[64]Indicating to the congregation what Psalm is to be sung.—Ed.[65]Salerno was once famous for its medical science; but here, as in many other cases, we could desire the aid of Herr Reinhold with hisLexicon-Commentary.—Ed."Little joys refresh us constantly like house-bread, and never bring disgust; and great ones, like sugar-bread, briefly, and then bring it.—Trifles we should let, not plague us only, but also gratify us; we should seize not their poison-bags only, but their honey-bags also: and if flies often buz about our room, we should, like Domitian, amuse ourselves with flies, or, like a certain still living Elector,[66]feed them.—Forciviclife and its micrologies, for which the Parson has a natural taste, we must acquire an artificial one; must learn to love without esteeming it; learn,far as it ranks beneathhumanlife, to enjoy it like another twig of this human life, as poetically as we do the pictures of it in romances. The loftiest mortal loves and seeks thesame sortof things with the meanest; only from higher grounds and by higher paths. Be every minute, Man, a full life to thee!—Despise anxiety and wishing, the Future and the Past!—If theSecond-pointercan be no road-pointer into an Eden for thy soul, theMonth-pointerwill still less be so, for thou livest not from month to month, but from second to second! Enjoy thy Existence more than thy Manner of Existence, and let the dearest object of thy Consciousness be this Consciousness itself!—Make not the Present a means of thy Future; for this Future is nothing but a coming Present; and the Present, which thou despisest, was once a Future which thou desiredst!—Stake in no lotteries,—keep at home,—give and accept no pompous entertainments,—travel not abroad every year!—Conceal not from thyself, by long plans, thy household goods, thy chamber, thy acquaintance!—Despise Life, that thou mayst enjoy it!—Inspect the neighbourhood of thy life; every shelf, every nook of thy abode; and nestling in, quarter thyself in the farthest and most domestic winding of thy snail-house!—Look upon a capital but as a collection of villages, a village as some blind-alley of a capital; fame as the talk of neighbours at the street-door; a library as a learned conversation, joy as a second, sorrow as a minute, life as a day; and three things as all in all: God, Creation, Virtue!"——[66]This hospitable Potentate is as unknown to me as to any of my readers.—Ed.And if I would follow myself and these rules, it will behove me not to make so much of this Biography; but once for all, like a moderate man, to let it sound out.After the Catechising, I stept down to my wide-gowned and black-gowned gossip. The congregation gone, we clambered up to all high places, perused the plates on the pews,—I took a lesson on the altar on its inscription incrusted with thesediment of Time(I speak not metaphorically); I organed, my gossip managing the bellows; I mounted the pulpit, and was happy enough there to alight on one other rose-shoot, which, in the farewell minute, I could still plant in the rose-garden of my Fixlein. For I descried aloft, on the back of a wooden Apostle, the nameLavater, which the Zurich Physiognomist had been pleased to leave on this sacred Torso in the course of his wayfaring. Fixlein did not know the hand, but I did, for I had seen it frequently in Flachsenfingen, not only on the tapestry of a Court Lady there,but also in hisHand-Library;[67]and met with it besides in many country churches, forming, as it were, the Directory and Address-Calendar of this wandering name, for Lavater likes to inscribe in pulpits, as a shepherd does in trees, the name of his beloved. I could now advise my gossip prudently to cut away the name, with the chip of wood containing it, from the back of the Apostle, and to preserve it carefully among hiscuriosa.[67]A little work printed in manuscript types; and seldom given by him to any but Princes. This piece of print-writing he intentionally passes off to the great as a piece of hand-writing; these persons being both more habituated and inclined to the reading of manuscript than of print.On returning to the parsonage, I made for my hat and stick; but the design, as it were the projection and contour of a supper in the acacia-grove, had already been sketched by Thiennette. I declared that I would stay till evening, in case the young mother went out with us to the proposed meal ... and truly the Biographer at length got his way, all doctors' regulations notwithstanding.I then constrained the Parson to put on his Kräutermütze,[68]or Herb-cap, which he had stitched together out of simples for the strengthening of his memory; "Would to Heaven," said I, "that Princes instead of their Princely Hats, Doctors and Cardinals instead of theirs, and Saints instead of martyr-crowns, would clap such memory-bonnets on their heads!"