SECOND PLACE,
and consider the reasons which may persuade first parents to become such, and to marry, and serve Destiny in the capacity of sewing and spinning machines of linseed, hemp, flax, and tow, to be wound by her in endless networks and coils around the earthly sphere. My strongest reason, and, I trust, yours also, is the thought of the Day of Judgment. For, in the event of our becoming the entrepreneurs of the human race, I shall see all my descendants, when they ascend from the calcined earth like vapour, at the last day, into the nearest planet, and fall into order for the last review; and among this harvest of children and grandchildren, I shall hit upon a few sensible people with whom one may be able to exchange a rational word or two—men whose whole lives were passed, as well as lost, amid thunder and lightning (as according to the Romans those whom the gods loved were killed by lightning), and who never closed their eyes or their ears, however wild the storm. I see the four heathen evangelists among them too, Socrates, Cato, Epictetus, and Antoninus, men who went through the world, using their voices like fire-engine pipes, two hundred feet long, to save people from being burnt out of house and home by the fire of their own passions, sluicing them all over with pure, cold, Alp-water. And there can be no doubt after all, that I may really be the arch-papa, and you the arch-mamma, of some very great and celebrated people, that’s to say, if we choose. I tell you, Eve, that I have it here in black and white among my excerpts and collectanea that I shall be the forefather, ancestor, and Bethlehem of an Aristotle, Plato, Shakespeare, Newton, Rousseau, Goethe, Kant, Leibnitz, people, take them for all in all, who are as able thinkers as their protoplast himself, if not abler. Eve, thou active and important member of the fruit-bearing jointstock company, or productive class of the state (consisting of thyself and this marriage-preacher), I assure you I expect to pass a few hours of exquisite enjoyment when on that neighbouring star I survey in a cursory manner that classic concourse newly risen from the dead, and at length kneel down, and cry, “Good morning, my children! Such of you as are Jews were wont to utter an ejaculatory prayer when ye met a wise man; but what such utterance would suffice for me, now that I behold all the wise and all the faculties at once, all of them my own blood relations too, who amid the wolfish hunger of their desires have stedfastly refrained from forbidden apples, pears, and pine apples, and, deep as their thirst for wisdom might be, committed no orchard-robbery on the tree of knowledge, though their first parents seized upon the forbidden fruit, although they had never known what hunger was, and upon the tree of knowledge, although they possessed all knowledge, except knowledge of the serpent nature.” And then I shall arise from the ground, pass into the angelic crowd, fall on the bosom of some distinguished descendant, and, throwing my arms around him, say, “Thou, true, good, contented-minded, gentle son! If I could just have shown thee only, sitting in thy brood-cell, to my Eve, the queen-bee of this great swarm here present, at the time when I was delivering the second head of my marriage sermon, I’m sure she would have listened to reason, and given a favourable answer.’”
“And thou, Siebenkæs, art that same, true, good son, and thou restest ever on the warm, heaving breast of
“Thy Friend.
“Postscript and Clausula Salutaris.
“Please to forgive me this merry private ball and witches’ dance upon cheap and nasty letter-paper, notwithstanding that you are unfortunately an infinitesimal fractional part of the German race, and as such, can’t be expected either to stand, or to understand, such a dance of ideas. This is why I never print anything for the unwieldy German intellect; entire sheets which I have spawned full of playful idea-fishes of this sort I consign at once to regions where such productions do not usually arrive till they attain the evening of their days, having previously exercised the right of transit through the booksellers’ shops. I was eight days in Hof, and am at present living a retired life at Bayreuth; in both of these towns I have made faces, that is, other people’s profiles; but most of the heads which sat or stood to my scissors opined that all was not quite right in mine. Tell me the real truth of the matter; it’s not altogether a matter of indifference to me, because if I should turn out not to be quite ‘all there,’ I should be incapable of devising my property by will, or of exercising various civil functions.
