But in the glowing Grecian–virgin days of court prosperity, the gulf that seemed to separate the grave German student from the brilliant creature who had witched his heart was too great, and the contrast between her summer–day existence and the pale life which he could offer to her to share, too strongly marked for him to hope that such an offer would be listened to. It appears, indeed, that the offer had been made and rejected; in terms, too, that would effectually have prevented its repetition by a less devoted and self–forgetting lover. That such was the fact may be gathered from a curious passage in the first letter from Olympia to her husband, which, for some incomprehensible motive, her recent French biographer, who gives a translation of the letter in question,[84] has omitted, without giving any typographical or other intimation, that any part of the sense of the original is absent. After pouring forth her love in the usual delightful fashion of honeymoon letters, she adds, "Were my feelings different I would not conceal them from you, as formerly I plainly told you that I had conceived an aversion to you;"—"_ut ante aperte me tui odium cepisse significabam_."[85] It was necessary, it should seem, that that Undine nature should be first exorcised by the touch of sorrow, before the mightier wizard, love, could be allowed to enter, and complete the task of purifying, humanising, and elevating it. But the dark days came; sorrow did its appointed ministry; and then love spoke, and was listened to. In that time of tribulation and trial, when all the world had suddenly changed its welcoming smile to a frown, when none of those she had once thought her friends dared to manifest any interest for the disgraced favourite, then Andreas Grünthler dared to woo, and succeeded in inspiring as devoted a love as ever woman's heart felt. Olympia was deeply touched by the noble disinterestedness of her lover's suit. "Neither the resentment of the Duke," she writes, long afterwards, to her earliest friend, Celio Curione, "nor all the miserable circumstances which surrounded me, could induce him to abandon his desire to make me his wife. So great and true a love has never been surpassed." In Olympia, the unselfish affection of a noble heart evoked, as the sequel of her story shows, a sentiment of equally ennobling devotion. And thus, whatever issue from the predestination maze the puzzled brain may have fancied it had found for itself, the purified heart furnished the completion of the answer to the great salvation question.