Hesperus

“ Now this is a sound which no fairy will ever pass by or ever so much as hear about without trying to comfort, and at once Prince Hesperus rose and flew to the sill of an open lattice.
He looked in on a poor room, with the meanest furnishings. On a comfortless bed lay the father of the house, ill and helpless. ”

“ It is no Spirit who from Heaven hath flown,
And is descending on his embassy;
Nor Traveller gone from Earth the Heavens to espy!
'Tis Hesperus—there he stands with glittering crown,
First admonition that the sun is down,
For yet it is broad day-light!—clouds pass by;
A few are near him still—and now the sky,
He hath it to himself—'tis all his own. ”

“ The best wedded love is not what the maidenly was; and so, too, is there in inspiration and delineation a maiden muse. Ah, all first things in poesy, as in life, whatever else may be wanting to them, are so innocent and good; and all blossoms come so pure-white into the world, in which by and by,—as Goethe says, [2] even of material colors, "The sun tolerates no white." Therefore shall all the ardent words of my inspiration for Emanuel's dying and Victor's loving and weeping, and for Clotilda's sorrow and silence, stand evermore in Hesperus uncooled and unchanged. ”

“ My name is Perseus.'
The girls leaped back from him, blushing and looking shy. The eldest girl answered, 'We are the daughters of Hesperus, the God of the Evening Star. I am Æglê, this is my sister Erytheia, and this is Hesperia. We are the keepers of this island, which is the garden of the gods, and they often visit us; our cousins, Dionysus, the young god of wine and mirth, and Hermes of the Golden Wand come often; and bright Apollo, and his sister Artemis the huntress. ”

“ Hesperus! say what flame more gladsome in Heavens be shining?
Thou whose light makes sure long-pledged connubial promise
Plighted erewhile by men and erstwhile plighted by parents.
Yet to be ne'er fulfilled before thy fire's ardours have risen!
30
What better boon can the gods bestow than hour so desirèd? ”

“ He says, that the world is in darkness, and his companions and he have lost each other; that Hesperus, the star of Europe, is obscured by clouds of incense, offered up by superstition to despots, who have made themselves gods, and have retired into the inmost recesses of their palaces, that they may not be recognised to be men, while their priests are deceiving the people, and causing them to worship these divinities. ”

“ Such was the wreck of the Hesperus,
In the midnight and the snow!
Christ save us all from a death like this
On the reef of Norman's Woe! ”

“ Very well, uncle; I feel quite tempted to fail, to inveigle you into a sensible termination to a foolish story. We often invent tales in the interval at school, and I'll give you one that my schoolmates like. It is called
[Pg 253] ;
The Rose of Hesperus; A FAIRY TALE.
Every one has heard of the Garden of Hesperus, famous in all ancient times for its exquisite beauty. Its golden fruit, more precious by far than the fleece of Jason, in search of which heroes perilled their lives on board the good ship Argo, was watched by a terrible dragon, whose eyes were never sealed by slumber. ”

“ As the star Hesperus, which is placed the brightest star in heaven, [13] proceeds among other stars in the unseasonable time of night, so it shone from the well-sharpened spear which Achilles, designing mischief to noble Hector, brandished in his right hand, eyeing his fair person, where it would best yield. But the beautiful brazen armor, of which he had despoiled great Patroclus, having slain him, covered the rest of his body so much; yet did there appear [a part] where the collar-bones separate the neck from the shoulders, and where the destruction of life is most speedy. ”

“ This curious fact affords (if it were needed) conclusive proof of the high antiquity of the Homeric poems. Not the faintest suspicion manifests itself in them that Hesperus, ‘fairest of all stars set in heaven,’ is but another aspect of Phosphorus, herald of light 39upon the earth, ‘the star that saffron-mantled Dawn cometh after, and spreadeth over the salt sea.’ [26] The identification is said by Diogenes Laertius to have been first made by Pythagoras ”

“ But an author should not be a child, and embitter for himself his Preface, when it is not every day that he has to make one. Why did I not rather in the first line address those readers, and take them by the hand, to whom I joyfully give my Hesperus, and whom I would present with a free copy of it if I knew where they lived?—Come, dear, weary soul, thou that hast anything to forget, either a sad day or a clouded year, or a human being that afflicts thee, or one that loves thee, or a dismantled youth, or a whole life of heaviness ”

