ehead?"
asked Hansei.

Irma started. On the gable of the house she read the following
inscription:--

EAT AND DRINK: FORGET NOT GOD: THINE HONOR GUARD:
OF ALL THY STORE,
THOU'LT CARRY HENCE
A WINDING-SHEET
AND NOTHING MORE.

Translation of S.A. Stern.

THE COURT PHYSICIAN'S PHILOSOPHY

From 'On the Heights'

Gunther continued, "I am only a physician, who has held many a hand hot
with fever or stiff in death in his own. The healing art might serve as
an illustration. We help all who need our help, and do not stop to ask
who they are, whence they come, or whether when restored to health they
persist in their evil courses. Our actions are incomplete, fragmentary;
thought alone is complete and all-embracing. Our deeds and ourselves are
but fragments--the whole is God."

"I think I grasp your meaning [replied the Queen]. But our life, as you
say, is indeed a mere fraction of life as a whole; and how is each one
to bear up under the portion of suffering that falls to his individual
lot? Can one--I mean it in its best sense--always be outside of
one's self?"

"I am well aware, your Majesty, that passions and emotions cannot be
regulated by ideas; for they grow in a different soil, or, to express
myself correctly, move in entirely different spheres. It is but a few
days since I closed the eyes of my old friend Eberhard. Even he never
fully succeeded in subordinating his temperament to his philosophy; but
in his dying hour he rose beyond the terrible grief that broke his
heart--grief for his child. He summoned the thoughts of better hours to
his aid,--hours when his perception of the truth had been undimmed by
sorrow or passion,--and he died a noble, peaceful death. Your Majesty
must still live and labor, elevating yourself and others, at one and the
same time. Permit me to remind you of the moment when, seated under the
weeping ash, your heart was filled with pity for the poor child that
from the time it enters into the world is doubly helpless. Do you still
remember how you refused to rob it of its mother? I appeal to the pure
and genuine impulse of that moment. You were noble and forgiving then,
because you had not yet suffered. You cast no stone at the fallen; you
loved, and therefore you forgave."

"O God!" cried the Queen, "and what has happened to me? The woman on
whose bosom my child rested is the most abandoned of creatures. I loved
her just as if she belonged to another world--a wor