“In conclusion, I send a thousand kind remembrances and kisses to your dear, good Lenette, and my compliments to Herr Schulrath Stiefel, and will you please ask him if he is any relation to Magister Stiefel, the rector of Holzdorf and Lochau (in Wittemberg), who prophesied (incorrectly, as I consider) that the end of the world would take place on the 1st January, 1533, at 8 o’clock in the morning, and lived to die in his own bed after all. I also send, for you and the ‘Advertiser,’ a couple of programmes of Professor Lang’s of this place, relative to the General Superintendent of Bayreuth, and one of Dr. Frank’s of Pavia. There is a very charming young lady, exceedingly clever and intellectual, living here at the Sun Hotel (she is in the front rooms, and I in the back). She has been very much pleased with me and my face, I am happy to tell you, seeing how exactly you and I are alike, the only difference between us being my lame foot. So that the things I pride myself upon in ladies’ society are my likeness to you and my weaknesses. Unless I have been misinformed, this lady is a poor niece of your old uncle’s with the broken glass wig, and is being brought up at his expense, and destined for a marriage with some Kuhschnappeler of the upper ten thousand. Perhaps she may soon be forwarded to you, entered in the way-bill as bridegroom’s effects.
“The above is my oldest news, but my newest news, namely your own self, I shall not expect to arrive here at Bayreuth till I and the spring get back to it together (for the day after to-morrow I am off to meet it in Italy), and we, I and the spring, together beautify the world to such a degree that you will certainly enjoy a happy time of it in Bayreuth, the houses and the hills of that place being so particularly charming. And so, fare thee somewhat well.”
They all felt certain that the Kuhschnappeler of rank for whom the Heimlicher’s niece was being brought up could be none other than the Venner Rosa, whose little burnt-down stump of a heart—what was left of it after being hitherto made use of to set fire to the bosoms of female humanity in general (as the lamp in a smoking-room serves to kindle the pipes of the collective frequenters thereof)—would be the marriage torch to light her to her new home.
As there were three heavens in this letter—one for each of the party—kind remembrances for Lenette, the programmes for Peltzstiefel, the letter itself for Siebenkæs—I shouldn’t have been astonished if the terzetto of them had danced for joy. The Schulrath, intoxicated with delight—for the glad blood rose to his sober head—opened the papers sent him upon the square patterned supper-cloth (which was laid already), and hungrily began to devour his three printed “relishes before supper,” and literary petits soupers, upon the tin plate without even saying grace, until an invitation to stay and have some supper reminded him that he must be off. But before leaving, he petitioned that, by way of fee for having acted as middleman and court of arbitration between them, or as an alkali to promote the blending of his oil with her water—he might have a new profile of Lenette. The old one cut out by Leibgeber (which the letter brought to his recollection), and which, as we may remember, Leibgeber let him have, happened to have been put into the pocket of his dressing-gown and sent to the wash with it (being of much the same colour, moreover). “It shall be put on the stocks to-night,” said Siebenkæs.
When the Schulrath was going, as he could see that the ring upon Lenette’s finger didn’t squeeze it so uncomfortably as it had done (and gave himself credit for having been the means of filing it smoother and padding it softer), he shook her hand with much warmth, and said—
“I shall always be delighted to come whenever there’s the slightest thing the matter with you two charming people.”
Lenette answered, “Oh yes, do come very often.”
And Siebenkæs added, “The oftener the better.”
And yet, when he had gone, the ring seemed to be not quite so comfortable again, and medical students who may be working at psychology may be a little surprised that during supper the advocate said very little to his wife, and she very little to him. The reason was that he had Leibgeber’s letter lying by his plate in the place where the bread normally is, and the image of his beloved friend shone bright before his mental vision from Bayreuth all athwart the far misty darkness between—their first happy meeting to come floated magically before him. Hope shot down a pure clearing ray into the dark mephitic cave where he was panting and toiling now—and the coming spring stood like some cathedral tower all hung with lamps lofty and bright in the distance, beaming through the dark night sky.
