Translations from the German Part 26

But now roam slower, Fixlein, through his Lordship's garden of Hukelum; not, indeed, lest thy coat sweep away any tulip-stamina, but that thy good mother may have time to lay her Cupid's-band of black taffeta about her smooth brow. I am grieved to think my fair readers take it ill of her, that she means first to iron this same band: they cannot know that she has no maid; and that today the whole Preceptorial dinner--the money purveyances the guest has made over to her three days before--is to be arranged and prepared by herself, without the aid of any Mistress of the Household whatever; for indeed she belongs to the _Tiers Etat_, being neither more nor less than a gardener's widow.

You can figure how this true, warm-hearted mother may have lain in wait all morning for her Schoolman, whom she loved as the apple of her eye; since, on the whole populous Earth, she had not (her first son, as well as her husband, was dead) any other for her soul, which indeed overflowed with love; not any other but her Zebedaus. Could she ever tell you aught about him, I mean aught joyful, without ten times wiping her eyes? Nay, did she not once divide her solitary Kirmes (or Churchale) cake between two mendicant students, because she thought Heaven would punish her for so feasting, while her boy in Leipzig had nothing to feast on, and must pa.s.s the cake-garden like other gardens, merely smelling at it?

"d.i.c.kens! Thou already, Zebedaus!" said the mother, giving an embarra.s.sed smile, to keep from weeping, as the son, who, had ducked past the window, and crossed the gra.s.sy threshold without knocking, suddenly entered. For joy she forgot to put the heater into the smoothing-iron, as her ill.u.s.trious scholar, amid the loud boiling of the soup, tenderly kissed her brow, and even said Mamma; a name which lighted on her breast like downy silk. All the windows were open; and the garden, with its flower-essences, and bird-music, and b.u.t.terfly-collections, was almost half within the room: but I suppose I have not yet mentioned that the little garden-house, rather a chamber than a house, was situated on the western cape of the Castle garden. The owner had graciously allowed the widow to retain this dowager-mansion; as indeed the mansion would otherwise have stood empty, for he now kept no gardener.

But Fixlein, in spite of his joy, could not stay long with her; being bound for the Church, which, to his spiritual appet.i.te, was at all times a king's kitchen; a mother's. A sermon pleased him simply because it was a sermon, and because he himself had once preached one. The mother was contented he should go: these good women think they enjoy their guests, if they can only give them aught to enjoy.

In the choir, this Free-haven and Ethnic Forecourt of stranger church-goers, he smiled on all parishioners; and, as in his childhood, standing under the wooden wing of an archangel, he looked down on the coifed _parterre_. His young years now enclosed him like children in their smiling circle; and a long garland wound itself in rings among them, and by fits they plucked flowers from it, and threw them in his face: Was it not old Senior Astman that stood there on the pulpit Parna.s.sus, the man by whom he had been so often flogged, while acquiring Greek with him from a grammar written in Latin, which he could not explain, yet was forced to walk by the light of? Stood there not behind the pulpit-stairs the sacristy-cabin, and in this was there not a church-library of consequence--no schoolboy could have buckled it wholly in his book-strap--lying under the minever cover of pastil dust? And did it not consist of the Polyglott in folio, which he, spurred on by Pfeiffer's _Critica Sacra_, had turned up leaf by leaf, in his early years, excerpting therefrom the _literae inversae_, _majusculae_, _minusculae_, and so forth, with an immensity of toil? And could he not at present, the sooner the more readily, have wished to cast this alphabetic soft-fodder into the Hebrew letter-trough, whereto your Oriental Rhizophagi (Root-eaters) are tied, especially as here they get so little vowel hard-fodder to keep them in heart?--Stood there not close by him the organ-stool, the throne to which, every Apostle-day, the Schoolmaster had by three nods elevated him, thence to fetch down the sacred hyssop, the sprinkler of the Church?

