Finally, in the third place, after the double amendment of two editions, (for the first received great improvements, and in fact _before_ it was printed,) a third was undertaken which had for its object to let fly at harshnesses, obscurities, mistakes, and other over-lengthenings and overshortenings of dress. But, heavens! how often must not a writing-man have to improve upon himself, who is hardly over half a century old! Were he to live, in fact, into a Methusalem's millennium, and continue to write, the Methusalem would have to append so many volumes of emendations that the work itself would have to be annexed to them as mere preliminary matter, appendix, or supplementary sheet. For several years the author has found in his earlier works, in a high degree, a fault which he has met with in Ernst Wagner, Fouqué, and others, frequently repeated or imitated, namely, the passion for enacting, in his authorial person, the trumpeter, or usher, of the emotions, which the subject himself should have and show, but not the poet. E. g. "With sublime calmness Dahore replied." Why add _sublime_, when it is superfluous, presumptuous, and premature, provided the answer really exalts, or, if it does not so, the result is still more pitiful? The poet who, in this way, is the _fore-echo_ of his personages, takes for his model certain modern tragic poets, like Werner, Müllner, &c., who prefix to every speech for the actor the bookbinder's directions: "With touching emotion,"--"with a sigh of painful remembrance out of the depths of sorrow,"--mere sentences of intensity, or rather of impotence, which only a pantomimic dance needs or can follow, but which no piece of Shakespeare's, of Schiller's, or of Goethe's needs, because, indeed, the speech itself teaches how to speak it. For the rest, I have not the courage, now that I am a quarter of a century older and more aged, to give the first youthful outstreamings of the heart a different channel, and a weaker fall and course. Man in later life too easily regards every change in his junior as an improvement; but as no man can take the place of another, so, too, cannot the same man act as his own substitute in his different periods of life, least of all the poet.