d you are right, and the whole
world is right. What you have rolled along in such a prophetic strain
surpasses my comprehension, but I am blest in my deep emotion. When
people go to the play, to weep for their money, it seems to me quite
absurd; let others feel elevated by lofty sentiments and actions, I do
not understand it; yet, when such good wine goes into me, it operates
wonderfully, so that every thing, every thing, let men say what they
will, keep silence or laugh, resolves itself with me into the sweetest
emotion. My heart, see you, is ready to break with pleasure; I could
fold all things, were it even your lame poodle, in my arms. But my eyes
suffer under it, and the doctor wanted on that account to forbid me
drinking. But this very thought is the most affecting of all ideas to
me; I could weep over it for days together: and so he was obliged to
recall this direction."

"The more I drink," said the Puritan, "the more I hate the stuff which
you have been palavering there, Eulenboeck, and the more senseless it
appears to me. Lies and tricks! It is almost as silly as to sing over
one's liquor the songs that are made for the purpose. Every word in
them is a falsehood. When a man begins to compare one object with
another, he lies directly. 'The dawn strews roses.' Can there be any
thing more silly? 'The sun sinks into the sea.' Stuff! 'The wine glows
with purple hue.' Foolery! 'The morning wakes.' There is no morning,
how can it sleep? It is nothing but the hour when the sun rises.
Plague! The sun does not rise, that too is nonsense and poetry. Oh! if
I had but my will with language, and might properly scour and sweep it!
O damnation! Sweep! In this lying world, one cannot help talking
nonsense!"

"Do not be put out, honest man," said Eulenboeck: "your virtue means
well, and if you take a different view of the matter from mine, you at
least drink the same wine, and almost as much as I do myself. Practice
unites us, if theory separates us. Who understands himself nowadays?
That is no longer the question even. I would only add one remark,
though it be not connected with what I was saying before, that the mode
in which men and physicians consider the process of nutrition and
assimilation, as it is called, appears to me extremely silly. The oak
grows out of its acorn, and the fig produces the fig-tree; and though
they require air, water and earth, yet these are not properly the
elements out of which they grow. In like