Part 2 — JEAN PAUL FRIEDRICH RICHTER. (continued 4)

The lackey being gone, Fixlein for joy began to grow sceptical—and timorous (wherefore, to prevent filching, he stowed his Presentation securely in his coffer, under keeping of two padlocks); and devout and softened, since he thanked God without scruple for all good that happened to him, and never wrote this Eternal Name but in pulpit characters and with coloured ink, as the Jewish copyists never wrote it except in ornamental letters and when newly washed;[52]—and deaf also did the parson grow, so that he scarcely heard the soft wooing-hour of the Actus—for a still softer one beside Thiennette, with its rose-bushes and rose-honey, would not leave his thoughts. He who of old, when Fortune made a wry face at him, was wont, like children in their sport at one another, to laugh at her so long till she herself was obliged to begin smiling,—he was now flying as on a huge seesaw higher and higher, quicker and quicker aloft.

But before the Actus, let us examine the Schadeck Lawyer. Fixlein instead of Füchslein[53] he had written from uncertainty about the spelling of the name; the more naturally as in transcribing the Rittmeisterinn's will, the former had occurred so often. Von, this triumphal arch he durst not set up before Füchslein's new name, because Aufhammer forbade it, considering Hans Füchslein as a mushroom who had no right to vons and titles of nobility, for all his patents. In fine, the Presentation-writer was possessed with Campe's[54] whim of Germanising everything, minding little though when Germanised it should cease to be intelligible;—as if a word needed any better act of naturalisation than that which universal intelligibility imparts to it. In itself it is the same—the rather as all languages, like all men, are cognate, intermarried and intermixed—whether a word was invented by a savage or a foreigner; whether it grew up like moss amid the German forests, or like street-grass, in the pavement of the Roman forum. The Lawyer, on the other hand, contended that it was different; and accordingly he hid not from any of his clients that Tagefarth (Day-turn) meant Term, and that Appealing was Berufen (Becalling). On this principle he dressed the word Subrector in the new livery of School-undergovernor. And this version farther converted the Schoolmaster into Parson: to such a degree does our civic fortune—not our personal well-being, which supports itself on our own internal soil and resources—grow merely on the drift-mould of accidents, connexions, acquaintances, and Heaven or the Devil knows what!—

By the by, from a Lawyer, at the same time a Country Judge, I should certainly have looked for more sense; I should (I may be mistaken) have presumed he knew that the Acts or Reports, which in former times (see Hoffmann's German or un-German Law-practice) were written in Latin, as before the times of Joseph the Hungarian,—are now, if we may say so without offence, perhaps written fully more in the German dialect than in the Latin; and in support of this opinion, I can point to whole lines of German language, to be found in these Imperial-Court-Confessions. However, I will not believe that the Jurist is endeavouring, because Imhofer declares the Roman tongue to be the mother tongue in the other world, to disengage himself from a language, by means of which, like the Roman Eagle, or later, like the Roman Fish-heron (Pope), he has clutched such abundant booty in his talons.——

Toll, toll your bell for the Actus; stream in, in to the ceremony: who cares for it? Neither I nor the Ex-Conrector. The six pigmy Ciceros will in vain set forth before us in sumptuous dress their thoughts and bodies. The draught-wind of Chance has blown away from the Actus its powder-nimbus of glory; and the Conrector that was has discovered how small a matter a cathedra is, and how great a one a pulpit: "I should not have thought," thought he now, "when I became Conrector, that there could he anything grander, I mean a Parson." Man, behind his everlasting blind, which he only colours differently, and makes no thinner, carries his pride with him from one step to another; and, on the higher step, blames only the pride of the lower.

The best of the Actus was, that the Regiments-Quartermaster, and Master Butcher, Steinberg, attended there, embaled in a long woollen shag. During the solemnity, the Subrector Hans von Füchslein cast several gratified and inquiring glances on the Schadeck servant, who did not once look at him: Hans would have staked his head, that after the Actus, the fellow would wait upon him. When at last the sextuple cockerel-brood had on their dunghill done crowing, that is to say, had perorated, the scholastic cocker, over whom a higher banner was now waving, himself came upon the stage; and delivered to the School-Inspectorships, to the Subrectorship, to the Guardianship and the Lackeyship, his most grateful thanks for their attendance; shortly announcing to them at the same time, "that Providence had now called him from his post to another; and committed to him, unworthy as he was, the cure of souls in the Hukelum parish, as well as in the Schadeck chapel of ease."

This little address, to appearance, well-nigh blew up the then Subrector Hans von Füchslein from his chair; and his face looked of a mingled colour, like red bole, green chalk, tinsel-yellow and vomissement de la reine.

The tall Quartermaster erected himself considerably in his shag, and hummed loud enough in happy forgetfulness: "The Dickens!—Parson?"——

The Subrector dashed by like a comet before the lackey: ordered him to call and take a letter for his master; strode home, and prepared for his patron, who at Schadeck was waiting for a long thanksgiving psalm, a short satirical epistle, as nervous as haste would permit, and mingled a few nicknames and verbal injuries along with it.

The courier handed in, to his master, Fixlein's song of gratitude, and Füchslein's invectives, with the same hand. The Dragoon Rittmeister, incensed at the ill-mannered churl, and bound to his word, which Fixlein had publicly announced in his Actus, forthwith wrote back to the new Parson an acceptance and ratification; and Fixlein is and remains, to the joy of us all, incontestable ordained parson of Hukelum.

His disappointed rival has still this consolation, that he holds a seat in the wasp-nest of the Neue Allgemeine Deutsche Bibliothek.[55] Should the Parson ever chrysalise himself into an author, the watch-wasp may then buzz out, and dart its sting into the chrysalis, and put its own brood in the room of the murdered butterfly. As the Subrector everywhere went about, and threatened in plain terms that he would review his colleague, let not the public be surprised that Fixlein's Errata, and his Masoretic Exercitationes, are to this hour withheld from it.

In spring, the widowed church receives her new husband; and how it will be, when Fixlein, under a canopy of flower-trees, takes the Sponsa Christi in one hand, and his own Sponsa in the other,—this, without an Eighth Letter-Box, which, in the present case, may be a true jewel-box and rainbow-key,[56] can no mortal figure, except the Sponsus himself.

EIGHTH LETTER-BOX.

Instalment in the Parsonage.

On the 15th of April 1793, the reader may observe, far down in the hollow, three baggage-wagons groaning along. These baggage-wagons are transporting the house-gear of the new Parson to Hukelum: the proprietor himself, with a little escort of his parishioners, is marching at their side, that of his china sets and household furniture there may be nothing broken in the eighteenth century, as the whole came down to him unbroken from the seventeenth. Fixlein hears the School-bell ringing behind him; but this chime now sings to him, like a curfew, the songs of future rest: he is now escaped from the Death-valley of the Gymnasium, and admitted into the abodes of the Blessed. Here dwells no envy, no colleague, no Subrector; here in the heavenly country, no man works in the New Universal German Library; here, in the heavenly Hukelumic Jerusalem, they do nothing but sing praises in the church; and here the Perfected requires no more increase of knowledge.... Here too one need not sorrow that Sunday and Saint's day so often fall together into one.

Truth to tell, the Parson goes too far: but it was his way from of old never to paint out the whole and half shadows of a situation, till he was got into a new one; the beauties of which he could then enhance by contrast with the former. For it requires little reflection to discover that the torments of a schoolmaster are nothing so extraordinary; but, on the contrary, as in the Gymnasium, he mounts from one degree to another, not very dissimilar to the common torments of Hell, which, in spite of their eternity, grow weaker from century to century. Moreover, since, according to the saying of a Frenchman, deux afflictions mises ensemble peuvent devenir une consolation, a man gets afflictions enow in a school to console him; seeing out of eight combined afflictions—I reckon only one for every teacher—certainly more comfort is to be extracted than out of two. The only pity is, that school-people will never act towards each other as court-people do: none but polished men and polished glasses will readily cohere. In addition to all this, in schools—and in offices generally—one is always recompensed: for, as in the second life, a greater virtue is the recompense of an earthly one, so, in the Schoolmaster's case, his merits are always rewarded by more opportunities for new merits; and often enough he is not dismissed from his post at all.—

Eight Gymnasiasts are trotting about in the Parsonage, setting up, nailing to, hauling in. I think, as a scholar of Plutarch, I am right to introduce such seeming minutiæ. A man whom grown-up people love, children love still more. The whole school had smiled on the smiling Fixlein, and liked him in their hearts, because he did not thunder, but sport with them; because he said Sie (They) to the Secundaners, and the Subrector said Ihr (Ye); because his uprearing forefinger was his only sceptre and baculus; because in the Secunda he had interchanged Latin epistles with his scholars; and in the Quinta, had taught not with Napier's Rods (or rods of a sharper description), but with sticks of barley-sugar.

Today his churchyard appeared to him so solemn and festive, that he wondered (though it was Monday) why his parishioners were not in their holiday, but merely in their weekday drapery. Under the door of the Parsonage stood a weeping woman; for she was too happy, and he was her—son. Yet the mother, in the height of her emotion, contrives quite readily to call upon the carriers, while disloading, not to twist off the four corner globes from the old Frankish chest of drawers. Her son now appeared to her as venerable, as if he had sat for one of the copperplates in her pictured Bible; and that simply, because he had cast off his pedagogue hair-cue, as the ripening tadpole does its tail; and was now standing in a clerical periwig before her: he was now a Comet, soaring away from the profane Earth, and had accordingly changed from a stella caudata into a stella crinita.

