Hesperus or Forty-Five Dog-Post-Days Volume II Part 3

He supported himself by resting his right hand against the wall, in a hovering posture above the blind fair one, because a little world-globe attracted his centripetal force and drew him out of his returning orbit.--For as the patient rested on her right side, one cloud after another of dishevelled hair had flowed down over the heart and over the lily hill which is lifted by sighs, and the locks falling towards the other hill had not been able there to cover up so much as they had here disclosed. The lace-veil sank slowly after the tresses, and the heart-leaves and the ripe blossoms fell away from the protruding apple-fruit.... Dear aesthetic hero of these Post-days, wilt thou remain a moral one, hanging, as thou art, unseen over this veritable Belidor's _globe de compression_,[32]--over this _waxing_ moon-globe, whereof one never sees the other half,--near this commanding eminence, which, like other eminences, one should not suffer round a fortification,--and that too at a court where generally the _dress-regulations_ suppress everything _elevated_?

When he is once away from the bed and the Paullinum, I will have a good quarrel with the reader about the whole occurrence,--but now it must first be related continuously and with a good deal of fire.

He was, as it were, fastened in the air. But at last it was time to withdraw from a position which was the torrid zone of all the feelings.

Besides, a new circ.u.mstance enhanced at once the danger and the charm.

A long sigh seemed to surcharge and heave her whole bosom, and to undulate like a zephyr through a bed of lilies, and the superinc.u.mbent snow-hill seemed to tremble with the swelling heart that glowed beneath it, and with the swelling sigh. The hand of the veiled G.o.ddess moved mechanically toward the imprisoned eye, as if it would press away a tear behind the bandage. Victor, in his fear that she would push aside the bandage, withdraws his right hand from the wall, and the left from the bed, in order, on tiptoe, to bend back, without grazing anything, out of this enchanted heaven.

Too late!--The ribbon is down from her eyes,--perhaps his sigh had been too near, or his silence too long.

And the unveiled eyes find above them an inspired youth, dissolved into love, hovering in the beginning of an embrace.... Stiff as a statue he hung in the petrified posture,--her eyes, inflamed with pain, suddenly overflowed with the milder light of love,--ardently and softly she said, _Comment?_ And too lame for apology, trembling, sinking, glowing, dying, he falls upon the hot lips and the beating bosom. He closed his eyes for rapture and confusion, and blind and love-intoxicated, bold and fearful, he grew to her lips with his thirsty ones ... when suddenly his ear, on the stretch for every approaching sound, heard the night-watchman calling the hour of twelve, and Agnola, as with a strange, intruding hand repelled him from her, to throw aside a b.l.o.o.d.y chemise-pin.

Like a doomsday in the night-clouds the watchman's homely admonition to think of death and of the twelfth spirit-hour of this midnight of life, pealed into his ears, before which the blood-streams of the heart rushed by. The call in the street seemed to come from Emanuel, and to say: "Horion! Stain not thy soul, and fall not away from thy Emanuel and from thyself! Look at the linen over her diseased eye, as if death veiled it, and sink not!"

"I sink not!" said his whole heart; he unwound himself with respectful forbearance out of the throbbing arms, and stiffening at the possibility of an imitation of the wretched Matthieu, whom he had so despised, he sank down outside of the bed on her hand, which he had drawn out with him, and said with streaming tears: "Forgive a youth,--forgive his overmastered heart,--his dazzled eyes,--I deserve all punishments, any one would be to me a pardon,--but I have forgotten no one except myself."--"_Mais c'est moi, que j'oublie en vous pardonnant_,"[33] said she with an ambiguous look, and he rose, and as her answer gave him the choice between the most agreeable and the most humbling interpretation, he gladly punished himself with the latter. Agnola's eye flashed with love,--then with anger,--then with love,--then it closed;--he stepped back to the most respectful distance,--she opened it again and turned her face coldly to the wall; and by a secret pressure against the wall which, I suppose, commanded a private bell in the apartment of the Chambermaid, gave the latter the order to make haste,--and in a few minutes she came in with the eye-band. Naturally (as in human life) they played out the fifth act, just as if there had been no third and fourth.--Then he politely withdrew.

