Coleridge's picture was another disillusionment, but not so great a shock, because I have loved him less. He was so rarely inspired. I don't think you need more than the fingers of one hand for the doing of sums with Coleridge's inspirations. Still, it saddened me to be told he was a helpless Psyche. I didn't like to hear about his cobwebs. I hated being forced to know of his weakness, of his wasted life growing steadily dingier the farther he travelled from that East that had seen him set out so bright with morning radiance. Really, the world would be a peaceful place if we could only keep quiet about each other's weak points. Why are we so restless till we have pulled down, belittled, besmudged? You'll say that without a little malice talk would grow very dull; you'll tell me it is the salt, the froth, the sparkle, the ginger in the ginger-beer, the mustard in the sandwich. But you must admit that it becomes only terrible when it can't leave the few truly great spirits alone, when it must somehow drag them down to our lower level, pointing out--in writing, so that posterity too shall have no illusions--the spots on the sun, the weak places in the armor, and pushing us, who want to be left alone praying in the fore-court of the temple, down the area steps into the kitchen. Two nights and two days have I spent feverishly with that book. I dare not hope that I shall forget it. I have never yet forgotten undesirable, bad things. Now, when I take my poets up with me into the forest, and sit on one of those dusky pine-grown slopes where the light is subdued to a mysterious gray-green and the world is quieted into a listening silence, and far away below the roofs of Jena glisten in the sun, and the white butterflies, like white flowers come to life, flutter after each other across the blue curtain of heat that hangs beyond the trees, now when I open them and begin to read the noble, familiar words, will not those other words, those anecdotes, those personal descriptions, those suggestions, those button-holings, leer at me between the lines? Shall I, straining my ears after the music, not be shown now for ever only the instrument, and how pitifully the ivory has come off the keys? Shall I, hungering after my spiritual food, not have pushed upon my notice, so that I am forced to look, the saucepan, tarnished and not quite clean, in which it was cooked? Please don't tell me you can't understand. Try to imagine yourself in my place. Come out of that gay world of yours where you are talking or being talked to all day long, and suppose yourself Rose-Marie Schmidt, alone in Jena, on a hill, with books. Suppose yourself for hours and hours every day of your life with nothing particular that you must do, that you have no shooting, no hunting, no newspapers, no novels. Suppose you are passionately fond of reading, and that of all reading you most love poetry. Suppose you have inherited from a mother who loved them as much