At length he “came to himself,” i. e. to his wife; the strong image of Leibgeber had buoyed him up from the sharp stones which strewed the present; the dear old friend, who had clipped out the bride’s profile up in the choir on the wedding-day, and been with them in the early weeks of their honeymoon, seemed to fling a chain of flower-wreaths about him and draw him closer to the silent form by his side. “Well darling, and how are you getting on?” he said, awaking from his reverie and taking her hand, now that all was peace again between them. She had, however, the feminine peculiarity or foible, habit at all events, of being much quicker to show that she was vexed than that her anger was over; of, at all events, being slow to show the latter; and of commencing a reconsideration of all the matters in dispute at the very moment that amends have been made and accepted, and pardon begged and granted. There are very few married women indeed who will put their hand into their husbands’, and say “There, I’m good again,” without a very considerable hesitation and delay; unmarried women are much more ready to do it. Wendeline did hold hers out, but did it too coldly, and drew it away again in a great hurry, to take up the table-cloth, which she asked him to help her to smooth and fold up. He did this smilingly—she gravely giving her whole attention to the process of folding the long white parallelogram into exact squares—and at length, when the last and thickest square was arrived at, he held it fast there—she pulled, trying to look very serious—he looked at her very fondly and tenderly—she couldn’t help smiling at this and then he took the tablecloth from her, pressed it and himself with it to her heart, and said, in her arms, “Little thief! how can you be so naughty to your old ragamuffin of a Siebenkæs, or whatever his name may be?” And now the rainbow of a brighter future appeared shining above the fast ebbing flood which had risen as high as their hearts so lately—But, my dears, rainbows now-a-days very often mean just the reverse of what the first was said to signify.
The prize he awarded to his queen of the rose-feast of the heart was to ask her to let him take a profile of her pretty face, that Peltzstiefel might find a joy and a present waiting for him on the morrow. I think I shall just trace an outline of his outline-tracing for people of taste in this place; but I must stipulate that nobody is to expect a pen to be a painter’s brush—or a painter’s brush to be an engraver’s style—or an engraver’s style a flower anther, generating generation upon generation of lilies and roses.
The advocate borrowed a drawing-board, viz. the façade of a new pigeon-house, from Fecht the cobbler. Lenette’s shoulder fitted into the oval portal of it as a clasp-knife does into its handle; a sheet of white paper was tacked on to the board—her pretty, soft head was pressed on the stiff paper—he applied, with much care and self restraint, his pencil at the upper part of the brow, difficult as it was to catch the shadow in such immediate proximity to the reality—and went slowly down the beautiful, flowery declivity all roses and lilies. But little or nothing came of it; the back part of the head was pretty good. His eyes would keep turning away from his work to the sitter, so that he drew as vilely as a box-painter.
“Wendeline, your head isn’t still a moment,” he said. And indeed her face, an well as her brain-fibres, shook by reason of the heightened beat of her pulse and the quickening of her breathing; while, on the other hand, his pencil stumbled when it came to the delicate basso relievo of her little nose, fell into the cleft at her lips, and stranded on the shoal of her chin. He kissed those lips which he couldn’t draw, and which she always had either too much open or too tightly closed, and brought a shaving-glass and said, “See, haven’t you got more faces than Janus, or any Indian god? The Schulrath will think you were making faces, and I copying them. Look, here’s where you moved, and I sprung after you like a chamois; the effect of the jump is, that the upper part of the face sticks out before the lower like a half mask. Just think how the Schulrath will stare in the morning.”
“Try once more, dear; I’ll do just as you tell me; I should like it to be very nice,” Lenette said, blushing; and stiffened her neck, and steadied her soft cheek against the drawing-board. And as her husband gently glided his drawing ovipositor over her brow like a segment of some white hemisphere—instead of breathing, he found she was holding her breath this time till she shook again, and till the colour came to her face.
And here jealousy, like some exploding fire-ship, sent hard fragments of the wreck of his shattered happiness crashing on a sudden against his heart.