There!--Now the reader and I begin to quarrel about the matter, and Victor to think about it. His embrace was not right,--nor were his voyage of discovery to the wall and his picture-exhibition,--but it was _discreet_; for he could not, of course, really throw a backward somerset, and say, "I thought Mat was hanging behind the bed."--To this, to be sure, people of experience reply, "We do not quarrel with him here for preferring discretion to virtue, but rather for this, that he did not do so again after the kiss. That kiss is too small a fault for Agnola to be able to forgive." I observe, these people of experience are adherents of the sect who, in my book, reckon the Princess, on account of so many half-proofs, among those women who, too proud and hard for the love of the heart, only let the love of the senses alternate flyingly with the love of domination, and who do it only for the sake of making out of Cupid's bandage a rein, and out of his arrows spurs and stirrups. I am very well acquainted, too, with the half-proofs with which this sect backs itself,--the bigotry of the Princess,--her confession-eve,--her previous attentions to my hero,--the covering of the painted Mary, and the exposure of the more living one,--and all the circ.u.mstances of my narration. But I cannot possibly believe such a thing of a friend of Clotilda (unless the latter, for this very reason, had taken leave of her, or from goodness of soul had not at all comprehended those couriers of the temperament more common with the male s.e.x), until in the sequel manifest traces of a more _exasperated_ than _afflicted_ woman compel me to it.

I am getting quite away from my promise, to present some considerations, which would certainly, with impartial persons, if not justify, yet excuse my hero, for becoming, after the kiss, virtuous again, so to speak, and not full of the live Devil. I boldly set down among the grounds of mitigation his want of acquaintance with those women who, like the Spartans, bravely ask not about the _number_ of the foes of their virtue, but about their _position_; he was often with them, indeed, and in their camp, but his virtue hindered them from showing him theirs. He is less excused by the influence of the night-watchman, and the remembrance of death; for this needs itself to be excused;--but then, on the other hand, it is only too certain, that certain men of a philosophical or even a poetic organization, precisely then, and in fact always, regard, instead of their own position, general ideas, when others can understand nothing at all, and be nothing at all but self: namely, in the greatest dangers, in the greatest sufferings, in the greatest joys.

A fair man will throw all upon the Apothecary, who was Victor's moral and mechanical bed-cord, or helper out-of-bed; for as he had prefigured to him the n.o.ble Mat in a similar situation (but without the bed-cord), of course the abhorrence which Victor, some days before, had felt of the Evangelist's conduct, became in him a laming incapacity of copying it in the least a few days after.--O if we could only, a couple of days beforehand, see every sin, to which we are tempted by ourselves or others, actually committed by a true scamp, whom we spit upon! Could we then eagerly imitate the scamp?

Finally, one needs only to cast a glance at Victor in his balcony, where he now sits in a singular barometrical condition, if one would pa.s.s judgment on his previous state. His present state, namely, is a mixture of emptiness, discontent (with himself and everybody), of increased love for Agnola, justification of this Agnola, and yet the _impossibility_ of imagining her a near friend, of Clotilda's.

For myself, I shall never repent the little which I have hastily brought together, if I have shown up therein by a few happy hints how well my hero, in regard to his conduct _after_ the kiss, which must strike strict people of the world as singular, can plead a disagreeable combination of constraining circ.u.mstances, and if I shall, therefore, have succeeded in restoring to him, at the end of the twenty-seventh chapter, the respect which he had forfeited, by not wrapping round the princely ring; too large for his finger, the long silken threads of love, so as to make it fit....

28. DOG-POST-DAY.

EASTER-FESTIVAL.

A dog-day so long and weighty as the twenty-eighth one may be allowed to break up into three holidays.

FIRST EASTER-HOLIDAY.

