Translations from the German · Thomas Carlyle
ELEVENTH LETTER-BOX.
At last I took heart, and asked after the little toy-press of the drowned son, which hitherto I had sought for in vain over all the house. Fixlein himself had inquired for it, with as little success. Thiennette gave the old mother a persuading look full of love; and the latter led me up-stairs to an outstretched hoop-petticoat, covering the poor press as with a dome. On the way thither the mother told me, she kept it hid from her son, because the recollection of his brother would pain him. When this deposit-chest of Time (the lock had fallen off) was laid open to me, and I had looked into the little charnel-house, with its wrecks of a childlike sportful Past, I, without saying a word, determined, some time ere I went away, to unpack these playthings of the lost boy, before his surviving brother: Can there be aught finer than to look at these ash-buried, deep-sunk Herculanean ruins of childhood, now dug up and in the open air?
Thiennette sent twice to ask me whether he was come. He and she, precisely because they do not give their love the weakening expression of phrases, but the strengthening one of actions, have a boundless feeling of it towards one another. Some wedded pairs eat each other's lips and hearts and love away by kisses,--as in Rome, the statues of Christ (by Angelo) have lost their feet by the same process of kissing, and got leaden ones instead; in other couples, again, you may see, by mere inspection, the number of their conflagrations and eruptions, as in Vesuvius you can discover his, of which there are now forty-three: but in these two beings rose the Greek fire of a moderate and everlasting love, and gave warmth without casting forth sparks, and flamed straight up without crackling. The evening-red is flowing back more magically from the windows of the gardener's cottage into my grove; and I feel as if I must say to Destiny: "Hast thou a sharp sorrow, then throw it rather into my breast, and strike not with it three good souls, who are too happy not to bleed by it, and too sequestered in their little dim village not to shrink back at the thunderbolt which hurries a stricken spirit from its earthly dwelling."---- Thou good Fixlein! Here comes he hurrying over the parsonage-green. What languishing looks full of love already rest in the eye of thy Thiennette!--What news wilt thou bring us tonight from the town!--How will the ascending steeple-ball refresh thy soul tomorrow!--
Text from Project Gutenberg, public domain in the United States.