Jean Paul

“ Thou dear Lenette! A bride is, it is true, during many days, for everyone whom she’s not going to many, a poor meagre piece of shewbread—and especially is she so to me. But I except one hour, namely, that on the morning of the wedding-day, when the girl, whose life has been all freedom hitherto, trembling in her wedding dress, overgrown (like an ivied tree) with flowers and feathers, which, with others like them, fate is soon to pluck away—and with anxious pious eyes overflowing on her mother’s heart for the last and loveliest time ”

“ Nathalie leant on Firmian’s hand, that he might help her to rise, and said, “I feel quite able to go home now.” He kept hold of her hand, but did not rise nor speak. He was gazing at the dry, prickly stalk of the old rose-twig which she had given him. Unwittingly, and without feeling what he was doing, he pressed the thorns into his fingers. His laden bosom heaved with deeper, warmer sighs; burning tears stood in his eyes, and the moon’s light trembled before them like a shower of falling light. A whole universe lay upon his soul and upon his tongue, and kept both motionless. ”

“ There are smiling eternal rainbows playing around all the waterfalls for you; but the rain-clouds of a woman’s heart must drop for many a long day ere they are brightened by the sad, yet cheering tints of the Iris which memory casts upon them at length. Your friend is with you still, no doubt. Press him warmly to your heart, and tell him, all that yours wishes, and gives him, mine wishes him; and never will he, or you, whom he loves, be forgotten by me. Always
“Your Nathalie.”
During the reading of this, Firmian stood with his face pressed to the window, and lifted towards the evening sky. ”

“ Even her very tears had ceased to flow. Oh! gaze no more, sad soul, towards the west, where stands the house of mourning all behung with funeral crape; nor to the east, upon the grave and house of death. For this one day, turn thy sad gaze away from that drear charnel house where the loved corpse is laid, so that the cool night breeze may fan and wake him from his sleep earlier than if he were shut up within the narrow grave! Yet, no! bereaved one, gaze thy fill on thy beloved one while he still is here, and ere he falls to dust—and steep thy heart deep in the eternal woe. ”

“ But as the tree (according to Bonnet) is planted as much in the air above it as it is in the earth beneath it, and derives nourishment quite as much from the one as from the other, so it is with every true human-creature. And thus Firmian lived in the future with more vivid life than in the past—only with fewer of his root-fibres in the visible ground. The whole tree, top-shoot, branches, and all, stood under the open sky, drinking the free breeze of heaven with its every blossom—where all he had to invigorate and cheer him were two invisible friends—the one a woman, the other a man. ”

“ Every husband should be provided with two or three visitors of this sort, to come in when he’s suffering from an attack of wife-possessed-too-long-with-the-devil-of-dumbness; as long as the people are there, at all events, she must speak, and take the iron thief-apple of silence—which grows on the same stalk as the apple of discord—out of her mouth.
The Schulrath stood up before Lenette Wendeline as if she were one of his school girls, and asked her if she had borne this first cross of her married life patiently, and like a worthy sister in suffering of the patriarch Job. ”

“ The only time when death is a flight—not a fall—is when some hero is smitten by one, single, mortal wound, when, as he stands like a spring-world, all new blossom, and old fruit, the next world suddenly flashes by him, like some comet, bearing him (miniature world as he is) all unwithered, along with it in its flight, to soar with it beyond the sun.
But this mental exaltation of Firmian’s would have been an indication of reviving strength and returning health to sharper eyes than Stiefel’s. ”

“ His eyes ran over with sorrow like a broken river-bank. He gave the picture to the Schulrath, paused, overcome by emotion, and said at length: “To you, my faithful friend, and to you alone, can I give this beloved portrait: you are her friend, as well as mine. Oh God! there is not a soul in the great, wide world that will take care of my dear Lenette if you forsake her. Don’t cry so bitterly, my darling; he will be everything to you. Ah! dearest of friends, this helpless, innocent heart will break in desolate loneliness of sorrow unless you protect it and console it. ”

“ In no hour is a lovely face lovelier than at that immediately succeeding the bitter one, when tears for the loss of a heart have passed over it; for the sight of the loveliness in its sorrow, during that hour itself, would be too sad to bear. For this beautiful creature, who hid the sacrificial knife deep in her heart, where it had been plunged, and gladly let it smart there, that but the wound’s bleeding might be delayed, Siebenkæs would gladly have died—in a way more serious than had been intended—could it have been of any service to her. ”

“ I am not one of those authors who, like very rattlesnakes, can sit and gaze upon thousands of charmed people running up and down, a prey to every kind of agitation, suspense, and anxiety, till his time comes to spring upon them and swallow them up.
When Siebenkæs awoke in the morning, he at once packed the devil of jealousy, the marriage devil, off to the place where all other devils dwell. For a calming sleep lowers the pulse of the soul’s fever—the grains thereof are fever-bark for the cold fever of hate, and also for the hot fever of love. ”

“ The cuckoo (always her own sounding-board and multiplying echo) talked to him from the tree-top in mournful tones of sorrow; the sun was gone; the shadows were throwing thick veils of crape over the brightness of the day. He asked himself, “What is my Lenette doing now? Of whom is she thinking? Who is with her?” And here there fell about his heart, like a band of ice, the thought, “Ah! but I have no loved one whose hand I can clasp!” ”

