The fairest piece of news was, that Fraulein Thiennette had sent word to-day, "he might visit Her Ladyship to-morrow, as My Lord, his G.o.dfather, was to be absent in town." This, however, I must explain.

Old Aufhammer was called _Egidius_, and was Fixlein's G.o.dfather; but he--though the Rittmeisterinn duly covered the cradle of the child with nightly offerings, with flesh-t.i.thes and grain-t.i.thes--had frugally made him no christening present, except that of his name, which proved to be the very balefullest. For, our _Egidius_ Fixlein, with his Shock, which, by reason of the French convulsions, had, in company with other emigrants, run off from Nantes, was but lately returned from college--when he and his dog, as ill-luck would have it, went to walk in the Hukelum wood. Now, as the Quintus was ever and anon crying out to his attendant: "Coosh, Schil" (_Couche Gilles_), it must apparently have been the Devil that had just then planted the Lord of Aufhammer among the trees and bushes in such a way, that this whole travestying and docking of his name--for Gilles means Egidius--must fall directly into his ear. Fixlein could neither speak French, nor any offence to mortal; he knew not head or tail of what _couche_ signified; a word, which, in Paris, even the plebeian dogs are now in the habit of saying to their _valets de chiens_. But there were three things which Von Aufhammer never recalled,--his error, his anger, and his word. The provokee, therefore, determined that the plebeian provoker and honor-stealer should never more speak to him, or--get a doit from him.

I return. After dinner he gazed out of the little window into the garden, and saw his path of life dividing into four branches, leading towards just as many skyward Ascensions; towards the Ascension into the Parsonage, and that into the Castle to Thiennette, for this day; and towards the third into Schadeck for the morrow; and lastly, into every house in Hukelum as the fourth. And now, when the mother had long enough kept cheerfully gliding about on tiptoe, "not to disturb him in studying his Latin Bible" (the _Vulgata_), that is, in reading the _Litteraturzeitung_, he at last rose to his own feet; and the humble joy of the mother ran long after the courageous son, who dared to go forth and speak to a Senior, quite unappalled. Yet it was not without reverence that he entered the dwelling of his old, rather gray than bald-headed, teacher, who was not only Virtue itself, but also Hunger, eating frequently, and with the appet.i.te of Pharaoh's lean kine. A schoolman that expects to become a professor will scarcely deign to cast an eye on a pastor; but one who is himself looking up to a parsonage as to his working-house and breeding-house, knows how to value such a character. The new parsonage--as if it had, like a _Casa Santa_, come flying out of Erlang, or the Berlin Friedrichs-stra.s.se, and alighted in Hukelum--was for the Quintus a Temple of the Sun, and the Senior a Priest of the Sun. To be Parson there himself was a thought overlaid with virgin honey; such a thought as occurs but one other time in History, namely, in the head of Hannibal, when he projected stepping over the Alps, that is to say, over the threshold of Rome.

The landlord and his guest formed an excellent _bureau d'esprit_; people of office, especially of the same office, have more to tell each other, namely, their own history, than your idle May-chafers and Court-celestials, who must speak only of other people's.--The Senior made a soft transition from his iron-ware (in the stable furniture), to the golden age of his Academic life, of which such people like as much to think, as poets do of their childhood. So good as he was, he still half joyfully recollected that he had once been less so; but joyful remembrances of wrong actions are their half repet.i.tion, as repentant remembrances of good ones are their half abolishment.

Courteously and kindly did Zebedaus (who could not even enter in his Notebook the name of a person of quality without writing an H. for Herr before it) listen to the Academic Saturnalia of the old gentleman, who in Wittenberg had toped as well as written, and thirsted not more for the Hippocrene than for Gukguk.[37]

Herr Jerusalem has observed that the barbarism, which often springs up close on the brightest efflorescence of the sciences, is a sort of strengthening mud-bath, good for averting the over-refinement wherewith such efflorescence always threatens us. I believe that a man who considers how high the sciences have mounted with our upper cla.s.ses,--for instance with every Patrician's son in Nurnberg, to whom the public must present 1000 florins for studying with,--I believe that such a man will not grudge the Son of the Muses a certain barbarous Middle-age (the Burschen or Student Life, as it is called), which may again so case-harden him that his refinement shall not go beyond the limits. The Senior, while in Wittenberg, had protected the one hundred and eighty Academic Freedoms--so many of them has Petrus Rebuffus summed up[38]--against prescription, and lost none except his moral one, of which truly a man, even in a convent, can seldom make much.

