CHAPTER XII.

CHAPTER XII.THE FLIGHT OUT OF EGYPT—THE GLORIES OF TRAVEL—THE UNKNOWN—BAYREUTH—BAPTISM IN A STORM—NATHALIE AND THE HERMITAGE—THE MOST IMPORTANT CONVERSATION IN ALL THIS BOOK—AN EVENING OF FRIENDSHIP.Once, in the Easter week, when Firmian came home from a half-hour’s pleasure-trip full of forced marches, Lenette asked him why he had not come back sooner, because the postman had been with a great, enormous packet, and had said that the husband must sign the receipt for it himself. In a small establishment like Siebenkæs’ an occurrence such as this ranks among the world’s greatest events, or the principal revolutions in its history. The moments of waiting lay on their souls like cupping-glasses and drawing plasters. At length the postman, in his yellow uniform, put an end to the bitter-sweet hemp beating of their arteries. Firmian acknowledged the receipt of fifty dollars, while Lenette asked the postman who had sent them, and where they came from. The letter commenced thus:—“My dear Siebenkæs,“I have received your ‘Evening Paper’ and ‘Devil’s Selections’ all safely. The rest by word of mouth.“Postscript.“But listen! If the future course of my waltz of life is a matter of the slightest interest to you—if you care in the least degree about my happiness, my plans, or ideas—if it is anything to you but a matter of the supremest indifference that I frank you as far as Bayreuth, providing you with board, lodging, and travelling expenses all on account of a project whose yarn the spinning-mills of the future must either manufacture into gin-snares and gallows-ropes (for my life), or else into rope-ladders and best bower anchor-cables—if this, and other matters more momentous still, have the smallest power over you, Firmian, for heaven’s sake, on with a pair of boots and start!”“And, by thy holy friendship!” said Siebenkæs, “I will on with a pair, though the bolt of apoplexy should flash out of the blue sky of Swabia, and strike me down beneath a cherry-tree in full blossom. Nothing shall prevent me now!”He kept his word, for in six days from thence we find him, at eleven o’clock at night, ready for his journey, with clean linen on his back, and in his pockets—with a hat-cover on his head (secretly freighted and stuffed with an old soft hat)—his newest boots (the antediluvian pair s relieved from duty, being left behind in garrison)—and a tower-clock, borrowed from Peltzstiefel, in his pocket—and fresh bathed, shaven, and kempt, standing by his wife and friend—both of whom kept their eyes fixed, with a gladsome, courteous watchfulness upon the departing traveller only, and did not, for the time being, look at all at one another. He took his leave of the pair while it was still night, being minded to pass the rest of it in his arm chair (of many sorrows), and be off about three o’clock, while Lenette should still be snoring. He committed to the Schulrath the office of treasurer-in-chief of the widow’s fund to his grass-widow, and the managership, or, at least, the “leading business,” of his miniature Covent Garden full of Gay’s Beggar’s Operas, the theatrical journal whereof I am here writing for the edification of a full half of the world. “Lenette,” he said, “when you want any counsel, apply to the counsellor here; he is going to do me the favour to come and see you very often indeed.” Peltzstiefel made the most solemn promises to come every day. Lenette did not go down stairs to the door with the Schulrath when he went away, as she usually did, but remained above, and drawing her hand out of her replenished money-bag (the starved stomachic coats of which had hitherto been rubbing together), snapped it to. It is not of sufficient importance to be recorded that Siebenkæs asked her to put out the light, and go to her bed, and that he gave her charming face his long parting kiss, and said good night, and took the tender farewell, almost within the Eden-gate of the land of dreams with that redoublement of fondness with which we take our leave of those we love, and greet them when we come back to them again.The watchman’s last call at length drew him from his sleeping chair out into the starlight, breezy morning; but, first, he crept once more into the bed-room to the rose-maiden dreaming there, warm and happy, pulled the window to (for there was a cool air from it falling upon her unprotected breast), and would not suffer his lips to touch her in an awakening kiss. He gazed at her by the light of the stars and early blush of dawn, till he turned his eyes away (fast growing dim) at the thought, “perhaps I may never see her again.”As he passed through the sitting-room, her distaff seemed to look at him as if it were a thing of life; it was wrapped in broad bands of coloured paper (which she had put on it because she had not got silk); and there was her spinning-wheel, too, which she used to work at in the dark mornings and evenings when there was not light enough for sewing. As he pictured her to himself working industriously at them while he was away, every wish of his heart cried out, “Ah, poor darling! may all go well with her, always, whether I ever come back to her or not.”This thought of thelast timegrew more vivid still when he was out in the open air, and felt a slight giddiness produced, in the physical part of his head, by agitation and broken sleep, as well as natural regret at the sight of his home receding from view, and the town growing dimmer, and the foreground changing into background, and the disappearance of all the paths and heights on which he had so often walked a little life into his benumbed heart, frozen by the past winter. The little leaf whereon, like a leaf roller, or miner-worm, he had been crawling and feeding, was falling now to earth behind him, a skeleton leaf.But the first spot of foreign, unfamiliar soil, as yet unmarked by any “Station of his Passion,” drew, like a serpent-stone, an acrid drop or two of sorrow-poison out of his heart.And now the solar flames shot higher and higher up upon the enkindled morning clouds, till, at length, hundreds of suns rose in an instant in the sky, in the streams and pools, and in the dew-cups of the flowers, while thousands of varied colours went flowing athwart the face of earth, and one bright whiteness broke from the sky.Fate plucked away most of the yellow, faded leaves from Firmian’s soul, as gardeners remove those of plants in spring. His giddiness diminished rather than otherwise as he went on; the walking did it good. As the sun rose in heaven, another, a super-earthly sun, rose in his soul. In every valley, in every grove, on every rising ground, he broke and cast away a ring or two of the chrysalis-case of wintry life and trouble (which had been clinging so tightly to him), and unfolded his moist upper and nether wings, and let the breeze of May waft him away, on four outspread pinions, up into the bright air among the butterflies, but higher than they, and over loftier flowers.And then with what a burst of power the life within him began, under this new impetus, to boil and seethe, as, issuing from a diamond-mine of a valley all shade and dewdrops, he walked a pace or two up through the heaven-gate of the spring. It was as if some great earthquake had upheaved a new-created flowery plain, all dripping from the ocean, stretching further than the eye could reach, all rich in youthful powers and impulses. The fire of earth glowed beneath the roots of this great hanging garden, and the fire of heaven flamed above it burning the colours into the trees and flowers. Between the white mountains, as between porcelain towers, stood the bright tinted, flowery slopes like thrones for the fruit goddesses. And all over the face of this great camp of gladness, the cups of the flowers and the heavy dewdrops were pitched, like peopled tents. The earth teemed with young broods, and sprouting grasses, and countless little hearts; and heart after heart, life after life, burst forth into being from out the warm brooding-cells of Mother Nature—burst forth with wings, or silken threads, or delicate feelers—and hummed, and sucked, and smacked its lips and sang. And for every one of these countless honeysucking trunks a cup of gladness had long since been filled and ready.In this great market-place of this living city of the sun, so full of glory and sounding life, the pet child of the infinite Mother stood solitary—gazing, with bright and happy eyes, delighted, around him into all its innumerable streets. But his eternal Mother wore her veil of immeasurable immensity, and it was only the warmth which pierced to his heart which told him that he was lying upon her breast. Firmian reposed from this two hours’ intoxication of heart in a peasant’s hut. The foaming spirit of a cup of joy like this went quicker to the heart of a sick man such as he than to those of the commoner run of sufferers.When he went out again the glory had sobered down into brightness, and his enthusiasm into simple happiness. Every red ladybird fluttering on its way, every red church-roof, and every sparkling stream as it glittered and glistened with dancing stars, shed joyous lights and brilliant colours upon his soul. When he heard the cries of the charcoal burners in the wood, the resounding cracking of whips, and the crash of falling trees, and then, when coming out into the open, he saw the white châteaux and roads standing out against the dark-green background like constellations and milky ways, and above the shining cloud specks in the deep blue sky; while lights flashed and darted everywhere, now down from trees, now up from streams, now athwart saws in the distance—there was no such thing as a foggy corner left in his soul, nor a single spot in it all unpenetrated by the spring sunshine: the moss of gnawing, corroding care, which can grow only in damp shade, fell from his bread-trees and trees of liberty out here in the glad, free air, and his soul could not but join in the great chorus of flying and humming creatures which was rising all round him, singing, “Life is beautiful, and youth is lovelier still; but spring is loveliest of all.”The bygone winter lay behind him like the dark, frozen South Pole; the royal burgh of Kuhschnappel like some deep, dreary school-dungeon with dripping walls. The only spot in it over which broad, gladsome sunbeams were intertwining was his own home, and he pictured to himself Lenette in that home as commander-in-chief, free to talk, cook, and wash at her own sweet will, and with her head (and hands, too) full all day long of the delight that was coming in the evening. He was glad from the very depths of his heart that, in that little egg-shell of hers, that sulphur-hut and chartreuse, she should enjoy the glory and brightness which that angel Peltzstiefel would bring with him into her St. Peter’s prison. “Ah! in God’s name,” thought he, “may she be as happy as I am—nay, and happier, too, if that be possible.”The more villages he came to, with their troupes of strolling players (of inhabitants), the more did life in general seem to assume a theatrical guise—his past troubles were transformed into leading parts in the drama, or Aristotelian problems—his clothes into stage costumes—his new boots becamecothurna—and his purse a theatre treasury—while a delicious stage-recognition was awaiting him in the arms of his beloved Henry.About half-past three in the afternoon, in a Swabian village, whose name he did not inquire, his whole soul melted of a sudden to tears, so that he was completely astonished at the unlooked-for and rapidattendrissement. His surroundings at the time would have rather led him to anticipate a contrary effect. He was standing by an old thorn-tree, rather crooked, and dead at the top; the village women were on the green washing their clothes, which glistened in the sunlight, and throwing down chopped eggs and nettles to feed the downy, yellow goslings; a gentleman’s gardener was clipping a hedge, while a herd-boy was summoning his sheep (clipped already fortheirpart) round the thorn-tree, with hiscornemuse. It was all so youthful, so pretty, so Italian! The beautiful May had half (or wholly) unclad everything and everyone—the sheep, the geese, the women, the shepherd-minstrel, the hedger, and his hedge....Why was he thus moved to tenderness in this gladsome and smiling scene? Partly because he had been so happy all day, but chiefly by the shepherd bassoonist calling his flock together with that stage instrument of his beneath the thorn. Firmian had helped a shepherd of this sort, with a crook and a reed-pipe, to drive his own father’s sheep home hundreds of times when he was a boy; and the tones of theRanz des Vachesbrought back in an instant his own rose-coloured childhood—it arose from out its dew of the morning, its bowers of budding blossoms and sleeping flowers, and stood before him in heavenly guise, and smiled in all its own innocence dressed in its thousand hopes, saying, “Behold me! see how lovely I am; we used to play together, you and I; how much I used to give you!—grand kingdoms, broad meadows, and gold, and a great, endless Paradise beyond the hills. But it seems you have nothing left now. And how pale you are, and worn! Come and play with me again!”Who is there amongst us to whom Music has not brought back his childhood a thousand times? She comes and says, “Are not the rosebuds blown yet which I gave you?” Yes, yes, they are blown; they were white roses, though!The evening made his joy-flowers close, folding their petals together above their nectaries; and an evening dew of melancholy fell ever heavier and thicker upon his soul as he went on his way. Just before sunset he came to a village; I am sorry to say I cannot remember whether it was Honbart, or Houstein, or Jaxheim; but of this I am pretty certain, that it was one of the three, because it was near the River Jagst, and in Anspach, on the borders of Ellwangen. His night-quarters lay smoking down in the valley before him. Before going on into them he lay down on the hill-side beneath a tree, whose branches were the cathedral chancel of a choir of singing creatures. Not far from him gleamed the trembling tinsel of a piece of water, glittering in the evening sun; and above him the golden leaves and the white blossoms rustled like grasses waving over flowers. The cuckoo (always her own sounding-board and multiplying echo) talked to him from the tree-top in mournful tones of sorrow; the sun was gone; the shadows were throwing thick veils of crape over the brightness of the day. He asked himself, “Whatis my Lenette doing now? Of whom is she thinking? Who is with her?” And here there fell about his heart, like a band of ice, the thought, “Ah! butIhave no loved one whose hand I can clasp!”After drawing to himself a vivid picture of the tender, delicate, beautiful, woman whom he had so often invoked, but never met—to whom he would have given and sacrificed—oh! so gladly—so much! not only his heart and his life, but his every wish, his every whim—he went down the hill with streaming eyes, which he strove in vain to dry; but, at all events, any kind womanly heart (among the readers of this tale) which has loved in vain, or to its own detriment, will forgive him these burning tears, knowing, from sad personal experience, how the soul seems to journey on through a desolate wilderness, where the deathly Samiel wind blows ceaselessly, while lifeless forms lie scattered around, dashed to earth by the blast, their arms breaking from their crumbling trunks when the living touches them in act to clasp them to his own warm heart. But ye, in whose clasp so many a heart has grown cold, chilled by inconstancy or by the frost of death—ye should not mourn so bitterly as do those lonely souls who have neverlost, because they have neverfound; who yearn for that immortal and eternal love of which even the mortal and transient reflex has never been vouchsafed to bless them.Firmian carried with him into his night-quarters a tranquil, though a tender, heart, which healed itself in dreams. When he looked up from his slumbers, the constellations, set in his window as in a picture-frame, twinkled lovingly before his bright and happy eyes, and beamed upon him the astrological prophecy of a happy morrow.He fluttered, with the earliest lark, up out of the furrow of his bed, with as many trills as he, and quite as much energy. That day, fatigue plucking the bird-of-paradise wings from his fancy, he could not quite get out of the territory of Anspach. The day after, he reached Bamberg, leaving on the right hand Nürnberg—that and itsPays CoutumiersandPays de Droit écrit. His path led him from one paradise to another. The plain seemed to be one great mosaic of gardens; the hills seemed to crouch closer to the earth, as if to let men the more readily climb up upon their backs and humps. The groves of deciduous trees were like garlands, twined and placed to adorn Nature on some great festal day; and the setting sun often glowed through the trellis-work of some leafy balustrade on a hill-side, like a purple apple in some perforated fruit-vase. In one valley one longed to take one’s mid-day sleep; in another, one’s breakfast; in this stream, to see the moon reflected when she stood in the zenith; to see her rise behind this group of trees; to see the sun rise out of that green trellised bed of trees at theStreitberg.When he arrived the next day at