On returning to the parsonage, I made for my hat and stick; but the design, as it were the projection and contour of a supper in the acacia-grove, had already been sketched by Thiennette. I declared that I would stay till evening, in case the young mother went out with us to the proposed meal.... and truly the Biographer at length got his way, all doctors' regulations notwithstanding.
I then constrained the Parson to put on his Kräutermütze,[[70]] or Herb-cap, which he had stitched together out of simples for the strengthening of his memory: "Would to Heaven," said I, "that Princes instead of their Princely Hats, Doctors and Cardinals instead of theirs, and Saints instead of martyr-crowns, would clap such memory-bonnets on their heads!"--Thereupon, till the roasting and cooking within doors were over, we marched out alone over the parsonage meadows, and talked of learned matters, we packed ourselves into the ruined Robber-Castle, on which my gossip, as already mentioned, has a literary work in hand. I deeply approved, the rather as this Kidnapper-tower had once belonged to an Aufhammer, his intention of dedicating the description to the Rittmeister; that nobleman, I think, will sooner give his name to the Book than to the Shock. For the rest, I exhorted my fellow-craftsman to pluck up literary heart, and said to him: "A fearless pen, good gossip! Let Subrector Hans von Füchslein be, if he like, the Dragon of the Apocalypse, lying in wait for the delivery of the fugitive Woman, to swallow the offspring; I am there too, and have my friend the Editor of the Litteraturzeitung at my side, who will gladly permit me to give an anticritique on paying the insertion-dues!"--I especially excited him to new fillings and return-freights of his Letter-Boxes. I have not taken oath that into this biographical chest-of-drawers I will not in the course of time introduce another Box. "Neither to my godson, worthy gossip, will it do any harm that he is presented, poor child, even now to the reading public, when he does not count more months than, as Horace will have it, a literary child should count years, namely, nine."
In walking homewards, I praised his wife. "If marriage," said I to him, "is the madder which in maids, as in cotton, makes the colors visible, then I contend, that Thiennette, when a maid, could scarcely be so good as she is now when a wife. By Heaven! in such a marriage, I should write Books of quite another sort, divine ones; in a marriage, I mean, where beside the writing-table (as beside the great voting-table at the Regensburg Diets, there are little tables of confectionery); where in like manner, I say, a little jar of marmalade were standing by me, namely, a sweetened, dainty, lovely face, and out of measure fond of the Letter-Box-writer, gossip! Your marriage will resemble the acacia-grove we are now going to, the leaves of which grow thicker with the heat of summer, while other shrubs are yielding only shrunk and porous shade."
As we entered through the upper garden-door into this same bower, the supper and the good mistress were already there. Nothing is more pure and tender than the respect with which a wife treats the benefactor or comrade of her husband; and happily the Biographer himself was this comrade, and the object of this respect. Our talk was cheerful, but my spirit was oppressed. The fetters, which bind the mere reader to my heroes, were in my case of triple force; as I was at once their guest and their portrait-painter. I told the Parson that he would live to a greater age than I, for that his temperate temperament was balanced, as if by a doctor, so equally between the nervousness of refinement and the hot thick-bloodedness of the rustic. Fixlein said that if he lived but as long as he had done, namely, two-and-thirty years, it would amount, exclusive of the leap-year-days, to 280,320 seconds, which in itself was something considerable; and that he often reckoned up with satisfaction the many thousand persons of his own age that would have a life equally long.
At last I tried to get in motion; for the red lights of the falling sun were mounting up over the grove, and dipping us still deeper in the shadows of night; the young mother had grown chill in the evening dew. In confused mood, I invited the Parson to visit me soon in the city, where I would show him not only all the chambers of the Palace, but the Prince himself. Gladder there was nothing this day on our old world than the face to which I said so; and than the other one which was the mild reflection of the former.--For the Biographer it would have been too hard, if now in that minute, when his fancy, like mirror-telescopes, was representing every object in a tremulous form, he had been obliged to cut and run; if, I will say, it had not occurred to him that to the young mother it could do little harm (but much good) were she to take a short walk, and assist in escorting the Author and architect of the present Letter-Box out of the garden to his road.
