The Serapion Brethren (Complete‪)‬

"Look at the question how one will, the bitter conviction is not to be got rid of by persuasion, or by force, that what has been never, never can be again. It is useless to contend with the irresistible power of Time, which goes on continually creating by a process of constant destruction. Nothing survives save the shadowy reflected images left by that part of our lives which has set, and gone far below our horizon; and they often haunt and mock us like evil, ghostly dreams. But weare fools, and expect that matters which, in reality, were nothing but our ideas, parts and portions of our own individualities, are to be found actually existent in the world outside us, and blooming in perpetual youth! The woman we have loved and parted from, the friend to whom we have said good-bye, are both lost to us for ever. The people whom, perhaps years afterwards, we meet as being them, are not the same whom we left, neither are we ever the same to them."

So saying, Lothair got up from his seat, and folding his arms on the mantel-piece, gazed, with gloomy sadness, into the fire which was blazing and crackling merrily.

"One thing is certain enough," said Theodore, "that, at all events, you, dear Lothair, are so far actually the same Lothair whom I bade good-bye to twelve years ago, that whenever any little thing vexes or disappoints you at all, you immediately sink down to the lowest depths of gloom and despair. It is quite true--and Cyprian, Ottmar and I feel it as much as you that this first meeting of ours after our twelve years' separation comes short of being quite all that we had pictured it to be. Put the blame on me, who raced through one of those endless streets of ours after another, leaving no stone unturned to get you all assembled here to-night by my fireside. Perhaps I had better have left it to chance. But I could not bear the idea that we--who had spent so many years together in such close friendship, joined by the bonds of our common pursuits in art and knowledge, and only driven asunder by the hurricane which raged during that fateful time--thatwe, I say, should come to cast anchor in the same harbour, for so much as a single day, and yet not look upon each other with the eyes of the body, as we had with the eyes of the spirit in the interval. And now, we have been sitting here together for some hours, wearying ourselves to death over the enthusiastic quality of our revived friendship, yet not one of us has said anything worth listening to: we have talked tedious, tiresome stuff, to a perfectly astonishing extent. And why is this, but because we are a set of very childish children, thinking we were going to take up the old tune which we sang twelve years ago, at the point where we broke off with it, and go on singing it as we were doing then. Lothair, we will say, should have read Tieck's 'Zerbino' aloud to us for the first time, to our astonished delight; or Cyprian should have brought some fanciful poem, or perhaps the text of a whole operatic extravaganza, to which I should then have composed the music on the spot, and thundered it out on the old weak-loined piano of twelve years back; or Ottmar should have told us about some wonderful curiosity he had come across--some remarkable wine, some extraordinary nincompoop, etc., and set us all on fire with projects and ideas how to make the most of our enjoyment of either, or both; and because none of all this has happened, we sit secretly sulking at each other, each thinking (of the other) 'Ay! what a change in the dear old fellow. Well! I never should have believed he could have altered so!' Of course we none of us are the same. I say nothing of the circumstance that we are twelve years older; that, no doubt, every year lays more earth upon us, which weighs us down from aerial regions, till we go under the earth at last. But whom of us, all this time, has not the wild whirlpool carried surging on from event to event, and from action to action? The terror, the trouble, the anxiety of that stormy time,1 could not pass over us without leaving bleeding scars graven on our hearts. The pictures of our early days are pale compared withthat, and we cannot revive their colours. No doubt, too, there is much in life and in ourselves which looked very bright and glorious, and has lost its dazzling glitter for our eyes, grown accustomed to a brighter light; but the modes of thinking and feeling which gave rise to our friendship remain pretty much the same. I mean that we all consider each other something rather above the common, in suitability to each other at all events, so as to be worthy of a thorough friendship. So let us leave the old days out of sight, with all the promise and anticipations belonging to them, and, starting from the conviction which I have expressed, see how we can best establish a new bond of union."