—But neither will there be any to come.—These four points, however, look like the hare's tracks in the snow.—In short: the Pomeranian dog, my biographical hod-bearer and forwarder, is already lying under the table, and has discharged some Elysian fields and heavenly kingdoms.—As, besides, I did not wholly know in the above paragraph what I was after (I hope not to sit a well man before the public, if I knew)—accordingly the dog did me a true labor of love in actually biting off, so to speak, the tail, or second member. It was, besides, my plan merely to make caprioles in a period of an ell's length until the dog should have removed my anxiety about the doubtfulness of the Whitsuntide journey.—In fact, I never wanted to lay out words and thoughts together, but to save the latter, while I spent the former; Peutzer wrote long ago to the men of Ratisbon and Wetzlar, Many thoughts need a small stream of words, but the greater the brook is, so much the smaller can be the mill-wheel.—An honest reviewer is offended also by a laconic book if only for this reason, (not merely that the public does not understand it but) because a German has in the jurists and theologians the very best models before him for writing prolixly, and indeed with a diffuseness which perhaps—for the thought is the soul, the word the body—establishes among words that higher friendship of men, which, according to Aristotle, consists in this, that one soul (one thought) inhabits several bodies (words) at once.—

—I now begin Victor's vigils, the holy eve of Whitsuntide. It was already Saturday,—the wind (like the sciences) came from the east,—the quicksilver in the barometer-tube (as it does to-day in my nervous-tubes) almost leaped out at the top.—Flamin had parted in peace with his friend on Friday, and was not to return for five days.—Victor will to-morrow, on the first day of Whitsuntide, sally forth before the sun, in order to come back again on the third, when he alights in America.—(I wish he would stay longer.)—It is a fine blue-Monday[[93]] in the soul (every blue day is one), and a fine dispensation from the mourning of life, when one (like my hero) has the good fortune on a holy even-tide, during the tolling for prayers, and when the moon is already up above the houses, to sit tranquil and innocent in Zeusel's balcony in the presence of the prospects of the fairest Whitsuntide-days and the fairest Whitsuntide-faces, to take a first cut of all the preparatory dishes of hope, to gather all the bosom-roses and signs of the fairest morning, and, amidst the noisy booth-preludes to the Festival, to read the second part of the Mumien[[94]] precisely in the Sectors of joy in which I sketch my own and Gustavus's entrance into the heavenly Jerusalem at Lilienbad.—All this, as was said, my hero had....

But when he who found out so much affinity between his Whitsuntide-journey and that journey to the watering-place in the book, came at last with his agitated soul to the destruction of that Jerusalem; then, with the first sad sigh of to-day, he said: "O thou good Destiny, never lay such a sacrificial knife on the heart of my Clotilda; ah, I should die, if she became so unhappy as Beata."—And he further reflected how the ruddy morning clouds of hope are only high, hovering rain, and how often sorrow is the bitter kernel of rapture, like the golden Imperial Apple of the German Emperor, which, to be sure, weighs three marks and three ounces, but inwardly is filled up with earth....

By Heaven! we are here needlessly embittering with night-thoughts the holy evening, and none of us knows why he sighs so.—I assure the reader I have the whole Whitsuntide-festival before me in copy, and there is not a single misfortune there, unless Victor joins on a fourth Whitsuntide-day as after-summer, and in that there should something be developed. I confess I like to be an æsthetic frère terrible, and to point the sword at the breast of the world, which is reading deep into my Invisible (mother) Lodge, and play other like tricks,—but that comes from the fact that in youth one reads and owns the Sorrows of Werther, of which, like a mass-priest, one prepares a bloodless victim before one enters the Academy. Nay, if I this very day were composing a romance, I should—as the blue-coated Werther has in every young Amoroso and author a quasi-Christ who on Good-Friday puts on a similar crown of thorns, and ascends a cross—myself also do the same over again....

