ing steps,
has healed the wounds of her heart, and has offered her a peaceful
haven, an affectionate defence, where she has time to rest after the
storms, and to collect and to know herself. Without this home, without
this influence, Petrea certainly might have become a witch, and not, as
now, a tolerably reasonable person.

"You know my present activity, which, whilst it conducts me deeper into
life, discovers to me more beauty, more poetry, than I had ever
conceived of it in the dreams of my youth. Not merely from this cause,
although greatly owing to it, a spring has began to blossom for me on
the other side of my thirty years, which, were it ever to wither, would
be from my own fault. And if even still a painful tear may be shed over
past errors or present faults; if the longing after what is yet
unattainably better, purer, and brighter, may occasion many a pang--what
matters it? What matter if the eye-water burn, so that the eye only
become clear; if heaven humiliate, so that it only draw us upwards?

"One of Petrea's means of happiness is, to require very few of the
temporal things of earth. She regards such things as nearly related to
the family of illusions, and will, on that account, have as little as
possible to do with them. And thus has she also the means of obtaining
for herself many a hearty and enduring pleasure. I will not, however, be
answerable for her not very soon being taken by a frenzy of giving a
feast up in her garret, and thereby producing all kinds of illusions;
such, for example, as the eating little cakes, the favourite illusion of
my mother, and citron-souffle, the almost perfect earthly felicity of
'our eldest,' in which a reconciliation skal with the frenzy-feast might
be proposed to her beloved 'eldest.'

"Would you now make a _summa summarum_ of Petrea's state, it stands
thus: that which was a fountain of disquiet in her is now become a
fountain of quiet. She believes in the actuality of life, and in her own
part therein. She does not allow her peace to be disturbed by accidental
troubles, be they from within or from without; she calls them
mist-clouds, passing storms, after which the sun will come forth again.
And should her little garret tumble to pieces one of these days, she
would regard even that as a passing misfortune, and hold herself ready,
in all humility--to mount up yet a little higher.

"But enough of Petrea and her future ascension.

"Yet one daughter dwelt in the fami