—Thereupon, till the roasting and cooking within doors were over, we marched out alone over the parsonage meadows, and talked of learned matters, we packed ourselves into the ruined Robber-Castle, on which my gossip, as already mentioned, has a literary work in hand. I deeply approved, the rather as this Kidnapper-tower had once belonged to an Aufhammer, his intention of dedicating the description to the Rittmeister: that nobleman, I think, will sooner give his name to the Book than to the Shock. For the rest, I exhorted my fellow-craftsman to pluck up literary heart, and said to him: "A fearless pen, good gossip! Let Subrector Hans von Füchslein be, if he like, the Dragon of the Apocalypse, lying in wait for the delivery of the fugitive Woman, to swallow the offspring; I am there too, and have my friend the Editor of theLitteraturzeitungat my side, who will gladly permit me to give ananticritique, on paying the insertion-dues!"—I especiallyexcited him to new fillings and return-freights of his Letter-Boxes. I have not taken oath that into this biographical chest-of-drawers, I will not in the course of time introduce another Box. "Neither to my godson, worthy gossip, will it do any harm that he is presented, poor child, even now to the reading public, when he does not count more months than, as Horace will have it, a literary child should count years, namely,nine."[68]Thus defined by Adelung in his Lexicon: "Kräutermütze, in Medicine, a cap with various dried herbs sewed into it, and which is worn for all manner of troubles in the head."—Ed.In walking homewards, I praised his wife. "If marriage," said I to him, "is the madder, which in maids, as in cotton, makes the colours visible, then I contend, that Thiennette, when a maid, could scarcely be so good as she is now when a wife. By Heaven! in such a marriage, I should write Books of quite another sort, divine ones; in a marriage, I mean, where beside the writing-table (as beside the great voting-table at the Regensburg Diets, there are little tables of confectionery); where in like manner, I say, a little jar of marmalade were standing by me, namely, a sweetened, dainty, lovely face, and out of measure fond of the Letter-Box-writer, gossip! Your marriage will resemble the Acacia-grove we are now going to, the leaves of which grow thicker with the heat of summer, while other shrubs are yielding only shrunk and porous shade."As we entered through the upper garden-door into this same bower, the supper and the good mistress were already there. Nothing is more pure and tender than the respect with which a wife treats the benefactor or comrade of her husband: and happily the Biographer himself was this comrade, and the object of this respect. Our talk was cheerful, but my spirit was oppressed. The fetters, which bind the mere reader to my heroes, were in my case of triple force; as I was at once their guest and their portrait-painter. I told the Parson that he would live to a greater age than I, for that his temperate temperament was balanced as if by a doctor so equally between the nervousness of refinement, and the hot thick-bloodedness of the rustic. Fixlein said that if he lived but as long as he had done, namely, two-and-thirty years, it would amount, exclusive of the leap-year-days, to 280,320 seconds, which in itself was something considerable; and that he often reckoned up with satisfaction the many thousand persons of his own age that would have a life equally long.At last I tried to get in motion; for the red lights of the falling sun were mounting up over the grove, and dipping us still deeper in the shadows of night: the young mother had grownchill in the evening dew. In confused mood, I invited the Parson to visit me soon in the city, where I would show him not only all the chambers of the Palace, but the Prince himself. Gladder there was nothing this day on our old world than the face to which I said so; and than the other one which was the mild reflexion of the former.—For the Biographer it would have been too hard, if now in that minute, when his fancy, like mirror-telescopes, was representing every object in atremulousform, he had been obliged to cut and run; if, I will say, it had not occurred to him that to the young mother it could do little harm (but much good), were she to take a short walk, and assist in escorting the Author and architect of the present Letter-Box out of the garden to his road.In short, I took this couple one in each hand, instead of under each arm, and moved with them through the garden to the Flachsenfingen highway. I often abruptly turned round my head between them, as if I had heard some one coming after us; but in reality I only meant once more, though mournfully, to look back into the happy hamlet, whose houses were all dwellings of contented still Sabbath-joy, and which is happy enough, though over its wide-parted pavement-stones there passes every week but one barber, every holiday but one dresser of hair, and every year but one hawker of parasols. Then truly I had again to turn round my head, and look at the happy pair beside me. My otherwise affectionate gossip could not rightly suit himself to these tokens of sorrow: but in thy heart, thou good, so oft afflicted sex, every mourning-bell soon finds its unison; and Thiennette, ennobled with the thin tremblingresonanceof a reverberating soul, gave me back all my tones with the beauties of an echo.