“ Of the other characters of Hesperus, the principal, and by far the most brilliant, is Clotilda, Jean Paul's ideal of the female character. She is related to Lord Horion by her mother's side, and becomes during a period of blindness, when he requires her aid to carry on his correspondence, the depositary of all his secrets, under the guarantee of an oath, which places it out of her power to reveal them even to save the life of her own brother. The loftiness of her spirit, united to the meekest gentleness of heart ”

“ In the Eighth Dog-Post-Day of Hesperus, Victor is represented as raising himself slowly by the bed-tassel out of bed, which he usually left with a spring. One would think it would need mechanical aid to hoist the fevered frame from under a German feather-bed.
Page 47, line 25.—The piping of Schoppe was simply with his windpipe; the whistle one is said to wet when he drinks.
Page 48, line 14.—"Dissolving" is not quite strong enough. The idea is, that, as ships have their bolts drawn out by the lodestone and fall apart, so the senses fall apart as man sinks to slumber. ”

“ But American readers have learned by this time, much to their credit, not to apply to Jean Paul for the sensation of a cunningly woven narrative, like that of the English school, which furnishes verisimilitude to real life that is quite as improbable, though less glaringly so, than his departures from it. "Hesperus" is filled with pure and noble thought. The different types of female character are particularly well-defined ”

“ Notes, principally to the first volume of Titan, which has generally proved more difficult than the second.
[The translator's reason for giving such Notes here, rather than in a (possible) third edition of Titan, is that a great many more of the buyers of the first editions of that work will also (may it not be presumed?) buy Hesperus than would be likely to see a third edition of Titan; and therefore the present way of furnishing the additional matter seemed to be the fairest to all parties.] ”

“ Ah, what must we not all already have lost, if the pictures of blissful days win from us nothing but sighs! O tranquillity, tranquillity, thou evening of the soul, thou still Hesper of the weary heart, which always abides beside the sun of virtue, if at thy very name our inner being is dissolved into tears, ah, is not that a sign that we seek thee, but have thee not? ”

“ He was the father of the Hesperides, and Hercules thought might, if any one could, find the apples and bring them to him. But how to send Atlas away from his post, or bear up the heavens while he was gone? Hercules took the burden on his own shoulders, and sent Atlas to seek the apples. He returned with them, and though somewhat reluctantly, took his burden upon his shoulders again, and let Hercules return with the apples to Eurystheus.
Milton, in his "Comus," makes the Hesperides the daughters of Hesperus and nieces of Atlas:
"... ”

“ No one is more profoundly sad than he who laughs too much; for when this laughter ceases, everything has power over the exhausted soul, and a meaningless lullaby, a flute-concert,—whose D sharp and F sharp keys and mouthpieces are merely the two lips wherewith a young shepherd whistles,—opens the flood-gates of the old tears, as a whisper loosens the poised and trembling avalanche. He felt as if his dream of this morning absolutely did not allow him to address Clotilda ”

“ And as she thought so, he did it, with a hand trained by the couching-needle.
Meanwhile, if (according to Pliny) a kiss on the eye is one on the soul, the opening of a vein in that organ is no joke; but one may, while he inflicts a wound, himself get one. The poor Court-Medicus must, with his swimming, friendly eye, from which only within a few days the tear of love has been dried away, boldly gaze into the sun pent up in an eye-socket, and, what is more, softly rest his finger on the warm face, and from the fountain of tears make bright blood spurt out.... ”

“ He confessed now that he had nourished into fulness of blood the nobler parts of his inner man at the expense of the lower,—that his hope of death had been too great as well as his poetic wing-feathers,—that he had contemplated the earth not from the earth, but too much from Jupiter, seen from whose observatory it must needs dwindle to a fiery spark, and that he had therefore lost the earth without getting Jupiter instead. ”

“ His trembling hands could hardly take from him a packet to that lord, which the friend handed to him with tender eyes and with the words, "When these seals are opened, then my oaths have ceased and thou wilt learn all." For his tender conscience allowed him to conceal only the import, not the existence of secrets.—It will not astonish us, as Victor's veins received one wound after another, that, in order not to increase their bleeding by agitations, he begged the flute-player not to play to-day; music would, on this day, have had too much power over his dissolved heart. ”

