Page:The Campaner thal, and other writings.djvu/104

 History, namely, in the head of Hannibal, when he projected stepping over the Alps, that is to say, over the threshold of Rome.

The landlord and his guest formed an excellent bureau d'esprit; people of office, especially of the same office, have more to tell each other, namely, their own history, than your idle May-chafers and Court-celestials, who must speak only of other people's.—The Senior made a soft transition from his iron-ware (in the stable furniture), to the golden age of his Academic life, of which such people like as much to think, as poets do of their childhood. So good as he was, he still half joyfully recollected that he had once been less so; but joyful remembrances of wrong actions are their half repetition, as repentant remembrances of good ones are their half abolishment.

Courteously and kindly did Zebedäus (who could not even enter in his Notebook the name of a person of quality without writing an H. for Herr before it) listen to the Academic Saturnalia of the old gentleman, who in Wittenberg had toped as well as written, and thirsted not more for the Hippocrene than for Gukguk.

Herr Jerusalem has observed that the barbarism, which often springs up close on the brightest efflorescence of the sciences, is a sort of strengthening mud-bath, good for averting the over-refinement wherewith such efflorescence always threatens us. I believe that a man who considers how high the sciences have mounted with our upper classes,—for instance with every Patrician's son in Nürnberg, to whom the public must present 1000 florins for studying with,—I believe that such a man will not grudge the Son of the Muses a certain barbarous Middle-age (the Burschen or Student Life, as it is called), which may again so case-