... _Spitzius Hofmann_ is the name of the dog; _he_ was the rat, and was scratching at the door with the second chapter in the flask. A whole crammed provisionship, which the learned world may nibble at have I taken off from Hofmann's neck; and now the reader, who loves to read wise things as well as stupid ones, shall have opened to him to-day--for henceforth it is certain that I shall go on with my writing--glad prospects which, from a certain feeling of modesty, I do not designate.... The reader sits now on his sofa, the fairest reading-Hours dance round him and hide from him his repeating-watch,--the Graces hold my book for him and hand to him the sheets,--the Muses turn over the leaves for him, or in fact read it all to him;--he has nothing to disturb him, but the Swiss or the children must say, "Papa is out." As life has on one foot a sock and on the other a buskin, he loves to have a biography laugh and weep in one breath; and as the fine writers always understand how to combine with the useful moral of their writings a something immoral which poisons, but charms,--like the apothecaries, who draw at once _medicines_ and _aqua vitæ_,--so does he willingly forgive me, in consideration of the immoral which is prominent, the religious quality which I sometimes have, and _vice versâ_; and as this biography is set to music, because Ramler sets it beforehand into hexameter (which it certainly needs far more than Gessner's harmonious prose[26]), he can, when he has done reading, stand up and play or sing it.... I, too, am almost as happy as if I read the work;--the Indian Ocean flings up the peacock-wheels of its illuminated circle of waves before my island,--I stand on the best footing with all, the Reader, the Reviewer, and the Dog;--everything is ready to hand with each Dog-post-day: a recipe for ink from an alchemist; the gooseherd with quills was here day before yesterday; the bookbinder with gay writing-books only to-day: nature buds, my body blooms, my mind produces,--and so I hang my blossoms over the tan-bed and forcing-bed (i. e. over the island), send my root-fibres through the soil, unable (Hamadryad that I am) to guess from my foliage how much moss years may collect on my bark, how many woodchafers the future may gather upon the pith of my heart, and how many tree-lifters Death may lay under my roots,--nothing of all this do I surmise, but swing joyfully--thou good destiny!--my boughs in the wind, lay my suckling leaves to the bosom of a Nature filled with light and dew, and, with the breath of universal life fluttering through me, stir up as much articulate noise as is necessary, that one or another sad human heart, while contemplating these _leaves_, may forget, in short, gentle dreams, its stings, its throbbings, its stiflings----O, why is a man sometimes so happy?