Streitberg, where all those delights could be indulged in at once, he might easily have seen the top of the spire of Bayreuth put on the blushing tints of the evening Aurora—unless he was a much worse walker than his historian; however, he did not care to do so. He said to himself, “I should be an ass were I to go rushing, all dog-tired and dried up as I am, upon the first hour of a delicious reunion and meeting of this sort; neither he (Leibgeber) nor I would get a wink of sleep; and what should we have time to talk about at this hour in the evening? No, no, better wait, and get there the first thing in the morning, about six o’clock, and so have the whole day before us for our millennium.”Accordingly he passed the night in Fantaisie, an artificial pleasure, rose, and flower-valley, half a mile from Bayreuth. I find it a very hard and difficult matter to reserve the erection of my paper model of this Seifersdorf miniature valley (which I should so much like to introduce at this point), until I find a roomier place for it than the present; however, I can’t help it, and should I not find such a place, there is sure to be ample space in the blank pages at the end of the book.Firmian started, then, in company with a body of bats and beetles—the advanced guard of a beautiful bright day—and bringing up the rear (so to speak) of the people of Bayreuth, who had just finished their Sunday and Feast of the Ascension (it was the 7th of May): and he walked so late that the moon, in her first quarter, was casting deep, strong shadows of the blossoms and branches upon the greensward. Thus late in the evening, then, Firmian climbed a height from whence he could look down, with tears of joy, to Bayreuth—where the beloved brother of his soul was waiting for him and thinking of him—as it lay softly veiled in the bridal night of spring, and broidered over with shining flakes of Luna’s radiance. I can affirm in his name with a “Verily” that he nearly did whatI shouldhave done myself; that is to say,I, with a heart welling up in such a warm sort of manner ashiswas, and on a night all so adorned and pranked out with gold and silver, should have made but one bound into the Sun Hotel, and into my Leibgeber’s arms. However, he went back again into his odour-breathing Capua (Fantaisie), and there, in the brief intervening space of time between his return and supper and evening prayer time, he met—beside a dried-up water-basin or fish-pond, peopled by a race of deities transformed into stone—he met with nothing less than an exceedingly charming adventure. I proceed to give an account of it.Beside the wall which surrounded the little lake in question, there was a lady standing; she was dressed all in black except her veil, which was white; she had a bouquet of faded flowers in her hand, and was turning it over with her fingers. She was looking towards the west, that is to say, away from him, and seemed to be contemplating partly the confused mass of stoneSuisseries, and the coral-reef of sea-horses, tritons, and so on, and partly a temple, in artificial ruins, which was close by. As he passed slowly on he saw, by a side glance, that she threw a flower, not so muchatasoverhim, as if this sign of exclamation were meant to rouse a pre-occupied person from hisreverie. He looked round a little, just to show that he was really awake and observant, and went up to the glass-door of the artificially-ruined temple, in order to linger a little longer in the vicinity of this enigma. Inside the temple, facing him, there was a mirrored pillar, which reflected all the foreground and middle distance (including the fair unknown) in the green perspective of a long background. Firmian saw, in the mirror, the lady throw her bouquet at him bodily, and then roll an orange (which would not fly so far as the flowers) towards his feet. He turned round with a smile. A soft voice cried in an eager, hasty way, “Don’t you know me?” He said, “No;” and ere he had added, more slowly, “I am a stranger,” the unknown Lady Abbess had drawn near to him, and lifted the Moses veil rapidly from her face, and asked, in a louder tone, “Don’t you,now?” And a female head which might have been sawn from the shoulders of the Vatican Apollo (only softened by some eight or ten feminine traits, and a narrower brow) glowed upon him like some bust illumined by the flare of a torch. But, on his repeating that he was a stranger, and when she examined him more closely, and without her veil, and let her gauze portcullis down again (which movements took altogether about as long as one beat of the pendulum of an astronomical clock), she turned away saying, “I beg your pardon,” in a tone which expressed more womanly annoyance than embarrassment.A very little thing would have set him off to follow her in a mechanical sort of manner. He immediately set about adorning all Fantaisie with plaster-casts of her head (instead of the stone goddesses)—of her head, which had but three pleonasms in the face of it—too much colour in the cheeks, too much curve in the nose, and too much wild fire (or rather material for kindling it) in the eyes. “That is the sort of head,” he thought, “which would be well in its place in an opera-box, beside the sparkling one of some royal bride (ay, and hold its own there), and might contain all the wisdom it might deprive—other people of.”One carries a magic adventure such as this into one’s dreams with one, for it is like a dream itself. The month of May now stuck in little flower-sticks to all Firmian’s drooping, trembling, joy-flowers (as she had done to Nature’s), and lightly bound them to them. Ah! with what brightness do even little joys beam upon the soul when it stands on some spot all darkened by clouds of sorrow—as stars shine out in the empty sky when we look up at it from a cellar or deep well.On the exquisite morning which followed, the earth rose with the sun. Siebenkæs had his friend of all time in his head and heart more than the unknown of yesterday; although, at the same time, he took care that his path should lead him by the ocean, and the shell out of which that Venus had arisen—for mere curiosity’s sake—which led to no result. And so he waded away through the moist radiance and cloudy vapour of the glittering silver-mine, tearing down in his passage the gossamer-wreaths all behung with seed-pearls of dew which hung upon the flowers; brushing (in his eagerness to reach his Olympus of yesterday) the chilled butterflies and dew-drops from off the branches, all a-flutter with the insect swarms (the key-board of a harmonica framed in flowers). He climbed to his place in the great “Auditorium” all delight at length. Bayreuth lay behind a glowing drop-curtain of mist. The sun (in his character of “king” of this drama) stood on a hill-top, and looked down at this many-tinted curtain, which took fire and blazed, while the morning breezes caught and bore away its fluttering, sparkling, tinder fragments, and scattered them over the gardens and the flowers. And soon nothing save the sun was shining; nothing round him now except the sky. Amid this radiance Siebenkæs made his entry into his dear friend’s camp of recreation and head-quarter city, whereof all the buildings looked as if they were a glittering, solider sort of air-and-magic castles fallen down from the æther. It was strange, but, on noticing certain window-curtains drawn in (which the street breeze had been toying with), he could scarcely help feeling certain that it was the “Unknown” of yesterday who was doing it, although at that time of the morning (it was barely eight o’clock) a Bayreuth lady would have as little got through her flower-sleep as the red mouse-ear, or the Alpine hawksbeard.[62]His heart beat quicker at every street. It was quite a pleasure to him to lose his way a little, as to some extent delaying and adding to his happiness. At length he attained his perihelion—that is to say—reached the Sun (Hotel), where was the metallic sun which had attracted to ithiscomet, as the astronomical sun does comets in general. He inquired the number of Leibgeber’s room; they said it was number 8, at the back of the house, but that he had gone that day on a trip into Swabia, unless he was still upstairs. Fortunately there just then came in from the street an individual who testified to the correctness of the latter hypothesis, and wagged his tail at sight of Siebenkæs—Leibgeber’s dog to wit.To storm up the stairs, to burst open the door of joy, to fall upon the beloved breast, was the work of a single instant; and then the barren minutes of life passed unseen and unheard by the close, silent union of two human creatures, who lay clinging together on the waters of life, like two shipwrecked brothers floating, embracing and embraced, on the chill waves, with nothing left them save the heart they die upon....As yet they had not said a word to one another. Firmian, whom a longer continuance of troubles had made the weaker of the two, wept without disguise at sight of the face of his newly recovered friend. Heinrich’s features were drawn as if by pain. They both had their hats still on. Leibgeber, in his embarrassment, could think of nothing to hold on to except the bell-rope. The waiter came running in. “Oh! it’s nothing!” said Leibgeber; “except, by the way, that I shan’t go out now. Heaven grant,” he added, “that we may get fairly into the thick of a long talk! Drag me into one, brother!”He had no difficulty in beginning one with the pragmatic detailing of theNouvelle du Jour—or ratherde la Nuit—in short, the town (or, more properly speaking, the country) news of what had taken place on the previous day in the vicinity of the veil of the beautifulJe ne sais quoi.“I know her” (Leibgeber answered), “as I know my own pulse; but I don’t intend to say anything whatever about her just now. I should be obliged to sit still and wait here for such a time. Put the whole thing off till we are sitting in Abraham’s warm bosom in the Hermitage, which is the second heaven of Bayreuth, next to Fantaisie,—for Fantaisie is the first heaven, and the whole country is the third.”They then made an ascent into heaven in every fresh street they came to, and also in every subject of conversation which they fell upon. “You shall knock my head off its stalk like a poppy,” said Leibgeber, on Firmian’s betraying (I regret to say) as great a curiosity as the reader’s own to know the secret, “before I transformmymysteries intoyours, either to-day, or to-morrow, or the day after that. Thus much I will tell you, that your ‘Selections from the Devil’s Papers’ (your ‘Evening Journal’ contains matter more morbific) are perfectly divine, and very heavenly indeed, and not at all bad, and by no means without beauties; but, on the whole (let us say), passable enough.” Leibgeber then told him how delighted he was with the work, and how it surprised him that he, a lawyer in a little country town, with nobody in it but a parcel of shopkeepers and juristic souls, with a sprinkling of higher officialities, should have managed to rise in these satires to such a freedom and purity of art; and, indeed, whenIfirst read the ‘Selections from the Devil’s Papers,’ I said, myself now and then, “I am sureIcouldn’t have written anything of the kind in Hof in Voigtland, and Ihavewritten one or two pretty good things there, too.”Leibgeber placed a crown on the top of the laurel wreath by declaring that it was much easier for him to laugh at the world aloud, and with both lips, than under his breath and with the pen, and this in accordance with well-tried rules of art. Siebenkæs was beyond himself with delight at his friend’s praise. But let no one grudge a pleasure of this sort to our advocate, or to any other worker who, in solitude, and without a single soul to give him a word of praise, has gone steadfastly forward along the path of art which he has honestly chosen, unsupported, unassisted by the smallest encouragement of any kind, whom, at last, on reaching the goal, the fragrance of a leaf or two of laurel from a friend’s hand, penetrates, strengthens, and recompenses, with an aroma as of Araby the Blest. If even the far-famed and the self-satisfied stand in need of a little of the warmth which is derived from other people’s opinions, how much more the diffident and the unknown! Ah! lucky Firmian! to what a distance in the far south-south-west did the passing thunder-storms of thy life now go drifting away. When the sun fell upon them, nothing of them was to be seen but a gentle fall of rain.At thetable d’hôtehe observed with delight, in the case of Leibgeber, how wonderfully a constant intercourse with men and cities loosens the tongue though, at the same time, the heart puts on the bridle which has been taken from the lips. Leibgeber thought nothing of talking about himself, and this in the most humorous manner, before all sorts of grand councillors of state and chancery officials dining at the Sun—a thing which he, a cabined, cribbed, confined parish advocate would scarce have dared even after a good bottle of wine. As the discourse which he delivered on this occasion pleased the parish advocate, I shall build it into this history, and place over it the superscription—LEIBGEBER’S DINNER SPEECH.“I think I may venture to say that of all the Christians and persons of name and title seated at this table, not one was made into one with such wonderful difficulty as I was. My mother, a native of Gascony, was on her way to Holland, by sea, from London, where she had left my father as diocesan of a German community. But, never since there has been such a thing on the face of the earth as a councillor of the German empire, did the German Ocean rage and insurge so terrifically as upon the occasion in question when it was my mother’s lot to be crossing it. Pour all hell, hissing lakes of brimstone, boiling copper, splattering devils, and all, into the cold ocean, and observe the crackling, the roaring, and the seething of the hell-flames and ocean-waves contending, till one of these hostile elements swallow up the other, and you have a faint (but, at dinner-time, a sufficient) idea of the infernal storm in which I came upon the sea, and into the world. When I tell you that the main braces, the topsail sheets, and the main topgallant stays (to say nothing of the crossjack braces and fore topgallant halyards, which were in a worse state still)—and when, moreover, the mizen topsail, and the foretop mast staysail rigging, and the flying jib (to say nothing of the spanker)—when things so accustomed to the sea as these (I say) felt as if theirlast hourwas come, it was a real ocean miracle that a creature so tender as I was at that time should have managed to commence hisfirst. I had about as much flesh on my body then as I have fat now, and may have weighed, at the outside, about four Nürnberg pounds, which (if we may credit the authority of the best anatomical theatres) is at the present moment about the weight of my brain alone. Besides which, I was the merest of beginners. I had seen absolutely nothing of the world, except this infernal gale. I was a creature, not so much offewyears as ofnoneat all (though everybody’s life commences some nine months sooner than the parish registers indicate), excessively tender and delicate—having been (in opposition to all the rules of hygiene) kept much too warm, swaddled, and coddled during these very first nine months in question, when I ought rather to have been undergoing a preparation of some kind to enable me to bear the chill atmosphere of this world. And thus, quarter-grown, a tender flower-bud, liquidly soft as first love, when I made my appearance during a storm such as was raging (I added one or two feeble squeaks, with some difficulty, to its roar), what was to be expected was, that I should be extinguished altogether, even before it calmed down. People didn’t like the idea of my going without something in the shape of a name—without some little vestige of Christianity of some kind—out of this world, which is a place whence wedocarry away even less than we bring into it with us. But the grand difficulty experienced was that ofstandinggodfather, in a rolling, plunging vessel, which pitched everything and everybody higgledy-piggledy that wasn’t made fast. The chaplain was (luckily) lying in a hammock, and he baptized down out of thence. My godfather was the boatswain, who held me for five whole minutes; but inasmuch as he couldn’t, without help, stand steady enough to enable the chaplain to touch my brow with the water without missing me, he was held by the barber’s mate, who was made fast to a marine, who was made fast to a boatswain’s mate, who was made fast to the master-at-arms, who sat upon the knee of an old bluejacket, who held on to him like grim death.“However, neither the ship nor the child (as I afterwards ascertained) came to any detriment; but you all see, do you not, that, hard as it is for any one amid the storms of life, to become, and continue, a Christian, or to get a name—be it in a directory, in a literary gazette, in a herald’s college, or upon a medal—yet there are few who have had the same difficulty as I have had in acquiring the merefirst elementsof a name—the groundwork, the binomial root, of a Christian name, whereon, at a subsequent period, the othergreatname might be engrafted—and to get hold of a faint smattering of Christianity, as much as a catechumen and candidate as yet in a speechless and sucking condition might be capable of. There is but one thing more difficult to make; the greatest princes and heroes can only do it once in their lives—the mightiest geniuses—even the three electors of the Church, the Emperor of Germany himself, with all their united efforts, can’t do more, were they to sit for years, stamping in the mint with all the latest improvements in coining machinery.”The whole of the company entreated him to explain what this was that was so hard to frame.