A delicate child, pale and prematurely wise, was complaining on a hot morning that the poor dewdrops had been too hastily snatched away and not allowed to glitter on the flowers like other happier dewdrops that live the whole night through and sparkle in the moonlight, and through the morning onwards to noonday: "The sun," said the child, "has chased them away with his heat--or swallowed them in his wrath." Soon after came rain and a rainbow; whereupon his father pointed upwards: "See," said he, "there stand thy dew-drops gloriously re-set--a glittering jewelry--in the heavens; and the clownish foot tramples on them no more. By this, my child, thou art taught that what withers upon earth blooms again in heaven." Thus the father spoke, and knew not that he spoke prefiguring words: for soon after the delicate child, with the morning brightness of his early wisdom, was exhaled, like a dewdrop, into heaven.
[ON DEATH.]
We should all think of death as a less hideous object, if it simply untenanted our bodies of a spirit, without corrupting them; secondly, if the grief which we experience at the spectacle of our friends' graves were not by some confusion of the mind blended with the image of our own; thirdly, if we had not in this life seated ourselves in a warm domestic nest, which we are unwilling to quit for the cold blue regions of the unfathomable heavens; finally,--if death were denied to us. Once in dreams I saw a human being of heavenly intellectual faculties, and his aspirations were heavenly; but he was chained (methought) eternally to the earth. The immortal old man had five great wounds in his happiness--five worms that gnawed forever at his heart: he was unhappy in springtime, because that is a season of hope--and rich with phantoms of far happier days than any which this aceldama of earth can realize. He was unhappy at the sound of music, which dilates the heart of man into its whole capacity for the infinite, and he cried aloud,--"Away, away! Thou speakest of things which throughout my endless life I have found not, and shall not find!" He was unhappy at the remembrance of earthly affections and dissevered hearts: for love is a plant which may bud in this life, but it must flourish in another. He was unhappy under the glorious spectacle of the starry host, and ejaculated forever in his heart,--"So then I am parted from you to all eternity by an impassable abyss: the great universe of suns is above, below, and round about me: but I am chained to a little ball of dust and ashes." He was unhappy before the great ideas of Virtue--of Truth--and of God; because he knew how feeble are the approximations to them which a son of earth can make. But this was a dream: God be thanked, that in reality there is no such craving and asking eye directed upwards to heaven--to which death will not one day bring an answer!
[IMAGINATION UNTAMED BY THE COARSER
REALITIES OF LIFE.]
Happy is every actor in the guilty drama of life, to whom the higher illusion within supplies or conceals the external illusion; to whom, in the tumult of his part and its intellectual interest, the bungling landscapes of the stage have the bloom and reality of nature, and whom the loud parting and shocking of the scenes disturb not in his dream!
[SATIRICAL NOTICE OF REVIEWERS.]
In Swabia, in Saxony, in Pomerania, are towns in which are stationed a strange sort of officers,--valuers of author's flesh, something like our old market-lookers in this town. They are commonly called tasters (or Prægustatores) because they eat a mouthful of every book beforehand, and tell the people whether its flavor be good. We authors, in spite, call them reviewers: but I believe an action of defamation would lie against us for such bad words. The tasters write no books themselves; consequently they have the more time to look over and tax those of other people. Or, if they do sometimes write books, they are bad ones: which again is very advantageous to them: for who can understand the theory of badness in other people's books so well as those who have learned it by practice in their own? They are reputed the guardians of literature and the literati for the same reason that St. Nepomuk is the patron saint of bridges and of all who pass over them,--namely, because he himself once lost his life from a bridge.
[FEMALE TONGUES.]
Hippel, the author of the book "Upon Marriage," says, "A woman, that does not talk, must be a stupid woman." But Hippel is an author whose opinions it is more safe to admire than to adopt. The most intelligent women are often silent amongst women; and again the most stupid and the most silent are often neither one nor the other except amongst men. In general the current remark upon men is valid also with respect to women,--that those for the most part are the greatest thinkers who are the least talkers; as frogs cease to croak when light is brought to the water edge. However, in fact, the disproportionate talking of women arises out of the sedentariness of their labors: sedentary artisans,--as tailors, shoemakers, weavers,--have this habit as well as hypochondriacal tendencies in common with women. Apes do not talk, as savages say, that they may not be set to work: but women often talk double their share--even because they work.