Albano found the diary open, and read with astonishment this:--"_Amandus-day_. A stupid and extremely remarkable day for the well-known Hesus or Hanus![45] I can hardly persuade myself that the poor Thunder-god deserved to walk along behind the tall Proserpine,[46] and at last to peep into her face, her brow, her lips, her neck! O God! If such a god had stayed now on the spot! As _Pastor fido_ he by good fortune rose up again and went on his way. O hell-goddess, heaven-stormer of Hesus, thou hast made thyself his heaven! Can he ever let thee go? "_Afternoon_. The _Pastor_ becomes his own baiting-house, he knows not how to stay; he lives now in all streets, in order to behold his _Jeanne d'Arc-en-ciel_,[47] and suffers enough. But, Hesus, are not sorrows the thorns, wherewith the buckle of love fastens? To-day Friday[48] went with the Princess to the observatory. The wind is south-east-east,[49]--read thirteen monthlies in one hour,--Spener sees life transfigured and poetic in the shining magnifying-mirror God, as well as another man. "_Sabina's day_. With the _Pastor_ it grows worse, if I see right. He is in the way to work himself over into a _billet-doux-presser_, to powder himself by night in bed; and the knave already raises in the heat, like milk which is kept warm, poetic cream. Only may Heaven never grant him to fall into a rational discourse with his hell-goddess, face to face, breath to breath, and the two souls be confounded together! Verily, Flins[50] would snatch him away, Hesus would devour a millennial kingdom at once; I fear he would become too wild with the nectar, and too hard for me to control. "_Evening_. Is it not already so far gone with the _Pastor_, that he has borrowed him an author out of the whining decade of the age (he is ashamed to name him), and will fain let himself be affected by the stupid stuff, while he muses upon the effect which the author had upon him in his fourteenth year. Of course he stumbles at him, in his present period of life, like a night-watchman by day; but still he cries back his cry, and has a new affection on the subject of his old. So does the declension of _cornu_ in the grammar still smile upon me, even to this hour, because I recollect how easily and glibly in the golden moons of childhood I retained the whole of the _Singular_. "_Simon Jud_.[51] Curse on it! A fair face and a false Maxd'or make, in the course of a year, a couple of hundred knaves, who differ from each other only in this, that one wishes to keep and the other to get rid of the article. Hesus frowns, and charges home upon a million rivals already. Like button- and lace-makers, or like copper- and brass-founders, two so nearly of a trade cannot let each other get on.[52] Right! hell-goddess, that thou hatest all men! That is, to be sure, something for the _Pastor_,--a wound-salve! Scioppius, the two Scaligers, and the vigorous Schlegels, &c.--"