I nowhere find a livelier emblem of the female sex, in all its boundless levity, than in the case where a woman is carrying the angel of Death beneath her heart, and yet in these nine months full of mortal tokens thinks of nothing more important than of who shall be the gossips, and what shall be cooked at the christening. But thou, Thiennette, hadst nobler thoughts, though these too along with them. The still hidden darling of thy heart was resting before thy eyes like a little angel sculptured on a gravestone, and pointing with its small finger to the hour when thou shouldst die; and every morning and every evening thou thoughtest of death with a certainty of which I yet knew not the reasons; and to thee it was as if the Earth were a dark mineral cave, where man's blood, like stalactitic water, drops down, and in dropping raises shapes which gleam so transiently, and so quickly fade away! And that was the cause why tears were continually trickling from thy soft eyes, and betraying all thy anxious thoughts about thy child; but thou repaidst these sad effusions of thy heart by the embrace in which, with new-awakened love, thou fellest on thy husband's neck, and saidst: "Be as it may, God's will be done, so thou and my child are left alive!--But I know well that thou, Dearest, lovest me as I do thee." ... Lay thy hand, good mother, full of blessings, on the two; and thou, kind Fate, never lift thine away from them!--
It is with emotion and good wishes that I witness the kiss of two fair friends, or the embracing of two virtuous lovers; and from the fire of their altar sparks fly over to me; but what is this to our sympathetic exaltation when we see two mortals, bending under the same burden, bound to the same duties, animated to the same care for the same little darlings, fall on one another's overflowing hearts, in some fair hour? And if these, moreover, are two mortals who already wear the mourning weeds of life, I mean old age, whose hair and cheeks are now grown colorless, and eyes grown dim, and whose faces a thousand thorns have marred into images of Sorrow;--when these two clasp each other with such wearied, aged arms, and so near to the precipice of the grave, and when they say or think: "All in us is dead, but not our love--O we have lived and suffered long together, and now we will hold out our hands to Death together also, and let him carry us away together,"--does not all within us cry: O Love, thy spark is superior to Time; it burns neither in joy nor in the cheek of roses; it dies not, neither under a thousand tears nor under the snow of old age, nor under the ashes of thy--beloved. It never dies; and Thou, All-good! if there were no eternal love, there were no love at all....
To the Parson it was easier than it is to me to pave for himself a transition from the heart to the digestive faculty. He now submitted to Thiennette (whose voice at once grew cheerful, while her eyes time after time began to sparkle) his purpose to take advantage of the frosty weather and have the winter meat slaughtered and salted. "The pig can scarcely rise," said he; and forthwith he fixed the determination of the women, further the butcher, and the day, and all et ceteras; appointing everything with a degree of punctuality, such as the war-college (when it applies the cupping-glass, the battle-sword, to the overfull system of mankind) exhibits on the previous day, in its arrangements, before it drives a province into the baiting-ring and slaughter-house.
This settled, he began to talk and feel quite joyously about the course of winter, which had commenced to-day at two-and-twenty minutes past eight in the morning; "for," said he, "new-year is close at hand; and we shall not need so much candle to-morrow night as to-night." His mother, it is true, came athwart him with the weapons of her five senses; but he fronted her with his Astronomical Tables, and proved that the lengthening of the day was no less undeniable than imperceptible. In the last place, like most official and married persons, heeding little whether his women took him or not, he informed them, in juristico-theological phrase: "That he would put off no longer, but write this very afternoon to the venerable Consistorium, in whose hands lay the jus circa sacra, for a new Ball to the church-steeple; and the rather, as he hoped before new-year's day to raise a bountiful subscription from the parish for this purpose. If God spare us till spring," added he, with peculiar cheerfulness, "and thou wert happily recovered, I might so arrange the whole that the ball should be set up at thy first churchgoing, dame!"
Thereupon he shifted his chair from the dinner and dessert table to the work-table; and spent the half of his afternoon over the petition for the steeple-ball. As there still remained a little space till dusk, he clapped his tackle to his new learned Opus, of which I must now afford a little glimpse. Out of doors among the snow, there stood near Hukelum an old Robber-Castle, which Fixlein, every day in Autumn, had hovered round like a revenant, with a view to gauge it, ichnographically to delineate it, to put every window-bar and every bridle-hook of it correctly on paper. He believed he was not expecting too much, if thereby--and by some drawings of the not so much vertical as horizontal walls--he hoped to impart to his "Architectural Correspondence of two Friends concerning the Hukelum Robber-Castle" that last polish and labor limæ which contents Reviewers. For towards the critical Star-chamber of the Reviewers he entertained not that contempt which some authors actually feel--or only affect, as, for instance, I. From this mouldered Robber-Louvre, there grew for him more flowers of joy than ever in all probability had grown from it of old for its owners.--To my knowledge, it is an anecdote not hitherto made public, that for all this no man but Büsching has to answer. Fixlein had, not long ago, among the rubbish of the church letter-room, stumbled on a paper wherein the Geographer had been requesting special information about the statistics of the village. Büsching, it is true, had picked up nothing,--accordingly, indeed, Hukelum, in his Geography, is still omitted altogether;--but this pestilential letter had infected Fixlein with the spring-fever of Ambition, so that his palpitating heart was no longer to be stilled or held in check, except by the assaf[oe]tida-emulsion of a review. It is with authorcraft as with love; both of them for decades long one may equally desire and forbear; but is the first spark once thrown into the powder-magazine, it burns to the end of the chapter.
Simply because winter had commenced by the Almanac, the fire must be larger than usual; for warm rooms, like large furs and bear-skin caps, were things which he loved more than you would figure. The dusk, this fair chiaroscuro of the day, this colored foreground of the night, he lengthened out as far as possible, that he might study Christmas discourses therein; and yet could his wife, without scruple, just as he was pacing up and down the room, with the sowing-sheet full of divine word-seeds hung round his shoulder,--hold up to him a spoonful of alegar, that he might try the same in his palate, and decide whether she should yet draw it off. Nay, did he not in all cases, though fonder of roe-fishes himself, order a milter to be drawn from the herring-barrel, because his good-wife liked it better?--
Here light was brought in; and as Winter was just now commencing his glass-painting on the windows, his ice flower-pieces, and his snow-foliage, our Parson felt that it was time to read something cold, which he pleasantly named his cold collation; namely, the description of some unutterably frosty land. On the present occasion, it was the winter history of the four Russian sailors on Nova Zembla. I, for my share, do often in summer, when the sultry zephyr is inflating the flower-bells, append certain charts and sketches of Italy, or the East, as additional landscapes to those among which I am sitting. And yet to-night he further took up the Weekly Chronicle of Flachsenfingen; and amid the bombshells, pestilences, famines, comets with long tails, and the roaring of all the Hell-floods of another Thirty Years' War, he could still listen with the one ear towards the kitchen, where the salad for his roast-duck was just a-cutting.
Good-night, old Fixlein! I am tired. May kind Heaven send thee, with the young year 1794, when the Earth shall again carry her people, like precious night-moths, on leaves and flowers, the new steeple-ball, and a thick, handsome--boy, to boot!
[ELEVENTH LETTER-BOX.]
Spring; Investiture; and Childbirth.