The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Volume 06. Коллектив авторов

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          The sacred flower breathed to her dead lover.

      Prose

      THE JOURNEY TO THE HARZ49 (1824)

      "Nothing is permanent but change, nothing constant but death. Every pulsation of the heart inflicts a wound, and life would be an endless bleeding were it not for Poetry. She secures to us what Nature would deny—a golden age without rust, a spring which never fades, cloudless prosperity and eternal youth."—BÖRNE.

      The town of Göttingen, celebrated for its sausages and its University, belongs to the King of Hanover, and contains nine hundred and ninety-nine dwellings, divers churches, a lying-in hospital, an observatory, a prison for students, a library, and a "Ratskeller," where the beer is excellent. The stream which flows by the town is called the Leine, and is used in summer for bathing, its waters being very cold, and in more than one place it is so broad that Lüder was obliged to take quite a run ere he could leap across. The town itself is beautiful, and pleases most when one's back is turned to it. It must be very ancient, for I well remember that five years ago, when I matriculated there (and shortly after received notice to quit), it had already the same gray, prim look, and was fully furnished with catch-polls, beadles, dissertations, thés dansants, washerwomen, compendiums, roasted pigeons, Guelphic orders, graduation coaches, pipe-heads, court-councilors, law-councilors, expelling councilors, professors ordinary and extraordinary. Many even assert that, at the time of the Great Migrations, every German tribe left behind in the town a loosely bound copy of itself in the person of one of its members, and that from these descended all the Vandals, Frisians, Suabians, Teutons, Saxons, Thuringians,50 and others, who at the present day still abound in Göttingen, where, separately distinguished by the color of their caps and pipe-tassels, they may be seen straying singly or in hordes along the Weender Street. They still fight their battles on the bloody arena of the Rasenmill, Ritschenkrug, and Bovden, still preserve the mode of life peculiar to their savage ancestors, and still, as at the time of the migrations, are governed partly by their Duces, whom they call "chief cocks," and partly by their primevally ancient law-book, known as the Comment, which fully deserves a place among the leges barbarorum.

      The inhabitants of Göttingen are generally divided into Students, Professors, Philistines, and Cattle, the points of difference between these castes being by no means strictly defined. The "Cattle" class is the most important. I might be accused of prolixity should I here enumerate the names of all the students and of all the regular and irregular professors; besides, I do not just at present distinctly remember the appellations of all the former gentlemen; while among the professors are many who as yet have no name at all. The number of the Göttingen "Philistines" must be as numerous as the sands (or, more correctly speaking, as the mud) of the seashore; indeed, when I beheld them of a morning, with their dirty faces and clean bills, planted before the gate of the collegiate court of justice, I wondered greatly that such an innumerable pack of rascals should ever have been created by the Almighty.

      It was as yet very early in the morning when I left Göttingen, and the learned –, beyond doubt, still lay in bed, dreaming as usual that he wandered in a fair garden, amid the beds of which grew innumerable white papers written over with citations. On these the sun shone cheerily, and he plucked up several here and there and laboriously planted them in new beds, while the sweetest songs of the nightingales rejoiced his old heart.

      Before the Weender Gate I met two small native schoolboys, one of whom was saying to the other, "I don't intend to keep company any more with Theodore; he is a low blackguard, for yesterday he didn't even know the genitive of Mensa." Insignificant as these words may appear, I still regard them as entitled to be recorded—nay, СКАЧАТЬ