I confess, I have, during the whole session of the Club, again had the freakish thought, which, wild as it is, I have often before been unable to drive out of my head,—for it is, to be sure, a little confirmed by the fact that, like an atheist, I know not whence I am, and that with my French name, Jean Paul, I was impelled by the most wondrous accidents to a German writing-desk, on which I one day will copiously report them to the world,—as I was saying, I hold it myself to be a folly, my sometimes getting the conceit in my head, that it is possible since thousand-fold examples of the kind are extant in Oriental history—that I might be actually the unknown son of a Kniese[[91]] or Shah, or something of the sort, that was trained for the throne, and from whom they concealed his noble birth the better to educate him. The very entertaining of such an idea is of itself folly; but so much is nevertheless correct, that the examples are not to be erased from universal history, in which many a one, even to his twenty-eighth year,—I am two years older,—knew not a word of it, that an Asiatic or some other throne awaited him, wherefrom he afterward, when he came to it, wielded a magnificent sway. But let it be assumed I was changed from a Jean Lack-land to a John With-land,—I should go forthwith to the billiard-room, and tell everybody whom he had before him. Were one of my subjects there joining in the game, I should forthwith govern him on the spot; and if it were a female subject, without scruple. I should proceed with considerateness, and invest only subjects from my billiard-shire with the weightier offices, because the Regent must be acquainted with him whom he appoints, which, as is well known, he can best become at the gaming-tables. I would strictly command my vassals and all by a general règlement for all times to be happy and well-off, and whoever was poor, him I would put as a punishment on half-pay; for I think, if I interdicted poverty so emphatically, it would come at last to be the same as if Saturn and I ruled together.—Like a Sultan in his harem, so I in my state, would desire no physical mutes or dwarfs, but, as occasion required, moral ones.—I confess, I should have a peculiar predilection for geniuses, and should appoint to all, even the wretchedest places, the greatest heads. I should fear nothing (enemies excepted) but dropsy on the brain, of which a crowned or mitred head must always be in an agony of dread, if, like me, it has read in Dr. Ludwig's, or else in Tissot's, treatises on the nerves, that it comes on at first with close bindings around the head, which I should fear still more from my crown, especially if the head which was forced into it was thick and it was tight....

We come back to the story. The next day Victor and Flamin, in the fair, newly assumed bonds of the covenant of friendship, returned to Flachsenfingen. Now could Victor enter through the heavenly gates of Maienthal, if Clotilda did not bolt them. All depended on Emanuel's answer. The May-airs breathed, the May-flowers exhaled, the May-trees rustled. O how this fanning kindled the longing to enjoy all these blisses in Maienthal, and to get from his friend the admission-ticket to the finest concert-hall of nature. None came; for it had already—come through the Bee-father Lind of Kussewitz, who as feudal-postilion had been sent by Count O. to Matthieu, and had taken the route through Maienthal. It was from Emanuel:—

"Horion!

"Come sooner, beloved! Hasten to our valley of Eden, which is a summer-house of nature, with green-growing walls between nothing but avenues running out of heaven into heaven. The light, flowery hours move by before the eye of man as the stars do before the optic tube of the astronomer. Blossom-snares of honeysuckle are laid for thee, and covered with fragrances; and when thou art caught in them, the up-welling incense envelops thee in a cloud, and unknown arms press through the cloud, and draw thee to three hearts full of love! I have already taken up lilies of the valley out of the wood, and planted them near me.—Thy city is indeed also a wood around thee, still lily of the valley! I have already transplanted two balsamines and five summer carnations; but my first transplanted Balsamine was Clotilda. Thou seest how spring, with its exuberant, swelling juices, penetrates through my budding soul also, and May splits open therein, as I am now doing on the carnations, all the buds.—Appear, appear, ere I become melancholy again, and then tell thy Julius who the angel was that handed him the letter for me.

"Emanuel."

Julius had probably thought on this occasion of that other letter which a hitherto unknown angel had given him to unseal on this Whitsuntide.—But what have I to do here with angels and letters? Write by courier is what I will now do, that so I may have got through the 32d Chapter before the dog appears with his 33d Whitsuntide Chapter, which, not merely because it has thirty-two ancestral chapters, but on account of the probable effusion therein of a holy spirit of joy, or on account of a whole dove-flock of holy spirits, and on account of the historic pictures it will contain,—and by reason of my own exertions,—must be (it is believed) a chapter like which in each Dionysian[[92]] period hardly half a one, and in each Constantinopolitan hardly a whole one, can be written.—The Whitsuntide dog-day may turn out long, but it will be good and divine,—Philippine will shake her brother and say (she loves to flatter): "Paul! St. Paul was also in the third heaven, but he never described it like this in his Epistle to the Romans!" I myself could wish that I might read my 33d dog-day before I had made it....

