mitigate the woe of thy friend in this hour, hold this breaking heart," then said Emanuel, looking on both with indescribable tenderness: "I bless you, like a father, holy pair of souls! never forsake, never forget each other!--O ye blessed spirits here above the glimmering mould of the crumbling coffins, give these two hearts peace and, happiness, and when I am dead, I will float around your souls and quiet them. And Thou, Eternal One, make these two mortals beneath thy stars as happy as I,--O take nothing from them, nothing on the earth, but life.--Good-night, Clotilda!" ... --The Whitsuntide days are over!-- And I thank thee, kind Destiny, that Thou hast given me health for the joy of sketching such a fleeting golden age, since my weak, unequally beating heart deserves not to paint such raptures.--And for thee, my dear reader, may the Whitsuntide feast have sweetened some ash-Sunday or passion-week of thy life![128]-- FOURTH PREFACE, OR, EXTORTED ANTICRITIQUE AGAINST ONE OR ANOTHER REVIEW, WITH WHICH I MIGHT POSSIBLY BE DISPLEASED. Clever Romance-writers create out of writing-ink and printer's-ink a new and terrible tyrant, give him a throne either in Italy or the Orient,--and then (unlike children who run away from the figure they have drawn) they step up courageously before the painted, crowned tyrant, and tell him the grandest, but boldest truths to his face, which betray the free man, and which no crooked courtling could well repeat before his sovereign. Such dare-devils remind me so often of two abecedarians, when I pass a gate in Oat Lane in Hof, on which a painted lion rears himself and his mane, and curls and sways his tail and his tongue. For one of the aforesaid abecedarians said to the other as I was hurrying by: "Hear me, I tell you I'll seize him by the tail, I'm not a bit afraid." But the other tyro, who had a much bolder thought, coolly mounted a corner-stone and said: "I first, Sir, I thrust my fist right into his jaws,--so!"-- It is the same boldness with which an author often attacks on paper, not only the aforementioned grim king of beasts, but also the critical _feline race_,--which Linnæus reckons in the royal line of lions,--while he shakes judicial chairs as coldly and boldly as if they were painted thrones, and so in general scolds and assails Journals in his Prefaces. A writer of power can do this. I, for my part, am perhaps as audacious in this as any one, and paint out for myself expressly the following review-cat, in order to grapple with her freely and fearlessly, and to show by her what courage can do.