19. It is easier, they say, to climb a hill when you ascend back foremost. This, perhaps, might admit of application to political eminences; if you still turned towards them that part of the body on which you sit, and kept your face directed down to the people; all the while, however, removing and mounting. ------------------------ Only one thing grieved me by anticipation; the sorrow of my Berga, for whom, dear tired wayfarer, I on the morrow must overcloud her arrival, and her shortened market-spectacle, by my negatory intelligence. She would so gladly (and who can take it ill of a rich farmer's Daughter?) have made herself somebody in Neusattel, and overshone many a female dignitary! Every mortal longs for his parade-place, and some earlier living honor than the last honors. Especially so good a lowly-born housewife as my Berga, conscious perhaps rather of her metallic than of her spiritual treasure, would still wish at banquets to be mistress of some seat or other, and so in place to overtop this or that plucked goose of the neighborhood. ------------------------ 26. Few German writers are not original, if we may ascribe originality (as is at least the conversational practice of all people) to a man who merely dishes out his own thoughts without foreign admixture. For as, between their Memory, where their reading or foreign matter dwells, and their Imagination or Productive Power, where their writing or own peculiar matter originates, a sufficient space intervenes, and the boundary-stones are fixed in so conscientiously and firmly that nothing foreign may pass over into their own, or inversely, so that they may really read a hundred works without losing their own primitive flavor, or even altering it,--their individuality may, I believe, be considered as secured; and their spiritual nourishment, their pancakes, loaves, fritters, caviare, and meat-balls, are not assimilated to their system, but given back pure and unaltered. Often in my own mind, I figure such writers as living but thousand-fold more artificial Ducklings from Vaucasson's Artificial Duck of Wood. For in fact they are not less cunningly put together than this timber Duck, which will gobble meat and apparently void it again, under show of having digested it, and derived from it blood and juices; though the secret of the business is, the artist has merely introduced an ingenious compound ejective matter behind, with which concoction and nourishment have nothing to do, but which the Duck illusorily gives forth and publishes to the world. ------------------------