The Invisible Lodge Part 12

TWENTY-FIFTH, OR XX TRINITY, SECTION.

Ottomar's Letter.

When we have read Ottomar's letter, we will take our places at Gustavus's new theatre and look at him. In the following letter a spirit reigns and riots, which, like an Alp, oppresses and often possesses all men of the higher and n.o.bler quality, and which--much as it outweighs even Holland spirits--a _higher_ spirit only can overpower and crowd out. Many men live in the _Perigee_, some in the _Apogee_, few in the _Perihelion_.--Fenk so often yearned for his Ottomar, especially since his complete silence of some years' standing, and spoke of him so often to Gustavus, that it was well the address of the letter was from a strange hand and to Doctor Zoppo in Pavia: else the Doctor had sinned at once against the first line of the letter.

"Name not my name, oh eternal friend, to the bearer: I must do it. On the last year of my life there lies a great black seal; break it not, count the past as the future--I make it for thee the present, only not just yet--and if I should die I would appear before and tell thee my last mystery of earth.

"I write to thee, simply that thou mayst know that I am living and am coming in autumn. My thirst for traveling is quenched with Alpine ice and sea-water; I repair home now to my resting-place, and if there, at my street-door, a tempting voice of secret desire should call me again to cross the mountains, I should say to myself: the same panting and pining human heart gazes down into the waters of the Gaudiana and the Volga, which sighs in thee beside the Rhine stream, and that which climbs the Alps and Caucasus, is what thou art, and turns a longing eye over toward thy street-door.[62] But if I sit here, and every morning go to the close-stool, and am glad to be hungry, and afterward that my appet.i.te is satisfied, and if I daily put on and pull out breeches and hair pins, ah! what in the end does all amount to? What was it then I wanted, when in my childhood I sat upon the stone in my gateway, and gazed yearningly in the direction of the long road and thought how it ran on and on, shot over the mountains, still onward and onward ... and at last?... Ah, all roads lead to nothing, and where they break off, there stands another looking longingly back over the hills to where we sit. What was it then I would have, when my little eye swam along with the waves of the Rhine, that it might waft me to a promised land, whither all streams, I thought, were flowing, not knowing, meanwhile, that the same river, which bore in its bosom many a heavy heart, murmured along by many a crushed form, which it alone could release from its anguish, that then, like man, it frittered and crumbled itself away, and filtered itself at last into Holland sands?--Orient land!

morning land! toward thy fields also did my soul once lean as trees do toward the East:--'Ah! how must it be there, where the sun rises!' I thought; and when I traveled with my mother to Poland, and at last into the land lying toward morning, and came among its n.o.bles, Jews and slaves--.... But there is no other sunny land of the morning to be found on this optical ball, than that one which all our steps can neither _remove_ nor _reach_. Ah, ye joys of earth, none of you can do more than satisfy the breast with sighs and the eye with water, and into the poor heart, which opens under your heaven, ye only pour one more wave of blood! And yet these two or three wretched pleasures lame us as poisonous flowers do children who play with them, in arm and limb. Only let there be no music, that mocker of our wishes; do not, at her call, all the fibres of my heart fly asunder and stretch themselves out like so many sucking polypus's-arms and tremble with longing and seek to embrace--whom? what?... An unseen something waiting in other worlds. I often think, perhaps it is, after all, nothing; perhaps, after death, all goes on just as now, and thy longings will reach forward out of one heaven toward another[63]--and then I crush under this fantastic nonsense the strings of my harpsichord, as if I would bring a fountain out of them, as if it were not enough that the pressure of this yearning untunes and snaps the thin strings of my inner musical system.

"In Rome there lived opposite the Church of St. Adrian a painter, who during a rain always placed himself under the spouts, and laughed till he was crazy, and who often said to me: 'There is no dog's death, but only a dog's life.' Fenk! take at least what man is or does: so very, very little! What power, then, is wholly developed in us, or in harmony with the other powers? Is it not a piece of good fortune, if so much as one faculty gets drawn in like a branch into the hot-house of a lecture-room or library and is forced by partial warmth to bloom, while the whole tree stands outside in the snow with hard black twigs? Heaven snows two or three flakes together to make one inner snow-man, which we call our education; the earth melts or muddies a quarter of it, the tepid wind loosens the snow man's head off--that is our cultured inner man, such an abominable patch-work in all our knowings and willings!

