even be the spring of the purest happiness. Uninterrupted joy, like
uninterrupted success, is not good for either man or woman. When Heine's
wife died, he began to reflect upon the loss he had sustained. They had
both known poverty, and struggled through it hand-in-hand; and it was
his greatest sorrow that she was taken from him at the moment when
fortune was beginning to smile upon him, but too late for her to share
in his prosperity. "Alas I" said he, "amongst my griefs must I reckon
even her love--the strongest, truest, that ever inspired the heart
of woman--which made me the happiest of mortals, and yet was to me a
fountain of a thousand distresses, inquietudes, and cares? To entire
cheerfulness, perhaps, she never attained; but for what unspeakable
sweetness, what exalted, enrapturing joys, is not love indebted to
sorrow! Amidst growing anxieties, with the torture of anguish in my
heart, I have been made, even by the loss which caused me this anguish
and these anxieties, inexpressibly happy! When tears flowed over our
cheeks, did not a nameless, seldom-felt delight stream through my
breast, oppressed equally by joy and sorrow!"

There is a degree of sentiment in German love which seems strange to
English readers,--such as we find depicted in the lives of Novalis, Jung
Stilling, Fichte, Jean Paul, and others that might be named. The German
betrothal is a ceremony of almost equal importance to the marriage
itself; and in that state the sentiments are allowed free play, whilst
English lovers are restrained, shy, and as if ashamed of their feelings.
Take, for instance, the case of Herder, whom his future wife first saw
in the pulpit. "I heard," she says, "the voice of an angel, and soul's
words such as I had never heard before. In the afternoon I saw him,
and stammered out my thanks to him; from this time forth our souls were
one." They were betrothed long before their means would permit them to
marry; but at length they were united. "We were married," says Caroline,
the wife, "by the rose-light of a beautiful evening. We were one heart,
one soul." Herder was equally ecstatic in his language. "I have a
wife," he wrote to Jacobi, "that is the tree, the consolation, and the
happiness of my life. Even in flying transient thoughts [20which often
surprise us], we are one!"

Take, again, the case of Fichte, in whose history his courtship and
marriage form a beautiful episode. He was a poor German student, living
with a fam