“’Tis a crown prince,” he answered, quietly; “even a reigning sovereign finds it no easy matter to produce an appanaged prince—but, let him try as he will, even in the best days of his life, he can never produce more than one specimen of a crown prince; for a Seminarist of that sort is none of your accessory-works, but the prime mover, the regulator, the striking and driving-wheel of the whole nation. On the other hand, gentry, counts, barons, chamberlains, staff-officers, and above all, common people and subjects of the altogether every-day sort—to be brief, a scurvy crew of that description—ageneratio æquivoca—can be brought into being by a prince with such wonderful ease that he creates theselusus naturæand virgin swarms, orprotoplasmata, in considerable numbers even in his earlier days, although in riper years he may not manage to turn out an heir to his throne. Yet, after so much preliminary drill, so many trial-shots, one would have taken one’s oath the other way!”END OF LEIBGEBER’S TABLE-TALK.In the afternoon they paid a visit to that verdant, pleasure place, the Hermitage, and the alley leading thither seemed to their happy hearts to be a path cut through some beauteous grove of gladness. That young bird of passage, Spring, was encamped all over the plain around, her unladen floral treasures scattered about the meadows, and floating down the streams, while the birds were drawn up into air upon long sunbeams, and the world of winged creatures hovered all about in intoxication of bliss amid the exquisite scents shed abroad by kind Nature.Leibgeber determined to pour out his heart and his secret at the Hermitage that day, and (by way of preliminary) a bottle of wine or so to begin with.He begged and constrained Siebenkæs first of all to deliver a diary-lecture concerning his adventures by land and by water up to the present time. Firmian complied, but with discretion. Over his stomach’s barren year, over his hard times, over the (metaphorical) winter of his life (upon whose snow he had had to make his nest, icebird-like), and over all the bitter northerly wind, which drives a man toBURYhimself in the earth (as soldiers do)—over all these he passed lightly and quickly. I myself must approve of him for so doing; firstly, because a man would be none who should shed a bigger tear over wounds of poverty than a young lady drops at the piercing of her ears, for in both cases the wounds become points of suspension for jewels; secondly, because Siebenkæs would not cause his friend the slightest pain on the score of their change of names, the main source of all his hunger-springs. However, his friend knew, and sympathised with him sufficiently to consider that his pale, faded face and his sunken eyes constituted a sufficient almanac month-emblem of his frost-month or winter-picture of the snowed-up tracts of his life-road.But when Siebenkæs came to speak of the deep and secret wounds of his soul, it was all he could do to keep back the drops of blood-water which pressed to his eyes; I mean the subject of Lenette’s hatred and love. But while he drew a very indulgent picture of her little love for him, and her great love for Stiefel, he used much brighter colours for the historical piece which he painted of her admirable behaviour to the Venner, and of that gentleman’s wickedness in general.“As soon as you have done,” said Leibgeber, “you must allow yourself to be informed that women are notfallenangels, butFALLINGones. By all the heavens! while we stand patient, like sheep being shorn, they stick the shears oftener into our skins than into our wool. I should think of the fair sex if I were to cross the bridge of St. Angelo at Rome, for there are twelve statues of angels there, holding the implements of the Passion, each a different one; one has the nails, another the reed, another the dice, and similarly each woman has a peculiar torture-instrument of her own to apply to us poor lambs. Whom, think you, for instance now, is the Palladium of yesterday, your unknown beauty, going to tether to her bed-post with the nose-ring of a wedding-ring? But I must tell you about her. She is altogether glorious: she is poetic; full of romantic, enthusiastic admiration for the British, and for intellectual people in general (consequently for me), and lives with an aristocratic English lady, a sort of companion to Lady Craven and the Margrave at Fantaisie yonder. She has nothing, and accepts nothing; is poor and proud, daring to rashness, and pure as the day; and she signs herself ‘Nathalie Aquiliana.’ Do you know who’s going to be her husband? A horrible, burnt-out, used-up wretch—a feeble, puny creature, whose egg-shell was chipped a week or two before its time, and who now goes cheeping about our toes like a chicken with the pip; a fellow who copies Heliogabalus (who put on a new ring every day) in the matter of wedding-rings; a hop-o’-my-thumb whom I could sneeze over the North Pole (and I should like very much to do it), and whom I have the less need to give you any description of, inasmuch as you have just givenmeone of him yourself: when I tell you his name, you will see that you know him pretty well. This magnificent creature is going to be married to the Venner Rosa von Meyern!”Firmian fell, notfromthe clouds, but rightintothem. To make a long tale short, this Nathalie is the Heimlicher’s niece, of whom Leibgeber wrote some account in our first volume. “But, listen,” continued Leibgeber, “I will let myself be hewn and hacked into crumbs smaller than those of Poland—into clippings not big enough to cover a Hebrew vowel—if this affair comes to anything; for I am going to put a stop to it.”Since Leibgeber (as we know) was in the habit of talking to the lady every day (his spotless soul and his bold mind having unspeakable attractions for her), all he had to do in order to break the marriage off, was simply to repeat to her what Siebenkæs had told him concerning her bridegroom elect. It was his intimacy with her, and his resemblance to Siebenkæs which had led to her mistaking Firmian for him on the evening of his arrival.The majority of my readers will urge against me and Leibgeber the same objection which Siebenkæs brought forward—that, Nathalie’s love and marriage for money were quite out of harmony with her character, and her disregard for riches. But, in one word, all she had ever as yet seen of that gaudy flycatcher, Mr. Rosa, was his Esau’s hand, that, is to say, his writing,i. e. his Jacob’s voice; he had only written her a few irreprehensible, sentimental letters of assurance (pin-papers, stuck full of Cupid’s darts and stitching-needles), and so given guarantee of thedocumentarynobility of his heart.... The Heimlicher, moreover, had written to his niece, saying, on St. Pancrasius’ day (May 12th, that is in four days’ time), the Venner would come and present himself, and if she refused him, let her never call herself his niece again, and starve in her native village for all he cared.But, speaking as a man of honour, I really have never had above three of Rosa’s letters in my hands for two or three minutes, and in my pocket for about an hour; and they were really not so very bad—far more moral than their author.Just as Leibgeber said he would assume the office of consistory, and divorce Nathalie from Rosa before their marriage, she came driving up, with one or two lady friends, and got out of the carriage; but instead of going with them to where the company were assembling, she went away alone, by a solitary side walk, to the so-called Temple. In her haste she had not noticed her friend Leibgeber sitting opposite the stables. I ought to explain here that when the Bayreuthians go to the Hermitage they have been in the habit, ever since the days of the Margrave, of sitting in a little wood, all breezes and cool shade, in front of the extensive farm-buildings and stables, but having the loveliest of prospects just at their backs, which they could easily substitute for the blank wall upon which they feast their gaze, by merely getting up and going a little way out of the wood on either side.Leibgeber told Siebenkæs he could take him to her in a moment, as she would be sure to sit down in the temple (as she usually did) to enjoy the enchanting view of the city towers and the hills, as they lay in the light of the evening sun beyond the shrubberies. He added that, unfortunately, she cared too little about appearances; andwouldgo to the summer-house all by herself, greatly to the distress of the English lady, who, after the manner of her countrywomen, didn’t like going anywhere alone, and wouldn’t trust herself to go near even a gentleman’s clothes cupboard without an Insurance Company and Bible Society of women with her to protect her. He said he had it on good authority that a British lady never permitted theideaof amanto enter her head without at once surrounding it with the number of ideas ofwomen, necessary to bridle and restrain him, should he begin behaving (in the four chambers of her brain) with that amount of freedom which he might employ ifat homethere.They found Nathalie in the open temple, with some papers in her hand. “I bring you our author of the ‘Selections from the Devil’s Papers,’” said Leibgeber, “which I see you are just reading; will you allow me to introduce him to you?” After a passing blush at having mistaken Siebenkæs for Leibgeber, in Fantaisie, she said to him, very kindly and pleasantly, “It would take very little to make me mistake you for your friend again, Mr. Siebenkæs; and you seem almost exactly alike in mind, as well as in body. Your satire is often exactly like his; it is only your graver ‘Appendices’ which I was just reading, and which I like very much, that seem to me as if they hadn’t been written by him.”I have not at present time to make—(for Leibgeber’s unauthorized communication to one friend of the papers of another)—excuses occupying long pages of print to readers who may insist upon extreme delicacy in matters of this description. Suffice it to say that Leibgeber took it for granted that every one who likedhimwould join with him in liking his friends, and that Siebenkæs (and even Nathalie) would see nothing in his unhesitatingly communicating these papers, but a mere passing on of a friendly circular letter, pre-supposing, as he did, the existence between them of a triple elective affinity.Nathalie scanned the pair—particularly Leibgeber, whose big dog she was stroking—with a kindly and observant look of comparison, as if she were trying to find out dissimilarities between them; for, in fact, Siebenkæs seemed to her to be scarcely as like his friend as she had thought. He was taller and slighter, and younger in the face; but this was because Leibgeber, whose shoulders and chest were more strongly built, bent his strange, earnest face more forward when he talked, as if he were speaking into the earth. He himself said he neverhadlooked really young, not even at his baptism—as his baptismal certificate would prove—and wasn’t likely to grow much younger now till he arrived at his second childhood. But when Leibgeber straightened his back somewhat, and Siebenkæs bent his a little, they looked very much like one another; however, this is more a hint for the drawer-up of their passports than anything else.Let us felicitate the Kuhschnappel lawyer on this opportunity of enjoying a few minutes’ conversation with a lady of position, and of such many-sided cultivation as even to be capable of appreciating satires. Allhewished was that a phœnix of this sort—such as, hitherto, he had only seen a pinch or so of the ashes of in actual life, or a phœnix-feather or two preserved in a book—might not take wing and disappearinstanter; but that he might be lucky enough to listen to a long talk between her and Leibgeber, as well as help to spin it out himself. But suddenly her Bayreuth friends came hurrying up to say that the fountains were just going to play, and there wasn’t a moment to be lost. The whole party, therefore, went towards the waterworks, Siebenkæs’ whole care being to keep as close as he could to the noblest of the spectatresses.They stood by the basin, and looked at the beautiful water artifices, which, no doubt, have long since played before the reader, either on the spot, or in the pages of the various writers of travels, who have expressed themselves on the subject of them at sufficient length, and in adequate terms of laudation. All kinds of mythologic demigod-ical demibeasts spouted forth streams; and from out this world, peopled with water-gods, there spouted a crystal forest, whose descending branches, liana-like, took root again in the earth. They enjoyed for a long while the sight of this talkative, intercommingling water-world. At length the fluttering, ever-growing water-forms sank down and died; the transparent lily-stems grew shorter and shorter, as they watched them. “Why is it, I wonder?” said Nathalie to Siebenkæs, “that a waterfall lifts up one’s heart; but this dying-down of these springing jets, this visible sinking away of these grand streaming beams of water, always makes me sad and anxious? We never see any such falling in of high things in real life.”Siebenkæs was thinking out the apt and comprehensive reply to this true and just expression of Nathalie’s feeling, when all at once she jumped into the water to rescue, with as little delay as possible, a child who had fallen in, a few steps away from her; for the water was there about waist-deep. Before the men who were present had so much asthought aboutit, she haddoneit; and she was right, for in this case rapidity without reflection was the good and true thing. She lifted the child out, and gave it to the women; but Siebenkæs and Leibgeber took her hands, and lightly raised the fiery creature (all blushes, of body and of soul) on to the bank. “What does it matter?” she said, with a smile, to the alarmed Siebenkæs, “I shall be none the worse,” and hurried away with her friends (who were all shocked into speechlessness), having first begged Leibgeber to come next evening, with his friend, to Fantaisie. “That of course I shall do,” he said; “but first of all, I am coming to see you by myself early in the morning.”The crying need of our two friends was now to be alone with one another. Leibgeber, under the new excitement, could scarce wait to attain the birch wood, where he meant to continue their previous conversation regarding Siebenkæs’ domestic and conjugal affairs. With respect to Nathalie, he briefly pointed out to his astonished friend that what so much delighted him in her was just the unhesitating, downright straightforwardness which marked all her thoughts and actions, and her manly cheerfulness, athwart which the world, and poverty, and chances and accidents of every kind merely passed floating away, like light, shining summer clouds, never darkening her day. “Now as regards you and your Lenette,” he went on (when they reached the solitude of the little wood), as quietly as if he had been talking continuously up to that instant, “if I were in your place, I should take an alterative, and get rid of the hard gall-stone of matrimony for good and all. You will never really be able to bear the pain of the bonds of wedlock, though you scrape and scratch away at them for years to come with all your finest hair-saws and bone-saws. The Divorce Court will giveonegrand cut and tear—and there you are, free of one another for ever and ever.”The idea of a divorce terrified Siebenkæs, although he saw very clearly that it was the only possible breaking-point for the storm-clouds of his life. He was far from grudging to Lenette either her freedom, or the marriage with Stiefel, which would infallibly result; but he felt quite sure that, however much she might wish for it, she never would consent to an enforced separation, on account of her strong regard for appearances,—also that on their road to this parting both she and he would have to pass many a bitter hour of heart-strain and nerve-fever,—and that they could hardly afford to pay for a betrothal, much less for a divorce.It was likewise an accessory circumstance, that it was more than he could bear to think of the sight of the poor innocent soul, who had shivered at his side through so many a cold storm of life, going away for ever from his home, and from his arms—ay, and withthat handkerchiefin her hand, too!All these considerations, with many stronger, and many weaker, he laid before his friend, finishing up with this final one: “I assure you, moreover, that if she went away from me, tag and baggage, and left me by myself in that empty room (as in a grave), and in all the blank, cleared-out spaces, where, when all’s said and done, we have sat together through so many kindly happy hours, and seen the flowers growing green about us—she never could pass by my window (while she bore my name, at all events, though no longer mine), but something within me would bid me throw myself down, and dash myself in pieces at her feet. Would it not be ten times better,” he continued in an altered tone, “to wait till I fall down upstairs in the room (or what does my giddiness mean), and be taken out of the window, and out of the world, in a better fashion? Friend Death would take his long erasing knife, and scrape my name (and other blots into the bargain) out of her marriage-lines.”Contrary to all expectation, this seemed to make Leibgeber merrier and livelier than ever. “Do so!” he said; “it’s the very thing! Die by all means! The funeral expenses can’t possibly come to anything approaching the costs of the other kind of separation; and besides, you belong to the Burial Society.” Siebenkæs stared at him in astonishment.He went on in a tone of the utmost indifference: “Only I must tell you it will do neither of us much good, if you dawdle a long time at your saddling and bridling, and take a year or two about your dying. I should think it much more to the purpose were you to be off to Kuhschnappel as soon as ever you can, take to your sick-bed and death-bed directly you get there; and die as quickly as ever you can manage it. And I’ll give you my reasons. For one thing your Lenette’s year of mourning would be out just before Advent, so that she would require no dispensation, if she wanted to marry Peltzstiefel before Christmas. It would suit me very well, too, for I could then disappear in the crowd, and I shouldn’t see you again for some considerable time to come. Besides, it is anything but a matter of indifference to yourself, for of course the sooner you’re appointed Inspector the better.”