The Invisible Lodge Part 10

TWENTY-FIRST, OR MICHAELMAS, SECTION.

New Contract Between the Reader and the Biographer.--Gustavus's Letter.

"Go thy way, beloved," said I, "whom the world-sea bears along with it; may the solar image of thy shy and sensitive heart smile up out of the watery depths and swim along with thee! Thy young heart thou wilt bring to Auenthal no more! Alas, that the fruits of man's life must have a different weather from that of his blossoms, instead of the breath of Spring the sting of August and the autumnal tempest!" Such were my thoughts so long as his carriage remained in sight; after that I went down into the garden-vault to the two monks, and as I thought: in your cold stony b.r.e.a.s.t.s dwells no wish, no longing, no sorrow, and--no heart: "for that very reason," said I in another sense.

To-day is Michaelmas, and to-day--I can no longer dissemble--his departure is _a year old_. To-day begins, between me and the reader, a wholly new life, and we will quietly settle it all with one another beforehand.

In the first place, it is true, I am a year behind Gustavus's life; but I think in eight weeks to have written up to it. I expected, indeed, half a year ago, that _now_ I should overtake him; but a life is easier to lead than to picture, especially in a good style. On the whole an author--a good one--can more easily reckon the stars in heaven than his future sheets, which are also stars. Finally, one expects that the Literary Times will consider at least so much as this, that I, as a counsellor-at-law, cannot possibly write so much for it as for whole colleges, faculties, and supreme courts of the empire. Is the Literary Times aware of the terrible amount of my labors? One should have seen my cupboard full of professional papers, whereon, moreover, not a word is yet written, because I have only just received them from the paper-mill; or one should have been in my judicial district of Schwenz, where the twelve subjects and the feudal lord and judge are themselves peasants, in order to require of me nothing more than a book a year.

Where is the lawyer throughout all Scheerau, who serves in a suit, that might shortly--for the devil must have his sport--have been made to stretch out through the Wetzlar gate under the session table of the imperial chancery, which knows all about good style? And yet the suit, like Peter the Great, served from below upward, and mounted, like the sect of Stylites, higher and higher seats.

Secondly, unless this is still firstly, I can, consequently, like the Jews, only on the Sabbath, or Sunday, think upon the plastic of my spiritual embryos; on week days nothing is written, except, to be sure, biographies also, but only those of rogues, by which is meant protocols and accusatory libels.

Secondly (or thirdly), I am the inmate of a schoolmaster's establishment. The good Captain, when his son was out of his door, undertook to put me under personal arrest, which in my case includes also real arrest, because my real estate consists of my body, and my personal property of my soul; he said I should stay in his palace and advocate and satirize as long as I pleased. It were to be wished his old judge would fade away, then I should be the new one, for his good heart--which my knavish one, accustomed to court subtleties, cannot always forgive for its want of them--cannot bear to dismiss anybody.

Still keep thy sound north-east breath; still keep those hands of thine with their cudgelling-stick of a woe-unto-thee! and thy tongue, with its two or three _thunders_! and thousand devils! my Falkenberg!

And I stayed with him through the winter; but early in the spring of this year I moved down to the place where I now write--in the upper chamber of the Auenthal schoolmaster, Sebastian Wutz.[55] I had, perhaps, the three weightiest reasons in the world for this step; in the first place, nowhere do I feel so shrivelled up as in a Vatican full of dreary caverns, in Sahara wastes of empty apartments; a dining-hall with its poverty of furniture is to me a Patmos, and only in little snug sitting-rooms does one feel enlarged. Man should from year to year creep into smaller and smaller cells, until he slips into the smallest, _i. e_., into the narrowest hole of this compressed silver wire ["silver cord"].

The second reason was, Herr Fortins (in Morhof. Poly hist., L.

II., c. 8), who advises literary men to change their towns every half-year,--and, in fact, one does write better after any change, and though it were only that of a writing-desk. Without such freshening of the air the soul writes itself so deeply into its narrow pa.s.s that it is caught there without being able to see sky or earth. The present work may, perhaps, come to something; but every month and every section I must write in a different cabin.

