Translations from the German (Vol 3 of 3): Tales by Musæus, Tieck, RichterCarlyle, Thomas
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Translations from the German (Vol 3 of 3): Tales by Musæus, Tieck, Richter
Carlyle, Thomas
German fiction -- Translations into English
"Appear, then, quickly tomorrow at noon, Berga," said my heart; "and if
possible before noon, that I may lengthen thy market paradise so many
hours as thou arrivest earlier!"
A clergyman, amid the tempests of the world, readily makes for a free
harbour, for the church: the church-wall is his casemate-wall and
fortification; and behind are to be found more peaceful and more
accordant souls than on the market-place: in short, I went into the High
Church. However, in the course of the psalm, I was somewhat disturbed by
a Heiduc, who came up to a well-dressed young gentleman sitting opposite
me, and tore the double opera-glass from his nose, it being against rule
in Flaetz, as it is in Dresden, to look at the Court with glasses which
diminish and approximate. I myself had on a pair of spectacles, but they
were magnifiers. It was impossible for me to resolve on taking them off;
and here again, I am afraid, I shall pass for a foolhardy person and a
desperado; so much only I reckoned fit, to look invariably into my
psalm-book; not once lifting my eyes while the Court was rustling and
entering, thereby to denote that my glasses were ground convex. For the
rest, the sermon was good, if not always finely conceived for a
Court-church; it admonished the hearers against innumerable vices, to
whose counterparts, the virtues, another preacher might so readily have
exhorted us. During the whole service, I made it my business to exhibit
true deep reverence, not only towards God, but also towards my
illustrious Prince. For the latter reverence I had my private reason: I
wished to stamp this sentiment strongly and openly as with raised
letters on my countenance, and so give the lie to any malicious imp
about Court, by whom my contravention of the _Panegyric on Nero_, and my
free German satire on this real tyrant himself, which I had inserted in
the _Flaetz Weekly Journal_, might have been perverted into a secret
characteristic portrait of my own Sovereign. We live in such times at
present, that scarcely can we compose a pasquinade on the Devil in Hell,
but some human Devil on Earth will apply it to an angel.
[Note 107: Germany is a long lofty mountain--under the sea.]
[Note 144: The Reviewer does not in reality employ his pen for
writing; but he burns it, to awaken weak people from their swoons, with
the smell; he tickles with it the throat of the plagiary, to make him
render back; and he picks with it his own teeth. He is the only
individual in the whole learned lexicon that can never exhaust himself,
never write himself out, let him sit before the ink-glass for centuries
or tens of centuries. For while the Scholar, the Philosopher, and the
Poet, produce their new book solely from new materials and growth, the
Reviewer merely lays his old gage of taste and knowledge on a thousand
new works; and his light, in the ever-passing, ever-differently-cut
glass-world which he _elucidates_, is still refracted into new colours.]
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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