——At last we reached the boundary, over which Thiennette could not be allowed to walk; and now must I part from my gossip, with whom I had talked so gaily every morning (each of us from his bed), and from the still circuit of modest hope where he dwelt, and return once more to the rioting, fermenting Court-sphere, where men in bull-beggar tone demand from Fate a root of Life-Licorice, thick as the arm, like the botanical one on the Wolga, not so much that they may chew the sweet beam themselves, as fell others to earth with it.As I thought to myself that I would say, Farewell! to them, all the coming plagues, all the corpses, and all the marred wishes of this good pair, arose before my heart; and I remembered thatlittle save the falling asleep of joy-flowers would mark the current of their Life-day, as it does of mine and of every one's.—And yet is it fairer, if they measure their years not by theWater-clockof falling tears, but by theFlower-clock[69]of asleep-going flowers, whose bells in our short-lived garden are sinking together before us from hour to hour.—[69]Linné formed in Upsal a flower-clock, the flowers of which, by their different times of falling asleep, indicated the hours of the day.I would even now—for I still recollect how I hung with streaming eyes over these two loved ones, as over their corpses—address myself, and say: Far too soft,Jean Paul, whose chalk still sketches the models of Nature on a ground of Melancholy; harden thy heart like thy frame, and waste not thyself and others by such thoughts. Yet why should I do it, why should I not confess directly what, in the softest emotion, I said to these two beings? "May all go right with you, ye mild beings," I said, for I no longer thought of courtesies, "may the arm of Providence bear gently your lacerated hearts, and the good Father, above all these suns which are now looking down on us, keep you ever united, and exalt you still undivided to his bosom and his lips!"—"Be you too right happy and glad!" said Thiennette.—"And to you, Thiennette," continued I, "Ah! to your pale cheeks, to your oppressed heart, to your long cold maltreated youth, I can never, never wish enough. No! But all that can soothe a wounded soul, that can please a pure one, that can still the hidden sigh—O, all that you deserve—may this be given you; and when you see me again, then say to me, 'I am now much happier!'"We were all of us too deeply moved. We at last tore ourselves asunder from repeated embraces; my friend retired with the soul whom he loves;—I remained alone behind him with the Night.And I walked without aim through woods, through valleys, and over brooks, and through sleeping villages, to enjoy the great Night like a Day. I walked, and still looked like the magnet, to the region of midnight, to strengthen my heart at the gleaming twilight, at this upstretching Aurora of a morning beneath our feet. White night-butterflies flitted, white blossoms fluttered, white stars fell, and the white snow-powder hung silvery in the high Shadow of the Earth, which reaches beyond the Moon, and which is our Night. Then began the Eolian Harp of the Creation to tremble and to sound, blown on from above, and my immortal soul was a string in this Harp.—The heart of a brothereverlasting Man swelled under the everlasting Heaven, as the seas swell under the Sun and under the Moon.—The distant village-clocks struck midnight, mingling, as it were, with the ever-pealing tone of ancient Eternity.—The limbs of my buried ones touched cold on my soul, and drove away its blots, as dead hands heal eruptions of the skin.—I walked silently through little hamlets, and close by their outer churchyards, where crumbled upcast coffin-boards were glimmering, while the once bright eyes that had laid in them were mouldered into gray ashes.—Cold thought! clutch not like a cold spectre at my heart: I look up to the starry sky, and an everlasting chain stretches thither, and over and below; and all is Life, and Warmth, and Light, and all is godlike or God....Towards morning I descried thy late lights, little city of my dwelling, which I belong to on this side the grave; I returned to the Earth; and in thy steeples, behind the by-advanced great Midnight, it struck half-past two; about this hour, in 1794, Mars went down in the west, and the Moon rose in the east; and my soul desired, in grief for the noble warlike blood which is still streaming on the blossoms of Spring: "Ah retire, bloody War, like red Mars; and thou, still Peace, come forth like the mild divided Moon!"—
[64]Indicating to the congregation what Psalm is to be sung.—Ed.
[64]Indicating to the congregation what Psalm is to be sung.—Ed.
[65]Salerno was once famous for its medical science; but here, as in many other cases, we could desire the aid of Herr Reinhold with hisLexicon-Commentary.—Ed.
[65]Salerno was once famous for its medical science; but here, as in many other cases, we could desire the aid of Herr Reinhold with hisLexicon-Commentary.—Ed.
