Fräulein Anna, das Papier in Deutschland ist wie das Papier in Amerika.
Ages ago Sophocles had worded it in almost the same phrase:
Oh, race of mortal men oppressed with care!
What nothings are we, like to shadows vain,
Cumb’ring the ground and wandering to and fro.
The greatest poets, from Le Gallienne down to Shakspere, have been aware of this evanescent property in the cumbrous and exsufflicate prowlers amid these “glimpses of the moon.” Well may we say with Cæsar, “Quamdiu se bene gesserit.”
There is always a touch of ozone in the words of Horace, and we find him saying of this very thing, “Precieuse ridicules pretiosa supellex.” Could it have been said better? How airily he pricks the bubble of man’s self-esteem! “Dressed in a little brief authority,” man plays his part amid mundane happenings tremelloid and sejant, and with a sort of innate connascence, a primitive conglutinate efflorescence, he approaches nearer and nearer, day by day, to that time when, as Shakspere hath it, “the beachy girdle of the ocean” will resolve itself into its component parts, and man as man will cease to exist.
But, to pass to a more inchoate view of these things,—to the “opum furiata cupido” of the ancient Latins,—what is there in all this that tends to lessen a man’s self-glorification, his auto-apotheosis? Victor Hugo can tell us: