"My digestion is better, especially after using the tepid baths, when I feel tolerably well for eight or ten days. Tonics I very seldom take, but follow your advice now with regard to the herb-plasters. Plunge baths Vering will not hear of. On the whole, I am not at all pleased with him; he has far too little solicitude or indulgence for a malady such as mine; if I did not go to him, and this I cannot do without great difficulty, I should never see him. What do you think of Schmidt?[25] I am unwilling to make a change, but it seems to me that Vering is too much of a practitioner to gain fresh ideas by reading. With regard to this, Schmidt appears a very different sort of man, and might also, perhaps, not be quite so negligent of my case. "I hear wonders of galvanism--what say you to it? A medical man told me that he had known a deaf and dumb child whose hearing was fully restored by it (in Berlin), and also a man who, after having been deaf for seven years, recovered his hearing. They tell me that your friend Schmidt is making experiments on the subject. "I lead a somewhat more agreeable life now that I mingle more with other people. You can hardly realize what a miserable, desolate life mine has been for the last two years. Like a ghost did my deafness haunt me everywhere, till I fled society, and must have appeared a misanthrope--yet this is so little my character. "This change has been brought about by a lovely and fascinating girl,[26] who loves me, and whom I love. After the lapse of two years I have again enjoyed some blissful moments, and now for the first time I feel that marriage can bestow happiness; but, alas! she is not in the same rank of life as myself; and at present, certainly I could not marry: I must first bestir myself actively. Were it not for my deafness, I would long ago have travelled half round the world, and I must do it yet. For me there is no greater pleasure than to follow and promote my art. Do not believe that I could be happy with you. What would there be, indeed, to make me happier? Even your solicitude would pain me; every moment I should read sympathy on your faces, and should find myself only the more wretched.