d fell incensed points
Of mighty opposites:
They lie not near our conscience:

Ah! if they were all .... But there is one misdeed,
one which outweighs all others whatsoever--a crime
which it is useless to palliate, let our other friend say
what he pleased; and Reineke himself felt it so. It
sate heavy, for him, on his soul, and alone of all the
actions of his life we are certain that he wished it
undone--the death and eating of that poor foolish
Lampe. It was a paltry revenge in Reineke. Lampe
had told tales of him; he had complained that Reineke
under pretence of teaching him his lesson, had seized
him, and tried to murder him; and though he provoked
his fate by thrusting himself, after such a warning, into
the jaws of Malepartus, Reineke betrays an uneasiness
about it in confession; and, unlike himself, feels it
necessary to make some sort of an excuse.

Grimbart had been obliged to speak severely of the
seriousness of the offence. "You see," he answers:--

To help oneself out through the world is a queer sort of
business: one can not
Keep, you know, quite altogether as pure as one can in the
cloister.
When we are handling honey we now and then lick at our
fingers.
Lampe sorely provoked me; he frisked about this way and
that way,
Up and down, under my eyes, and he looked so fat and so
jolly,
Really I could not resist it. I entirely forgot how I loved
him.
And then he was so stupid.

But even this acknowledgment does not satisfy
Reineke. His mind is evidently softened, and it is
on that occasion that he pours out his pathetic
lamentation over the sad condition of the world--so fluent,
so musical, so touching, that Grimbart listened with
wide eyes, unable, till it had run to the length of a
sermon, to collect himself. It is true that at last his
office as ghostly confessor obliged him to put in a slight
demurrer:--

Uncle, the badger replied, why these are the sins of your
neighbours;
Yours, I should think, were sufficient, and rather more now
to the purpose.

But he sighs to think what a preacher Reineke would
have made.

And now, for the present, farewell to Reineke Fuchs,
and to the song in which his glory is enshrined--the
Welt Bibel, Bible of this world, as Goethe called it, the
most exquisite moral satire, as we will call it, which has
ever been composed. It is not addressed to a passing
mode of folly or of profligacy, but it touches the
perennial nature of mankind, laying bare our own
sym