I should be glad to see it, if he were to renew again with the Regency Councillor the treaty of friendship: I should then get to describe his Whitsuntide journey to Maienthal, which perhaps is the Septleva[[77]] and the best thing to which the human understanding has yet attained. But nothing will come of this Septleva, unless they make peace again; by the side of every flower in Maienthal, by the side of every delight, the grief-worn face of his friend would appear and ask, "Canst thou be so happy, while I am so far from it?"

It were a wiser course, if both were monks or courtiers; then they might be expected, as friendship is the marriage of souls, to remain continent in a celibacy of souls....

Just at the very conclusion of this chapter the dog brings the new one, and I simply weave both together and go on:—

Without any remarkable vexation at the delay of the answer from Maienthal, Victor went alone on the 4th of May to St. Luna, and with every step that brought him nearer, his soul grew more soft and placable.—When he arrived:—

There are in every house days, which were forgotten in the Litany,—cursed, devilish, deused days,—when all goes criss-cross,—when everything scolds and growls and wags its tail,—when the children and the dog dare not say, Pugh![[78]] and the liege-and-manor-lord of the house slams-to all the doors and the house-mistress draws the bass-register of moralizing,[[79]] and strikes the silvery tone of dishes and the bunch of keys,—when one does nothing but hunt up old grievances, all forest-offences of mice and moths, broken parasols and fan-sticks, and that the gunpowder and the perfume-powder, and the elegant note-paper have become damp, and that the sausage-sledge is worn out by sitting to a wooden hobby-horse, and that the dog and the sofa are shedding hair,—when everything comes too late, everything is roasted to death, everything is over-boiled, and the chamber-donna sticks the pins into my lady's flesh as into a doll,—and when, after they have, in this scurvy sickness where nothing is the matter, vexed themselves to their hearts' content without cause, they become good-natured again without cause.—

When Victor arrived at the parsonage, he heard the birthday hero of the day, the parson, lecturing and screaming in his study. Eymann was pouring out his holy spirit into the long ears of his catechumens, into whom no fiery tongues were to be got. He had in hand a female dunce from a hermitage (a solitary house in the woods), and was trying to explain to her the distinction between the loosing-key and the binding-key. Nothing, however, could be done with her: the chaplain and the convert had already spent a half-hour over the school-time with the explanation; the dunce was constantly confounding the keys, as if she were a—lady of the world. The chaplain had set his head upon illuminating hers;—he set before her every consideration that might have moved iron-wood and iron-stone,—his birthday festival of to-day, the embittering of the general joy, the surplus half-hour,—in order to persuade her, that she must comprehend the difference,—she did not, she could not see it;—he condescended to entreaties and said: "Jewel, Lamb, Beast, daughter penitent, understand it, I beseech thee,—do thy spiritual shepherd the pleasure of repeating to him the extraordinary difference between binding- and loosing-keys. Am I not dealing fairly with thee?—But my office as parson requires of me not to let thee go like a cow, without knowing a key.—Only take courage and just say after me, word for word, dearly-bought christian beast."—She did so at last, and when she had done, he said joyfully, "Now thou pleasest thy teacher, and attend further."—Out of doors she recapitulated it all, and had comprehended it all very well, except that instead of "Bind- und Löse-Schlüssel" (keys) she always caught it "Bind- und Löse-Schüssel" (dishes).—

The three-twins had a miserable plan of not coming till after dinner.—The soul of the red Appel was exhaling for this very occasion a wild-game flavor, and smelt like burnt milk-porridge, and complained that she alone had all the labor on her shoulders, and when Agatha offered to fly to her assistance, she said: "I can do it, thank God! as well as thou!" The Regency-Councillor had arrived, but unfortunately had run out into the fields again till dinner-time,—Agatha's face had been crystallized into a rock-cellar by the coldness of her brother towards Victor,—only the parson's wife was the parson's wife; not merely one mother-country, but one breath of love linked her heart to his, and it was impossible for her to be angry with him. She loved a maiden, if he praised her; had she been without a husband, she would have been either his love-letter-writer or his letter-carrier.

—Thus do women love—without measure! often, too, they hate in the same way.—To this my correspondent adds further, that he could draw from the watering-village a whole protocol of depositions in evidence that the Parson's wife not merely always, but even on the present Ventose and Pluviose[[80]] day, was able to endure and live through it with the unvarnished composure of a Christian woman, if any one let anything fall, a cup or a word. For such a state of mind,—for apathy under the present, entire loss of a soup-tureen, or rinsing-bowl, or fruit-dish,—there is needed perhaps as much health as reason.

—At last in the evening, the Page came in and said, Flamin was still in the garden. Victor received it, as if it were said to him, and went out carrying his oppressed heart to meet another troubled one: Flamin he found in an embowered nook staring up with all his eyes at the wax-image of the rejected friend; Victor's heart moved heavily as if through tears in his overladen breast. Flamin's face was covered, not with the panoply of wrath, but with the funeral veil of sorrow. For here in the foreground of a bright, warm youth, as it were on the classic soil of a former, irreplaceable love, he became too warm and too tender,—in the village he revoked his hardness in the city,—and what was still more, only friends of his friend, only affectionate eulogies on the despised darling, overwhelmed and warmed his impoverished heart, and he could here still more easily excuse than spare him. Victor welcomed him with the soft voice of a subdued heart, but he only half spoke either his thoughts or his words. Victor gazed deep down into the soul which mourned for friendship; for only a heart sees a heart; so only the great man sees great men, as one sees mountains only from mountains. He held it therefore as no sign of resentment, when Flamin slowly walked away from him; but he must needs, left so alone there, turn away his eyes from the consecrated corner of the garden, where their friendship had once opened its blossoms, and from the sacrificial bower where he had interceded with his father for Flamin's and Clotilda's union, and from the high observatory, the Tabor of friendship's transfiguration, from all these burial-places of a fairer time he must needs avert his eyes, in order to endure the poorer present. But that which he would not look upon, he represented so much the more vividly to his mind.

Now the Vesper-bell extended its melancholy vibrations even to the hearts of men,—past times sent the tones, and the evening-lamentations sank like ardent entreaties into the souls of the sundered friends: "O be reconciled and walk together! Is then life so long that men may venture to be angry with each other? Are then good souls so numerous, that they can fly from each other? O these tones have floated around many a heap of the ashes of mortality, around many a stiffened heart full of love, around many closed lips full of fury,—O transitory creatures, love, love each other!"—Victor followed willingly (for he wept) after his friend, and found him standing by the bed whereon Eymann caused the F of his name to grow green on the cole-rape-plants, and he was silent, because he knew that for all sympathetic cures silence is needed. O, such an hour of deepening silence, when friends stand beside each other like strangers, and compare the silence with the old outpouring, has too many heart-stings, and a thousand smothered tears, and for words sighs!