“Ah!” (he thought) “can it be that she does really love him?” (i. e. the Schulrath).
His pencil stood still in the obtuse angle between her nose and her chin as if under a spell; he heard her let go her pent-up breath; his pencil made black zigzags at the edge of the paper, and as he stopped at the closed lips, which nothing warmer than his own, and her morning prayers, had ever touched, and thought “Must this come upon me too? must this joy be taken from me like all the rest? And am I drawing up my bill of divorce and Uriah-letter here with my own very hands?” He could do no more at it. He took the drawing-board quickly from her shoulder—fell upon her closed lips—kissed away the pent-up sigh—pressed the life out of his jealousy between his heart and hers, and said—
“I can’t do it till to-morrow, Lenette! Don’t be vexed, darling! Tell me, are you quite as you used to be in Augspurg? Don’t you understand me? Have you not the slightest idea what I am driving at?”
She answered quite innocently, “Now you will be annoyed, Firmian, I know, but I really have not the slightest idea.”
Then the Goddess of Peace took from the God of Sleep his poppy garland, and twined it into her own olive wreath and led the wedded pair, garlanded and reconciled, hand in hand into the glittering, gleaming, icefields of the land of dreams—the magic shadowy background of the noisy jarring, shifting day—our camera obscura full of moving miniature pictures of a world all dwarfed, in which man, like the Creator, dwells alone with his own creations.
END OF THE PREFACE AND OF THE FIRST BOOK.
The reader will remember that, at the beginning of the preface, I stated that I succeeded in putting the old merchant into a sweet sleep, and in providing his daughter with a gladsome feast of tabernacles, in the shape of the young unopened buds of this, my little cottage-garden here. But the foul fiend knows how to breeze up a sudden rain squall, and let it splattering down upon all our loveliest fireworks. I was only performing a duty in converting myself into a small, pocket circulating library for a poor lonely thing of a girl, whose father gave her no chance of a word or two of rational conversation except with her parrot, and with the family lawyer aforesaid.
The cage of the former was placed near her inkstand and waste-book; and he acquired from his mistress as much in the shape of German-Italian as a bookkeeper finds necessary for carrying on his foreign correspondence. And a parrot being always incited to talkativeness by a looking-glass in his cage, he and his language-mistress were enabled to look at themselves in it together. The latter (the family lawyer) I myself was. But the Captain—for fear of seductive princess-kidnappers and pirates such as me, and because her mother was dead, and because she was useful in the business—would let her speak to no man whomsoever, except in the presence of a third party (viz., himself). So that it was very seldom any man came to the house, except me; whereas, a father generally decoys whole museums of insects into his house by means of a blooming daughter, just as a cherry-tree in blossom near a window fills a room with wasps and bees. It wasn’t exactly everybody who, when he wanted to speak a rational word with her (i. e. one her father shouldn’t hear), could manage to draw the flute stop of his organ, and then play away for an hour to this Argus till he should close his hundred green eyes, so that two blue ones might be looked into. I did manage it, indeed; but the world shall hear what sort of a psalm of thanksgiving and vote of thanks I was treated to for my pains.
The old man—who had grown suspicious on account of the length of time I had remained the evening before—had this evening only pretended to be asleep, that he might see what I was going to be at. The rapidity with which he went asleep (the reader no doubt remembers it at the beginning of the book) ought to have struck me more than it did. I ought to have reckoned on a contrary state of matters myself, and been ready with more prefaces in addition to this present one, to serve as sleeping powders.
The rascally eavesdropper lay in wait till I had made my report on the two Flower-pieces and the four first chapters of this book. At the end of the fourth he bounced up as a mole-trap does when one walks on it, and addressed me from behind with the following harangue of congratulation—“Has the devil got you by the coat-tails? You must come here from Berlin, must you, and stuff my daughter’s head with all sorts of atheistical, nonsensical, romantic balderdash and nonsense, till she’ll be of no more use in a shop than——”
“Just listen to one word, Herr Pigtail!” said I quite quietly, taking him into the next room, where there was neither fire nor light; “just listen to one single, half-word!”
