Page:The Campaner thal, and other writings.djvu/252

 will still less be so, for thou livest not from month to month, but from second to second! Enjoy thy Existence more than thy Manner of Existence, and let the dearest object of thy Consciousness be this Consciousness itself!—Make not the Present a means of thy Future; for this Future is nothing but a coming Present; and the Present, which thou despisest, was once a Future which thou desiredst!—Stake in no lotteries,—keep at home,—give and accept no pompous entertainments,—travel not abroad every year!—Conceal not from thyself, by long plans, thy household goods, thy chamber, thy acquaintance!—Despise Life, that thou mayst enjoy it!—Inspect the neighborhood of thy life; every shelf, every nook of thy abode; and nestling in, quarter thyself in the farthest and most domestic winding of thy snail-house!—Look upon a capital but as a collection of villages, a village as some blind-alley of a capital; fame as the talk of neighbors at the street-door; a library as a learned conversation, joy as a second, sorrow as a minute, life as a day; and three things as all in all: God, Creation, Virtue!"——

And if I would follow myself and these rules, it will behoove me not to make so much of this Biography; but once for all, like a moderate man, to let it sound out.

After the Catechizing, I stept down to my wide-gowned and black-gowned gossip. The congregation gone, we clambered up to all high places, perused the plates on the pews—I took a lesson on the altar on its inscription incrusted with the sediment of Time (I speak not metaphorically); I organed, my gossip managing the bellows; I mounted the pulpit, and was happy enough there to alight on one other rose-shoot, which in the farewell minute, I could still plant in the rose-garden of my Fixlein. For I descried aloft, on the back of a wooden Apostle, the name