Wieland was not a
creative
genius, nor a great reformatory force
in literature.
in literature.
Warner - World's Best Literature - v27 - Wat to Zor
the smoke has rolled away;
And I see the Northern rifles gleaming down the ranks of gray.
Hark! that sudden blast of bugles! there the troop of Minon wheels;
There the Northern horses thunder, with the cannon at their heels.
“Jesu, pity! how it thickens! now retreat and now advance!
Right against the blazing cannon shivers Puebla's charging lance!
## p. 15946 (#286) ##########################################
15946
JOHN GREENLEAF WHITTIER
Down they go, the brave young riders; horse and foot together
fall:
Like a plowshare in the fallow, through them plows the Northern
ball. )
>>
Nearer came the storm and nearer, rolling fast and frightful on.
Speak, Ximena, speak and tell us, who has lost and who has
won ? -
"Alas! alas! I know not: friend and foe together fall,
O'er the dying rush the living: pray, my sisters, for them all!
с
"Lo! the wind the smoke is lifting — Blessed Mother, save my
brain !
I can see the wounded crawling slowly out from heaps of slain.
Now they stagger, blind and bleeding; now they fall, and strive to
rise :
Hasten, sisters, haste and save them, lest they die before our eyes!
“O my heart's love! O my dear one! lay thy poor head on my
knee:
Dost thou know the lips that kiss thee? Canst thou hear me ?
canst thou see?
O my husband, brave and gentle! O my Bernal, look once more
On the blessed cross before thee! Mercy! mercy! all is o'er! ”
Dry thy tears, my poor Ximena; lay thy dear one down to rest;
Let his hands be meekly folded, lay the cross upon his breast;
Let his dirge be sung hereafter, and his funeral masses said :
To-day, thou poor bereaved one, the living ask thy aid.
Close beside her, faintly moaning, fair and young, a soldier lay,
Torn with shot and pierced with lances, bleeding slow his life away;
But as tenderly before him the lorn Ximena knelt,
She saw the Northern eagle shining on his pistol-belt.
With a stifled cry of horror straight she turned away her head;
With a sad and bitter feeling looked she back upon her dead:
But she heard the youth's low moaning, and his struggling breath
of pain,
And she raised the cooling water to his parching lips again.
Whispered low the dying soldier, pressed her hand and faintly
smiled:
Was that pitying face his mother's ? did she watch beside her child ?
All his stranger words with meaning her woman's heart supplied:
With her kiss upon his forehead, “Mother! ” murmured he, and died!
## p. 15947 (#287) ##########################################
JOHN GREENLEAF WHITTIER
15947
>>
"A bitter curse upon them, poor boy, who led thee forth,
From some gentle, sad-eyed mother, weeping lonely in the North!
Spake the mournful Mexic woman, as she laid him with her dead,
And turned to soothe the living, and bind the wounds which bled.
Look forth once more, Ximena! — Like a cloud before the wind
Rolls the battle down the mountains, leaving blood and death
behind:
Ah! they plead in vain for mercy; in the dust the wounded strive:
Hide your faces, holy angels! O thou Christ of God, forgive! )
Sink, O Night, among thy mountains! let the cool gray shadows
fall:
Dying brothers, fighting demons, drop thy curtain over all!
Through the thickening winter twilight, wide apart the battle
rolled;
In its sheath the sabre rested, and the cannon's lips grew cold.
But the noble Mexic women still their holy task pursued,
Through that long, dark night of sorrow, worn and faint and lack-
ing food;
Over weak and suffering brothers, with a tender care they hung,
And the dying foeman blessed them in a strange and Northern
tongue.
Not wholly lost, O Father! is this evil world of ours:
Upward, through its smoke and ashes, spring afresh the Eden
flowers;
From its smoking hell of battle, Love and Pity send their prayer,
And still thy white-winged angels hover dimly in our air !
THE SEER
I
HEAR the far-off voyager's horn,
I see the Yankee's trail;
His foot on every mountain pass,
On every stream his sail.
He's whittling round St. Mary's Falls,
Upon his loaded wain;
He's leaving on the pictured rocks
His fresh tobacco stain.
I hear the mattock in the mine,
The axe-stroke in the dell,
## p. 15948 (#288) ##########################################
15948
JOHN GREENLEAF WHITTIER
The clamor from the Indian lodge,
The Jesuit's chapel bell.
I see the swarthy trappers come
From Mississippi's springs;
The war-chiefs with their painted bows,
And crest of eagle wings.
Behind the scared squaw's birch canoe
The steamer smokes and raves;
And city lots are staked for sale
Above old Indian graves.
By forest, lake, and waterfall,
I see the peddler's show,-
The mighty mingling with the mean,
The lofty with the low.
I hear the tread of pioneers
Of nations yet to be;
The first low wash of waves that soon
Shall roll a human sea.
The rudiments of empire here
Are plastic yet and warm;
The chaos of a mighty world
Is rounding into form.
Each rude and jostling fragment soon
Its fitting place shall find -
The raw material of a State,
Its music and its mind.
And, westering still, the star which leads
The New World in its train,
Has tipped with fire the icy spears
Of many a mountain chain. .
The snowy cones of Oregon
Are kindled on its way;
And California's golden sands
Gleam brighter in its ray.
## p. 15949 (#289) ##########################################
JOHN GREENLEAF WHITTIER
15949
BURNS
(ON RECEIVING A SPRIG OF HEATHER IN BLOSSOM)
N°
MORE these simple flowers belong
To Scottish maid and lover:
Sown in the common soil of song,
They bloom the wide world over.
In smiles and tears, in sun and showers,
The minstrel and the heather,
The deathless singer and the flowers
He sang of, live together.
Wild heather-bells and Robert Burns!
The moorland flower and peasant!
How, at their mention, memory turns
Her pages old and pleasant!
The gray sky wears again its gold
And purple of adorning,
And manhood's noonday shadows hold
The dews of boyhood's morning, -
The dews that washed the dust and soil
From off the wings of pleasure,
The sky that flecked the ground of toil
With golden threads of leisure.
I call to mind the summer day,
The early harvest mowing,
The sky with sun and clouds at play,
And flowers with breezes blowing.
I hear the blackbird in the corn,
The locust in the haying;
And like the fabled hunter's horn,
Old tunes my heart is playing.
How oft that day, with fond delay,
I sought the maple's shadow,
And sang with Burns the hours away,
Forgetful of the meadow!
Bees hummed, birds twittered, overhead
I heard the squirrels leaping,
The good dog listened while I read,
And wagged his tail in keeping.
## p. 15950 (#290) ##########################################
15950
JOHN GREENLEAF WHITTIER
I watched him while in sportive mood
I read The Twa Dogs'' story,
And half believed he understood
The poet's allegory.
Sweet day, sweet songs! - The golden hours
Grew brighter for that singing,
From brook and bird and meadow flowers
A dearer welcome bringing.
New light on home-seen Nature beamed,
New glory over Woman;
And daily life and duty seemed
No longer poor and common.
I woke to find the simple truth
Of fact and feeling better
Than all the dreams that held my youth
A still repining debtor:
That Nature gives her handmaid, Art,
The themes of sweet discoursing;
The tender idyls of the heart
In every tongue rehearsing.
Why dream of lands of gold and pearl,
Of loving knight and lady,
When fariner boy and barefoot girl
Were wandering there already ?
I saw through all familiar things
The romance underlying;
The joys and griefs that plume the wings
Of Fancy skyward flying.
I saw the same blithe day return,
The same sweet fall of even,
That rose on wooded Craigie-burn,
And sank on crystal Devon.
I matched with Scotland's heathery hills
The sweet-brier and the clover;
With Ayr and Doon, my native rills,
Their wood-hymns chanting over.
O'er rank and pomp, as he had seen,
I saw the Man uprising;
No longer common or unclean,
The child of God's baptizing!
## p. 15951 (#291) ##########################################
JOHN GREENLEAF WHITTIER
15951
With clearer eyes I saw the worth
Of life among the lowly;
The Bible at his Cotter's hearth
Had made my own more holy.
And if at times an evil strain,
To lawless love appealing,
Broke in upon the sweet refrain
Of pure and healthful feeling,
It died upon the eye and ear,
No inward answer gaining:
No heart had I to see or hear
The discord and the staining.
Let those who never erred forget
His worth, in vain bewailings;
Sweet Soul of Song! -I own my debt
Uncanceled by his failings!
Lament who will the ribald line
Which tells his lapse from duty,
How kissed the maddening lips of wine
Or wanton ones of beauty;
But think, while falls that shade between
The erring one and Heaven,
That he who loved like Magdalen,
Like her may be forgiven.
Not his the song whose thunderous chime
Eternal echoes render,-
The mournful Tuscan's haunted rhyme,
And Milton's starry splendor!
But who his human heart has laid
To Nature's bosom nearer ?
Who sweetened toil like him, or paid
To love a tribute dearer ?
Through all his tuneful art, how strong
The human feeling gushes!
The very moonlight of his song
Is warm with smiles and blushes!
Give lettered pomp to teeth of Time,
So 'Bonnie Doon' but tarry;
Blot out the Epic's stately rhyme,
But spare his Highland Mary!
## p. 15952 (#292) ##########################################
15952
JOHN GREENLEAF WHITTIER
THE SUMMONS
M
Y EAR is full of summer sounds,
Of summer sights my languid eye;
Beyond the dusty village bounds
I loiter in my daily rounds,
And in the noontime shadows lie.
I hear the wild bee wind his horn,
The bird swings on the ripened wheat,
The long green lances of the corn
Are tilting in the winds of morn,
The locust shrills his song of heat.
