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
The Parson thinks also to get some credit from it as a Dutch garden,
particularly by a peruke made of water, which hangs not on a wig-stand,
but on a tin pipe, and which leaps so in curls that already several
city-parsons have wished they could wear it. Butterfly-show-glasses
kept off the night-chills from precocious roses of silk and early
cucumbers of wax. Cucumbers which consisted of real cucumbers, he was
the first among all pastors to put in, in order to worry himself with
the fear that they might freeze; for this fear he must have, in order
to rejoice whenever a glass bottle was broken in his house: he could
then carry this ice- or glass-mountain (which, in the case of wines,
unfortunately heightens every year as our thirst does) into the garden,
and with this manure-bell cover the heart-leaves. Round more important
beds he ran a motley, mosaic border of crockery; his family was his
verge-tool,--I mean, they had to break for him the few porcelain cups
which he needed, in order with this motley powdered sugar to set off
the more considerable patches, as a prince enchases and berings himself
with the variegated order-ribbons drawn through the button-holes of his
antechambers. As he could not set _whole_ cups round the beds, but must
first analyze them by his chemists, a reviewer who eats with him must
avail himself of my hint to understand how it happens, if such a
consumptive patient is not beside himself for rage, when some very
valuable vessel is broken; for only when it happens to worthless ones
is he no longer master of himself. Every housewife should set off such
a bed as an Arndt's garden of Paradise, as a Golgotha for porcelain
whereof the _fashion is changed_, for the good of her soul, in order
that she may not lose her senses when a cup falls. "Dearest!" I would
say, "bear up under this misfortune like a Christian woman; it, will
turn out for thy advantage either in eternity yonder, or here in the
garden."
Near a house, Dutch garden-ornaments, with their homely minuteness,
make a better figure than thrilling Nature, with her eternal majesty.
Eymann's clipped and carved parsonage-garden was in fact merely a
continued family-room without roof or partition.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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