priceless letters, you yourself will feel and graciously express.
Through a decided antithesis I was carried back to those times when we
felt mutually pledged to procure a preliminary culture, when, united
with our great and noble friend, we strove after concrete truths, and
most faithfully and diligently sought to attain all that was most
beautiful and sublime in the world about us, for the edification of our
willing, yearning spirits, and to fill to its full an atmosphere which
required substance and contents.

How beautiful and splendid is it now that you should lay the foundations
for your latest composition (_Review of Goethe's Italian Travels_) in
that happy soil, that you should seek to explain me and my endeavors at
that laborious time, and that attentively and lovingly you should have
traced back that which in my efforts might seem incidental or lacking in
coherence, in sequence, to a spiritual necessity and to individual
characteristic combinations.

Here, now, there would be a most beautiful theme for discussion by word
of mouth. It is impossible to commit to writing how I was mirrored in
your words; how I received elucidation on many things; how, at the same
time, I was again challenged to reflect on the many enigmas that ever
remain unsolved in man, even as regards himself; and seriously to
reflect on the inner nexus of many qualities which cross in the
individual and which, despite a certain degree of contradiction, are
intertwined and united.

Here belongs preeminently my relation to plastic art, to which you have
devoted an attention so deserving of thanks. It is marvelous enough that
man feels an irresistible impulse to prosecute what he cannot achieve,
and yet that by this very process he is most essentially furthered in
his actual achievements.

That, however, this long-delayed letter may no further lag behind, I
shall close, but shall, nevertheless, at the same time inform you that,
while I uttered the sentiments written above, I once more returned to
your letters, and by seeing myself mirrored in them afresh was
challenged to new considerations, and was powerfully reminded of those
times when, united in spirit though not in body, we, already advanced in
years, enjoyed with the strength of youth and with delight those idyllic
days.

For six months [32] now my son has shared in the exuberance with which,
on the priceless peninsula, nature and centuries have, with most
marvelous intricacy, amass