In the morning he was well again and cheery; the sun dried up his eyes, and the misty image of his genius under the veil of the past night receded far into the background. I am sorry to have to lay it to the charge of his years and his character, that, with the exception of the evening hours of the most painful yearning, he let the image of a friend be crowded out by nearer images and thrust far backward. All flowers were now playthings for him, every animal a playmate and every human being a bird Ph[oe]nix; every change in the heavens, every sunset, every minute overwhelmed him with novelties.
It was with him as with children of distinction who come out into the country; who peer into, handle, jump over, everything in the new earth and the new sky. For it is an indescribable good fortune for children of rank, that their parents, who generally make little account of Nature, nevertheless train them between high walls and high houses, which do not leave thirty-eight square feet of heaven visible, as in hot-house gardens with high walls, that Nature may come before their eyes as little as to those of their parents; whereby their feeling for both is kept as unworn above the earth, as if they had been actually brought up under it; nay, they see sunrise for the first time almost later than Gustavus--in the post-chaise or in Carlsbad.
His parents treated him as a new-born child, and did not like to have him out of their sight; they would hardly let him go out into the castle-garden and never down the mountain, where he would be in danger from the post-road. He had brought up with him, too, from his subterranean school-room a certain bashfulness which ordinary men and almost his father take for simplicity, but which men in higher life, if it only appears, as with him, in the company not of a staring, but of an overfull, enthusiastic eye, regard as the order-cross of a brother of the order. Nevertheless, eight days after, his parents repented not that they had shut him up, but that they had ever let him out.
The wife of the Head-forester, von Knör, had brought a lot of Moravian men and women with her to hear the disciple of the grave; an aftermath-sheaf of old maids had already bespoken the visit four weeks before, and had renewed the invitation, just to get sight of such a wonderful child. The Moravian brethren were lively and free, within the bounds of propriety; the sisters in a body formed a wall around a tall clock, whose case was bordered with angels blowing trumpets--they could not be torn away from the horn-blowers. Nor could they be persuaded to take anything; they opened neither their jaws nor their eyes, and the Captain was black with suppressed vexation. At last the lip of a sister touched a wine-glass, the others touched theirs; as much as one nibbled off of a cake just so big a crumb nibbled the others; one shiver would agitate this whole obligato company of two-footed sheep. The aftermath of old damsels, on the contrary, plunged into everything; on solid and in fluid, like Amphibia, they were equally at home; they had never in their chewing and chattering life stirred any member but the tongue.