Page:The Campaner thal, and other writings.djvu/257

 beauties of an echo. At last we reached the boundary, over which Thiennette could not be allowed to walk; and now must I part from my gossip, with whom I had talked so gayly every morning (each of us from his bed), and from the still circuit of modest hope where he dwelt, and return once more to the rioting, fermenting Court-sphere, where men in bull-beggar tone demand from Fate a root of Life-Licorice, thick as the arm, like the botanical one on the Wolga, not so much that they may chew the sweet bean themselves, as fell others to earth with it.

As I thought to myself that I would say. Farewell! to them, all the coming plagues, all the corpses, and all the marred wishes of this good pair, arose before my heart; and I remembered that little, save the falling asleep of joy-flowers, would mark the current of their Life-day, as it does of mine and of every one's.—And yet is it fairer, if they measure their years not by the Water-clock of falling tears, but by the Flower-clock of asleep-going flowers, whose bells in our short-lived garden are sinking together before us from hour to hour.—

I would even now—for I still recollect how I hung with streaming eyes over these two loved ones, as over their corpses—address myself, and say: Far too soft, Jean Paul, whose chalk still sketches the models of Nature on a ground of Melancholy; harden thy heart like thy frame, and waste not thyself and others by such thoughts. Yet why should I do it, why should I not confess directly what, in the softest emotion, I said to these two beings?" May all go right with you, ye mild beings," I said, for I no longer thought of courtesies,