His bride also had, on former days, given sedulous assistance in this new improved edition of his house, and laboured faithfully among the other furnishers and furbishers. But today she kept aloof; for she was too good to forget the maiden in the bride. Love, like men, dies oftener of excess than of hunger; it lives on love, but it resembles those Alpine flowers, which feed themselves by suction from the wet clouds, and die if you besprinkle them.—

At length the Parson is settled, and of course he must—for I know my fair readers, who are bent on it as if they were bridemaids—without delay get married. But he may not: before Ascension-day there can nothing be done, and till then are full four weeks and a half. The matter was this: He wished in the first place to have the murder-Sunday, the Cantata, behind him; not indeed because he doubted of his earthly continuance, but because he would not (even for the bride's sake) that the slightest apprehension should mingle with these weeks of glory.

The main reason was, He did not wish to marry till he were betrothed: which latter ceremony was appointed, with the Introduction Sermon, to take place next Sunday. It is the Cantata-Sunday. Let not the reader afflict himself with fears. Indeed, I should not have molested an enlightened century with this Sunday-Wauwau at all, were it not that I delineate with such extreme fidelity. Fixlein himself—especially as the Quartermaster asked him if he was a baby—at last grew so sensible, that he saw the folly of it; nay, he went so far, that he committed a greater folly. For as dreaming that you die signifies, according to the exegetic rule of false, nothing else than long life and welfare, so did Fixlein easily infer that his death-imagination was just such a lucky dream; the rather as it was precisely on this Cantata-Sunday that Fortune had turned up her cornucopia over him, and at once showered down out of it a bride, a presentation and a roll of ducats. Thus can Superstition imp its wings, let Chance favour it or not.

A Secretary of State, a Peace-treaty writer, a Notary, any such incarcerated Slave of the Desk, feels excellently well how far he is beneath a Parson composing his inaugural sermon. The latter (do but look at my Fixlein) lays himself heartily over the paper—injects the venous system of his sermon-preparation with coloured ink—has a Text-Concordance on the right side, and a Song-Concordance on the left; is there digging out a marrowy sentence, here clipping off a song-blossom, with both to garnish his homiletic pastry;—sketches out the finest plan of operations, not, like a man of the world, to subdue the heart of one woman, but the hearts of all women that hear him, and of their husbands to boot;—draws every peasant passing by his window into some niche of his discourse, to coöperate with the result;—and, finally, scoops out the butter of the smooth soft hymn-book, and therewith exquisitely fattens the black broth of his sermon, which is to feed five thousand men.——

At last, in the evening, as the red sun is dazzling him at the desk, he can rise with heart free from guilt; and, amid twittering sparrows and finches, over the cherry-trees encircling the parsonage, look toward the west, till there is nothing more in the sky but a faint gleam among the clouds. And then when Fixlein, amid the tolling of the evening prayer-bell, slowly descends the stair to his cooking mother, there must be some miracle in the case, if for him whatever has been done or baked, or served up in the lower regions, is not right and good.... A bound, after supper, into the Castle; a look into a pure loving eye; a word without falseness to a bride without falseness; and then under the coverlid, a soft-breathing breast, in which there is nothing but Paradise, a sermon and evening prayer.... I swear, with this I will satisfy a Mythic God, who has left his Heaven, and is seeking a new one among us here below!

Can a mortal, can a Me in the wet clay of Earth, which Death will soon dry into dust, ask more in one week than Fixlein is gathering into his heart? I see not how: At least I should suppose, if such a dust-framed being, after such a twenty-thousand prize from the Lottery of Chance, could require aught more, it would at most be the twenty-one-thousand prize, namely, the inaugural discourse itself.

And this prize our Zebedäus actually drew on Sunday: he preached—he preached with unction,——he did it before the crowding, rustling press of people; before his Guardian, and before the Lord of Aufhammer, the godfather of the priest and the dog;—a flock with whom in childhood he had driven out the Castle herds about the pasture, he was now, himself a spiritual sheep-smearer, leading out to pasture;—he was standing to the ankles among Candidates and Schoolmasters, for today (what none of them could) at the altar, with the nail of his finger, he might scratch a large cross in the air, baptisms and marriages not once mentioned.... I believe, I should feel less scrupulous than I do to chequer this sunshiny esplanade with that thin shadow of the grave, which the preacher threw over it, when, in the application, with wet heavy eyes, he looked round over the mute attentive church, as if in some corner of it he would seek the mouldering teacher of his youth and of this congregation, who without, under the white tombstone, the wrong-side of life, had laid away the garment of his pious spirit. And when he, himself hurried on by the internal stream, inexpressibly softened by the farther recollections of his own fear of death on this day, of his life now overspread with flowers and benefits, of his entombed benefactress resting here in her narrow bed—when he now—before the dissolving countenance of her friend, his Thiennette—overpowered, motionless and weeping, looked down from the pulpit to the door of the Schadeck vault, and said: "Thanks, thou pious soul, for the good thou hast done to this flock and to their new teacher; and, in the fulness of time, may the dust of thy god-fearing and man-loving breast gather itself, transfigured as gold-dust, round thy reawakened heavenly heart,"—was there an eye in the audience dry? Her husband sobbed aloud; and Thiennette, her beloved, bowed her head, sinking down with inconsolable remembrances, over the front of the seat, like kindred mourners in a funeral train.

No fairer forenoon could prepare the way for an afternoon in which a man was to betroth himself forever, and to unite the exchanged rings with the Ring of Eternity. Except the bridal pair, there was none present but an ancient pair; the mother and the long Guardian. The bridegroom wrote out the marriage-contract or marriage-charter with his own hand; hereby making over to his bride, from this day, his whole moveable property (not, as you may suppose, his pocket-library, but his whole library; whereas, in the Middle Ages, the daughter of a noble was glad to get one or two books for marriage-portion);—in return for which, she liberally enough contributed—a whole nuptial coach or car, laden as follows: with nine pounds of feathers, not feathers for the cap such as we carry, but of the lighter sort such as carry us;—with a sumptuous dozen of godchild-plates and godchild-spoons (gifts from Schadeck), together with a fish-knife;—of silk, not only stockings (though even King Henri II. of France could dress no more than his legs in silk), but whole gowns;—with jewels and other furnishings of smaller value. Good Thiennette! in the chariot of thy spirit lies the true dowry; namely, thy noble, soft, modest heart, the morning-gift of Nature!

The Parson,—who, not from mistrust but from "the uncertainty of life," could have wished for a notary's seal on everything; to whom no security but a hypothecary one appeared sufficient, and who, in the depositing of every barleycorn, required quittances and contracts,—had now, when the marriage-charter was completed, a lighter heart; and through the whole evening the good man ceased not to thank his bride for what she had given him. To me, however, a marriage-contract were a thing as painful and repulsive,—I confess it candidly, though you should in consequence upbraid me with my great youth,—as if I had to take my love-letter to a Notary Imperial, and make him docket and countersign it before it could be sent. Heavens! to see the light flower of Love, whose perfume acts not on the balance, so laid like tulip-bulbs on the hay-beam of Law; two hearts on the cold councillor-and flesh-beam of relatives and advocates, who are heaping on the scales nothing but houses, fields and tin—this, to the interested party, may be as delightful as, to the intoxicated suckling and nursling of the Muses and Philosophy, it is to carry the evening and morning sacrifices he has offered up to his goddess into the book-shop, and there to change his devotions into money, and sell them by weight and measure.——

From Cantata-Sunday to Ascension, that is, to marriage-day, are one and a half weeks—or one and a half blissful eternities. If it is pleasant that nights or winter separate the days and seasons of joy to a comfortable distance; if, for example, it is pleasant that birthday, Saint's-day, betrothment, marriage and baptismal day, do not all occur on the same day (for with very few do those festivities, like Holiday and Apostle's day, commerge),—then is it still more pleasant to make the interval, the flower-border, between betrothment and marriage, of an extraordinary breadth. Before the marriage-day are the true honey-weeks; then come the wax-weeks; then the honey-vinegar-weeks.

In the Ninth Letter-Box, our Parson celebrates his wedding; and here, in the Eighth, I shall just briefly skim over his way and manner of existence till then; an existence, as might have been expected, celestial enough. To few is it allotted, as it was to him, to have at once such wings and such flowers (to fly over) before his nuptials; to few is it allotted, I imagine, to purchase flour and poultry on the same day, as Fixlein did;—to stuff the wedding-turkey with hangman-meals;—to go every night into the stall, and see whether the wedding-pig, which his Guardian has given him by way of marriage-present, is still standing and eating;—to spy out for his future wife the flax-magazines and clothes-press-niches in the house;—to lay in new wood-stores in the prospect of winter;—to obtain from the Consistorium directly, and for little smart-money, their Bull of Dispensation, their remission of the threefold proclamation of banns;—to live not in a city, where you must send to every fool (because you are one yourself), and disclose to him that you are going to be married; but in a little angular hamlet, where you have no one to tell aught, but simply the Schoolmaster that he is to ring a little later, and put a knee-cushion before the altar.——

O! if the Ritter Michaelis maintains that Paradise was little, because otherwise the people would not have found each other,—a hamlet and its joys are little and narrow, so that some shadow of Eden may still linger on our Ball.——

I have not even hinted that, the day before the wedding, the Regiments-Quartermaster came uncalled, and killed the pig, and made puddings gratis, such as were never eaten at any Court.

And besides, dear Fixlein, on this soft rich oil of joy there was also floating gratis a vernal sun,—and red twilights,—and flower-garlands,—and a bursting half world of buds!...

