Ludwig Tieck

“ Canst thou then love me?"
"I wish thee well from my very heart, my old playmate," said Sophia: "but for all that, we are not happy yet."
"What can there be still in our way?" cried Edward. "Oh! how deeply am I ashamed, to have been capable of mistaking so grossly your generous father! How kindly he meets my wishes! How cordially he presses me to his bosom as his son!"
"Ay, thou strange creature," said Sophia, laughing, "but his caresses were not meant so. But the man will never reflect as long as he lives, and immediately begins to reckon without his host! ”

“ The man to whom God no longer appears in nature and history, is to be considered as dead; that man is lost, who no longer sees his lofty presence in the strength of reason. He too is pious on whom a picture flashes rapturous delight, and who, while he reads Shakespeare's Midsummer Night's Dream, feels blest and in paradise. For even mirth, humour and wit are of divine original, and we grow the purer and the more refined, the more we learn to perceive the ray of divinity in these delicate sports of the fancy. ”

“ This barbarism of ignorance at least is now gone by."
"If only no new and worse barbarism had arisen to supply its place!" cried Eulenböck, purpling deep with wine, as he threw a fiery glance at the stranger. "I never cease to regret that in our days the language of a genuine connoisseur is scarcely any longer to be heard; enthusiasm drowns the voice of judgment; and yet nothing is so instructive for the artist as a conversation with a genuine lover of the arts, to inform and animate him, though it is an advantage which for years together he may not be fortunate enough to enjoy." ”

“ You cannot love what is love itself? Go then and deny every thing divine, live a reprobate and die forsaken by heaven."
"You do not understand me," cried Dorothea with deep indignation: "it is the very misfortune of my life, that every thing is misunderstood in me, however well I mean it. Perhaps M. von Wallen would be quite to my mind, if only I did not know that he is so pious, perhaps even I might then think him pious."
"Excellent!" said the mother in a painful state of irritation: "when we are ourselves depraved, it is certainly most convenient to doubt the virtue of persons of worth. ”

“ What the poor man gains in such a moment of sunshine? Oh! sir, he who is accustomed to be thrust out of the society of men; he, for whom there is no holiday, no market-place, no society, and scarcely a church, for whom ceremony, courtesy and all the attentions which every man usually pays to his neighbour are extinct; this wretched creature, for whom, in public walks and vernal nature, there shoots and blossoms nothing but contempt, often turns his dry eye to heaven and the stars above him, and sees there even nothing but vacancy and doubts ”

“ Take my word for it, young men, all that etherializing, and that luscious piety yonder, has no other object, than that you should bite at this tempting bait in the way of marriage, provided, that is, you have places and fortune. There are so many daughters there, and only the eldest, a wild thing, is mad enough to reject all offers. Ay, that it is, the dear, good, much-desired matrimony, the wooing, towards which all the telescopes are pointed, when such fine noble daughters are sitting in the family saloon, round and plump, red and white, comely and clever, full-grown and finished! ”

“ Verily few men are so inclined to virtue as myself, for it requires a keen eye to know even what virtue is. To act the niggard, and force people to lie in the face of God and man, is certainly none. But whoever has the true talent that way is sure to find it. If I help a sensible man to a good Salvator or Julio Romano of my own hand, and he is pleased with it, I have at all events done a better action than if I were to sell a blockhead a genuine Raphael, of which the dolt does not know the value, and at the bottom of his heart would take more delight in a tricksy Vanderwerft. ”

“ Even young Dietrich drank stoutly, and Eulenböck arranged the order in which the wines were to follow one another. "To-day is the trial!" he cried: "the battle must be won, and the conqueror shews no mercy to the conquered. Look on my martial countenance, ye young heroes, here have I hung out the threatening blood-red banner, as a sign that no mercy is to be found. Nothing in the world, my friends, is so misunderstood as the apparently simple act which men superficially call drinking, and there is no boon to which less justice is done, which is so little prized, as wine. ”