This gave our Quintus courage to relate certain pleasant somersets of his own, which at Leipzig, under the Incubus-pressure of poverty, he had contrived to execute. Let us hear him. His landlord, who was at the same time Professor and Miser, maintained in his enclosed court a whole community of hens. Fixlein, in company with three room-mates, without difficulty mastered the rent of a chamber, or closet. In general their main equipments, like Ph[oe]nixes, existed but in the singular number: one bed, in which always the one pair slept before midnight, the other after midnight, like nocturnal watchmen; one coat, in which one after the other they appeared in public, and which, like a watch-coat, was the national uniform of the company; and several other _ones_, Unities both of Interest and Place. Nowhere can you collect the stress-memorials and siege-medals of Poverty more pleasantly and philosophically than at College; the Academic burgher exhibits to us how many humorists and Diogeneses Germany has in it. Our Unitarians had just one thing four times, and that was hunger. The Quintus related, perhaps with a too pleasurable enjoyment of the recollection, how one of this famishing _coro_ invented means of appropriating the Professor's hens as just tribute, or subsidies. He said (he was a Jurist), they must once for all borrow a legal fiction from the Feudal code, and look on the Professor as the soccage tenant, to whom the usufruct of the hen-yard and hen-house belonged; but on themselves as the feudal superiors of the same, to whom accordingly the va.s.sal was bound to pay his feudal dues. And now, that the Fiction might follow Nature, continued he--"_fictio sequitur naturam_,"--it behooved them to lay hold of said Yule-hens, by direct personal distraint. But into the court-yard there was no getting. The feudalist, therefore, prepared a fishing-line; stuck a bread-pill on the hook, and lowered his fishing-tackle, anglewise, down into the court. In a few seconds the barb stuck in a hen's throat, and the hen, now communicating with its feudal superior, could silently, like ships by Archimedes, be heaved aloft to the hungry air-fishing society, where, according to circ.u.mstances, the proper feudal name and t.i.tle of possession failed not to be awaiting her; for the updrawn fowls were now denominated Christmas-fowls, now Forest-hens, Bailiff-hens, Pentecost and Summer-hens. "I begin," said the angling lord of the manor, "with taking _Rutcher-dues_, for so we call the triple and quintuple of the original quitrent, when the va.s.sal, as is the case here, has long neglected payment." The Professor, like any other prince, observed with sorrow the decreasing population of his hen-yard, for his subjects, like the Hebrews, were dying by enumeration. At last he had the happiness, while reading his lecture--he was just come to the subject of _Forest Salt and Coin Regalities_--to descry through the window of his auditorium a quitrent hen suspended, like Ignatius Loyola in prayer, or Juno in her punishment, in middle-air. He followed the incomprehensible direct ascension of the aeronautic animal, and at last descried at the upper window the attracting artist, and animal-magnetizer, who had drawn his lot for dinner from the hen-yard below. Contrary to all expectation, he terminated this fowling sport sooner than his Lecture on Regalities.

Fixlein walked home, amid the vesperal melodies of the steeple sounding-holes; and by the road courteously took off his hat before the empty windows of the Castle. Houses of quality were to him like persons of quality, as in India the PaG.o.da at once represents the temple and the G.o.d. To the mother he brought feigned compliments, which she repaid with authentic ones; for this afternoon she had been over, with her historical tongue and nature-interrogating eye, visiting the white-muslin Thiennette. The mother was wont to show her every spare-penny which he dropped into her large empty purse, and so raise him in the good graces of the Fraulein; for women feel their hearts much more attracted towards a son, who tenderly reserves for a mother some of their benefits, than we do to a daughter anxiously caring for her father; perhaps from a hundred causes, and this among the rest, that in their experience of sons and husbands they are more used to find these persons mere six-feet thunder-clouds, forked waterspouts, or even reposing tornadoes.

