t, and thereby recovering from the agitation he had lately
undergone. It was of importance to have these matters perfectly
arranged before he went away. At length he succeeded in banishing what
had happened from his thoughts for the time; and he became so much
engaged in his employment, he forgot that these very hours might be
unravelling that unpleasant affair, which had given them so much
annoyance for years.

When he had finisht and was turning over the leaves of an old book
that he had taken up along with the rest, some written papers fell out
of it: they were in Balthasar's hand, and had evidently been written
many years. He read the following fragments.

Yes in truth weeping is a wonder, and, as they say, a gift sent
from heaven. A bliss spreads through our soul, as soon as our
flowing tears come, like the waters of a river, sweeping away
black sorrow, and disquietude, and trembling doubts. Ye are all
given back to me, ye spirits that once were mine, and that a cruel
destiny afterward severed from me.

For the sake of this, people will woo tears, and try to lure them
with coaxing when they will not come. Our day's work is over, and
now, as the rich man and the glutton will wind up his multifarious
meal with sweetmeats, so after our toil, after closing our
accounts, we court devotional thoughts and pathetical emotions, we
meditate on the dead, in order to entice this lifes-wine of tears
into our voluptuous eyes and our luxurious brain. Now a
sentimental melancholy inhaloes every ordinary object around us;
and amid the meek abasht feelings of a pining anguish and remorse,
suddenly starts up nauseous arrogance, vaunting the grandeur of a
spoilt capricious heart. O what poor wretches our fellow creatures
now seem to us in their commonplaceness, who yet all, as the
patient children and drudges of mother earth, are better than we.

But laughter! This earthquake which invisible powers heave up out
of the knotty entanglement of our dark enigmatical being! which in
boisterous senseless noises announces that within, in the unseen
world, the soul neither recks of nor knows truth or falsehood, and
has just been murdering the innocent herald who was bringing these
phantasms before it! These rude unmeaning sounds which will for a
long time distort even the best face, the most mechanically
regular mask!

How men