From individuals to universal humanity I have no desire to pa.s.s; I care not to think, how a century is ploughed and harrowed under to manure the next--how nothing will round itself to anything--how the eternal writing in books and stratifying of the _Scibile_ has no aim, no end, and all dig and drive in opposite directions! What does man do? Even less than he knows and becomes. Tell me, what then does thy penetration, thy heart, thy swiftness effect before the princely portrait over the President's chair, or in fact before an emasculated reigning face? The crooked twigs pressed back into each other are squeezed against the window of the winter-house, the Regent causes their fruit to pa.s.s by his dish in the _compotiere_, the blue sky is denied them, the cleverest thing at last is, that they rot! What, then, do the n.o.blest faculties avail in thee, when weeks and months glide away, which do not use, do not call out, do not exercise them? When I have thus contemplated, as I often do, the impossibility, in all our monarchical offices, of being a whole, a really active, a universally useful man--even the monarch cannot, with those innumerable black subaltern claws and hands which he must first fasten to his own hands as fingers or pincers, do anything completely good--as often as I have contemplated this, I have wished I were hanged with my robbers, but were first their captain, and with them ran down the old const.i.tution!... Beloved Fenk! _Thy_ heart no one can tear out of _my_ breast, it propels my best blood and never canst _thou_ misunderstand me, let me be as unknowable as I will! But, oh friend, the times are coming on, when for thee this misunderstanding may after all grow easier!

"Veiled Genius of our overshadowed globe! ah, had I only been something, had the globe of my brain and had my heart, like Luther's, only earned by some lasting and far-rooting deed the blood which reddens and feeds them; then would my _hungry pride_ become _satisfied lowliness_, four humble walls would be large enough for me, I should no longer sigh for anything great except death, and first for the autumn of life and age, in which man, when the birds of youth are dumb, when over the _earth_ lies haze and flying gossamer-summer, when the heavens hang bright, but not blazing, over all, lays himself down to sleep upon the withered leaves.----Farewell, my friend, upon an earth where one can no further do any good except to lie down in it; _next_ autumn we shall be with one another!"

To this letter, which takes possession of my whole soul and renews my errors as well as my wishes, I can add nothing more, than that to-day the first man in this history has been buried on a mountain. When, after four or five sections, I come to speak of his evening-euthanasy, then will the outlines of his form already have grown paler and fainter, as well in the coffin as in the hearts of his friends!

EXTRA-LEAF.

Concerning Lofty Men, and Evidence that the Pa.s.sions belong to the Next Life, and Stoicism to this.

I call certain men _lofty_ or festal-day-men, and to this cla.s.s belong, in my history, Ottomar, Gustavus, the Genius and the Doctor, and none beside.

By a lofty man I do not mean the man of strict honesty and rect.i.tude, who, like a body of a solar system, pursues his path without other than apparent aberrations; nor do I mean the fine soul which, with prophetic feeling, smooths all down, spares every one, satisfies every one, and sacrifices itself, but does not throw itself away; nor the man of honor, whose word is a rock, and in whose breast, heated and moved by the central Sun of Honor, there are no thoughts and purposes other than the deeds outside of it; nor, finally, either the cold, virtuous man of principle, or the man of feeling, whose feelers wind about all beings, and quiver in another's wound, and who embraces Virtue and a Beauty with equal ardor; nor do I mean by the lofty man the mere great man of genius, and indeed the very metaphor indicates in the one case horizontal, and in the other vertical extension.

But I mean him who, to a greater or lesser degree of all these distinctions, adds something more, which earth so seldom possesses--elevation above the earth, the feeling of the pettiness of all earthly doings, and the disproportion between our heart and our place; a countenance lifted[64] above the confusing jungle and the disgusting filth of our floor--the wish for death and the glance beyond the clouds. If an angel should place himself above our atmosphere and look down through this darkened sea, turbid with cloud-sc.u.m and floating verdure, to the bottom on which we lie and to which we cleave; were he to see the thousand eyes and hands which stare and clutch _horizontally_ at the contents of the air, at mere tinsel; should he see the worse ones which are bent _sheer downward_ toward the prey and yellow mica on the muddy bottom, and finally the worst, which _supinely_ drag the n.o.ble human face[65] through the mire;--if this angel however, should behold among the sea-animals some lofty men walking upright and looking upward to himself, and should perceive how they, weighed down by the watery column above their heads, entangled in the snarl and slime of the ground beneath them, pressed through the waves and panted for a breath of the vast ether above them, how they loved more than they were loved, endured life rather than enjoyed it, equally far from the stationary upward gaze of astonishment and the race of business-life, left their hands and feet to the mercy of the bottom, and gave only the upward yearning heart and head to the ether beyond the sea, and looked at nothing but the hand which separates the weight of the body from the bottom to which the diver is held down by it, and lets him soar into his proper element-- ... Oh, well might this angel count such men as submerged angels, and pity their low condition and their tears in the sea.... Could one gather together the graves of a Pythagoras (that n.o.blest soul among the ancients), of Plato, Socrates, Antoninus (not so much, of Cato the great or Epictetus), Shakespeare's (if his life was like his writing), J. J. Rousseau's, and the like, into one churchyard, then would one have the true princely bench of the _high n.o.bility_ of mankind, the consecrated earth of our globe, G.o.d's flower-garden in the low North. But why do I take my white paper and picture it and strew it with coal-dust or ink-powder, in order to dust-in the image of a lofty man, while from heaven hangs down the great, never-fading picture of the virtuous man which Plato in his Republic has transferred out of his own heart to the canvas?

The greatest villains are the least acquainted with each other; lofty men know each other after the first hour. Authors who belong to this cla.s.s are the most censured and the least read; for example, the departed Hamann. Englishmen and Orientals have this fixed star on the breast oftener than any other people.

Ottomar led me to the subject of the pa.s.sions: I know that he, once at least, hated nothing so much as heads and hearts which were covered with the stony rind of Stoicism--that he longed for cataracts in his veins and in his lungs tempests--that he said, a man without pa.s.sion was a still greater egotist than one of the intensest; that one whom the near fire of the sensuous world did not kindle would be still inflamed by the distant fixed-starlight of the intellectual; that the Stoic differed from the worn-out courtier only in this, that the cooling off of the former proceeded from within outward, that of the other from without inward.... I know not whether with the inwardly burning, outwardly freezing, slippery court-man it is so; but so it is with gla.s.s: when it receives from without too much chilling around the glowing nucleus, it becomes porous and frangible;[66] the process must be reversed.

All pa.s.sions deceive themselves, not in respect to the _kind_, or the _degree_, but in respect to the _object_ of the feeling; namely thus:

Our pa.s.sions err, not in this respect, that they hate or love some person or other:--for then there would be an end of all moral beauty and ugliness:--nor yet in this, that they wail or exult over anything--for in that case, not the smallest tear of joy or sorrow over weal or woe would be allowable, and we should not be permitted any longer to wish or even will anything, not even virtue. Nor do the pa.s.sions err as to the degree of this inclination or disinclination, this rejoicing and bewailing; for supposing the sense and the fancy invest the object in their eyes with thousandfold greater moral or physical charms than they wear to others: nevertheless the loving and hating must increase in proportion to the outward occasion; and provided any external attraction gratifies the least degree of love or hatred, then must even the exaggerated attraction justify an aggravated degree of the pa.s.sions. Most of the arguments against anger only prove that the imputed moral ugliness of the enemy does not exist, not that it does exist and he is still to be loved--most of the arguments against our love only prove that our love mistakes not so much the degree as the object, etc. Not merely a moderate, but the highest degree of the pa.s.sions would be allowable, provided only their object were presented to them, _e. g_., the highest love toward the highest of good beings, the highest hatred toward the highest of bad ones. Now as no earthly objects have the quality that can justly excite in us such tempests of the soul; as therefore the greatest objects which can attract or repel us must be found, in other worlds: we see that the greatest emotions of our inner being perhaps find only outside of the body their permitted and more ample field of activity.

On the whole, pa.s.sion is subjective and relative: the same movement of the will is in the stronger soul and amidst greater billows only a volition, and in the weaker one and on the smoother surface an internal storm. A perpetual stream of volition flows through us, and the pa.s.sions are only the _water-falls_ and _spring-floods_ of this river; but are we justified in damming them up merely because of their rarity?--Is not that a flood to the brooklet which is only a wave to the river?--And if we, when on fire, censure our coldness, and when cold our heat, where do we get the right? And does the duration of our censure give it?

I feel in advance, objections and difficulties, nay I know and feel that, on this beclouded rainy globe nothing can wall and roof us in against outward storms, except the subjugation of inward ones--nevertheless I also feel, that all which has gone before is true.

TWENTY-SIXTH, OR XXI TRINITATIS, SECTION.

_Diner_ at the Schoolmaster's.