Another sound my spirit hears -
A deeper sound that drowns them all:
A voice of pleading choked with tears,
The call of human hopes and fears,
The Macedonian cry to Paul.
The storm-bell rings, the trumpet blows;
I know the word and countersign:
Wherever Freedom's vanguard goes,
Where stand or fall her friends or foes,
I know the place that should be mine.
Shamed be the hands that idly fold,
And lips that woo the reed's accord,
When laggard Time the hour has tolled
For true with false and new with old
To fight the battles of the Lord!
O brothers! blest by partial Fate
With power to match the will and deed,
To him your summons comes too late
Who sinks beneath his armor's weight,
And has no answer but God-speed!
## p. 15953 (#293) ##########################################
JOHN GREENLEAF WHITTIER
15953
THE LAST EVE OF SUMMER
(WRITTEN WHEN THE POET WAS NEARLY 83)
S
.
UMMER's last sun nigh unto setting shines
Through yon columnar pines,
And on the deepening shadows of the lawn
Its golden lines are
re drawn.
Dreaming of long-gone summer days like this,
Feeling the wind's soft kiss,
Grateful and glad that failing ear and sight
Have still their old delight,
I sit alone, and watch the warm, sweet day
Lapse tenderly away;
And wistful, with a feeling of forecast,
I ask, “Is this the last ?
« Will nevermore for me the seasons run
Their round, and will the sun
Of ardent summers yet to come forget
For me to rise and set ? »
Thou shouldst be here, or I should be with thee
Wherever thou mayst be,
Lips mute, hands clasped, in silences of speech
Each answering unto each.
For this still hour, this sense of mystery far
Beyond the evening star,
No words outworn suffice on lip or scroll:
The soul would fain with soul
Wait, while these few swift-passing days fulfill
The wise-disposing Will,
And, in the evening as at morning, trust
The A11-Merciful and Just.
The solemn joy that soul-communion feels,
Immortal life reveals;
And human love, its prophecy and sign,
Interprets love divine.
Come then, in thought, if that alone may be,
O friend! and bring with thee
Thy calm assurance of transcendent spheres,
And the eternal years!
xxv11-998
## p. 15953 (#294) ##########################################
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16
POD
JUTTU
CHR. WIELAND
## p. 15953 (#296) ##########################################
15954
CHRISTOPHER MARTIN WIELAND
(1733-1813)
M
RITERS of a certain class exercise a fruitful influence in their
day, and form an important part in the contemporary liter-
ary development, yet with the lapse of time lose much of
their claim on our interest. This is true of Wieland, whose services
to the German language and literature were decided.
Both in prose
and verse he helped to make the tongue an artistic instrument of.
expression, lending it grace, definiteness, elegance: he gave it a sort
of French refinement. He was largely active in reviving both classi-
cal and mediæval studies; he introduced Shakespeare to his country-
men, and by his keen, sane criticism did much for German culture.
Wieland was a humanist at a time when taste and scholarship were
sorely needed in the fatherland. He was a writer of lively wit and
fancy, sometimes running into frivolity and sensuality. He initiated
the historical culture-novel and psychological romance. He produced
an epic, Oberon, which had an immense vogue in his own and other
languages, though now it commands little more than a formal regard.
An English critic, writing at the beginning of the present century,
could remark soberly with (Oberon' in mind, that “the fame of Wie-
land is as wide-spread as that of Horace. ” That such praise now
seems excessive, must not blind us to the poet's merits and genuine
contributions to the literature of his country. Fashions in literature
succeed each other almost as rapidly as fashions in dress.
Christopher Martin Wieland, by ancestry, education, and early
habit, had a bias towards philosophical and religious thought, though
the writings of his maturity were of a very different kind.
He was
the son of a country clergyman, and was born in the Suabian village
of Oberholzheim, on September 5th, 1733. He was carefully instructed
under his father's direction, and showed literary precocity. When
fourteen he went to school at Klosterbergen, near Magdeburg, where
his exceptional abilities attracted attention. Next we find him living
with a relative in Erfurt, and reading for the University. The fam-
ily home was moved to Biberach during this preparation; and it was
there he met and fell in love with Sophie Gutermann, afterwards the
wife of De Laroche, who was the factotum of Count Stadion, in whose
home Wieland was a constant visitor in after years. The intimacy
became in time a platonic friendship, but made its deep impress upon
Wieland's ripening powers. The idea of his first poem, "The Nature
## p. 15953 (#297) ##########################################
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》。
CHR. WIE LAND
ارایه
## p. 15954 (#300) ##########################################
## p. 15955 (#301) ##########################################
CHRISTOPHER MARTIN WIELAND
15955
of Things,' written and published several years later, came to him
while he was walking with Sophie.
He went to Tübingen in 1750,- nominally to study law, but gave
his main attention to philology, philosophy, and literature. Wieland
was one of the army of young men in all lands who begin with
the law, and are irresistibly deflected by their taste toward letters.
Bodmer, the Swiss poet, was then a sort of Rhadamanthus in Ger-
man literary affairs, and to him Wieland, fired by ambition, sent his
unfinished manuscript epic 'Hermann”; the result was an invitation
to visit Bodmer at Zürich, and the young aspirant spent a number of
months with the veteran, a cordial friendship being established be-
tween them. Wieland derived much benefit from this association; but
left his friend and patron in 1754, other influences being at work in
him. He lived for some time in Zürich and Bern, supporting him-
self by tutoring. At the University his writings, such as the Moral
Letters and Moral Tales,' had been of a philosophico-ethical and
mystical nature, and under the Swiss influence they continued to be
so for several years.
His Letters from the Dead to Living Friends,'
and other works of this period, are full of spiritual aspiration; and
his tone in rebuking worldly pleasures is austere.
But this was not to be Wieland's typical work. The impulse is
explained by heredity and environment. He went to Biberach in
1760 as Director of Chancery; and as he began to mix in polite soci-
ety, and especially to frequent Count Stadion's house, he developed
into a man of the world, and his writings reflected his experience.
Wit, fancy, satire, and worldly wisdom took the place of pious mystic
imaginings. The romance Don Sylvio von Rosalva' (1764), the cul-
pably free 'Comic Tales? (1766), the romance (Agathon' (1766–67), —
described as the first modern romance of culture, and certainly one of
his most characteristic and able productions,— exhibit this change of
heart; and in the Musarion the next year (1768) a middle ground
is reached, — the author advocating the rational cultivation of the
sensual and spiritual sides of man, avoiding alike the extremes of
the ascetic and the worldling. His study of Shakespeare began at
Biberach; and between 1762 and 1766 he published twenty-two prose
translations of the plays, thus making the English poet an open book
for Germans.
After a three-years' stay in Erfurt as professor of philosophy,
Wieland began in 1772 what was to be a life residence in Weimar.
An interesting feature of this life is his connection with Goethe.
Soon after Wieland's arrival in the city, he listened in an evening
company to the remarkable improvised verses of a young man
known to him, and exclaimed, “That must be either the Devil — or
Goethe! It proved to be the latter. A warm friendship grew up
between the two, in spite of the fact that ethe had
attacked
-
-
un-
## p. 15956 (#302) ##########################################
15956
CHRISTOPHER MARTIN WIELAND
Wieland's writings, and in ‘Gods, Heroes, and Wieland' represented
the other as an object of sport in hell. His literary activity in Wei-
mar was prolific and many-sided;. and here his most famous single
work, the Oberon,' was done. He edited the German Mercury, many
of his writings first appearing in that paper; he began a periodical
called the Attic Museum; wrote some of his best things in the comic
and satiric veins, among them The Inhabitants of Booby-land' (Die
Abderiten: 1774), New Dialogues of the Gods) (1791), and “The
Secret History of the Philosopher Peregrinus Proteus' (1791); and
translated Horace, Lucian, and Cicero, his last labor being expended
on the Letters of the last-named classic.
His masterpiece, Oberon,' was brought out in 1780, and received
with a favor rarely extended to any literary work. It is a romantic
epic, interweaving the love story of the mediaval knight Huon with
an amatory episode in the story of the fairy king and queen, Oberon
and Titania. The poem is written in a skillfully handled stanzaic
form, and in the original possesses vigor, melody, lively invention,
picturesque description, and narrative movement, — qualities some of
which are lost in the English rendering. Its manner and matter now
seem a trifle antiquated. Wieland purchased in 1797 an estate named
Osmannstädt near Weimar, and lived there until 1801; when, his wife
dying, he returned to Weimar, and remained until his own death on
January 20th, 1813. Personally he is drawn as sensitive and vain, but
of pure private life, and of generous impulses. His character may
be studied in his (Selected Letters) (1815-16) and the biographies of
Gruber, Loebell, Ofterdingen, and Pröhle. A most voluminous writer,
his collected works number thirty-six in the edition of 1851-6.
Wieland was not a creative genius, nor a great reformatory force
in literature. He never, in his most representative works, soared
very high nor probed very deep. But he was a gifted writer in
varied fields, whose influence was salutary, and who will always have
a secure place in that particular corner of the Pantheon devoted to
authors just below stellar rank.
MANAGING HUSBANDS
From the Fourth Dialogue,' Volume xxvii. , Collected Works
Jº
UNO O my dear Livia, I am the unhappiest woman in the
world!
Livia - Never had I expected to hear such a word from
-
the lips of the queen of gods and men!
Juno — How, Livia ? Do you too hold the common error that
happiness is the inseparable property of high station ? — when we
## p. 15957 (#303) ##########################################
CHRISTOPHER MARTIN WIELAND
15957
-
should deem ourselves lucky could we exchange our position,
with all its prerogatives, for that of the modest joy of a poor
shepherdess who is reconciled to her lot!
Livia — Since I was first among the mortals, I do not remem-
ber ever to have been so dissatisfied with my lot as to wish to
exchange it for a humbler one.
