loved Nathanael, do you believe then that the intuitive
prescience of a dark power working within us to our own ruin cannot
exist also in minds which are cheerful, natural, free from care? But
please forgive me that I, a simple girl, presume in any way to indicate
to you what I really think of such an inward strife. After all, I
should not find the proper words, and you would only laugh at me, not
because my thoughts were stupid, but because I was so foolish as to
attempt to tell them to you.

If there is a dark and hostile power which traitorously fixes a thread
in our hearts in order that, laying hold of it and drawing us by means
of it along a dangerous road to ruin, which otherwise we should not
have trod--if, I say, there is such a power, it must assume within us a
form like ourselves, nay, it must be ourselves; for only in that way
can we believe in it, and only so understood do we yield to it so far
that it is able to accomplish its secret purpose. So long as we have
sufficient firmness, fortified by cheerfulness, to always acknowledge
foreign hostile influences for what they really are, whilst we quietly
pursue the path pointed out to us by both inclination and calling, then
this mysterious power perishes in its futile struggles to attain the
form which is to be the reflected image of ourselves. It is also
certain, Lothair adds, that if we have once voluntarily given ourselves
up to this dark physical power, it often reproduces within us the
strange forms which the outer world throws in our way, so that thus it
is we ourselves who engender within ourselves the spirit which by some
remarkable delusion we imagine to speak in that outer form. It is the
phantom of our own self whose intimate relationship with, and whose
powerful influence upon our soul either plunges us into hell or
elevates us to heaven. Thus you will see, my beloved Nathanael, that I
and brother Lothair have well talked over the subject of dark powers
and forces; and now, after I have with some difficulty written down the
principal results of our discussion, they seem to me to contain many
really profound thoughts. Lothair's last words, however, I don't quite
understand altogether; I only dimly guess what he means; and yet I
cannot help thinking it is all very true, I beg you, dear, strive to
forget the ugly advocate Coppelius as well as the weather-glass hawker
Giuseppe Coppola. Try and convince yourself that these foreign
influences can have no