Blessed Quintus! on whose Life this other distinction, like an order of n.o.bility, does also shine, that thou canst tell it over to thy mother; as, for example, this past afternoon in the parsonage. Thy joy flows into another heart, and streams back from it, redoubled, into thy own.

There is a closer approximating of hearts, and also of sounds, than that of the _Echo_; the highest approximation melts Tone and Echo into _Resonance_ together.

It is historically certain that both of them supped this evening; and that instead of the whole dinner fragments which to-morrow might themselves represent a dinner, nothing but the cake-offering or pudding was laid upon the altar of the table. The mother, who for her own child would willingly have neglected not herself only, but all other people, now made a motion that to the Quintaner, who was sporting out of doors and baiting a bird instead of himself, there should no crumb of the precious pastry be given, but only table-bread without the crust. But the Schoolman had a Christian disposition, and said that it was Sunday, and the young man liked something delicate to eat as well as he.

Fixlein--the counterpart of great men and geniuses--was inclined to treat, to gift, to gratify a serving housemate, rather than a man who is for the first time pa.s.sing through the gate, and at the next post-stage will forget both his hospitable landlord and the last postmaster. On the whole, our Quintus had a touch of honor in him, and notwithstanding his thrift and sacred regard for money, he willingly gave it away in cases of honor, and unwillingly in cases of overpowering sympathy, which too painfully filled the cavities of his heart, and emptied those of his purse. Whilst the Quintaner was exercising the _jus compascui_ on the cake, and six arms were peacefully resting on Thiennette's free-table, Fixlein read to himself and the company the Flachsenfingen Address-calendar; any higher thing, except Meusel's _Gelehrtes Deutschland_,[39] he could not figure; the Kammerherrs and Raths of the Calendar went tickling over his tongue like the raisins of the cake; and of the more rich church-livings he, by reading, as it were levied a t.i.the.

He purposely remained his own Edition in Sunday Wove-paper; I mean, he did not lay away his Sunday coat, even when the Prayer-bell tolled; for he had still much to do.

After supper he was just about visiting the Fraulein, when he descried her in person, like a lily dipped in the red twilight, in the Castle garden, whose western limit his house const.i.tuted, the southern one being the Chinese wall of the Castle.... By the way, how I got to the knowledge of all this, what Letter-boxes are, whether I myself was ever there, &c., &c.--the whole of this shall, upon my life, be soon and faithfully communicated to the reader, and that too in the present Book.

Fixlein hopped forth like a Will-o'-wisp into the garden, whose flower-perfume was mingling with his supper-perfume. No one bowed lower to a n.o.bleman than he, not out of plebeian servility, nor of self-interested cringing, but because he thought "a n.o.bleman was a n.o.bleman." But in this case his bow, instead of falling forwards, fell obliquely to the right, as it were after his hat; for he had not risked taking a stick with him; and hat and stick were his proppage and balance-wheel, in short, his bowing-gear, without which it was out of his power to produce any courtly bow, had you offered him the High Church of Hamburg for so doing. Thiennette's mirthfulness soon unfolded his crumpled soul into straight form, and into the proper tone. He delivered her a long, neat Thanksgiving and Harvest sermon for the scaly cake; which appeared to her at once kind and tedious. Young women without the polish of high life reckon tedious pedantry, merely like snuffing, one of the necessary ingredients of a man; they reverence us infinitely; and as Lambert could never speak to the King of Prussia, by reason of his sun-eyes, except in the dark, so they, I believe, often like better--also by reason of our sublime air--if they can catch us in the dark too. _Him_ Thiennette edified by the Imperial History of Herr von Aufhammer and Her Ladyship his spouse, who meant to put him, the Quintus, in her will; _her_ he edified by his Literary History, as relating to himself and the Subrector; how, for instance, he was at present vicariating in the Second Form, and ruling over scholars as long in stature as himself. And thus did the two in happiness, among red bean-blossoms, red May-chafers, before the red of the twilight burning lower and lower on the horizon, walk to and fro in the garden; and turn always with a smile as they approached the head of the ancient gardeneress, standing like a window-bust through the little lattice, which opened in the bottom of a larger one.