The third and soundest reason is my sister. She has come back again from the Resident Lady von Bouse's, because she had to vacate her place for a fair book-patient, namely, the good Beata, whom father, doctor, lover--the stupid Oefel (but he finds not the least favor)--have at last tempted into this confluence of all enjoyments and visitings.

Secondly, my sister is here, because I would so have it; but Sister, Sister, why did not I s.n.a.t.c.h thee sooner out of this overrunning mineral-whirlpool? Why hast thou so changed? Who can change thee back again? Who will wipe out of thy heart thy thoughts that forever recur to strange glances; thy eagerness to be admired but not loved; thy coquetry, which seeks only to excite love, not to reciprocate it, and all that distinguishes thy heart from thy former heart and from the unchangeable heart of Beata? I would not, therefore, with my sister, make the palace narrower, where, besides, she already, every day, sits away two or three hours.

I have now explained to the reader what he is about. We return to Gustavus's carriage, and are all satisfied--reader, printer and writer.

Gustavus, in an intoxication of sorrow, which the lovely heavens dissolved in tears, drove on to Scheerau, and counted every bee and every swallow that flew towards our palace, happy. The next ten years hung down like ten dark curtains before him. "And," he asked himself, "do skeletons, wild beasts, or paradises lie behind the curtains?" The thing which, without curtain, sat before him and lectured, he did not see--namely, the Professor. Two leagues this side of Scheerau he wrote to me with that flaming grat.i.tude which breaks forth from a man so radiantly only in his second decade. As in the case of all souls which alter more from within outwardly than from without inward, the barometer of the heart stood within him, often immovable at the same degree. The rain-clouds and the rainbow in his inner heaven he carried with him to Scheerau; he bore his veiled heart into the wide, echoing cadet barracks, into the fair-day-tumult on its stairs, and into the noise of watchwords, as if into the midst of the hammerings of a copper foundry and a fulling mill. He grew still sadder, but more painfully so.

The remarkable thing in the chamber which he entered and was to occupy, was not the presence of three cadets--for they were _current_ men, small change and prosaic souls, _i. e_., jolly, witty, devoid of feeling, without interest in higher wants, and of moderate pa.s.sions--but it was the Ephorus of the chambers, Herr von Oefel, who skipped about with his sword at his side like an impaled fly with his needle. Oefel began at once to observe him in order to describe him at evening; but in company he observed everybody, not in order to overhear others' tricks, but to exhibit his own. So, too, he praised without esteeming, and blackened without hating. He wanted merely to s.h.i.+ne.

Amidst these circ.u.mstances, before Gustavus made the heavy pa.s.sage through sorrows to occupations, a solace came to him in the form of memory, and he saw, what he should not have forgotten--his _Amandus_, his childhood's friend. But the good youth came before him not in his first form of a blind boy, but in his last, of a dying man. He had a nervous consumption, which had sucked all the pith out of the still standing bark of the tree of life. On the bark there lingered no green save hanging twigs with pale drooping foliage. He was preparing himself for no office or life, but was expecting and stood ready to receive at the threshold of the hereditary sepulchre Death coming up the steps.

But that his soul lay in a living wound[56]--there is nothing in that to surprise us except his _s.e.x_; for the fairest female souls seldom live otherwise; but men do not spare such wound; the spectacle does not soften them towards so soft a s.e.x, that most of them live, not from day to day, but from sorrow to sorrow and from tear to tear....

In Gustavus the second self (his friend) dwelt almost under one and the same roof with the first, under the skull and skin of the brain; I mean, he loved in others less what he saw than what he conceived; his feelings, in fact, were nearer and more compact about his ideas than about his senses; hence the flame of friends.h.i.+p which streamed up so high before the image of a friend, was often bent and blown aside by his bodily presence. Hence he received his Amandus (since in general an arrival creates less glow than a departure) with a warmth which did not quite reach from his inner to his outer man--but Oefel, who observed it, wormed out the secret with six glances: that the new cadet was proud of his n.o.bility.

