it upon him to spread out and paint a large historic sheet, representing the whole of us as we went to church? Would he not require to draw the father, with swelling canonicals, moving forward slowly, devoutly, and full of emotion? Would he not have to sketch the godfather, minded this day to lend out his names, which he derived from two Apostles (John and Paul), as Julius Caesar lent out his names to two things still living even now (to a month and a throne)?—And must he not put the godson on his sheet, with whom even the Emperor Joseph (in his need of nurse-milk) might become a foster-brother, in his old days, if he were still in them? —
In my chamber, I have a hundred times determined to smile at solemnities, in the midst of which I afterwards, while assisting at them, involuntarily wore a petrified countenance, full of dignity and seriousness. For, as the Schoolmaster, just before the baptism, began to sound the organ—an honor never paid to any other child in Hukelum,—and when I saw the wooden christening-angel, like an alighted Genius, with his painted timber arm spread out under the baptismal ewer, and I myself came to stand close by him, under his gilt wing, I protest the blood went slow and solemn, warm and close, through my pulsing head, and my lungs full of sighs; and to the silent darling lying in my arms, whose unripe eyes Nature yet held closed from the full perspective of the Earth, I wished, with more sadness than I do to myself, for his Future also as soft a sleep as to-day; and as good an angel as to-day, but a more living one, to guide him into a more living religion, and, with invisible hand, conduct him unlost through the forest of Life, through its falling trees, and Wild Hunters,[1] and all its storms and perils.
- ↑ The Wild Hunter, Wilde, Jäger, is a popular spectre of Germany.—Ed.
