From Cantata-Sunday to Ascension, that is, to marriage-day, are one and a half weeks--or one and a half blissful eternities. If it is pleasant that nights or winter separate the days and seasons of joy to a comfortable distance; if, for example, it is pleasant that birthday, Saint's-day, betrothment, marriage, and baptismal day, do not all occur on the same day (for with very few do those festivities, like Holiday and Apostle's day, commerge),--then is it still more pleasant to make the interval, the flower-border, between betrothment and marriage, of an extraordinary breadth. Before the marriage-day are the true honey-weeks; then come the wax-weeks; then the honey-vinegar-weeks. In the Ninth Letter-Box our Parson celebrates his wedding; and here, in the Eighth, I shall just briefly skim over his way and manner of existence till then; an existence, as might have been expected, celestial enough. To few is it allotted, as it was to him, to have at once such wings and such flowers (to fly over) before his nuptials; to few is it allotted, I imagine, to purchase flour and poultry on the same day, as Fixlein did;--to stuff the wedding-turkey with hangman-meals;--to go every night into the stall, and see whether the wedding-pig, which his Guardian had given him by way of marriage-present, is still standing and eating;--to spy out for his future wife the flax-magazines and clothes-press-niches in the house;--to lay in new wood-stores in the prospect of winter;--to obtain from the Consistorium directly, and for little smart-money, their Bull of Dispensation, their remission of the threefold proclamation of banns;--to live not in a city, where you must send to every fool (because you are one yourself), and disclose to him that you are going to be married; but in a little angular hamlet, where you have no one to tell aught, but simply the Schoolmaster that he is to ring a little later, and put a knee-cushion before the altar.---- O, if the Ritter Michaelis maintains that Paradise was little, because otherwise the people would not have found each other,--a hamlet and its joys are little and narrow, so that some shadow of Eden may still linger on our Ball.---- I have not even hinted that, the day before the wedding, the Regiments-Quartermaster came uncalled, and killed the pig, and made puddings gratis, such as were never eaten at any Court. And besides, dear Fixlein, on this soft, rich oil of joy there was also floating gratis a vernal sun,--and red twilights,--and flower-garlands,--and a bursting half-world of buds!...