Of all military catechumens Gustavus had the most th.o.r.n.y time. From a still Carthusian monastery he had been banished to a lumber-room, where the three cadets bombarded his ears all day long with thrusts of rapiers, slaps of cards and curses--from a country castle he had been thrown into a Louvre, where the drum was the organ of speech and the speaking machine, through which the masters.h.i.+p talks with the scholars, as the gra.s.shopper makes all his noise with an inborn drum attached to his belly. To eating, to sleeping and to waking, they were, like the pit of a village player, drummed together. In march-time and following the word of command this militia mounted the dining-hall as their wall and brought nothing away from the fortification but their portion of victuals for half a day. The gesture of command started them up from their seats and led them out again from the citadel. One could at night count the steps of a single cadet, and one knew those of all the rest, because the word of command like a blast drove all these wheels at once.--For this very reason, I mean because grace before meat was regularly commanded, the whole corps had the same devotions, no one spoke with G.o.d a second longer than another. I know not to which of the Scheerau regiments the fellow belonged who once, at a church parade, when the officer for once commanded the souls to go to G.o.d, which he generally ordered to go to the Devil, so flagrantly rebelled against reasonable subordination, as to crook his pious knee before Heaven at least four minutes longer than the file-leader;--I mention it for this reason, that I afterward, when the pray-er got a whipping for it, publicly propounded the question, whether in this same way one might not train the companies in logic, which is as necessary to them as the mustache and even more useful, since the latter, but not the former, needs brus.h.i.+ng. Might not one give the command, only leaving out the word "make": "make the major proposition--make the minor--make the conclusion?" Thus no one could blame me, if I should buy me a company, and make them go through the three parts of the Penance somewhat in this way: Repent--Believe--Reform--namely yourselves, or else the ---- shall strike you--as younger officers add.

The Austrian soldiers had, until the year 1756, seventy-two manual movements to learn, not for smiting the enemy, but Satan.

While in this mood towards war and his comrades, Gustavus wrote a letter to me, of which I omit the beginning, because in that part our correspondent used always to be as cold as at the reception of a friend.

"---- Exercising and studying make me quite another man, but not a happier one. I am often vexed myself at my weakness, at my eyes, from which I privately seek to wipe away all traces of emotion, and at my heart, which, at offences such as I now frequently experience, though certainly without the intention of the offenders, does not boil up with pa.s.sion, but compresses itself as if into a great tear over the wicked world. My chums, among whom I hear nothing but rapier-thrust and curses, ridicule me in everything. Even this writing I am not doing in their sight, but under the open heavens in the _Silent Land_[57], at the feet and on the pedestal of a flower-G.o.ddess, whose arm and flower-basket have been broken off. The worthy Herr von Oefel is meanwhile at the Resident Lady's, in the old palace.

"Whenever I am not at work, every room, every house, every face confines and oppresses me. And yet when I resume it--that is, when it is foul weather, as it was last week, I open my case of mathematical instruments as fondly as if it were a casket of jewels; but when a fiery morning, amidst the screaming of all the birds, even the _imprisoned_ ones, pours down from the roofs into our streets, when the postillion reminds me with his horn that he has just come out from the angular, dingy, dilapidated, unorganically glued-together rubbish heaps of killed nature, which they call a city, into the pulsing, swelling, budding fullness of unmurdered nature, where one root clambers about another, where all things grow together and into each other, and all lesser lives twine together into one great infinite life; then every drop of blood in my heart recoils from the pitch-hoops, trench-cavaliers, and from the sponges with which the artillery stuff and stifle our blue morning hours. Nevertheless, I forget blooming nature and the counter-mines wherewith they are learning to blow it up into the air, and see merely the long c.r.a.pes which stream out on high from the poles at the house of a dyer opposite, even as nights hang over the faces of poor mothers, that the dew of grief may fall in the dark behind the corpses which we are learning to make on the morrow.----Ah! since I have learned there is no longer any dying _for_, but only _against_ the fatherland; since I have learned that if I sacrifice my own life, I save none but only enslave one; since that I have been compelled to wish that when war one day shall draw me into the work of killing, it will first burn my eyes blind with powder, that I may not see the breast I stab, nor pity the fair form which I mutilate, and may only die, but not kill.... Oh, while I still looked out into the world from the monastery, from your study chamber, then did it expand before me in fairer and grander dimensions with waving woods and flaming capes and meadows painted in thousandfold colors--now I stand upon that same earth and see the bold needle-pine with miry roots, the black boggy pond and the pasture of one mowing full of yellow gra.s.s and draining ditches.

