It is well known that, out of care for the preservation of my life, I never walk within at least ten fields of any shore full of bathers or swimmers; merely because I foresee to a certainty, that, in case one of them were drowning, I should that moment (for the heart overbalances the head) plunge after the fool to save him, into some bottomless depth or other, where we should both perish. And if dreaming is the reflex of waking, let me ask you, true Hearts, if you have forgotten my relating to you dreams of mine, which no Cæsar, no Alexander or Luther, need have felt ashamed of? Have I not, to mention a few instances, taken Rome by storm; and done battle with the Pope and the whole elephantine body of the Cardinal College, at one and the same time? Did I not once on horseback, while simply looking at a review of military, dash headlong into a _bataillon quarré_; and then capture, in Aix-la-Chapelle, the Peruke of Charlemagne, for which the town pays yearly ten reichsthalers of barber-money; and carrying it off to Halberstadt von Gleim, there in like manner seize the Great Frederick's Hat; put both Peruke and Hat on my head, and yet return home, after I had stormed their batteries and turned the cannon against the cannoneers themselves? Did I not once submit to be made a Jew of, and then be regaled with hams; though they were ape-hams on the Orinoco (see Humboldt)? And a thousand such things; for I have thrown the Consistorial President of Flätz out of the Palace window; those alarm-fulminators, sold by Heinrich Backofen in Gotha, at six groschen the dozen, and each going off like a cannon, I have listened to so calmly that the fulminators did not even awaken me; and more of the like sort. ------------------------ 100. In books lie the Phoenix-ashes of a past Millennium and Paradise; but War blows, and much ashes are scattered away. ------------------------