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Two men of very different kinds have thoroughly impressed the journalists of our time, Macaulay and Mr. Mill. Mr. Carlyle we do not add to them; he is, as the Germans call Jean Paul, der Einzige. And he is a poet, while the other two are in their degrees serious and argumentative writers, dealing in different ways with the great topics that constitute the matter and business of daily discussion.
He called her Die Einzige something like a thousand times. It seemed an absurd thing to say; I knew dozens just like her, with blue eyes and Gretchen braids. But Hammerstein meant it, for he shot himself the week after her wedding with the assessor. But mine is the Only One though she is not mine. I would rather love her without hope than be loved by any other woman in the world."
The marriage service still reads: "He shall be your ruler, and you shall be his vassal." The women are not only patient with all that requires patience of the men, but they are patient with the men besides, a heavy additional burden from the American point of view. Beethoven writes: "Resignation! Welch' elendes Hülfsmittel! Und doch bleibt es mir das einzige übrige."
It is only to be expected as a matter of course that in Germany as in France, that literary Bohemia, certain "advanced minds" should prefer to give themselves out as Anarchists and Individualists, as Einzige; but it must not therefore be concluded that it is our duty to concern ourselves with writers such as Pudor, Bruno Wille, and others.
We accept Carlyle's statement that he learnt most of the secret of life and its aims from his master Goethe: but the closest of his kin, the man with whom he shook hands more nearly as an equal, was Richter Jean Paul der einzige, lord of the empire of the air, yet with feet firmly planted on German earth, a colossus of reading and industry, the quaintest of humorists, not excepting either Sir Thomas Browne or Laurence Sterne, a lover and painter of Nature unsurpassed in prose.
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