Page:Tales by Musæus, Tieck, Richter, Volume 2.djvu/183

Rh charter was completed, a lighter heart; and through the whole evening the good man ceased not to thank his bride for what she had given him. To me, however, a marriage-contract were a thing as painful and repulsive,—I confess it candidly, though you should in consequence upbraid me with my great youth,—as if I had to take my love-letter to a Notary Imperial, and make him docket and countersign it before it could be sent. Heavens! to see the light flower of Love, whose perfume acts not on the balance, so laid like tulip-bulbs on the hay-beam of Law; two hearts on the cold councillor- and flesh-beam of relatives and advocates, who are heaping on the scales nothing but houses, fields and tin—this, to the interested party, may be as delightful as, to the intoxicated suckling and nursling of the Muses and Philosophy, it is to carry the evening and morning sacrifices he has offered up to his goddess into the book-shop, and there to change his devotions into money, and sell them by weight and measure.— —

From Cantata-Sunday to Ascension, that is, to marriage-day, are one and a half weeks—or one and a half blissful eternities. If it is pleasant that nights or winter separate the days and seasons of joy to a comfortable distance; if, for example, it is pleasant that birthday, Saint’s-day, betrothment, marriage and baptismal day, do not all occur on the same day (for with very few do those festivities, like Holiday and Apostle’s day, commerge),—then is it still more pleasant to make the interval, the flower-border, between betrothment and marriage, of an extraordinary breadth. Before the marriage-day are the true honey-weeks; then come the wax-weeks; then the honey-vinegar-weeks.

In the Ninth Letter-Box, our Parson celebrates his wedding; and here, in the Eighth, I shall just briefly skim over his way and manner of existence till then; an existence, as might have been expected, celestial enough. To few is it allotted, as it was to him, to have at once such wings and such flowers (to fly over) before his nuptials; to few is it allotted, I imagine, to purchase flour and poultry on the same day, as Fixlein did;—to stuff the wedding-turkey with hangman-meals;—to go every night into the stall, and see whether the wedding-pig, which his Guardian has given him by way of