Madam, I have deceived you. I am not the Count of the Ganges. Never in my life have I seen the holy stream, nor the lotus-flowers which are mirrored in its sacred waves. Never did I lie dreaming under Indian palms, nor in prayer before the Diamond Deity Juggernaut, who with his diamonds might have easily aided me out of my difficulties. I have no more been in Calcutta than the turkey, of which I ate yesterday at dinner, had ever been in the realms of the Grand Turk. Yet my ancestors came from Hindustan, and therefore I feel so much at my ease in the great forest of song of Valmiki. The heroic sorrows of the divine Ramo move my heart like familiar griefs; from the flower lays of Kalidasa the sweetest memories bloom; and when a few years ago a gentle lady in Berlin showed me the beautiful pictures which her father, who had been Governor in India, had brought from thence, the delicately-painted, holy, calm faces seemed as familiar to me as though I were gazing at my own family gallery.
Franz Bopp, Madam—you have of course read his Nalus and his system of Sanscrit Conjugations—gave me much information relative to my ancestry, and I now know with certainty that I am descended from Brahma’s head, and not from his corns. I have also good reason to believe that the entire Mahabarata, with its two hundred thousand verses, is merely an allegorical love-letter which my first fore-father wrote to my first fore-mother. Oh, they loved dearly; their souls kissed, they kissed with their eyes; they were both but one single kiss.
An enchanted nightingale sits on a red coral bough in the silent sea, and sings a song of the love of my ancestors; the pearls gaze eagerly from their shells, the wonderful water-flowers tremble with sorrow, the cunning sea-snails, bearing on their backs many-coloured porcelain towers, come creeping onwards, the ocean roses blush with shame, the yellow, sharp-pointed starfish and the thousand-hued glassy jelly-fish quiver and stretch, and all swarm and listen.
Unfortunately, Madam, this nightingale song is far too long to be set down here; it is as long as the world itself. Even its dedication to Anangas, the God of Love, is as long as all Scott’s novels; and there is a passage referring to it in Aristophanes, which in German reads thus—
“Tiotio, tiotio, tiotinx,
Totototo, totototo, tototinx.”
“SIT THE GOOD TOWNSPEOPLE OF A SUMMER EVENING.”
No, I was not born in India. I first beheld the light of the world on the shore of that beautiful stream on whose green hills folly grows and is plucked in autumn, laid away in cellars, poured into barrels, and exported to foreign lands. In fact, only yesterday I heard some one speaking a piece of folly, which in the year 1811 was imprisoned in a bunch of grapes which I myself then saw growing on the Johannisberg. But much folly is also consumed at home, and men are the same there as everywhere; they are born, eat, drink, sleep, laugh, cry, slander each other, are greatly troubled about the propagation of their race, try to seem what they are not, and to do what they cannot; never shave until they have a beard, and often have beards before they get discretion; and when they have at last discretion, they drink it away in white and red folly.
Mon dieu! If I had faith, so that I could remove mountains—the Johannisberg would be just the mountain which I would carry with me everywhere. But as my faith is not strong enough, imagination must aid me, and she quickly sets me by the beautiful Rhine.