Page:The Campaner thal, and other writings.djvu/126



THIRD LETTER-BOX.

OR. all of us the passage to the grave is, alas! a string of empty, insipid days, as of glass pearls, only here and there divided by an orient one of price. But you die murmuring, unless, like the Quintus, you regard your existence as a drum; this has only one single tone, but variety of time gives the sound of it cheerfulness enough. Our Quintus taught in the Fourth Class; vicariated in the Second; wrote at his desk by night; and so lived on the usual monotonous fashion—all the time from the Holidays—till Christmas eve, 1791; and nothing was remarkable in his history except this same eve, which I am now about to paint.

But I shall still have time to paint it, after, in the first place, explaining shortly how, like birds of passage, he had contrived to soar away over the dim, cloudy Harvest. The secret was, he set upon the Hamburg Political Journal, with which the lackeys of Schadeck had been for papering their buttons. He could now calmly, with his back at the stove, accompany the winter campaigns of the foregoing year; and fly after every battle, as the ravens did after that of Pharsalia. On the printed paper he could still, with joy and admiration, walk round our German