May

   31, 1814.

   We have done, then, the desperate deed: there is Schlemihl’s story which we were to preserve to ourselves as our own secret, and lo! not only Frenchmen and Englishmen, Dutchmen and Spaniards have translated it, and Americans have reprinted it from the English text, as I announced to my own erudite Berlin, but now in our beloved Germany a new edition appears with the English etchings, which the illustrious Cruikshank sketched from the life, and wider still will the story be told. Not a word didst thou mutter to me in 1814, of the publication of the MS., and did I not deem thy reckless enterprise suitably punished by the complaints of our Chamisso, in his Voyage round the World from 1815 to 1818—complaints urged in Chili and Kamtschatka, and uttered even to his departed friend Tameramaia

   of Owahee, I should even now demand of you crowning retribution.

   However—this by the by—bygones are bygones—and you are right in this—that many, many friendly ones have looked upon the little book with affection during the thirteen eventful years since it saw the world’s light. I shall never forget the hour when I first read it to Hoffmann. He was beside himself with delight and eagerness, and hung upon my lips till I got to the end. He could not wait, not he, to make the personal acquaintance of the poet;—but though he hates all imitation, he could not withstand the temptation to copy—though not very felicitously—the idea of the lost shadow in the lost mirror picture of Crasinus Spekhn, in his tale of the “Last Night of the Year.” Yes, even among children has our marvellous history found its way, for on a bright winter evening, as I was going up the Borough-street with its narrator, a boy busied with his sledge laughed at him, upon which he tucked the boy under his bear-skin mantle—you know it well—and while he carried him he remained perfectly quiet until he was set down on the footway—and then—having

   made off to a distance, where he felt safe as if nothing had happened, he shouted aloud to his captor—“Nay, stop, Peter Schlemihl!”

   Methinks, the honourable scarecrow, clad now in trist and fashionable attire, may be welcome to those who never saw him in his modest kurtka of 1814. These and those will be surprised in the botanizing, circumnavigating—the once well-appointed Royal Prussian officer, in the historiographer of the illustrious Peter Schlemihl, to discover a lyric whose poetical heart is rightly fixed, whether he sing in Malayan or 

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