Without Lifting A Finger

The painter Friedrich Pecht, in a reminiscence from this time, relates how on several occasions he observed Mörike noting down things which came into his head on special scraps and pieces of paper, only soon afterward to take these notes and “tear them up again into little pieces and bury them in the pockets of his dressing gown.”

  In the woods, who knows where, Stands a green fir-tree;  A rosebush, who can tell, Blooms in what garden?  Already they have been chosen – Oh soul, remember! –  To take root on your grave, For they must grow there.  Out on the meadow two Black steeds are grazing,  And homewards to the town They trot so sprightly.  They will be walking when They draw your coffin;  Who knows but that may be Even before they shed  That iron on their hooves That glints so brightly.

How we wish we could here convey to our readers at least a touch of that singular sensation which can strike us with such electrifying and spellbinding force even when one unrelated chord floats from an open window, when our hearing catches it as we pass, aware that it can only come from that unknown source; even a touch of that sweet perturbation which affects us as we sit in a theatre while the orchestra tunes, and wait for the curtain to rise! Is it not so? If, on the threshold of any sublime and tragic work of art, whether it be called Macbeth or Oedipus or anything else, we feel a hovering tremor of eternal beauty: where could this be more the case, or even as much the case, as in the present situation? Man simultaneously longs and fears to be driven out of his usual self, he feels that he will be touched by the infinite, by something that will seize his heart, contracting it even as it expands it, as it violently embraces his spirit. 

Eduard Friedrich Mörike  (8 September 1804 – 4 June 1875) was a German  Romantic  poet and writer of novellas and novels. Biography Mörike was born in  Ludwigsburg . His father was Karl Friedrich Mörike (died 1817), a district medical councilor; his mother was Charlotte Bayer. After the death of his father, in 1817, he went to live with his uncle Eberhard Friedrich Georgii in Stuttgart, who intended his nephew to become a clergyman. Therefore, after one year at the Stuttgart  Gymnasium illustre , Mörike joined the Evangelical Seminary  Urach , a humanist grammar school, in 1818 and from 1822 to 1826 attended the  Tübinger Stift . [1]  There, he scored low grades and failed the admission test to Urach Seminary, yet was accepted anyhow. At the Seminary he went on to study the classics, something that was to become a major influence on his writing, and he made the acquaintance of Wilhelm Hartlaub and  Wilhelm Waiblinger . Afterwards he stud...

Downloaded this novella because Handke alluded to Morike and this was all that's available. Morike was known more as a poet, but he wrote this little piece. The only piece on Kindle available in English. I visited the Mozart Museum in Prague more than 20 years ago, so I thought I'd give it a try. Very short. Already half way through. * ‘It’s seventeen years now since I saw Italy. What man who has seen it, and seen Naples above all, does not remember it for the rest of his life, even if, like myself, he was still half a child at the time! But scarcely ever have I experienced so vivid a recollection of that beautiful evening by the Gulf as today, in your garden. Every time I closed my eyes, there it was – quite plain and clear and bright, its last veil lifting and drifting away, that heavenly panorama spread out before me! The sea and the sea-shore, the mountain and the city, the motley crowd of people on the embankment, and then that wonderful complicated game with the b...