Juno — Then you must have a tenderer, or at least a more
courteous and agreeable, husband than I have.
Livia - I should be making ridiculous pretensions did I not
count myself happy. In the three-and-fifty years of our union,
Augustus has never given me a single cause to doubt that I hold
the first place in his heart.
Juno — I can't by any means make the same boast with
respect to my husband, Livia. Who doesn't know, since that
gossipy old Homer let out all our marriage secrets so shame-
fully, with how little consideration and delicacy I have been
treated by Jupiter; how rudely he addresses me in the presence
of the other gods; what sort of names I must put up with from
him; and how he appears to take an actual pleasure in remind-
ing me on every occasion of misdeeds concerning which he ought
to feel the greatest shame, if he were still capable of blushing!
-
-
Livia — One cannot deny that men
– with some few excep-
tions, perhaps -- are in comparison with us a rough, untender,
horrid sort of being. Without some tact, it is very difficult even
for a goddess to have as much power over the most ordinary
rude mortal as a wife must have over her husband in order to
be tolerably contented.
Juno — If this be the case, Livia, I should like very much to
know how you managed to have such firm control of a husband
like Augustus, who was so jealous of his privileges, so mistrust-
ful and cautious, and withal so hot and hasty in his passions.
Livia — Nothing can be simpler at bottom. I made him be.
lieve, so long as he lived, that I had no other will than his; and
yet I managed to bring about just the contrary: he thought
he ruled me, and I ruled him. In all matters concerning which
I was indifferent, and that he laid stress upon, I did exactly
according to his taste and whim: I was always just as he wished
and believed the wife of Augustus should be. My obligingness
in such things was boundless. So far from bothering him with
jealousy, I appeared not to have the slightest suspicion of his
love affairs,
and by virtue of a sympathy of which he
## p. 15958 (#304) ##########################################
15958
CHRISTOPHER MARTIN WIELAND
had not the least doubt, brought it about that the ladies who
had the most charm for him were always the very ones whom I
preferred, and with whom I was on the best footing. Through
this utter indifference as to his little secrets, I gained the advan-
tage that he had no others from me; and while I left him in the
delusion that he deceived me on this point, I could be all the
surer that he deceived me in no others, and in everything touch-
ing his rule, his family, and his political relations did naught
without my counsel, and made no decision I had not led him to;
but in such manner that he ever believed he was following his
own head, when really he was the tool of mine. By this craft
(to give it its proper name) I profited, in that he was as little
jealous of my intelligence as I was of his love escapades; and
when I had won this, all was won.
Juno - You are a woman after my own heart, Julia Augusta!
We must get better acquainted with one another. But I doubt
if, with the Titanic blood that runs in my veins, I should ever be
pliant enough to make use of the hint you have given me.
Translated for (A Library of the World's Best Literature) by Richard Burton.
THE DEITIES DEPOSED
The Sixth of “The Dialogues of the Gods, Volume xxvii. of Collected Works)
[The gods, while banqueting in Olympus, are startled by the tidings
brought by Mercury, that they have been deposed as deities by the Romans.
They talk it over in council, and Jupiter points out that their case admits of
consolation.
Characters – Jupiter, Juno, Apollo, Minerva, Venus, Bacchus, Vesta, Ceres,
Victoria, Quirinus, Serapis, Momus, and Mercury.
Jupiter and Juno, with the other dwellers in Olympus, sit in an open hall
of the Olympus Palace, at divers great tables. Ganymede and Antinous serve
nectar to the gods, Hebe to the goddesses. The Muses make table music, the
Graces and the Hours dance pantomimic dances, and Jocus arouses the blessed
gods to loud laughter from time to time by his caricatures and buffooneries.
When the merriment is at its beight, Mercury, in hot haste, comes flying in. )
JT
?
UPITER - You are late, my child, as you see. What news do
you bring us from below there?
l'enus [to Bacchus] – He appears to bring something un-
pleasant. How disturbed he looks!
Mercury — The latest news I bring is not very much calcu-
lated to increase the jollity which I see reigning here.
## p. 15959 (#305) ##########################################
CHRISTOPHER MARTIN WIELAND
15959
-
-
Jupiter — At all events, your manner isn't, Mercury. What
can have happened so bad as to have disturbed the gods in their
joy?
Quirinus - Has an earthquake overthrown the Capitol ?
Mercury - That would be a small matter.
a
Ceres — Has a more violent eruption of Ætna devastated my
beautiful Sicily?
Bacchus — Or an untimely frost nipped the vineyards of the
Campagna ?
Mercury - Trifles, trifles!
Jupiter — Now out with your grievous story, then!
Mercury — It is nothing more than — [He pauses. ]
Jupiter — Don't make me impatient, Hermes! What is noth.
ing more than — ?
Mercury — Nothing, Jupiter, except that, upon a motion made
by the Emperor in his own person in the Senate, you have been
formally deposed by a decided majority.
[The gods all arise from the tables in great agitation. ]
Jupiter [who alone remains seated, laughing] – Nothing but
that? I have foreseen it for a long while.
?
All the Gods [together] – Jupiter deposed! Is it possible ?
Jupiter!
Juno-You talk nonsense, Mercury. Æsculapius, feel of his
pulse!
The Gods — Jupiter deposed!
Mercury – Just as I say: formally, and with solemnity, de-
clared by a great majority of votes to be a man of straw -
What do I say? A man of straw is something. Less than a man
of straw, a mere nothing; robbed of your temple, your priests,
your dignities as the highest protector of the Roman realm!
Hercules — It's a mad piece of news, Mercury; but as true as
I am Hercules (he swings his club], they shan't have done it to
me in vain!
Jupiter -- Be quiet, Hercules! So, then, has Jupiter Optimus
Maximus, Capitolinus, Feretrius, Stator, Lapis, etc. , played out
his part ?
Mercury — Your statue is overthrown, and they are in the
very act of destroying your temple. The same tragedy is being
played in all the provinces and corners of the Roman kingdom.
## p. 15960 (#306) ##########################################
15960
CHRISTOPHER MARTIN WIELAND
Everywhere hosts of goat-bearded brutes rush about with torches,
battering-rams, hammers, hatchets, and axes, and in a fanatic
rage lay waste the honored objects of the ancient faith of the
folk.
Serapis — Alas, what will happen to my stately temple at
Alexandria and my splendid colossal statue! If the Theban des-
ert belches forth only half of its holy hermit wood-devils, every-
thing's up.
Momus - Oh, you don't need to worry, Serapis. Who would
undertake to lay hands on your image, when at Alexandria it is
an understood thing that at the least despite offered it by an
impious hand, heaven and earth - would fall in fragments, and all
nature sink back into old chaos ?
Quirinus — But one can't always depend upon stories of that
kind, my good Serapis. It might happen with you as it did with
the massive golden statue of the goddess Anaitis at Zela, concern-
ing which it was believed that the first person who seized on it
would be stricken to the ground by a thunderbolt.
Serapis - And what happened to this statue ?
Quirinus — When the triumvir Antony defeated the Phæni-
cians at Zela, the city together with the temple of Anaitis was
plundered, and nobody could say where the massive golden god-
dess had got to.
It chanced that some years after, Augustus was
passing the night at Bononia with a veteran of Antony's. The
Emperor was sumptuously entertained; and as the talk at table
fell on the battle of Zela and the plundering of the temple of
Anaitis, he asked his host as an eye-witness, whether it was true
that the first who laid a hand on her had been suddenly stricken
dead to the earth. “You see that foolhardy one before you,”
replied the veteran; "and you are in fact eating off the leg of
the goddess. I had the fortune to conquer her first. Anaitis is
a very good sort of person, and I acknowledge gratefully that I
owe to her all my wealth. ”
Serapis - You give me poor consolation, Quirinus. If things
are going in the world as Mercury declares, I can promise my
colossus at Alexandria no better fate. It is simply shocking that
Jupiter can regard such outrageous things so coolly!
Jupiter - You will do well, Serapis, if you can manage to do
the same.
You have enjoyed long enough the honor of being
reverenced from East to West, — you, a mere god from the
Pontus; and you certainly can't desire that it should fare better
## p. 15961 (#307) ##########################################
CHRISTOPHER MARTIN WIELAND
15961
with your temples than with mine, or that your colossus should
last longer than the godlike master-work of Phidias. If we all
topple over, you would not wish to be the only one who remains
upright?
Momus — Ho, ho, Jupiter, where have you left your renowned
thunderbolt, that you take your downfall so mildly?
Jupiter - If I were not what I am, I would answer you with
one of them for this silly question, you noodle!
Quirinus [to Mercury] – You must tell me once more, Mer-
cury, if I am to believe you. My flamen superseded ? my temple
closed ? my feast no longer celebrated ? and the enervated, slav-
ish, heartless Quirites have sunk to this degree of unthankfulness
towards their founder?
Mercury- I should be deceiving you if I gave you any other
information.
Victoria – I don't need to ask what is happening to my altar
and my statue in the Julian Curia. It is so long now since the
Romans have learned the art of conquest, that I find nothing
more natural than that they cannot any longer endure the pres-
ence of my picture. At every glance which they throw upon it,
it must be to them a reproach for their shameful degeneration.
With the Romans, whose name has become a byword among
the barbarians which only blood can wash away, Victoria has
nothing more to do.
Vesta - Under these circumstances they will certainly not
allow the holy fire in my temple to burn any longer! Heavens,
what will be the fate of my poor virgins!
Mercury - Oh, not a hair of their heads will be touched, hon-
ored Vesta! They will be allowed to die of hunger in perfect
peace.