How didst thou behave thee in these hot whirlpools of pleasure?—Thou movedst thy Fishtail (Reason), and therewith describedst for thyself a rectilineal course through the billows. For even half as much would have hurried another Parson from his study; but the very crowning felicity of ours was, that he stood as if rooted to the boundary-hill of Moderation, and from thence looked down on what thousands flout away. Sitting opposite the Castle-windows, he was still in a condition to reckon up that Amen occurs in the Bible one hundred and thirty times. Nay, to his old learned laboratory he now appended a new chemical stove: he purposed writing to Nürnberg and Bayreuth, and there offering his pen to the Brothers Senft, not only for composing practical Receipts at the end of their Almanacs, but also for separate Essays in front under the copperplate title of each Month, because he had a thought of making some reformatory cuts at the common people's mental habitudes.... And now, when in the capacity of Parson he had less to do, and could add to the holy resting-day of the congregation six literary creating-days, he determined (even in these Carnival weeks) to strike his plough into the hitherto quite fallow History of Hukelum, and soon to follow the plough with his drill....

Thus roll his minutes, on golden wheels-of-fortune, over the twelve days, which form the glancing star-paved road to the third-heaven of the thirteenth, that is to the

NINTH LETTER-BOX,

Or to the Marriage.

Rise, fair Ascension and Marriage day, and gladden readers also! Adorn thyself with the fairest jewel, with the bride, whose soul is as pure and glittering as its vesture; like pearl and pearl-muscle, the one as the other, lustrous and ornamental! And so over the espalier, whose fruit-hedge has hitherto divided our darling from his Eden, every reader now presses after him!—

On the 9th of May 1793, about three in the morning, there came a sharp peal of trumpets, like a light-beam, through the dim-red May-dawn: two twisted horns, with a straight trumpet between them, like a note of admiration between interrogation-points, were clanging from a house in which only a parishioner (not the Parson) dwelt and blew: for this parishioner had last night been celebrating the same ceremony which the pastor had this day before him. The joyful tallyho raised our Parson from his broad bed (and the Shock from beneath it, who some weeks ago had been exiled from the white sleek coverlid), and this so early, that in the portraying tester, where on every former morning he had observed his ruddy visage and his white bedclothes, all was at present dim and crayonned.

I confess, the new-painted room, and a gleam of dawn on the wall, made it so light, that he could see his knee-buckles glancing on the chair. He then softly awakened his mother (the other guests were to lie for hours in the sheets), and she had the city cookmaid to awaken, who, like several other articles of wedding-furniture, had been borrowed for a day or two from Flachsenfingen. At two doors he knocked in vain, and without answer; for all were already down at the hearth, cooking, blowing and arranging.

How softly does the Spring day gradually fold back its nun-veil, and the Earth grow bright, as if it were the morning of a Resurrection!—The quicksilver-pillar of the barometer, the guiding Fire-pillar of the weather-prophet, rests firmly on Fixlein's Ark of the Covenant. The Sun raises himself, pure and cool, into the morning-blue, instead of into the morning-red. Swallows, instead of clouds, shoot skimming through the melodious air.... O, the good Genius of Fair Weather, who deserves many temples and festivals (because without him no festival could be held), lifted an ethereal azure Day, as it were, from the well-clear atmosphere of the Moon, and sent it down, on blue butterfly-wings—as if it were a blue Monday—glittering below the Sun, in the zigzag of joyful quivering descent, upon the narrow spot of Earth, which our heated fancies are now viewing.... And on this balmy vernal spot, stand amid flowers, over which the trees are shaking blossoms instead of leaves, a bride and a bridegroom.... Happy Fixlein! how shall I paint thee without deepening the sighs of longing in the fairest souls?—

But soft! we will not drink the magic cup of Fancy to the bottom at six in the morning; but keep sober till towards night!

At the sound of the morning prayer-bell, the bridegroom, for the din of preparation was disturbing his quiet orison, went out into the churchyard, which (as in many other places), together with the church, lay round his mansion like a court. Here on the moist green, over whose closed flowers the churchyard-wall was still spreading broad shadows, did his spirit cool itself from the warm dreams of Earth: here, where the white flat grave-stone of his Teacher lay before him like the fallen-in door on the Janus'-temple of Life, or like the windward side of the narrow house, turned towards the tempests of the world: here, where the little shrunk metallic door on the grated cross of his father uttered to him the inscriptions of death, and the year when his parent departed, and all the admonitions and mementos, graven on the lead;—there, I say, his mood grew softer and more solemn; and he now lifted up by heart his morning prayer, which usually he read; and entreated God to bless him in his office, and to spare his mother's life; and to look with favour and acceptance on the purpose of today.—Then over the graves he walked into his fenceless little angular flower-garden; and here, composed and confident in the divine keeping, he pressed the stalks of his tulips deeper into the mellow earth.

But on returning to the house, he was met on all hands by the bell-ringing and the janissary-music of wedding-gladness;—the marriage-guests had all thrown off their nightcaps, and were drinking diligently;—there was a clattering, a cooking, a frizzling;—tea-services, coffee-services and warm-beer-services, were advancing in succession; and plates full of bride-cakes were going round like potter's frames or cistern-wheels.—The Schoolmaster, with three young lads, was heard rehearsing from his own house an Arioso, with which, so soon as they were perfect, he purposed to surprise his clerical superior.—But now rushed all the arms of the foaming joy-streams into one, when the sky-queen besprinkled with blossoms, the bride, descended upon Earth in her timid joy, full of quivering humble love;—when the bells began;—when the procession-column set forth with the whole village round and before it;—when the organ, the congregation, the officiating priest and the sparrows on the trees of the church-window, struck louder and louder their rolling peals on the drum of the jubilee-festival.... The heart of the singing bridegroom was like to leap from its place for joy, "that on his bridal-day it was all so respectable and grand."—Not till the marriage-benediction could he pray a little.

Still worse and louder grew the business during dinner, when pastry-work and marchpane-devices were brought forward,—when glasses and slain fishes (laid under the napkins to frighten the guests) went round;—and when the guests rose, and themselves rent round, and at length danced round: for they had instrumental music from the city there.

One minute handed over to the other the sugar-bowl and bottle-case of joy: the guests heard and saw less and less, and the villagers began to see and hear more and more, and towards night they penetrated like a wedge into the open door,—nay two youths ventured even in the middle of the parsonage-court, to mount a plank over a beam, and commence seesawing.—Out of doors, the gleaming vapour of the departed Sun was encircling the Earth, the evening-star was glittering over parsonage and churchyard; no one heeded it.

However, about nine o'clock,—when the marriage-guests had well-nigh forgotten the marriage-pair, and were drinking or dancing along for their own behoof; when poor mortals, in this sunshine of Fate, like fishes in the sunshine of the sky, were leaping up from their wet cold element; and when the bridegroom under the star of happiness and love, casting like a comet its long train of radiance over all his heaven, had in secret pressed to his joy-filled breast his bride and his mother,—then did he lock a slice of wedding-bread privily into a press, in the old superstitious belief that this residue secured continuance of bread for the whole marriage. As he returned, with greater love for the sole partner of his life, she herself met him with his mother, to deliver him in private the bridal-nightgown and bridal-shirt, as is the ancient usage. Many a countenance grows pale in violent emotions, even of joy: Thiennette's wax-face was bleaching still whiter under the sunbeams of Happiness. O never fall, thou lily of Heaven, and may four springs instead of four seasons open and shut thy flower-bells to the sun!—All the arms of his soul, as he floated on the sea of joy, were quivering to clasp the soft warm heart of his beloved, to encircle it gently and fast, and draw it to his own....

He led her from the crowded dancing-room into the cool evening. Why does the evening, does the night put warmer love in our hearts? Is it the nightly pressure of helplessness; or is it the exalting separation from the turmoil of life; that veiling of the world, in which for the soul nothing more remains but souls;—is it therefore, that the letters in which the loved name stands written on our spirit appear, like phosphorus-writing, by night in fire, while by day in their cloudy traces they but smoke?

He walked with his bride into the Castle-garden: she hastened quickly through the Castle, and past its servants'-hall, where the fair flowers of her young life had been crushed broad and dry, under a long dreary pressure; and her soul expanded and breathed in the free open garden, on whose flowery soil destiny had cast forth the first seeds of the blossoms which today were gladdening her existence. Still Eden! green flower-chequered chiaroscuro!—The moon is sleeping underground like a dead one; but beyond the garden the sun's red evening-clouds have fallen down like rose-leaves; and the evening-star, the brideman of the sun, hovers, like a glancing butterfly, above the rosy red, and, modest as a bride, deprives no single starlet of its light.

The wandering pair arrived at the old gardener's hut; now standing locked and dumb, with dark windows in the light garden, like a fragment of the Past surviving in the Present. Bared twigs of trees were folding, with clammy half-formed leaves, over the thick intertwisted tangles of the bushes.—The Spring was standing, like a conqueror, with Winter at his feet.—In the blue pond, now bloodless, a dusky evening-sky lay hollowed out, and the gushing waters were moistening the flower-beds.—The silver sparks of stars were rising on the altar of the East, and falling down extinguished in the red sea of the West.