"Perhaps, however, I might still better realize my dreams of being useful to men, if I should strike into another path, and were permitted to choose, instead of the battle-field, the session-table, and so enn.o.ble the object of sacrifice.[58] The red sun stands before my pen and besprinkles my paper with running shadows. O thou workest standing, heavenly diamond! and illuminatest like the lightning, but without its murderous knell! All nature is mute when it creates and loud when it destroys. O great Nature, standing in evening's fire! man should imitate only thy stillness and be merely thy feeble child, carrying forth thy blessings to the needy!

"If you look up to-day from Auenthal at the windows of our castle flickering in the summer-gold, so does my soul also at this moment look over, but with a sigh," etc....

The officers see clearly that Gustavus never will be one; but he has against him the whole of his father, who loves only the storming warrior and scorns more quiet business-men, as they in their turn despise the still more quiet businessless scholar.

TWENTY-SECOND, OR XVII TRINITY, SECTION.

The Genuine Criminal Prosecutor.--My Magistracy.--A Birthday and a Smuggling of Grain.

When, on the following Thursday, I set out to visit my Gustavus and instruct him a little, behold Herr von Oefel, for a reason which it will take a whole section to unfold preliminarily and profoundly, has despatched him with a body of Hussars to the borders, where they were to form a frumentary cordon, which should let no grain go out and no pepper come in. Since most popular movements take their rise in _peristaltic_ ones [those of the stomach], many people of fine sense would have it they nosed out that the sovereign did the thing in order that his subjects might have the means of living.

But I was brought at last into the greatest sc.r.a.pe with it all, and one shall now hear how the matter was, but it must be from the very beginning.

Namely, thus: the great Manor of Maussenbach has, as it is well known, the supreme jurisdiction, although I and Mr. Commercial Agent von Roper are vexed at it, on opposite grounds. I am vexed because I see the life, at least the honor, of some hundreds of people in the hands, not of a whole Roman people, but of a single official, etc.; the hereditary, feudal and juridical lord is vexed, because the criminal court brings in nothing, since it costs more to have the executioners sword sharpened than all comes to which is mowed down by it into the treasury. "Adultery is the only thing left for the criminal magistracy!" says the hereditary lord. Quite the opposite said his justice, Kolb; high criminal trials were his high opera, penal acts were his Klopstock's odes, and a constable his Orestes and Sancho Panza. He would have divided the people into two cla.s.ses, the hanging and the hanged, and he would have remained criminal prosecutor. An unshaven malefactor in prison was to him a Chinese goldfish in a gla.s.s bowl, both were shown to guests. Free hunt after scoundrels only in two or three quarters of the globe would have been his business and pleasure. He hated me to death, because I had defended a man against him and saved him from death and got him into the penitentiary. He possessed the necrology of all who had been executed and a matriculation or genealogical register of all robbers (except robbers of honor) who stood ripe for reaping, and genuine knaves were for him what well-disposed men were for the biographic Plutarch. In brief, he was a genuine criminal prosecutor, just as the old German or modern English laws would have him; for according to both every man must be judged and sentenced only by his peers; but Kolb every knave and murderer could claim to be as great a one as himself, and consequently the culprit could say that he enjoyed the legal benefit of being tried by one of his peers. I know not many contemporary criminal counsellors and members of faculties to whom this could be applied.

