y
Lina von Adelsson. Like the characters in the works of the greatest of
writers--I mean Goethe--not one of mine was wholly invented, but neither
was any an accurate portrait of the model.

I by no means concealed from myself the difficulties with which I had to
contend or the doubts the critics would express, but this troubled me
very little. I was writing the book only for myself and my mother, who
liked to hear every chapter read as it was finished. I often thought that
this novel might perhaps share the fate of my Poem of the World, and find
its way into the fire.

No matter. The greatest success could afford me no higher pleasure than
the creative labour. Those were happy evenings when, wholly lifted out of
myself, I lived in a totally different world, and, like a god, directed
the destinies of the persons who were my creatures. The love scenes
between Bartja and Sappho I did not invent; they came to me. When, with
brow damp with perspiration, I committed the first one to paper in a
single evening, I found the next morning, to my surprise, that only a few
touches were needed to convert it into a poem in iambics.

This was scarcely permissible in a novel. But the scene pleased my
mother, and when I again brought the lovers together in the warm
stillness of the Egyptian night, and perceived that the flood of iambics
was once more sweeping me along, I gave free course to the creative
spirit and the pen, and the next morning the result was the same.

I then took Julius Hammer into my confidence, and he thought that I had
given expression to the overflowing emotion of two loving young hearts in
a very felicitous and charming way.

While my friends were enjoying themselves in ball-rooms or exciting
society, Fate still condemned me to careful seclusion in my mother's
house. But when I was devoting myself to the creation of my Nitetis, I
envied no man, scarcely even a god.

So this novel approached completion. It had not deprived me of an hour of
actual working time, yet the doubt whether I had done right to venture on
this side flight into fairer and better lands during my journey through
the department of serious study was rarely silent.

At the beginning of the third volume I ventured to move more freely.

Yet when I went to Lepsius, the most earnest of my teachers, to show him
the finished manuscript, I felt very anxious. I had not said even a word
in allusion to what I was doing in the evening hours, and the t