"But as touching those dried-up, withered men, in whose eyes nothing is great but their own image, and whose stomach at the sight of a fairer movement of the exalted heart is taken with a _reverse_ movement,--in short, whom everything nauseates (except what is nauseous),--make believe as if you did not perceive them; and so much more as they resemble patients who are gnawed by the tape-worm, and who, according to medical observations, sicken and vomit at all music, especially organs, think rather of the good souls whom thou knowest and lovest, and of the good ones whom thou only lovest,----and therefore at the end of the Preface be earnest and grateful and rejoice!"---- Verily that I should have done, even without the sketch!--How could I remain insensible to the indulgence with which, on the whole, the world has appropriated the Aphrodito-graphic[5] fragments of my Evening Star, which runs around the sun with such remarkable aberrations, or deflections, and in so little of a planetary ellipse, that it may easily, as often happens to the Hesperus in the sky, be taken for a hairy, bearded, and tailed comet?--And how hard and cold must the soul be which could remain without emotion and without joy at the thought of the shortest happy day, nay, even happy second, or _third_, into which it had been able to introduce suffering men; and at the wide-spread relationship of lofty wishes and holy hopes, and friendly feelings, and at the gracious concordat wherein the brawlers and wranglers in this first world of the prosaic life give each other their hands in the _second_ world of poetry, in mutual recognitions, and become brothers?-- Once more, good Asterisk and secondary planet of the soft evening-star above me, I follow thee on thy way with the wishes of three years ago for every soul which thou canst gladden. Only never rise upon any eye as a rainy star,--only never lead one astray, so that it shall take the _moonlight_ of poesy for the _morning_ of truth, and dismiss too early its morning dreams!--But into the torture-chambers and through the prison-gratings of forsaken souls throw a cheering radiance; and for him whose blessed island has sunk away from him to the bottom of the sea of eternity, transfigure thou the low, dark region; and whoever looks round and looks up in vain in a dismantled Paradise, to him may a little ray from thee show, down on the ground, under the yellow leaves, some hidden sweet fruit or other of a former time; and if there is any eye to which thou canst show nothing, draw it softly upward to thy brother, and to the heaven in which he shines.--Nay, and if I ever grow too old, then comfort me also! Hof, May 16, 1797. PREFACE, SEVEN REQUESTS, AND CONCLUSION. PREFACE.