“This is the very first of your jokes, dear old Henry,” said Siebenkæs, “of which I don’t understand one single word.”Leibgeber, with a disturbed countenance, whereon a whole history of the world was legible, and which indicated, as well as gave rise to, the greatest possible anticipation of something of immense importance to come, pulled a letter from his pocket and handed it to Siebenkæs in silence. It was a letter of appointment by the Count von Vaduz, constituting Leibgeber Inspector of the Chief Bailiwick of Vaduz. He next handed him a letter in the count’s handwriting. While Firmian was reading the letter, Leibgeber brought out his pocket-diary, and calmly muttered to himself, “From the quarter-day after Whitsunday, it says, does it not? to the time when I am to enter upon my office; that is to say, from to-day—St. Stanislaus’ Day. Ah! only think of that—how odd it seems—from St. Stanislaus’ day one, two, three, four—fourweeks and a half.”Firmian, much pleased, was handing him back the letter, but he wouldn’t take it, but pressed it back to him, saying, “I read it long ago, long beforeyoudid. Put it in your pocket.”And here Heinrich, in a burst of solemn, impassioned, humoristic enthusiasm, knelt down in the middle of a long narrow path, which looked between the trees of the thick grove like some subterranean passage (the weathercock of the distant steeple ended off the perspective of it as if with a turnstile)—knelt down facing the west, and gazed through the long green hollow way upon the evening sun, sinking earthward like some brilliant meteor, its broad beams darting down upon the long green path, like forest-water gilt by the spring; he gazed fixedly at it, and his eyes all blinded (and lighted up) by its sheen, he began to speak as follows:—“If there be a good spirit near me, or a guardian angel of mine or of his, or ifthyspirit surviveth still thine ashes, oh! my old,kind, loving father, so deep in thy grave, then draw near, oh! thou dim and ancient shade, and grant to thy stupid, silly son (still limping about here in this fluttering, ragged shirt of a body) this one, one favour, the first and the last, and enter into Firmian’s heart, and (while giving it a good sound shaking) address it as follows: ‘Die, Firmian, for my son’s sake, though it be but in jest and in appearance only. Throw away your own name, go in his (which was yours before) to Vaduz as Inspector, and give yourself out to be him. My poor son here (like thatJoujou de Normandiewhereon he is sticking, which circles round the sun upon strings of sunbeams) would fain go whirling aboutuponsaid Joujou himself for a little while longer. Before all you parrots the ring of eternity is still hanging, and you can hop on to it and rock upon it if you will. But he does not see the ring; don’t deprive the poor Poll-parrot of the pleasure of hopping about on the perch of this earth till, when he has wound his life’s thread some sixty times about its reels, the reel gives a ring and a snap, the thread breaks, and all his fun is over and done!’ Oh! kind spirit of my father, stir up my friend’s heart this day, and guide his tongue, that it may not say ‘No,’ when I ask him, ‘Will you do all this.’” Blinded by the evening sun, he felt for Firmian’s hand, crying, “Where’s your hand, dear friend? and do not say ‘No.’”But Firmian, quite carried away by emotion (for this sudden outburst of Leibgeber’s long pent-up excitement was most contagious), speechless, and all in tears, like an evening shade, knelt down before his friend and fell on his breast, and said in a low tone (for he could do no otherwise), “I am ready to die for you a thousand deaths, any death you please: only say what death I can die for you. All I ask is, tell me plainly what you would have me do. I swear to you beforehand that I will do whatever you tell me; I swear it by your dear father’s soul. I will gladly give my life for you, and you know I have nothing but that to give.” Heinrich said, in a most unusually subdued voice, “Let’s get away in among the Bayreuthians. I certainly have an attack of hydrothorax this afternoon, or else a hot mineral spring inside my waistcoat; ’pon my word, any ordinary heart ought to have a swimming-belt on, or a scaphander, in a vapour-bath of this kind.” But up at the table under the trees, among the people come to keep the Whitsuntide fair, the great holiday and festival of spring—up there among people all happy and enjoying themselves, emotion was easier to conquer. Here Heinrich quickly unrolled the ground-plans and elevations of his castle in the air, the building grants of his Tower of Babel. To the Count von Vaduz (whose ears and heart opened and expanded to him hungrily) he had given his sacred word of honour that he would return to him as Inspector. But his idea was that his dear coadjutor and substitute,cum spe succedendi, Firmian, should take his place and personate him: Firmian, who was such a tautology of him in mind and body, that both the count, and the theory of distinctive differences itself, would have been puzzled to tell one of them from the other. Even in the worst of years the Inspectorship brought in an income of 1200 thalers; that is to say, the exact amount of Firmian’s whole inheritance (now sealed up with the law’s leaden signet); so that when Siebenkæs re-assumed his old name of Leibgeber, he would regain just what he had lost by changing it. “For,” said Leibgeber, “now that I have read your ‘Devil’s Papers,’ I can’t endure or swallow the notion of your lying fallow any longer in Kuhschnappel; sitting there in solitude, like a pelican (or an unicorn, or an unknown hermit) in the wilderness. Now, will it take you as long to think about the matter as it takes the Chief Clerk of the Chancellery there to shake the ashes out of his pipe, when I tell you that, thoughyouare a fellow who could fill any and every office in the world splendidly, there’s only one calling I can follow—that of aGrazioso; for though Iknowmore than most people, I can’t put my knowledge to any practical use except satirising, and my language is a parti-colouredLingua Franca, my head a Proteus, and I myself a delightful compilation of the devil and his grandmother. Besides, if Icoulddo anything else, Iwouldn’t. What, am I, in the very flower of my days, to stamp and neigh, like a state draught-horse, a government prisoner in the donjon-keep, the shoeing travis of some miserable office counting-house, with nothing to look at but my saddle and bridle hanging on the stable-wall, and the loveliest Parnassuses and Tempe valleys wooing the free feet of the sons of the Muses just outside! In the very years when my milk of life is inclined to throw out a little cream—(and the years when a fellow sours and turns to curds and whey come on so fast)—shall I go and throw the rennet of an appointment into my morning milk? Now, as foryou,youhave a different song to sing altogether; you are half a man of office already, and you are married into the bargain. Ah! it will beat all ‘Bremish Contributions to the Pleasures of Wit and Understanding;’ it will be a business far beyond every existing comic opera, and every funny novel that ever was written, when I go back to Kuhschnappel with you, and you make your will and depart this life. And then when, after we have paid you the last honours, you jump up again (in a good deal of a hurry) and take yourself off to receive greater honours still; not to enter into the bliss of the departed so much as to become abonâ fidelive Inspector; not to appear before a tribunal, but to take your seat upon one yourself. Joke upon joke wherever we turn! I can’t quite seeallthe consequences of it yet, or only in a very half-and-half sort of way; the burial club will have to pay your afflicted widow (you can pay them back again when you’re in cash). Death will fop off your ring-finger, all swollen with the betrothal ring. Your widow will be able to marry anybody she pleases (yourself if she likes), and so will you.”Here, all of a sudden, Leibgeber slapped his leg forty times running, and cried, “Ey! Ey! Ey! Ey! Ey! I can hardly wait till you’re fairly dead and off the hooks; only think of this, your death may make two women widows instead of one. I will persuade Nathalie to insure herself a pension of 200 dollars a year, payable on your death, in the Royal Prussian Provident Widows’ Fund[63](you can pay them it back again as soon as you get your money). When your widow that is to be gives the Venner the sack,youmust privately provideherwith a sack of breadfruit. And supposing you really could never pay them back, and were to die in sober earnest,Ishould take care that their treasury was none the worse for it as soon as I was in funds again.” For Leibgeber lived in a constant mysterious state of intermittent fever between riches and poverty (which he has never explained), or, to use his own expression, between the inspiration and expiration of that breath of life (Aura Vitalis) called money. Any other but this man, who played his game of life with such a dashing boldness, whose blazing fire for the true, the right, and the unselfish, had gleamed upon the advocate for so many a year as if from a lighthouse-tower, would have startled Siebenkæs, particularly in his capacity of lawyer, or have made him very angry, instead of over-persuading him. But Leibgeber thoroughly saturated him, nay, burnt him through and through with the etherial playfulness of his humour, and hurried him resistlessly on to the commission of a mimic deception, which had no aim of selfish untruthfulness or deceit.Firmian, however, notwithstanding his intoxication of mind, retained sufficient control over himself to think, at least, of the risk which Leibgeber would run in this transaction. “Suppose,” said he, “anybody should come across my dearrealHeinrich (whose name I steal) in the vicinity of me, a coiner of false names, what then?“Nobody ever will,” said Heinrich, “for as soon as you have re-assumed your own canonical name of Leibgeber, and given up ‘Firmian Stanislaus,’ which was conferred upon me at such a stormy baptismal font (and Heaven grant you may do so!), I shall, under names altogether unheard of—(perhaps, indeed, that I may have the gratification of being able to keep 365 name-days in the course of the year, I shall take every name in the calendar, one after the other)—I shall throw myself off the dry land (under these names or some of them) into the great ocean, and propel myself with my dorsal, ventral, and caudal fins (and any others I may have besides), through the waves and the billows of life towards the thick, muddy sea of death; so that ’twill probably be many a day before we meet again.”He gazed fixedly towards the sun, then sinking in glory beyond Bayreuth; his motionless eyes shone with a moister sheen, and he continued, more slowly, thus: “Firmian, the Almanac says this is St. Stanislaus’ Day; it is your name-day, and mine, and the death-day of that wandering, migratory name, because you will have to give it up after your mock death. I, poor devil as I am, would fain be serious to-day—for the first time this many a long year. Go you home, alone, through the village of Johannes; I shall go by the alley; we’ll meet again at the inn. By Heaven! everything is so beautiful here, and so rose-coloured, that one would think the Hermitage was a piece of the sun. Don’t be very long, though!”But a sharp pang of pain shot, with swelling folds, athwart Heinrich’s face, and he averted that image of sorrow and his blinded eyes—(which were full of radiance, and of water, too)—and marched rapidly off past the spectators, looking as if at something very far away with a face of apparent attention.Firmian, alone, with tearful eyes, fronted the gentle sunlight dissolving into varied tints over the face of the green-hued world. Close beneath the sun-fire the deep gold-mine of an evening cloud was falling in drops upon the hill-tops which lay under it; the wandering shifting gold of the evening sky lay, all transparently, upon the yellow-green buds and red and white hill-tops, whilst a great, grand, immeasurable smoke, as if of an altar, cast a strange, magic reflection—all shifting, distant, translucent hues—athwart the hills. The hills and the happy earth, reflecting the sun as it sank, seemed to be receiving him in their arms, and taking him into their embrace. But at the moment when the sun dipped wholly beneath the earth, there came (as it were) the angel of a higher light into this gleaming world (which seemed, to Firmian’s tearful eyes, to tremble like some flickering fiery meteor of the air); this angel advanced, flashing like day, into the midst of the night-torch-dance of the living, who, at his coming, turned pale, and halted still. But, as Firmian dried his eyes, the sun set, the earth grew stiller and paler yet, and night, dewy and wintry, came forth from the woods.But that melted heart of his longed for its fellows, and for all whom it knew and loved; it throbbed insatiate in this lonely prison-cell, our life; it yearned to love all humanity. Ah! the soul which has had to give up much, or has lost much, is too, too wretched on such an evening as this.In a blissful, tranced reverie, Firmian went his way through the blossomy fragrance, among the American flowers which open to the sky ofournight, through the closed meadows (chambers of sleep), and under dew-dropping flowers. The moon stood on the pinnacle of the heavenly temple in the midday effulgence which the sun cast up to her from the deeps beneath the earth and her evening-blushes. As Firmian passed through the leaf-hidden village of Johannes (where the houses were all scattered about in a great orchard), the evening bells from the distant hamlets were lulling the slumbering spring to sleep with cradle-songs. Æolian harps, breathed on by zephyrs, seemed to be sending forth their tones from out the evening-red, their melodies flowed softly on into the wide realm of sleep, and there took the form of dreams. Firmian’s heart, moved to its very centre, yearned for love—and for very longing he felt impelled to press his flowers into the white hands of a pretty child in Johannes—just that he mighttoucha human hand.Go, dear Firmian, with that softened heart of yours, to your deeply-moved friend, whose inner being, too, stretches its arms out towards its likeness; for, to-day, you are nowhere so happy as together. When Firmian entered their common chamber (which, was dark save for the glow of the red twilight in the west), Heinrich turned to meet him; they fell silently into each other’s arms and forgot all the tears which burned within them, even those of joy. Their embrace ended, but their silence did not. Heinrich threw himself on his bed, in his clothes, and covered himself up. Firmian sank upon the other bed and wept there, with closed lids. After an hour or two of excited fancy, heated by visions and by pangs of pain, a soft light fell upon his burning eyelids; he opened them, and there hung the pale, glowing moon over against his window. He rose up; but when he saw his friend standing pale and motionless, like a shadow cast by the moon upon the wall—and suddenly there came up from a neighbouring garden (like a nightingale’s voice awaking), Rust’s melody to the words—“’Tis not for this earthly landThat Friendship weaves her holy band”—he fell back under the load of bitter memory; an emotion, too great to bear, a spasm, closed his sad eyes, and he said, in hollow accents,“Heinrich! oh believe in immortality. How can we love, if we perish!”“Peace, peace!” said Heinrich. “To-day I am keeping my name-day, and that is enough; for man, certainly, has no birth-day, and, consequently, no death-day either.”