My readers themselves will gather spirits when they now hear that our Quintus, during the outshaking of the poor-bag, was invited by the Senior to come over in the afternoon; and to them, it will be little less gratifying than if he had invited themselves. But what will they say, when they get home with him to mother and dinner-table, both already clad in their white Sunday dress; and behold the large cake which Fraulein Thiennette (Stephanie) has rolled from her peel? In the first place, however, they will wish to know who _she_ is?

She is,--for if (according to Lessing) in the very excellence of the Iliad, we neglect the personalities of its author; the same thing will apply to the fate of several authors, for instance to my own; but an auth.o.r.ess of cakes must not be forgotten in the excellence of her baking,--Thiennette is a poor, indigent, insolvent young lady; has not much, except years, of which she counts five-and-twenty; no near relations living now; no acquirements (for in literature she does not even know _Werter_) except economical; reads no books, not even mine; inhabits, that is, watches like a wardeness, quite alone, the thirteen void disfurnished chambers of the Castle of Hukelum, which belongs to the Dragoon Rittmeister Aufhammer, at present resident in his other mansion of Schadeck: on occasion, she commands and feeds his soccagers and handmaids; and can write herself By the grace of G.o.d,--which, in the thirteenth century, the country n.o.bles did as well as princes,--for she lives by the grace of man, at least of woman, the Lady Rittmeisterinn Aufhammer's grace, who, at all times, blesses those va.s.sals whom her husband curses. But, in the breast of the orphaned Thiennette lay a sugared marchpane heart, which, for very love, you could have devoured: her fate was hard, but her soul was soft; she was modest, courteous and timid, but too much so;--cheerfully and coldly she received the most cutting humiliations in Schadeck, and felt no pain, and not till some days after did she see it all clearly, and then these cuts began sharply to bleed, and she wept in her loneliness over her lot.

It is hard for me to give a light tone, after this deep one, and to add, that Fixlein had been almost brought up beside her, and that she, his school-moiety over with the Senior, while the latter was training him for the dignities of the Third Form, had learned the _Verba Anomala_ along with him.

The Achilles'-shield of the cake, jagged and embossed with carved work of brown scales, was whirling round in the Quintus like a swing-wheel of hungry and thankful ideas. Of that philosophy which despises eating, and of that high breeding which wastes it, he had not so much about him as belongs to the ungratefulness of such cultivated persons; but for his platter of meat, for his dinner of herbs, he could never give thanks enough.

Innocent and contented, the quadruple dinner-party,--for the Shock with his cover under the stove cannot be omitted,--now began their Feast of Sweet Bread, their Feast of Honour for Thiennette, their Grove-feast in the garden. It may truly be a subject of wonder how a man who has not, like the King of France, four hundred and forty-eight persons (the hundred and sixty-one _Garcons de la Maison-bouche_ I do not reckon) in his kitchen, nor a _Fruiterie_ of thirty-one human bipeds, nor a Pastry-cookery of three-and-twenty, nor a daily expenditure of 387 livres 21 sous,--how such a man, I say, can eat with any satisfaction.

Nevertheless, to me, a cooking mother is as dear as a whole royal cooking household, given rather to feed upon me than to feed me.--The most precious fragments which the Biographer and the World can gather from this meal, consist of here and there an edifying piece of table-talk. The mother had much to tell. Thiennette is this night, she mentions, for the first time, to put on her morning promenade-dress of white muslin, as also a satin girdle and steel buckle: but, adds she, it will not sit her; as the Rittmeisterinn (for this lady used to hang her cast clothes on Thiennette, as Catholics do their cast crutches and sores on their patron Saints) was much thicker. Good women grudge each other nothing, save only clothes, husbands and flax. In the fancy of the Quintus, by virtue of this apparel, a pair of angel pinions were sprouting forth from the shoulder-blades of Thiennette: for him a garment was a sort of hollow half-man, to whom only the n.o.bler parts and the first principles were wanting: he honoured these wrappages and hulls of our interior, not as an Elegant, or a Critic of Beauty, but because it was not possible for him to despise aught which he saw others honouring. Farther, the good mother read to him, as it were, the monumental inscription of his father, who had sunk into the arms of Death in the thirty-second year of his age, from a cause which I explain not here, but in a future Letter-box, having too much affection for the reader. Our Quintus could not sate himself with hearing of his father.

