[12] "Aber lasst uns nicht, männernde Jünglinge, unsere Kraft vergeuden, sondern die Lust in keuscher Ehe umarmen, damit sie fruchtbar und unsterblich werde ... Es ziemt uns nicht, uns keck in den Rath der Fürsten einzudringen; sie sind besser als wir."
But let us not squander our strength, O youths who are becoming men; let us embrace joy in chaste wedlock, that she may become fruitful and immortal.... It becomes us not audaciously to thrust ourselves into the counsels of princes; they are better than we.
[13] Karl Gutzkow: "Birne's Leben, Ges. Werke, xii. 328, 329.
[14] Metternich was even acquainted with the later, quite revolutionary letters from Paris. On the 26th of January 1834, Princess Melanie Metternich writes in her diary: "I spent the early hours of the evening with Clemens, to whom I read Börne's Letters from Paris. They are of course as malicious as possible, but the style, with its dæmonic extravagance, is remarkably clever." (Metternich's Posthumous Papers, v. 545, quoted by Holzmann.)
[15] He writes to his father: "Gentz, too, was doubtless a Liberal to begin with, but he could give securities for a sincere conversion which I cannot give. He had been sold to England for many years before he took service with Austria. He is sensual, extravagant, the most dissolute man in the country."
[16] "A frog, a cucumber, a leg of mutton, a Wilhelm Meister, a Christ—it is all the same to them; they actually forgive a Madonna her holiness, if she is well painted. So am not I, and never was. In nature I have always sought God, God only, and in art the divine; and where I did not find God, I saw nothing but miserable botch-work. History, men, and books I have judged in like manner—unfortunately!"
[17] "I have never been able to understand their conception of fate, their confusion of the antique with the Romantic idea, their Christian paganism. Death is either a loving father, who comes to fetch his child home from the school of life, in which case fate is not tragic; or he is the cannibal Kronos, who swallows his own children, in which case it is unchristian. Your fate is a hermaphrodite, unable either to beget or to bring forth."
[18] Briefe des jungen Börne, p. 143.