When an author is left so many weeks behind his story as I am, he says to himself, the deuce may take and carry off to-day's Post-Trinitatis if he will. I will therefore speak of nothing in this section but of to-day's Post-Trinitatis, of my sister, my keeping-room and myself. Few storytellers will have had to-day behind their ink-stands so good a day as their colleague.

I sit here in Schoolmaster Wutz's upper chamber and have for the last quarter of a year been holding my arm out of the window as a branch candlestick with a long light, to shine into the ten German circles. I shall, every fall and winter, begin to make all my sections as I do to-day's by candle-light at 4 o'clock in the morning; for as the sublime darkness before midnight lifts man away above the earth and its clouds, so does that which follows midnight lay us back again in our earthly nest--after 12 o'clock at night I begin already to feel a new joy of life, which increases just in proportion as the morning light streaming down thins the darkness and makes its transparent. Precisely the finest and most invisible feelers of our soul run on like roots under the coa.r.s.e world of sense and are repelled by the most distant agitation. _E. g_. if the sky is rayless and cloudless toward the east, and toward the west darkened with heavy clouds, I then just in joke turn round and round more than ten times--when I stand facing the east all inner clouds flee away out of my spirit--if I turn toward the west, they hang down again round about it--and in this way by rapid revolutions I compel the most opposite sensations to approach and recede before me.

In this pleasure-section logical order is not even to be thought of; historical order is alone to be found; only there is many a thought with a thousand brilliant angles that will be suppressed by my snuffers when I trim the candle, or drowned in my cup, when I drink out of it yesterday's coffee. This latter is rather to be recommended to the public; among all warm drinks cold coffee is, indeed, of the most detestable flavor, but at the same time of the least potency. The sleeping day like a sleeping beauty, aglow with her morning dreams, is already red, and must soon open its eye. Its first business will be--poetically speaking--to wake up my sister and come with her as a bedfellow into my chamber. I ought like a Moravian Brother to have two or three thousand sisters, I so love them all. Verily, many a time, I feel like striking out with a Satyr's rude goat-feet against the good female s.e.x, and then let it be, because I see beside me the little Sunday shoes of my Philippina and my fancy shoves into them the small, womanly feet, that will have to step into so many a thorn-tangle and rain-puddle, both of which easily penetrate the thin tapestry of the female foot. The _empty_ clothes of a person, particularly of children, inspire me with kindliness and pity, because they remind me of the suffering which the poor occupant must already have undergone in them; and once in Carlsbad I could easily have reconciled myself to a Bohemian damsel, if she would have allowed me to behold her house-dress, when she was not in it herself....

These _periods_ represent periods of time that have rolled away. Now the blind are healed, the lame walk, the deaf hear--that is to say, all are awake; under my feet the schoolmaster is already cracking up the Sunday sugar; my sister has already laughed at me four times in succession; the senior parson, Setzmann, has already from his window whistled to my landlord the most necessary religious edicts for the day; the clock, like Hezekiah's sun-dial, has, by the miraculous power of the decreeing whistle, gone back an hour, and I can write so much longer; but have thereby withdrawn my pencil from my morning sketch.

The sun shines over against my face, and makes my biographical paper a blank Moses'-visage; it is therefore my good fortune that I can take a penknife and Austria and Bohemia or the Germany of the Jesuits, namely, Hamann's maps of the same, and with the knife nail and impale these countries over my window; such a country always keeps off the _morning-sun_ as well and throws as much _shadow_ over it, as if I had the shame-ap.r.o.n or _pallium_ of a window curtain hanging there.

My pen now runs on, in the _earth-shadow_ of the orb, thus: Wutz keeps not in his house three respectable chairs, no window curtains or tapestry-hangings. Meanwhile very much too showy furniture lies in Scheerau; I enjoy here the most miserable, and say to myself, a Prince can hardly show a worse in an artificial hermitage. Even our almanac we, I and my landlord, write out for ourselves with our own hands, like fellows of the Berlin Academy--only with chalk on the keeping room door; every week we publish a _Heft_ or weekly part of our almanac and wipe out the past. On the four-square stove three couples might dance, whom, like the modern tragedies, notwithstanding all deformity of arrangement and breadth, it would poorly warm through. It must, by the way, come at last to hand and pocket stoves when the times arrive that we shall have to fetch out of the mines instead of the metals the wood wherewith we now feed them....

