc. l2mo, 286 
 pp. Paper, 25 cents; fine cloth, ^i.oo. 
 
 New Yorli Sun : 
 
 *' Mr. Hood's biography is a positive 
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 presents a more correct view of the great 
 soldier than any of the shorter lives pub- 
 lished, whether we compare it with 
 Southey's, Guizot's, or even Forster's." 
 
 New- York Heralds 
 
 "The book is one of deep interest. 
 The style is good, the analysts searching." 
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 "The fairest and most readable of the 
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 '* Mr. Hood'sstyle is vivid, picturesque, 
 and fascinating in no small degree. He 
 portrays his hero's weakness as well as his 
 strength." 
 
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 vie"w: 
 
 " llie book deserves to take a place 
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 Science in Short Chapters. 
 
 SCIENCE IN SHORT CHAPTERS. By W. Mattieu 
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C4 
 
 The American Humorist. 
 
 THE AMERICAN HUMORIST. By Rev. H. R. Haweis, M.A., a 
 distinguished clergyman of London, author of *' Music and Morals,*' 
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 cloth, 75 cents. 
 
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65 
 
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 tory." 
 
 Charlotte Bronte. 
 
 AN HOUR WITH CHARLOTTE BRONTfi:; or, FLOWERS 
 FROM A YORKSHIRE MOOR. By Laura C. Holloway, 
 author of '< Ladies of the "White House,'* etc. l2rao, 156 pp. Paper, 
 IS cents; fine cloth, 75 cents. The 75 cent edition contains a fine steel 
 engraving of Charlotte Bronte. 
 
 Oaily Advertiser, Newark, N.J. 
 
 "There was but one Charlotte Brontfi, 
 as there was but one William Shakespeare. 
 To wiite her life acceptably, one must 
 have made it the study of years; have 
 studied it in the integrity of all its rela- 
 tions, and considered it from the broadest 
 as well as from the narrowest aspect. This 
 is what Mrs. Holloway has done." 
 
 ttew Yorlt Herald; 
 
 " There are, at times, flights of eloquence 
 that rise to grandeur." 
 
 Zion^s Herald. Boston : 
 
 " This well-written sketch, with selec- 
 tions from her writings, will be appreciated, 
 and give a clear idea of the remarkable 
 intellectual ability of this gifled but heavily 
 burdened woman." 
 
 American Reformer, New York: 
 
 •'The brief sketch of the life of thisraro 
 woman is so sad that it makes a sombet 
 picture. But there is such a sweet spirit 
 sliining out in every place that it tbgea the 
 picture with a radiance almost supernal. 
 No one can read the story of her life ex- 
 cept to be charmed by the character of the 
 patient sufferer. This, together with the 
 extracts from her letters, prcse and poetical 
 works, makes a volume of rare interest." 
 
 Brooklyn Daily Eagle: 
 
 " Managed with the rare skill we might 
 expect at the hands of a fair-minded woman 
 dealing with the traits of character and 
 the actual career of one who, amid extra- 
 ordinary circumstances of adversity, plod- 
 ded her way In fame within the ^pan of a 
 brici lilctime/' 
 
67 
 
 George Eliot's Essays. 
 
 THE ESSAYS OF GEORGE ELIOT, Collected and Arranged, 
 with an Introduction on her " Analysis of Motives,'' By Nathan 
 Sheppard, author of *' Shut up in Paris," " Readings from George 
 Eliot," etc. Paper, 25 cents; fine cloth, ^i.oo. 
 
 ( This is the first appearance of these Essay:: in book form in England 
 or America.) 
 
