The Talent Of Composition Is Very Dangerous, - The Striking Out
The Heart Of Life At A Blow, As The Indian Takes Off A Scalp.
I
feel as if my life had grown more outward when I can express it.
On his journey from Brenner to Verona, Goethe writes:
"The Tees flows now more gently, and makes in many places broad
sands. On the land, near to the water, upon the hillsides,
everything is so closely planted one to another, that you think
they must choke one another, - vineyards, maize, mulberry-trees,
apples, pears, quinces, and nuts. The dwarf elder throws itself
vigorously over the walls. Ivy grows with strong stems up the
rocks, and spreads itself wide over them, the lizard glides
through the intervals, and everything that wanders to and fro
reminds one of the loveliest pictures of art. The women's tufts
of hair bound up, the men's bare breasts and light jackets, the
excellent oxen which they drive home from market, the little
asses with their loads, - everything forms a living, animated
Heinrich Roos. And now that it is evening, in the mild air a few
clouds rest upon the mountains, in the heavens more stand still
than move, and immediately after sunset the chirping of crickets
begins to grow more loud; then one feels for once at home in the
world, and not as concealed or in exile. I am contented as
though I had been born and brought up here, and were now
returning from a Greenland or whaling voyage. Even the dust of
my Fatherland, which is often whirled about the wagon, and which
for so long a time I had not seen, is greeted. The
clock-and-bell jingling of the crickets is altogether lovely,
penetrating, and agreeable. It sounds bravely when roguish boys
whistle in emulation of a field of such songstresses. One
fancies that they really enhance one another. Also the evening
is perfectly mild as the day."
"If one who dwelt in the south, and came hither from the south,
should hear of my rapture hereupon, he would deem me very
childish. Alas! what I here express I have long known while I
suffered under an unpropitious heaven, and now may I joyful feel
this joy as an exception, which we should enjoy everforth as an
eternal necessity of our nature."
Thus we "sayled by thought and pleasaunce," as Chaucer says, and
all things seemed with us to flow; the shore itself, and the
distant cliffs, were dissolved by the undiluted air. The hardest
material seemed to obey the same law with the most fluid, and so
indeed in the long run it does. Trees were but rivers of sap and
woody fibre, flowing from the atmosphere, and emptying into the
earth by their trunks, as their roots flowed upward to the
surface. And in the heavens there were rivers of stars, and
milky-ways, already beginning to gleam and ripple over our heads.
There were rivers of rock on the surface of the earth, and rivers
of ore in its bowels, and our thoughts flowed and circulated, and
this portion of time was but the current hour.
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