I put my hands upon his shoulders, and said, “Herr Pigtail—for in Charles the Great’s time every officer was so styled, because in those days the soldiers wore tails, as the women do now—Herr Pigtail, I’m not going to have a tussle with you to-night, when the old year’s going out and the new year’s coming in. I assure you solemnly that I am the son of the ——,[[32]] and that I shall never see you more, though you shall have all the Vienna letters just the same. But I implore you, for God’s sake, to allow your daughter to read. Now-a-days every tradesman reads—one of whom will be her husband—and every tradesman’s wife. Yet for all this reading, there’s still plenty of spinning and cooking going on; there are shirts in plenty, and fat people in abundance. And as for corrupting her—why! that’s just what a man who reads will find it most difficult to accomplish in the case of a woman who reads, and most easy in the case of one who hardly knows her A B C. Let me entreat you, Captain.”
“If you would but just mind your own affairs! What’s the girl to you?” was his reply. It was a true harbour of refuge for me that, on neither of these two evenings, the Christmas Eve or the New Year’s, had I, in the enthusiasm of narration, so much as touched anything of the daughter’s but about a groschen’s worth of hair (and that not her own), which got among my fingers somehow or other, I hardly know how.
It would have been little to have seized her hands, in the fervour of my biographical enthusiasm it would have been nothing at all; but, as I have said, I hadn’t done it. I had said to myself, “Enjoy a pretty face as you would a picture, and a female voice as you would a nightingale’s, and don’t touch the picture or throttle the bird. What! must every tulip be out up for salad, and all altar-cloths made into camisoles?”
Of all truths, the one which we bring ourselves to credit last of all is that there are certain men whom no amount of truth will convince. That Herr Pigtail was one of these presently occurred to me, not so soon as it ought to have done, and I determined that the only sermon I should preach, to him would be of the jocular and middle-age-Easter kind.[[33]] “Not so loud, Herr Pigtail, or mademoiselle will hear every syllable; you have pinned her, poor butterfly, into your letter book; but at the great day of judgment I shall accuse you of not having given her my works to read. I do wish you had only gone on pretending to be asleep long enough to allow me to tell her the other books of the history of Kuhschnappel, where Siebenkæs’s troubles occur, and his death, and his marriage. But, mademoiselle, I shall tell my publisher in Berlin to send you the remaining books of the story the moment they are in print, fresh out of the press, still all damp, like a morning newspaper. And now, adieu, Herr Pigtail; may Heaven grant you a new heart with the new year, and your dear daughter a second heart inside her own.”
The elemental conflict of his and my dissimilar components raged louder and louder: but I say no more about it—every additional word would have the appearance of an act of vindictiveness. This, however, I may at all events say: happy is every daughter who may read my works while her father is awake (very few such daughters, however, recognise this truth). Unhappy is every dependent of an Oehrmann, because he will be starved, as a greyhound is, that he may be the more nimble at running (I do not mean on the piano with his fingers), as the dancers’ children get nothing to eat that they may spring the better! And fortunate are all needy persons who have nothing to do with him; because Jacob Oehrmann gives to everyone just as much moral, as he possesses mercantile, credit, to which recruit-measure of worth he has been habituated by his fellow-tradesmen, who measure each other with yard-measures of metal. The only people who find favour in his sight are those who are complete paupers, and this because they serve as pedestals for his charity; for the alms which he distributes in the name of the town and out of its exchequer, he looks upon as his own. Peace be with him! At that time I had not taken a part myself in celebrating the peace-festival of the soul which I have described in the Fruit-piece of this book, and I had read but little of what I have there written concerning the year of Jubilee which ought to last as long as the Long Parliament in our hearts with respect to all our moral debtors; for if I had I should not even have contradicted Herr Pigtail.
I vexed him, I am sorry to say, once more by my parting speech to his daughter (for I wished him and her my wishes both together and at once, so that it might not appear which was for which).
