Translations from the German (Vol 3 of 3): Tales by Musæus, Tieck, RichterCarlyle, Thomas
General
Translations from the German (Vol 3 of 3): Tales by Musæus, Tieck, Richter
Carlyle, Thomas
German fiction -- Translations into English
cold sweat on me already, to need any fresh refrigeration. On my
infernal Trojan Horse (only I myself was Troy, not beridden but riding
to destruction), I arrived at Malzlein (a suburb of Vienna), or perhaps,
so confused were my senses, it might be quite another range of streets.
At last, late in the dusk, I had to turn into the Prater; and here, long
after the Evening Gun, to my horror, and quite against the police-rules,
keep riding to and fro on my honey-coloured nag; and possibly I might
even have passed the night on him, had not my brother-in-law, the
Dragoon, observed my plight, and so found me still sitting firm as a
rock on my runaway steed. He made no ceremonies; caught the brute; and
put the pleasant question: Why I had not vaulted, and come off by
ground-and-lofty tumbling? though he knew full well, that for this a
wooden-horse, which stands still, is requisite. However, he took me
down; and so, after all this riding, horse and man got home with whole
skins and unbroken bones.
But now at last to my Journey!
[Note 34: Women are like precious carved works of ivory; nothing is
whiter and smoother, and nothing sooner grows _yellow_.]
[Note 72: The Half-learned is adored by the Quarter-learned; the
latter by the Sixteenth-part-learned; and so on; but not the
Whole-learned by the Half-learned.]
_Journey to Flaetz_.
You are aware, my friends, that this Journey to Flaetz was necessarily to
take place in Vacation time; not only because the Cattle-market, and
consequently the Minister and General von Schabacker, was there then;
but more especially, because the latter (as I had it positively from a
private hand) did annually, on the 23d of July, the market-eve, about
five o'clock, become so full of gaudium and graciousness, that in many
cases he did not so much snarl on people, as listen to them, and grant
their prayers. The cause of this gaudium I had rather not trust to
paper. In short, my Petition, praying that he would be pleased to
indemnify and reward me, as an unjustly deposed Army-chaplain, by a
Catechetical Professorship, could plainly be presented to him at no
better season, than exactly about five o'clock in the evening of the
first dog-day. In less than a week, I had finished writing my Petition.
As I spared neither summaries nor copies of it, I had soon got so far as
to see the relatively best lying completed before me; when, to my
terror, I observed, that, in this paper, I had introduced above thirty
_dashes_, or breaks, in the middle of my sentences! Nowadays, alas,
these stings shoot forth involuntarily from learned pens, as from the
tails of wasps. I debated long within myself whether a private scholar
could justly be entitled to approach a minister with dashes,--greatly as
this level interlineation of thoughts, these horizontal note-marks of
poetical _music_-pieces, and these rope-ladders or Achilles' tendons of
philosophical _see_-pieces, are at present fashionable and
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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