Quirinus - How times change! Once it was a shocking mis-
fortune for the whole Roman world, if the holy fire on the altar
of Vesta went out –
Mercury — And now there would be more to-do made if the
profane fire in some Roman cook-shop went out than if the ves-
tals had allowed theirs to be extinguished twice a week.
Quirinus — But who, then, in the future shall be the patron
of war at Rome in my place ?
Mercury — St. Peter with his double key has assumed to him-
self this duty.
Quirinus — St. Peter with his double key? Who is he?
## p. 15962 (#308) ##########################################
15962
CHRISTOPHER MARTIN WIELAND
Mercury – I don't know myself exactly; ask Apollo, - perhaps
he can give you more points about it.
Apollo — He's a man, Quirinus, who, in his successors, shall
rule half the world eight hundred years on end, although he him-
self was only a poor fisherman.
Quirinus — What?
The world will let itself be ruled by fish-
ermen ?
Apollo — By a certain kind of fishermen, at least: fishers of
men, who, in a very cunning kind of fish-net called decretals,
shall little by little catch all the nations and princes of Europe.
Their commands shall be esteemed as oracles of the gods, and
a piece of sheepskin or paper sealed with St. Peter's fisherman's
ring will have the power to seat and unseat kings.
Quirinus - This St. Peter of the double key must be a mighty
magician!
Apollo — No less than that! As you ought to have known
long ago, all the strange and wonderful things in the world occur
quite naturally in this way. The avalanche which shakes down
a whole village was at first a little snowball, and the flood that
shatters a great ship is at its source a purling mountain spring.
Why should not the successors of the Galilean fishermen in a
few centuries be able to become lords of Rome, and arrange a
new religion, of which they constitute themselves high priests,
and with the aid of brand-new ethics and politics, which they
know how to build upon it, finally be masters for a while of
half the world? Didn't you yourself herd the flocks of the King
of Alba, before you made yourself the head of all the bandits in
Latium, and patched together the little robbers' nest that finally
became the capital city and queen of the world ? St. Peter, to
be sure, in his life cut no great figure; but he shall see the time
when kaisers shall hold the stirrups of his successors, and queens
shall humbly kiss their feet.
Quirinus — What doesn't one go through, when one is im-
mortal!
A pollo — It needs a good deal of time, perhaps, and not a
little craft also, in order to bring fishermen so far; but then
the fish will be stupid enough who let themselves be caught by
them.
Quirinus — In the mean time, here we are all together deposed,
aren't we?
Mercury - That's the way things stand.
## p. 15963 (#309) ##########################################
CHRISTOPHER MARTIN WIELAND
15963
Various Gods - Better not be immortal than experience such
things!
Jupiter — My dear sons, uncles, nephews, one and all! I see
that you take this little revolution, which I have quietly seen
coming for a long while, in a more tragic way than the affair is
worth. Take your seats, if you will, and let us speak calmly and
undisturbed of these things, over a glass of nectar. Everything
in nature has its time. Everything changes; and so it is with
the notions of men. They are always changing with their cir-
cumstances; and when we remember what a difference fifty years
make between grandson and grandfather, it will not appear
strange to us that the world seems to acquire within a thousand
years or so, imperceptibly, an entirely new aspect. For at bot-
tom it is only appearance: it remains, under whatever other masks
and names, always the same comedy. The silly people down
there have occupied themselves long enough with superstitions
about us; and if some among you fancied they were advantaged
by it, I must tell them that they were wrong.
Mankind ought
not to be envied if they finally become wiser. By heavens, it is
none too soon!
But that is not to be thought about for the time being. In-
deed, they always flatter themselves that the last foolishness of
which they get knowledge will be the last which they shall com-
mit. The hope of better times is their eternal chimera, by which
they will ever keep on deceiving themselves again and yet again;
because they will never realize that not the time, but their own
inborn wretched foolishness, is the reason why it will never be
better with them. For it is indeed their lot to get pure enjoy-
ment out of nothing good; and only to exchange one folly with
which they have finally become weary, as children with a worn-
out doll, for another with which for the most part they fare
worse than they did with the former one. This time it actually
seemed as if they were winners by the exchange, but I knew
about it too well not to foresee that they wouldn't get help in
this way; for indeed if Wisdom herself should come down to
them in person, and wish to dwell visibly among them, they
would not stop bedecking her with feathers and furbelows, with
baubles and bells, until they had made a fool out of her.
Believe me, gods, the triumphal song which they at this
moment are raising on account of the famous victory they have
our defenseless statues, is for posterity a raven-cry
won
over
## p. 15964 (#310) ##########################################
15964
CHRISTOPHER MARTIN WIELAND
foreboding ill fortune. They think to better themselves, but they
may go further and fare worse. They are weary of us, they wish
to have nothing more to do with us; but so much the worse for
them! We don't need them. If their priests declare us to be
impure and evil spirits, and assure the simple-minded folk that
our dwelling is an eternally flaming pool of sulphur, what harm
does that do to you or me? What matters it to us what ideas
only half-developed earth-creatures have of us, or in what rela-
tion they stand to us, or whether they smoke us with a loath-
some mixture of sacrificial stink and incense, or with brimstone
of hell ? Neither the one nor the other rises up to us. They
don't know us, you say, now that they wish to withdraw them-
selves from our government. Did they know us any better when
they served us? What the poor people call their religion is only
their affair after all, not ours. They alone have to lose or win
by it, when they direct their manner of life wisely or the re-
verse. And their descendants too, when they once feel the results
of the unwise decrees of their Valentinians, their Gratiani, and
their Theodosii, will find cause enough to rue the rash measures
which have heaped together upon their dizzy heads a flood of
new and unendurable evils, whereof the world, so long as it was
subject to the old belief or superstition, had no conception.
It would be another thing if they actually bettered themselves
by this new arrangement. Who among us could or would take
it evil of them ? But it is just the contrary! They are like a
man who in order to drive away a small trouble with which he
might be able to live as long as Tithonus, endures ten others
which are ten times worse. Thus, for example, they raise a great
outcry against our priests, because they fed the people, that is
everywhere superstitious and will ever so remain, with delusions
from which the State derives just as much profit as do they them-
selves. Will their priests improve matters? At this moment they
are founding a superstition which will avail no one but them-
selves, and instead of strengthening the political situation, will
cast into confusion and destroy all human and civil relations; a
superstition which will lie like lead in their brains, shut out
every sane conception of natural and moral things, and under
the color of a chimerical perfection, will poison in the bud the
humanity in each and every man. When one has said the worst
that can be said with truth concerning the superstition which up
till now has befooled the world, one must at least concede that
## p. 15965 (#311) ##########################################
CHRISTOPHER MARTIN WIELAND
15965
it was far more humane, blameless, and beneficent, than the new
faith which one has put in its stead. Our priests were always
more harmless people than these to whom they must now yield.
Those enjoyed their station and their revenues in peace, were on
good terms with every one, and attacked no man's belief; but
these are arrogant and impatient, persecute each other with the
fiercest anger on account of a mere insignificant play on words,
decide by a majority of votes what one must think of unthink-
able things, how one must speak of unspeakable things, and
reckon all who think and speak otherwise as enemies of God and
man. For the priests of the gods to come into collision with the
civic power or otherwise disturb the peace of the State, before
they were interfered with by these raging iconoclasts, has scarcely
been heard of in a thousand years; the new priesthood, on the
contrary, since its party has been popular, has not ceased to
throw the world into confusion. So far their pontiffs work in
secret; but in a short time they will seize on the sceptres of
kings, set themselves up as viceroys of God, and under this title
assume a hitherto unheard-of power over heaven and earth.
If it be true that our priests were (as was right) no very
zealous patrons of philosophy, yet at least they were not its
declared enemies; for they feared nothing from it, under the
protection of the law. Least of all did they conceive of draw-
ing the thoughts and ideas of men under their jurisdiction, or
wish to hinder their currency in society. Those others, on the
contrary,— who so long as they were the weaker party, made so
much of having reason on their side, and in any attack from
us always placed it to the fore,— since now it would only be a
hindrance to them in their wider operations, say good-by to it,
and will not rest until they make it all dark around them, until
they take away from the people all means of enlightenment,
and have condemned the free use of natural judgment as the
first of all sins. Formerly, when they themselves still depended
upon alms, the well-being and comfortable manner of life of
our priests was an abomination to them; now that they fare with
full sails, the moderate incomes of our temples, which they have
made themselves masters of, are much too small to satisfy the
needs of their pride and their vanity. Already now their pon-
tiffs at Rome — through the liberality of rich and foolish matrons
whose dreamy sentimentality they know very well how to use,
through the most shameless legacy-hunting, and a thousand
## p. 15966 (#312) ##########################################
15966
CHRISTOPHER MARTIN WIELAND
other tricks of this kind - put themselves in a position to surpass
the first persons in the State in pomp, expenditure, and voluptu-
ousness. But all these springs, although grown to streams through
ever new tributaries, will not satisfy these insatiable ones: they
will find a thousand ways never heard of before to levy upon the
simpleness of men untutored and beguiled; even the sins of the
world will they transform through their magic art to golden
fountains; and to make them yield the more, they will think up
a monstrous multitude of new sins, of which the Theophrastuses
and the Epictetuses had never a suspicion.
Wherefore do I say all this? What does it matter to us
what these people do, or don't do, and how well or ill they
shall administer their new government over the sick souls of
men nerveless and stunted through lust and slavery? Even
the deceivers are themselves deceived: they too know not what
they do; but we who see clear in all this— it befits us to treat
them with forbearance as sick and insane, and in the future to
show them as much kindness as their own unreason will give
us opportunity. Poor unfortunates! Whom do they harm but
themselves, when they of their own free will rob themselves of
the beneficent influence whereby Athens has become the school
of wisdom and of art, and Rome the law-bearer and regent of
the earth ?