A ram was terribly pounded, that is, his red shank--the tin platters, the baptismal presents of the little Wutzes, are dusted out--my silver knife and fork are borrowed for the occasion--the fire crackles--the Frau Wutz runs--her children and birds scream.--All these preparations for a far too great _diner_, which is to-day to be given down below, I hear up in my study-chamber. Such preparations are perhaps more suitable to the rank of the two guests who are to receive the entertainment, than to the station of the two school-men who give it.

To the present historian and his sister, namely, they are permitted to give a dinner and to sit themselves with the company at the table. The schoolmaster had been allowed to install much of his cleaned-out furniture for the s.p.a.ce of a week in my sitting-room, because his own was at last, after long pet.i.tioning--for the consistory does not look with favor on repairs in the visible any more than in the invisible church--being reformed, _i. e_., repaired, namely whitewashed.--Therefore he invited me (in court style) to dine, and I (in similar court style) accepted the invitation.

I shall not write out the rest of the section till evening, partly in order not to _think away_ my appet.i.te for dinner, partly by way of hobbling after a little addition to it in the open air, where, besides, I can hear two or three yellow-hammers and the church-people sing. On the whole the after-summer, which, to-day, with its finest sky-blue dress and the sun upon it as order-badge, stands out there upon the fields, is a still Good Friday of Nature; and if we human beings were polite people, we should go out oftener into the open air and politely escort the departing summer to the very door. I foresee I should never be able to look my fill at the mild sun, which has become a moon stealing softly around us, and which in the after-summer deserves the feminine article [_die Sonne_], if I were not obliged to fix my eye upon the heights of Scheerau, where my good souls live and whence my Doctor is coming to-day to visit me....

Gone down below the earth is now the day and its sun. A happy journey home, beloved friend! On the silver-ground with which the moon overlays thy way, may thy soul paint the lost Eden of youth, and the black shadow which thou and thy shy steed cast upon the radiant floor must glide behind you, not before!

Why are most of the population of this book precisely Fenk's friends?

For two substantial reasons. In the first place the quicksilver of humor which shines out from him side by side with the warmth of his heart, amalgamates the most easily with all characters. Secondly, he is a _moral optimist_. I would give ten metaphysical optimists for one moral one, who knows how to enjoy, not a single plant as the caterpillar does, but like man, a whole flora of pleasures--who has not five senses only, but a thousand for everything, for women and heroes, for fields of knowledge and pleasure parties, for tragedies and comedies, for Nature and for courts.--There is a certain higher tolerance, which is not the fruit of the Peace of Westphalia, nor of the Concord of 1705, but of a life filtered through many years and improvements--this tolerance finds in every opinion the element of the True, in every species of beauty the Beautiful, in every humor the Comic, and does not regard, in men, nations and books, difference and peculiarity of merit as the absence of it. Not merely with the best must we be pleased, but with the good and everything.

When the people had come back from the little church and I from the great one, the dining in the Wutz house began. Our landlord received the pair of guests with his usual, and with an unusual friendliness beside; for he had brought home with him to-day from his church-collection--by creeping into all the pews after divine service and attracting to himself magnetically all the pennies which had fallen during the collecting--a considerable silver fleet of 18 pence. The splendor of the banquet did not in this room crush out the enjoyment.

Knives and forks, as already mentioned, were of silver and from me; but who could help taking pleasure in performing therewith at a table where the meats and sauce are dished out of one--pan?--our show-dishes were perhaps too sumptuous for an elector; for they consisted not of porcelain, wax or alabaster seeds on plate-gla.s.s dishes, nor did they weigh a few pounds merely: but the two show-dishes weighed sixty, and were from the same master and of the same material as the electoral bench, of flesh and blood, namely, Wutz's children. An ecclesiastical elector would not have been able for pleasure to eat a morsel, if like us, he had had standing beside his giant-table a dwarf-table with its little ones around it. Their table was not much larger than a herring-dish; but they had an eye to proportion and feasted from the Lilliputian table-service of which since Christmas they had made more of a sportive than serious use. The little ones were beside themselves, at cutting up their meat on wafers of plates and with hair-saws of knives; play and earnest, here as with feasting actors, melted into each other; and I saw in the end that it was so with me too, and that my enjoyment arose from artificial littleness and poverty.

