His bride also had, on former days, given sedulous assistance in this new improved edition of his house, and laboured faithfully among the other furnishers and furbishers. But today she kept aloof; for she was too good to forget the maiden in the bride. Love, like men, dies oftener of excess than of hunger; it lives on love, but it resembles those Alpine flowers, which feed themselves by suction from the wet clouds, and die if you besprinkle them.—
At length the Parson is settled, and of course he must—for I know my fair readers, who are bent on it as if they were bridemaids—without delay get married. But he may not: before Ascension-day there can nothing be done, and till then are full four weeks and a half. The matter was this: He wished in the first place to have the murder-Sunday, the Cantata, behind him; not indeed because he doubted of his earthly continuance, but because he would not (even for the bride's sake) that the slightest apprehension should mingle with these weeks of glory.
The main reason was, He did not wish to marry till he were betrothed: which latter ceremony was appointed, with the Introduction Sermon, to take place next Sunday. It is the Cantata-Sunday. Let not the reader afflict himself with fears. Indeed, I should not have molested an enlightened century with this Sunday-Wauwau at all, were it not that I delineate with such extreme fidelity. Fixlein himself—especially as the Quartermaster asked him if he was a baby—at last grew so sensible, that he saw the folly of it; nay, he went so far, that he committed a greater folly. For as dreaming that you die signifies, according to the exegetic rule of false, nothing else than long life and welfare, so did Fixlein easily infer that his death-imagination was just such a lucky dream; the rather as it was precisely on this Cantata-Sunday that Fortune had turned up her cornucopia over him, and at once showered down out of it a bride, a presentation and a roll of ducats. Thus can Superstition imp its wings, let Chance favour it or not.
A Secretary of State, a Peace-treaty writer, a Notary, any such incarcerated Slave of the Desk, feels excellently well how far he is beneath a Parson composing his inaugural sermon. The latter (do but look at my Fixlein) lays himself heartily over the paper—injects the venous system of his sermon-preparation with coloured ink—has a Text-Concordance on the right side, and a Song-Concordance on the left; is there digging out a marrowy sentence, here clipping off a song-blossom, with both to garnish his homiletic pastry;—sketches out the finest plan of operations, not, like a man of the world, to subdue the heart of one woman, but the hearts of all women that hear him, and of their husbands to boot;—draws every peasant passing by his window into some niche of his discourse, to coöperate with the result;—and, finally, scoops out the butter of the smooth soft hymn-book, and therewith exquisitely fattens the black broth of his sermon, which is to feed five thousand men.——
At last, in the evening, as the red sun is dazzling him at the desk, he can rise with heart free from guilt; and, amid twittering sparrows and finches, over the cherry-trees encircling the parsonage, look toward the west, till there is nothing more in the sky but a faint gleam among the clouds. And then when Fixlein, amid the tolling of the evening prayer-bell, slowly descends the stair to his cooking mother, there must be some miracle in the case, if for him whatever has been done or baked, or served up in the lower regions, is not right and good.... A bound, after supper, into the Castle; a look into a pure loving eye; a word without falseness to a bride without falseness; and then under the coverlid, a soft-breathing breast, in which there is nothing but Paradise, a sermon and evening prayer.... I swear, with this I will satisfy a Mythic God, who has left his Heaven, and is seeking a new one among us here below!
Can a mortal, can a Me in the wet clay of Earth, which Death will soon dry into dust, ask more in one week than Fixlein is gathering into his heart? I see not how: At least I should suppose, if such a dust-framed being, after such a twenty-thousand prize from the Lottery of Chance, could require aught more, it would at most be the twenty-one-thousand prize, namely, the inaugural discourse itself.