The fairest piece of news was, that Fraulein Thiennette had sent word today: "he might visit Her Ladyship tomorrow, as My Lord, his G.o.dfather, was to be absent in town." This, however, I must explain. Old Aufhammer was called _Egidius_, and was Fixlein's G.o.dfather: but he,--though the Rittmeisterinn duly covered the cradle of the child with nightly offerings, with flesh-t.i.thes and grain-t.i.thes,--had frugally made him no christening present, except that of his name, which proved to be the very balefulest. For, our _Egidius_ Fixlein, with his Shock, which, by reason of the French convulsions, had, in company with other emigrants, run off from Nantes, was but lately returned from college,--when he and his dog, as ill luck would have it, went to walk in the Hukelum wood.

Now, as the Quintus was ever and anon crying out to his attendant: "Coosh, Schil" (_Couche, Gilles_), it must apparently have been the Devil that had just then planted the Lord of Aufhammer among the trees and bushes in such a way, that this whole travestying and docking of his name,--for Gilles means Egidius,--must fall directly into his ear.

Fixlein could neither speak French, nor any offence to mortal: he knew not head or tail of what _couche_ signified; a word, which, in Paris, even the plebeian dogs are now in the habit of saying to their _valets de chiens_. But there were three things which Von Aufhammer never recalled; his error, his anger and his word. The provokee, therefore, determined that the plebeian provoker and honour-stealer should never more speak to him, or--get a doit from him.

I return. After dinner he gazed out of the little window into the garden, and saw his path of life dividing into four branches, leading towards just as many skyward Ascensions; towards the Ascension into the Parsonage, and that into the Castle to Thiennette, for this day; and towards the third into Schadeck for the morrow; and lastly, into every house in Hukelum as the fourth. And now when the mother had long enough kept cheerfully gliding about on tiptoe, "not to disturb him in studying his Latin Bible" (the _Vulgata_), that is, in reading the _Litteratur-zeitung_, he at last rose to his own feet; and the humble joy of the mother ran long after the courageous son, who dared to go forth and speak to a Senior, quite unappalled. Yet it was not without reverence that he entered the dwelling of his old, rather gray than bald-headed teacher, who was not only Virtue itself, but also Hunger, eating frequently, and with the appet.i.te of Pharaoh's lean kine. A schoolman, that expects to become a professor, will scarcely deign to cast an eye on a pastor; but one, who is himself looking up to a parsonage as to his working-house and breeding-house, knows how to value such a character. The new parsonage,--as if it had, like a _Casa Santa_, come flying out of Erlangen, or the Berlin Friedrichs-stra.s.se, and alighted in Hukelum,--was for the Quintus a Temple of the Sun, and the Senior a Priest of the Sun. To be Parson there himself, was a thought overlaid with virgin honey; such a thought as occurs but one other time in History, namely, in the head of Hannibal, when he projected stepping over the Alps, that is to say, over the threshold of Rome.

The landlord and his guest formed an excellent _bureau d'esprit_: people of office, especially of the same office, have more to tell each other, namely, their own history, than your idle May-chafers and Court-celestials, who must speak only of other people's.--The Senior made a soft transition from his iron-ware (in the stable furniture), to the golden age of his Academic life, of which such people like as much to think, as poets do of their childhood. So good as he was, he still half joyfully recollected that he had once been less so: but joyful remembrances of wrong actions are their half repet.i.tion, as repentant remembrances of good ones are their half abolishment.

Courteously and kindly did Zebedaus (who could not even enter in his Notebook the name of a person of quality without writing an H. for Herr before it) listen to the Academic Saturnalia of the old gentleman, who in Wittenberg had toped as well as written, and thirsted not more for the Hippocrene than for Guk-guk.[34]

[34] A university beer.

