But he had the greatest difficulty in getting her to understand how it was that he made out that he would be able to procure her another calf's head with a single sheet of the 'Selections from the Devil's Papers,' and that he was perfectly justified in issuing a dispensation from that evening's fast; for like the common herd of mankind, or like the printers, Lenette thought that a written book was paid for at the same rate as a printed one, and that the compositor got rather more than the author. She had never in her life had the slightest idea of the enormous sums which authors are paid nowadays; she was like Racine's wife, who did not know what a line of poetry or a tragedy was, although she kept house upon them. For my part, however, I should never lead to the altar, or into my home as my wife, any woman who wasn't capable of at least completing any sentence which death should knock me over with his hour-glass in the middle of,--or who wouldn't be unspeakably delighted when I read to her learned Göttingen gazettes, or universal German magazines, in which I was bepraised, more than I deserved perhaps. The rapture of authorship had set all Siebenkæs's blood-globules into such a flow, and all his ideas into such a whirlwind this whole evening that, in the condition of vividness of fueling and fancy in which he was (a condition which in him often assumed the appearance of temper), he would instantly have flown out and exploded like so much fulminating gold at everything of a slow moving kind which he came across--such as the servant girl's heavy dawdling step, or the species of dropsy with which her utterance was afflicted;--but that he at once laid hold on a precious sedative powder for the over-excitement caused by happiness, and took a dose of it. It is easier to communicate an impetus and a rapid flow to the slow-gliding blood of a heavy, sorrowful heart, than to moderate and restrain the billowy, surging, foaming current which rushes through the veins in happiness; but he could always calm himself, even in the wildest joy, by the thought of the inexhaustible Hand which bestowed it, and that gentle tenderness of heart wherewith our eyes are drooped to earth as we remember the invisible, eternal Benefactor of all hearts. At such a time the heart, softened by thankfulness and by joyful tears, will speak its gratitude by at least being kindlier towards all mankind, if in no other way. That fierce, untamed delight, which is what Nemesis avenges, can best be kept within due bounds by this sense of gratitude; and those who have died of joy would either _not_ have died at all, or would have died of a _better_ and lovelier joy, if their hearts had first been softened by a grateful heavenward gaze.