something about the old couple that attracts my heart! How homely, how
patriarchal, it must have been in the old mansion, where the mistress sat at
the spinning-wheel with her maids, while her husband read aloud out of the
Bible!”
“They must have been excellent, sensible people,” said the pastor’s son.
And with this the conversation turned naturally to noblemen and
commoners; from the manner in which the tutor spoke about the
significance of being noble, it seemed almost as if he did not belong to a
commoner’s family.
“It is good fortune to be of a family who have distinguished themselves,
and to possess as it were a spur in oneself to advance to all that is good. It is
a splendid thing to belong to a noble family, whose name serves as a card of
admission to the highest circles. Nobility is a distinction; it is a gold coin
that bears the stamp of its own value. It is the fallacy of the time, and many
poets express it, to say that all that is noble is bad and stupid, and that, on
the contrary, the lower one goes among the poor, the more brilliant virtues
one finds. I do not share this opinion, for it is wrong. In the upper classes
one sees many touchingly beautiful traits; my own mother has told me of
such, and I could mention several. One day she was visiting a nobleman’s
house in town; my grandmother, I believe, had been the lady’s nurse when
she was a child. My mother and the nobleman were alone in the room, when
he suddenly noticed an old woman on crutches come limping into the
courtyard; she came every Sunday to carry a gift away with her.
“‘There is the poor old woman,’ said the nobleman; ‘it is so difficult for
her to walk.’
“My mother had hardly understood what he said before he disappeared
from the room, and went downstairs, in order to save her the troublesome
walk for the gift she came to fetch. Of course this is only a little incident,
but it has its good sound like the poor widow’s two mites in the Bible, the
sound which echoes in the depth of every human heart; and this is what the
poet ought to show and point out-more especially in our own time he ought
to sing of this; it does good, it mitigates and reconciles! But when a man,