Herr Jerusalem has observed, that the barbarism which often springs up, close on the brightest efflorescence of the sciences, is a sort of strengthening mudbath, good for averting the over-refinement, wherewith such efflorescence always threatens us. I believe that a man who considers how high the sciences have mounted with our upper cla.s.ses,--for instance with every Patrician's son in Nurnberg, to whom the public must present 1000 florins for studying with,--I believe that such a man will not grudge the Son of the Muses a certain barbarous Middle-age (the Burschen or Student Life, as it is called), which may again so case-harden him that his refinement shall not go beyond the limits. The Senior, while in Wittenberg, had protected the one hundred and eighty Academic Freedoms,--so many of them has Petrus Rebuffus summed up,[35]--against prescription, and lost none except his moral one, of which truly a man, even in a convent, can seldom make much. This gave our Quintus courage to relate certain pleasant somersets of his own, which at Leipzig, under the Incubus-pressure of poverty, he had contrived to execute. Let us hear him: His landlord, who was at the same time Professor and Miser, maintained in his enclosed court a whole community of hens: Fixlein, in company with three room-mates, without difficulty mastered the rent of a chamber, or closet: in general their main equipments, like Phoenixes, existed but in the singular number; one bed, in which always the one pair slept before midnight, the other after midnight, like nocturnal watchmen; one coat, in which one after the other they appeared in public, and which, like a watch-coat, was the national uniform of the company; and several other _ones_, Unities both of Interest and Place. Nowhere can you collect the stress-memorials and siege-medals of Poverty more pleasantly and philosophically than at College; the Academic burgher exhibits to us how many humorists and Diogeneses Germany has in it. Our Unitarians had just one thing four times, and that was hunger. The Quintus related, perhaps with a too pleasurable enjoyment of the recollection, how one of this famishing _coro_ invented means of appropriating the Professor's hens as just tribute, or subsidies. He said (he was a Jurist), they must once for all borrow a legal fiction from the Feudal code, and look on the Professor as the soccage tenant, to whom the usufruct of the hen-yard and hen-house belonged; but on themselves, as the feudal superiors of the same, to whom accordingly the va.s.sal was bound to pay his feudal dues.

And now, that the Fiction might follow Nature, continued he,--"_fictio sequitur naturam_,"--it behoved them to lay hold of said Yule-hens, by direct personal distraint. But into the court-yard there was no getting.

The feudalist, therefore, prepared a fishing-line; stuck a bread-pill on the hook, and lowered his fishing-tackle, anglerwise, down into the court. In a few seconds the barb stuck in a hen's throat, and the hen now communicating with its feudal superior, could silently, like ships by Archimedes, be heaved aloft to the hungry air-fishing society, where, according to circ.u.mstances, the proper feudal name and t.i.tle of possession failed not to be awaiting her: for the updrawn fowls were now denominated Christmas-fowls, now Forest-hens, Bailiff-hens, Pentecost and Summer-hens. "I begin," said the angling lord of the manor, "with taking _Rutcher-dues_, for so we call the triple and quintuple of the original quit-rent, when the va.s.sal, as is the case here, has long neglected payment." The Professor, like any other prince, observed with sorrow the decreasing population of his hen-yard, for his subjects, like the Hebrews, were dying by enumeration. At last he had the happiness, while reading his lecture,--he was just come to the subject of _Forest Salt and Coin Regalities_,--to descry, through the window of his auditorium, a quit-rent hen suspended, like Ignatius Loyola in prayer, or Juno in her punishment, in middle air: he followed the incomprehensible direct ascension of the aeronautic animal, and at last descried at the upper window the attracting artist, and animal-magnetiser, who had drawn his lot for dinner from the hen-yard below. Contrary to all expectation, he terminated this fowling sport sooner than his Lecture on Regalities.