“ Now he hastened, glad and trembling, down to Julius, whom he found, with his lily-face, fair as the younger brother of an angel, with birds flying and singing around him, leaning against a birch-tree: "What forms, what hearts," thought he, "adorn this Paradise." How could he, on such a morning, on such a holy spot, toward so good a youth, have disguised himself, and handed to him, say, with the imitated voice of his Italian servant, the letter to Emanuel!—No, that he could not do ”

“ The first avalanche, which the least sound of his may topple down upon him, is his crazy relation with his court acquaintance. He can boast of having angered them in a body: the Princess, Joachime, Matthieu. But, even independently of that, some conductor or other—merely because he stands not with the rest on the social isolating stool of the throne—must soon dart a diminished flash at his fingers or his eyes; at boards and at courts no one can stand upright without connections ”

“ Ah, thou knewest then, perhaps, that thou shouldst never live to experience such a night, and for that reason wast thou so copious. And what else than petrified blossoms of a clime which is not on our earth, do we dig up out of our fantasy, just as in our North they exhume fossil palms?...
Victor went to the still Julius at the hedge of the nightingale and laid night violets in his hand, and kissed him on the curtained eye, which could not see, yet could weep for joy,—and neighbor nightingale paused not during the kiss. He came up the garden, as Emanuel came down ”

“ After a crotchet-rest, he answered himself, "Thou wilt be his Physician-in-ordinary, Victor." Victor's hand twitched in his father's. "Thou hast already been promised to him; and he longs for thee, simply because I have often named thee. He is impatient to see for himself how any one looks whose father he knows so well. As Physician-in-ordinary, thou canst, with thy art and thy fancy, keep him clear of strange fetters until I come again ”

“ Victor, in his joy at the lightness of the malady, hurried away to give his recipe for it, after he had asserted, by way of consolation, that "an ethereal body was still to be taken along with him, and would serve the soul, not indeed for a heavenly Graham's-bed, [194] but still for an air-bed, which made itself up. Only poor women's-souls—if one rightly regarded their bodies—might be said to lie on thorny straw sacks, smooth hussars'-saddles, and sharp sausage-sledges [195] ”

“ Our Victor felt almost as if he had transferred another heart than the metal one with the billet, and thought with pleasure of the Flachsenfingen court. Before her ran her copied bridegroom or his litter, from which he alighted on the wall of the bedchamber. As he was her god, I can compare him or his image with the images of the ancient gods, who were carried round on a peculiar vis-à-vis, called a thensa, [134] —or in a portrait-box, called [Greek: ναος, naos] , [135] —or in a cage, called [Greek: kadiskon] . ”

“ But the Apothecary, whose heart was only small, but not black, felt himself too sorely injured, and when Matthieu, laughing at his complaints, departed from him in silence, without even giving himself the trouble of an excuse, then the chiragrist swore—and there we have the fool again—to upset him.
Come forth again, my Victor! I yearn for fairer souls than these foolish brothers have! None of us lives and reads on so carelessly as not to know in what biographical period of time we are living; it is, namely, eight days before Easter, when Zeusel is on the way to St. ”

“ Connoisseurs say that every secret one tells to one of the fair sex is a sticking-plaster which attaches him to her, and often begets a second secret: was it for some such reason that Victor was so eager to contrive a way of showing to Clotilda his acquaintance with her sisterly relation?—
He stayed day after day, as, besides, the butter-week [187] of the marriage must go by first. ”

“ Dear Emanuel, that, alas! thou wilt do! The heaven of joy presses downward to thy lips, and amidst breezes, amidst tones, amidst kisses, it drinks up thy flickering breath; for the earthly body which will only graze, not pluck, digests only lowly joys, and chills under the beam of a higher sun!—
With emotion I draw aside from Victor's distracted, irrecognizable face the veil which covers his sorrows. Let us look upon thee, disconsolate man, who art going to meet a spring where thy heart is to lose everything: Emanuel by death, Clotilda by love, Flamin by jealousy, even Joachime by suspicion! ”