This annoyed Roper exceedingly, for his criminal counsellor brought upon him every month a case that involved enormous expenses; and high criminal judges are not so well served by the securing of criminals as by keeping up the succession. In short, when the magistrate thought to undertake a new levy of gallows recruits in the woods of Maussenbach, for which _perhaps_ Robisch was to blame, Herr von Roper would nullify these thief-pressgangs by offering as many insults to his criminal counsellor as were necessary to bring it about that the magistrate could do no less than resign.

He did, to be sure, one thing more, the rascal, he drew a picture of my littleness. As he could not forget my defensive argument, he acted the fiscal attorney, and told Roper I was good for nothing. I was a man who hated him and sundry other n.o.blemen, and who had the finest court-style; Paul took every case of subjects against their liege-lord, and had once even plied his quill against his honor the Commercial Agent. Thou wretch of a Kolb! Why should not One-legs do that? My most important cases are to this very day no other. And why should not, in fact, a proposition be realized which I will forthwith make? This, namely, that, after the pattern of the poor man's attorney, there should be inst.i.tuted people's attorneys, who should contend merely against patrimonial tribunals, as the Knights of Malta do against infidel ones.

I have it from Roper's own mouth; for, in short, he installed me, to be sure, as Maussenbach--magistrate, let the advocating and reading world be as much astonished as it will. The Kolbian attacks were my very spiral stairway to this judicial bench. My judicial princ.i.p.al must needs, in his eternal battles with all instances and n.o.ble folk, have a juristic _Taureador_ vigorous pen-harpooner; but Kolb said I was one.

Secondly, Herr von Roper presented me the bench of justice, because I neither rode (on account of my short leg) nor drove (on account of my sea-sick stomach), and consequently would go on foot to the administration of justice without the bevy of horses which his stable otherwise must furnish as perquisites. For reviewers and their editors the hint will do no harm, that they would be pleased to consider and from this time take paper and review a man who is not, like themselves, nothing; but one who sits in judgment as well as they, but over a more real life than the literary, and who can even hang such reviewers, if within his jurisdiction they steal anything but reputation.

Now comes the main thing. I was for the first time, as judge, in Maussenbach and entered upon the duties of my office. All went very well; I and my subjects were presented to each other, and I had on this day over five hundred hands in mine. Of course I had still to smooth down many an ugly face, which they made at me, because they had been in the habit of making it at my little-loved princ.i.p.al; for people and n.o.bles, not merely in Rome, but also in our villages now-a-days, are always in each other's hair and fighting like cats and dogs about financial matters. Beside my magistracy, something else celebrated a birthday to-day--the patron himself, Roper; we feasted, therefore, right well in honor of two things; first, because the parliament which he had dissolved was in me to-day convoked again; and secondly, because the summoner had, many years before, been born. I can say, I had a good time of it, despite my unlikeness to the new born one--of thee I am not at all speaking, Louisa and judicial Patroness!--what lame heart would not beat in sympathetic harmony with thine, when it saw thy eye glisten at the pleasure of thy husband and with wishes for his welfare? But it is of thy wedded lord himself I speak: let him be, now, what he will, it is impossible for me, in regard to a man with whom I sit under the same keeping-room ceiling, to think the evil which I have hitherto heard or even believed of him, and it is really not the same thing, whether a highway or only a table is between us. If thou hatest a man from hearsay; then go into his house and see whether, when thou hast discovered in his conversation so many friendly traits, in his behavior toward the child or the wife whom he loves so many signs of affection, whether, then, thou goest out again with the hatred which thou broughtest in. If the present author was ever in his life prepossessed against anything, it was against the great; but since, in his musical lessons at Scheerau, he has the opportunity of standing under the same ceiling with many a great one, since he has himself skipped round among these giants; he sees that a minister who oppresses his people may love his children, and that the misanthrope at the session-table may be a philanthropist at the sewing-table of his wife. Thus the Alpine peaks have in the distance a bold and steep aspect, but near to, room enough and good plants.