 'Che Critic, New York: 
 
 "Messrs. Funk & Wagnallsbave done 
 y. real service to George Eliot's innumer- 
 able admirers by reprinting in their p'^pu- 
 lar Standard Library the great novel- 
 ist's occasional contributions to the period- 
 ical press.'* 
 JfeiF York Smbi : 
 
 "In the case of George Eliot especially, 
 whose reviews were anonymous, and who 
 could never have supposed that such 
 fugitive ventures would ever be widely 
 associated with the name of a diffident 
 and obscure young woman, we gain access 
 in her early essays, as in no other of her 
 published writings, o the sanctuary cf her 
 deepest convictions, and to the intellectual 
 workshop in which literary methods and 
 processes were tested, discarded, or sp- 
 proved, and literary tools fashiored and 
 manipulated long before the author had 
 discerned the large purposes to which ihey 
 were to be applied. * * * Looking back 
 over the whole ground covered by these 
 admirable papers, we are at no loss to un- 
 derstand why George Eliot should have 
 made it a :ule to read no criticisms on her 
 own sLories. She had nothing to learn 
 from critics. She was j ustified in assum- 
 ing? that not one of those who took upon 
 themselves to appraise her achievements 
 had given half of the time, or a tithe of 
 the intellect, to the determination of the 
 right aims and processes of the English 
 novel, which, as these reviews atte%t, she 
 had herself expended on that object before 
 venturing upon that form of coniposition 
 which Fielding termed the modern epic." 
 Kxaminer, New York : 
 
 •'These essays ought to be read by any 
 one who would understand ihis part of 
 George Eliot's career; and, indeed, they 
 
 furnish the key to all her subsequent 
 literary achievements," 
 Ev«*iiing Transcript, Boston . 
 
 " No one who reads these essays will re- 
 gret their publication, for they are of 
 striking and varied ability, and add much 
 to the completeness of our conception of 
 Marian Evans' character. Critical and 
 artistic power seldom go hand-in-hand. 
 The most brilliant piece cf purely literary 
 work is the one on Heine and German 
 wit. It is one which reaches the highest 
 level of intellectual criticism, and stands 
 unsurpassed by anything of Arnold or 
 Lov.-ell." 
 Clmrrli XTnion, New York : 
 
 *' Nathan Sheppard, the collector of the 
 ten essays in this form, has written a high- 
 ly laudatory but critical introduction to 
 the book, on her 'Analysis of Motives,* 
 and, after reading it, it seems to us that 
 every one who would read her worlts 
 profitably and truly should first have read 
 it." 
 Zion*8 Herald, Boston : 
 
 ** As remarkable illustrations of her 
 masculine metaphysical ability as is evi- 
 denced in her strongest fictions." 
 Slpisccpal Alethodist, Baltimore: 
 
 "Everybody of culture wants to read 
 all George Eliot wrote." 
 Kai'lford Keening Post: 
 
 " They are admirable pieces of liter- 
 ary workmanship, but they are much more 
 than that. * * * These essays are tri- 
 umphs of critical analysis combined with 
 epigrammatic pungency, subtle irony, 
 and a wit that never seems strained.** 
 Christian Advocate, New York : 
 
 " They show the versatility of the great 
 novelist. One on Evangelical Teaching is 
 especially interesting/' 
 
Sam Hobart. 
 
 SAM HOBART. The Locomotive Engineer. A Workingman's 
 Solution of the Labor Problem. A biography. By Justin D. Fulton, 
 B.D., author of *' Woman as God made Her," etc. i2mo, 255 pp. 
 Paper, 25 cents; fine cloth, $1,00. 
 
 Danbury News 
 
 " It is doubtful if any working person 
 can read this book and not become a 
 belter worker and a better man." 
 Xiiitli.8ia,ii, ObBerver, Philadelphia : 
 
 *'Dr, Fulton has done a good work in 
 •writing this story of a railroad man. It is 
 a genuine record of heroic fidelity to duty. 
 Let it be scattered by the thousands." 
 Cliurch. Advocate, Harrisburg : 
 
 "If every workingman and employer 
 would follow its principles, the solution of 
 the Labor Question would be near at 
 hand." 
 
 Cliristiaii Secretary, Hartford, 
 Conn.: 
 
 " The object of the book is to show how 
 
 happy and useful a workingman may be, 
 if content in his work and willing to do 
 well. Written in a very interesting way; 
 and while it will probably be devoured 
 by railroad men, it wiil afford very pleas- 
 urable reading to all." 
 
