in thy sharper glance, thou wert mute for all that environed thee here below. Thou glidest to and fro with troubled look, like a hopeless lover; and all that thou sawest men attempting or attaining, in the noisy vortex of their many-coloured existence, awakened in thee no sorrow and no joy, as if thou hadst neither part nor lot in this sublunary world.
If such, favourable reader, has at any time been thy humour, then from thy own experience thou knowest the state into which the Student Anselmus had now fallen. On the whole, I could wish much, courteous reader, that it were in my power to bring the Student Anselmus with proper vividness before thy eyes. For in the Night-watches, which I spend in recording his highly singular history, I have still so much of the marvellous, which like a spectral vision may remove into faint remoteness the week-day life of common mortals, to lay before thee, that I fear thou wilt come, in the end, to believe neither in the Student Anselmus, nor in Archivarius Lindhorst; nay, wilt even entertain some unfounded doubts as to Registrator Heerbrand and Conrector Paulmann, though the last two estimable persons, at least, are yet walking the pavement of Dresden. Make an effort, favourable reader—while in the Fairy region full of glorious Wonders, which with subduing thrills calls forth the highest rapture and the deepest horror; nay, where the Earnest Goddess herself will waft aside her veil, so that we seem to look upon her countenance (but a smile often glimmers through her earnest glance; and this is that jestful teasing, which sports with us in all manner of perplexing enchantments, as mothers in nursing and dandling their dearest children)—in this region, which the spirit so often, at least in dreams, lays open to us, do thou make an effort, favourable reader, again to recognise the well-known shapes which, even in common life, are daily, in fitful brightness, hovering round thee. Thou wilt then find that this glorious kingdom lies much closer at hand, than thou wert wont to suppose; which I now
