* * * * *

You are right; we must certainly buy the little estate. I am glad that
you went right ahead with the arrangements, without waiting for my
decision. Order everything just as you please; but, if I may say so,
do not have it too beautiful, nor yet too useful, and, above all
things, not too elaborate.

If you only arrange it all in accordance with your own judgment and do
not allow yourself to be talked into the proper and conventional,
everything will be quite right, and the way I want it to be; and I
shall derive immense enjoyment from the beautiful property. Hitherto I
have lived in a thoughtless way and without any feeling of ownership;
I have tripped lightly over the earth and have never felt at home on
it. Now the sanctuary of marriage has given me the rights of
citizenship in the state of nature. I am no longer suspended in the
empty void of general inspiration; I like the friendly restraint, I
see the useful in a new light, and find everything truly useful that
unites everlasting love with its object--in short everything that
serves to bring about a genuine marriage. External things imbue me
with profound respect, if, in their way, they are good for something;
and you will some day hear me enthusiastically praise the blessedness
of home and the merits of domesticity.

I understand now your preference for country life, I like you for it
and feel as you do about it. I can no longer endure to see these
ungainly masses of everything that is corrupt and diseased in mankind;
and when I think about them in a general way they seem to me like wild
animals bound by a chain, so that they cannot even vent their rage
freely. In the country, people can live side by side without
offensively crowding one another. If everything were as it ought to
be, beautiful mansions and cosy cottages would there adorn the green
earth, as do the fresh shrubs and flowers, and create a garden worthy
of the gods.

To be sure we shall find in the country the vulgarity that prevails
everywhere. There ought really to be only two social classes, the
culturing and the cultured, the masculine and the feminine; instead of
all artificial society, there should be a grand marriage of these two
classes and universal brotherhood of all individuals. In place of that
we see a vast amount of coarseness and, as an insignificant exception,
a few who are perverted by a wrong education. But in the open air the
one thing which