The wind whirred, like a night-bird, louder through the trees; and gave tones to the acacia-grove, and the tones called to the pair who had first become happy within it: "Enter, new mortal pair, and think of what is past, and of my withering and your own; and be holy as Eternity, and weep not only for joy, but for gratitude also!"—And the wet-eyed bridegroom led his wet-eyed bride under the blossoms, and laid his soul, like a flower, on her heart, and said: "Best Thiennette, I am unspeakably happy, and would say much, and cannot.—Ah, thou Dearest, we will live like angels, like children together! Surely I will do all that is good to thee; two years ago I had nothing, no nothing; ah, it is through thee, best Love, that I am happy. I call thee Thou, now, thou dear good soul!" She drew him closer to her, and said, though without kissing him: "Call me Thou always, Dearest!"

And as they stept forth again from the sacred grove into the magic-dusky garden, he took off his hat; first, that he might internally thank God, and secondly, because he wished to look into this fairest evening sky.

They reached the blazing, rustling marriage-house, but their softened hearts sought stillness; and a foreign touch, as in the blossoming vine, would have disturbed the flower-nuptials of their souls. They turned rather, and winded up into the churchyard to preserve their mood. Majestic on the groves and mountains stood the Night before man's heart, and made it also great. Over the white steeple-obelisk the sky rested bluer and darker; and behind it wavered the withered summit of the May-pole with faded flag. The son noticed his father's grave, on which the wind was opening and shutting, with harsh noise, the little door of the metal cross, to let the year of his death be read on the brass plate within. An overpowering sadness seized his heart with violent streams of tears, and drove him to the sunk hillock, and he led his bride to the grave, and said: "Here sleeps he, my good father; in his thirty-second year, he was carried hither to his long rest. O thou good, dear father, couldst thou today but see the happiness of thy son, like my mother! But thy eyes are empty, and thy breast is full of ashes, and thou seest us not."—He was silent. The bride wept aloud; she saw the mouldering coffins of her parents open, and the two dead arise and look round for their daughter, who had stayed so long behind them, forsaken on the Earth. She fell upon his heart, and faltered: "O beloved, I have neither father nor mother, do not forsake me!"

O thou who hast still a father and a mother, thank God for it, on the day when thy soul is full of joyful tears, and needs a bosom wherein to shed them....

And with this embracing at a father's grave, let this day of joy be holily concluded.—

TENTH LETTER-BOX.

St. Thomas's Day and Birthday.

An Author is a sort of bee-keeper for his reader-swarm; in whose behalf he separates the Flora kept for their use into different seasons, and here accelerates, and there retards, the blossoming of many a flower, that so in all chapters there be blooming.

The goddess of Love and the angel of Peace conducted our married pair on tracks running over full meadows, through the Spring; and on footpaths hidden by high cornfields, through the Summer; and Autumn, as they advanced towards Winter, spread her marbled leaves under their feet. And thus they arrived before the low dark gate of Winter, full of life, full of love, trustful, contented, sound and ruddy.

On St. Thomas's day was Thiennette's birthday as well as Winter's. About a quarter past nine, just when the singing ceases in the church, we shall take a peep through the window into the interior of the parsonage. There is nothing here but the old mother, who has all day (the son having restricted her to rest, and not work) been gliding about, and brushing, and burnishing, and scouring, and wiping: every carved chair-leg, and every brass nail of the waxcloth-covered table, she has polished into brightness;—everything hangs, as with all married people who have no children, in its right place, brushes, fly-flaps and almanacs;—the chairs are stationed by the room-police in their ancient corners;—a flax-rock, encircled with a diadem, or scarf of azure ribbon, is lying in the Schadeckbed, because, though it is a half holiday, some spinning may go on;—the narrow slips of paper, whereon heads of sermons are to be arranged, lie white beside the sermons themselves, that is, beside the octavo paper-book which holds them, for the Parson and his work-table, by reason of the cold, have migrated from the study to the sitting-room;—his large furred doublet is hanging beside his clean bridegroom nightgown: there is nothing wanting in the room but He and She. For he had preached her with him tonight into the empty Apostle's-day church, that so her mother, without witnesses—except the two or three thousand readers who are peeping with me through the window—might arrange the provender-baking, and whole commissariat department of the birthday-festival, and spread out her best table-gear and victual-stores without obstruction.

The soul-curer reckoned it no sin to admonish, and exhort, and encourage, and threaten his parishioners, till he felt pretty certain that the soup must be smoking on the plates. Then he led his birthday helpmate home, and suddenly placed her before the altar of meat-offering, before a sweet title-page of bread-tart, on which her name stood baked, in true monastic characters, in tooth-letters of almonds. In the background of time and of the room, I yet conceal two—bottles of Pontac. How quickly, under the sunshine of joy, do thy cheeks grow ripe, Thiennette, when thy husband solemnly says: "This is thy birthday; and may the Lord bless thee and watch over thee, and cause his countenance to shine on thee, and send thee, to the joy of our mother and thy husband especially, a happy glad recovery. Amen!"—And when Thiennette perceived that it was the old mistress who had cooked and served up all this herself, she fell upon her neck, as if it had been not her husband's mother, but her own.

Emotion conquers the appetite. But Fixlein's stomach was as strong as his heart; and with him no species of movement could subdue the peristaltic. Drink is the friction-oil of the tongue, as eating is its drag. Yet, not till he had eaten and spoken much, did the pastor fill the glasses. Then indeed he drew the cork-sluice from the bottle, and set forth its streams. The sickly mother, of a being still hid beneath her heart, turned her eyes, in embarrassed emotion, on the old woman only; and could scarcely chide him for sending to the city wine-merchant on her account. He took a glass in each hand, for each of the two whom he loved, and handed them to his mother and his wife, and said: "To thy long, long life, Thiennette!—And your health and happiness, Mamma!—And a glad arrival to our little one, if God so bless us!"—"My son," said the gardeneress, "it is to thy long life that we must drink; for it is by thee we are supported. God grant thee length of days!" added she, with stifled voice, and her eyes betrayed her tears.

I nowhere find a livelier emblem of the female sex in all its boundless levity, than in the case where a woman is carrying the angel of Death beneath her heart, and yet in these nine months full of mortal tokens thinks of nothing more important, than of who shall be the gossips, and what shall be cooked at the christening. But thou, Thiennette, hadst nobler thoughts, though these too along with them. The still-hidden darling of thy heart was resting before thy eyes like a little angel sculptured on a grave-stone, and pointing with its small finger to the hour when thou shouldst die; and every morning and every evening, thou thoughtest of death, with a certainty, of which I yet knew not the reasons; and to thee it was as if the Earth were a dark mineral cave where man's blood like stalactitic water drops down, and in dropping raises shapes which gleam so transiently, and so quickly fade away! And that was the cause why tears were continually trickling from thy soft eyes, and betraying all thy anxious thoughts about thy child: but thou repaidst these sad effusions of thy heart by the embrace in which, with new-awakened love, thou fellest on thy husband's neck, and saidst: "Be as it may, God's will be done, so thou and my child are left alive!—But I know well that thou, Dearest, lovest me as I do thee.".... Lay thy hand, good mother, full of blessings, on the two; and thou kind Fate, never lift thine away from them!—

It is with emotion and good wishes that I witness the kiss of two fair friends, or the embracing of two virtuous lovers; and from the fire of their altar sparks fly over to me: but what is this to our sympathetic exaltation, when we see two mortals, bending under the same burden, bound to the same duties, animated by the same care for the same little darlings—fall on one another's overflowing hearts, in some fair hour? And if these, moreover, are two mortals who already wear the mourning-weeds of life, I mean old age, whose hair and cheeks are now grown colourless, and eyes grown dim, and whose faces a thousand thorns have marred into images of Sorrow;—when these two clasp each other with such wearied aged arms, and so near to the precipice of the grave, and when they say or think: "All in us is dead, but not our love—O, we have lived and suffered long together, and now we will hold out our hands to Death together also, and let him carry us away together,"—does not all within us cry: O Love, thy spark is superior to Time; it burns neither in joy nor in the cheek of roses; it dies not, neither under a thousand tears, nor under the snow of old age, nor under the ashes of thy—beloved? It never dies: and Thou, All-good! if there were no eternal love, there were no love at all....

To the Parson it was easier than it is to me to pave for himself a transition from the heart to the digestive faculty. He now submitted to Thiennette (whose voice at once grew cheerful, while her eyes time after time began to sparkle) his purpose to take advantage of the frosty weather, and have the winter meat slaughtered and salted: "the pig can scarcely rise," said he; and forthwith he fixed the determination of the women, farther the butcher, and the day, and all et ceteras; appointing everything with a degree of punctuality, such as the war-college (when it applies the cupping-glass, the battle-sword, to the overfull system of mankind) exhibits on the previous day, in its arrangements, before it drives a province into the baiting-ring and slaughter-house.

This settled, he began to talk and feel quite joyously about the course of winter, which had commenced today at two-and-twenty minutes past eight in the morning: "for," said he, "new-year is close at hand; and we shall not need so much candle tomorrow night as tonight." His mother, it is true, came athwart him with the weapons of her five senses: but he fronted her with his Astronomical Tables, and proved that the lengthening of the day was no less undeniable than imperceptible. In the last place, like most official and married persons, heeding little whether his women took him or not, he informed them in juristico-theological phrase: "That he would put off no longer, but write this very afternoon to the venerable Consistorium, in whose hands lay the jus circa sacra, for a new Ball to the church-steeple; and the rather, as he hoped before newyear's day to raise a bountiful subscription from the parish for this purpose.—If God spare us till Spring," added he with peculiar cheerfulness, "and thou wert happily recovered, I might so arrange the whole that the Ball should be set up at thy first church-going, dame!"

