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The Library of the World’s Best Literature. An Anthology in Thirty Volumes. 1917.
Speculations on New Years Day
By Matthias Claudius (17401815)
A
And so I am accustomed, every New Year’s morning, to sit down on a stone by the wayside, to scratch with my staff in the sand before me, and to think of this and of that. Not of my readers. I hold them in all honor: but on New Year’s morning, on the stone by the wayside, I think not of them; but I sit there and think that during the past year I saw the sun rise so often, and the moon,—that I saw so many rainbows and flowers, and breathed the air so often, and drank from the brook,—and then I do not like to look up, and I take with both hands my cap from my head and look into that.
Then I think also of my acquaintances who have died during the year; and how they can talk now with Socrates and Numa, and other men of whom I have heard so much good, and with John Huss. And then it seems as if graves opened round me, and shadows with bald crowns and long gray beards came out of them and shook the dust out of their beards. That must be the work of the “Everlasting Huntsman,” who has his doings about the twelfth. The old pious long-beards would fain sleep. But a glad new year to your memory and to the ashes in your graves!