 Guardian, Truro, Nova Scotia : 
 
 "The author's object in writing it was 
 to portray the possibilities cf happiness and 
 usefulness within the reach of a working- 
 man content to fill the sphere cf usefulness 
 awarded him, and willing to lend a help- 
 ing hand to do work for God and hu- 
 manUy. It is just such a book as we 
 would like to see in the hands of railroad 
 
 Successful Men. 
 
 SUCCESSFUL MEN OF TO-DAY AND WHAT THEY 
 SAY OF SUCCESS. Based on facts and opinions gathered from. 
 Five Hundred Prominent Men. By Rev. Wilbur F. Crafts, A.M., 
 author of ** Heroes and Holidays," etc. A book of Self Help. i2mo, 
 276 pp. Paper, 25 cents; fine cloth, ^i.oo, 
 
 Tlie Critic, New York: | more incentives to honorable living so 
 
 'This is an excellent book of the kind, delightfully and impressively told than m 
 
 and contains much that is valuable. It is 
 very pleasant readmg, for it abounds in 
 good anecdotes, and contains many hints 
 both original and practicable. It gives an 
 excellent definition cf success." 
 
 Cliristian Union, New York : 
 
 •■ We cordially commend this book to 
 young men." 
 
 BrooUlyn (N. Y.) Eagle : 
 
 "A wonderfully instructive book." 
 
 Inter-Ocean, Chicago. : 
 
 •* The style is terse, vigorous, and pleas- 
 ant, abounding in sententious maxims, 
 which are well calculated to impress 
 young readers. Nowhere have we found 
 
 this volume. If it could be stuffed into 
 every boy's satchel as he journeys from 
 home it would be well." 
 
 Clxrisiian Secretary, Hartford, Ct.: 
 " Full of sound, wise, and practical 
 advice to all young men of all occupations. 
 Written with an earnest and noble pur- 
 pose to help and encourage young men," 
 
 IToung Ciiurcliman, Milwaukee: 
 " Full of good maxims and sound advice 
 
 for the yoimg." 
 
 I^ntheran Observer, Philadelphia : 
 " Clear, forcible, pungent — nearly every 
 
 page sparkles with a fresh illustration or a 
 
 pertinent story.'* 
 
Nature Studies. 
 
 NATURE STUDIES. By Richard A. Proctor, Grant Allen, 
 Andrew Wilson, Thomas Foster, and Edward Clodd. With 
 copious Index. A sterling volume. i2mo, 264 pp. Paper, 25 cents; 
 fine cloth, ^l.oo. 
 
 The Critic, New York : 
 
 " Were we to act upon the principle 
 that good wine needs no brush, we should 
 certainly forbear praising the 'potable 
 gold ' presented in ' Nature Studies.* 
 The twenty-four essays are at once agree- 
 aWc reading and intellectually stimula- 
 tive." 
 
 Danbury (Conn.) News: 
 
 " Although by a scientist, the book is 
 not a teacher of skepticisms. Proctor be- 
 lieves fjUy in the existence of an all-creat- 
 ing, all-ruling God. But his views of the 
 Creacer arc grea.tcr than ours, because his 
 knowledge of the vasmess of time, of 
 space, and of creation, arc greater than 
 ours. The book is inteiisely interesting, as 
 well as thoroughly instructive." 
 
 Metliodist Recorder, Pittsburg : 
 
 "These eminent naturalists give us ia 
 this volume many articles as intra-esting 
 and as exciting as a story in human life, 
 and there is not one that will disappoint 
 the most dull reader. The theories ad- 
 vanced in some cf the articles will proba- 
 bly not be accepted, but will be of interest 
 to show the light in which these theories 
 are held by their advocates." 
 
 Presbyterian IVitueas, Halifax, 
 
 N. S. : 
 
 A lurge amount of valuable reading 
 from five of the greatest scientists of the 
 day." 
 S. S. Journal, New Yorkr 
 
 " They are for the most part free from 
 technical language, though discussing pro- 
 found themes." 
 
 India: What Can it Teach ¥s? 
 
 INDIA: WHAT CAN IT TEACH US ? A course of Lectures 
 delivered before the University of Cambridge. By F. Max Muller, 
 IC.M. With an Introduction and Notes by Prof. Alexander Wilder, 
 M.D.; also by the American Publishers. i2mo, 288 pp. Paper, 25 
 cents; fine cloth, |i.oo. 
 