"Little joys refresh us constantly like house-bread, and never bring disgust; and great ones, like sugar-bread, briefly, and then bring it.—Trifles we should let, not plague us only, but also gratify us; we should seize not their poison-bags only, but their honey-bags also: and if flies often buz about our room, we should, like Domitian, amuse ourselves with flies, or, like a certain still living Elector,[66]feed them.—Forciviclife and its micrologies, for which the Parson has a natural taste, we must acquire an artificial one; must learn to love without esteeming it; learn,far as it ranks beneathhumanlife, to enjoy it like another twig of this human life, as poetically as we do the pictures of it in romances. The loftiest mortal loves and seeks thesame sortof things with the meanest; only from higher grounds and by higher paths. Be every minute, Man, a full life to thee!—Despise anxiety and wishing, the Future and the Past!—If theSecond-pointercan be no road-pointer into an Eden for thy soul, theMonth-pointerwill still less be so, for thou livest not from month to month, but from second to second! Enjoy thy Existence more than thy Manner of Existence, and let the dearest object of thy Consciousness be this Consciousness itself!—Make not the Present a means of thy Future; for this Future is nothing but a coming Present; and the Present, which thou despisest, was once a Future which thou desiredst!—Stake in no lotteries,—keep at home,—give and accept no pompous entertainments,—travel not abroad every year!—Conceal not from thyself, by long plans, thy household goods, thy chamber, thy acquaintance!—Despise Life, that thou mayst enjoy it!—Inspect the neighbourhood of thy life; every shelf, every nook of thy abode; and nestling in, quarter thyself in the farthest and most domestic winding of thy snail-house!—Look upon a capital but as a collection of villages, a village as some blind-alley of a capital; fame as the talk of neighbours at the street-door; a library as a learned conversation, joy as a second, sorrow as a minute, life as a day; and three things as all in all: God, Creation, Virtue!"——
[66]This hospitable Potentate is as unknown to me as to any of my readers.—Ed.
[66]This hospitable Potentate is as unknown to me as to any of my readers.—Ed.
And if I would follow myself and these rules, it will behove me not to make so much of this Biography; but once for all, like a moderate man, to let it sound out.
After the Catechising, I stept down to my wide-gowned and black-gowned gossip. The congregation gone, we clambered up to all high places, perused the plates on the pews,—I took a lesson on the altar on its inscription incrusted with thesediment of Time(I speak not metaphorically); I organed, my gossip managing the bellows; I mounted the pulpit, and was happy enough there to alight on one other rose-shoot, which, in the farewell minute, I could still plant in the rose-garden of my Fixlein. For I descried aloft, on the back of a wooden Apostle, the nameLavater, which the Zurich Physiognomist had been pleased to leave on this sacred Torso in the course of his wayfaring. Fixlein did not know the hand, but I did, for I had seen it frequently in Flachsenfingen, not only on the tapestry of a Court Lady there,but also in hisHand-Library;[67]and met with it besides in many country churches, forming, as it were, the Directory and Address-Calendar of this wandering name, for Lavater likes to inscribe in pulpits, as a shepherd does in trees, the name of his beloved. I could now advise my gossip prudently to cut away the name, with the chip of wood containing it, from the back of the Apostle, and to preserve it carefully among hiscuriosa.
[67]A little work printed in manuscript types; and seldom given by him to any but Princes. This piece of print-writing he intentionally passes off to the great as a piece of hand-writing; these persons being both more habituated and inclined to the reading of manuscript than of print.
[67]A little work printed in manuscript types; and seldom given by him to any but Princes. This piece of print-writing he intentionally passes off to the great as a piece of hand-writing; these persons being both more habituated and inclined to the reading of manuscript than of print.
On returning to the parsonage, I made for my hat and stick; but the design, as it were the projection and contour of a supper in the acacia-grove, had already been sketched by Thiennette. I declared that I would stay till evening, in case the young mother went out with us to the proposed meal ... and truly the Biographer at length got his way, all doctors' regulations notwithstanding.
