have the appearance of a
feast, if he was not intimately acquainted with the members of the
company, to conceive the opinion, that preparations had here been made
for guzzling, drinking, riot and extravagant jollity, such as befits
only the rude multitude. Even a young artist named Dietrich, who is now
for the first time sitting among us at this table, darts wondering
glances at the multitude of these bottles and dishes, at these
goose-liver pies, at these oysters and muscles and at the whole
apparatus of a solemnity, which to him seems to promise an excess of
sensual enjoyment, and he too will be surprized when he learns in how
entirely different and directly opposite a sense all this is meant.
Gentlemen, I beg you to give me your attention and not to let my words
drop too lightly on your ears. If countries solemnize the birth of a
prince, if in Arabia a whole tribe hails with festive rejoicings the
epoch, when a poet makes his appearance and distinguishes himself; if
the installation of a Lord Mayor is celebrated with a banquet; if even
the birth of horses of generous breed is with good cause signalized in
an impressive manner: it surely concerns us still more closely (not to
end with an anti-climax) to look up, to feel an emotion and to touch
glasses a little, when the immortal spirit discovers itself to us, when
virtue deigns to appear before us in corporeal shape. Yes, my friends,
with affected heart I announce it to you, a young candidate for virtue
is among us, who this very evening, like an emergent butterfly, will
burst his case, and unfold his wings in a new state of being. It is no
other person than our generous host, who has given us so many a feast,
and so often filled our glasses. But an ardent purpose, not to mention
that he is himself on the shallows, that impetus of inspiration, of
which the ancients sang, now tears him from us aloft into fields of
light, and we, from this table and these bottles and dishes, his
earthly burial-place, gaze after him in dizzy amazement, to see to what
unknown regions he will now steer his flight. I tell you, my dearest
friends, he is revolving innumerable and excellent resolutions in his
bosom: and what cannot man, even the weakest and most inconsiderable,
resolve? Did you ever consider, (but in your levity you think not of
such things), that in a miserable map, if it contain only about a
hundred places marked on it, a tract of a thousand miles may be
concealed, and that y