remember it, there is no
mail leaving you Saturday and Sunday, and I should have received
Friday's today. If you have not sworn off writing altogether and wish to
reply to this letter, address me at Naugard. * * *

Had another visitor, and he stayed to supper and well into the
night--my neighbor, the town-counsellor Gaertner. People think they
must call on each other Sunday evening, and can have nothing else to
do. Now that all is quiet in the night, I am really quite disturbed
about you and your silence, and my imagination, or, if not that, then
the being whom you do not like to have me name, shows me with scornful
zeal pictures of everything that _could_ happen. Johanna, if you were
to fall sick now, it would be terrible beyond description. At the
thought of it, I fully realize how deeply I love you, and how deeply
the bond that unites us has grown into me. I understand what you call
loving much. When I think of the possibility of separation--and
possible it is still--I should never have been so lonely in all my
dreary, lonely life.

What would Moritz's situation be, compared with that?--for he has a
child, a father, a sister, dear and intimate friends in the
neighborhood. I have no one within forty miles with whom I should be
tempted to talk more than that which politeness demands; only a
sister--but a happily married one with children is really one no
longer, at least for a brother who is single. For the first time I am
looking the possibility straight in the eyes that you might be taken
away from me, that I might be condemned to inhabit these empty rooms
without a prospect of your sharing them with me, with not a soul in
all the surrounding region who would not be as indifferent to me as
though I had never seen him. I should, indeed, not be so devoid to
comfort in myself as of old, but I should also have lost something
that I used not to know--a loving and beloved heart, and at the same
time be separated from all that which used to make life easy in
Pomerania through habit and friendship. A very egotistical line of
thought and way of looking at things this discloses, you will say.
Certainly, but Pain and Fear are egotists, and, in cases like that
referred to, I never think the deceased, but only the survivors, are
to be pitied. But who speaks of dying? All this because you have not
written for a week; and then I have the assurance to lecture you for
gloomy forebodings, etc.! If you had only not spoken of the dea