[35] From Peter I will copy one or two of these privileges; the whole of which were once, at the origin of universities, in full force. For instance, a student can compel a citizen to let him his house and his horse; an injury, done even to his relations, must be made good fourfold; he is not obliged to fulfil the written commands of the Pope; the neighbourhood must indemnify him for what is stolen from him; if he and a non-student are living at variance, the latter only can be expelled from the boarding-house; a Doctor is obliged to support a poor student; if he is killed, the next ten houses are laid under interdict till the murderer is discovered; his legacies are not abridged by _falcidia_, &c. &c.

Fixlein walked home, amid the vesperal melodies of the steeple sounding-holes; and by the road, courteously took off his hat before the empty windows of the Castle: houses of quality were to him like persons of quality, as in India the PaG.o.da at once represents the temple and the G.o.d. To the mother he brought feigned compliments, which she repaid with authentic ones; for this afternoon she had been over, with her historical tongue and nature-interrogating eye, visiting the white-muslin Thiennette. The mother was wont to show her every spare penny which he dropped into her large empty purse, and so raise him in the good graces of the Fraulein; for women feel their hearts much more attracted towards a son, who tenderly reserves for a mother some of his benefits, than we do to a daughter anxiously caring for her father; perhaps from a hundred causes, and this among the rest, that in their experience of sons and husbands they are more used to find these persons mere six-feet thunder-clouds, forked waterspouts, or even reposing tornadoes.

Blessed Quintus! on whose Life this other distinction like an order of n.o.bility does also shine, that thou canst tell it over to thy mother; as, for example, this past afternoon in the parsonage. Thy joy flows into another heart, and streams back from it, redoubled, into thy own.

There is a closer approximating of hearts, and also of sounds, than that of the _Echo_; the highest approximation melts Tone and Echo into _Resonance_ together.

It is historically certain that both of them supped this evening; and that instead of the whole dinner fragments which tomorrow might themselves represent a dinner, nothing but the cake-offering or pudding was laid upon the altar of the table. The mother, who for her own child would willingly have neglected not herself only, but all other people, now made a motion that to the Quintaner, who was sporting out of doors and baiting a bird instead of himself, there should no crum of the precious pastry be given, but only table-bread without the crust. But the Schoolman had a Christian disposition, and said that it was Sunday, and the young man liked something delicate to eat as well as he.

Fixlein,--the counterpart of great men and geniuses,--was inclined to treat, to gift, to gratify a serving house-mate, rather than a man who is for the first time pa.s.sing through the gate, and at the next post-stage will forget both his hospitable landlord and the last postmaster. On the whole, our Quintus had a touch of honour in him, and notwithstanding his thrift and sacred regard for money, he willingly gave it away in cases of honour, and unwillingly in cases of overpowering sympathy, which too painfully filled the cavities of his heart, and emptied those of his purse. Whilst the Quintaner was exercising the _jus compascui_ on the cake, and six arms were peacefully resting on Thiennette's free-table, Fixlein read to himself and the company the Flachsenfingen Address-calendar; any higher thing, except Meusel's _Gelehrtes Deutschland_,[36] he could not figure: the Kammerherrs and Raths of the Calendar went tickling over his tongue like the raisins of the cake; and of the more rich church-livings he, by reading, as it were levied a t.i.the.

[36] _Literary Germany_; a work (I believe of no great merit) which Richter often twitches in the same style.--ED.

He purposely remained his own Edition in Sunday Wove-paper; I mean, he did not lay away his Sunday coat, even when the Prayer-bell tolled; for he had still much to do.

After supper, he was just about visiting the Fraulein, when he descried her in person, like a lily dipt in the red twilight, in the Castle-garden, whose western limit his house const.i.tuted, the southern one being the Chinese wall of the Castle.... By the way, how I got to the knowledge of all this, what Letter-boxes are, whether I myself was ever there, &c. &c.,--the whole of this shall, upon my life, be soon and faithfully communicated to the reader, and that too in the present Book.