And this prize our Zebedäus actually drew on Sunday: he preached—he preached with unction,——he did it before the crowding, rustling press of people; before his Guardian, and before the Lord of Aufhammer, the godfather of the priest and the dog;—a flock with whom in childhood he had driven out the Castle herds about the pasture, he was now, himself a spiritual sheep-smearer, leading out to pasture;—he was standing to the ankles among Candidates and Schoolmasters, for today (what none of them could) at the altar, with the nail of his finger, he might scratch a large cross in the air, baptisms and marriages not once mentioned.... I believe, I should feel less scrupulous than I do to chequer this sunshiny esplanade with that thin shadow of the grave, which the preacher threw over it, when, in the application, with wet heavy eyes, he looked round over the mute attentive church, as if in some corner of it he would seek the mouldering teacher of his youth and of this congregation, who without, under the white tombstone, the wrong-side of life, had laid away the garment of his pious spirit. And when he, himself hurried on by the internal stream, inexpressibly softened by the farther recollections of his own fear of death on this day, of his life now overspread with flowers and benefits, of his entombed benefactress resting here in her narrow bed—when he now—before the dissolving countenance of her friend, his Thiennette—overpowered, motionless and weeping, looked down from the pulpit to the door of the Schadeck vault, and said: "Thanks, thou pious soul, for the good thou hast done to this flock and to their new teacher; and, in the fulness of time, may the dust of thy god-fearing and man-loving breast gather itself, transfigured as gold-dust, round thy reawakened heavenly heart,"—was there an eye in the audience dry? Her husband sobbed aloud; and Thiennette, her beloved, bowed her head, sinking down with inconsolable remembrances, over the front of the seat, like kindred mourners in a funeral train.
No fairer forenoon could prepare the way for an afternoon in which a man was to betroth himself forever, and to unite the exchanged rings with the Ring of Eternity. Except the bridal pair, there was none present but an ancient pair; the mother and the long Guardian. The bridegroom wrote out the marriage-contract or marriage-charter with his own hand; hereby making over to his bride, from this day, his whole moveable property (not, as you may suppose, his pocket-library, but his whole library; whereas, in the Middle Ages, the daughter of a noble was glad to get one or two books for marriage-portion);—in return for which, she liberally enough contributed—a whole nuptial coach or car, laden as follows: with nine pounds of feathers, not feathers for the cap such as we carry, but of the lighter sort such as carry us;—with a sumptuous dozen of godchild-plates and godchild-spoons (gifts from Schadeck), together with a fish-knife;—of silk, not only stockings (though even King Henri II. of France could dress no more than his legs in silk), but whole gowns;—with jewels and other furnishings of smaller value. Good Thiennette! in the chariot of thy spirit lies the true dowry; namely, thy noble, soft, modest heart, the morning-gift of Nature!
The Parson,—who, not from mistrust but from "the uncertainty of life," could have wished for a notary's seal on everything; to whom no security but a hypothecary one appeared sufficient, and who, in the depositing of every barleycorn, required quittances and contracts,—had now, when the marriage-charter was completed, a lighter heart; and through the whole evening the good man ceased not to thank his bride for what she had given him. To me, however, a marriage-contract were a thing as painful and repulsive,—I confess it candidly, though you should in consequence upbraid me with my great youth,—as if I had to take my love-letter to a Notary Imperial, and make him docket and countersign it before it could be sent. Heavens! to see the light flower of Love, whose perfume acts not on the balance, so laid like tulip-bulbs on the hay-beam of Law; two hearts on the cold councillor-and flesh-beam of relatives and advocates, who are heaping on the scales nothing but houses, fields and tin—this, to the interested party, may be as delightful as, to the intoxicated suckling and nursling of the Muses and Philosophy, it is to carry the evening and morning sacrifices he has offered up to his goddess into the book-shop, and there to change his devotions into money, and sell them by weight and measure.——
From Cantata-Sunday to Ascension, that is, to marriage-day, are one and a half weeks—or one and a half blissful eternities. If it is pleasant that nights or winter separate the days and seasons of joy to a comfortable distance; if, for example, it is pleasant that birthday, Saint's-day, betrothment, marriage and baptismal day, do not all occur on the same day (for with very few do those festivities, like Holiday and Apostle's day, commerge),—then is it still more pleasant to make the interval, the flower-border, between betrothment and marriage, of an extraordinary breadth. Before the marriage-day are the true honey-weeks; then come the wax-weeks; then the honey-vinegar-weeks.