To me it is incomprehensible he did not fall in love. I know his reasons, indeed. In the first place, she had nothing; secondly, he had nothing, and school-debts to boot; thirdly, her genealogical tree was a boundary tree and warning-post; fourthly, his hands were tied up by another n.o.bler thought, which, for good cause, is yet reserved from the reader. Nevertheless--Fixlein! I durst not have been in thy place!

I should have looked at her, and remembered her virtues and our school-years, and then have drawn forth my too fusible heart, and presented it to her as a bill of exchange, or insinuated it as a summons. For I should have considered that she resembled a nun in two senses, in her good heart and in her good pastry; that, in spite of her intercourse with male va.s.sals, she was no Charles Genevieve Louise Auguste Timothe Eon de Beaumont,[40] but a smooth, fair-haired, white-capped dove; that she sought more to please her own s.e.x than ours; that she showed a melting heart, not previously borrowed from the Circulating Library, in tears, for which in her innocence she rather took shame than credit.--At the very first cheapening, I should, on these grounds, have been out with my heart.--Had I fully reflected, Quintus! that I knew her as myself; that her hands and mine (to wit, had I been thou) had both been guided by the same Senior to Latin penmanship; that we two, when little children, had kissed each other before the gla.s.s, to see whether the two image-children would do it likewise in the mirror; that often we had put hands of both s.e.xes into the same m.u.f.f, and there played with them in secret; had I, lastly, considered that we were here standing before the gla.s.s-house, now splendent in the enamel of twilight, and that on the cold panes of this gla.s.s-house we two (she within, I without) had often pressed our warm cheeks together, parted only by the thickness of the gla.s.s,--then had I taken this poor gentle soul, pressed asunder by Fate, and seeing, amid her thunder-clouds, no higher elevation to part them and protect her than the grave, and had drawn her to my own soul, and warmed her on my heart, and encompa.s.sed her about with my eyes.

In truth, the Quintus would have done so too, had not the above-mentioned n.o.bler thought, which I yet disclose not, kept him back. Softened, without knowing the cause,--(accordingly he gave his mother a kiss,)--and blessed without having had a literary conversation; and dismissed with a freight of humble compliments, which he was to disload on the morrow before the Dragoon Rittmeisterinn, he returned to his little cottage, and looked yet a long while out of its dark windows, at the light ones of the Castle. And then, when the first quarter of the moon was setting, that is, about midnight, he again, in the cool sigh of a mild, fanning, moist, and directly heart-addressing night-breeze, opened the eyelids of a sight already sunk in dreaming....

Sleep, for to-day thou hast done naught ill! I, whilst the drooping, shut flower-bell of thy spirit sinks on thy pillow, will look into the breezy night over thy morning footpath, which, through the translucent little wood, is to lead thee to Schadeck, to thy patroness. All prosperity attend thee, thou foolish Quintus!--

SECOND LETTER-BOX.

Frau von Aufhammer.--Childhood-resonance.--Authorcraft.

The early piping which the little thrush, last night adopted by the Quintaner from its nest, started for victual about two o'clock, soon drove our Quintus into his clothes; whose calender-press and parallel-ruler the hands of his careful mother had been, for she would not send him to the Rittmeisterinn "like a runagate dog." The Shock was incarcerated, the Quintaner taken with him, as likewise many wholesome rules from Mother Fixlein, how to conduct himself towards the Rittmeisterinn. But the son answered: "Mamma, when a man has been in company, like me, with high people, with a Fraulein Thiennette, he soon knows whom he is speaking to, and what polished manners and Saver di veaver (_Savoir vivre_) require."

