In the first place, the Reviewer who charges me with being indebted to the amount of two whole Intercalary Days,--the one after the Fortieth and the one after the Forty-fourth Dog-Post-Days,--cannot have seen this Second Edition at all; the two Prefaces with which I have enriched it, the first and this, will answer with all sensible men for true Intercalary Days. Secondly, my Reviewer will find fault (in future) with my indulging my _manner_. But let him hear now the Philosopher (namely, myself): Manner is of itself nothing but what follows: the æsthetic ideal and integral, like every other, is reached only by an infinite power, but we with our finite strength are incessantly coming _nearer_ to it, never so much as _near_; Manner is, therefore, as the Philosopher takes it, a finite mirror of infinity, or the expression of the relation in which every _temperament_ and number of strings of any given Æolian harp stands to the score of the infinite music of the Spheres, which it has to echo. Every combination of human powers gives only a manner; and higher spirits would find in Homer and Goethe the _human_ manner at least; nay, the higher angelic hierarchy would find the lower manneristic, the seraph the angel of the churches. But as I am not even an ordinary angel,--not to say a seraph,--another Reviewer than he who will criticise me would have presumed beforehand that I should have a manner.--And such I manifestly have.--But yet more: as the _degree_ and the _relation_ of our powers change from year to year,--and consequently the product and proceeds of the same also, the manner--: accordingly and unfortunately the manner of the fiftieth year generally sets itself as the corrector of that of the twenty-fifth; or rather there ensues a heterogeneous adoption of children of two marriages, in which both are losers. Such a simultaneous Hysteron-Proteron[129] is still worse than if one should undertake to clip and grind down the Grecian statues of one of Winkelmann's ages of art according to the statues of another. Pour rather a pure, flowing work into thy present mould, and do not wait to force it in when it is cast and hardened!--Even granting I should become hereafter another and a wiser man, I would never graft the old man upon the youth. Man regards himself in the concert-hall of the universe, if not as the solo-player, yet as one of the instruments,--instead of a single _tone_,--as in fact the Prince looks upon himself as an Oberon's or at least hunter's horn,--the poet as an oaten pipe,--the author as a composing-instrument,[130]--the Pope as the organ-works,--the belle as Bestelmeier's hand-steel-harmonica, or as a quail-whistle,--my reviewer as a pitch-pipe,--and I on myself as Maelzel's great Panharmonicon. But we are all only _tones_, as in Potemkin's orchestra every one of the sixty metallic flutes gave only _one_ tone. Therefore I am glad of every individuality, of every manner, as of a new semitone in the church music of natures.