And I see the Northern rifles gleaming down the ranks of gray.
Hark! that sudden blast of bugles! there the troop of Minon wheels;
There the Northern horses thunder, with the cannon at their heels.
“Jesu, pity! how it thickens! now retreat and now advance!
Right against the blazing cannon shivers Puebla's charging lance!
## p. 15946 (#286) ##########################################
15946
JOHN GREENLEAF WHITTIER
Down they go, the brave young riders; horse and foot together
fall:
Like a plowshare in the fallow, through them plows the Northern
ball. )
>>
Nearer came the storm and nearer, rolling fast and frightful on.
Speak, Ximena, speak and tell us, who has lost and who has
won ? -
"Alas! alas! I know not: friend and foe together fall,
O'er the dying rush the living: pray, my sisters, for them all!
с
"Lo! the wind the smoke is lifting — Blessed Mother, save my
brain !
I can see the wounded crawling slowly out from heaps of slain.
Now they stagger, blind and bleeding; now they fall, and strive to
rise :
Hasten, sisters, haste and save them, lest they die before our eyes!
“O my heart's love! O my dear one! lay thy poor head on my
knee:
Dost thou know the lips that kiss thee? Canst thou hear me ?
canst thou see?
O my husband, brave and gentle! O my Bernal, look once more
On the blessed cross before thee! Mercy! mercy! all is o'er! ”
Dry thy tears, my poor Ximena; lay thy dear one down to rest;
Let his hands be meekly folded, lay the cross upon his breast;
Let his dirge be sung hereafter, and his funeral masses said :
To-day, thou poor bereaved one, the living ask thy aid.
Close beside her, faintly moaning, fair and young, a soldier lay,
Torn with shot and pierced with lances, bleeding slow his life away;
But as tenderly before him the lorn Ximena knelt,
She saw the Northern eagle shining on his pistol-belt.
With a stifled cry of horror straight she turned away her head;
With a sad and bitter feeling looked she back upon her dead:
But she heard the youth's low moaning, and his struggling breath
of pain,
And she raised the cooling water to his parching lips again.
Whispered low the dying soldier, pressed her hand and faintly
smiled:
Was that pitying face his mother's ? did she watch beside her child ?
All his stranger words with meaning her woman's heart supplied:
With her kiss upon his forehead, “Mother! ” murmured he, and died!
## p. 15947 (#287) ##########################################
JOHN GREENLEAF WHITTIER
15947
>>
"A bitter curse upon them, poor boy, who led thee forth,
From some gentle, sad-eyed mother, weeping lonely in the North!
Spake the mournful Mexic woman, as she laid him with her dead,
And turned to soothe the living, and bind the wounds which bled.
Look forth once more, Ximena! — Like a cloud before the wind
Rolls the battle down the mountains, leaving blood and death
behind:
Ah! they plead in vain for mercy; in the dust the wounded strive:
Hide your faces, holy angels! O thou Christ of God, forgive! )
Sink, O Night, among thy mountains! let the cool gray shadows
fall:
Dying brothers, fighting demons, drop thy curtain over all!
Through the thickening winter twilight, wide apart the battle
rolled;
In its sheath the sabre rested, and the cannon's lips grew cold.
But the noble Mexic women still their holy task pursued,
Through that long, dark night of sorrow, worn and faint and lack-
ing food;
Over weak and suffering brothers, with a tender care they hung,
And the dying foeman blessed them in a strange and Northern
tongue.
Not wholly lost, O Father! is this evil world of ours:
Upward, through its smoke and ashes, spring afresh the Eden
flowers;
From its smoking hell of battle, Love and Pity send their prayer,
And still thy white-winged angels hover dimly in our air !
THE SEER
I
HEAR the far-off voyager's horn,
I see the Yankee's trail;
His foot on every mountain pass,
On every stream his sail.
He's whittling round St. Mary's Falls,
Upon his loaded wain;
He's leaving on the pictured rocks
His fresh tobacco stain.
I hear the mattock in the mine,
The axe-stroke in the dell,
## p. 15948 (#288) ##########################################
15948
JOHN GREENLEAF WHITTIER
The clamor from the Indian lodge,
The Jesuit's chapel bell.
I see the swarthy trappers come
From Mississippi's springs;
The war-chiefs with their painted bows,
And crest of eagle wings.
Behind the scared squaw's birch canoe
The steamer smokes and raves;
And city lots are staked for sale
Above old Indian graves.
By forest, lake, and waterfall,
I see the peddler's show,-
The mighty mingling with the mean,
The lofty with the low.
I hear the tread of pioneers
Of nations yet to be;
The first low wash of waves that soon
Shall roll a human sea.
The rudiments of empire here
Are plastic yet and warm;
The chaos of a mighty world
Is rounding into form.
Each rude and jostling fragment soon
Its fitting place shall find -
The raw material of a State,
Its music and its mind.
And, westering still, the star which leads
The New World in its train,
Has tipped with fire the icy spears
Of many a mountain chain. .
The snowy cones of Oregon
Are kindled on its way;
And California's golden sands
Gleam brighter in its ray.
## p. 15949 (#289) ##########################################
JOHN GREENLEAF WHITTIER
15949
BURNS
(ON RECEIVING A SPRIG OF HEATHER IN BLOSSOM)
N°
MORE these simple flowers belong
To Scottish maid and lover:
Sown in the common soil of song,
They bloom the wide world over.
In smiles and tears, in sun and showers,
The minstrel and the heather,
The deathless singer and the flowers
He sang of, live together.
Wild heather-bells and Robert Burns!
The moorland flower and peasant!
How, at their mention, memory turns
Her pages old and pleasant!
The gray sky wears again its gold
And purple of adorning,
And manhood's noonday shadows hold
The dews of boyhood's morning, -
The dews that washed the dust and soil
From off the wings of pleasure,
The sky that flecked the ground of toil
With golden threads of leisure.
I call to mind the summer day,
The early harvest mowing,
The sky with sun and clouds at play,
And flowers with breezes blowing.
I hear the blackbird in the corn,
The locust in the haying;
And like the fabled hunter's horn,
Old tunes my heart is playing.
How oft that day, with fond delay,
I sought the maple's shadow,
And sang with Burns the hours away,
Forgetful of the meadow!
Bees hummed, birds twittered, overhead
I heard the squirrels leaping,
The good dog listened while I read,
And wagged his tail in keeping.
## p. 15950 (#290) ##########################################
15950
JOHN GREENLEAF WHITTIER
I watched him while in sportive mood
I read The Twa Dogs'' story,
And half believed he understood
The poet's allegory.
Sweet day, sweet songs! - The golden hours
Grew brighter for that singing,
From brook and bird and meadow flowers
A dearer welcome bringing.
New light on home-seen Nature beamed,
New glory over Woman;
And daily life and duty seemed
No longer poor and common.
I woke to find the simple truth
Of fact and feeling better
Than all the dreams that held my youth
A still repining debtor:
That Nature gives her handmaid, Art,
The themes of sweet discoursing;
The tender idyls of the heart
In every tongue rehearsing.
Why dream of lands of gold and pearl,
Of loving knight and lady,
When fariner boy and barefoot girl
Were wandering there already ?
I saw through all familiar things
The romance underlying;
The joys and griefs that plume the wings
Of Fancy skyward flying.
I saw the same blithe day return,
The same sweet fall of even,
That rose on wooded Craigie-burn,
And sank on crystal Devon.
I matched with Scotland's heathery hills
The sweet-brier and the clover;
With Ayr and Doon, my native rills,
Their wood-hymns chanting over.
O'er rank and pomp, as he had seen,
I saw the Man uprising;
No longer common or unclean,
The child of God's baptizing!
## p. 15951 (#291) ##########################################
JOHN GREENLEAF WHITTIER
15951
With clearer eyes I saw the worth
Of life among the lowly;
The Bible at his Cotter's hearth
Had made my own more holy.
And if at times an evil strain,
To lawless love appealing,
Broke in upon the sweet refrain
Of pure and healthful feeling,
It died upon the eye and ear,
No inward answer gaining:
No heart had I to see or hear
The discord and the staining.
Let those who never erred forget
His worth, in vain bewailings;
Sweet Soul of Song! -I own my debt
Uncanceled by his failings!
Lament who will the ribald line
Which tells his lapse from duty,
How kissed the maddening lips of wine
Or wanton ones of beauty;
But think, while falls that shade between
The erring one and Heaven,
That he who loved like Magdalen,
Like her may be forgiven.
Not his the song whose thunderous chime
Eternal echoes render,-
The mournful Tuscan's haunted rhyme,
And Milton's starry splendor!
But who his human heart has laid
To Nature's bosom nearer ?
Who sweetened toil like him, or paid
To love a tribute dearer ?
Through all his tuneful art, how strong
The human feeling gushes!
The very moonlight of his song
Is warm with smiles and blushes!
Give lettered pomp to teeth of Time,
So 'Bonnie Doon' but tarry;
Blot out the Epic's stately rhyme,
But spare his Highland Mary!
## p. 15952 (#292) ##########################################
15952
JOHN GREENLEAF WHITTIER
THE SUMMONS
M
Y EAR is full of summer sounds,
Of summer sights my languid eye;
Beyond the dusty village bounds
I loiter in my daily rounds,
And in the noontime shadows lie.
I hear the wild bee wind his horn,
The bird swings on the ripened wheat,
The long green lances of the corn
Are tilting in the winds of morn,
The locust shrills his song of heat.
Another sound my spirit hears -
A deeper sound that drowns them all:
A voice of pleading choked with tears,
The call of human hopes and fears,
The Macedonian cry to Paul.