 Neiv YorR Times : 
 
 " Max MuUer's enthusiasm in the cause 
 of the Indian, past and present, makes him 
 worthy of the most respectful attention. 
 * * * "^hcn one thinks what India has 
 taught the last century, and especially the 
 third quarter of the present century, it is 
 remarkable that it should be necessary to 
 convince people that there is a great deal 
 -worth learning from India." 
 Brooklyn (N. Y.) Union ; 
 
 "The author discusses in a vivid and 
 charming manner the truthful character of 
 the Hindus, the human interest of Sanscrit 
 literature, the lessons of the Vcdas and the 
 Vedic deities, revealins the v-st richness 
 
 of his subject, which under his skillful 
 treatment becomes more and more attract- 
 ive as it is attentively examined by the 
 reader." 
 Nevr York "World : 
 
 **At this time, when the issue of Oriental 
 tradition and literatitre is being so success- 
 fully worked by poets and novelists, these 
 studies by an expert in the life and lore 
 of India cannot fail to interest and instruct 
 a large class of readers." 
 •Tonrnal ofCommerce, New York: 
 
 •' The author, the learned Muller, shows 
 that India can teach us a great deal that 
 is well worth learning. His investigations 
 are profound and interesting." 
 
70 
 
 A Winter in India. 
 
 A WINTER IN INDIA. By Rt. Hod. W. E. Baxter, M.P. A 
 fascinating story of a jpurney through India. With Index and Notes 
 by the American Publishers, with Map. i2mo, 154 pp. Paper, 15 
 
 cents; fine cloth, 75 cents. 
 
 Sew Vorlt ^Vorld : 
 
 "There is not one page of dry reading 
 in the work, and the descriptions of the 
 country, its inhabitants and resources, are 
 so"vivid!y drawn as to give the reader an 
 excellent mental photograph." 
 
 Christian Advocate : 
 
 - "A piece of pleasant writing giving a 
 glimmer of that wonderful country during 
 a winter's stay. " 
 
 Clirlstfan Statesman, Philadel- 
 phia : 
 
 "His te«timony to the labors of Chris- 
 tian missionaries in that f^r away land is 
 very valuable and gratifying." 
 Toronto (Canada} Mail : 
 
 "Any one who wishes to get a bright. 
 
 intelligent and late account of India, its 
 railways, buildings, people, civilizaiion 
 and prospects under British rule, will find 
 this a most agreeable means of doing so." 
 Zion*s Herald, Boston : 
 
 ** Gives us fresh and vivid views of this 
 mighty portion of the English Empire 
 and its probable future, and will closely 
 hold the reader's atLeniion from beginning 
 to the end." 
 Good Literature, New York: 
 
 " Mr. Baxter i.s perhaps better known in 
 this country as a writer of several bright 
 and chatty sketches than as a member of 
 Parliament. This book will be read with 
 enjoyment by all who desire to possess the 
 latest and most imprejudiced information 
 about this country." 
 
 Scottish Characteristics. 
 
 SCOTTISH CHARACTERISTICS. By Paxton Hood, author 
 of "Oliver Cromwell," "Christmas Evans," etc. i2mo, 315 pp. 
 Paper, 25 cents; fine cloth, ;SSi.oo. 
 
 Vei/v York Herald : 
 
 "Paxton Hood is one of the very best of 
 our living bookmakers, * * * and has the 
 faculty of putting things in an attractive 
 form. He has here given us a work which 
 is not only readable but instruciive and 
 amusing." 
 Ife'W I'ork E^xaminer: 
 
 •' A large fund cf anecdotes utilized 
 with much literary art. A vastly enter- 
 taining book." 
 The Critic. New York : 
 
 "Many of the anecdotes are excellent, 
 and the book is a pleasant illustration of 
 thingspeculiar to Scotland and the Scotch'* 
 Congregationalist, Boston: 
 
 "The stories are strung on a thread of 
 
 reflection and comment which is worthy 
 of perusal." 
 
