Hesperus; or, Forty-Five Dog-Post-Days: A Biography. Vol. I.Jean Paul
General
Hesperus; or, Forty-Five Dog-Post-Days: A Biography. Vol. I.
Jean Paul
Fiction
Be tender and expand not your hatred of princes into hatred of
princesses! Shall a bowed-down female head not touch our hearts with
pity, because it leans on a mahogany table? and shall great tears not
move us, because they fall upon silk? "It is too hard," Victor said,
when in Hanover, "that poets and _magistri legentes_, when they pass by
a chateau, make, with an envious, malicious pleasure, the remark, In
there as much bread of sorrow is baked, perhaps, as in fishermen's
huts. O yes, doubtless greater and harder loaves! But is the eye, out
of which in the badger's kennel of a Scotchman nothing extorts a tear
but the smoke of the room, worthy of a greater compassion than the
tender one which, like that of an Albino, smarts at the very rays of
joy, and which the spirit fills with spiritual tears? Ah, down in the
valleys only the skin is punctured, but up on the high places of rank,
the heart; and the index-hand of the village clock moves merely around
the hours of hunger and sweat, but the second-hand, set with
brilliants, flies round dreary, despairing, bloody minutes."
But fortunately never is rehearsed to us the passion-history of those
womanly victims, whose hearts are tossed to the mint, and, like other
jewels, cast among the throne-insignia,--who, as flowers with souls,
hung upon an ermine-clad dead man's heart, fall to pieces, unenjoyed,
on the bed of state, mourned by no one, save by a distant, tender soul,
which finds no place in the Court-almanac....
This Act consists of nothing but _goings_: in fact, this whole comedy
resembles the life of a child. In the first Act, there was _providing
of household furniture_ for the coming existence; in the second, the
_arrival_; in the third, _talking_; in the fourth, _learning to walk_,
&c.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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