I then constrained the Parson to put on his Kräutermütze,[68]or Herb-cap, which he had stitched together out of simples for the strengthening of his memory; "Would to Heaven," said I, "that Princes instead of their Princely Hats, Doctors and Cardinals instead of theirs, and Saints instead of martyr-crowns, would clap such memory-bonnets on their heads!"—Thereupon, till the roasting and cooking within doors were over, we marched out alone over the parsonage meadows, and talked of learned matters, we packed ourselves into the ruined Robber-Castle, on which my gossip, as already mentioned, has a literary work in hand. I deeply approved, the rather as this Kidnapper-tower had once belonged to an Aufhammer, his intention of dedicating the description to the Rittmeister: that nobleman, I think, will sooner give his name to the Book than to the Shock. For the rest, I exhorted my fellow-craftsman to pluck up literary heart, and said to him: "A fearless pen, good gossip! Let Subrector Hans von Füchslein be, if he like, the Dragon of the Apocalypse, lying in wait for the delivery of the fugitive Woman, to swallow the offspring; I am there too, and have my friend the Editor of theLitteraturzeitungat my side, who will gladly permit me to give ananticritique, on paying the insertion-dues!"—I especiallyexcited him to new fillings and return-freights of his Letter-Boxes. I have not taken oath that into this biographical chest-of-drawers, I will not in the course of time introduce another Box. "Neither to my godson, worthy gossip, will it do any harm that he is presented, poor child, even now to the reading public, when he does not count more months than, as Horace will have it, a literary child should count years, namely,nine."
[68]Thus defined by Adelung in his Lexicon: "Kräutermütze, in Medicine, a cap with various dried herbs sewed into it, and which is worn for all manner of troubles in the head."—Ed.
[68]Thus defined by Adelung in his Lexicon: "Kräutermütze, in Medicine, a cap with various dried herbs sewed into it, and which is worn for all manner of troubles in the head."—Ed.
In walking homewards, I praised his wife. "If marriage," said I to him, "is the madder, which in maids, as in cotton, makes the colours visible, then I contend, that Thiennette, when a maid, could scarcely be so good as she is now when a wife. By Heaven! in such a marriage, I should write Books of quite another sort, divine ones; in a marriage, I mean, where beside the writing-table (as beside the great voting-table at the Regensburg Diets, there are little tables of confectionery); where in like manner, I say, a little jar of marmalade were standing by me, namely, a sweetened, dainty, lovely face, and out of measure fond of the Letter-Box-writer, gossip! Your marriage will resemble the Acacia-grove we are now going to, the leaves of which grow thicker with the heat of summer, while other shrubs are yielding only shrunk and porous shade."
As we entered through the upper garden-door into this same bower, the supper and the good mistress were already there. Nothing is more pure and tender than the respect with which a wife treats the benefactor or comrade of her husband: and happily the Biographer himself was this comrade, and the object of this respect. Our talk was cheerful, but my spirit was oppressed. The fetters, which bind the mere reader to my heroes, were in my case of triple force; as I was at once their guest and their portrait-painter. I told the Parson that he would live to a greater age than I, for that his temperate temperament was balanced as if by a doctor so equally between the nervousness of refinement, and the hot thick-bloodedness of the rustic. Fixlein said that if he lived but as long as he had done, namely, two-and-thirty years, it would amount, exclusive of the leap-year-days, to 280,320 seconds, which in itself was something considerable; and that he often reckoned up with satisfaction the many thousand persons of his own age that would have a life equally long.
At last I tried to get in motion; for the red lights of the falling sun were mounting up over the grove, and dipping us still deeper in the shadows of night: the young mother had grownchill in the evening dew. In confused mood, I invited the Parson to visit me soon in the city, where I would show him not only all the chambers of the Palace, but the Prince himself. Gladder there was nothing this day on our old world than the face to which I said so; and than the other one which was the mild reflexion of the former.—For the Biographer it would have been too hard, if now in that minute, when his fancy, like mirror-telescopes, was representing every object in atremulousform, he had been obliged to cut and run; if, I will say, it had not occurred to him that to the young mother it could do little harm (but much good), were she to take a short walk, and assist in escorting the Author and architect of the present Letter-Box out of the garden to his road.