Arrival at the Parsonage.--Club of the Three Twins.--Carps.

On the first day of Easter; Sebastian, full of snow-clouds as the heavens above him, stole out of the farm-buildings of the pa.s.sions,--I mean the residence-city,--but not till towards evening, in order not, to-day, with a heart whose very foundation had been washed away by a half-year's rainstorm, to be long a burden to any friend. On the mountain behind which Flachsenfingen drops down as by a sinking of the earth, he turned round toward the dusky city, and let the remembrance pa.s.s by as an evening mist before his soul, how, three quarters of a year ago, in the refulgence of summer and of hope, he had looked out so joyously over these houses,--I described it long ago,--and he compared his prospects of that time with his present desolation; at last he said: "Only say to thyself outright, what thou _hast_ and what thou _meanest_,--namely, thou hast nothing more, not a loved or loving heart in the whole city,--but thou meanest once more to march to St. Luna, and, all impoverished as thou art, to take the _second_ leave of the pale angel whom thy robbed and ruined heart cannot forget, as thou climbest after the sun, and, having already seen his setting from out a valley, once more seest him sink, from a mountain." ...

Five half Sabbath-day's journeys from the village he espied the Court-Chaplain, pursued by a Catechumen (as well of the tailoring craft as of Christianity). In vain did he and the young tailor seek to overtake the hotly hunted shepherd of souls. The shepherd came not to a stand until the youngster had got into his house. A hundred-and-twenty-pounder (that is my physical weight) gets no addition to his aesthetic weight by keeping so long to himself the insignificant cause of this insignificant running, and not saying till now that the Chaplain could absolutely hear no one coming after him, because he was afraid the man would smash him from behind. Now the apprentice wanted to tread in the footsteps of his spiritual master and come up with him,--the more fiercely the master dashed forward through s.p.a.ce to leave the other behind him, so much the longer leaps forward did the scholar take to overtake him,--that was the whole sc.r.a.pe, but so do men chase men.

Victor ran with outflying arms to a pair of hanging ones, which the owner in his agony could not raise. But in the parsonage two warmer ones folded themselves around his frozen bosom, those of his countrywoman; nor did the parson's wife disturb his and her resurrection-joy with a single complaint of his long absence,--this delicacy of friendship, which spared another unprofitable apologies, he reciprocrated with double warmth, and with a voluminous bill of accusation against his own follies. She led him up a stairway in the joyful parsonage, which to-night was one pierced-work of lighted stories, to her dear son's embrace, and into the presence of the three kindred sons from one mother-country, the three twins....

O ye four men of one heart, press my forlorn Victor's to yours warmly, and make the good youth glad only for one evening!... I myself have verily been so, since the paschal Exodus from the Flachsenfingen Egypt: I will therefore make the twenty-eighth chapter as long as the watering-village itself is. A weightiness will thereby be imparted to my work with true critics,--but with postmasters, too, who, when I despatch it to the bookstore, will draw something considerable from me for their weighing.... But shall an author be so shabby as to abridge his sentiments, for the sake of postage, merely because a post-office clerk weighs them more according to his own than the postal rates? And am I not encouraged to the opposite course--that of protracting my emotions--by the electoral, princely, and city-benches in Ratisbon, inasmuch as the said benches by an imperial recess allow me a deduction of two thirds of my postage for printed matter, in order, as they hope, to give encouragement to literature and to sentiment?

The n.o.ble Evangelist, to be sure, was also up there among the rest,--he and Joachime having politely escorted the maid of honor to the house of her parents;--but here in the _country_, where there are fewer moral weeds than in _cities_ (just as there are fewer botanical in _fields_ than in _gardens_), and where one enjoys pleasures without _maitres de deplaisirs_,--here where in Victor love of country appeased the longing for all other love,--no one could be unhappy but he who deserved to be.

