ey cannot add
or take away anything, since our hearts look into each other, eye to
eye, to the very bottom, and though here and there, behind a fold,
some new thing is discovered, a strange thing it is not. Dear heart,
what stuff you talk (excuse my rudeness) when you say I must not come
if I would rather stop in Zimmerhausen or Angermuende at Whitsuntide!
How can I take pleasure anywhere while I know that you are suffering,
and moreover, am uncertain in what degree? With us two it is a
question, not of amusing and entertaining, but only of loving and
being together, spiritually, and, if possible, corporeally; and if you
should lie speechless for four weeks--sleep, or something else--I
would be nowhere else, provided nothing but my wish were to decide. If
I could only "come to your door," I would still rather be there than
with my dear sister; and the sadder and sicker you are, so much the
more. But the door will not separate me from you, however ill you may
be. That is a situation in which the slave mutinies against his
mistress. * * *

Your faithful B.

Berlin, Tuesday Morning, May 18, '47.

_Dearest_,--The last letters from Reinfeld permit me to hope that your
illness is not so threatening at the moment as I feared from the first
news, although I am continually beset by all possible fears about you,
and thus am in a condition of rather complicated restlessness. * * *
My letter in which I told you of my election you have understood
somewhat, and your dear mother altogether, from a point of view
differing from that which was intended. I only wanted to make my
position exactly clear to you, and the apologies which to you seemed
perhaps forced, as I infer from your mother's letter, you may regard
as an entirely natural outflow of politeness. That I did not stand in
need of justification with you I very well know; but also that it must
affect us both painfully to see our fine plans cancelled. It was my
ardent wish to be a member of the Landtag; but that the Landtag and
you are fifty miles apart distressed me in spite of the fulfilment of
my wish. You women are, and always will be, unaccountable, and it is
better to deal with you by word of mouth than by writing. * * * I have
ventured once or twice on the speaker's platform with a few words, and
yesterday raised an unheard-of storm of displeasure, in that, by a
remark which was not explained clearly enough touching the character
of the popular uprising of 1813, I w