Fixlein hopped forth like a Will-o'-wisp into the garden, whose flower-perfume was mingling with his supper-perfume. No one bowed lower to a n.o.bleman than he, not out of plebeian servility, nor of self-interested cringing, but because he thought "a n.o.bleman was a n.o.bleman." But in this case his bow, instead of falling forwards, fell obliquely to the right, as it were after his hat: for he had not risked taking a stick with him; and hat and stick were his proppage and balance-wheel, in short, his bowing-gear, without which it was out of his power to produce any courtly bow, had you offered him the High Church of Hamburg for so doing. Thiennette's mirthfulness soon unfolded his crumpled soul into straight form, and into the proper tone. He delivered her a long neat Thanksgiving and Harvest sermon for the scaly cake; which appeared to her at once kind and tedious. Young women without the polish of high life reckon tedious pedantry, merely like snuffing, one of the necessary ingredients of a man: they reverence us infinitely; and as Lambert could never speak to the King of Prussia, by reason of his sun-eyes, except in the dark, so they, I believe, often like better,--also by reason of our sublime air,--if they can catch us in the dark too. _Him_ Thiennette edified by the Imperial History of Herr von Aufhammer and Her Ladyship his spouse, who meant to put him, the Quintus, in her will: _her_ he edified by his Literary History, as relating to himself and the Subrector; how, for instance, he was at present vicariating in the Second Form, and ruling over scholars as long in stature as himself. And thus did the two in happiness, among red bean-blossoms, red may-chafers, before the red of the twilight burning lower and lower on the horizon, walk to and fro in the garden; and turn always with a smile as they approached the head of the ancient gardeneress, standing like a window-bust through the little lattice, which opened in the bottom of a larger one.

To me it is incomprehensible he did not fall in love. I know his reasons, indeed: in the first place, she had nothing; secondly, he had nothing, and school-debts to boot; thirdly, her genealogical tree was a boundary-tree and warning-post; fourthly, his hands were tied up by another n.o.bler thought, which, for good cause, is yet reserved from the reader. Nevertheless--Fixlein! I durst not have been in thy place! I should have looked at her, and remembered her virtues and our school-years, and then have drawn forth my too fusible heart, and presented it to her as a bill of exchange, or insinuated it as a summons. For I should have considered that she resembled a nun in two senses, in her good heart and in her good pastry; that, in spite of her intercourse with male va.s.sals, she was no Charles Genevieve Louise Auguste Timothe Eon de Beaumont,[37] but a smooth, fair-haired, white-capped dove; that she sought more to please her own s.e.x than ours; that she showed a melting heart, not previously borrowed from the Circulating Library, in tears, for which in her innocence she rather took shame than credit.--At the very first cheapening, I should, on these grounds, have been out with my heart.--Had I fully reflected, Quintus! that I knew her as myself; that her hands and mine (to wit, had I been thou) had both been guided by the same Senior to Latin penmanship; that we two, when little children, had kissed each other before the gla.s.s, to see whether the two image-children would do it likewise in the mirror; that often we had put hands of both s.e.xes into the same m.u.f.f, and there played with them in secret; had I, lastly, considered that we were here standing before the gla.s.s-house, now splendent in the enamel of twilight, and that on the cold panes of this gla.s.s-house we two (she within, I without) had often pressed our warm cheeks together, parted only by the thickness of the gla.s.s,--then had I taken this poor gentle soul, pressed asunder by Fate, and seeing, amid her thunder-clouds, no higher elevation to part them and protect her than the grave, and had drawn her to my own soul, and warmed her on my heart, and encompa.s.sed her about with my eyes.

[37] See _Schmelzle's Journey_, p. 284.--ED.