The storm-bell rings, the trumpet blows;
I know the word and countersign:
Wherever Freedom's vanguard goes,
Where stand or fall her friends or foes,
I know the place that should be mine.
Shamed be the hands that idly fold,
And lips that woo the reed's accord,
When laggard Time the hour has tolled
For true with false and new with old
To fight the battles of the Lord!
O brothers! blest by partial Fate
With power to match the will and deed,
To him your summons comes too late
Who sinks beneath his armor's weight,
And has no answer but God-speed!
## p. 15953 (#293) ##########################################
JOHN GREENLEAF WHITTIER
15953
THE LAST EVE OF SUMMER
(WRITTEN WHEN THE POET WAS NEARLY 83)
S
.
UMMER's last sun nigh unto setting shines
Through yon columnar pines,
And on the deepening shadows of the lawn
Its golden lines are
re drawn.
Dreaming of long-gone summer days like this,
Feeling the wind's soft kiss,
Grateful and glad that failing ear and sight
Have still their old delight,
I sit alone, and watch the warm, sweet day
Lapse tenderly away;
And wistful, with a feeling of forecast,
I ask, “Is this the last ?
« Will nevermore for me the seasons run
Their round, and will the sun
Of ardent summers yet to come forget
For me to rise and set ? »
Thou shouldst be here, or I should be with thee
Wherever thou mayst be,
Lips mute, hands clasped, in silences of speech
Each answering unto each.
For this still hour, this sense of mystery far
Beyond the evening star,
No words outworn suffice on lip or scroll:
The soul would fain with soul
Wait, while these few swift-passing days fulfill
The wise-disposing Will,
And, in the evening as at morning, trust
The A11-Merciful and Just.
The solemn joy that soul-communion feels,
Immortal life reveals;
And human love, its prophecy and sign,
Interprets love divine.
Come then, in thought, if that alone may be,
O friend! and bring with thee
Thy calm assurance of transcendent spheres,
And the eternal years!
xxv11-998
## p. 15953 (#294) ##########################################
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16
POD
JUTTU
CHR. WIELAND
## p. 15953 (#296) ##########################################
15954
CHRISTOPHER MARTIN WIELAND
(1733-1813)
M
RITERS of a certain class exercise a fruitful influence in their
day, and form an important part in the contemporary liter-
ary development, yet with the lapse of time lose much of
their claim on our interest. This is true of Wieland, whose services
to the German language and literature were decided.
Both in prose
and verse he helped to make the tongue an artistic instrument of.
expression, lending it grace, definiteness, elegance: he gave it a sort
of French refinement. He was largely active in reviving both classi-
cal and mediæval studies; he introduced Shakespeare to his country-
men, and by his keen, sane criticism did much for German culture.
Wieland was a humanist at a time when taste and scholarship were
sorely needed in the fatherland. He was a writer of lively wit and
fancy, sometimes running into frivolity and sensuality. He initiated
the historical culture-novel and psychological romance. He produced
an epic, Oberon, which had an immense vogue in his own and other
languages, though now it commands little more than a formal regard.
An English critic, writing at the beginning of the present century,
could remark soberly with (Oberon' in mind, that “the fame of Wie-
land is as wide-spread as that of Horace. ” That such praise now
seems excessive, must not blind us to the poet's merits and genuine
contributions to the literature of his country. Fashions in literature
succeed each other almost as rapidly as fashions in dress.
Christopher Martin Wieland, by ancestry, education, and early
habit, had a bias towards philosophical and religious thought, though
the writings of his maturity were of a very different kind.
He was
the son of a country clergyman, and was born in the Suabian village
of Oberholzheim, on September 5th, 1733. He was carefully instructed
under his father's direction, and showed literary precocity. When
fourteen he went to school at Klosterbergen, near Magdeburg, where
his exceptional abilities attracted attention. Next we find him living
with a relative in Erfurt, and reading for the University. The fam-
ily home was moved to Biberach during this preparation; and it was
there he met and fell in love with Sophie Gutermann, afterwards the
wife of De Laroche, who was the factotum of Count Stadion, in whose
home Wieland was a constant visitor in after years. The intimacy
became in time a platonic friendship, but made its deep impress upon
Wieland's ripening powers. The idea of his first poem, "The Nature
## p. 15953 (#297) ##########################################
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》。
CHR. WIE LAND
ارایه
## p. 15954 (#300) ##########################################
## p. 15955 (#301) ##########################################
CHRISTOPHER MARTIN WIELAND
15955
of Things,' written and published several years later, came to him
while he was walking with Sophie.
He went to Tübingen in 1750,- nominally to study law, but gave
his main attention to philology, philosophy, and literature. Wieland
was one of the army of young men in all lands who begin with
the law, and are irresistibly deflected by their taste toward letters.
Bodmer, the Swiss poet, was then a sort of Rhadamanthus in Ger-
man literary affairs, and to him Wieland, fired by ambition, sent his
unfinished manuscript epic 'Hermann”; the result was an invitation
to visit Bodmer at Zürich, and the young aspirant spent a number of
months with the veteran, a cordial friendship being established be-
tween them. Wieland derived much benefit from this association; but
left his friend and patron in 1754, other influences being at work in
him. He lived for some time in Zürich and Bern, supporting him-
self by tutoring. At the University his writings, such as the Moral
Letters and Moral Tales,' had been of a philosophico-ethical and
mystical nature, and under the Swiss influence they continued to be
so for several years.
His Letters from the Dead to Living Friends,'
and other works of this period, are full of spiritual aspiration; and
his tone in rebuking worldly pleasures is austere.
But this was not to be Wieland's typical work. The impulse is
explained by heredity and environment. He went to Biberach in
1760 as Director of Chancery; and as he began to mix in polite soci-
ety, and especially to frequent Count Stadion's house, he developed
into a man of the world, and his writings reflected his experience.
Wit, fancy, satire, and worldly wisdom took the place of pious mystic
imaginings. The romance Don Sylvio von Rosalva' (1764), the cul-
pably free 'Comic Tales? (1766), the romance (Agathon' (1766–67), —
described as the first modern romance of culture, and certainly one of
his most characteristic and able productions,— exhibit this change of
heart; and in the Musarion the next year (1768) a middle ground
is reached, — the author advocating the rational cultivation of the
sensual and spiritual sides of man, avoiding alike the extremes of
the ascetic and the worldling. His study of Shakespeare began at
Biberach; and between 1762 and 1766 he published twenty-two prose
translations of the plays, thus making the English poet an open book
for Germans.
After a three-years' stay in Erfurt as professor of philosophy,
Wieland began in 1772 what was to be a life residence in Weimar.
An interesting feature of this life is his connection with Goethe.
Soon after Wieland's arrival in the city, he listened in an evening
company to the remarkable improvised verses of a young man
known to him, and exclaimed, “That must be either the Devil — or
Goethe! It proved to be the latter. A warm friendship grew up
between the two, in spite of the fact that ethe had
attacked
-
-
un-
## p. 15956 (#302) ##########################################
15956
CHRISTOPHER MARTIN WIELAND
Wieland's writings, and in ‘Gods, Heroes, and Wieland' represented
the other as an object of sport in hell. His literary activity in Wei-
mar was prolific and many-sided;. and here his most famous single
work, the Oberon,' was done. He edited the German Mercury, many
of his writings first appearing in that paper; he began a periodical
called the Attic Museum; wrote some of his best things in the comic
and satiric veins, among them The Inhabitants of Booby-land' (Die
Abderiten: 1774), New Dialogues of the Gods) (1791), and “The
Secret History of the Philosopher Peregrinus Proteus' (1791); and
translated Horace, Lucian, and Cicero, his last labor being expended
on the Letters of the last-named classic.
His masterpiece, Oberon,' was brought out in 1780, and received
with a favor rarely extended to any literary work. It is a romantic
epic, interweaving the love story of the mediaval knight Huon with
an amatory episode in the story of the fairy king and queen, Oberon
and Titania. The poem is written in a skillfully handled stanzaic
form, and in the original possesses vigor, melody, lively invention,
picturesque description, and narrative movement, — qualities some of
which are lost in the English rendering. Its manner and matter now
seem a trifle antiquated. Wieland purchased in 1797 an estate named
Osmannstädt near Weimar, and lived there until 1801; when, his wife
dying, he returned to Weimar, and remained until his own death on
January 20th, 1813. Personally he is drawn as sensitive and vain, but
of pure private life, and of generous impulses. His character may
be studied in his (Selected Letters) (1815-16) and the biographies of
Gruber, Loebell, Ofterdingen, and Pröhle. A most voluminous writer,
his collected works number thirty-six in the edition of 1851-6.
Wieland was not a creative genius, nor a great reformatory force
in literature. He never, in his most representative works, soared
very high nor probed very deep. But he was a gifted writer in
varied fields, whose influence was salutary, and who will always have
a secure place in that particular corner of the Pantheon devoted to
authors just below stellar rank.
MANAGING HUSBANDS
From the Fourth Dialogue,' Volume xxvii. , Collected Works
Jº
UNO O my dear Livia, I am the unhappiest woman in the
world!
Livia - Never had I expected to hear such a word from
-
the lips of the queen of gods and men!
Juno — How, Livia ? Do you too hold the common error that
happiness is the inseparable property of high station ? — when we
## p. 15957 (#303) ##########################################
CHRISTOPHER MARTIN WIELAND
15957
-
should deem ourselves lucky could we exchange our position,
with all its prerogatives, for that of the modest joy of a poor
shepherdess who is reconciled to her lot!
Livia — Since I was first among the mortals, I do not remem-
ber ever to have been so dissatisfied with my lot as to wish to
exchange it for a humbler one.
