88. Hitherto I have always regarded the Polemical writings of our present philosophic and aesthetic Idealist Logic-buffers,--in which, certainly, a few contumelies, and misconceptions, and misconclusions do make their appearance,--rather on the fair side; observing in it merely an imitation of classical Antiquity, in particular of the ancient Athletes, who (according to Schöttgen) besmeared their bodies with _mud_, that they might not be laid hold of; and filled their hands with _sand_, that they might lay hold of their antagonists.
For the rest, throughout the whole stage, I had a constant source of altercation with the coachman, because he grudged stopping perhaps once in the quarter of an hour, when I chose to come out for a natural purpose. Unhappily, in truth, one has little reason to expect water-doctors among the postilion class, since Physicians themselves have so seldom learned from Haller's large _Physiology_ that a postponement of the above operation will precipitate devilish stone-ware, and at last precipitate the proprietor himself; this stone-manufactory being generally concluded, not by the Lithotomist, but by Death. Had postilions read that Tycho Brahe died like a bombshell by bursting, they would rather pull up for a moment; with such unlooked-for knowledge, they would see it to be reasonable that a man, though expecting some time to carry his death-stone _on_ him, should not incline, for the time being, to carry it _in_ him. Nay, have I not often, at Weimar, in the longest concluding scenes of Schiller, run out with tears in my eyes; purely that, while his Minerva was melting me on the whole, I might not by the Gorgon's head on her breast be partially turned to stone? And did I not return to the weeping play-house, and fall into the general emotion so much the more briskly, as now I had nothing to give vent to but my heart?
103. Or are all Mosques, Episcopal-churches, Pagodas, Chapels-of-Ease, Tabernacles, and Pantheons, anything else than the Ethnic Forecourt of the Invisible Temple and its Holy of Holies?
Deep in the dark we arrived at Niederschöna.
_Third Stage; from Niederschöna to Flätz_.
While I am standing at the Posthouse musing, with my eye fixed on my portmanteau, comes a beast of a watchman, and bellows and brays in his night-tube so close by my ear that I start back in trepidation, I whom even a too hasty accosting will vex. Is there no medical police, then, against such efflated hour-fulminators and alarm-cannon, by which notwithstanding no gunpowder cannon are saved? In my opinion nobody should be invested with the watchman-horn but some reasonable man, who had already blown himself into an asthma, and who would consequently be in case to sing out his hour-verse so low that you could not hear it.