THE FLIGHT OUT OF EGYPT—THE GLORIES OF TRAVEL—THE UNKNOWN—BAYREUTH—BAPTISM IN A STORM—NATHALIE AND THE HERMITAGE—THE MOST IMPORTANT CONVERSATION IN ALL THIS BOOK—AN EVENING OF FRIENDSHIP.

Once, in the Easter week, when Firmian came home from a half-hour’s pleasure-trip full of forced marches, Lenette asked him why he had not come back sooner, because the postman had been with a great, enormous packet, and had said that the husband must sign the receipt for it himself. In a small establishment like Siebenkæs’ an occurrence such as this ranks among the world’s greatest events, or the principal revolutions in its history. The moments of waiting lay on their souls like cupping-glasses and drawing plasters. At length the postman, in his yellow uniform, put an end to the bitter-sweet hemp beating of their arteries. Firmian acknowledged the receipt of fifty dollars, while Lenette asked the postman who had sent them, and where they came from. The letter commenced thus:—

“My dear Siebenkæs,

“I have received your ‘Evening Paper’ and ‘Devil’s Selections’ all safely. The rest by word of mouth.

“Postscript.

“But listen! If the future course of my waltz of life is a matter of the slightest interest to you—if you care in the least degree about my happiness, my plans, or ideas—if it is anything to you but a matter of the supremest indifference that I frank you as far as Bayreuth, providing you with board, lodging, and travelling expenses all on account of a project whose yarn the spinning-mills of the future must either manufacture into gin-snares and gallows-ropes (for my life), or else into rope-ladders and best bower anchor-cables—if this, and other matters more momentous still, have the smallest power over you, Firmian, for heaven’s sake, on with a pair of boots and start!”

“And, by thy holy friendship!” said Siebenkæs, “I will on with a pair, though the bolt of apoplexy should flash out of the blue sky of Swabia, and strike me down beneath a cherry-tree in full blossom. Nothing shall prevent me now!”

He kept his word, for in six days from thence we find him, at eleven o’clock at night, ready for his journey, with clean linen on his back, and in his pockets—with a hat-cover on his head (secretly freighted and stuffed with an old soft hat)—his newest boots (the antediluvian pair s relieved from duty, being left behind in garrison)—and a tower-clock, borrowed from Peltzstiefel, in his pocket—and fresh bathed, shaven, and kempt, standing by his wife and friend—both of whom kept their eyes fixed, with a gladsome, courteous watchfulness upon the departing traveller only, and did not, for the time being, look at all at one another. He took his leave of the pair while it was still night, being minded to pass the rest of it in his arm chair (of many sorrows), and be off about three o’clock, while Lenette should still be snoring. He committed to the Schulrath the office of treasurer-in-chief of the widow’s fund to his grass-widow, and the managership, or, at least, the “leading business,” of his miniature Covent Garden full of Gay’s Beggar’s Operas, the theatrical journal whereof I am here writing for the edification of a full half of the world. “Lenette,” he said, “when you want any counsel, apply to the counsellor here; he is going to do me the favour to come and see you very often indeed.” Peltzstiefel made the most solemn promises to come every day. Lenette did not go down stairs to the door with the Schulrath when he went away, as she usually did, but remained above, and drawing her hand out of her replenished money-bag (the starved stomachic coats of which had hitherto been rubbing together), snapped it to. It is not of sufficient importance to be recorded that Siebenkæs asked her to put out the light, and go to her bed, and that he gave her charming face his long parting kiss, and said good night, and took the tender farewell, almost within the Eden-gate of the land of dreams with that redoublement of fondness with which we take our leave of those we love, and greet them when we come back to them again.

The watchman’s last call at length drew him from his sleeping chair out into the starlight, breezy morning; but, first, he crept once more into the bed-room to the rose-maiden dreaming there, warm and happy, pulled the window to (for there was a cool air from it falling upon her unprotected breast), and would not suffer his lips to touch her in an awakening kiss. He gazed at her by the light of the stars and early blush of dawn, till he turned his eyes away (fast growing dim) at the thought, “perhaps I may never see her again.”

As he passed through the sitting-room, her distaff seemed to look at him as if it were a thing of life; it was wrapped in broad bands of coloured paper (which she had put on it because she had not got silk); and there was her spinning-wheel, too, which she used to work at in the dark mornings and evenings when there was not light enough for sewing. As he pictured her to himself working industriously at them while he was away, every wish of his heart cried out, “Ah, poor darling! may all go well with her, always, whether I ever come back to her or not.”

This thought of thelast timegrew more vivid still when he was out in the open air, and felt a slight giddiness produced, in the physical part of his head, by agitation and broken sleep, as well as natural regret at the sight of his home receding from view, and the town growing dimmer, and the foreground changing into background, and the disappearance of all the paths and heights on which he had so often walked a little life into his benumbed heart, frozen by the past winter. The little leaf whereon, like a leaf roller, or miner-worm, he had been crawling and feeding, was falling now to earth behind him, a skeleton leaf.

But the first spot of foreign, unfamiliar soil, as yet unmarked by any “Station of his Passion,” drew, like a serpent-stone, an acrid drop or two of sorrow-poison out of his heart.

And now the solar flames shot higher and higher up upon the enkindled morning clouds, till, at length, hundreds of suns rose in an instant in the sky, in the streams and pools, and in the dew-cups of the flowers, while thousands of varied colours went flowing athwart the face of earth, and one bright whiteness broke from the sky.

Fate plucked away most of the yellow, faded leaves from Firmian’s soul, as gardeners remove those of plants in spring. His giddiness diminished rather than otherwise as he went on; the walking did it good. As the sun rose in heaven, another, a super-earthly sun, rose in his soul. In every valley, in every grove, on every rising ground, he broke and cast away a ring or two of the chrysalis-case of wintry life and trouble (which had been clinging so tightly to him), and unfolded his moist upper and nether wings, and let the breeze of May waft him away, on four outspread pinions, up into the bright air among the butterflies, but higher than they, and over loftier flowers.

And then with what a burst of power the life within him began, under this new impetus, to boil and seethe, as, issuing from a diamond-mine of a valley all shade and dewdrops, he walked a pace or two up through the heaven-gate of the spring. It was as if some great earthquake had upheaved a new-created flowery plain, all dripping from the ocean, stretching further than the eye could reach, all rich in youthful powers and impulses. The fire of earth glowed beneath the roots of this great hanging garden, and the fire of heaven flamed above it burning the colours into the trees and flowers. Between the white mountains, as between porcelain towers, stood the bright tinted, flowery slopes like thrones for the fruit goddesses. And all over the face of this great camp of gladness, the cups of the flowers and the heavy dewdrops were pitched, like peopled tents. The earth teemed with young broods, and sprouting grasses, and countless little hearts; and heart after heart, life after life, burst forth into being from out the warm brooding-cells of Mother Nature—burst forth with wings, or silken threads, or delicate feelers—and hummed, and sucked, and smacked its lips and sang. And for every one of these countless honeysucking trunks a cup of gladness had long since been filled and ready.

In this great market-place of this living city of the sun, so full of glory and sounding life, the pet child of the infinite Mother stood solitary—gazing, with bright and happy eyes, delighted, around him into all its innumerable streets. But his eternal Mother wore her veil of immeasurable immensity, and it was only the warmth which pierced to his heart which told him that he was lying upon her breast. Firmian reposed from this two hours’ intoxication of heart in a peasant’s hut. The foaming spirit of a cup of joy like this went quicker to the heart of a sick man such as he than to those of the commoner run of sufferers.

When he went out again the glory had sobered down into brightness, and his enthusiasm into simple happiness. Every red ladybird fluttering on its way, every red church-roof, and every sparkling stream as it glittered and glistened with dancing stars, shed joyous lights and brilliant colours upon his soul. When he heard the cries of the charcoal burners in the wood, the resounding cracking of whips, and the crash of falling trees, and then, when coming out into the open, he saw the white châteaux and roads standing out against the dark-green background like constellations and milky ways, and above the shining cloud specks in the deep blue sky; while lights flashed and darted everywhere, now down from trees, now up from streams, now athwart saws in the distance—there was no such thing as a foggy corner left in his soul, nor a single spot in it all unpenetrated by the spring sunshine: the moss of gnawing, corroding care, which can grow only in damp shade, fell from his bread-trees and trees of liberty out here in the glad, free air, and his soul could not but join in the great chorus of flying and humming creatures which was rising all round him, singing, “Life is beautiful, and youth is lovelier still; but spring is loveliest of all.”

The bygone winter lay behind him like the dark, frozen South Pole; the royal burgh of Kuhschnappel like some deep, dreary school-dungeon with dripping walls. The only spot in it over which broad, gladsome sunbeams were intertwining was his own home, and he pictured to himself Lenette in that home as commander-in-chief, free to talk, cook, and wash at her own sweet will, and with her head (and hands, too) full all day long of the delight that was coming in the evening. He was glad from the very depths of his heart that, in that little egg-shell of hers, that sulphur-hut and chartreuse, she should enjoy the glory and brightness which that angel Peltzstiefel would bring with him into her St. Peter’s prison. “Ah! in God’s name,” thought he, “may she be as happy as I am—nay, and happier, too, if that be possible.”

The more villages he came to, with their troupes of strolling players (of inhabitants), the more did life in general seem to assume a theatrical guise—his past troubles were transformed into leading parts in the drama, or Aristotelian problems—his clothes into stage costumes—his new boots becamecothurna—and his purse a theatre treasury—while a delicious stage-recognition was awaiting him in the arms of his beloved Henry.

About half-past three in the afternoon, in a Swabian village, whose name he did not inquire, his whole soul melted of a sudden to tears, so that he was completely astonished at the unlooked-for and rapidattendrissement. His surroundings at the time would have rather led him to anticipate a contrary effect. He was standing by an old thorn-tree, rather crooked, and dead at the top; the village women were on the green washing their clothes, which glistened in the sunlight, and throwing down chopped eggs and nettles to feed the downy, yellow goslings; a gentleman’s gardener was clipping a hedge, while a herd-boy was summoning his sheep (clipped already fortheirpart) round the thorn-tree, with hiscornemuse. It was all so youthful, so pretty, so Italian! The beautiful May had half (or wholly) unclad everything and everyone—the sheep, the geese, the women, the shepherd-minstrel, the hedger, and his hedge....

Why was he thus moved to tenderness in this gladsome and smiling scene? Partly because he had been so happy all day, but chiefly by the shepherd bassoonist calling his flock together with that stage instrument of his beneath the thorn. Firmian had helped a shepherd of this sort, with a crook and a reed-pipe, to drive his own father’s sheep home hundreds of times when he was a boy; and the tones of theRanz des Vachesbrought back in an instant his own rose-coloured childhood—it arose from out its dew of the morning, its bowers of budding blossoms and sleeping flowers, and stood before him in heavenly guise, and smiled in all its own innocence dressed in its thousand hopes, saying, “Behold me! see how lovely I am; we used to play together, you and I; how much I used to give you!—grand kingdoms, broad meadows, and gold, and a great, endless Paradise beyond the hills. But it seems you have nothing left now. And how pale you are, and worn! Come and play with me again!”

Who is there amongst us to whom Music has not brought back his childhood a thousand times? She comes and says, “Are not the rosebuds blown yet which I gave you?” Yes, yes, they are blown; they were white roses, though!

The evening made his joy-flowers close, folding their petals together above their nectaries; and an evening dew of melancholy fell ever heavier and thicker upon his soul as he went on his way. Just before sunset he came to a village; I am sorry to say I cannot remember whether it was Honbart, or Houstein, or Jaxheim; but of this I am pretty certain, that it was one of the three, because it was near the River Jagst, and in Anspach, on the borders of Ellwangen. His night-quarters lay smoking down in the valley before him. Before going on into them he lay down on the hill-side beneath a tree, whose branches were the cathedral chancel of a choir of singing creatures. Not far from him gleamed the trembling tinsel of a piece of water, glittering in the evening sun; and above him the golden leaves and the white blossoms rustled like grasses waving over flowers. The cuckoo (always her own sounding-board and multiplying echo) talked to him from the tree-top in mournful tones of sorrow; the sun was gone; the shadows were throwing thick veils of crape over the brightness of the day. He asked himself, “Whatis my Lenette doing now? Of whom is she thinking? Who is with her?” And here there fell about his heart, like a band of ice, the thought, “Ah! butIhave no loved one whose hand I can clasp!”

After drawing to himself a vivid picture of the tender, delicate, beautiful, woman whom he had so often invoked, but never met—to whom he would have given and sacrificed—oh! so gladly—so much! not only his heart and his life, but his every wish, his every whim—he went down the hill with streaming eyes, which he strove in vain to dry; but, at all events, any kind womanly heart (among the readers of this tale) which has loved in vain, or to its own detriment, will forgive him these burning tears, knowing, from sad personal experience, how the soul seems to journey on through a desolate wilderness, where the deathly Samiel wind blows ceaselessly, while lifeless forms lie scattered around, dashed to earth by the blast, their arms breaking from their crumbling trunks when the living touches them in act to clasp them to his own warm heart. But ye, in whose clasp so many a heart has grown cold, chilled by inconstancy or by the frost of death—ye should not mourn so bitterly as do those lonely souls who have neverlost, because they have neverfound; who yearn for that immortal and eternal love of which even the mortal and transient reflex has never been vouchsafed to bless them.

Firmian carried with him into his night-quarters a tranquil, though a tender, heart, which healed itself in dreams. When he looked up from his slumbers, the constellations, set in his window as in a picture-frame, twinkled lovingly before his bright and happy eyes, and beamed upon him the astrological prophecy of a happy morrow.

He fluttered, with the earliest lark, up out of the furrow of his bed, with as many trills as he, and quite as much energy. That day, fatigue plucking the bird-of-paradise wings from his fancy, he could not quite get out of the territory of Anspach. The day after, he reached Bamberg, leaving on the right hand Nürnberg—that and itsPays CoutumiersandPays de Droit écrit. His path led him from one paradise to another. The plain seemed to be one great mosaic of gardens; the hills seemed to crouch closer to the earth, as if to let men the more readily climb up upon their backs and humps. The groves of deciduous trees were like garlands, twined and placed to adorn Nature on some great festal day; and the setting sun often glowed through the trellis-work of some leafy balustrade on a hill-side, like a purple apple in some perforated fruit-vase. In one valley one longed to take one’s mid-day sleep; in another, one’s breakfast; in this stream, to see the moon reflected when she stood in the zenith; to see her rise behind this group of trees; to see the sun rise out of that green trellised bed of trees at theStreitberg.

