only love, and speak of my
love, sonnetically!

"Love flames aloft in thousand eager sunspheres,
Joy wooeth joy within the heart so warmly:
Down from the darkling sky soft stars are shining.
Back-mirrored from the deep, still wells of love-tears.

"Delight, alas! doth die of joy too burning--
The sweetest fruit hath aye the bitt'rest kernel--
While longing beckons from the violet distance,
In pain of love my heart to dust is turning.

"In fiery billows rage the ocean surges,
Yet the bold swimmer dares the plunge full arduous,
And soon amid the waves his strong course urges.

"And on the shore, now near, the jacinth shoots:
The faithful heart holds firm: 'twill bleed to death;
But heart's blood is the sweetest of all roots.[1]

"Oh, Anna! when thou readest this sonnet of all sonnets, may all the
heavenly rapture permeate thee in which all my being was dissolved when
I wrote it down, and then read it out, to kindred minds, conscious,
like myself, of life's highest. Think, oh, think I sweet maiden of

"Thy faithful, enraptured,
"AMANDUS VON NEBELSTERN.

"P.S.--Don't forget, oh, sublime virgin! when answering this, to send a
pound or two of that Virginia tobacco which you grow yourself. It burns
splendidly, and has a far better flavour than the Porto Rico which the
Buerschen smoke when they go to the Kneipe."

[Footnote 1: The translator may point out that the original of this
nonsense is, itself, intentionally nonsense, and that he has done his
best to render it into English--not an easy task.--A. E.]

Fraeulein Aennchen pressed the letter to her lips, and said, "Oh, how
dear, how beautiful! And the darling verses, rhyming so beautifully.
Oh, if I were only clever enough to understand it all; but I suppose
nobody can do that but a student. I wonder what that about the 'roots'
means? I suppose it must be the long red English carrots, or, who
knows, it may be the rapuntica. Dear fellow!"

That very day Fraeulein Aennchen made it her business to pack up the
tobacco, and she took a dozen of her finest goose-quills to the
schoolmaster, to get him to make them into pens. Her intention was to
sit down at once and begin her answer to the precious letter. As she
was going out of the kitchen-garden, she was again followed by a very
faint, almost imperceptible,