In truth, the Quintus would have done so too, had not the above-mentioned n.o.bler thought, which I yet disclose not, kept him back. Softened, without knowing the cause--(accordingly he gave his mother a kiss)--and blessed without having had a literary conversation; and dismissed with a freight of humble compliments, which he was to disload on the morrow before the Dragoon Rittmeisterinn, he returned to his little cottage, and looked yet a long while out of its dark windows, at the light ones of the Castle. And then, when the first quarter of the moon was setting, that is, about midnight, he again, in the cool sigh of a mild, fanning, moist and directly heart-addressing night-breeze, opened the eyelids of a sight already sunk in dreaming....

Sleep, for today thou hast done naught ill! I, whilst the drooping shut flower-bell of thy spirit sinks on thy pillow, will look forth into the breezy night over thy morning footpath, which, through the translucent little wood, is to lead thee to Schadeck, to thy patroness. All prosperity attend thee, thou foolish Quintus!--

SECOND LETTER-BOX.

_Frau von Aufhammer. Childhood-Resonance. Authorcraft._

The early piping which the little thrush last night adopted by the Quintaner from its nest, started for victual about two o'clock, soon drove our Quintus into his clothes; whose calender-press and parallel-ruler the hands of his careful mother had been, for she would not send him to the Rittmeisterinn "like a runagate dog." The Shock was incarcerated, the Quintaner taken with him, as likewise many wholesome rules from Mother Fixlein, how to conduct himself towards the Rittmeisterinn. But the son answered: "Mamma, when a man has been in company, like me, with high people, with a Fraulein Thiennette, he soon knows whom he is speaking to, and what polished manners and Saver di veaver (_Savoir vivre_) require."

He arrived with the Quintaner, and green fingers (dyed with the leaves he had plucked on the path), and with a half-nibbled rose between his teeth, in presence of the sleek lackeys of Schadeck.--If women are flowers,--though as often silk and Italian and gum-flowers as botanical ones,--then was Frau von Aufhammer a ripe flower, with (adipose) neck-bulb, and tuberosity (of lard). Already, in the half of her body, cut away from life by the apoplexy, she lay upon her lard-pillow but as on a softer grave: nevertheless, the portion of her that remained was at once lively, pious and proud. Her heart was a flowing cornucopia to all men, yet this not from philanthropy, but from rigid devotion: the lower cla.s.ses she a.s.sisted, cherished and despised, regarding nothing in them, except it were their piety. She received the bowing Quintus with the back-bowing air of a patroness; yet she brightened into a look of kindliness at his disloading of the compliments from Thiennette.

She began the conversation, and long continued it alone, and said,--yet without losing the inflation of pride from her countenance: "She should soon die; but the G.o.d-children of her husband she would remember in her will." Farther, she told him directly in the face, which stood there all over-written with the Fourth Commandment before her, that "he must not build upon a settlement in Hukelum; but to the Flachsenfingen Conrectorate (to which the Burgermeister and Council had the right of nomination), she hoped to promote him, as it was from the then Burgermeister that she bought her coffee, and from the Town-Syndic (he drove a considerable wholesale and retail trade in Hamburg candles) that she bought both her wax and tallow lights."

And now by degrees he arrived at his humble pet.i.tion, when she asked him sick-news of Senior Astmann, who guided himself more by Luther's Catechism than by the Catechism of Health. She was Astmann's patroness in a stricter than ecclesiastical sense; and she even confessed that she would soon follow this, true shepherd of souls, when she heard, here at Shadeck, the sound of his funeral-bell. Such strange chemical affinities exist between our dross and our silver veins; as, for example, here between Pride and Love: and I could wish that we would pardon this hypostatic union in all persons, as readily as we do it in the fair, who, with all their faults, are nevertheless by us,--as, according to Du Fay, iron, though mixed with any other metal, is, by the magnet,--attracted and held fast.

