Page:Tales by Musæus, Tieck, Richter, Volume 1.djvu/91

Rh these circumstances, could withstand the courting of the brilliant chivalry who struggled for her love, than that Penelope of Ithaca could let a whole cohort of wooers sigh for her in vain, when her heart had nothing in reserve but the gray-headed Ulysses. Rank and birth, however, had established such a difference in the situations of the Fräulein and of her beloved youth, that any closer union than Platonic love, a shadowy business which can neither warm nor nourish, was not readily to be expected. Though in those distant times, the pairing of the sexes was as little estimated by parchments and genealogical trees, as the chaffers were arranged by their antennæ and shell-wings, or the flowers by their pistils, stamina, calix and honey-produce; it was understood that with the lofty elm the precious vine should mate itself, and not the rough tangleweed which creeps along the hedges. A misassortment of marriage from a difference of rank an inch in breadth excited, it is true, less uproar than in these our classic times; yet a difference of an ell in breadth, especially when rivals occupied the interstice, and made the distance of the two extremities more visible, was even then a thing which men could notice. All this, and much more, did the Fräulein accurately ponder in her prudent heart; therefore she granted Passion, the treacherous babbler, no audience, loudly as it spoke in favour of the youth whom Love had honoured. Like a chaste vestal, she made an irrevocable vow to persist through life in her virgin closeness of heart; and to answer no inquiry of a wooer, either with her eyes, or her gestures, or her lips; yet reserving to herself, as a just indemnification, the right of platonising to any length she liked. This nunlike system suited the aspirants’ way of thought so ill, that they could not in the least comprehend the killing coldness of their mistress; Jealousy, the confidant of Love, whispered torturing suspicion in their ears; each thought the other was the happy rival, and their penetration spied about unweariedly to make discoveries, which both of them recoiled from. Yet Fräulein Libussa weighed out her scanty graces to the two valiant Ritters with such prudence and acuteness, on so fair a balance, that the scale of neither rose above the other.

Weary of this fruitless waiting, both of them retired from the Court of their Princess, and settled, with secret discontent, upon the affeoffments which Duke Krokus had conferred on