Juno — Then you must have a tenderer, or at least a more
courteous and agreeable, husband than I have.
Livia - I should be making ridiculous pretensions did I not
count myself happy. In the three-and-fifty years of our union,
Augustus has never given me a single cause to doubt that I hold
the first place in his heart.
Juno — I can't by any means make the same boast with
respect to my husband, Livia. Who doesn't know, since that
gossipy old Homer let out all our marriage secrets so shame-
fully, with how little consideration and delicacy I have been
treated by Jupiter; how rudely he addresses me in the presence
of the other gods; what sort of names I must put up with from
him; and how he appears to take an actual pleasure in remind-
ing me on every occasion of misdeeds concerning which he ought
to feel the greatest shame, if he were still capable of blushing!
-
-
Livia — One cannot deny that men
– with some few excep-
tions, perhaps -- are in comparison with us a rough, untender,
horrid sort of being. Without some tact, it is very difficult even
for a goddess to have as much power over the most ordinary
rude mortal as a wife must have over her husband in order to
be tolerably contented.
Juno — If this be the case, Livia, I should like very much to
know how you managed to have such firm control of a husband
like Augustus, who was so jealous of his privileges, so mistrust-
ful and cautious, and withal so hot and hasty in his passions.
Livia — Nothing can be simpler at bottom. I made him be.
lieve, so long as he lived, that I had no other will than his; and
yet I managed to bring about just the contrary: he thought
he ruled me, and I ruled him. In all matters concerning which
I was indifferent, and that he laid stress upon, I did exactly
according to his taste and whim: I was always just as he wished
and believed the wife of Augustus should be. My obligingness
in such things was boundless. So far from bothering him with
jealousy, I appeared not to have the slightest suspicion of his
love affairs,
and by virtue of a sympathy of which he
## p. 15958 (#304) ##########################################
15958
CHRISTOPHER MARTIN WIELAND
had not the least doubt, brought it about that the ladies who
had the most charm for him were always the very ones whom I
preferred, and with whom I was on the best footing. Through
this utter indifference as to his little secrets, I gained the advan-
tage that he had no others from me; and while I left him in the
delusion that he deceived me on this point, I could be all the
surer that he deceived me in no others, and in everything touch-
ing his rule, his family, and his political relations did naught
without my counsel, and made no decision I had not led him to;
but in such manner that he ever believed he was following his
own head, when really he was the tool of mine. By this craft
(to give it its proper name) I profited, in that he was as little
jealous of my intelligence as I was of his love escapades; and
when I had won this, all was won.
Juno - You are a woman after my own heart, Julia Augusta!
We must get better acquainted with one another. But I doubt
if, with the Titanic blood that runs in my veins, I should ever be
pliant enough to make use of the hint you have given me.
Translated for (A Library of the World's Best Literature) by Richard Burton.
THE DEITIES DEPOSED
The Sixth of “The Dialogues of the Gods, Volume xxvii. of Collected Works)
[The gods, while banqueting in Olympus, are startled by the tidings
brought by Mercury, that they have been deposed as deities by the Romans.
They talk it over in council, and Jupiter points out that their case admits of
consolation.
Characters – Jupiter, Juno, Apollo, Minerva, Venus, Bacchus, Vesta, Ceres,
Victoria, Quirinus, Serapis, Momus, and Mercury.
Jupiter and Juno, with the other dwellers in Olympus, sit in an open hall
of the Olympus Palace, at divers great tables. Ganymede and Antinous serve
nectar to the gods, Hebe to the goddesses. The Muses make table music, the
Graces and the Hours dance pantomimic dances, and Jocus arouses the blessed
gods to loud laughter from time to time by his caricatures and buffooneries.
When the merriment is at its beight, Mercury, in hot haste, comes flying in. )
JT
?
UPITER - You are late, my child, as you see. What news do
you bring us from below there?
l'enus [to Bacchus] – He appears to bring something un-
pleasant. How disturbed he looks!
Mercury — The latest news I bring is not very much calcu-
lated to increase the jollity which I see reigning here.
## p. 15959 (#305) ##########################################
CHRISTOPHER MARTIN WIELAND
15959
-
-
Jupiter — At all events, your manner isn't, Mercury. What
can have happened so bad as to have disturbed the gods in their
joy?
Quirinus - Has an earthquake overthrown the Capitol ?
Mercury - That would be a small matter.
a
Ceres — Has a more violent eruption of Ætna devastated my
beautiful Sicily?
Bacchus — Or an untimely frost nipped the vineyards of the
Campagna ?
Mercury - Trifles, trifles!
Jupiter — Now out with your grievous story, then!
Mercury — It is nothing more than — [He pauses. ]
Jupiter — Don't make me impatient, Hermes! What is noth.
ing more than — ?
Mercury — Nothing, Jupiter, except that, upon a motion made
by the Emperor in his own person in the Senate, you have been
formally deposed by a decided majority.
[The gods all arise from the tables in great agitation. ]
Jupiter [who alone remains seated, laughing] – Nothing but
that? I have foreseen it for a long while.
?
All the Gods [together] – Jupiter deposed! Is it possible ?
Jupiter!
Juno-You talk nonsense, Mercury. Æsculapius, feel of his
pulse!
The Gods — Jupiter deposed!
Mercury – Just as I say: formally, and with solemnity, de-
clared by a great majority of votes to be a man of straw -
What do I say? A man of straw is something. Less than a man
of straw, a mere nothing; robbed of your temple, your priests,
your dignities as the highest protector of the Roman realm!
Hercules — It's a mad piece of news, Mercury; but as true as
I am Hercules (he swings his club], they shan't have done it to
me in vain!
Jupiter -- Be quiet, Hercules! So, then, has Jupiter Optimus
Maximus, Capitolinus, Feretrius, Stator, Lapis, etc. , played out
his part ?
Mercury — Your statue is overthrown, and they are in the
very act of destroying your temple. The same tragedy is being
played in all the provinces and corners of the Roman kingdom.
## p. 15960 (#306) ##########################################
15960
CHRISTOPHER MARTIN WIELAND
Everywhere hosts of goat-bearded brutes rush about with torches,
battering-rams, hammers, hatchets, and axes, and in a fanatic
rage lay waste the honored objects of the ancient faith of the
folk.
Serapis — Alas, what will happen to my stately temple at
Alexandria and my splendid colossal statue! If the Theban des-
ert belches forth only half of its holy hermit wood-devils, every-
thing's up.
Momus - Oh, you don't need to worry, Serapis. Who would
undertake to lay hands on your image, when at Alexandria it is
an understood thing that at the least despite offered it by an
impious hand, heaven and earth - would fall in fragments, and all
nature sink back into old chaos ?
Quirinus — But one can't always depend upon stories of that
kind, my good Serapis. It might happen with you as it did with
the massive golden statue of the goddess Anaitis at Zela, concern-
ing which it was believed that the first person who seized on it
would be stricken to the ground by a thunderbolt.
Serapis - And what happened to this statue ?
Quirinus — When the triumvir Antony defeated the Phæni-
cians at Zela, the city together with the temple of Anaitis was
plundered, and nobody could say where the massive golden god-
dess had got to.
It chanced that some years after, Augustus was
passing the night at Bononia with a veteran of Antony's. The
Emperor was sumptuously entertained; and as the talk at table
fell on the battle of Zela and the plundering of the temple of
Anaitis, he asked his host as an eye-witness, whether it was true
that the first who laid a hand on her had been suddenly stricken
dead to the earth. “You see that foolhardy one before you,”
replied the veteran; "and you are in fact eating off the leg of
the goddess. I had the fortune to conquer her first. Anaitis is
a very good sort of person, and I acknowledge gratefully that I
owe to her all my wealth. ”
Serapis - You give me poor consolation, Quirinus. If things
are going in the world as Mercury declares, I can promise my
colossus at Alexandria no better fate. It is simply shocking that
Jupiter can regard such outrageous things so coolly!
Jupiter - You will do well, Serapis, if you can manage to do
the same.
You have enjoyed long enough the honor of being
reverenced from East to West, — you, a mere god from the
Pontus; and you certainly can't desire that it should fare better
## p. 15961 (#307) ##########################################
CHRISTOPHER MARTIN WIELAND
15961
with your temples than with mine, or that your colossus should
last longer than the godlike master-work of Phidias. If we all
topple over, you would not wish to be the only one who remains
upright?
Momus — Ho, ho, Jupiter, where have you left your renowned
thunderbolt, that you take your downfall so mildly?
Jupiter - If I were not what I am, I would answer you with
one of them for this silly question, you noodle!
Quirinus [to Mercury] – You must tell me once more, Mer-
cury, if I am to believe you. My flamen superseded ? my temple
closed ? my feast no longer celebrated ? and the enervated, slav-
ish, heartless Quirites have sunk to this degree of unthankfulness
towards their founder?
Mercury- I should be deceiving you if I gave you any other
information.
Victoria – I don't need to ask what is happening to my altar
and my statue in the Julian Curia. It is so long now since the
Romans have learned the art of conquest, that I find nothing
more natural than that they cannot any longer endure the pres-
ence of my picture. At every glance which they throw upon it,
it must be to them a reproach for their shameful degeneration.
With the Romans, whose name has become a byword among
the barbarians which only blood can wash away, Victoria has
nothing more to do.
Vesta - Under these circumstances they will certainly not
allow the holy fire in my temple to burn any longer! Heavens,
what will be the fate of my poor virgins!
Mercury - Oh, not a hair of their heads will be touched, hon-
ored Vesta! They will be allowed to die of hunger in perfect
peace.
