Page:Hoffmann's Strange Stories - Hoffman - 1855.djvu/16

 Pour him out some prince's wine, let a flow of Johannisberg tint his glass with golden reflections, and the poet's imagination sets off at a gallop, like the courser who carried Burger's Leonora;—then springs forth all the train of strange beings, children of his wandering thoughts, that appear when he calls them, come, grow and range themselves before him. It is a drama that he raises between heaven and earth;—it is his world, peopled with personages whose secret he alone possesses. Pour out for the poet a flow of Johannisberg, and his thought, so many times trodden down by the dry pre-occupations of daily labor, so many times ruffled by trust deceived, becomes illumined with a magic brilliancy; the scene becomes enlarged, all the arts furnish their part to the work; painting brings its lively colors; music its trembling vibrations; poetry its secret treasures. Pour out Johannisberg, and life fires the drama! Advance on this new earth, amongst these personages that you have nowhere seen, and that you seem nevertheless to recollect; all the most diverse emotions will surprise and fascinate you.

Listen to the melancholy echo of Antonia's Song, immediately you are bursting with laughter at the relation of the Lost Reflection;—then a delicious curiosity drags you on to the last page of the Walled-up Door; farther on, all the spirit, all the elegance of the age of Louis XIV. shines in the description of manners which serves as a frame to Cardillac the Jeweller;—do you wish for comedy in real life, read the Agate Heart:—do you wish for the strange in its highest perfection, take Coppelius or Berthold the Madman. At whatever page the book is opened, there is instruction for things in life. By the side of the wanderings of a burning imagination, is found at every line an observation of the world, which mingles all the delicacy of a criticism in good taste with the traits which prove the most intimate acquaintance with the human heart:—the moral deduction is never separated from the marvellousness of the form.