tention, and the Baron said with some ill
humour: "Love cannot err; where else should we seek a guide for our
path?"

"If it is the true love, it cannot," replied the Count; "but in this we
too easily deceive ourselves; for if our passions were not sophists,
they would in fact not be passions."

"So then doubt," said the Baron angrily, "is the only thing we can
gain."

"Let it be considered as our servant," answered the Count, "who
explores our road; our fool, to warn us with his dry jest against
excess and precipitation. Children and fools, the popular proverb says,
speak the truth; sometimes at least, if not often and always."

"A mother," said the Baroness, "knows what love is; a man retains
perhaps always but a dim dubious conception of its power. The act too
is always more than the word, and so have I brought up my children and
lived with them, wholly in love, requiring from them no blind
obedience, never anything unreasonable; I have ever sacrificed myself
to them; but even in their lispings they have recognized and returned
my love; they have only needed to follow their hearts, and rigour,
fear, and every thing of that sort, has been always wholly unknown to
them."

The daughters looked tenderly at their mother, the mother had tears in
her eyes, only Dorothea looked timidly downwards, and the Baron said in
a fit of rapture, "All the world knows and reveres this model of
education, and if any one doubts the power of love, let him come and
see this family circle."

"Far be from me," said Brandenstein, turning himself to Dorothea, "the
rudeness of feeling which would refuse to acknowledge this tender love;
I only think, when I recall to mind my happy childhood, that love to
parents, and a certain religious and liberal fear of them should be one
and the same thing; for by means of the latter alone my childish love
acquired, I think, its true force and intensity; it is this holy awe
too of something incomprehensible in the parents, that should produce
that blind unqualified obedience, which is the very thing wherein the
child feels itself so happy; for without this obedience, it appears to
me, neither education nor love are possible."

The mother looked apprehensively at her eldest daughter, who seemed to
be of the same opinion, and then said with a rather pointed tone: "I
preferred convincing my children at an early age, and where that was
impossible, I so disposed them, that they did for my sake what they