Hesperus; or, Forty-Five Dog-Post-Days: A Biography. Vol. I.

"The Earth is the _cul-de-sac_ in the great city of God,--the camera obscura full of inverted and contracted images from a fairer world,--the coast of God's creation,--a vaporou...

"But as touching those dried-up, withered men, in whose eyes nothing is great but their own image, and whose stomach at the sight of a fairer movement of the exalted heart is ta...

To return: the Chaplain's wife now related as much about Victor as all knew before. But this repetition of the old story is just the fairest charm of domestic discourse. If we c...

It was day before yesterday, on the 29th of April, that I was walking in the evening up and down my island. The evening had already spun itself into haze and shadow. I could har...

With such a conjunction of ill stars, of course our Chamberlain found the bill of divorce, which at first was written with sympathetic ink in January's face, gradually more and...

Now could the supplementary volumes of the Universal History of St. Luna be conveniently issued. Eymann could deliver his folio volumes of _gravamina_ (grievances) upon the cons...

Flamin dipped Matthieu's likeness into a quite different dyeing-copper from that the mother used: he was a jolly genius, and nothing worse. He personated everything in the world...

"O thou good, good soul!" cried Victor, "I can now no more forget thee. Thou must--thou wilt--take an interest in my weak heart!" From his inner strings the drops of vapor that...

As the Chaplain passed along before the quiet head of the six-weeks' child, which to-day's lace-cap already oppressed, he went back, from vexation at its indifference, lifted it...

However, she was not embarrassed. He thought it unjust toward Flamin to observe her sentiments towards himself; but still he remarked this much,--that the observatory on which o...

"I am not very happy, my Emanuel! When my great teacher, Dahore,--that shining Swan of heaven, who, fastened to life by his broken wing-joint, looked up wistfully at other Swans...

"Heaven keep our politeness safe and sound," said he; "without it there were not only no holding out among a set of knaves, but it pays also minute-tributes of pleasure, whereas...

"Ah, Horion! there lies in man a black Dead Sea, out of which only when it is agitated the blessed island of the next world lifts itself up with its clouds. But my lips will alr...

The planet Venus and a grove show most beautifully in the morning and the evening; on both, at these hours, more rays of the sun fall than at any other. Hence our Victor felt, i...

At the house of the Count of O---- (so was called also a famous officer in the Seven Years' War, and by Shakespeare the world, and the whole territory of an old lady; and, accor...

Coulisses Nos. 1 and 2 are still choke-full of actors and actresses, who must now come out. This is the day on which two courts, like two armies, are halted over against each ot...

The Bee-father went on to make no secret of it, that he formerly, before he procured this ring in Nuremberg on a court-day, had not been able to believe in the Trinity; "but now...

They passed out of the leafy mausoleum, and sat down on an overturned stalactite. At times, during the conversation, a strange harmonica-tone fell from leaf to leaf, and, at a g...

When man can obtain from reason no balsamic relief, he begs it at the hands of Hope and Illusion; and they two then willingly share his sorrow. Just as the blue sky of to-day by...

In the morning Emanuel, as cicerone of Nature, led his guest through the ruins and antiques of the earth: for every tree is an eternal antique. How different is a walk with a re...

Victor reproached himself with every drop of blood shed by Emanuel, and resolved to go to-day, because this Psyche, with her great wings, could no longer stir herself in her web...

Victor did not do this; he absolutely now could not get away from the house, i. e. from the village. The summer days seemed to him to rest in St. Luna, softly breathing, fragran...

At six o'clock in the evening,--for it was only a skip to Flachsenfingen,--when the cattle came home, he sallied forth, accompanied by the whole family. On his more fortunate ar...

Away he flew; and I have already reported that the apothecary presently thought to himself: "Heigh! heigh!" In the apothecary's shop Victor said to the dispenser, at whom he fle...

"I have not had hitherto spare time enough to lift my eyes up and see what moon we have. Verily, a court wants time for virtue. The Prince carries me about with him everywhere,...

What did January see still further? Untaxed knaves he saw, who enriched themselves at the expense of taxed poor men,--honest advocates he heard, who did not, like his courtiers...

But among such people my hero, with all his toleration, could not take any comfort whatever,--he who so hated all selfishness, especially in the sensual form, and who would glad...

But why do I expect my hero to make any more active demonstration to-day,--him who, to-day, buried in that dream-night and in the coming evening, his emotions stirred by every k...

"But, ah! more than one tempest thunders into the life's-dream of the rest of us, and makes it distressful. If a higher being could enter into the hurly-burly of ideas which enc...

If my good reader ever has to take an eternal farewell of a too dear friend, let him take it _twice_.--The _first_ we all understand, as a matter of course, when he sinks in the...

He was, perhaps, too tolerant towards the doubt which only a woman could make _endurable_ and _enduring_,--the doubt which one she mistook for the other, the Court-Physician or...

The reader will be vexed with this Dog-Post-Day; I, for my part, have already been vexed about it. My hero is evidently becoming entangled in the meshes of two female trains, an...

It was well that, on such an evening, no chamberlain, no man of the world, stood in the balcony, just as poor Marie--on whom her former life has been precipitated like a crushin...

But the Devil had his game, and in fact a true game of Ombre[258] for _four_ persons,[259] with a dummy:[260] this croupier[261] had made the original vault of playing out the f...

With many, properly speaking, badly,--in the first place, with Clotilda. She resided, to be sure, at the Minister's; as maid of honor, she would have belonged in the Paullinum,...

Gait and posture were unchanged; there was the same external joyousness, but the glance was often too fluttering, often too fixed; across the lily-cheeks darted often a hectic f...

Man regards his century or his half-century as the culmination of light, as a festal-day, to which all other centuries lead only as week-days. He knows only two golden ages,--th...

[Footnote 132: A lady's watch, as is well known, shaped like a heart, provided on the back with a dial-gnomon and magnetic needle. The latter points out to the ladies (who hate...