Thereupon he shifted his chair from the dinner and dessert table to the work-table; and spent the half of his afternoon over the petition for the steeple-ball. As there still remained a little space till dusk, he clapped his tackle to his new learned Opus, of which I must now afford a little glimpse. Out of doors among the snow, there stood near Hukelum an old Robber-Castle, which Fixlein, every day in Autumn, had hovered round like a revenant, with a view to gauge it, ichnographically to delineate it, to put every window-bar and every bridle-hook of it correctly on paper. He believed he was not expecting too much, if thereby—and by some drawings of the not so much vertical as horizontal walls—he hoped to impart to his "Architectural Correspondence of two Friends concerning the Hukelum Robber-Castle" that last polish and labor limæ which contents Reviewers. For towards the critical Starchamber of the Reviewers he entertained not that contempt which some authors actually feel—or only affect, as for instance, I. From this mouldered Robber-Louvre, there grew for him more flowers of joy, than ever in all probability had grown from it of old for its owners.—To my knowledge, it is an anecdote not hitherto made public, that for all this no man but Büsching has to answer. Fixlein had not long ago, among the rubbish of the church letter-room, stumbled on a paper wherein the Geographer had been requesting special information about the statistics of the village. Büsching, it is true, had picked up nothing—accordingly, indeed, Hukelum, in his Geography, is still omitted altogether;—but this pestilential letter had infected Fixlein with the spring-fever of Ambition, so that his palpitating heart was no longer to be stilled or held in check, except by the assafœtida-emulsion of a review. It is with authorcraft as with love: both of them for decades long one may equally desire and forbear: but is the first spark once thrown into the powder-magazine, it burns to the end of the chapter.

Simply because winter had commenced by the Almanac, the fire must be larger than usual; for warm rooms, like large furs and bearskin-caps, were things which he loved more than you would figure. The dusk, this fair chiaroscuro of the day, this coloured foreground of the night, he lengthened out as far as possible, that he might study Christmas discourses therein: and yet could his wife, without scruple, just as he was pacing up and down the room, with the sowing-sheet full of divine word-seeds hung round his shoulder,—hold up to him a spoonful of alegar, that he might try the same in his palate, and decide whether she should yet draw it off. Nay, did he not in all cases, though fonder of roe-fishes himself, order a milter to be drawn from the herring-barrel, because his good-wife liked it better?—

Here light was brought in; and as Winter was just now commencing his glass-painting on the windows, his ice flower-pieces, and his snow-foliage, our Parson felt that it was time to read something cold, which he pleasantly named his cold collation; namely, the description of some unutterably frosty land. On the present occasion, it was the winter history of the four Russian sailors on Nova Zembla. I, for my share, do often in summer, when the sultry zephyr is inflating the flower-bells, append certain charts and sketches of Italy, or the East, as additional landscapes to those among which I am sitting. And yet tonight he farther took up the Weekly Chronicle of Flachsenfingen; and amid the bombshells, pestilences, famines, comets with long tails, and the roaring of all the Hell-floods of another Thirty-Years War, he could still listen with the one ear towards the kitchen, where the salad for his roast-duck was just a-cutting.

Good-night, old Fixlein! I am tired. May kind Heaven send thee with the young year 1794, when the Earth shall again carry her people, like precious night-moths, on leaves and flowers, the new steeple-ball, and a thick handsome—boy to boot!

ELEVENTH LETTER-BOX.

Spring; Investiture; and Childbirth.

I have just risen from a singular dream; but the foregoing Box makes it natural. I dreamed that all was verdant, all full of odours; and I was looking up at a steeple-ball glittering in the sun, from my station in the window of a little white garden-house, my eyelids full of flower-pollen, my shoulders full of thin cherry-blossoms, and my ears full of humming from the neighbouring bee-hives. Then, methought, advancing slowly through the beds, came the Hukelum Parson, and stept into the garden-house, and solemnly said to me: "Honoured Sir, my wife has just brought me a little boy; and I make bold to solicit your Honour to do the holy office for the same, when it shall be received into the bosom of the church."

I naturally started up, and there was—Parson Fixlein standing bodily at my bedside, and requesting me to be godfather: for Thiennette had given him a son last night about one o'clock. The confinement had been as light and happy as could be conceived; for this reason, that the father had, some months before, been careful to provide one of those Klappersteins, as we call them, which are found in the aerie of the eagle, and therewith to alleviate the travail: for this stone performs, in its way, all the service which the bonnet of that old Minorite monk in Naples, of whom Gorani informs us, could accomplish for people in such circumstances, who put it on....

—I might vex the reader still longer; but I willingly give up, and show him how the matter stood.

Such a May as the present (of 1794), Nature has not, in the memory of man—begun: for this is but the fifteenth of it. People of reflection have for centuries been vexed once every year, that our German singers should indite May-songs, since several other months deserve such a poetical night-music much better; and I myself have often gone so far as to adopt the idiom of our market-women, and instead of May butter, to say June butter, as also June, March, April songs.—But thou, kind May of this year, thou deservest to thyself all the songs which were ever made on thy rude namesakes! By Heaven! when I now issue from the wavering chequered acacia-grove of the Castle-garden, in which I am writing this Chapter, and come forth into the broad living day, and look up to the warming Heaven, and over its Earth budding out beneath it,—the Spring rises before me like a vast full cloud, with a splendour of blue and green. I see the Sun standing amid roses in the western sky, into which he has thrown his ray-brush, wherewith he has today been painting the Earth;—and when I look round a little in our picture-exhibition, his enamelling is still hot on the mountains; on the moist chalk of the moist Earth, the flowers full of sap-colours are laid out to dry, and the forget-me-not with miniature colours; under the varnish of the streams, the skyey Painter has pencilled his own eye; and the clouds, like a decoration-painter, he has touched off with wild outlines and single tints: and so he stands at the border of the Earth, and looks back upon his stately Spring, whose robe-folds are valleys, whose breast-bouquet is gardens, and whose blush is a vernal evening, and who, when she arises, shall be—Summer.

But to proceed! Every spring—and especially in such a spring—I imitate on foot our birds of passage; and travel off the hypochondriacal sediment of winter: but I do not think I should have seen even the steeple-ball of Hukelum, which is to be set up one of these days, to say nothing of the Parson's family, had not I happened to be visiting the Flachsenfingen Superintendent and Consistorialrath. From him I got acquainted with Fixlein's history (every Candidatus must deliver an account of his life to the Consistorium), and with his still madder petition for a steeple-ball. I observed, with pleasure, how gaily the cob was diving and swashing about in his duck-pool and milk-bath of life; and forthwith determined on a journey to his shore. It is singular, that is to say, manlike, that when we have for years kept prizing and describing some original person or original book, yet the moment we see such, they anger us: we would have them fit us and delight us in all points, as if any originality could do this but our own.

It was Saturday the third of May, when I, with the Superintendent, the Senior Capituli, and some temporal Raths, mounted and rolled off, and in two carriages were driven to the Parson's door. The matter was, he was not yet—invested, and tomorrow this was to be done. I little thought, while we whirled by the white espalier of the Castle-garden, that there I was to write another book.

I still see the Parson, in his peruke-minever and head-case, come springing to the coach-door and lead us out; so smiling—so courteous—so vain of the disloaded freight, and so attentive to it. He looked as if in the journey of life he had never once put on the travelling-gauze of Sorrow: Thiennette again seemed never to have thrown hers back. How neat was everything in the house, how dainty, decorated and polished! And yet so quiet, without the cursed alarm-ringing of servants' bells, and without the bass-drum tumult of stair-pedaling. Whilst the gentlemen, my road-companions, were sitting in state in the upper room, I flitted, as my way is, like a smell, over the whole house, and my path led me through the sitting-room over the kitchen, and at last into the churchyard beside the house. Good Saturday! I will paint thy hours as I may, with the black asphaltos of ink, on the tablets of other souls! In the sitting-room, I lifted from the desk a volume gilt on the back and edges, and bearing this title: "Holy Sayings, by Fixlein. First Collection." And as I looked to see where it had been printed, the Holy Collection turned out to be in writing. I handled the quills, and dipped into the negro-black of the ink, and I found that all was right and good: with your fluttering gentlemen of letters, who hold only a department of the foreign, and none of the home affairs, nothing (except some other things about them) can be worse than their ink and pens. I also found a little copperplate, to which I shall in due time return.

In the kitchen, a place not more essential for the writing of an English novel, than for the acting of a German one, I could plant myself beside Thiennette, and help her to blow the fire, and look at once into her face and her burning coals. Though she was in wedlock, a state in which white roses on the cheeks are changed for red ones, and young women are similar to a similitude given in my Note;[57]—and although the blazing wood threw a false rouge over her, I guessed how pale she must have been; and my sympathy in her paleness rose still higher at the thought of the burden which Fate had now not so much taken from her, as laid in her arms and nearer to her heart. In truth, a man must never have reflected on the Creation-moment, when the Universe first rose from the bosom of an Eternity, if he does not view with philosophic reverence a woman, whose thread of life a secret all-wondrous Hand is spinning to a second thread, and who veils within her the transition from Nothingness to Existence, from Eternity to Time;—but still less can a man have any heart of flesh, if his soul, in presence of a woman, who, to an unknown unseen being, is sacrificing more than we will sacrifice when it is seen and known, namely, her nights, her joys, often her life, does not bow lower, and with deeper emotion, than in presence of a whole nun-orchestra on their Sahara-desert;—and worse than either is the man for whom his own mother has not made all other mothers venerable.

