"Cornelia, glorious creature! What a picture you conjure up before the soul! These are divine revelations, and I will follow them unquestioningly. Yes, I will begin anew; guide me with your inspired, prophetic glance, lead me to the path upon which my first step faltered; you alone know what is for my welfare." He gazed long and earnestly into her eyes. "Oh, do not reproach me as unmanly because I give myself up entirely to you, since through you I first became what I am, through you alone I first learned to perceive in laboring for others a duty, an object, in life! The representatives of these noble ideas are principally women; for to labor and care for others is woman's mission, to sacrifice herself for others' interests her greatest power. The man who allows himself to be guided by a woman need not become womanish, nor the woman masculine. If, like you, Cornelia, she rises above her narrow subjective world to ideas which comprehend all humanity, she confers the qualities inherent in her upon them, and then doubtless becomes capable of guiding the more egotistical man to honest efforts for the race, self-sacrifice, and true philanthropy! Thus the strength of your love and virtue, in one word, your lofty womanhood, draws me upward." He threw his arms around her and pressed her ardently to his heart. "Cornelia, my betrothed bride, oh, tell me again and again that I can never lose you, that you are mine!" She clasped her hands. "Forever! forever! and may God's blessing be with us!" "Amen!" said _Heinrich_. Thus the power of a genuine love had healed the secret conflict in Ottmar. Intellect and sensuous feelings, both equally attracted, equally satisfied, united in the same object, and in the soft atmosphere of a true happiness his shattered nature healed into a symmetrical whole. The ghostly apparitions of his dual existence disappeared before the reality of an all-reconciling feeling which seized upon the inmost kernel of life, and from this brought forth the source of never-failing joy.