“ Eulenböck, who observed every thing, and was never so well pleased as when he could wrap his malice in the disguise of good-nature, squeezed the young man's hand, and thanked him with seeming emotion for having cruised about so long merely to sit by the side of an old man who, it was true, also loved and practised the art, but still with his declining powers could no longer emulate the flight of the new school, though its enthusiasm rekindled his old fire, and warmed his chilled spirits. ”

“ The heart of Germany was still sound and entire, and the foreign cultivation, in spite of the activity with which it was conducted, could not find a congenial soil. Even when the moral and intellectual imbecility and dependence were at their height, the great mass of the people remained uncorrupted and unperverted. The soul of poetry and the life of religion had retreated from the crown and topmost branches toward the root of society, and there, while the sere and many-coloured leaves trembled on the boughs, preserved the hope of a coming spring. ”

“ Even a young artist named Dietrich, who is now for the first time sitting among us at this table, darts wondering glances at the multitude of these bottles and dishes, at these goose-liver pies, at these oysters and muscles and at the whole apparatus of a solemnity, which to him seems to promise an excess of sensual enjoyment, and he too will be surprized when he learns in how entirely different and directly opposite a sense all this is meant. ”

“ As the company rose from table, and during the exchange of compliments, Sophia took the opportunity, as she held out her hand to the old painter, who politely kissed it, to whisper distinctly in his ear, "O you most detestable of all detestable sinners, you ungrateful hypocrite! How can your perverse heart find in itself publicly to calumniate the man by whose benefits you have been enriched, and of whose thoughtlessness you take advantage, in order with your helpmates to plunge him into misery? ”

“ In company people take every opportunity to talk of repentance, penance, devotion and redemption, and profane, according to my feeling, what is sacred, forgetting that it has a resemblance to love, the feelings and confessions of which the true lover will be unwilling to expose to a stranger's ear."
"But what harm does it," said the Baron, "if pious spirits do perhaps speak even too often of the object of their love?"
"It cannot be love," replied Brandenstein, "it is vanity, arrogance, that affects to be better than other men. ”

“ The most attentive of all had been the fair Kunigunde, and she it was who most loudly expressed her approbation. "How fortunate are we," she at last concluded, "to assemble in our dear circle more and more of those spirits, who aim at what is good and noble; who have a perception of something above the earthly, and to whom the world, with all its alluring treasures, appears but vanity. But it is the property of truth and goodness to attract better natures, and to sublimate the weak. ”

“ They run about and meet each other, and kiss a joyous life one from the other's lips. Still closer, still brighter grows the throng, more and more melodious their lispings; then with garlands and solemn triumph they lead the Genius along, who with his dark eyes can hardly peep through his luxuriant flower-wreaths. Now the man is conscious of infinity, immortality; he sees and feels the myriads of spirits within him, and takes pleasure in their frolics. What is one to say then of the vulgar souls, who cry after a man: 'look, the fellow is drunk.' What thinkest thou, honest Crocodile? ”

“ If countries solemnize the birth of a prince, if in Arabia a whole tribe hails with festive rejoicings the epoch, when a poet makes his appearance and distinguishes himself; if the installation of a Lord Mayor is celebrated with a banquet; if even the birth of horses of generous breed is with good cause signalized in an impressive manner: it surely concerns us still more closely (not to end with an anti-climax) to look up, to feel an emotion and to touch glasses a little, when the immortal spirit discovers itself to us, when virtue deigns to appear before us in corporeal shape. ”

“ I have ever sacrificed myself to them; but even in their lispings they have recognized and returned my love; they have only needed to follow their hearts, and rigour, fear, and every thing of that sort, has been always wholly unknown to them."
The daughters looked tenderly at their mother, the mother had tears in her eyes, only Dorothea looked timidly downwards, and the Baron said in a fit of rapture, "All the world knows and reveres this model of education, and if any one doubts the power of love, let him come and see this family circle." ”

