Secondly, unless this is still firstly, I can, consequently, like the Jews, only on the Sabbath, or Sunday, think upon the plastic of my spiritual embryos; on week days nothing is written, except, to be sure, biographies also, but only those of rogues, by which is meant protocols and accusatory libels.
Secondly (or thirdly), I am the inmate of a schoolmaster's establishment. The good Captain, when his son was out of his door, undertook to put me under personal arrest, which in my case includes also real arrest, because my real estate consists of my body, and my personal property of my soul; he said I should stay in his palace and advocate and satirize as long as I pleased. It were to be wished his old judge would fade away, then I should be the new one, for his good heart--which my knavish one, accustomed to court subtleties, cannot always forgive for its want of them--cannot bear to dismiss anybody. Still keep thy sound north-east breath; still keep those hands of thine with their cudgelling-stick of a woe-unto-thee! and thy tongue, with its two or three _thunders_! and thousand devils! my Falkenberg!
And I stayed with him through the winter; but early in the spring of this year I moved down to the place where I now write--in the upper chamber of the Auenthal schoolmaster, Sebastian Wutz.[55] I had, perhaps, the three weightiest reasons in the world for this step; in the first place, nowhere do I feel so shrivelled up as in a Vatican full of dreary caverns, in Sahara wastes of empty apartments; a dining-hall with its poverty of furniture is to me a Patmos, and only in little snug sitting-rooms does one feel enlarged. Man should from year to year creep into smaller and smaller cells, until he slips into the smallest, _i. e_., into the narrowest hole of this compressed silver wire ["silver cord"].
The second reason was, Herr Fortins (in Morhof. Poly hist., L. II., c. 8), who advises literary men to change their towns every half-year,--and, in fact, one does write better after any change, and though it were only that of a writing-desk. Without such freshening of the air the soul writes itself so deeply into its narrow pass that it is caught there without being able to see sky or earth. The present work may, perhaps, come to something; but every month and every section I must write in a different cabin.