Mat disappeared there like a toad among tulips. Victor would have loved the English, even without the blood-relationship of nationality, and would have given a bad name to the Dutch, even with that relation; to this is to be ascribed his inconsiderate speech, that these nations pictured themselves in their tobacco-pipes, inasmuch as the English ones had _upright_ heads and the Belgian _hanging_ ones.

All three were of the opposition party, and lost the coldness of their blood at the ice-coldness of Pitt's. The correspondent of the Dog-Days does not write me, whether it was because the Minister had offended them,--or whether they took a nearer interest in the frightful judgment-day and resurrection of the dead in France, where the sun broods at once over Ph[oe]nix-ashes and crocodile's eggs,--or what the reason was. In fact he reports to me nothing further about them than their names, namely, Caspar, Melchior, and Balthazar,[34] which were the names of the three holy kings from the East.

The one who took the whim of calling himself Melchior concealed under a phlegmatic ice-crust an equatorial glow, and was a Hecla, that splits its ice-mountains before it flings out flames; with cold eye and languid voice and pale brow he spoke in a monosyllabic, sententious, condensed style,--he saw the truth only in a burning reflector, and his ink was a tearing waterspout. The second Englishman was a philosopher and German at once. The elder Cato, who likewise represented the Moorish king, every one knows. I am as glad as if it were I myself, that my hero was the very one who was distinguished from them all by a greater serene considerateness of free-thinking. I mean that Socratic bright eye which glances round freely over and through the garden of the trees of knowledge, and which chooses like a man, whereas others are exclusively impelled by instinct toward some one proposition, some one apple of these trees, as every insect is to its fruit. Moral freedom operates no less on our opinions than on our actions; and despite all grounds of decision in the understanding, and all grounds of motive in the will, still man _chooses_ as well his system as his conduct.

Hence, almost even before supper, the three twins had become cold in affection toward Sebastian, merely because he was so in judgment. He was to-day for the first time in a case with them, into which he fell three times every day with Flamin; certain men can better worry down unlimited contradiction than limited concurrence. The case was this: Matthieu, by his satiric exaggerations, gave to the slight dissimilarity between Victor and them an ever-increasing prominence. He said (not for the purpose of making allusion, but only of seeming to) that princes to whom, as from the Chinese king, their subjects prayed for political weather, helped themselves like that rector who himself composed the almanac, and allowed his scholars (in this, case the favorites of the princes) to make the weather for it. He said, too, that the poets could _sing_ for Liberty, indeed, but not _speak_ for it; that they imitated in a timid plight under the mask of tragic heroes the voice of the heroes, just as he had often witnessed a similar joke in the case of a roasted calf's head, which seemed to the whole table to bellow like a living calf, whereas there was nothing inside but a live tree-toad, which sent forth its croaking. "But it were a still greater cowardice," said Victor, "not even to sing; only I know men are now neither _barbaric_ nor cultivated enough to enjoy the Poets and follow them; _Poets_, _Religion_, _Pa.s.sions_, and _Women_ are four things which live through three ages, whereof we are just in the middle age,--that of _despising_ them; the past age was that of _deifying_ them; the future will be that of _honoring_ them." The indignant trio of twins were of opinion that religion, and women particularly, were merely for the state. Besides, Victor's republican sentiments were ambiguous in their eyes, if only by reason of his aristocratic relations. And now, when he actually added that the freedom of states had nothing at all to do with retrenchment of expenses, with greater security of property, with increased comfort of living, in short, with the promotion of material welfare, that all this was found often still more abundantly in monarchies, and that that for which one sacrificed property and life must of course be something higher than property or life;--when he further said, every man of culture and virtue lived under a republican form of government, notwithstanding his physical relations, just as prisoners in _democracies_ enjoyed nevertheless the rights of freedom;--and when he made himself, not so much for the Minister and the Upper House as for the English people, armor-bearer and _Contradictor_, because the principles of the first two had from time immemorial combated those of the latter and not yet determined them; because the complaint of to-day was as old as the (English) revolution; because the ground-plan of this last could be torn to pieces only in a formal counter-revolution; because all acts of injustice were committed _according_ to the _show_ of law, which was better than a justice _against_ the _show_ of law; and because the _nunnery-grating_ which had now been built around the freedom of the English press[35] was no worse than the Athenian prohibition of philosophizing, but better than the permission of the Roman emperors to make pasquils upon them,----

The English love long coats and speeches. As he began with "when," so must, in his as in my period, a "then" follow....

