then permits this woman--her every fibre quivering with passion, in a frenzy of personal despair, without a thought of the universal and the abstract, of the Republic or of intellectual freedom, and while her father is being murdered before the church door--to be driven to proclaim from the altar the new gospel of reason, which she herself has once mockingly designated the world's law that two times two make four. This drama appears to me of far greater value as a contribution to the psychology of its author than from a poetic point of view. Nevertheless, it would be an injustice to Heyse to infer from what has hitherto been made prominent, that he recognizes nothing higher than elemental nature and its impulses. By the word instinct is meant something wholly different from _isolated_ impulses. Instinct is the inner need of being true to one's self. Therefore, it is that Heyse can consistently permit an independent sympathy to triumph over the ties of blood, and even over the closest bonds of relationship. In the novel "Der verlorene Sohn" (The Lost Son), a mother conceals, and tends unawares the innocent murderer of her son, and after he, through his amiability, has won the heart of the mother as well as that of the daughter, the poet makes him lead home the daughter as his bride. "The lost son" had been killed in honorable self-defence in the midst of great peril, and his opponent did not even know his name. Even when the mother learns the particulars concerning the death of her son, she places no hindrances on account of them in the way of the marriage, but bears alone, and without confiding her secret to a living mortal, the misfortune that has befallen her. Here, then, with the full accord of her character, a purely spiritual tie enters into the place of the ties of blood; the mother adopts as a son him through whose hand her own son has fallen; but in so doing she acts in harmony with the depths of her nature, and preserves her soul intact. It is the same in all cases where Heyse allows the personality, through considerations of duty, to repress a genuine passion, a deep love. Wherever this takes place (as in the drama "Marie Moroni," in the novelette "Die Pfadfinderin"--The Path-finder--or in the romance "Die Kinder der Welt") it is in order to maintain loyalty to self, in order not to forfeit the unity and healthfulness of the individual being, and duty may be seen to flow freely forth from the well-springs of one's own nature, inasmuch as the command not to be at variance with self is esteemed the highest law of duty. So far is Heyse removed from conceiving nature to be inimical to spirituality and duty.