MEDITATIONS ON A BROOMSTICK. 
181 
from his seat, he called out to the domestic sweep in his 
bed-chamber—* Lenette, pray don’t scratch and scrape 
with that broom ; it prevents me from thinking. There 
was once an old clergyman, named Pechmann, who would 
rather have been condemned to sweep the streets of 
Vienna himself, than to hear them swept; yes, who 
would even have preferred a flogging with the birch to 
its horrid whetting and grinding noise : and do you think 
I can have one sensible thought fit to appear before 
the compositor and printer, in the neighbourhood of this 
house-broom ? Only think a little of this, Lenette/”* 
Here our broomstick would have told its story, but 
that its fallen state is so suggestive of the fate of man, 
that we should lose the very pith and marrow of its 
teachings were we to lay down our pen without deducing 
this moral epilogue. The history of a broomstick is a 
fit emblem of the history of man; for its green vigour 
when flourishing in the woods, and its neglected and 
enfeebled state after a life of good services, are exact 
counterparts of the sunny freshness of early life and the 
imbecilities of age. The most useful labourers in the 
van of progress, those who sweep away the abuses of 
society, are not they who reap the largest rewards: 
poets, philosophers, and philanthropists fall friendless 
and penniless into old age, and, like worn out broom¬ 
sticks, are cast aside and forgotten; while the fawning 
and hypocritical too often feather their nests snugly, and 
retire from a world which they have defiled, into a 
retirement which laughs nobler souls to scorn. 
* See also pp. 136, 142, of the English translation of the 
“ Flower, Fruit, and Thorn Pieces.’' 