Then was there not a devil of them satisfied, and Cato the Elder said: "If he should deliver these principles in the Upper House, there would arise the greatest uproar on the subject, but from approbation, and every hearer would still cry, _Hear him!_" Victor said, with the modesty of a man of the world, he was as warm a republican and Old Briton as any of them, only he was incapable to-day of "proving from these principles that he resembled them;--perhaps at the next club!"

"And that can be held," said the Court-Chaplain, "on my birthday, in a few weeks."--If we live to see it,--I and the reader,--it is to be hoped they will invite us, too, as old G.o.dfathers; the first time (on the sixth Dog-Post-Day) we were, as is well known, a part of the company.

My hero exacted of men (especially as he did not give himself the trouble) too little respect. He labored, to be sure, for these wages; but if they did not give him any, he knew how to make a thousand excuses for men, and drew out his mint-stamp and struck off for himself a medal of honor, swearing meanwhile, "I'll be hanged, if the next time I don't behave myself more proudly, and less indulgently, and altogether more seriously, so as to excite a certain reverence." The next time is yet to come. He therefore forgave the twin-trio so beautifully, that they at last folded the philanthropist with pa.s.sionate embrace forever to their souls.

After such a commencement-disputation there was nothing he loved to do better than something really nonsensical, gallant, childish,--this time it was going to the kitchen. Catinat said, he only was a hero _qui jouerait une partie de quilles au sortir d'une bataille gaynee ou perdue_,[36]--or, after winning in a disputation, could go to the kitchen. "Either all or nothing has weight in this mock-life," said he.

Into the kitchen, which was not so dirty as a French bedchamber, but as clean as a Belgian cattle-stall, another festal hare and envoy extraordinary had already made his entry, the Court-Chaplain, who had there his calling to attend to. He had to see whether his four-pound carp,--a native of the pastoral pond, and wintered expressly for the adopted son Bastian,--not so much whether it was properly scaled (he pa.s.sed over that question entirely with very little philosophy) as whether the tail was properly tucked up. It could not surely be a matter of indifference to him, but as a man he must at once feel and fight down his sorrow on the subject, if a carp of as many pounds as a mortal has brains were so miserably slit open that the one quotum of the tail should be no smaller than a hair-bag, and the other no bigger than a fin. And this entire nominal terrorism[37] is after all of small consequence compared with another real terrorism (so much does important trouble fade before greater) which tormented the Parson with the threat that they would crush the four-pounder's gallbladder.----His own would have at once emptied itself after the other. "For G.o.d's sake, more considerately, Appel! _Embitter_ not my first Easter-day," said he. Gall is, according to Boerhaave, true soap: hence the satirical kind washes half the reading world clean and shiny, and the liver of such a man is the soap-ball of a quarter of the world and its colonies.

However, it turned out gloriously. But, by Heaven! the world should for once perceive (after the printing of this book) that a carp of four pounds--so long fed in the fish-box, so skilfully gutted--weighs more in the fish-scales of _contentment_, than the golden _fish-bones_ in the red field of the arms of Count Windischgratz!

