ukelt_) by sweetest Dreams! If the paternal Cottage
still shuts us in, its roof still screens us; with a Father we have as
yet a prophet, priest and king, and an Obedience that makes us free.
The young spirit has awakened out of Eternity, and knows not what we
mean by Time; as yet Time is no fast-hurrying stream, but a sportful
sunlit ocean; years to the child are as ages: ah! the secret of
Vicissitude, of that slower or quicker decay and ceaseless
down-rushing of the universal World-fabric, from the granite mountain
to the man or day-moth, is yet unknown; and in a motionless Universe,
we taste, what afterwards in this quick-whirling Universe is forever
denied us, the balm of Rest. Sleep on, thou fair Child, for thy long
rough journey is at hand! A little while, and thou too shalt sleep no
more, but thy very dreams shall be mimic battles; thou too, with old
Arnauld, wilt have to say in stern patience: "Rest? Rest? Shall I not
have all Eternity to rest in?" Celestial Nepenthe! though a Pyrrhus
conquer empires, and an Alexander sack the world, he finds thee not;
and thou hast once fallen gently, of thy own accord, on the eyelids,
on the heart of every mother's child. For as yet, sleep and waking are
one: the fair Life-garden rustles infinite around, and everywhere is
dewy fragrance, and the budding of Hope; which budding, if in youth,
too frostnipt, it grow to flowers, will in manhood yield no fruit, but
a prickly, bitter-rinded stone-fruit, of which the fewest can find the
kernel.'

In such rose-coloured light does our Professor, as Poets are wont,
look back on his childhood; the historical details of which (to say
nothing of much other vague oratorical matter) he accordingly dwells
on with an almost wearisome minuteness. We hear of Entepfuhl standing
'in trustful derangement' among the woody slopes; the paternal Orchard
flanking it as extreme out-post from below; the little Kuhbach gushing
kindly by, among beech-rows, through river after river, into the
Donau, into the Black Sea, into the Atmosphere and Universe; and how
'the brave old Linden,' stretching like a parasol of twenty ells in
radius, overtopping all other rows and clumps, towered-up from the
central _Agora_ and _Campus Martius_ of the Village, like its Sacred
Tree; and how the old men sat talking under its shadow (Gneschen often
greedily listening), and the wearied labourers reclined, and the
unwearied children sported, and the young men and maidens often da