The much in little which, with my previous haste, I have still to throw out, is, according to the gourd-documents, this: Victor set his heart full as much as I do on the Whitsuntide-gospels. His conscience placed not the thinnest pasture-bars, not the lowest boundary-stone, in the way of his enjoyment, and he could go like an innocent pleasure to the beloved Clotilda, and say to her, Accept me. He paid now his farewell and professional visits regularly at court, and cared nothing for any word full of human caustic, or any eye full of basilisk's poison. He redoubled his fairer visits to Flamin, in order to reward his noble reconciliation with a warmer friendship, and he stamped upon the past history and on the subject of jealousy the privy-seal of forbearing silence. His dreams did not, to be sure, on their stage full of shadow-plays and airy apparitions, present Clotilda's form (the most loved faces are just those dream denies), but by conducting him into the old, dark, rainy months, when he was again unhappy and without love and without the dearest soul, they gave him by means of the rained-out night a brighter day, and redoubled melancholy became redoubled love.—And when in the morning after such dreams of the past dream he walked out through the May-frost, and by the swollen joy-drops of the vine-leaves, and under the morning wind, which rather wafted than cooled him, in order to touch with his yearning eyes as precious relics the fixed western woods, which hung a green curtain before the opera-stage of his hope,—a reviewer, who shall put himself in my place, cannot possibly expect me with this shortness of time, and in my extra post-coach to the carriage of Phœbus (now in the shorter days), to give this long antecedent member of the period its conclusion.

Even the perpendicular climax of the barometer, and the horizontal streams of the east wind, swelled the sails of his hope, and wafted him into the silent sea of the Whitsuntide-future, and into the Almanach of 1793, to see whether the moon fulled on Whitsuntide.—By Heaven, it will at least be half full, which is much better still, because one will have it at hand in the middle of heaven when one is about to begin his evening....

I have, after all, by extraordinary racing, brought matters so far, that I have done with the 32d dog-post-day before Spitz with his goblet of joy on his neck has made his way across the Indian Ocean.—And as, besides, according to the capitulatio perpetua with the reader, (at which, notoriously, the benches of princes and cities bite the dust,) I must now make an Intercalary Day: I will spend the Dog's vacation in that way; but I earnestly beg all my day-electors, those of my subscribers who have hitherto skipped across the Intercalary Days on the leaping-pole of the index-finger, not to do it in this case, first, because I agree to be shot, if in this Intercalary Day I in the least exercise my intercalary-day privilege, though confirmed under several governments, of delivering the wittiest and weightiest matters,—and, secondly, because the dog even on the Intercalary day may run into port, and bring me facts which I may serve up not in the 33d Dog-post-day, but already in the—VIIIth Intercalary day, or in the VIIIth Sansculottide.—The contents of this, like the present, are a rambling overture to the Future.—

I must say, if, in the first place, as Bellarmin (the Catholic champion and contradictor) asserts, every man is his own Redeemer,—whence follows, in my judgment, that he is also his own Eve and serpent for his old Adam,—if, secondly, the pen of an extraordinarily good author is the snuffers of truth, just as, inversely, to Herr von Moser in prison the snuffers were a pen,—if, thirdly, Despotism may at last, instead of the living tree-stems (for it saws right into the world as if blind,) saw into the throne-saw-horse itself,—further, I must say, if, fourthly, every action (even the worst) has, like Christ, two unlike genealogies,—if in fact, fifthly, one and another reviewer carries his critical eye, wherewith he surveys everything, not on the apex of his skull (as Mahomet's saints are said to, in order not to see beauties), nor, like Argus, before and behind, but actually in front, under the stomach, over the gut, in the midst of the navel; if this man, in addition thereto, possesses no other heart than the linen one which the seamstress has stitched in the corner of the shirt-frill, and which lies over the pit of the heart, which one would call more sensibly the pit of the stomach,—finally I must say (at least I can do so), if, in the sixth place, true coherence, strict concatenation of paragraphs, is perhaps the greatest ornament and soul of the so-called unbound discourse, or prose, which, however, is like a bound harpsichord, and if, therefore, the sense, like an epic action, must begin at the end of the (rhetorical and temporal) period, because otherwise there would not be any at all....