But his view of things and his actual life became, without his express intention, powerful over the Count, whom everything great only enlarged, as it belittles others. Schoppe sat like a Cato upon ruins, but, to be sure, upon the greatest of all; if the wise man ought to be a barometer-tube at the Equator, in which even the tornado produces little displacement, he was a wise man. Accidentally he tore open the Count's glued-up wings at an inn by means of the _Hamburg Impartial Correspondent_, which he found lying there. Schoppe read aloud out of it two extensive battles, wherein, as by an earthquake, lands instead of houses were buried, and whose wounds and tears only the evil genius of the earth could be willing to know; thereupon he read,--after the death-marches of whole generations, and the rending open of the craters of humanity,--with uninterrupted seriousness, the notices, under the head of Intelligence, where one solitary individual mounts upon an unknown little grave and announces and asseverates to the world, which surely condoles with him,--"Frightful was the blow which laid our child of five weeks--"; or, "In the bitterest anguish which ever--"; or, "Overwhelmed with the loss of our father in the eighty-first year of his age," &c. Schoppe said, he pronounced that to be right; for every distress, even a universal one, after all, housed itself only in one individual breast; and were he himself lying on a red battle-field full of fallen sheaves, he would sit up among them, if only he could, and deliver to those lying around him a short funeral sermon upon his shot-wound. "So has Galvani observed," he said, "that a frog which stands in electrical relations quivers as often as thunder rolls over the earth." He adhered to this position, also, out of doors. He cited with disapprobation what Matthison remarks,--as a traveller's note by the way,--that in the modern town, _Avenches_, in Switzerland, on the site of the Helvetian capital, _Aventicum_, which was laid in ruins by the Romans, the plan of the streets and walls may be traced by the thinner strips of grass; whereas, in fact, the same stereographic projections of the past lay manifestly all about in every meadow,--every mountain was the shore of a deluged old world; every spot here below was actually six thousand years old and a relic; all was churchyards and ruins on the earth, particularly the earth itself; "Heavens!" he continued, "what is there, in fact, which is not already gone by,--nations, fixed stars, female virtue, the best Paradises, many just men, all Reviews, Eternity a _parte ante_, and just now even my feeble description of all this? Now, if life is such a game of nothingness, one must prefer to be _card-painter_ rather than _king of cards_."