When this festal day comes, then will our children's children be—no more. We stand now in the evening and see at the close of our dark day the sun go down with a red-hot glory, and promise us behind the last cloud the still, serene sabbath-day of humanity; but our posterity have yet to travel through a night full of wind, and through a cloud full of poison, till at last over a happier earth an eternal morning-wind full of blossom-spirits, moving on before the sun, expelling all clouds, shall breathe on men without a sigh. Astronomy promises the earth an eternal vernal equinox;[[296]] and history promises it a higher one; perhaps the two eternal springs may coincide.—
Since man disappears among men, we downcast ones must erect ourselves before humanity. When I think of the Greeks, I see that our hopes move faster than fate.—As one travels by night with lights over the icy Alps, in order not to be terrified at the abysses and at the long road, so does fate spread night around us, and hands us only torches for the way immediately before us, that we may not worry ourselves about the chasms of the future, and the distance of the goal.—There were centuries when humanity was led with bandaged eyes—from one prison to another;—there were other centuries when spectres rattled and overturned all night long, and in the morning nothing was disturbed; there can be no other centuries except those in which individuals die, but nations rise, and in which nations decay, but mankind rises: when mankind itself sinks and falls to ruins, and ends with the scattering of the globe in a dust-cloud ... what shall console us?—
A veiled eye behind the bounds of time, an infinite heart beyond the world. There is a higher order of things than we can demonstrate,—there is a Providence in the world's history and in every one's life which reason has the boldness to deny, and which the heart has the boldness to believe;—there must be a Providence, which, according to other rules than we have hitherto assumed, links this confused earth as daughter-land to a higher city of God,—there must be a God, a Virtue, and an Eternity.
FOOTNOTES:
[Footnote 1]: His collected works, Vol. III. p. 68.
[2]: In Faust,—Scene of the Easter Holidays.—Tr.
[3]: A Jew once separated from his wife when she appeared with bare arms; but it is difficult to ascribe the present frequent divorces in Paris to that cause.
[4]: It is amusing to hear Jean Paul call it so, but the German diminutive, "Werklein," also expresses attachment to the thing in question. Thus children say Väter-chen, "Little Papa; Daddy."—Tr.
[5]: Descriptive of Venus, or written under her influence.—Tr.
[6]: The stick on which a painter rests his arm.—Tr.