And this is just my excuse, if I deny the Maienthal domain of joy to a thousand rival claimants, if I as its fee-provost cannot invest with this Swabian reversionary fief such people as are not fit for a proper _feudum_, morally blind, lame, minors, eunuchs, &c.--And here I must make myself many enemies, when, from among the vassals and joint subjects of investiture to whom Maienthal, with all its poetic privileges, is given in fee, I expressly exclude old gabblers who can no longer make the _knight's leap_ of fancy,--forty-seven inhabitants of Scheerau and one hundred of Flachsenfingen, whose hearts are as cold as their knee-pans, or as dogs' noses,--the greatest ministers and other grandees, in whom, as in _great_ roasted lumps of meat, only the middle is still raw, namely the heart,--one half billion economists, jurists, exchequer and finance-counsellors, and plus- i. e. minus-makers,[95] in whom the soul, as in Adam's case the body, was kneaded out of a clod of earth, who have a pericardium [or heart-bag], but no heart, cerebral-membranes without brain, shrewdness without philosophy, who, instead of the book of nature, read only their papers for law-cases and their tax-books,--finally, those who have not fire enough to kindle at the fire of love, poetry, religion, who for _weep_ say _blubber_, for _poetry_, _rhyme_, for _sentiment_, _craziness_.... Am I then crazy that I work myself up here into such a rage, as if I had not before me on the other side the finest college of readers, which I am promoting to the _primus adquirens_ of the freehold and apron-string-hold of Maienthal; a mystical, moral person, who discerns that utility is only an inferior beauty, and beauty a higher utility?--It is peculiar to all emotions (but not to opinions) that one thinks he alone has them. Thus every youth holds his love to be an extraordinary celestial phenomenon which has been only once in the world, as the star of love, the evening star, often looks like a comet. But the world is not all Flachsenfingenites and Dutchmen, who climb the Alps less to have great thoughts and elevations than to get _sedes_,[96] or go to sea, not to throw a poet's glance over the sublime ocean, but to escape consumption.... but there are everywhere to be found, in every market-town, on every island, fair souls who rest in the bosom of nature,--who reverence the dreams of love, though they themselves have awaked from their own,--who are encased with rough men, before whom they have to veil their idyllic fantasies about the second life, and their tears over the first,--who give fairer days than they receive,--to this whole fair society I finally make a present of the _Feudum_ of Maienthal, of which there has been already so much talk, and go in at the head with some friends of both sexes and my sister as investing fief-provost.