When he arrived the next day at Streitberg, where all those delights could be indulged in at once, he might easily have seen the top of the spire of Bayreuth put on the blushing tints of the evening Aurora—unless he was a much worse walker than his historian; however, he did not care to do so. He said to himself, “I should be an ass were I to go rushing, all dog-tired and dried up as I am, upon the first hour of a delicious reunion and meeting of this sort; neither he (Leibgeber) nor I would get a wink of sleep; and what should we have time to talk about at this hour in the evening? No, no, better wait, and get there the first thing in the morning, about six o’clock, and so have the whole day before us for our millennium.”

Accordingly he passed the night in Fantaisie, an artificial pleasure, rose, and flower-valley, half a mile from Bayreuth. I find it a very hard and difficult matter to reserve the erection of my paper model of this Seifersdorf miniature valley (which I should so much like to introduce at this point), until I find a roomier place for it than the present; however, I can’t help it, and should I not find such a place, there is sure to be ample space in the blank pages at the end of the book.

Firmian started, then, in company with a body of bats and beetles—the advanced guard of a beautiful bright day—and bringing up the rear (so to speak) of the people of Bayreuth, who had just finished their Sunday and Feast of the Ascension (it was the 7th of May): and he walked so late that the moon, in her first quarter, was casting deep, strong shadows of the blossoms and branches upon the greensward. Thus late in the evening, then, Firmian climbed a height from whence he could look down, with tears of joy, to Bayreuth—where the beloved brother of his soul was waiting for him and thinking of him—as it lay softly veiled in the bridal night of spring, and broidered over with shining flakes of Luna’s radiance. I can affirm in his name with a “Verily” that he nearly did whatI shouldhave done myself; that is to say,I, with a heart welling up in such a warm sort of manner ashiswas, and on a night all so adorned and pranked out with gold and silver, should have made but one bound into the Sun Hotel, and into my Leibgeber’s arms. However, he went back again into his odour-breathing Capua (Fantaisie), and there, in the brief intervening space of time between his return and supper and evening prayer time, he met—beside a dried-up water-basin or fish-pond, peopled by a race of deities transformed into stone—he met with nothing less than an exceedingly charming adventure. I proceed to give an account of it.

Beside the wall which surrounded the little lake in question, there was a lady standing; she was dressed all in black except her veil, which was white; she had a bouquet of faded flowers in her hand, and was turning it over with her fingers. She was looking towards the west, that is to say, away from him, and seemed to be contemplating partly the confused mass of stoneSuisseries, and the coral-reef of sea-horses, tritons, and so on, and partly a temple, in artificial ruins, which was close by. As he passed slowly on he saw, by a side glance, that she threw a flower, not so muchatasoverhim, as if this sign of exclamation were meant to rouse a pre-occupied person from hisreverie. He looked round a little, just to show that he was really awake and observant, and went up to the glass-door of the artificially-ruined temple, in order to linger a little longer in the vicinity of this enigma. Inside the temple, facing him, there was a mirrored pillar, which reflected all the foreground and middle distance (including the fair unknown) in the green perspective of a long background. Firmian saw, in the mirror, the lady throw her bouquet at him bodily, and then roll an orange (which would not fly so far as the flowers) towards his feet. He turned round with a smile. A soft voice cried in an eager, hasty way, “Don’t you know me?” He said, “No;” and ere he had added, more slowly, “I am a stranger,” the unknown Lady Abbess had drawn near to him, and lifted the Moses veil rapidly from her face, and asked, in a louder tone, “Don’t you,now?” And a female head which might have been sawn from the shoulders of the Vatican Apollo (only softened by some eight or ten feminine traits, and a narrower brow) glowed upon him like some bust illumined by the flare of a torch. But, on his repeating that he was a stranger, and when she examined him more closely, and without her veil, and let her gauze portcullis down again (which movements took altogether about as long as one beat of the pendulum of an astronomical clock), she turned away saying, “I beg your pardon,” in a tone which expressed more womanly annoyance than embarrassment.

A very little thing would have set him off to follow her in a mechanical sort of manner. He immediately set about adorning all Fantaisie with plaster-casts of her head (instead of the stone goddesses)—of her head, which had but three pleonasms in the face of it—too much colour in the cheeks, too much curve in the nose, and too much wild fire (or rather material for kindling it) in the eyes. “That is the sort of head,” he thought, “which would be well in its place in an opera-box, beside the sparkling one of some royal bride (ay, and hold its own there), and might contain all the wisdom it might deprive—other people of.”

One carries a magic adventure such as this into one’s dreams with one, for it is like a dream itself. The month of May now stuck in little flower-sticks to all Firmian’s drooping, trembling, joy-flowers (as she had done to Nature’s), and lightly bound them to them. Ah! with what brightness do even little joys beam upon the soul when it stands on some spot all darkened by clouds of sorrow—as stars shine out in the empty sky when we look up at it from a cellar or deep well.

On the exquisite morning which followed, the earth rose with the sun. Siebenkæs had his friend of all time in his head and heart more than the unknown of yesterday; although, at the same time, he took care that his path should lead him by the ocean, and the shell out of which that Venus had arisen—for mere curiosity’s sake—which led to no result. And so he waded away through the moist radiance and cloudy vapour of the glittering silver-mine, tearing down in his passage the gossamer-wreaths all behung with seed-pearls of dew which hung upon the flowers; brushing (in his eagerness to reach his Olympus of yesterday) the chilled butterflies and dew-drops from off the branches, all a-flutter with the insect swarms (the key-board of a harmonica framed in flowers). He climbed to his place in the great “Auditorium” all delight at length. Bayreuth lay behind a glowing drop-curtain of mist. The sun (in his character of “king” of this drama) stood on a hill-top, and looked down at this many-tinted curtain, which took fire and blazed, while the morning breezes caught and bore away its fluttering, sparkling, tinder fragments, and scattered them over the gardens and the flowers. And soon nothing save the sun was shining; nothing round him now except the sky. Amid this radiance Siebenkæs made his entry into his dear friend’s camp of recreation and head-quarter city, whereof all the buildings looked as if they were a glittering, solider sort of air-and-magic castles fallen down from the æther. It was strange, but, on noticing certain window-curtains drawn in (which the street breeze had been toying with), he could scarcely help feeling certain that it was the “Unknown” of yesterday who was doing it, although at that time of the morning (it was barely eight o’clock) a Bayreuth lady would have as little got through her flower-sleep as the red mouse-ear, or the Alpine hawksbeard.[62]His heart beat quicker at every street. It was quite a pleasure to him to lose his way a little, as to some extent delaying and adding to his happiness. At length he attained his perihelion—that is to say—reached the Sun (Hotel), where was the metallic sun which had attracted to ithiscomet, as the astronomical sun does comets in general. He inquired the number of Leibgeber’s room; they said it was number 8, at the back of the house, but that he had gone that day on a trip into Swabia, unless he was still upstairs. Fortunately there just then came in from the street an individual who testified to the correctness of the latter hypothesis, and wagged his tail at sight of Siebenkæs—Leibgeber’s dog to wit.

To storm up the stairs, to burst open the door of joy, to fall upon the beloved breast, was the work of a single instant; and then the barren minutes of life passed unseen and unheard by the close, silent union of two human creatures, who lay clinging together on the waters of life, like two shipwrecked brothers floating, embracing and embraced, on the chill waves, with nothing left them save the heart they die upon....

As yet they had not said a word to one another. Firmian, whom a longer continuance of troubles had made the weaker of the two, wept without disguise at sight of the face of his newly recovered friend. Heinrich’s features were drawn as if by pain. They both had their hats still on. Leibgeber, in his embarrassment, could think of nothing to hold on to except the bell-rope. The waiter came running in. “Oh! it’s nothing!” said Leibgeber; “except, by the way, that I shan’t go out now. Heaven grant,” he added, “that we may get fairly into the thick of a long talk! Drag me into one, brother!”

He had no difficulty in beginning one with the pragmatic detailing of theNouvelle du Jour—or ratherde la Nuit—in short, the town (or, more properly speaking, the country) news of what had taken place on the previous day in the vicinity of the veil of the beautifulJe ne sais quoi.

“I know her” (Leibgeber answered), “as I know my own pulse; but I don’t intend to say anything whatever about her just now. I should be obliged to sit still and wait here for such a time. Put the whole thing off till we are sitting in Abraham’s warm bosom in the Hermitage, which is the second heaven of Bayreuth, next to Fantaisie,—for Fantaisie is the first heaven, and the whole country is the third.”

They then made an ascent into heaven in every fresh street they came to, and also in every subject of conversation which they fell upon. “You shall knock my head off its stalk like a poppy,” said Leibgeber, on Firmian’s betraying (I regret to say) as great a curiosity as the reader’s own to know the secret, “before I transformmymysteries intoyours, either to-day, or to-morrow, or the day after that. Thus much I will tell you, that your ‘Selections from the Devil’s Papers’ (your ‘Evening Journal’ contains matter more morbific) are perfectly divine, and very heavenly indeed, and not at all bad, and by no means without beauties; but, on the whole (let us say), passable enough.” Leibgeber then told him how delighted he was with the work, and how it surprised him that he, a lawyer in a little country town, with nobody in it but a parcel of shopkeepers and juristic souls, with a sprinkling of higher officialities, should have managed to rise in these satires to such a freedom and purity of art; and, indeed, whenIfirst read the ‘Selections from the Devil’s Papers,’ I said, myself now and then, “I am sureIcouldn’t have written anything of the kind in Hof in Voigtland, and Ihavewritten one or two pretty good things there, too.”

Leibgeber placed a crown on the top of the laurel wreath by declaring that it was much easier for him to laugh at the world aloud, and with both lips, than under his breath and with the pen, and this in accordance with well-tried rules of art. Siebenkæs was beyond himself with delight at his friend’s praise. But let no one grudge a pleasure of this sort to our advocate, or to any other worker who, in solitude, and without a single soul to give him a word of praise, has gone steadfastly forward along the path of art which he has honestly chosen, unsupported, unassisted by the smallest encouragement of any kind, whom, at last, on reaching the goal, the fragrance of a leaf or two of laurel from a friend’s hand, penetrates, strengthens, and recompenses, with an aroma as of Araby the Blest. If even the far-famed and the self-satisfied stand in need of a little of the warmth which is derived from other people’s opinions, how much more the diffident and the unknown! Ah! lucky Firmian! to what a distance in the far south-south-west did the passing thunder-storms of thy life now go drifting away. When the sun fell upon them, nothing of them was to be seen but a gentle fall of rain.

At thetable d’hôtehe observed with delight, in the case of Leibgeber, how wonderfully a constant intercourse with men and cities loosens the tongue though, at the same time, the heart puts on the bridle which has been taken from the lips. Leibgeber thought nothing of talking about himself, and this in the most humorous manner, before all sorts of grand councillors of state and chancery officials dining at the Sun—a thing which he, a cabined, cribbed, confined parish advocate would scarce have dared even after a good bottle of wine. As the discourse which he delivered on this occasion pleased the parish advocate, I shall build it into this history, and place over it the superscription—

“I think I may venture to say that of all the Christians and persons of name and title seated at this table, not one was made into one with such wonderful difficulty as I was. My mother, a native of Gascony, was on her way to Holland, by sea, from London, where she had left my father as diocesan of a German community. But, never since there has been such a thing on the face of the earth as a councillor of the German empire, did the German Ocean rage and insurge so terrifically as upon the occasion in question when it was my mother’s lot to be crossing it. Pour all hell, hissing lakes of brimstone, boiling copper, splattering devils, and all, into the cold ocean, and observe the crackling, the roaring, and the seething of the hell-flames and ocean-waves contending, till one of these hostile elements swallow up the other, and you have a faint (but, at dinner-time, a sufficient) idea of the infernal storm in which I came upon the sea, and into the world. When I tell you that the main braces, the topsail sheets, and the main topgallant stays (to say nothing of the crossjack braces and fore topgallant halyards, which were in a worse state still)—and when, moreover, the mizen topsail, and the foretop mast staysail rigging, and the flying jib (to say nothing of the spanker)—when things so accustomed to the sea as these (I say) felt as if theirlast hourwas come, it was a real ocean miracle that a creature so tender as I was at that time should have managed to commence hisfirst. I had about as much flesh on my body then as I have fat now, and may have weighed, at the outside, about four Nürnberg pounds, which (if we may credit the authority of the best anatomical theatres) is at the present moment about the weight of my brain alone. Besides which, I was the merest of beginners. I had seen absolutely nothing of the world, except this infernal gale. I was a creature, not so much offewyears as ofnoneat all (though everybody’s life commences some nine months sooner than the parish registers indicate), excessively tender and delicate—having been (in opposition to all the rules of hygiene) kept much too warm, swaddled, and coddled during these very first nine months in question, when I ought rather to have been undergoing a preparation of some kind to enable me to bear the chill atmosphere of this world. And thus, quarter-grown, a tender flower-bud, liquidly soft as first love, when I made my appearance during a storm such as was raging (I added one or two feeble squeaks, with some difficulty, to its roar), what was to be expected was, that I should be extinguished altogether, even before it calmed down. People didn’t like the idea of my going without something in the shape of a name—without some little vestige of Christianity of some kind—out of this world, which is a place whence wedocarry away even less than we bring into it with us. But the grand difficulty experienced was that ofstandinggodfather, in a rolling, plunging vessel, which pitched everything and everybody higgledy-piggledy that wasn’t made fast. The chaplain was (luckily) lying in a hammock, and he baptized down out of thence. My godfather was the boatswain, who held me for five whole minutes; but inasmuch as he couldn’t, without help, stand steady enough to enable the chaplain to touch my brow with the water without missing me, he was held by the barber’s mate, who was made fast to a marine, who was made fast to a boatswain’s mate, who was made fast to the master-at-arms, who sat upon the knee of an old bluejacket, who held on to him like grim death.

“However, neither the ship nor the child (as I afterwards ascertained) came to any detriment; but you all see, do you not, that, hard as it is for any one amid the storms of life, to become, and continue, a Christian, or to get a name—be it in a directory, in a literary gazette, in a herald’s college, or upon a medal—yet there are few who have had the same difficulty as I have had in acquiring the merefirst elementsof a name—the groundwork, the binomial root, of a Christian name, whereon, at a subsequent period, the othergreatname might be engrafted—and to get hold of a faint smattering of Christianity, as much as a catechumen and candidate as yet in a speechless and sucking condition might be capable of. There is but one thing more difficult to make; the greatest princes and heroes can only do it once in their lives—the mightiest geniuses—even the three electors of the Church, the Emperor of Germany himself, with all their united efforts, can’t do more, were they to sit for years, stamping in the mint with all the latest improvements in coining machinery.”