"It is little serviceable to thee, poor Thiennette," thought I, "that now, when thy bitter cup of sickness is made to run over, thou must have loud festivities come crowding round thee." I meant the Investiture and the Ball-raising. My rank, the diploma of which the reader will find stitched in with the Dog-post-days, and which had formerly been hers, brought about my ears a host of repelling, embarrassed, wavering titles of address from her; which people, to whom they have once belonged, are at all times apt to parade before superiors or inferiors, and which it now cost me no little trouble to disperse. Through the whole Saturday and Sunday, I could never get into the right track either with her or him, till the other guests were gone. As for the mother, she acted, like obscure ideas, powerfully and constantly, but out of view: this arose in part from her idolatrous fear of us; and partly also from a slight shade of care (probably springing from the state of her daughter), which had spread over her like a little cloud.

I cruised about, so long as the moon-crescent glimmered in the sky, over the churchyard; and softened my fantasies, which are at any rate too prone to paint with the brown of crumbling mummies, not only by the red of twilight, but also by reflecting how easily our eyes and our hearts can become reconciled even to the ruins of Death; a reflection which the Schoolmaster, whistling as he arranged the charnel-house for the morrow, and the Parson's maid singing, as she reaped away the grass from the graves, readily enough suggested to me. And why should not this habituation to all forms of Fate in the other world, also, be a gift reserved for us in our nature by the bounty of our great Preserver?—I perused the grave-stones; and I think even now that Superstition[58] is right in connecting with the reading of such things a loss of memory; at all events, one does forget a thousand things belonging to this world....

The Investiture on Sunday (whose Gospel, of the good shepherd, suited well with the ceremony) I must dispatch in few words; because nothing truly sublime can bear to be treated of in many. However, I shall impart the most memorable circumstances, when I say that there was—drinking (in the Parsonage),—music-making (in the Choir),—reading (of the Presentation by the Senior, and of the Ratification-rescript by the lay Rath),—and preaching, by the Consistorialrath, who took the soul-curer by the hand, and presented, made over and guaranteed him to the congregation, and them to him. Fixlein felt that he was departing as a high-priest from the church, which he had entered as a country parson; and all day he had not once the heart to ban. When a man is treated with solemnity, he looks upon himself as a higher nature, and goes through his solemn feasts devoutly.

This indenturing, this monastic profession, our Head-Rabbis and Lodge-masters (our Superintendents) have usually a taste for putting off till once the pastor has been some years ministering among the people, to whom they hereby present him; as the early Christians frequently postponed their consecration and investiture to Christianity, their baptism namely, till the day when they died: nay, I do not even think this clerical Investiture would lose much of its usefulness, if it and the declaring-vacant of the office were reserved for the same day; the rather as this usefulness consists entirely in two items; what the Superintendent and his Raths can eat, and what they can pocket.

Not till towards evening did the Parson and I get acquainted. The Investiture officials, and elevation pulley-men, had, throughout the whole evening, been very violently—breathing. I mean thus: as these gentlemen could not but be aware, by the most ancient theories and the latest experiments, that air was nothing else than a sort of rarefied and exploded water, it became easy for them to infer that, conversely, water was nothing else than a denser sort of air. Wine-drinking, therefore, is nothing else but the breathing of an air pressed together into proper spissitude, and sprinkled over with a few perfumes. Now, in our days, by clerical persons too much (fluid) breath can never be inhaled through the mouth; seeing the dignity of their station excludes them from that breathing through the smaller pores, which Abernethy so highly recommends under the name of air-bath: and can the Gullet in their case be aught else than door-neighbour to the Windpipe, the consonant and fellow-shoot of the Windpipe?—I am running astray: I meant to signify, that I this evening had adopted the same opinion; only that I used this air or ether, not like the rest for loud laughter, but for the more quiet contemplation of life in general. I even shot forth at my gossip certain speeches, which betrayed devoutness: these he at first took for jests, being aware that I was from Court, and of quality. But the concave mirror of the wine-mist at length suspended the images of my soul, enlarged and embodied like spiritual shapes, in the air before me.—Life shaded itself off to my eyes like a hasty summer night, which we little fire-flies shoot across with transient gleam;—I said to him that man must turn himself like the leaves of the great mallow, at the different day-seasons of his life, now to the rising sun, now to the setting, now to the night, towards the Earth and its graves;—I said, the omnipotence of Goodness was driving us and the centuries of the world towards the gates of the City of God, as, according to Euler, the resistance of the Ether leads the circling Earth towards the Sun, &c. &c.

On the strength of these entremets, he considered me the first theologian of his age; and had he been obliged to go to war, would previously have taken my advice on the matter, as belligerent powers were wont of old from the theologians of the Reformation. I hide not from myself, however, that what preachers call vanity of the world, is something altogether different from what philosophy so calls. When I, moreover, signified to him that I was not ashamed to be an Author; but had a turn for working up this and the other biography; and that I had got a sight of his Life in the hands of the Superintendent; and might be in case to prepare a printed one therefrom, if so were he would assist me with here and there a tint of flesh-colour,—then was my silk, which, alas! not only isolates one from electric fire, but also from a kindlier sort of it, the only grate which rose between his arms and me; for, like the most part of poor country parsons, it was not in his power to forget the rank of any man, or to vivify his own on a higher one. He said: "He would acknowledge it with veneration, if I should mention him in print; but he was much afraid his life was too common and too poor for a biography." Nevertheless, he opened me the drawer of his Letter-boxes; and said, perhaps, he had hereby been paving the way for me.

The main point, however, was, he hoped that his Errata, his Exercitationes, and his Letters on the Robber-Castle, if I should previously send forth a Life of the Author, might be better received; and that it would be much the same as if I accompanied them with a Preface.

In short, when on Monday the other dignitaries with their nimbus of splendour had dissipated, I alone, like a precipitate, abode with him; and am still abiding, that is, from the fifth of May (the Public should take the Almanac of 1794, and keep it open beside them) to the fifteenth: today is Thursday, tomorrow is the sixteenth and Friday, when comes the Spinat-Kirmes, or Spinage-Wake, as they call it, and the uplifting of the steeple-ball, which I just purposed to await before I went. Now, however, I do not go so soon; for on Sunday I have to assist at the baptismal ceremony, as baptismal agent for my little future godson. Whoever pays attention to me, and keeps the Almanac open, may readily guess why the christening is put off till Sunday: for it is that memorable Cantata-Sunday, which once, for its mad narcotic hemlock-virtues, was of importance in our History; but is now so only for the fair betrothment, which after two years we mean to celebrate with a baptism.

Truly it is not in my power—for want of colours and presses—to paint or print upon my paper the soft balmy flower-garland of a fortnight which has here wound itself about my sickly life; but with a single day I shall attempt it. Man, I know well, cannot prognosticate either his joys or his sorrows, still less repeat them, either in living or writing.

The black hour of coffee has gold in its mouth for us and honey; here, in the morning coolness, we are all gathered; we maintain popular conversation, that so the parsoness and the gardeneress may be able to take share in it. The morning-service in the church, where often the whole people[59] are sitting and singing, divides us. While the bell is sounding, I march with my writing-gear into the singing Castle-garden; and seat myself in the fresh acacia-grove, at the dewy two-legged table. Fixlein's Letter-boxes I keep by me in my pocket; and I have only to look and abstract from his what can be of use in my own.—Strange enough! so easily do we forget a thing in describing it, I really did not recollect for a moment that I am now sitting at the very grove-table, of which I speak, and writing all this.—

My gossip in the mean time is also labouring for the world. His study is a sort of sacristy, and his printing-press a pulpit, wherefrom he preaches to all men; for an Author is the Town-chaplain of the Universe. A man, who is making a Book, will scarcely hang himself; all rich Lords'-sons, therefore, should labour for the press; for, in that case, when you awake too early in bed, you have always a plan, an aim, and therefore a cause before you why you should get out of it. Better off too is the author who collects rather than invents,—for the latter with its eating fire calcines the heart: I praise the Antiquary, the Heraldist, Notemaker, Compiler; I esteem the Title-perch (a fish called Perca-Diagramma, because of the letters on its scales), and the Printer (a chafer, called Scarabæus Typographus, which eats letters in the bark of fir),—neither of them needs any greater or fairer arena in the world than a piece of rag-paper, or any other laying-apparatus than a pointed pencil, wherewith to lay his four-and-twenty letter-eggs.—In regard to the catalogue raisonné, which my gossip is now drawing up of German Errata, I have several times suggested to him, "that it were good if he extended his researches in one respect, and revised the rule, by which it has been computed, that e. g. for a hundredweight of pica black-letter, four hundred and fifty semicolons, three hundred periods, &c. are required; and to recount, and see whether in Political writings and Dedications the fifty notes of admiration for a hundredweight of pica black-letter were not far too small an allowance, and if so, what the real quantity was?"

Several days he wrote nothing; but wrapped himself in the slough of his parson's-cloak; and so in his canonicals, beside the Schoolmaster, put the few A-b-c shooters, which were not, like forest-shooters, absent on furlough by reason of the spring,—through their platoon firing in the Hornbook. He never did more than his duty, but also never less. It brought a soft benignant warmth over his heart, to think that he, who had once ducked under a School-inspectorship, was now one himself.

About ten o'clock, we meet from our different museums, and examine the village, especially the Biographical furniture and holy places, which I chance that morning to have had under my pen or pantagraph; because I look at them with more interest after my description than before it.

