THINK OFT, YE BRETHREN;
THINK OF THE GLADNESS OF OUR YOUTHFUL PRIME,--
IT COMETH NOT AGAIN,--THAT GOLDEN TIME!
The Commers Book.
PHILADELPHIA:
CAREY AND HART.
MDCCCXLII.
C. Sherman &, Co. Printers, 19 St. James Street
"How shall I call thee, thou high, thou rough, thou noble, thou barbaric, thou loveable, unharmonious, song-full, repelling, yet refreshing life of the Burschen years? How shall I describe you, ye golden hours, ye choral-songs of brotherly love? What tone shall I give to you to make myself understood? What colours to thee, thou never-comprehended chaos? I shall describe thee? Never! Thy ludicrous outside lies open; the layman sees that; one can describe that to him; but thy inner and lovely ore, the miner only knows who goes singing with his brethren into the deep shaft. He brings up gold; pure, solid gold; be it much or little, it is still of high value. But this is not his whole booty. What he sees there, he may not describe to the layman: it were all too strange, and too precious for his ear. There are spirits in the deep that no other ear can comprehend; no other eye perceive. Music floats through those halls, which to every uninitiated ear sounds empty and unmeaning. But to him who has felt with it and sung with it, it gives a peculiar consecration; when he, moreover, smiles over the hole in his cap which he has brought back with him as a symbol.
"Old Grandfather! now know I what thou undertook when thou held thy annual, solitary, intercalary day! Thou too hadst thy companions in the days of thy youth, and the water stood in thy gray eyelashes when thou marked one in thy stambook as entombed."
Hauff's Rathskeller in Bremen.