'This sword of ours is no plough or spade, You cannot delve or reap with the iron blade; For us there falls no seed, no corn-field grows, Neither home nor kindred the soldier knows: Wandering over the face of the earth, Warming his hands at another's hearth: From the pomp of towns he must onward roam; In the village-green with its cheerful game, In the mirth of the vintage or harvest-home, No part or lot can the soldier claim. Tell me then, in the place of goods or pelf, What has he unless to honour himself? Leave not even _this_ his own, what wonder The man should burn and kill and plunder? But the camp of Wallenstein is fall of bustle as well as speculation; there are gamblers, peasants, sutlers, soldiers, recruits, capuchin friars, moving to and fro in restless pursuit of their several purposes. The sermon of the Capuchin is an unparalleled composition;[34] a medley of texts, puns, nicknames, and verbal logic, conglutinated by a stupid judgment, and a fiery catholic zeal. It seems to be delivered with great unction, and to find fit audience in the camp: towards the conclusion they rush upon him, and he narrowly escapes killing or ducking, for having ventured to glance a censure at the General. The soldiers themselves are jeering, wrangling, jostling; discussing their wishes and expectations; and, at last, they combine in a profound deliberation on the state of their affairs. A vague exaggerated outline of the coming events and personages is imaged to us in their coarse conceptions. We dimly discover the precarious position of Wallenstein; the plots which threaten him, which he is meditating: we trace the leading qualities of the principal officers; and form a high estimate of the potent spirit which, binds this fierce discordant mass together, and seems to be the object of universal reverence where nothing else is revered. [Footnote 34: Said to be by Goethe; the materials faithfully extracted from a real sermon (by the Jesuit Santa Clara) of the period it refers to.—There were various Jesuits Santa Clara, of that period: this is the _German_ one, Abraham by name; specimens of whose Sermons, a fervent kind of preaching-run-mad, have been reprinted in late years, for dilettante purposes, (_Note of 1845._)]