He arrived with the Quintaner, and green fingers (dyed with the leaves he had plucked on the path), and with a half-nibbled rose between his teeth, in presence of the sleek lackeys of Schadeck. If women are flowers--though as often silk and Italian and gum-flowers as botanical ones--then was Frau von Aufhammer a ripe flower, with (adipose) neck-bulb, and tuberosity (of lard). Already, in the half of her body, cut away from life by the apoplexy, she lay upon her lard-pillow but as on a softer grave; nevertheless, the portion of her that remained was at once lively, pious, and proud. Her heart was a flowing cornucopia to all men, yet this not from philanthropy, but from rigid devotion; the lower cla.s.ses she a.s.sisted, cherished, and despised, regarding nothing in them, except it were their piety. She received the bowing Quintus with the back-bowing air of a patroness; yet she brightened into a look of kindliness at his disloading of the compliments from Thiennette.

She began the conversation, and long continued it alone, and said,--yet without losing the inflation of pride from her countenance,--"She should soon die; but the G.o.dchildren of her husband she would remember in her will." Further, she told him directly in the face, which stood there all over-written with the Fourth Commandment before her, that "he must not build upon a settlement in Hukelum; but to the Flachsenfingen Conrectorate (to which the Burgermeister and Council had the right of nomination) she hoped to promote him, as it was from the then Burgermeister that she bought her coffee, and from the Town-Syndic (he drove a considerable wholesale and retail trade in Hamburg candles) that she bought both her wax and tallow lights."

And now by degrees he arrived at his humble pet.i.tion, when she asked him sick-news of Senior Astmann, who guided himself more by Luther's Catechism than by the Catechism of Health. She was Astmann's patroness in a stricter than ecclesiastical sense; and she even confessed that she would soon follow this true shepherd of souls, when she heard, here at Schadeck, the sound of his funeral-bell. Such strange chemical affinities exist between our dross and our silver veins; as, for example, here between Pride and Love; and I could wish that we would pardon this hypostatic union in all persons, as we do it in the fair, who, with all their faults, are nevertheless by us--as, according to Du Fay, iron, though mixed with any other metal, is by the magnet--attracted and held fast.

Supposing even that the Devil _had_, in some idle minute, sown a handful or two of the seeds of Envy in our Quintus's soul, yet they had not sprouted; and to-day especially they did not, when he heard the praises of a man who had been his teacher, and who--what he reckoned a t.i.tulado of the Earth, not from vanity, but from piety--was a clergyman. So much, however, is, according to History, not to be denied; that he now straightway came forth with his pet.i.tion to the n.o.ble lady, signifying that "indeed he would cheerfully content himself for a few years in the school; but yet in the end he longed to be in some small quiet priestly office." To her question, "But was he orthodox?" he answered, that "he hoped so; he had, in Leipzig, not only attended all the public lectures of Dr. Burscher, but also had taken private instructions from several sound teachers of the faith, well knowing that the Consistorium, in its examinations as to purity of doctrine, was now more strict than formerly."

The sick lady required him to make a proof-shot, namely, to administer to her a sick-bed exhortation. By Heaven! he administered to her one of the best. Her pride of birth now crouched before his pride of office and priesthood; for though he could not, with the Dominican monk, Ala.n.u.s de Rupe, believe that a priest was greater than G.o.d, inasmuch as the latter could only make a World, but the former a G.o.d (in the ma.s.s); yet he could not but fall in with Hostiensis, who shows that the priestly dignity is seven thousand six hundred and forty-four times greater than the kingly, the Sun being just so many times greater than the Moon. But a Rittmeisterinn--_she_ shrinks into absolute nothing before a parson.

In the servants' hall he applied to the lackeys for the last annual series of the _Hamburg Political Journal_; perceiving that with these historical doc.u.ments of the time they were scandalously papering the b.u.t.tons of travelling raiment. In gloomy harvest evenings, he could now sit down and read for himself what good news were transpiring in the political world--twelve months ago.

On a Triumphal Car, full-laden with laurel, and to which Hopes alone were yoked, he drove home at night, and by the road advised the Quintaner not to be puffed up with any earthly honor, but silently to thank G.o.d, as himself was now doing.