“Herr Pigtail, and mademoiselle, I bid you a long farewell. No more shall I be able, in elysian evenings, to relate to you any of my biographies (shorn of the digressions); and the feast days and the holidays, as well as the eves thereof, will come and will go, but he who has caused you such vivid emotions will come no more. May fate send thee books instead of bookmakers, sometimes stir thy dull heart with a poetic throb, heave thy still breast with tender sighs prophetic of the future—bring to thy eyes some gentle tear drops, such as an andante causes to flow, and lead thee on through the hot, toilsome summer days, not to an after summer, but to a flowery tuneful spring. And so, good night.”
It goes to my heart to part with people; even were it my sworn hereditary foe: one is going to see him no more. Pauline was anything but my sworn hereditary foe. Out in the streets there were more new year well-wishers going their rounds, the watchmen, who were giving utterance to their good wishes in wind instrumental music and miserable verse. Stiff, old-fashioned, rude verses always touch me more—particularly in an appropriate mouth—than your sapless, new poems, all tricked out with artificial flowers and ice-plants; poetry altogether wretched is better than the mediocre. I decided upon going through the town gate; my heart was filled with emotions of very different kinds—for you see it was only eleven o’clock and the cold night was full of stars. And it was the last night of the year, and I didn’t want to pass from the old year to the new in sleep, though that is how I would pass from this life to the next. I resolved to take that flushed, throbbing heart of mine out of the streets, and to a quieter company.
Place a man in some waste Sahara desert stretching further than the eye can reach, and afterwards pen him up into the narrowest of corners, he will be struck, in both cases, by the same vivid consciousness of his own individuality—the widest spaces and the narrowest have the same powerful effect in quickening our perception of our own Ego and of its relationship. There is nothing, on the whole, oftener forgotten than that which is what forgets—namely, the forgetter’s self. Not only do the mechanical employments of labour and trade always draw men out of themselves, but the mental effort of study and investigation, also, renders scholars and philosophers just as deaf and blind to their own Ego, and its position with respect to other entities—deafer and blinder even. Nothing is more difficult than to convert an object of contemplation (which we always move away to a certain distance from ourselves, and from the mind’s eye, so as to bring the latter to bear on it properly) into an object of sensation, and to feel that the object is the eye itself. I have often read whole books on the subject of the Ego, and of printing, right through, until at last I saw, to my astonishment, that the Ego and the printed letters were before—me so to speak under my nose.
Let the reader say truly: has he not even at this moment, while I have been talking, been forgetting that there are letters before him, ay, and his own Ego into the bargain?
But out where I was, under the twinkling heavens, and on a snow-covered height, round about which there gleamed a white, frozen plain, my Ego burst away from its relationships (while in connection with them it was no more than an attribute, a quality), and it became a personage—a separate entity. And then I could look upon myself. All marked points of time—stanzas as it were, or music phrases, of existence—new years’ days for example, and birthdays, lift man high out of and up above the waves which are round him; he clears the water from his eyes, and looks about him, and says—“How the current has been carrying me along, drowning my hearing, and blinding my sight! Those are the waves, down there, onward, which have been bearing me along, and these, now coming toward me, when I dip down among them, will whirl me away!”
Without this clear, distinct consciousness of one’s Ego, there can be no freedom, and no calm equanimity amid the crowding elbowing tumult of the world.
I shall go on with my story. I stood upon an iceberg, but my soul was all aglow—the cloven moon shone brightly down, and the shadows of the pine-trees about me lay, like dismembered limbs of the night, black upon the lily ground of snow. Away, some distance from me, a man seemed to be kneeling motionless on the ground.
And now 12 o’clock struck, and 1794, year of war and tumult, fell, with all its rivers of blood, into the ocean of eternity; the booming after-tone of the bell seemed to say to me, “Now has Destiny, with the twelfth stroke of her hammer, knocked down the old year to you, poor perishing mortals, at her auction of minutes.”
The kneeling man now stood up and went quickly away. I could long see him and his shadow disappearing in the moonlight.