 Interior, Chicago : 
 
 One of the liveliest and most enjoyable 
 books of the season for its sarcasm and 
 other characteristics of the genuine Scot " 
 
 Boston Globe : 
 
 " Scottish character and humor are esti- 
 mated in a feithful and generous spirit, 
 and shown with racy descriptions and 
 anecdotes." 
 Montreal Gazette : 
 
 " Whoever would see Scotland and its 
 people as they really arr, whether he be 
 Scotch himself or not, should read these 
 characteristics." 
 
71 
 
 Historical and Other Sketches. 
 
 HISTORICAL AND OTHER SKETCHES. By James AnthonV 
 Froude. Edited with an Introduction by David H. Wheeler, LL.D* 
 l2mo, 288 pp. Paper, 25 cents; fine cloth, ^l.oo. 
 
 Observer, New York : 
 
 "Presents the varied characteristics of 
 Mr. Froude's style, and enables the reader 
 lo form a tolerably comprehensive idea 
 cf his writings without going through the 
 many volumes in which they are con- 
 tained.*' 
 
 NortUern. Cbristian. Advocate, 
 
 Syracuse, N. Y. ; 
 " ITie paf t that every one will select first 
 is the brief account of Mrs. Carlyle's be- 
 trothal, and his estimate of the causes 
 which produced in her that discontent 
 now known as widely as her name." 
 
 Tlie Contisient, Philadelphia: 
 
 "The selections are partly literary, 
 partly historical, but all in the best manner 
 of the author, and the issue is one of the 
 most attractive of the s:ries." 
 
 J. A. Frondet 
 
 The following letter explains itself: 
 
 The Molt, Salcombe, 1 
 kingsbridge, devonshire, > 
 
 August 22, 1883. ) 
 
 Rev. Davtd H. Wheeler, D. D.-, Alle- 
 gheny College, Meadville, Pa. 
 Dear Sir: Your volume has reached 
 me. For your kind and charitable ac- 
 count of my individual self, I can only 
 thank you. You pass over my innumer- 
 able iaults, and you graciously make the 
 most of such merits as you suppose your- 
 self to find. I thank you particularly for 
 what you say of the publication of Carlyle's 
 memoirs, when I complete my account 
 of him I can look confidently to a verdict 
 in mj' favor; but, meanwhile, I have a bad 
 time of it. But I will not enter fuitheron 
 a subject which you show you fully under- 
 stand. And now accept my assurance oi the 
 gratification with which I have seen the 
 image of myself which your mirror refiects, 
 and believe me, yours faithfully. 
 
 Jewish Artisan Life. 
 
 JEWISH ARTISAN LIFE IN THE TIME OF JESUS, 
 By Prof. Franz Delitzsch. Translated from the latest revised 
 German Edition, by Bernhard Pick, Ph. D, lamo. Paper, 15 cents; 
 fine clolh, 75 cents. 
 
 Xe-w York Trlbniie : 
 
 "In this volume the distinguished 
 German scholar describes the trades and 
 the home life of the Jews, going back to 
 the oldest sources of Rabbinical litera- 
 ture and history for his facts, and blend- 
 ing all hito a picturesque and instructive 
 whole. The work has been and will be 
 of real value, especially to Biblical 
 students." 
 Congregationalist, Boston : 
 
 ** Prof. Delitsch has depicted with great 
 distinctness papular life and manners in 
 the time of Christ." 
 Scliool Joiirual, New York , 
 
 ■'Prof. DelitEch kasa world-wide repu- 
 
 tation as one of the ablest scholars in 
 Biblical science. He sketches the public, 
 the business and the home life of the Jews 
 in the time of Christ in such a ch.irming 
 style that one is fascinated throughout." 
 S. S. Times, Philadelphia: 
 
 "An excellent portraiture ot the state of 
 Jewish society in the time of Christ, written 
 as if an eye-witness by one whose scholar- 
 ship is unchallenged.*' 
 Zion's Herald, Eoston : 
 
 " An original and valuable work, throw- 
 ing much light upon the New Testament 
 life of Christ, and full of curioiu informa- 
 tion to the modem reader. It is the result 
 of thorough scholarship/*