The rapture bridled his feverish heart; and his mad pulse grew calm. Next morning his mother, when she saw that all was prospering, would have had the church-bells rung, to make him think that the second Sunday was already here. But his wife (perhaps out of shame in my presence) was averse to the lying; and said it would be all the same if we moved the month-hand of his clock (but otherwise than Hezekiah's Dial) eight days forward; especially as he was wont rather to rise and look at his clock for the day of the month, then to turn it up in the almanac. I for my own part simply went up to the bedside, and asked him: "If he was cracked--what in the world he meant with his mad death-dreams, when he had lain so long, and passed clean over the Cantata-Sunday, and yet, out of sheer terror, was withering to a lath?"
A glorious reinforcement joined me; the Flesher or Quartermaster. In his anxiety, he rushed into the room, without saluting the women, and I forthwith addressed him aloud: "My gossip here is giving me trouble enough, Mr. Regiments-Quartermaster; last night, he let them persuade him he was little older than his own son; here is the child's fall-hat he was for putting on." The Guardian deuced and devilled, and said: "Ward, are you a parson or a fool?--Have not I told you twenty times, there was a maggot in your head about this?"--
At last he himself perceived that he was not rightly wise, and so grew better; besides the guardian's invectives, my oaths contributed a good deal; for I swore I would hold him as no right gossip, and edit no word of his Biography, unless he rose directly and got better....
--In short, he showed so much politeness to me that he rose and got better.--He was still sickly, it is true, on Saturday; and on Sunday could not preach a sermon (something of the sort the Schoolmaster read, instead); but yet he took Confessions on Saturday, and at the altar next day he dispensed the Sacrament. Service ended, the feast of his recovery was celebrated, my farewell-feast included; for I was to go in the afternoon.
This last afternoon I will chalk out with all possible breadth, and then, with the pentagraph of free garrulity, fill up the outline and draw on the great scale.
During the Thanksgiving-repast, there arrived considerable personal tribute from his catechumens, and fairings by way of bonfire for his recovery; proving how much the people loved him, and how well he deserved it; for one is oftener hated without reason by the many, than without reason loved by them. But Fixlein was friendly to every child; was none of those clergy who never pardon their enemies except in--God's stead; and he praised at once the whole world, his wife, and himself.
I then attended at his afternoon's catechizing; and looked down (as he did in the first Letter-Box) from the choir, under the wing of the wooden cherub. Behind this angel, I drew out my note-book, and shifted a little under the cover of the Black Board, with its white Psalm-ciphers,[[66]] and wrote down what I was there--thinking. I was well aware, that when I to-day, on the twenty-fifth of May retired from this Salernic[[67]] spinning-school, where one is taught to spin out the thread of life, in fairer wise, and without wetting it by foreign mixtures,--I was well aware, I say, that I should carry off with me far more elementary principles of the Science of Happiness than the whole Chamberlain piquet ever muster all their days. I noted down my first impression, in the following Rules of Life for myself and the press.
"Little joys refresh us constantly like house-bread, and never bring disgust; and great ones, like sugar-bread, briefly, and then bring it.--Trifles we should let, not plague us only, but also gratify us; we should seize not their poison-bags only, but their honey-bags also; and if flies often buzz about our room, we should, like Domitian, amuse ourselves with flies, or, like a certain still living Elector,[[68]] feed them.--For civic life and its micrologies, for which the Parson has a natural taste, we must acquire an artificial one; must learn to love without esteeming it; learn, far as it ranks beneath human life, to enjoy it like another twig of this human life, as poetically as we do the pictures of it in romances. The loftiest mortal loves and seeks the same sort of things with the meanest; only from higher grounds and by higher paths. Be every minute, Man, a full life to thee!--Despise anxiety and wishing, the Future and the Past!--If the Second-pointer can be no road-pointer into an Eden for thy soul, the Month-pointer will still less be so, for thou livest not from month to month, but from second to second! Enjoy thy Existence more than thy Manner of Existence, and let the dearest object of thy Consciousness be this Consciousness itself!--Make not the Present a means of thy Future; for this Future is nothing but a coming Present; and the Present, which thou despisest, was once a Future which thou desiredst!--Stake in no lotteries,--keep at home,--give and accept no pompous entertainments,--travel not abroad every year!--Conceal not from thyself, by long plans, thy household goods, thy chamber, thy acquaintance!--Despise Life, that thou mayst enjoy it!--Inspect the neighborhood of thy life; every shelf, every nook of thy abode; and nestling in, quarter thyself in the farthest and most domestic winding of thy snail-house!--Look upon a capital but as a collection of villages, a village as some blind-alley of a capital; fame as the talk of neighbors at the street-door; a library as a learned conversation, joy as a second, sorrow as a minute, life as a day; and three things as all in all: God, Creation, Virtue!"----
And if I would follow myself and these rules, it will behoove me not to make so much of this Biography; but once for all, like a moderate man, to let it sound out.
After the Catechizing, I stept down to my wide-gowned and black-gowned gossip. The congregation gone, we clambered up to all high places, perused the plates on the pews--I took a lesson on the altar on its inscription incrusted with the sediment of Time (I speak not metaphorically); I organed, my gossip managing the bellows; I mounted the pulpit, and was happy enough there to alight on one other rose-shoot, which in the farewell minute, I could still plant in the rose-garden of my Fixlein. For I descried aloft, on the back of a wooden Apostle, the name Lavater, which the Zurich Physiognomist had been pleased to leave on this sacred Torso in the course of his wayfaring. Fixlein did not know the hand, but I did, for I had seen it frequently in Flachsenfingen, not only on the tapestry of a Court Lady there, but also in his Hand-Library;[[69]] and met with it besides in many country churches, forming, as it were, the Directory and Address-Calendar of this wandering name, for Lavater likes to inscribe in pulpits, as a shepherd does in trees, the name of his beloved. I could now advise my gossip prudently to cut away the name, with the chip of wood containing it, from the back of the Apostle, and to preserve it carefully among his curiosa.