"By you I swear,"--said he, as, by degrees, more and more larks soared up singing out of their dew into the morning-hora,[97]--"I will even in joy remain composed for thirty whole years together, at least for three whole Whitsuntide days,--I will be a university-friend and house-friend, but not a Wertherish lover of enjoyment.--Does not man act as if his path of life must be a bridge of connected honey-combs, through which he has, moth-like, to chew his way, as if his hands were only sugar-tongs of pleasure?--I will again apply the sportive faculty as a bridle to my pleasures and my pains. The warm tears of melancholy, especially those of rapture, a sort of hot vapor which propels and decomposes more mightily than gunpowder and Papin's[98] machines, I will indeed shed, but cool them a little beforehand.--And if I do not get sight of Clotilda every forenoon, I will simply say, A man cannot be always in the third heaven, he must also sometimes stay over night in the first."--He has, perhaps, more reason than power; but, it is true, health of heart is equally removed from hysteric spasms and from phlegmatic torpor, and rapture borders more nearly on pain than on tranquillity. But no tranquillity or coolness is worth aught but that which is _attained_,--man must have at once the _capacity_ and the _mastery_ of passion. The _freshets_ of the will resemble those of _rivers_, which for a time muddy all the _springs_; but take away the rivers, and the springs are gone too.-- The increasing dawn veiled one distant sun, after another; and when at last the near one had risen, or rather nature, then could Victor see and read and take my work (the well-known _Mumien_) out of his pocket. A book was for him, in the midst of free, stimulative nature, a pair of _garden-shears_ to his wantonly up-shooting dreams and joys. This morning sparkling with a whole spring, this flashing on all brooks, this humming out of blossoms into blossoms,--this blue hanging sea, over which the sun sailed like a Bucentaur,[99] in order to throw on the bottom of that sea, the earth, the marriage-ring,--such a Present beside such a Future would even now at the third hour have deprived him of the strength, in obedience to his new constitution, to rule over his ecstasy, and to preserve steadily so much repose as is needed for a _mezzotint_ between a rapturous and a dull day,--I say he would not have had that power without his biographer, I mean, if he had not had my book before him, in the second part of which he had still the schoolmaster Wutz[100] to read. But this learned work--I venture without self-conceit to flatter myself--set the proper limits to his rapture. For thus,--as he walked along reading,--(as others, e. g. Rousseau and I, read while eating, and take a bite now from the plate and now from the book,)--as he contemplated the life of the schoolmaster till a new valley or a new wood opened,--as he listened