The little piece which I shall to-day further translate for you from my Swiss novel is interesting chiefly in showing the power with which affectionate and sentimental imagination may attach itself even to inanimate objects, and give them personality. But the works of its writer generally show the most wholesome balance of the sentimental and rational faculty I have ever met with in literature;--the part of Gotthelf's nature which is in sympathy with Pope and Fielding enables him to touch, to just the necessary point, the lower grotesqueness of peasant nature, while his own conception of ideal virtue is as pure as Wordsworth's.
But I have only room in this 'Fors' for a very little bit more of the broom-maker. I continue the last sentence of it from page 13 of Letter XXX.:--
"And then Hansli always knew that as soon as he got home there would be enough to eat;--his mother saw faithfully to that. She knew the difference it makes whether a man finds something ready to eat, when he comes in, or not. He who knows there will be something at home, does not stop in the taverns; he arrives with an empty stomach, and furnishes it, highly pleased with all about him; but if he usually finds nothing ready when at home, he stops on the road, comes in when he has had enough or too much; and grumbles right and left.
"Hansli was not avaricious, but economical. For things really useful and fit, he did not look at the money. In all matters of food and clothes, he wished his mother to be thoroughly at ease. He made a good bed for himself; and when he had saved enough to buy a knife or a good tool, he was quite up in the air. He himself dressed well, not expensively, but solidly. Any one with a good eye knows quickly enough, at the sight of houses or of people, whether they are going up or down. As for Hansli, it was easy to see he was on his way up--not that he ever put on anything fine, but by his cleanliness and the careful look of his things: aussi, everybody liked to see him, and was very glad to know that he prospered thus, not by fraud, but by work. With all that, he never forgot his prayers. On Sunday he made no brooms: in the morning he went to the sermon, [86] and in the afternoon he read a chapter of the Bible to his mother, whose sight was now failing. After that he gave himself a personal treat. This treat consisted in bringing out all his money, counting it, looking at it, [87] and calculating how much it had increased, and how much it would yet increase, etc. etc. In that money there were some very pretty pieces,--above all, pretty white pieces" (silver among the copper). "Hansli was very strong in exchanges; he took small money willingly enough, but never kept it long; it seemed always to him that the wind got into it and carried it off too quickly. The new white pieces gave him an extreme pleasure,--above all, the fine dollars of Berne with the bear, and the superb Swiss of old time. When he had managed to catch one of these, it made him happy for many days. [88]