I left my height, the boundary hill between two years, and went down to where the man had been kneeling. I found a crucifix and a black leather prayer-book in duodecimo, all thumbed yellow, except one leaf at the beginning on which was the name of the owner, whose knees had worn deep traces in the ice. I knew him well, he was a cottager whose two sons had had to go to the war. On looking more closely, I found he had drawn a circle in the snow, to keep off evil spirits.
I saw it all; the simple, weak-minded creature, whose soul was darkened by a perpetual annular eclipse, had gone there on this solemn night to hearken to the hollow distant muttering thunder of the coming storm, and laid his prostrate soul, as it were, upon the earth to hear the distant march of the approaching foe. “Shallow, timid soul,” thought I, “why should the dead that are to be come floating athwart the face of the clear, still night—thy sleeping sons among them, memberless? Why strive already to see the darting flames of conflagrations yet to come, and to hear the dismal turmoil, the bitter wail, of a woe as yet unborn? The coffins of the coming year have, as in times of pestilence, no inscriptions yet—why should the names appear upon them? Oh! thy Solomon’s ring has been no protection against the destroying angel who dwells within our breasts. And that vague, ugly giant-cloud, behind which are death and the future, will prove, on approach, to be death and the future itself.”
In hours like these we are all ready to lay our hats and swords on to the bier—ay, and ourselves as well—our old wounds burn anew, and our hearts, not being truly healed, a little thing breaks them again, like arms imperfectly set. But the cruel, piercing lightning flash of some great minute, the reflection of which stretches gleaming athwart the whole river of our life, is necessary to us to make us blind to the ignes fatui and glowworms which meet us, to guide us, every hour: and frivolous, giddy man needs some powerful shock to counteract his tendency to continual petty naggling. Therefore, to us little crustaceans sticking with our suckers upon the ship of this earth, every new year’s night is, like night in the old mythologies, a mother of many gods in us—and in such a night there begins for us a better normal year than that which began in 1624. And I felt as if I should kneel, humble and penitent, on the spot where the poor childless father had knelt.
But now a brisker air brought to my ears a burst of gladsome music; it came like the breath of flowers across the frozen plain, horns and trumpets on the church tower, sending their cheering harmonies over the sleeping earth, ushering, with glad vigorous tones, the first hour of the new year in to a world of anxious, doubting men. And I too grew glad and strong; I raised my glance from the white shroud of the coming spring, and gazed at the moon; and on these spots on her face (these spots which grow green as you approach) I saw our earthly spring reposing upon flowers, and already moving his young wings, soon to take his flight with other birds of passage, and, bright with glittering plumes, and hailed by skylarks’ anthems, come and alight upon our shores.
The distant new year’s music flowed around me still I felt much happier, and far more tender; I saw the coming sorrows in the new born year, but they wore such lovely masks that they were more like sorrows that are past, or like the music around me—just as the rain which falls through the great caverns in the Derbyshire hills sounds in the distance like music.
But when I looked around me, and saw the white earth shining like a white sun, and the silent deep blue sphere all round, like a household circle of one great family—and as the music, like lovelier sighs, accompanied my thoughts—as I fixed my gaze, with grateful heart, upon the starry sky where all these thousands of stedfast witnesses of the beautiful moments (moments faded, out of bloom, indeed, now—but the great Beneficence spreads their seed for evermore)—when I thought of the men asleep all around me, and wished that they might all be happier when they opened their eyes in the morning—and when I thought of those awake UNDER me, whose slumbering souls stood in need of such a wish,—my heart, oppressed by the music, and by the night, grew heavy and grew full, and the blue sky, the glittering moon, and the sparkling snow-height all melted into one great floating shimmer.
And in the shimmer, and amid the music, I heard voices of my friends, and dear fellow-creatures, tenderly and anxiously wishing their new year’s wishes. They touched my heart so deeply, that I could but barely think my own—
“Oh! may you all be happy all the years of your lives.”