Next comes dinner.—

After the concluding grace, which is too long, we both of us set to entering the charitable subsidies, and religious donations, which our parishioners have remitted to the sinking or rather rising fund of the church-box for the purchase of the new steeple-globe, into two ledgers: the one of these, with the names of the subscribers, or (in case they have subscribed for their children) with their children's names also, is to be inurned in a leaden capsule, and preserved in the steeple-ball; the other will remain below among the parish Registers. You cannot fancy what contributions the ambition of getting into the Ball brings us in; I declare, several peasants who had given and well once already, contributed again when they had baptisms: must not little Hans be in the Ball too?

After this book-keeping by double-entry, my gossip took to engraving on copper. He had been so happy as to elicit the discovery, that from a certain stroke resembling an inverted Latin S, the capital letters of our German Chancery-hand, beautiful and intertwisted as you see them stand in Law-deeds and Letters-of-nobility, may every one of them be composed and spun out.

"Before you can count sixty," said he to me, "I take my fundamental-stroke and make you any letter out of it."

I merely inverted this fundamental-stroke, that is, gave him a German S, and counted sixty till he had it done. This line of beauty, when once it has been twisted and flourished into all the capitals, he purposes by copperplates which he is himself engraving, to make more common for the use of Chanceries; and I may take upon me to give the Russian, the Prussian, and a few other smaller Courts, hopes of proof impressions from his hand: to under-secretaries they are indispensable.

Now comes evening; and it is time for us both, here forking about with our fruit-hooks on the literary Tree of Knowledge, at the risk of our necks, to clamber down again into the meadow-flowers and pasturages of rural joy. We wait, however, till the busy Thiennette, whom we are now to receive into our communion, has no more walks to take but the one between us. Then slowly we stept along (the sick lady was weak) through the office-houses; that is to say, through stalls and their population, and past a horrid lake of ducks, and past a little milk-pond of carps, to both of which colonies, I and the rest, like princes, gave bread, seeing we had it in view on the Sunday after the christening, to—take them for bread ourselves.

The sky is still growing kindlier and redder, the swallows and the blossom-trees louder, the house-shadows broader, and men more happy. The clustering blossoms of the acacia-grove hang down over our cold collation; and the ham is not stuck (which always vexes me) with flowers, but beshaded with them from a distance....

And now the deeper evening and the nightingale conspire to soften me; and I soften in my turn the mild beings round me; especially the pale Thiennette, to whom, or to whose heart, after the apoplectic crushings of a downpressed youth, the most violent pulses of joy are heavier than the movements of pensive sadness. And thus beautifully runs our pure transparent life along, under the blooming curtains of May; and in our modest pleasures we look with timidity neither behind us nor before; as people who are lifting treasure gaze not round at the road they came, or the road they are going.

So pass our days. Today, however, it was different: by this time, usually, the evening meal is over; and the Shock has got the osseous preparation of our supper between his jaws; but tonight I am still sitting here alone in the garden, writing the Eleventh Letter-Box, and peeping out every instant over the meadows, to see if my gossip is not coming.

For he is gone to town, to bring a whole magazine of spiceries: his coat-pockets are wide. Nay, it is certain enough that oftentimes he brings home with him, simply in his coat-pocket, considerable flesh-tithes from his Guardian, at whose house he alights; though truly intercourse with the polished world and city, and the refinement of manners thence arising,—for he calls on the bookseller, on school-colleagues, and several respectable shopkeepers,—does, much more than flesh-fetching, form the object of these journeys to the city. This morning he appointed me regent head of the house, and delivered me the fasces and curule chair. I sat the whole day beside the young pale mother; and could not but think, simply because the husband had left me there as his representative, that I liked the fair soul better. She had to take dark colours, and paint out for me the winter landscape and ice region of her sorrow-wasted youth; but often, contrary to my intention, by some simple elegiac word, I made her still eye wet; for the too full heart, which had been crushed with other than sentimental woes, overflowed at the smallest pressure. A hundred times in the recital I was on the point of saying: "O yes, it was with winter that your life began, and the course of it has resembled winter!"—Windless, cloudless day! Three more words about thee, the world will still not take amiss from me!

I advanced nearer and nearer to the heart-central-fire of the women; and at last they mildly broke forth in censure of the Parson; the best wives will complain of their husbands to a stranger, without in the smallest liking them the less on that account. The mother and the wife, during dinner, accused him of buying lots at every book-auction; and, in truth, in such places, he does strive and bid not so much for good or for bad books—or old ones—or new ones—or such as he likes to read—or any sort of favourite books—but simply for books. The mother blamed especially his squandering so much on copperplates; yet some hours after, when the Schultheis, or Mayor, who wrote a beautiful hand, came in to subscribe for the steeple-ball, she pointed out to him how finely her son could engrave, and said that it was well worth while to spend a groschen or two on such capitals as these.

They then handed me,—for when once women are in the way of a full open-hearted effusion, they like (only you must not turn the stop-cock of inquiry) to pour out the whole,—a ring-case, in which he kept a Chamberlain's key that he had found, and asked me if I knew who had lost it. Who could know such a thing, when there are almost more Chamberlains than picklocks among us?—

At last I took heart, and asked after the little toy-press of the drowned son, which hitherto I had sought for in vain over all the house. Fixlein himself had inquired for it, with as little success. Thiennette gave the old mother a persuading look full of love; and the latter led me up-stairs to an outstretched hoop-petticoat, covering the poor press as with a dome. On the way thither the mother told me, she kept it hid from her son, because the recollection of his brother would pain him. When this deposit-chest of Time (the lock had fallen off) was laid open to me, and I had looked into the little charnel-house, with its wrecks of a childlike sportful Past, I, without saying a word, determined, some time ere I went away, to unpack these playthings of the lost boy, before his surviving brother: Can there be aught finer than to look at these ash-buried, deep-sunk Herculanean ruins of childhood, now dug up and in the open air?

Thiennette sent twice to ask me whether he was come. He and she, precisely because they do not give their love the weakening expression of phrases, but the strengthening one of actions, have a boundless feeling of it towards one another. Some wedded pairs eat each other's lips and hearts and love away by kisses,—as in Rome, the statues of Christ (by Angelo) have lost their feet by the same process of kissing, and got leaden ones instead; in other couples, again, you may see, by mere inspection, the number of their conflagrations and eruptions, as in Vesuvius you can discover his, of which there are now forty-three: but in these two beings rose the Greek fire of a moderate and everlasting love, and gave warmth without casting forth sparks, and flamed straight up without crackling. The evening-red is flowing back more magically from the windows of the gardener's cottage into my grove; and I feel as if I must say to Destiny: "Hast thou a sharp sorrow, then throw it rather into my breast, and strike not with it three good souls, who are too happy not to bleed by it, and too sequestered in their little dim village not to shrink back at the thunderbolt which hurries a stricken spirit from its earthly dwelling."——

Thou good Fixlein! Here comes he hurrying over the parsonage-green. What languishing looks full of love already rest in the eye of thy Thiennette!—What news wilt thou bring us tonight from the town!—How will the ascending steeple-ball refresh thy soul tomorrow!—

TWELFTH LETTER-BOX.

Steeple-ball-Ascension. The Toy-press.

How, on this sixteenth of May, the old steeple-ball was twisted-off from the Hukelum steeple, and a new one put on in its stead, will I now describe to my best ability; but in that simple historical style of the Ancients, which, for great events, is perhaps the most suitable.

At a very early hour, a coach arrived containing Messrs. Court-Guilder Zeddel and Locksmith Wächser, and the new Peter's-cupola of the steeple. Towards eight o'clock the community, consisting of subscribers to the Globe, was visibly collecting. A little later came the Lord Dragoon Rittmeister von Aufhammer, as Patron of the church and steeple, attended by Mr. Church-Inspector Streichert. Hereupon my Reverend Cousin Fixlein and I repaired, with the other persons whom I have already named, into the Church, and there celebrated before innumerable hearers a weekday prayer-service. Directly afterwards, my Reverend Friend made his appearance above in the pulpit, and endeavoured to deliver a speech which might correspond to the solemn transaction;—and immediately thereafter, he read aloud the names of the patrons and charitable souls, by whose donations the Ball had been put together; and showed to the congregation the leaden box in which they were specially recorded; observing, that the book from which he had recited them was to be reposited in the Parish Register-office. Next he held it necessary to thank them and God, that he, above his deserts, had been chosen as the instrument and undertaker of such a work. The whole he concluded with a short prayer for Mr. Stechmann the Slater (who was already hanging on the outside on the steeple, and loosening the old shaft); and entreated that he might not break his neck, or any of his members. A short hymn was then sung, which the most of those assembled without the church-doors sang along with us, looking up at the same time to the steeple.

All of us now proceeded out likewise; and the discarded ball, as it were the amputated cock's-comb of the church, was lowered down and untied. Church-Inspector Streichert drew a leaden case from the crumbling ball, which my Reverend Friend put into his pocket, purposing to read it at his convenience; I, however, said to some peasants: "See, thus will your names also be preserved in the new Ball, and when, after long years, it shall be taken down, the box lies within it, and the then parson becomes acquainted with you all."—And now was the new steeple-globe, with the leaden cup in which lay the names of the bystanders, at length full-laden so to speak, and saturated, and fixed to the pulley-rope;—and so did this the whilom cupping-glass of the community ascend aloft....

