"How can I help it? What can I begin after this failure? My political credit is ruined here as well as elsewhere. What can it avail to convince myself more and more that I cannot make amends for my errors in this province? But here,"--he laid his band an Cornelia's shoulder,--"here, thank God, I can atone for the wrongs I have committed; here I can and will prove that I have become a different man!" "No, Heinrich," cried Cornelia, deeply touched. "I thank you for these words, and for the cheerfulness with which you hope to find in me a compensation for all; but I think too highly of you to be able to share this hope. No wife, not even the most beloved, can make that superfluous for which her husband was born: to work in a lofty vocation. What you now feel, in the first ebullition of joy, you cannot always experience. The storm that now fills your heart now will subside in time, and the calm which will then follow would at last make you find a void in yourself. You are no 'shepherd,' Heinrich. An idyllic, private life would not long satisfy you; a quiet withdrawal into your own family circle, a limiting of yourself to that which is personally dear to you, would be again an egotistical, and therefore only a partial, happiness. You possess the power of solving comprehensive problems. Every power imperiously demands its right to assert itself; if the opportunity is denied, it turns destructively against the barriers imposed upon it, and that which is also within them. Thus it would be with you and our peace. Woe betide the wife who believes that she can and must be the whole world to her husband! She does not understand his larger nature, and will only make herself or him unhappy. I do not belong to that class. I pride myself in taking into account all the just demands of your character, thus only can I make you happy. I will not regret you in the hours your profession claims, for I shall take possession of you doubly in spirit, when I know you to be toiling for that for which I myself would fain strive with all my powers, and must not because I am a woman. I will not bewail the time you take from me to give to mankind, for I love all men far too much to grudge them what you can do for their welfare. And then, Heinrich,"--she laid her head on his breast, and gazed into his face with a bride's ardent love,--"then when you return home to your wife weary but joyous in the consciousness of duty then you shall rest in my arms, in my faithful love, and let me have the proud belief that my heart is the soil from which the roots of your life draw nourishment for the glorious fruits that you permit the world to reap!"