The thickset blooming grove of his four canicular weeks, and the flying tumult of blossoms therein, are already painted on three of the sides.

I will now clutch blindfold into his days, and bring out one of them; one smiles and sends forth its perfumes like another.

Let us take, for instance, the Saint's day of his mother, _Clara_, the twelfth of August. In the morning, he had perennial, fire-proof joys, that is to say, Employments. For he was writing, as I am doing. Truly, if Xerxes proposed a prize for the invention of a new pleasure, any man who had sat down to write his thoughts on the prize-question had the new pleasure already among his fingers. I know only one thing sweeter than making a book, and that is, to project one. Fixlein used to write little works, of the twelfth part of an alphabet in size, which in their ma.n.u.script state he got bound by the bookbinder in gilt boards, and bet.i.tled with printed letters, and then inserted them among the literary ranks of his book-board. Every one thought they were novelties printed in writing types. He had labored--I shall omit his less interesting performances--at a _Collection of Errors of the Press_, in German writings; he compared _Errata_ with each other; showed which occurred most frequently; observed that important results were to be drawn from this, and advised the reader to draw them.

Moreover, he took his place among the German _Masorites_. He observes with great justice in his Preface: "The Jews had their _Masora_ to show, which told them how often every letter was to be found in their Bible; for example, the Aleph (the A) 42,377 times; how many verses there are in which all the consonants appear (there are 26 verses), or only eighty (there are 3); how many verses we have into which 42 words and 160 consonants enter (there is just one, Jeremiah xxi. 7); which is the middle letter in certain books (in the Pentateuch, it is in Leviticus xi. 42, the n.o.ble V[41]), or in the whole Bible itself. But where have we Christians any similar Masora for Luther's Bible to show?

Has it been accurately investigated which is the middle word, or the middle letter here, which vowel appears seldomest, and how often each vowel? Thousands of Bible-Christians go out of the world, without ever knowing that the German A occurs 323,015 times (therefore above 7 times oftener than the Hebrew one) in their Bible."

I could wish that inquirers into Biblical Literature among our Reviewers would publicly let me know if, on a more accurate summation, they find this number incorrect.[42]

Much also did the Quintus _collect_; he had a fine _Almanack Collection_, a _Catechism_ and _Pamphlet Collection_; also, a _Collection of Advertis.e.m.e.nts_, which he began, is not so incomplete as you most frequently see such things. He puts high value on his _Alphabetical Lexicon of German Subscribers for Books_, where my name also occurs among the Js.

But what he liked best to produce were Schemes of Books. Accordingly, he sewed together a large work, wherein he merely advised the Learned of things they ought to introduce in Literary History, which History he rated some ells higher than Universal or Imperial History. In his Prolegomena to this performance, he transiently submitted to the Literary republic that Hommel had given a register of Jurists who were sons of wh--, of others who had become Saints; that Baillet enumerates the Learned who _meant_ to write something; and Ancillon those who wrote nothing at all; and the Lubeck Superintendent Gotze, those who were shoemakers, those who were drowned; and Bernhard those whose fortunes and history before birth were interesting. This (he could now continue) should, as it seems, have excited us to similar muster-rolls and matriculations of other kinds of Learned; whereof he proposed a few; for example, of the Learned who were unlearned; of those who were entire rascals; of such as wore their own hair,--of cue-preachers, cue-psalmists, cue-annalists, and so forth; of the Learned who had worn black leather breeches, of others who had worn rapiers; of the Learned who had died in their eleventh year,--in their twentieth,--twenty-first, &c.,--in their hundred and fiftieth, of which he knew no instance, unless the Beggar Thomas Parr might be adduced; of the Learned who wrote a more abominable hand than the other Learned (whereof we know only Rolfinken and his letters, which were as long as his hands[43]); or of the Learned who had clipt nothing from each other but the beard (whereof no instance is known, save that of Philelphus and Timotheus[44]).

Such by-studies did he carry on along with his official labors; but I think the State in viewing these matters is actually mad: it compares the man who is great in Philosophy and Belles-Lettres at the expense of his jog-trot officialities, to _concert-clocks_, which, though striking their hours in flute-melodies, are worse time-keepers than your gross, stupid steeple-clocks.