Quirinus - How times change! Once it was a shocking mis-
fortune for the whole Roman world, if the holy fire on the altar
of Vesta went out –
Mercury — And now there would be more to-do made if the
profane fire in some Roman cook-shop went out than if the ves-
tals had allowed theirs to be extinguished twice a week.
Quirinus — But who, then, in the future shall be the patron
of war at Rome in my place ?
Mercury — St. Peter with his double key has assumed to him-
self this duty.
Quirinus — St. Peter with his double key? Who is he?
## p. 15962 (#308) ##########################################
15962
CHRISTOPHER MARTIN WIELAND
Mercury – I don't know myself exactly; ask Apollo, - perhaps
he can give you more points about it.
Apollo — He's a man, Quirinus, who, in his successors, shall
rule half the world eight hundred years on end, although he him-
self was only a poor fisherman.
Quirinus — What?
The world will let itself be ruled by fish-
ermen ?
Apollo — By a certain kind of fishermen, at least: fishers of
men, who, in a very cunning kind of fish-net called decretals,
shall little by little catch all the nations and princes of Europe.
Their commands shall be esteemed as oracles of the gods, and
a piece of sheepskin or paper sealed with St. Peter's fisherman's
ring will have the power to seat and unseat kings.
Quirinus - This St. Peter of the double key must be a mighty
magician!
Apollo — No less than that! As you ought to have known
long ago, all the strange and wonderful things in the world occur
quite naturally in this way. The avalanche which shakes down
a whole village was at first a little snowball, and the flood that
shatters a great ship is at its source a purling mountain spring.
Why should not the successors of the Galilean fishermen in a
few centuries be able to become lords of Rome, and arrange a
new religion, of which they constitute themselves high priests,
and with the aid of brand-new ethics and politics, which they
know how to build upon it, finally be masters for a while of
half the world? Didn't you yourself herd the flocks of the King
of Alba, before you made yourself the head of all the bandits in
Latium, and patched together the little robbers' nest that finally
became the capital city and queen of the world ? St. Peter, to
be sure, in his life cut no great figure; but he shall see the time
when kaisers shall hold the stirrups of his successors, and queens
shall humbly kiss their feet.
Quirinus — What doesn't one go through, when one is im-
mortal!
A pollo — It needs a good deal of time, perhaps, and not a
little craft also, in order to bring fishermen so far; but then
the fish will be stupid enough who let themselves be caught by
them.
Quirinus — In the mean time, here we are all together deposed,
aren't we?
Mercury - That's the way things stand.
## p. 15963 (#309) ##########################################
CHRISTOPHER MARTIN WIELAND
15963
Various Gods - Better not be immortal than experience such
things!
Jupiter — My dear sons, uncles, nephews, one and all! I see
that you take this little revolution, which I have quietly seen
coming for a long while, in a more tragic way than the affair is
worth. Take your seats, if you will, and let us speak calmly and
undisturbed of these things, over a glass of nectar. Everything
in nature has its time. Everything changes; and so it is with
the notions of men. They are always changing with their cir-
cumstances; and when we remember what a difference fifty years
make between grandson and grandfather, it will not appear
strange to us that the world seems to acquire within a thousand
years or so, imperceptibly, an entirely new aspect. For at bot-
tom it is only appearance: it remains, under whatever other masks
and names, always the same comedy. The silly people down
there have occupied themselves long enough with superstitions
about us; and if some among you fancied they were advantaged
by it, I must tell them that they were wrong.
Mankind ought
not to be envied if they finally become wiser. By heavens, it is
none too soon!
But that is not to be thought about for the time being. In-
deed, they always flatter themselves that the last foolishness of
which they get knowledge will be the last which they shall com-
mit. The hope of better times is their eternal chimera, by which
they will ever keep on deceiving themselves again and yet again;
because they will never realize that not the time, but their own
inborn wretched foolishness, is the reason why it will never be
better with them. For it is indeed their lot to get pure enjoy-
ment out of nothing good; and only to exchange one folly with
which they have finally become weary, as children with a worn-
out doll, for another with which for the most part they fare
worse than they did with the former one. This time it actually
seemed as if they were winners by the exchange, but I knew
about it too well not to foresee that they wouldn't get help in
this way; for indeed if Wisdom herself should come down to
them in person, and wish to dwell visibly among them, they
would not stop bedecking her with feathers and furbelows, with
baubles and bells, until they had made a fool out of her.
Believe me, gods, the triumphal song which they at this
moment are raising on account of the famous victory they have
our defenseless statues, is for posterity a raven-cry
won
over
## p. 15964 (#310) ##########################################
15964
CHRISTOPHER MARTIN WIELAND
foreboding ill fortune. They think to better themselves, but they
may go further and fare worse. They are weary of us, they wish
to have nothing more to do with us; but so much the worse for
them! We don't need them. If their priests declare us to be
impure and evil spirits, and assure the simple-minded folk that
our dwelling is an eternally flaming pool of sulphur, what harm
does that do to you or me? What matters it to us what ideas
only half-developed earth-creatures have of us, or in what rela-
tion they stand to us, or whether they smoke us with a loath-
some mixture of sacrificial stink and incense, or with brimstone
of hell ? Neither the one nor the other rises up to us. They
don't know us, you say, now that they wish to withdraw them-
selves from our government. Did they know us any better when
they served us? What the poor people call their religion is only
their affair after all, not ours. They alone have to lose or win
by it, when they direct their manner of life wisely or the re-
verse. And their descendants too, when they once feel the results
of the unwise decrees of their Valentinians, their Gratiani, and
their Theodosii, will find cause enough to rue the rash measures
which have heaped together upon their dizzy heads a flood of
new and unendurable evils, whereof the world, so long as it was
subject to the old belief or superstition, had no conception.
It would be another thing if they actually bettered themselves
by this new arrangement. Who among us could or would take
it evil of them ? But it is just the contrary! They are like a
man who in order to drive away a small trouble with which he
might be able to live as long as Tithonus, endures ten others
which are ten times worse. Thus, for example, they raise a great
outcry against our priests, because they fed the people, that is
everywhere superstitious and will ever so remain, with delusions
from which the State derives just as much profit as do they them-
selves. Will their priests improve matters? At this moment they
are founding a superstition which will avail no one but them-
selves, and instead of strengthening the political situation, will
cast into confusion and destroy all human and civil relations; a
superstition which will lie like lead in their brains, shut out
every sane conception of natural and moral things, and under
the color of a chimerical perfection, will poison in the bud the
humanity in each and every man. When one has said the worst
that can be said with truth concerning the superstition which up
till now has befooled the world, one must at least concede that
## p. 15965 (#311) ##########################################
CHRISTOPHER MARTIN WIELAND
15965
it was far more humane, blameless, and beneficent, than the new
faith which one has put in its stead. Our priests were always
more harmless people than these to whom they must now yield.
Those enjoyed their station and their revenues in peace, were on
good terms with every one, and attacked no man's belief; but
these are arrogant and impatient, persecute each other with the
fiercest anger on account of a mere insignificant play on words,
decide by a majority of votes what one must think of unthink-
able things, how one must speak of unspeakable things, and
reckon all who think and speak otherwise as enemies of God and
man. For the priests of the gods to come into collision with the
civic power or otherwise disturb the peace of the State, before
they were interfered with by these raging iconoclasts, has scarcely
been heard of in a thousand years; the new priesthood, on the
contrary, since its party has been popular, has not ceased to
throw the world into confusion. So far their pontiffs work in
secret; but in a short time they will seize on the sceptres of
kings, set themselves up as viceroys of God, and under this title
assume a hitherto unheard-of power over heaven and earth.
If it be true that our priests were (as was right) no very
zealous patrons of philosophy, yet at least they were not its
declared enemies; for they feared nothing from it, under the
protection of the law. Least of all did they conceive of draw-
ing the thoughts and ideas of men under their jurisdiction, or
wish to hinder their currency in society. Those others, on the
contrary,— who so long as they were the weaker party, made so
much of having reason on their side, and in any attack from
us always placed it to the fore,— since now it would only be a
hindrance to them in their wider operations, say good-by to it,
and will not rest until they make it all dark around them, until
they take away from the people all means of enlightenment,
and have condemned the free use of natural judgment as the
first of all sins. Formerly, when they themselves still depended
upon alms, the well-being and comfortable manner of life of
our priests was an abomination to them; now that they fare with
full sails, the moderate incomes of our temples, which they have
made themselves masters of, are much too small to satisfy the
needs of their pride and their vanity. Already now their pon-
tiffs at Rome — through the liberality of rich and foolish matrons
whose dreamy sentimentality they know very well how to use,
through the most shameless legacy-hunting, and a thousand
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CHRISTOPHER MARTIN WIELAND
other tricks of this kind - put themselves in a position to surpass
the first persons in the State in pomp, expenditure, and voluptu-
ousness. But all these springs, although grown to streams through
ever new tributaries, will not satisfy these insatiable ones: they
will find a thousand ways never heard of before to levy upon the
simpleness of men untutored and beguiled; even the sins of the
world will they transform through their magic art to golden
fountains; and to make them yield the more, they will think up
a monstrous multitude of new sins, of which the Theophrastuses
and the Epictetuses had never a suspicion.
Wherefore do I say all this? What does it matter to us
what these people do, or don't do, and how well or ill they
shall administer their new government over the sick souls of
men nerveless and stunted through lust and slavery? Even
the deceivers are themselves deceived: they too know not what
they do; but we who see clear in all this— it befits us to treat
them with forbearance as sick and insane, and in the future to
show them as much kindness as their own unreason will give
us opportunity. Poor unfortunates! Whom do they harm but
themselves, when they of their own free will rob themselves of
the beneficent influence whereby Athens has become the school
of wisdom and of art, and Rome the law-bearer and regent of
the earth ?
