"Don't you think the house has a good motto written on its forehead?" asked Hansei.
Irma started. On the gable of the house she read the following inscription:--
EAT AND DRINK: FORGET NOT GOD: THINE HONOR GUARD:
OF ALL THY STORE,
THOU'LT CARRY HENCE
A WINDING-SHEET
AND NOTHING MORE.
Translation of S.A. Stern.
THE COURT PHYSICIAN'S PHILOSOPHY
From 'On the Heights'
Gunther continued, "I am only a physician, who has held many a hand hot with fever or stiff in death in his own. The healing art might serve as an illustration. We help all who need our help, and do not stop to ask who they are, whence they come, or whether when restored to health they persist in their evil courses. Our actions are incomplete, fragmentary; thought alone is complete and all-embracing. Our deeds and ourselves are but fragments--the whole is God."
"I think I grasp your meaning [replied the Queen]. But our life, as you say, is indeed a mere fraction of life as a whole; and how is each one to bear up under the portion of suffering that falls to his individual lot? Can one--I mean it in its best sense--always be outside of one's self?"
"I am well aware, your Majesty, that passions and emotions cannot be regulated by ideas; for they grow in a different soil, or, to express myself correctly, move in entirely different spheres. It is but a few days since I closed the eyes of my old friend Eberhard. Even he never fully succeeded in subordinating his temperament to his philosophy; but in his dying hour he rose beyond the terrible grief that broke his heart--grief for his child. He summoned the thoughts of better hours to his aid,--hours when his perception of the truth had been undimmed by sorrow or passion,--and he died a noble, peaceful death. Your Majesty must still live and labor, elevating yourself and others, at one and the same time. Permit me to remind you of the moment when, seated under the weeping ash, your heart was filled with pity for the poor child that from the time it enters into the world is doubly helpless. Do you still remember how you refused to rob it of its mother? I appeal to the pure and genuine impulse of that moment. You were noble and forgiving then, because you had not yet suffered. You cast no stone at the fallen; you loved, and therefore you forgave."