“ If colour ever appeared in its glory as a daughter of heaven, if there ever was a play of light and shade, in which the noblest emotions of the soul were awakened; if delight, inspiration, poetry and truth and dignity of character, were ever fixed in figures and colouring upon canvas, it was done in that picture, which was more than painting and enchantment. ”

“ A spirit, it cannot be denied, is manifesting itself, which will strengthen and improve. A new road has been discovered, which will, it is true, as is the case in every period of enthusiasm, be trodden by many uncalled aspirants, whose productions will be exaggerated, offensive, and in every respect censurable. But is then the bad of this age worse than the creations which some time ago raised Casanova to celebrity? or the empty emptier than that cold copying of the misunderstood antique, which gives the whole of the last age the appearance of one great botch in the history of the arts? ”

“ What shall I say of thee, librarian, thou who standest before the empty bookcases, and hast not merely read, but literally swallowed, the works? O thou cormorant of erudition, thou of the sect of the Mussulman Omar, canker-worm of libraries, ravager of literature, thou that couldst destroy a new Alexandrian collection, simply by the excellent new device of drawing thy salary, not intellectually, but really, from its books. All the booksellers of the Roman empire ought to send thee round to reduce collections to atoms by thy destructive power, and create a demand for new works. ”

“ While social intercourse has this happy effect in a larger sphere, it is, in the confined domestic circle, the blissfulness of wedlock, that kindles in the souls which it unites a still more fervent enthusiasm for every thing divine, which here still more powerfully raises the weaker spirit to the love of the infinite Being."
"Yes indeed," said a young man, who sat by the elderly gentleman, "this is what I feel every day more intensely and thankfully." He sighed and looked at the clouds, and the counsellor learnt upon inquiry, that this was the husband of the lovely and pious Kunigunde. ”

“ We have I should think Holy Families enough in our galleries, it is a field in which there is no room for a new invention; and those corpses and distortions of agony are so wholly repugnant to all grace and enjoyment of sense, that I can never help turning my eyes away from them. It is the business of the arts to heighten and cheer our existence, to make all its wants and all the wretchedness of the world vanish at their approach, and not to vex and rack our fancy with their productions. ”

“ Forsaken by men and women, in discord and enmity with your family, lonely and utterly lost in a cold, insulting world, poor and without succour! Will you not then review your youth with regret, and in bitter anguish repent, that you so wantonly, so thoughtlessly, rejected all happiness for yourself and your family? Does this generous man then require from you love and passion, as they are described in our perverse books? Does he wish for more than friendship and esteem? ”

“ For my nose, as it is, I am indebted to my barber."
"Tell us, old boy," cried the young people.
"Patience!" said the painter. "The science of physiognomy will always continue a fallacious one, for the very reason that too little regard is paid to barbers, taverns and other historical circumstances. The face is indeed the expression of the soul, but it suffers remarkably under the way in which it is treated. The brow from its solidity is best off, if a man does not use himself to paint all his little passions, vexation and uneasiness, by folds upon its surface. ”

“ In the execution of his delicate task, the Author has displayed the temper and spirit befitting a theme, the treatment of which, without the nicest impartiality, might be mischievous or offensive. In the midst of the keenest ridicule and the warmest glow of feeling he preserves an ironical self-possession, such as only a consummate artist can command. The keeping is every where perfect; the living scene is presented to us rather in a mirror than a picture. ”

“ Beauty is joy, life, vigour. The man who seeks night and gloomy feelings has acquired yet small knowledge of himself. But you perhaps are one of those who, at the sight of pictures of this sort, force their religious faith into raptures, and require a species of devotion to be kindled in us, that we may understand the subject and appreciate it with christian feelings?"
"And would that then," cried Dietrich with a degree of haste and vehemence, "be a thing so unheard-of, or even singular? ”