The whole of the company entreated him to explain what this was that was so hard to frame.

“’Tis a crown prince,” he answered, quietly; “even a reigning sovereign finds it no easy matter to produce an appanaged prince—but, let him try as he will, even in the best days of his life, he can never produce more than one specimen of a crown prince; for a Seminarist of that sort is none of your accessory-works, but the prime mover, the regulator, the striking and driving-wheel of the whole nation. On the other hand, gentry, counts, barons, chamberlains, staff-officers, and above all, common people and subjects of the altogether every-day sort—to be brief, a scurvy crew of that description—ageneratio æquivoca—can be brought into being by a prince with such wonderful ease that he creates theselusus naturæand virgin swarms, orprotoplasmata, in considerable numbers even in his earlier days, although in riper years he may not manage to turn out an heir to his throne. Yet, after so much preliminary drill, so many trial-shots, one would have taken one’s oath the other way!”

In the afternoon they paid a visit to that verdant, pleasure place, the Hermitage, and the alley leading thither seemed to their happy hearts to be a path cut through some beauteous grove of gladness. That young bird of passage, Spring, was encamped all over the plain around, her unladen floral treasures scattered about the meadows, and floating down the streams, while the birds were drawn up into air upon long sunbeams, and the world of winged creatures hovered all about in intoxication of bliss amid the exquisite scents shed abroad by kind Nature.

Leibgeber determined to pour out his heart and his secret at the Hermitage that day, and (by way of preliminary) a bottle of wine or so to begin with.

He begged and constrained Siebenkæs first of all to deliver a diary-lecture concerning his adventures by land and by water up to the present time. Firmian complied, but with discretion. Over his stomach’s barren year, over his hard times, over the (metaphorical) winter of his life (upon whose snow he had had to make his nest, icebird-like), and over all the bitter northerly wind, which drives a man toBURYhimself in the earth (as soldiers do)—over all these he passed lightly and quickly. I myself must approve of him for so doing; firstly, because a man would be none who should shed a bigger tear over wounds of poverty than a young lady drops at the piercing of her ears, for in both cases the wounds become points of suspension for jewels; secondly, because Siebenkæs would not cause his friend the slightest pain on the score of their change of names, the main source of all his hunger-springs. However, his friend knew, and sympathised with him sufficiently to consider that his pale, faded face and his sunken eyes constituted a sufficient almanac month-emblem of his frost-month or winter-picture of the snowed-up tracts of his life-road.

But when Siebenkæs came to speak of the deep and secret wounds of his soul, it was all he could do to keep back the drops of blood-water which pressed to his eyes; I mean the subject of Lenette’s hatred and love. But while he drew a very indulgent picture of her little love for him, and her great love for Stiefel, he used much brighter colours for the historical piece which he painted of her admirable behaviour to the Venner, and of that gentleman’s wickedness in general.

“As soon as you have done,” said Leibgeber, “you must allow yourself to be informed that women are notfallenangels, butFALLINGones. By all the heavens! while we stand patient, like sheep being shorn, they stick the shears oftener into our skins than into our wool. I should think of the fair sex if I were to cross the bridge of St. Angelo at Rome, for there are twelve statues of angels there, holding the implements of the Passion, each a different one; one has the nails, another the reed, another the dice, and similarly each woman has a peculiar torture-instrument of her own to apply to us poor lambs. Whom, think you, for instance now, is the Palladium of yesterday, your unknown beauty, going to tether to her bed-post with the nose-ring of a wedding-ring? But I must tell you about her. She is altogether glorious: she is poetic; full of romantic, enthusiastic admiration for the British, and for intellectual people in general (consequently for me), and lives with an aristocratic English lady, a sort of companion to Lady Craven and the Margrave at Fantaisie yonder. She has nothing, and accepts nothing; is poor and proud, daring to rashness, and pure as the day; and she signs herself ‘Nathalie Aquiliana.’ Do you know who’s going to be her husband? A horrible, burnt-out, used-up wretch—a feeble, puny creature, whose egg-shell was chipped a week or two before its time, and who now goes cheeping about our toes like a chicken with the pip; a fellow who copies Heliogabalus (who put on a new ring every day) in the matter of wedding-rings; a hop-o’-my-thumb whom I could sneeze over the North Pole (and I should like very much to do it), and whom I have the less need to give you any description of, inasmuch as you have just givenmeone of him yourself: when I tell you his name, you will see that you know him pretty well. This magnificent creature is going to be married to the Venner Rosa von Meyern!”

Firmian fell, notfromthe clouds, but rightintothem. To make a long tale short, this Nathalie is the Heimlicher’s niece, of whom Leibgeber wrote some account in our first volume. “But, listen,” continued Leibgeber, “I will let myself be hewn and hacked into crumbs smaller than those of Poland—into clippings not big enough to cover a Hebrew vowel—if this affair comes to anything; for I am going to put a stop to it.”

Since Leibgeber (as we know) was in the habit of talking to the lady every day (his spotless soul and his bold mind having unspeakable attractions for her), all he had to do in order to break the marriage off, was simply to repeat to her what Siebenkæs had told him concerning her bridegroom elect. It was his intimacy with her, and his resemblance to Siebenkæs which had led to her mistaking Firmian for him on the evening of his arrival.

The majority of my readers will urge against me and Leibgeber the same objection which Siebenkæs brought forward—that, Nathalie’s love and marriage for money were quite out of harmony with her character, and her disregard for riches. But, in one word, all she had ever as yet seen of that gaudy flycatcher, Mr. Rosa, was his Esau’s hand, that, is to say, his writing,i. e. his Jacob’s voice; he had only written her a few irreprehensible, sentimental letters of assurance (pin-papers, stuck full of Cupid’s darts and stitching-needles), and so given guarantee of thedocumentarynobility of his heart.... The Heimlicher, moreover, had written to his niece, saying, on St. Pancrasius’ day (May 12th, that is in four days’ time), the Venner would come and present himself, and if she refused him, let her never call herself his niece again, and starve in her native village for all he cared.

But, speaking as a man of honour, I really have never had above three of Rosa’s letters in my hands for two or three minutes, and in my pocket for about an hour; and they were really not so very bad—far more moral than their author.

Just as Leibgeber said he would assume the office of consistory, and divorce Nathalie from Rosa before their marriage, she came driving up, with one or two lady friends, and got out of the carriage; but instead of going with them to where the company were assembling, she went away alone, by a solitary side walk, to the so-called Temple. In her haste she had not noticed her friend Leibgeber sitting opposite the stables. I ought to explain here that when the Bayreuthians go to the Hermitage they have been in the habit, ever since the days of the Margrave, of sitting in a little wood, all breezes and cool shade, in front of the extensive farm-buildings and stables, but having the loveliest of prospects just at their backs, which they could easily substitute for the blank wall upon which they feast their gaze, by merely getting up and going a little way out of the wood on either side.

Leibgeber told Siebenkæs he could take him to her in a moment, as she would be sure to sit down in the temple (as she usually did) to enjoy the enchanting view of the city towers and the hills, as they lay in the light of the evening sun beyond the shrubberies. He added that, unfortunately, she cared too little about appearances; andwouldgo to the summer-house all by herself, greatly to the distress of the English lady, who, after the manner of her countrywomen, didn’t like going anywhere alone, and wouldn’t trust herself to go near even a gentleman’s clothes cupboard without an Insurance Company and Bible Society of women with her to protect her. He said he had it on good authority that a British lady never permitted theideaof amanto enter her head without at once surrounding it with the number of ideas ofwomen, necessary to bridle and restrain him, should he begin behaving (in the four chambers of her brain) with that amount of freedom which he might employ ifat homethere.

They found Nathalie in the open temple, with some papers in her hand. “I bring you our author of the ‘Selections from the Devil’s Papers,’” said Leibgeber, “which I see you are just reading; will you allow me to introduce him to you?” After a passing blush at having mistaken Siebenkæs for Leibgeber, in Fantaisie, she said to him, very kindly and pleasantly, “It would take very little to make me mistake you for your friend again, Mr. Siebenkæs; and you seem almost exactly alike in mind, as well as in body. Your satire is often exactly like his; it is only your graver ‘Appendices’ which I was just reading, and which I like very much, that seem to me as if they hadn’t been written by him.”

I have not at present time to make—(for Leibgeber’s unauthorized communication to one friend of the papers of another)—excuses occupying long pages of print to readers who may insist upon extreme delicacy in matters of this description. Suffice it to say that Leibgeber took it for granted that every one who likedhimwould join with him in liking his friends, and that Siebenkæs (and even Nathalie) would see nothing in his unhesitatingly communicating these papers, but a mere passing on of a friendly circular letter, pre-supposing, as he did, the existence between them of a triple elective affinity.

Nathalie scanned the pair—particularly Leibgeber, whose big dog she was stroking—with a kindly and observant look of comparison, as if she were trying to find out dissimilarities between them; for, in fact, Siebenkæs seemed to her to be scarcely as like his friend as she had thought. He was taller and slighter, and younger in the face; but this was because Leibgeber, whose shoulders and chest were more strongly built, bent his strange, earnest face more forward when he talked, as if he were speaking into the earth. He himself said he neverhadlooked really young, not even at his baptism—as his baptismal certificate would prove—and wasn’t likely to grow much younger now till he arrived at his second childhood. But when Leibgeber straightened his back somewhat, and Siebenkæs bent his a little, they looked very much like one another; however, this is more a hint for the drawer-up of their passports than anything else.

Let us felicitate the Kuhschnappel lawyer on this opportunity of enjoying a few minutes’ conversation with a lady of position, and of such many-sided cultivation as even to be capable of appreciating satires. Allhewished was that a phœnix of this sort—such as, hitherto, he had only seen a pinch or so of the ashes of in actual life, or a phœnix-feather or two preserved in a book—might not take wing and disappearinstanter; but that he might be lucky enough to listen to a long talk between her and Leibgeber, as well as help to spin it out himself. But suddenly her Bayreuth friends came hurrying up to say that the fountains were just going to play, and there wasn’t a moment to be lost. The whole party, therefore, went towards the waterworks, Siebenkæs’ whole care being to keep as close as he could to the noblest of the spectatresses.

They stood by the basin, and looked at the beautiful water artifices, which, no doubt, have long since played before the reader, either on the spot, or in the pages of the various writers of travels, who have expressed themselves on the subject of them at sufficient length, and in adequate terms of laudation. All kinds of mythologic demigod-ical demibeasts spouted forth streams; and from out this world, peopled with water-gods, there spouted a crystal forest, whose descending branches, liana-like, took root again in the earth. They enjoyed for a long while the sight of this talkative, intercommingling water-world. At length the fluttering, ever-growing water-forms sank down and died; the transparent lily-stems grew shorter and shorter, as they watched them. “Why is it, I wonder?” said Nathalie to Siebenkæs, “that a waterfall lifts up one’s heart; but this dying-down of these springing jets, this visible sinking away of these grand streaming beams of water, always makes me sad and anxious? We never see any such falling in of high things in real life.”

Siebenkæs was thinking out the apt and comprehensive reply to this true and just expression of Nathalie’s feeling, when all at once she jumped into the water to rescue, with as little delay as possible, a child who had fallen in, a few steps away from her; for the water was there about waist-deep. Before the men who were present had so much asthought aboutit, she haddoneit; and she was right, for in this case rapidity without reflection was the good and true thing. She lifted the child out, and gave it to the women; but Siebenkæs and Leibgeber took her hands, and lightly raised the fiery creature (all blushes, of body and of soul) on to the bank. “What does it matter?” she said, with a smile, to the alarmed Siebenkæs, “I shall be none the worse,” and hurried away with her friends (who were all shocked into speechlessness), having first begged Leibgeber to come next evening, with his friend, to Fantaisie. “That of course I shall do,” he said; “but first of all, I am coming to see you by myself early in the morning.”

The crying need of our two friends was now to be alone with one another. Leibgeber, under the new excitement, could scarce wait to attain the birch wood, where he meant to continue their previous conversation regarding Siebenkæs’ domestic and conjugal affairs. With respect to Nathalie, he briefly pointed out to his astonished friend that what so much delighted him in her was just the unhesitating, downright straightforwardness which marked all her thoughts and actions, and her manly cheerfulness, athwart which the world, and poverty, and chances and accidents of every kind merely passed floating away, like light, shining summer clouds, never darkening her day. “Now as regards you and your Lenette,” he went on (when they reached the solitude of the little wood), as quietly as if he had been talking continuously up to that instant, “if I were in your place, I should take an alterative, and get rid of the hard gall-stone of matrimony for good and all. You will never really be able to bear the pain of the bonds of wedlock, though you scrape and scratch away at them for years to come with all your finest hair-saws and bone-saws. The Divorce Court will giveonegrand cut and tear—and there you are, free of one another for ever and ever.”

The idea of a divorce terrified Siebenkæs, although he saw very clearly that it was the only possible breaking-point for the storm-clouds of his life. He was far from grudging to Lenette either her freedom, or the marriage with Stiefel, which would infallibly result; but he felt quite sure that, however much she might wish for it, she never would consent to an enforced separation, on account of her strong regard for appearances,—also that on their road to this parting both she and he would have to pass many a bitter hour of heart-strain and nerve-fever,—and that they could hardly afford to pay for a betrothal, much less for a divorce.

It was likewise an accessory circumstance, that it was more than he could bear to think of the sight of the poor innocent soul, who had shivered at his side through so many a cold storm of life, going away for ever from his home, and from his arms—ay, and withthat handkerchiefin her hand, too!

All these considerations, with many stronger, and many weaker, he laid before his friend, finishing up with this final one: “I assure you, moreover, that if she went away from me, tag and baggage, and left me by myself in that empty room (as in a grave), and in all the blank, cleared-out spaces, where, when all’s said and done, we have sat together through so many kindly happy hours, and seen the flowers growing green about us—she never could pass by my window (while she bore my name, at all events, though no longer mine), but something within me would bid me throw myself down, and dash myself in pieces at her feet. Would it not be ten times better,” he continued in an altered tone, “to wait till I fall down upstairs in the room (or what does my giddiness mean), and be taken out of the window, and out of the world, in a better fashion? Friend Death would take his long erasing knife, and scrape my name (and other blots into the bargain) out of her marriage-lines.”

