Page:Tales by Musæus, Tieck, Richter, Volume 2.djvu/105

Rh than the penny for a rainy day; and that not great, but little good-haps can make us happy.—Can I accomplish this, I shall, through means of my Book, bring up for Posterity, a race of men finding refreshment in all things; in the warmth of their rooms and of their nightcaps; in their pillows; in the three High Festivals; in mere Apostles’ days; in the Evening Moral Tales of their wives, when these gentle persons have been forth as ambassadresses visiting some Dowager Residence, whither the husband could not be persuaded; in the bloodletting-day of these their news-bringers; in the day of slaughtering, salting, potting against the rigour of grim winter; and in all such days. You perceive, my drift is that man must become a little Tailor-bird, which, not amid the crashing boughs of the storm-tost, roaring, immeasurable tree of Life, but on one of its leaves, sews itself a nest together, and there lies snug. The most essential sermon one could preach to our century, were a sermon on the duty of staying at home.

The third skyward road is the alternation between the other two. The foregoing second way is not good enough for man, who here on Earth should take into his hand not the Sickle only, but also the Plough. The first is too good for him. He has not always the force, like Rugendas, in the midst of the Battle to compose Battle-pieces; and, like Backhuysen in the Shipwreck, to clutch at no board but the drawing-board to paint it on. And then his pains are not less lasting than his fatigues. Still oftener is Strength denied its Arena: it is but the smallest portion of life that, to a working soul, offers Alps, Revolutions, Rhine-falls, Worms Diets, and Wars with Xerxes; and for the whole it is better so: the longer portion of life is a field beaten flat as a threshing-floor, without lofty Gothard Mountains; often it is a tedious ice-field, without a single glacier tinged with dawn.

But even by walking, a man rests and recovers himself for climbing; by little joys and duties, for great. The victorious Dictator must contrive to plough down his battle Mars-field into a flax and carrot field; to transform his theatre of war into a parlour theatre, on which his children may enact some good pieces from the Children’s Friend. Can he accomplish this, can he turn so softly from the path of poetical happiness into that of household happiness,—then is he little different from myself, who even now, though modesty might forbid me to disclose it—who even now, I say, amid the creation of this Letter, have been enabled to reflect, that when it is done, so also will the Roses and Elder-berries of pastry be done, which a sure hand is seething in butter for the Author of this Work.

As I purpose appending to this Letter a Postscript (at the end of the Book), I reserve somewhat which I had to say about the Third half-satirical half-philosophical part of the Work, till that opportunity. Rh