In short, I took this couple one in each hand, instead of under each arm, and moved with them through the garden to the Flachsenfingen highway. I often abruptly turned round my head between them, as if I had heard some one coming after us; but in reality I only meant once more, though mournfully, to look back into the happy hamlet, whose houses were all dwellings of contented still Sabbath-joy, and which is happy enough, though over its wide-parted pavement-stones there passes every week but one barber, every holiday but one dresser of hair, and every year but one hawker of parasols. Then truly I had again to turn round my head, and look at the happy pair beside me. My otherwise affectionate gossip could not rightly suit himself to these tokens of sorrow; but in thy heart, thou good, so oft afflicted sex, every mourning-bell soon finds its unison; and Thiennette, ennobled with the thin trembling resonance of a reverberating soul, gave me back all my tones with the beauties of an echo.---- At last we reached the boundary, over which Thiennette could not be allowed to walk; and now must I part from my gossip, with whom I had talked so gayly every morning (each of us from his bed), and from the still circuit of modest hope where he dwelt, and return once more to the rioting, fermenting Court-sphere, where men in bull-beggar tone demand from Fate a root of Life-Licorice, thick as the arm, like the botanical one on the Wolga, not so much that they may chew the sweet bean themselves, as fell others to earth with it.
As I thought to myself that I would say, Farewell! to them, all the coming plagues, all the corpses, and all the marred wishes of this good pair, arose before my heart; and I remembered that little, save the falling asleep of joy-flowers, would mark the current of their Life-day, as it does of mine and of every one's.--And yet is it fairer, if they measure their years not by the Water-clock of falling tears, but by the Flower-clock[[71]] of asleep-going flowers, whose bells in our short-lived garden are sinking together before us from hour to hour.--
I would even now--for I still recollect how I hung with streaming eyes over these two loved ones, as over their corpses--address myself, and say: Far too soft, Jean Paul, whose chalk still sketches the models of Nature on a ground of Melancholy; harden thy heart like thy frame, and waste not thyself and others by such thoughts. Yet why should I do it, why should I not confess directly what, in the softest emotion, I said to these two beings? "May all go right with you, ye mild beings," I said, for I no longer thought of courtesies, "may the arm of Providence bear gently your lacerated hearts, and the good Father, above all these suns which are now looking down on us, keep you ever united, and exalt you still undivided to his bosom and his lips!" "Be you, too, right happy and glad!" said Thiennette. "And to you, Thiennette," continued I, "Ah! to your pale cheeks, to your oppressed heart, to your long cold maltreated youth, I can never, never wish enough. No! But all that can soothe a wounded soul, that can please a pure one, that can still the hidden sigh--O, all that you deserve--may this be given you; and when you see me again, then say to me, 'I am now much happier!'"
We were all of us too deeply moved. We at last tore ourselves asunder from repeated embraces; my friend retired with the soul whom he loves,--I remained alone behind him with the Night.
And I walked without aim through woods, through valleys, and over brooks, and through sleeping villages, to enjoy the great Night like a Day. I walked, and still looked like the magnet to the region of midnight, to strengthen my heart at the gleaming twilight, at this upstretching Aurora of a morning beneath our feet. White night-butterflies flitted, white blossoms fluttered, white stars fell, and the white snow-powder hung silvery in the high Shadow of the Earth, which reaches beyond the Moon, and which is our Night. Then began the Æolian Harp of the Creation to tremble and to sound, blown on from above, and my immortal soul was a string in this Harp.--The heart of a brother everlasting Man swelled under the everlasting Heaven, as the seas swell under the Sun and under the Moon.--The distant village-clocks struck midnight, mingling, as it were, with the ever-pealing tone of ancient Eternity.--The limbs of my buried ones touched cold on my soul, and drove away its blots, as dead hands heal eruptions of the skin.--I walked silently through little hamlets, and close by their outer churchyards, where crumbled upcast coffin-boards were glimmering, while the once bright eyes that had lain in them were mouldered into gray ashes.--Cold thought! clutch not like a cold spectre at my heart; I look up to the starry sky, and an everlasting chain stretches thither, and over and below; and all is Life, and Warmth, and Light, and all is godlike or God....