To return to St. Clara's day. Fixlein, after such mental exertions, bolted out under the music-bushes and rustling trees; and returned not again out of warm Nature, till plate and chair were already placed at the table. In the course of the repast, something occurred which a Biographer must not omit; for his mother had, by request, been wont to map out for him, during the process of mastication, the chart of his child's-world, relating all the traits which in any way prefigured what he had now grown to. This perspective sketch of his early Past he committed to certain little leaves which merit our undivided attention.

For such leaves exclusively, containing scenes, acts, plays of his childhood, he used chronologically to file and arrange in separate drawers in a little child's-desk of his; and thus to divide his Biography, as Moser did his Publicistic Materials, into separate _letter-boxes_. He had boxes or drawers for memorial-letters of his twelfth, of his thirteenth, fourteenth, &c., of his twenty-first year, and so on. Whenever he chose to conclude a day of pedagogic drudgery by an evening of peculiar rest, he simply pulled out a letter-drawer, a register-bar in his Life-hand-organ, and recollected the whole.

And here must I, in reference to these reviewing Mutes, who may be for casting the noose of strangulation round my neck, most particularly beg, that, before doing so on account of my Chapters being called Letter-boxes, they would have the goodness to look whose blame it was, and to think whether I could possibly help it, seeing the Quintus had divided his Biography into such Boxes himself: they have Christian bowels.

But about his elder brother he put no saddening question to his mother; this poor boy a peculiar Fate had laid hold of, and with all his genial endowment dashed to pieces on the iceberg of Death. For he chanced to leap on an ice-board that had jammed itself among several others; but these recoiled, and his shot forth with him; melted away as it floated under his feet, and so sunk his heart of fire amid the ice and waves.

It grieved his mother that he was not found, that her heart had not been harrowed by the look of the swoln corpse.--O good mother, rather thank G.o.d for it!--

After breakfast, to fortify himself with new vigor for his desk, he for some time strolled idly over the house, and, like a Police Fire-inspector, visited all the nooks of his cottage, to gather from them here and there a live ember from the ash-covered rejoicing-fire of his childhood. He mounted to the garret, to the empty bird-coops of his father, who in winter had been a birder; and he transiently reviewed the lumber of his old playthings, which were lying in the netted enclosure of a large canary breeding-cage. In the minds of children, it is regular _little_ forms, such as those of b.a.l.l.s and dies, that impress and express themselves most forcibly. From this may the reader explain to himself Fixlein's delight in the red acorn-blockhouse, in the sparwork glued together out of white chips and husks of potato-plums, in the cheerful gla.s.shouse of a cube-shaped lantern, and other the like products of his early architecture. The following, however, I explain quite differently; he had ventured, without leave given from any lord of the manor, to build a clay house; not for cottagers, but for flies; and which, therefore, you could readily enough have put in your pocket. This fly-hospital had its gla.s.s windows, and a red coat of coloring, and very many alcoves, and three balconies; balconies, as a sort of house within a house, he had loved from of old so much, that he could scarcely have liked Jerusalem well, where (according to Lightfoot) no such thing is permitted to be built. From the glistening eyes with which the architect had viewed his tenantry creeping about the windows, or feeding out of the sugar-trough,--for, like the Count St. Germain, they ate nothing but sugar,--from this joy an adept in the art of education might easily have prophesied his turn for household contraction; to his fancy, in those times, even gardeners'-huts were like large waste Arks and Halls, and nothing bigger than such a fly-Louvre seemed a true, snug citizen's-house. He now felt and handled his old high child's-stool, which had in former days resembled the _Sedes Exploratoria_ of the Pope; he gave his child's-coach a tug and made it run; but he could not understand what balsam and holiness so much distinguished it from all other child's-coaches. He wondered that the real sports of children should not so delight him as the emblems of these sports, when the child that had carried them on was standing grown up to manhood in his presence.