Supposing even that the Devil _had_, in some idle minute, sown a handful or two of the seeds of Envy in our Quintus' soul, yet they had not sprouted; and today especially they did not, when he heard the praises of a man who had been his teacher, and who,--what he reckoned a t.i.tulado of the Earth, not from vanity but from piety,--was a clergyman. So much, however, is, according to History, not to be denied: That he now straight-way came forth with his pet.i.tion to the n.o.ble lady, signifying that "indeed he would cheerfully content himself for a few years in the school; but yet in the end he longed to be in some small quiet priestly office." To her question, "But was he orthodox?" he answered, that "he hoped so; he had in Leipzig, not only attended all the public lectures of Dr. Burscher, but also had taken private instructions from several sound teachers of the faith, well knowing that the Consistorium, in its examinations as to purity of doctrine, was now more strict than formerly."

The sick lady required him to make a proof-shot, namely, to administer to her a sick-bed exhortation. By Heaven! he administered to her one of the best. Her pride of birth now crouched before his pride of office and priesthood; for though he could not, with the Dominican monk, Ala.n.u.s de Rupe, believe that a priest was greater than G.o.d, inasmuch as the latter could only make a World, but the former a G.o.d (in the ma.s.s); yet he could not but fall-in with Hostiensis, who shows that the priestly dignity is seven thousand six hundred and forty-four times greater than the kingly, the Sun being just so many times greater than the Moon.--But a Rittmeisterinn--_she_ shrinks into absolute nothing before a parson.

In the servants' hall he applied to the lackeys for the last annual series of the _Hamburg Political Journal_; perceiving, that with these historical doc.u.ments of the time, they were scandalously papering the b.u.t.tons of travelling raiment. In gloomy harvest evenings, he could now sit down and read for himself what good news were transpiring in the political world--twelve months ago.

On a Triumphal Car, full-laden with laurel, and to which Hopes alone were yoked, he drove home at night, and by the road advised the Quintaner not to be puffed up with any earthly honour, but silently to thank G.o.d, as himself was now doing.

The thickset blooming grove of his four canicular weeks, and the flying tumult of blossoms therein, are already painted on three of the sides. I will now clutch blindfold into his days, and bring out one of them: one smiles and sends forth its perfumes like another.

Let us take, for instance, the Saint's day of his mother, _Clara_, the twelfth of August. In the morning, he had perennial, fireproof joys, that is to say, Employments. For he was writing, as I am doing. Truly, if Xerxes proposed a prize for the invention of a new pleasure, any man who had sat down to write his thoughts on the prize-question, had the new pleasure already among his fingers. I know only one thing sweeter than making a book, and that is, to project one. Fixlein used to write little works, of the twelfth part of an alphabet in size, which in their ma.n.u.script state he got bound by the bookbinder in gilt boards, and bet.i.tled with printed letters, and then inserted them among the literary ranks of his book-board. Every one thought they were novelties printed in writing types. He had laboured,--I shall omit his less interesting performances,--at a _Collection of Errors of the Press_, in German writings: he compared _Errata_ with each other; showed which occurred most frequently; observed that important results were to be drawn from this, and advised the reader to draw them.

Moreover, he took his place among the German _Masorites_. He observes with great justice in his Preface: "The Jews had their _Masora_ to show, which told them how often every letter was to be found in their Bible; for example, the Aleph (the A) 42,377 times; how many verses there are in which all the consonants appear (there are 26 verses), or only eighty (there are 3); how many verses we have into which 42 words and 160 consonants enter (there is just one, Jeremiah xxi. 7); which is the middle letter in certain books (in the Pentateuch, it is in Leviticus xi. 42, the n.o.ble V[38]), or in the whole Bible itself. But where have we Christians any similar Masora for Luther's Bible to show? Has it been accurately investigated which is the middle word, or the middle letter here, which vowel appears seldomest, and how often each vowel? Thousands of Bible-Christians go out of the world, without ever knowing that the German A occurs 323,015 times (therefore above 7 times oftener than the Hebrew one) in their Bible."

[38] As in the State.--V. or Von, _de_, _of_, being the symbol of the n.o.bility, the middle order of the State.--ED.

I could wish that inquirers into Biblical Literature among our Reviewers would publicly let me know, if on a more accurate summation they find this number incorrect.[39]