Could he then stay long in the kitchen,--that widow's seat of his old departed youth,--among so many female friends of Clotilda, who all bewailed to him her sinking and going away (in a double sense), without having the oxymel of regretted pleasures run over his lips, and the pang of sympathy shoot through his heart,--although he had to-day in the second story spread the disputation on Freedom, as a true scattering medicine, as an arquebusade-water,[38] at least as a bandage over his open veins? I asked whether he could long avoid thinking of the good soul. But I absolutely would not give the answer, from sympathy with the innocent Victor I absolutely would not disclose before so many thick-skinned souls--who in their empty b.r.e.a.s.t.s approve the poetical joys of love, and yet not its poetical sorrows--how often he again and again mixed fate's sugar of milk with memory's sugar of lead, were I not obliged to for the reason--

--that little Julia came back from the castle and brought with her the promise that Aunty (Clotilda) was coming to-morrow. This promised, then, that the Minister's daughter would leave to-morrow. Let no one think hardly of the parsonage-people for their importunity about Clotilda: for on the third holiday she goes to the ball, on the day following to Maienthal,--and all they had left was to-morrow and to-day.... Our Flamin had brought along with him little Julia herself, being well pleased with her office of penny-post. I am morally certain, the Chaplain's wife saw in my hero as much as I write of him, and she loved him so much, that, had she been obliged to decree instead of Fate, she would have died for sorrow, before she could have brought herself to bless the son at the expense of the friend. So very much did he win, by a beautiful blending of refinement, sensibility, and fancy, the fairest and tenderest hearts,--I mean those of women.

This tiny Julia, the after-flora of the faded Giulia, twined together in Victor's soul roses and nettles, and all his flowers of to-day's joy had their roots in tears deep buried in his breast. Even the kiss of Clotilda's friend, of Agatha, affected him. He thought of the Stamitz concert, and of their sitting side by side, and of the c.r.a.pe hat which veiled the grief of two beloved eyes. He begged Agatha to borrow that hat of Clotilda, and make him an exact copy of it, because he wanted to give it as a present. "When she is gone," he said to himself,----"no, when she is dead,--then I will weep without concealment, and tell all men openly that I loved her." My dear fellow, at the _souper_--a parson can give one--they will ascribe the glistening of thine eyes more to thy self-discharging wit than to the repressed flood of tears, and, if I were at the table, I could not look upon thee for emotion, when during the hammering and "hardening" of the red eggs I saw thee try to fix thy overflowing and downcast eye, half shut, steadfastly on the pole of a red egg, and silently place thy egg-gable under the cross-block of Eymann's egg, in order to gain time for victory over thy voice and eye-socket! And yet I cannot see what important advantage thou wilt then think to gain by this mask, when Old Appel sends thee by the little Iris and express, Julia,--she can never, herself, undertake it,--a stained, tattooed egg, a real, boiled, allegorical picture, and when thou readest over in the fragile sh.e.l.l the flower-pieces etched into it with aqua-fortis, and thy name bordered with forget-me-nots; I say, what help can thy previous dissimulation be to thee, when thou now, in order not to think out the thought "Forget-me-not," hurriest from the room under the double pretext of having to thank Apollonia, and on account of exhaustion, to retire thus early to rest? Ah, the thanking thou wilt! undoubtedly do, but rest thou wilt not!...

SECOND EASTER-HOLIDAY.

Funeral-Discourse on Himself.--Two Opposite Sorts of Fatality to the Wax-Statue.

The snow-heavens had fallen and lay upon the landscape. The snow made me melancholy, and reminded one of the wintry lace-knots of Nature. It was the 1st of April, when Nature, so to speak, made the season itself an April fool. Victor had long ago learned manners (_mores_) enough to teach him that, when one is visiting a Court-Chaplain, he must go with him to sermon. And then, too, he loved to march to sacristies for the same reason that he loved to steal away to the huts of shepherds, hunters, and fowlers. It did not strike him as overwrought that the Chaplain (as he himself did at last) should place his mounting of the pulpit,--merely on account of the mult.i.tude of preparations he made for it,--in point of importance, side by side with the scaling of a wall.

Nay, he disputed with him during the long hymn about the surplice-fees of a stillborn f[oe]tus, and proved by a short argument that a parson could demand of every f[oe]tus--and though it were five nights old--the appropriate burial-fees, whether the miserly parents bespoke a funeral sermon for the thing or not. The Chaplain made a weighty objection, but Victor removed it by the weighty proposition that a clergyman (for otherwise he would be cheated out of his best f[oe]tuses) could make every couple pay him burial-fees as often as it could pay baptismal moneys. The Chaplain replied: "It is stupid that the best pastoral Theologies hurry over this point like a pinch of snuff in the wind."