In short, I took this couple one in each hand, instead of under each arm, and moved with them through the garden to the Flachsenfingen highway. I often abruptly turned round my head between them, as if I had heard some one coming after us; but in reality I only meant once more, though mournfully, to look back into the happy hamlet, whose houses were all dwellings of contented still Sabbath-joy, and which is happy enough, though over its wide-parted pavement-stones there passes every week but one barber, every holiday but one dresser of hair, and every year but one hawker of parasols. Then truly I had again to turn round my head, and look at the happy pair beside me. My otherwise affectionate gossip could not rightly suit himself to these tokens of sorrow: but in thy heart, thou good, so oft afflicted sex, every mourning-bell soon finds its unison; and Thiennette, ennobled with the thin tremblingresonanceof a reverberating soul, gave me back all my tones with the beauties of an echo.——At last we reached the boundary, over which Thiennette could not be allowed to walk; and now must I part from my gossip, with whom I had talked so gaily every morning (each of us from his bed), and from the still circuit of modest hope where he dwelt, and return once more to the rioting, fermenting Court-sphere, where men in bull-beggar tone demand from Fate a root of Life-Licorice, thick as the arm, like the botanical one on the Wolga, not so much that they may chew the sweet beam themselves, as fell others to earth with it.
As I thought to myself that I would say, Farewell! to them, all the coming plagues, all the corpses, and all the marred wishes of this good pair, arose before my heart; and I remembered thatlittle save the falling asleep of joy-flowers would mark the current of their Life-day, as it does of mine and of every one's.—And yet is it fairer, if they measure their years not by theWater-clockof falling tears, but by theFlower-clock[69]of asleep-going flowers, whose bells in our short-lived garden are sinking together before us from hour to hour.—
[69]Linné formed in Upsal a flower-clock, the flowers of which, by their different times of falling asleep, indicated the hours of the day.
[69]Linné formed in Upsal a flower-clock, the flowers of which, by their different times of falling asleep, indicated the hours of the day.
I would even now—for I still recollect how I hung with streaming eyes over these two loved ones, as over their corpses—address myself, and say: Far too soft,Jean Paul, whose chalk still sketches the models of Nature on a ground of Melancholy; harden thy heart like thy frame, and waste not thyself and others by such thoughts. Yet why should I do it, why should I not confess directly what, in the softest emotion, I said to these two beings? "May all go right with you, ye mild beings," I said, for I no longer thought of courtesies, "may the arm of Providence bear gently your lacerated hearts, and the good Father, above all these suns which are now looking down on us, keep you ever united, and exalt you still undivided to his bosom and his lips!"—"Be you too right happy and glad!" said Thiennette.—"And to you, Thiennette," continued I, "Ah! to your pale cheeks, to your oppressed heart, to your long cold maltreated youth, I can never, never wish enough. No! But all that can soothe a wounded soul, that can please a pure one, that can still the hidden sigh—O, all that you deserve—may this be given you; and when you see me again, then say to me, 'I am now much happier!'"
We were all of us too deeply moved. We at last tore ourselves asunder from repeated embraces; my friend retired with the soul whom he loves;—I remained alone behind him with the Night.
And I walked without aim through woods, through valleys, and over brooks, and through sleeping villages, to enjoy the great Night like a Day. I walked, and still looked like the magnet, to the region of midnight, to strengthen my heart at the gleaming twilight, at this upstretching Aurora of a morning beneath our feet. White night-butterflies flitted, white blossoms fluttered, white stars fell, and the white snow-powder hung silvery in the high Shadow of the Earth, which reaches beyond the Moon, and which is our Night. Then began the Eolian Harp of the Creation to tremble and to sound, blown on from above, and my immortal soul was a string in this Harp.—The heart of a brothereverlasting Man swelled under the everlasting Heaven, as the seas swell under the Sun and under the Moon.—The distant village-clocks struck midnight, mingling, as it were, with the ever-pealing tone of ancient Eternity.—The limbs of my buried ones touched cold on my soul, and drove away its blots, as dead hands heal eruptions of the skin.—I walked silently through little hamlets, and close by their outer churchyards, where crumbled upcast coffin-boards were glimmering, while the once bright eyes that had laid in them were mouldered into gray ashes.—Cold thought! clutch not like a cold spectre at my heart: I look up to the starry sky, and an everlasting chain stretches thither, and over and below; and all is Life, and Warmth, and Light, and all is godlike or God....
Towards morning I descried thy late lights, little city of my dwelling, which I belong to on this side the grave; I returned to the Earth; and in thy steeples, behind the by-advanced great Midnight, it struck half-past two; about this hour, in 1794, Mars went down in the west, and the Moon rose in the east; and my soul desired, in grief for the noble warlike blood which is still streaming on the blossoms of Spring: "Ah retire, bloody War, like red Mars; and thou, still Peace, come forth like the mild divided Moon!"—