. All love from me and Fanny to your incomparable
mother. So to our speedy meeting. Truly yours.

George will have arrived in London yesterday with wife and child; his
darling Ella has a serious nervous affection, and they are to try sea air.
He is much depressed.

[80.]

CHARLOTTENBERG, _February 17, 1858_.

Your affectionate letter, my dear friend, has touched me deeply. First
your unaltered love and attachment, and that you have perfectly understood
me and my conduct in this affair. Naturally my fate will be very much
influenced by it. I must be _every year_ in Berlin: this year I shall
satisfy myself with the last three weeks after Easter. In 1859 (as I shall
spend the winter in Nice) I shall take my seat, when I return in April
across the Alps. But later (and perhaps from 1859) I must not only live in
Prussia, which is prescribed by good feeling and by the constitution, but
I must stay for some time in Berlin. They all wish to have me there. God
knows how little effort it costs me not to seek the place of Minister of
Instruction, to say nothing of declining it, for everything is daily going
more to _ruin_. But it could only be for a short time, and
Bethmann-Hollweg, Usedom, and others can do the right thing just as well,
and have time and youth to drag away the heavy cart of a Chinese order of
business, which now consumes nine tenths of the time of a Prussian
minister (who works twelve hours a day).

What I wish and am doing with my "Biblework," _you_ will see between the
lines of my first volume; other people, twelve months later, when my first
volume of the Bible documents "comes out:" and even then they will not see
where the concluding volume tends,--the world's history in the Bible, and
the Bible in the world's history. Already in the end of 1857 I finished
all of the first volume: the stereotyping goes on fearfully slow. You will
receive one of the first copies which goes across the Channel; and you
will read it at once, will you not? I am delighted that you are absorbed
in _Eckart_: he is the key to Tauler, and there is nothing better, _except
the Gospel of St. John_. For there stands still more clearly than in the
other gospel writings, that the object of life in this world is to _found
the Kingdom of God on earth_ (as my friends the Taipings understand it
also). Of this, Eckart and his scholars had despaired, just as much as
Dante and his parody, Reineke Fuchs. You will find already many pious
e