With all the humor of my hero, and with all the gayety of my parson,--who on every holy eve scolded and, condemned like a revolutionary tribunal, and who on every first holiday softened, till on the third he became absolutely an angel,--the world should promise itself something different from what nevertheless is coming: namely, that Victor saw gleaming out of every hour of the approaching evening which was to bring Clotilda for the last time but one into his company, a protruding sacrificial knife against which he must press his wounded bosom. She was invited to-day, as it were to a farewell-supper,--the three twins of course.

At last she came at evening on the arm of the misunderstood Matthieu.--If, as Ruska a.s.serts, the number of devils (44,435,556) who, according to the a.s.sertion of _Guliermus Parisiensis_, flank a _dying_ Abbess, is made much too small,[39] one can readily imagine how many devils may form the escorting squadron of a _living_, a _blooming_ one.

I, for my part, a.s.sume as many devils around a fair one, as there are male persons.

When Clotilda appeared with that face of hers smiling down into its fading beauty, with the exhausted lute-voice, which sorrow draws from us, as a peculiar pianoforte variation, by the pressure of the stop,--but is it not with men as with organs, of which the _human voice_ goes most finely with tremolos?--when she thus appeared, then had her n.o.blest friend the choice, either to fall down before her with the words, "Let me die first," or to be, to-day, right funny.

He chose the latter (excepting with her) by way of drowning his dreams.

He therefore flung about him with stories and healthy observations.

Therefore he threw into the imperial military chest against sentimentalism this satirical contribution, that it was the March-gall or moist-gall in the human field, i. e. a spot that always remained damp, and on which everything rotted. As this availed nothing, he entered into alliance with whole states, and promised himself some help from remarking concerning them, that their summits, like forest-trees, had grown into each other, and that it had no effect to saw one through down below,--that the equality of kingdoms was a subst.i.tute or a preparation for the equality of ranks,--and that gunpowder, which had hitherto been the _sticking powder_ of the great powers, would finally burn out and heal the hydrophobous wounds of the human race. At last, when he plainly perceived that it helped him very little, as he expressed the conjecture that Europe would one day become the _North India_, and the same North which had once been the breaking-tools and building-materials of the earth would be so once more, but the North in the other hemisphere, he struck, with his chemical process, into the wet road, and (like a secretary of legation) instead of politics took--punch.

But only cares, not melancholy nor love, can be drowned by drinking.

The other spirits, dissolved in the nervous spirit, array themselves in a magically sparkling circle around every idea, around every emotion, which thou hast therein, as in breweries the lights, by reason of the steam; burn in a colored circle. The gla.s.s with its hot cloud is a Papin's digester[40] even to the densest heart, and decomposes the whole soul; the draught makes every one at once more tender and bold. A soft heart was of old ever a.s.sociated with a bold, hardened fist. As it kept on snowing, he offered Clotilda for to-morrow his sh.e.l.l-shaped sleigh and himself (as he was, besides, invited to the ball) as knight-errant,--whereby he compelled the Evangelist to offer himself as sledge-gondolier to the stepmother.

Clotilda withdrew now from the merry male company into the adjoining room, where her Agatha and all were,--it was not done from disapproval of decorous, manly festivity,--still less from embarra.s.sment, as it is, in fact, easier, and made easier for her s.e.x, to behave itself naturally under forty eyes than under four,--still less from inability to disguise her sisterly love towards Flamin; for her flying soul had long since learned to fold together its wings and hide its tears and wishes, brought up as she had been among _strangers_, trained in th.o.r.n.y relations and between discordant parents. She did it merely, like the Parson's wife, because it is a _British_ custom, that the ladies shall take themselves away from the men and their incense-kettle of punch.