At the great table--with other tables the reverse holds--the individual conversation soon pa.s.sed over into general; I and the Cantor said every moment "the Prussian," "the Russian," "the Turk," meaning (like the Prime Minister) by the nation in each case its Regent. I took to-day such a peculiar pleasure in miserable customs, that I let every morsel be _preached into_ me and drank over twenty healths. Ladies of rank cannot let themselves down to unfrizzled people so easily as men can, at least to those of the female s.e.x; but my sister deserves that her brother should bestow upon her in his book the praise of the handsomest and most amiable condescension. The more womanly a lady is, so much the more disinterested and good-natured is she; and those maidens, especially, who love _half_ the human race, love the _whole_ heartily, _e. g_., in regard to the Resident Lady von Bouse, one knows not whether she bestows more on the poor or on the men. Old maids are stingy and hard. My doctor and a bottle of wine came in as dessert. As he reads in the present book every week, I prefer to scold rather than praise him in it. The best I can do is to weave in here an ambiguous thing, which with many will amount neither to praising nor blaming him--his hearty inclination toward the female s.e.x, which stands midway between indifferent gallantry and ardent love. This same inclination suits our s.e.x very well, but not the female, to which, however, my sister belongs. The affair grew simply out of her left ear. The ear-ring had torn its way through the ear-flap; she ought, however, properly to have waited till Monday, when her brother would have bored her ear for her, like that of a Jewish slave, in the most skillful manner. But it must be done to-day and his doctor's hat was the cover of her design. It should have made the subject of a picture, how the poor Pestilentiary rubbed and polished the ear-flap between his three front fingers--like a medical leaf which one is to smell of--in order to make it swollen and insensible.

Nothing is more perilous to me and the medical counsellor, than to pick and stroke at a lady with two or three fingers--to stretch the whole arm around her is, for us, attended with no danger whatever; just as nettles burn far more when lightly touched than when grasped vigorously. Perhaps it is with this fire as with the electric fluid, which pa.s.ses into man in a larger stream through the tips of the fingers than through a broad surface. My sister went further and brought an apple; the Doctor had to press with his pulse-fingers the red ear-tip against the apple, and then force an egrette, or whatever it was, through this organ of sense, which maidens p.r.i.c.k up much seldomer than they pucker-up the one nearest to it--and now could be buckled or b.u.t.toned in what belonged there. The steel almost chained the operator himself to her ear. "There is nothing with which a beauty attaches one to her more effectually, than by giving one occasion to do her a favor," the Doctor himself said and learned it by his own experience. Hence the operator and ear-magnetizer complained it was hard to cure a beauty without loving her, and that his first fair patient had almost made a patient of him. I have nothing against the Doctor; let him be a cosmopolite in love if he will--but, Sister, I would thou wert already in bed, because any minute in which I merely take two or three steps up and down, I am not sure that thou wilt not be squinting into my chapters and reading what I blame in thee. Ah, I blame less than I pity thy fancy, that plays so airily around thy own and others' troubles, and thy heart so spun out of the tenderest fibres, that the white crown of _shy womanliness_, which alone adorns and exalts all these traits, has, in the crowded apartments of the Lady Resident become slightly tarnished with black, like silver in marshy Holland, and that thy virtue, which essentially wants nothing, wants the form of virtue! Ye parents! your young men can hardly make themselves black in h.e.l.l; but for your daughters and their _snow-white_ raiment Heaven itself is scarcely clean enough!

They are seldom worse than their company, but also seldom better. This spiritual wine absorbs the flavor of the Apples-of-Eve and of-Paris which lie about it; after that it still tastes good, only not like wine.

The Doctor gave me much light on Gustavus's condition, which at a proper time shall in turn be given to the reader.

A certain person, who almost every fortnight reads over what I have written, is satirical, and asks me whether on page Aaa Zzz the further courting between Paul and Beata will be worked out--he further asks, whether it has been already related to the reader, that the coquetting Paul has since that made verses, profiles, bouquets and adagios, in order to bring on and present his heart in these dessert dishes, these pierced fruit-dishes, these confect-baskets--this _enfant terrible_ of a mocking personage asks finally whether it has been already reported to the world that Beata, however, cared for nothing of it all but the empty basket[67] and the empty dessert dish.... At bottom this malice never offends me; but Doctor Fenk and the reader have manifestly the wickedest ingenuity in placing and seeing heart-matters in a false light. Verily, it has heretofore been mere joke, my alleged love; and if it were not, it must needs become such, because such a handsome and meritorious rival as I, it seems, am to meet in Gustavus, I could not find it in my heart to outstrip and overshadow, even if I had the power or the liberty, which to be sure is not the case.

TWENTY-SEVENTH, OR XXII TRINITATIS, SECTION.