e, who only wanted to thoroughly shake off the school dust
and forget everything that could remind me of the agreement of
triangles and the theory of parallelograms, this twilight mood was
exactly the right one, in which all forms blend together and I as it
were returned with a living body into the Infinite. 'Give my soul full
freedom'--how often I've repeated the words! How often I've thought of
and pitied you, because, as a woman, you can never enjoy the strange,
sweet wondrous delight, which I inhaled in full draughts with the night
breeze. The spell can only work in perfect solitude. The ear must hear
but one footstep, when the night reveals its secrets and there rises
that wierd vibrating hum, a noise like that our earth might make,
moving through the grooves of space. It is like a fairy dream, dearest,
to look up to the stars and become absorbed in the measureless silent
enigmas; the countless 'burning questions,' which nevertheless burn
only the souls of dreamers and night wanderers. And amid the depression
caused by the loneliness of the world it was a grand feeling of triumph
the consciousness of loving and being loved, that though fallen in the
deepest abysses we are never really given over solitary and hopeless,
to the spectres of night, since we can raise above us a shield our
pure, honest purpose, our strength and love of good, and feel ourselves
allied to all our struggling brothers, and throughout all this journey
you were always by my side, beloved, and on the other walked our
Balder, often in such bodily presence, that I actually saw your eyes
sparkle, and thought I distinctly heard your voice as it sounds when
you steal behind me and whisper in my ear: 'do I disturb you?'_

"_As I said before, I deprived myself of all this, when the fancy
seized me to come hither in the day time. Now in order to assure myself
of your presence, I must take up my pen which will not lend wings to my
thoughts, after my hot walk in the dog days. But if I keep silence
longer, I fear you may take some jealous fancy and imagine Frau
Christiane to be the cause, and that, instead of the moonlight, in
which I stagger intoxicated with the beauty of nature, perhaps the
moonlight sonata, which to be sure I have recently heard with fresh
delight, has gone to my head. No, dear Wisdom, on this point you can be
as much at ease as you were four years ago; nay, more so, for even your
old and at that time not wholly to be rejected hypothesi