“ The month of May now stuck in little flower-sticks to all Firmian’s drooping, trembling, joy-flowers (as she had done to Nature’s) , and lightly bound them to them. Ah! with what brightness do even little joys beam upon the soul when it stands on some spot all darkened by clouds of sorrow—as stars shine out in the empty sky when we look up at it from a cellar or deep well.
On the exquisite morning which followed, the earth rose with the sun. Siebenkæs had his friend of all time in his head and heart more than the unknown of yesterday ”

“ Æolian harps, breathed on by zephyrs, seemed to be sending forth their tones from out the evening-red, their melodies flowed softly on into the wide realm of sleep, and there took the form of dreams. Firmian’s heart, moved to its very centre, yearned for love—and for very longing he felt impelled to press his flowers into the white hands of a pretty child in Johannes—just that he might touch a human hand.
Go, dear Firmian, with that softened heart of yours, to your deeply-moved friend, whose inner being, too, stretches its arms out towards its likeness ”

“ These recollections, with all their tears, brought back the belief that he was soon to die; and this he must tell Nathalie. He saw the wide expanse of night stretched over the world like some great corpse but her shadowy limbs quiver under the moonlit-branches at the first touches of the morning breeze awaking in the east. She rises towards the coming sun as a dissolving vapour, an all-embracing cloud, and man says “It is day.” Two crape-covered thoughts, like hideous spectres, fought within Firmian’s soul. The one said, “He is going to die of apoplexy, so he never can see her more.” ”

“ Evening is the time when we weary, hunted men long to be at rest; it is for the evening of the day, for the evening of the year (autumn) , and for the evening of life, that we lay up our hard-earned harvests, and with such eager hopes! But hast thou never seen in fields, when the crops were gathered, an image and emblem of thyself—I mean the autumn daisy, the flower of harvest; she delays her blossom till the summer is past and gone, the winter snows cover her before her fruit appears, and it is not till the—coming spring that that fruit is ripe! ”

“ The shooting-match on St. Andrew’s Day was her Fortunatus’s wishing-cap, the wooden wings of the eagle were as waxen flying-apparatus fixed on to her hopes, the powder and shot were the flower-seeds of her future blossoms of peace (as they are to crowned heads also) . Thou poor soul, in many senses of the word! But the poor hope incredibly more than the rich; therefore it is that poor devils are more apt to catch the infection of lotteries than the rich—just as they are to catch the plague and other epidemics. ”

“ Only, most people in our, not so much enlightened as enlightening times, are like nocturnal insects who avoid, or are pained by, the light of day, but, in the night, fly to every nocturnal light, every phosphorescent surface.
The graves of the best men are like those of the Moravians, level and flat, and this earthly sphere of ours is a Westminster Abbey of such levellings and flattenings—ah! what innumerable drops of tears as well as blood (which are what the three grand trees of this world—the trees of Life, of Knowledge, and Liberty—are watered with) have been shed, but never counted. ”

“ For the first day of convalescence of the body, after its winter of sickness, is the blossoming time of a lovelier soul, which issues forth as if transfigured from the earth’s cold crust into a mild warm Eden; longing to press all things to her breast (feeble yet, and short of breath) —mankind, and flowers, and spring breezes, and every other bosom which has sighed for her upon her bed of pain. Like all the newly risen from death, she longs to love all things throughout an eternity; and the whole heart is a warm and dewy spring-time, rich in buds, beneath a youthful sun. ”

“ Some ashes, a few worms, coldness, and night—by Heaven! there is nothing better above it either, except that one feels it. Mr. Schulrath, Time sits behind us, and reads the calendar of life so cursorily, and turns over the page of month after month at such a rate, that I can fancy this grave—this moat here about our castles in the air—this fortress trench—lengthening out and extending till it reaches my bed, and I am shaken out of the bedclothes into this cooking-hole, like a heap of Spanish flies. ”

“ It was the Schulrath.
Poor, fevered human creatures that we are! driven back and repulsed asunder by our own lackings, and those of others, yet continually drawn together again by never-ceasing longings, in whom one hope of finding love falls away to dust after another, whose wishes come to nothing but memories. Our feeble hearts are at all events glowing and right full of love in that hour when we come back and meet again; and in that other hour when we part, disconsolate,—as every star seems milder, larger, and lovelier when it is rising, than when it is overhead. ”

“ And at this moment, a flash of such brilliance illumined the heavens, and such a shattering peal of thunder followed close upon it, that, stretching out her hand to him, she said, “I will do anything and everything you wish me to do; only, for Heaven’s sake, be a God-fearing man again! I will even give Leibgeber my hand; yes, and a kiss too, if I must—no matter whether he has washed his face after the dog’s licking it, or not—and I shall neither listen, nor mind, when you say what a delightful, beautiful place the silvery, flowery Bayreuth Fantaisie is.” ”

“ We love much more warmly when we are looking forward to making somebody happy than we do half an hour after, when we have done it. It was as windy this morning as if the gales were holding tournament, or riding at the ring, or as if Æolus were shooting his winds out of air-guns. Hence many people thought either that the earthquake was beginning, or that a few people here and there had hanged themselves for fear of it. Firmian met a pair of eyes in Lenette’s face, from which, even at that early hour, there had fallen a warm blood-rain of tears, on this first of her days. ”