By heaven! the unadorned style is here a thing beyond my power: for when the Ball moved, swung, mounted, there rose a drumming in the centre of the steeple; and the Schoolmaster, who, till now, had looked down through a sounding-hole directed towards the congregation, now stept out with a trumpet at a side sounding-hole, which the mounting Ball was not to cross.—But when the whole Church rung and pealed, the nearer the capital approached its crown,—and when the Slater clutched it and turned it round, and happily incorporated the spike of it, and delivered down, between Heaven and Earth, and leaning on the Ball, a Topstone-speech to this and all of us,—and when my gossip's eyes, in his rapture at being Parson on this great day, were running over, and the tears trickling down his priestly garment;—I believe I was the only man,—as his mother was the only woman,—whose souls a common grief laid hold of to press them even to bleeding; for I and the mother had yesternight, as I shall tell more largely afterwards, discovered in the little chest of the drowned boy, from a memorial in his father's hand, that, on the day after the morrow, on Cantata-Sunday and his baptismal-Sunday, he would be—two-and-thirty years of age. "O!" thought I, while I looked at the blue heaven, the green graves, the glittering ball, the weeping priest, "so, at all times, stands poor man with bandaged eyes before thy sharp sword, incomprehensible Destiny! And when thou drawest it and brandishest it aloft, he listens with pleasure to the whizzing of the stroke before it falls!"—

Last night I was aware of it; but to the reader, whom I was preparing for it afar off, I would tell nothing of the mournful news, that, in the press of the dead brother, I had found an old Bible which the boys had used at school, with a white blank leaf in it, on which the father had written down the dates of his children's birth. And even this it was that raised in thee, thou poor mother, the shade of sorrow which of late we have been attributing to smaller causes; and thy heart was still standing amid the rain, which seemed to us already past over and changed into a rainbow!—Out of love to him, she had yearly told one falsehood, and concealed his age. By extreme good luck, he had not been present when the press was opened. I still purpose, after this fatal Sunday, to surprise him with the parti-coloured reliques of his childhood, and so of these old Christmas-presents to make him new ones. In the mean while, if I and his mother can but follow him incessantly, like fish-hook-floats and foot-clogs, through tomorrow and next day, that no murderous accident lift aside the curtain from his birth-certificate,—all may yet be well. For now, in truth, to his eyes, this birthday, in the metamorphotic mirror of his superstitious imagination, and behind the magnifying magic vapour of his present joys, would burn forth like a red death-warrant.... But besides all this, the leaf of the Bible is now sitting higher than any of us, namely, in the new steeple-ball, into which I this morning prudently introduced it. Properly speaking there is indeed no danger.

THIRTEENTH LETTER-BOX.

Christening.

Today is that stupid Cantata-Sunday; but nothing now remains of it save an hour.—By heaven! in right spirits were we all today. I believe I have drunk as faithfully as another.—In truth, one should be moderate in all things, in writing, in drinking, in rejoicing; and as we lay straws into the honey for our bees that they may not drown in their sugar, so ought one at all times to lay a few firm Principles, and twigs from the tree of Knowledge, into the Syrup of life, instead of those same bee-straws, that so one may cling thereto, and not drown like a rat. But now I do purpose in earnest to—write (and also live) with steadfastness; and therefore, that I may record the christening ceremony with greater coolness,—to besprinkle my fire with the night-air, and to roam out for an hour into the blossom-and-wave-embroidered night, where a lukewarm breath of air, intoxicated with soft odours, is sinking down from the blossom-peaks to the low-bent flowers, and roaming over the meadows, and at last launching on a wave, and with it sailing down the moonshiny brook. O, without, under the stars, under the tones of the nightingale, which seem to reverberate, not from the echo, but from the far-off down-glancing worlds; beside that moon, which the gushing brook in its flickering watery band is carrying away, and which creeps under the little shadows of the bank as under clouds,—O, amid such forms and tones, the heart of man grows serious; and as of old an evening bell was rung to direct the wanderer through the deep forests to his nightly home, so in our Night are such voices within us and about us, which call to us in our strayings, and make us calmer, and teach us to moderate our own joys, and to conceive those of others.

I return, peaceful and cool enough, to my narrative. All yesternight I left not the worthy Parson half an hour from my sight, to guard him from poisoning the well of his life. Full of paternal joy, and with the skeleton of the sermon (he was committing it to memory) in his hand, he set before me all that he had; and pointed out to me the fruit-baskets of pleasures which Cantata-Sunday always plucked and filled for him. He recounted to me, as I did not go away, his baptisms, his accidents of office; told me of his relatives; and removed my uncertainty with regard to the public revenues—of his parish, to the number of his communicants and expected catechumens. At this point, however, I am afraid that many a reader will in vain endeavour to transport himself into my situation, and still be unable to discover why I said to Fixlein: "Worthy gossip, better no man could wish himself." I lied not, for so it is.... But look in the Note.[60]

At last rose the Sunday, the present; and on this holy day, simply because my little godson was for going over to Christianity, there was a vast racket made: every time a conversion happens, especially of nations, there is an uproaring and a shooting; I refer to the two Thirty-Years Wars, to the more recent one, and to the earlier, which Charlemagne so long carried on with the heathen Saxons: thus, in the Palais Royal, the Sun, at his transit over the meridian, fires off a cannon.[61] But this morning the little Unchristian, my godson, was precisely the person least attended to; for, in thinking of the conversion, they had no time left to think of the convert. Therefore I strolled about with him myself half the forenoon; and, in our walk, hastily conferred on him a private-baptism; having named him Jean Paul before the priest did so. At midday, we sent the beef away as it had come; the Sun of happiness having desiccated all our gastric juices. We now began to look about us for pomp; I for scientific decorations of my hair, my godson for his christening-shirt, and his mother for her dress-cap. Yet before the child's-rattle of the christening-bell had been jingled, I and the midwife, in front of the mother's bed, instituted Physiognomical Travels[62] on the countenance of the small Unchristian, and returned with the discovery, that some features had been embossed by the pattern of the mother, and many firm portions resembled me; a double similarity, in which my readers can take little interest. Jean Paul looks very sensible for his years, or rather for his minutes, for it is the small one I am speaking of.——

But now I would ask, what German writer durst take it upon him to spread out and paint a large historic sheet, representing the whole of us as we went to church? Would he not require to draw the father, with swelling canonicals, moving forward slowly, devoutly, and full of emotion? Would he not have to sketch the godfather, minded this day to lend out his names, which he derived from two Apostles (John and Paul), as Julius Cæsar lent out his names to two things still living even now (to a month, and a throne)?—And must he not put the godson on his sheet, with whom even the Emperor Joseph (in his need of nurse-milk) might become a foster-brother, in his old days, if he were still in them?—

In my chamber, I have a hundred times determined to smile at solemnities, in the midst of which I afterwards, while assisting at them, involuntarily wore a petrified countenance, full of dignity and seriousness. For, as the Schoolmaster, just before the baptism, began to sound the organ,—an honour never paid to any other child in Hukelum,—and when I saw the wooden christening-angel, like an alighted Genius, with his painted timber arm spread out under the baptismal ewer, and I myself came to stand close by him, under his gilt wing, I protest the blood went slow and solemn, warm and close, through my pulsing head, and my lungs full of sighs; and, to the silent darling lying in my arms, whose unripe eyes Nature yet held closed from the full perspective of the Earth, I wished, with more sadness than I do to myself, for his Future also as soft a sleep as today; and as good an angel as today, but a more living one, to guide him into a more living religion, and, with invisible hand, conduct him unlost through the forest of Life, through its falling trees, and Wild Hunters,[63] and all its storms and perils.... Will the world not excuse me, if when, by a side-glance, I saw on the paternal countenance prayers for the son, and tears of joy trickling down into the prayer; and when I noticed on the countenance of the grandmother far darker and fast-hidden drops, which she could not restrain, while I, in answer to the ancient question, engaged to provide for the child if its parents died,—am I not to be excused if I then cast my eyes deep down on my little godson, merely to hide their running over?—For I remembered that his father might perhaps this very day grow pale and cold before a suddenly arising mask of Death; I thought how the poor little one had only changed his bent posture in the womb with a freer one, to bend and cramp himself ere long more harshly in the strait arena of life; I thought of his inevitable follies and errors and sins; of these soiled steps to the Grecian Temple of our Perfection; I thought that one day his own fire of genius might reduce himself to ashes, as a man that is electrified can kill himself with his own lightning.... All the theological wishes, which, on the godson-billet printed over with them, I placed in his young bosom, were glowing written in mine.... But the white feathered-pink of my joy had then, as it always has, a bloody point within it,—I again, as it always is, went to nest, like a woodpecker, in a skull.... And as I am doing so even now, let the describing of the baptism be over for today, and proceed again tomorrow....

FOURTEENTH LETTER-BOX.

O, so is it ever! So does Fate set fire to the theatre of our little plays, and our bright-painted curtain of Futurity! So does the Serpent of Eternity wind round us and our joys, and crush, like the royal-snake, what it does not poison! Thou good Fixlein!—Ah! last night, I little thought that thou, mild soul, while I was writing beside thee, wert already journeying into the poisonous Earth-shadow of Death.

Last night, late as it was, he opened the lead box found in the old steeple-ball; a catalogue of those who had subscribed to the last repairing of the church was there; and he began to read it now; my presence and his occupations having prevented him before. O, how shall I tell that the record of his birth-year, which I had hidden in the new Ball, was waiting for him in the old one? that in the register of contributions he found his father's name, with the appendage, "given for his new-born son Egidius"?—

This stroke sank deep into his bosom, even to the rending of it asunder: in this warm hour, full of paternal joy, after such fair days, after such fair employments, after dread of death so often survived, here, in the bright smooth sea, which is rocking and bearing him along, starts snorting, from the bottomless abyss, the sea-monster Death; and the monster's throat yawns wide, and the silent sea rushes into it in whirlpools, and hurries him along with it.