I confess, therefore, when according to ancestral usage (on birthdays at court I never tasted the like) a tart or turnover was brought on, on which the Vivat and the name Roper could be read and eaten set in types of almonds--when, furthermore, the proprietor of the name said indeed: "this now is one of thy stupid tricks," but immediately had his eye fill with moisture and added: "cut out a piece for our people also outside," I confess, I say, I could at that moment have wished my memory rid of many a saying I had heard of him which did not well comport with the lapidary almond style, and I would especially have given something, the crabs most readily, if he had not been so troubled about the bits of gravel in their heads, and scolded so at his Louisa, who in her joy had scattered in sundry contributions to his crab _dactyliotheca_ or collection of pebbles. I will just be candid, the deuce might have taken me, if I could have borne to remain hard as a crab-eye, when thou, my music-pupil, beloved Beata, who from the court-air[59] as other flowers do from the mephitic, hadst imbibed nothing but tenderer charms and a higher enamel--when thou, fair pupil, with a feminine sense of paternal respectability, didst go up to thy father and with thy lips on his hand, offer him the most sincere wishes, and when only on the neck of thy mother, who showered upon you both looks of love, thou didst let thy heart overflow into a more congenial one....

I come now to the promised _main thing_--namely, my Gustavus. I wish he had stayed away. He rode in advance of two Hussars, who were escorting a grain-wagon. The wagon was going to discharge its load beyond the limits--(the princ.i.p.ality of Scheerau, like the human understanding, everywhere runs against limits)--the two Hussars were ready to be bribed, so far all was agreeable; but Gustavus was not; the conductor, the farmer, had given out that the smuggled goods were Roper's property--and from Roper the whole of Gustavus recoiled from his very fathers loins. Secondly, he was living now in bridal relations with virtue, and in the honeymoon, when one regards good works and moral _hors d'[oe]uvre_ [works of supererogation] as one and the same thing, and when style and virtue alike have too much fire. In short, farmer and wagon must go back; and the Cadet had burst into the birthday chamber to make the announcement with over-boiling indignation against Roperish treacheries. But was he in a fit frame to do this when he saw me again after many weeks and my fair scholar for the first time, and when he found himself among the faces glowing with friends.h.i.+p, from which he would at once banish blood and joy? The most he could do was to draw me aside and disclose to me all; but the overhearing neighborhood and the impetuous _corpus delicti_ discovered the same to the Commercial Agent. Without ceremony he broke out into a furious tirade against the Cadet, who, as he said, had nothing to do with the matter, and continued rising to a climax in his fury, till a remedy occurred to him for the whole disaster. I had to go out with him before the street door and there he told me I could, as his magistrate, easily see that one must needs give out the grain as the property of the farmers, because the Prince would have no mercy on an official. This last a.s.sertion I, as his new magistrate, could well understand, that the covetous, a.r.s.enical king, who could tolerate office-trading, judicial misdemeanors, and the like, would nevertheless come down like a poisonous wind upon all disobedience to himself; but this I could not see through, that a second treason must needs be the abattis and advocate of the first. In the midst of our fight came running up at length the object of it, the farmer himself, who broke in with distorted visage and with the stammering entreaty that "His Grace would not ungraciously remark the fact that he in his bewilderment had given out _his_ grain as _His Grace's own_." Now the knot was untied; my princ.i.p.al had until now merely confounded his own smuggled goods which had been successfully brought over the frontier with arrested goods of another party. To the farmer he forthwith, as a sound moralist, represented the wickedness of deceiving at once himself, the country, and the Prince, "and he wished he would break open now the writing of the Government, he would deliver him up on the spot." He hastened in to my Gustavus and hurled at him, with the heat of misunderstood innocence, as many coa.r.s.enesses as one might expect from an offended demi-millionaire, since gold possessors, like gold strings, sound the harshest. I pitied my dear Gustavus with his plethora of virtue; he pitied the ill-luck of the poor farmer, and Beata pitied our confusion all round. With boiling emotions Gustavus fled out of a dumb apartment, where he had broken off from the tenderest heart that ever trembled under a fair form, that of Beata, the flowers of childish joy, and dashed them to the ground.