Contrary to all expectation, this seemed to make Leibgeber merrier and livelier than ever. “Do so!” he said; “it’s the very thing! Die by all means! The funeral expenses can’t possibly come to anything approaching the costs of the other kind of separation; and besides, you belong to the Burial Society.” Siebenkæs stared at him in astonishment.

He went on in a tone of the utmost indifference: “Only I must tell you it will do neither of us much good, if you dawdle a long time at your saddling and bridling, and take a year or two about your dying. I should think it much more to the purpose were you to be off to Kuhschnappel as soon as ever you can, take to your sick-bed and death-bed directly you get there; and die as quickly as ever you can manage it. And I’ll give you my reasons. For one thing your Lenette’s year of mourning would be out just before Advent, so that she would require no dispensation, if she wanted to marry Peltzstiefel before Christmas. It would suit me very well, too, for I could then disappear in the crowd, and I shouldn’t see you again for some considerable time to come. Besides, it is anything but a matter of indifference to yourself, for of course the sooner you’re appointed Inspector the better.”

“This is the very first of your jokes, dear old Henry,” said Siebenkæs, “of which I don’t understand one single word.”

Leibgeber, with a disturbed countenance, whereon a whole history of the world was legible, and which indicated, as well as gave rise to, the greatest possible anticipation of something of immense importance to come, pulled a letter from his pocket and handed it to Siebenkæs in silence. It was a letter of appointment by the Count von Vaduz, constituting Leibgeber Inspector of the Chief Bailiwick of Vaduz. He next handed him a letter in the count’s handwriting. While Firmian was reading the letter, Leibgeber brought out his pocket-diary, and calmly muttered to himself, “From the quarter-day after Whitsunday, it says, does it not? to the time when I am to enter upon my office; that is to say, from to-day—St. Stanislaus’ Day. Ah! only think of that—how odd it seems—from St. Stanislaus’ day one, two, three, four—fourweeks and a half.”

Firmian, much pleased, was handing him back the letter, but he wouldn’t take it, but pressed it back to him, saying, “I read it long ago, long beforeyoudid. Put it in your pocket.”

And here Heinrich, in a burst of solemn, impassioned, humoristic enthusiasm, knelt down in the middle of a long narrow path, which looked between the trees of the thick grove like some subterranean passage (the weathercock of the distant steeple ended off the perspective of it as if with a turnstile)—knelt down facing the west, and gazed through the long green hollow way upon the evening sun, sinking earthward like some brilliant meteor, its broad beams darting down upon the long green path, like forest-water gilt by the spring; he gazed fixedly at it, and his eyes all blinded (and lighted up) by its sheen, he began to speak as follows:—

“If there be a good spirit near me, or a guardian angel of mine or of his, or ifthyspirit surviveth still thine ashes, oh! my old,kind, loving father, so deep in thy grave, then draw near, oh! thou dim and ancient shade, and grant to thy stupid, silly son (still limping about here in this fluttering, ragged shirt of a body) this one, one favour, the first and the last, and enter into Firmian’s heart, and (while giving it a good sound shaking) address it as follows: ‘Die, Firmian, for my son’s sake, though it be but in jest and in appearance only. Throw away your own name, go in his (which was yours before) to Vaduz as Inspector, and give yourself out to be him. My poor son here (like thatJoujou de Normandiewhereon he is sticking, which circles round the sun upon strings of sunbeams) would fain go whirling aboutuponsaid Joujou himself for a little while longer. Before all you parrots the ring of eternity is still hanging, and you can hop on to it and rock upon it if you will. But he does not see the ring; don’t deprive the poor Poll-parrot of the pleasure of hopping about on the perch of this earth till, when he has wound his life’s thread some sixty times about its reels, the reel gives a ring and a snap, the thread breaks, and all his fun is over and done!’ Oh! kind spirit of my father, stir up my friend’s heart this day, and guide his tongue, that it may not say ‘No,’ when I ask him, ‘Will you do all this.’” Blinded by the evening sun, he felt for Firmian’s hand, crying, “Where’s your hand, dear friend? and do not say ‘No.’”

But Firmian, quite carried away by emotion (for this sudden outburst of Leibgeber’s long pent-up excitement was most contagious), speechless, and all in tears, like an evening shade, knelt down before his friend and fell on his breast, and said in a low tone (for he could do no otherwise), “I am ready to die for you a thousand deaths, any death you please: only say what death I can die for you. All I ask is, tell me plainly what you would have me do. I swear to you beforehand that I will do whatever you tell me; I swear it by your dear father’s soul. I will gladly give my life for you, and you know I have nothing but that to give.” Heinrich said, in a most unusually subdued voice, “Let’s get away in among the Bayreuthians. I certainly have an attack of hydrothorax this afternoon, or else a hot mineral spring inside my waistcoat; ’pon my word, any ordinary heart ought to have a swimming-belt on, or a scaphander, in a vapour-bath of this kind.” But up at the table under the trees, among the people come to keep the Whitsuntide fair, the great holiday and festival of spring—up there among people all happy and enjoying themselves, emotion was easier to conquer. Here Heinrich quickly unrolled the ground-plans and elevations of his castle in the air, the building grants of his Tower of Babel. To the Count von Vaduz (whose ears and heart opened and expanded to him hungrily) he had given his sacred word of honour that he would return to him as Inspector. But his idea was that his dear coadjutor and substitute,cum spe succedendi, Firmian, should take his place and personate him: Firmian, who was such a tautology of him in mind and body, that both the count, and the theory of distinctive differences itself, would have been puzzled to tell one of them from the other. Even in the worst of years the Inspectorship brought in an income of 1200 thalers; that is to say, the exact amount of Firmian’s whole inheritance (now sealed up with the law’s leaden signet); so that when Siebenkæs re-assumed his old name of Leibgeber, he would regain just what he had lost by changing it. “For,” said Leibgeber, “now that I have read your ‘Devil’s Papers,’ I can’t endure or swallow the notion of your lying fallow any longer in Kuhschnappel; sitting there in solitude, like a pelican (or an unicorn, or an unknown hermit) in the wilderness. Now, will it take you as long to think about the matter as it takes the Chief Clerk of the Chancellery there to shake the ashes out of his pipe, when I tell you that, thoughyouare a fellow who could fill any and every office in the world splendidly, there’s only one calling I can follow—that of aGrazioso; for though Iknowmore than most people, I can’t put my knowledge to any practical use except satirising, and my language is a parti-colouredLingua Franca, my head a Proteus, and I myself a delightful compilation of the devil and his grandmother. Besides, if Icoulddo anything else, Iwouldn’t. What, am I, in the very flower of my days, to stamp and neigh, like a state draught-horse, a government prisoner in the donjon-keep, the shoeing travis of some miserable office counting-house, with nothing to look at but my saddle and bridle hanging on the stable-wall, and the loveliest Parnassuses and Tempe valleys wooing the free feet of the sons of the Muses just outside! In the very years when my milk of life is inclined to throw out a little cream—(and the years when a fellow sours and turns to curds and whey come on so fast)—shall I go and throw the rennet of an appointment into my morning milk? Now, as foryou,youhave a different song to sing altogether; you are half a man of office already, and you are married into the bargain. Ah! it will beat all ‘Bremish Contributions to the Pleasures of Wit and Understanding;’ it will be a business far beyond every existing comic opera, and every funny novel that ever was written, when I go back to Kuhschnappel with you, and you make your will and depart this life. And then when, after we have paid you the last honours, you jump up again (in a good deal of a hurry) and take yourself off to receive greater honours still; not to enter into the bliss of the departed so much as to become abonâ fidelive Inspector; not to appear before a tribunal, but to take your seat upon one yourself. Joke upon joke wherever we turn! I can’t quite seeallthe consequences of it yet, or only in a very half-and-half sort of way; the burial club will have to pay your afflicted widow (you can pay them back again when you’re in cash). Death will fop off your ring-finger, all swollen with the betrothal ring. Your widow will be able to marry anybody she pleases (yourself if she likes), and so will you.”

Here, all of a sudden, Leibgeber slapped his leg forty times running, and cried, “Ey! Ey! Ey! Ey! Ey! I can hardly wait till you’re fairly dead and off the hooks; only think of this, your death may make two women widows instead of one. I will persuade Nathalie to insure herself a pension of 200 dollars a year, payable on your death, in the Royal Prussian Provident Widows’ Fund[63](you can pay them it back again as soon as you get your money). When your widow that is to be gives the Venner the sack,youmust privately provideherwith a sack of breadfruit. And supposing you really could never pay them back, and were to die in sober earnest,Ishould take care that their treasury was none the worse for it as soon as I was in funds again.” For Leibgeber lived in a constant mysterious state of intermittent fever between riches and poverty (which he has never explained), or, to use his own expression, between the inspiration and expiration of that breath of life (Aura Vitalis) called money. Any other but this man, who played his game of life with such a dashing boldness, whose blazing fire for the true, the right, and the unselfish, had gleamed upon the advocate for so many a year as if from a lighthouse-tower, would have startled Siebenkæs, particularly in his capacity of lawyer, or have made him very angry, instead of over-persuading him. But Leibgeber thoroughly saturated him, nay, burnt him through and through with the etherial playfulness of his humour, and hurried him resistlessly on to the commission of a mimic deception, which had no aim of selfish untruthfulness or deceit.

Firmian, however, notwithstanding his intoxication of mind, retained sufficient control over himself to think, at least, of the risk which Leibgeber would run in this transaction. “Suppose,” said he, “anybody should come across my dearrealHeinrich (whose name I steal) in the vicinity of me, a coiner of false names, what then?

“Nobody ever will,” said Heinrich, “for as soon as you have re-assumed your own canonical name of Leibgeber, and given up ‘Firmian Stanislaus,’ which was conferred upon me at such a stormy baptismal font (and Heaven grant you may do so!), I shall, under names altogether unheard of—(perhaps, indeed, that I may have the gratification of being able to keep 365 name-days in the course of the year, I shall take every name in the calendar, one after the other)—I shall throw myself off the dry land (under these names or some of them) into the great ocean, and propel myself with my dorsal, ventral, and caudal fins (and any others I may have besides), through the waves and the billows of life towards the thick, muddy sea of death; so that ’twill probably be many a day before we meet again.”

He gazed fixedly towards the sun, then sinking in glory beyond Bayreuth; his motionless eyes shone with a moister sheen, and he continued, more slowly, thus: “Firmian, the Almanac says this is St. Stanislaus’ Day; it is your name-day, and mine, and the death-day of that wandering, migratory name, because you will have to give it up after your mock death. I, poor devil as I am, would fain be serious to-day—for the first time this many a long year. Go you home, alone, through the village of Johannes; I shall go by the alley; we’ll meet again at the inn. By Heaven! everything is so beautiful here, and so rose-coloured, that one would think the Hermitage was a piece of the sun. Don’t be very long, though!”

But a sharp pang of pain shot, with swelling folds, athwart Heinrich’s face, and he averted that image of sorrow and his blinded eyes—(which were full of radiance, and of water, too)—and marched rapidly off past the spectators, looking as if at something very far away with a face of apparent attention.

Firmian, alone, with tearful eyes, fronted the gentle sunlight dissolving into varied tints over the face of the green-hued world. Close beneath the sun-fire the deep gold-mine of an evening cloud was falling in drops upon the hill-tops which lay under it; the wandering shifting gold of the evening sky lay, all transparently, upon the yellow-green buds and red and white hill-tops, whilst a great, grand, immeasurable smoke, as if of an altar, cast a strange, magic reflection—all shifting, distant, translucent hues—athwart the hills. The hills and the happy earth, reflecting the sun as it sank, seemed to be receiving him in their arms, and taking him into their embrace. But at the moment when the sun dipped wholly beneath the earth, there came (as it were) the angel of a higher light into this gleaming world (which seemed, to Firmian’s tearful eyes, to tremble like some flickering fiery meteor of the air); this angel advanced, flashing like day, into the midst of the night-torch-dance of the living, who, at his coming, turned pale, and halted still. But, as Firmian dried his eyes, the sun set, the earth grew stiller and paler yet, and night, dewy and wintry, came forth from the woods.

But that melted heart of his longed for its fellows, and for all whom it knew and loved; it throbbed insatiate in this lonely prison-cell, our life; it yearned to love all humanity. Ah! the soul which has had to give up much, or has lost much, is too, too wretched on such an evening as this.

In a blissful, tranced reverie, Firmian went his way through the blossomy fragrance, among the American flowers which open to the sky ofournight, through the closed meadows (chambers of sleep), and under dew-dropping flowers. The moon stood on the pinnacle of the heavenly temple in the midday effulgence which the sun cast up to her from the deeps beneath the earth and her evening-blushes. As Firmian passed through the leaf-hidden village of Johannes (where the houses were all scattered about in a great orchard), the evening bells from the distant hamlets were lulling the slumbering spring to sleep with cradle-songs. Æolian harps, breathed on by zephyrs, seemed to be sending forth their tones from out the evening-red, their melodies flowed softly on into the wide realm of sleep, and there took the form of dreams. Firmian’s heart, moved to its very centre, yearned for love—and for very longing he felt impelled to press his flowers into the white hands of a pretty child in Johannes—just that he mighttoucha human hand.

Go, dear Firmian, with that softened heart of yours, to your deeply-moved friend, whose inner being, too, stretches its arms out towards its likeness; for, to-day, you are nowhere so happy as together. When Firmian entered their common chamber (which, was dark save for the glow of the red twilight in the west), Heinrich turned to meet him; they fell silently into each other’s arms and forgot all the tears which burned within them, even those of joy. Their embrace ended, but their silence did not. Heinrich threw himself on his bed, in his clothes, and covered himself up. Firmian sank upon the other bed and wept there, with closed lids. After an hour or two of excited fancy, heated by visions and by pangs of pain, a soft light fell upon his burning eyelids; he opened them, and there hung the pale, glowing moon over against his window. He rose up; but when he saw his friend standing pale and motionless, like a shadow cast by the moon upon the wall—and suddenly there came up from a neighbouring garden (like a nightingale’s voice awaking), Rust’s melody to the words—

“’Tis not for this earthly landThat Friendship weaves her holy band”—

he fell back under the load of bitter memory; an emotion, too great to bear, a spasm, closed his sad eyes, and he said, in hollow accents,

“Heinrich! oh believe in immortality. How can we love, if we perish!”

“Peace, peace!” said Heinrich. “To-day I am keeping my name-day, and that is enough; for man, certainly, has no birth-day, and, consequently, no death-day either.”

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