But it is time I opened my Maienthal, and let every one in. Only I will no longer make a mystery of it that I am minded to present outright this whole Paphos and knightly seat to the reader, as Louis XI. cast the Duchy of Boulogne at the feet of the Holy Mary. I think thereby to tower, perhaps, above other writers, who bestow only their quills upon their readers, full as much as the king does above old Lipsius, who made over to Mary only his silver-pen. In the beginning I meant to retain for myself this Elysium with thrice-mowed meadows and pine-groves, because I am in fact a poor devil, and really have no more income than a Prince of Wurtemberg formerly, namely ninety florins Rhenish of appanage-money, and ten florins for a coat of state, and because, as to the two square miles of land set off to me by God and equity,—for so much does the whole earth at an equal division, according to a good plan, lay off to each man,—verily I make so small account of that, that I would gladly give up my two miles to any one for a miserable sheepfold.—And what most kept me back from making this presentation of my Maienthal to living men, was the fear that I should turn over a feudum to people, readers, provincial deputies, who are possessed of a thousand times greater palatinates and patrimonial estates, and whom one would provoke, if one should make them resemble the holy Mary, who from a Queen of Heaven became a Duchess of Boulogne, or the Roman Emperor who must on the day of his coronation become at the same time a member of the Order of Mary at Aachen.

But what then can all their majorats,—their Teutonic-knights' estates,—their mesne-tenures,—and their patrimonia Petri (an allusion to my patrimonium PAULI),—and their grandfathers' estates and all their cargoes stowed into the ship of earth,—in short, their European possessions on the earth,—what, I say, can all these Dutch farms yield, in the way of products, that could stand even at a distance before those of Maienthal? And do there grow on their crown-estates heavenly blue days, evenings full of blissful tears, nights full of great thoughts? No, Maienthal bears loftier flowers than those which cattle pluck off, fairer apples of the Hesperides than are laid up in fruit-cellars, super-terrestrial treasures on subterranean rival-pieces to Eden, like Clotilda and Emanuel, and all that our dreams paint and our tears of joy bedew.—

And this is just my excuse, if I deny the Maienthal domain of joy to a thousand rival claimants, if I as its fee-provost cannot invest with this Swabian reversionary fief such people as are not fit for a proper feudum, morally blind, lame, minors, eunuchs, &c.—And here I must make myself many enemies, when, from among the vassals and joint subjects of investiture to whom Maienthal, with all its poetic privileges, is given in fee, I expressly exclude old gabblers who can no longer make the knight's leap of fancy,—forty-seven inhabitants of Scheerau and one hundred of Flachsenfingen, whose hearts are as cold as their knee-pans, or as dogs' noses,—the greatest ministers and other grandees, in whom, as in great roasted lumps of meat, only the middle is still raw, namely the heart,—one half billion economists, jurists, exchequer and finance-counsellors, and plus- i. e. minus-makers,[[95]] in whom the soul, as in Adam's case the body, was kneaded out of a clod of earth, who have a pericardium [or heart-bag], but no heart, cerebral-membranes without brain, shrewdness without philosophy, who, instead of the book of nature, read only their papers for law-cases and their tax-books,—finally, those who have not fire enough to kindle at the fire of love, poetry, religion, who for weep say blubber, for poetry, rhyme, for sentiment, craziness....

Am I then crazy that I work myself up here into such a rage, as if I had not before me on the other side the finest college of readers, which I am promoting to the primus adquirens of the freehold and apron-string-hold of Maienthal; a mystical, moral person, who discerns that utility is only an inferior beauty, and beauty a higher utility?—It is peculiar to all emotions (but not to opinions) that one thinks he alone has them. Thus every youth holds his love to be an extraordinary celestial phenomenon which has been only once in the world, as the star of love, the evening star, often looks like a comet. But the world is not all Flachsenfingenites and Dutchmen, who climb the Alps less to have great thoughts and elevations than to get sedes,[[96]] or go to sea, not to throw a poet's glance over the sublime ocean, but to escape consumption.... but there are everywhere to be found, in every market-town, on every island, fair souls who rest in the bosom of nature,—who reverence the dreams of love, though they themselves have awaked from their own,—who are encased with rough men, before whom they have to veil their idyllic fantasies about the second life, and their tears over the first,—who give fairer days than they receive,—to this whole fair society I finally make a present of the Feudum of Maienthal, of which there has been already so much talk, and go in at the head with some friends of both sexes and my sister as investing fief-provost.

Postscript or autograph bull of dispensation:—The Mining Superintendent cannot deny that the S. T. author of this biography, by the fact that the dog is lazy, and that these post-days are more than commonly voluminous, and that in this chapter he has actually melted two into one, is sufficiently excused with those who have the right to ask him why he has not ended the 32d Post-day till the middle of September or Fructidor. He still sits with his description four months distant from the history, 1793.

J. P.