In fact, now at length the old Harry was loose--namely, the howling of Roper's rage against the house of Falkenberg and its abominable extravagance, and against the Cadet. Beata was silent; but not I. I should have been a scoundrel (a greater one, I mean) if I had allowed extravagance, in the sense in which the adversary meant it, to be imputed to the Captain. I should, moreover, have been stupid (or stupider) if I had not in my first official act endeavored to accustom him to opposition, instead of waiting till the tenth or twentieth....

But the oil which I poured round for the purpose of smoothing his waves, dropped into fire instead of water. Little did it help either of us, that my pupil played upon us with the richest pa.s.sages out of Benda's Romeo, the old hilarity was not to be brought back again; we twitched and twisted our faces to no purpose. Roper looked like an Indian c.o.c.k and I like a European. I had intended, toward evening, after moon-rise, to be somewhat sentimental in the presence of Beata, seeing, besides, that the Count tore her away from me. I am certain I should have had sensibility and sentiment adequate to the occasion. I should, under the shade of a tree, have taken out my heart and said, _prenez_. Nay, I seemed even to-day to draw Beata much nearer to me than usual, a thing in which one prospers with all maidens with whose parents one has business a.s.sociations. But all that was now gone to the old Harry. I was compelled to make my exit cold and hard as a page of the exchequer, and felt miserably. If the new magistrate was provoked, who had thus been ushered into his new office in a cloud of vexation, his princ.i.p.al was still more so, who had been escorted by a jar and jangle into his new year. So I limped off and said to myself all the way, "thus, then, and with such face and aspect art thou hieing home, happy Paul, from thy Maussenbach judges.h.i.+p, of which thou hast boasted so much in thy former sections. Thou need'st not rise on my account, O moon; I need not to-night thy powdered face. That single, confounded grain-wagon! and the Prince! and the skin-flint, too! and even youthful virtue! Would that ye all.... But had I only been as sensible and felt as much in the very forenoon, and had I only, before dinner, shown forth something of my heart, an auricle, a fibre.

"Heigh! Mr. Magistrate," cried my Wutz, coming to meet me; "here again!

Hast had fine cases of adultery, harlotry, riots, defamations?"

"Merely a few defamations," I replied.

TWENTY-THIRD, OR XVIII TRINITY, SECTION.

Other Quarreling.--The Still Land.--Beata's Letter.--The Reconciliation.--The Portrait of Guido.

Up to this present Sunday I have not succeeded in finding out why Gustavus arrived at Scheerau five days later than he might have done; he evaded even my inquiries more distressfully than adroitly. Oefel had all reported to him, and made out of it one or two sections of his romance, which I and the reader, it is to be hoped, may yet see. I could wish his might see the light sooner than mine, then I might refer the reader to it or perhaps extract from it some anecdotes. Gustavus seemed to have a mental wound-fever. He carried his heart chilled with recent bleeding to Amandus, to warm it and let it brood again upon his friend's hot bosom, and to recover the self-respect which he could not get at first hand, from a second, and there he always got it--for a peculiar reason. In his character there was a trait, which, if he had been a member of a Moravian church, would long ago have enrolled him a missionary therefrom to America for the conversion of the savages: he was fond of preaching. I can say it in other words: his gus.h.i.+ng soul must either stream or stagnate, but trickle or drop it could not--and then, when once a friendly ear opened to it, it rained down in inspiration upon Virtue, Nature and Futurity.--Then did a fresh, bracing air flow through the world of his ideas--the down-pouring torrents disclosed the fair, bright, deep-blue heaven of his inner-being and Amandus stood under the open heaven enraptured. This youth, to whom the exuberance of his heartily beloved friend was a pedestal, something that did not oppress but uplifted him, enjoyed in another's worth his own; nay, in his less enlightened head there arose a still greater warmth than was in the speaker, somewhat as _dark_ water grows more intensely warm in the sun than that which is _bright_.