Before one article in the house he stood heart-melted and sad; before a little angular clothes-press, which was no higher than my table, and which had belonged to his poor drowned brother. When the boy with the key of it was swallowed by the waves, the excruciated mother had made a vow that this toy-press of his should never be broken up by violence.

Most probably there is nothing in it but the poor soul's playthings.

Let us look away from this b.l.o.o.d.y urn.----

Bacon reckons the remembrances of childhood among wholesome, medicinal things; naturally enough, therefore, they acted like a salutary digestive on the Quintus. He could now again betake him with new heart to his desk, and produce something quite peculiar,--pet.i.tions for church livings. He took the Address-calendar, and, for every country parish that he found in it, got a pet.i.tion in readiness; which he then laid aside, till such time as the present inc.u.mbent should decease. For Hukelum alone he did not solicit.--It is a pretty custom in Flachsenfingen, that, for every office which is vacant, you are required, if you want it, to sue. As the higher use of Prayer consists, not in its fulfilment, but in its accustoming you to pray; so likewise pet.i.tionary papers ought to be given in, not indeed that you may get the office,--this nothing but your money can do,--but that you may learn to write pet.i.tions. In truth, if, among the Calmucks, the turning of a calabash[45] stands in place of Prayer, a slight movement of the purse may be as much as if you supplicated in words.

Towards evening--it was Sunday--he went out roving over the village; he pilgrimed to his old sporting-places, and to the common where he had so often driven his snails to pasture; visited the peasant who, from school-times upwards, had been wont, to the amazement of the rest, to _thou_[46] him; went, an Academic Tutor, to the Schoolmaster; then to the Senior; then to the Episcopal-barn or church. This last no mortal understands, till I explain it. The case was this. Some three-and-forty years ago a fire had destroyed the church (not the steeple), the parsonage, and, what was not to be replaced, the church-records. (For this reason it was only the smallest portion of the Hukelum people that knew exactly how old they were; and the memory of our Quintus himself vibrated between adopting the thirty-third year and the thirty-second.) In consequence, the preaching had now to be carried on where formerly there had been threshing; and the seed of the divine word to be turned over on the same threshing-floor with natural corn-seed. The Chanter and the School-boys took up the threshing-floor; the female mother-church-people stood on the one sheaves-loft, the Schadeck womankind on the other; and their husbands cl.u.s.tered pyramidically, like groschen and farthing-gallery men; about the barn-stairs; and far up on the straw-loft, mixed souls stood listening. A little flute was their organ, an upturned beer-cask their altar, round which they had to walk. I confess, I myself could have preached in such a place, not without humor. The Senior (at that time still a Junior), while the parsonage was building, dwelt and taught in the Castle; it was here, accordingly, that Fixlein had learned the _Irregular Verbs_ with Thiennette.

These voyages of discovery completed, our Hukelum voyager could still, after evening prayers, pick leaf-insects, with Thiennette, from the roses; worms from the beds, and a Heaven of joy from every minute.

Every dew-drop was colored as with oil of cloves and oil of gladness; every star was a sparkle from the sun of happiness; and in the closed heart of the maiden, there lay near to him, behind a little wall of separation, (as near to the Righteous man behind the thin wall of Life,) an outstretched blooming Paradise.... I mean, she loved him a little.

He might have known it, perhaps. But to his compressed delight he gave freer vent, as he went to bed, by early recollections on the stair. For in his childhood he had been accustomed, by way of evening-prayer, to go over, under his coverlet, as it were, a rosary, including fourteen Bible Proverbs, the first verse of the Psalm, "All people that on Earth," the Tenth Commandment, and, lastly, a long blessing. To get the sooner done with it, he had used to begin his devotion, not only on the stair, but before leaving that place where Alexander studied men, and Semler stupid books. Moored in the haven of the down-waves, he was already over with his evening supplication; and could now, without further exertion, shut his eyes and plump into sleep.----Thus does there lurk, in the smallest _homunculus_, the model of--the Catholic Church.

So far the Dog-days of Quintus Zebedaus Egidius Fixlein.--I, for the second time, close a Chapter of this _Life_, as Life itself is closed, with a sleep.