“I once saw him at one of his night-carouses.  He was sitting in his glory, at the head of the table; not stupidly drunk, but warmed with wine, which made him madly eloquent, as the Devil’s Elixir did the Monk Medardus.  There, in the full tide of witty discourse, or, if silent, his gray, hawk eye flashing from beneath his matted hair, and taking note of all that was grotesque in the company round him, sat this unfortunate genius, till the day began to dawn.  Then he found his way homeward, having, like the souls of the envious in Purgatory, his eyelids sewed together with iron wire;—­though his was from champagne bottles.  At such hours he wrote his wild, fantastic tales.  To his excited fancy everything assumed a spectral look.  The shadows of familiar things about him stalked like ghosts through the haunted chambers of his soul; and the old portraits on the walls winked at him, and seemed stepping down from their frames; till, aghast at the spectral throng about him, he would call his wife from her bed, to sit by him while he wrote.”

“No wonder he died in the prime of life!”

“No.  The only wonder is, that he could have followed this course of life for six years.  I am astonished that it did not kill him sooner.”

“But death came at last in an appalling shape.”

“Yes; his forty-sixth birth day found him sitting at home in his arm-chair, with his friends around him.  But the rare old wine,—­he always drank the best,—­touched not the sick-man’s lips that night.  His wonted humor was gone.  Of all his ’jibes, his gambols, his songs, his flashes of merriment, that were wont to set the table on a roar, not one now, to mock his own grinning!—­quite chap-fallen.’—­The conversation was of death and the grave.  And when one of his friends said, that life was not the highest good, Hoffmann interrupted him, exclaiming with a startling earnestness; ‘No, no!  Life, life, only life! on any condition whatsoever!’ Five months after this he had ceased to suffer, because he had ceased to live.  He died piecemeal.  His feet and hands, his legs and arms, gradually, and in succession, became motionless, dead.  But his spirit was not dead, nor motionless; and, through the solitary day or sleepless night, lying in his bed, he dictated to an amanuensis his last stories.  Strange stories, indeed, were they for a dying man to write!  Yet such delight did he take in dictating them, that he said to his friend Hitzig, that, upon the whole, he was willing to give up forever the use of his hands, if he could but preserve the power of writing by dictation.  Such was his love of life,—­of what he called the sweet habitude of being!”

“Was it not he, who in his last hours expressed such a longing to behold the green fields once more; and exclaimed; ’Heaven! it is already summer, and I have not yet seen a single green tree!’”