Does not my enthusiasm, my mountain energy, make you groan with the deadly fatigue of him who has to listen and cannot share? I'll leave off. My letter is growing unbecomingly fat. The air up here is so bracing that my very unhappinesses seem after all full of zest, very vocal, healthy griefs, really almost enjoying themselves. I'll go back to my pots. I'm busy today, though you mightn't think it, making apple jelly out of our very own apples. I'll go back to my pots and forget--no, I won't make a feeble joke I was just going to make, because of what I know your face would look like when you read it. After all, I believe I'm more than a little bit frightened of you. Yours sincerely, ROSE-MARIE SCHMIDT. XLVII Galgenberg, Sept. 30th. Dear Mr. Anstruther,--How nice of you to be so kind, to write so consolingly, to be so patient in explaining where I am thinking wrong. I burned the book in the kitchen fire, and felt great satisfaction in clearing the house of its presence. You are right; I have no concern with the body of a poet--all my concern is with his soul, and the two shall be severely separated. I am glad you agree with me that poets should be anonymous, but you seem to have even less hope that they ever will be than I have. At least I pray that they may; you apparently take no steps whatever to bring it about. You say that experience teaches that we must not expect too much of gods; that the possible pangs of posterity often leave them cold; that they are blind to the merits of bushels, and discern neither honor nor profit in the use of those vessels of extinguishment; you fear that they will not change, and you exhort me to see to it that their weakness shall not be an occasion for my stumbling. That is very sensible advice. But before your kind letter came a few fresh autumn mornings had cleared a good deal of my first dejection away. If the gods won't hide themselves I can after all shut my eyes. If I may not rejoice in the divine in them with undistracted attention I will try at least to get all the warmth I can from its burning. And I can imitate my own dainty and diligent bees, and take care to be absorbed only in their honey. You make me ashamed of my folly in thinking I could never read Burns again now that I know about his sins. I did secretly think so. I was sure of it. I felt quite sick to see him tumbled from his altar into the mud. Your letter shows me that once again I have been foolish. Why, it has verged on idiocy. I myself have laughed at people in Jena, strictly pious people, who will not read Goethe, who have a personally vindictive feeling against him because of his different love-affairs, and I have listened astonished to the fury with which the proposal of a few universal-minded persons to give Heine a statue was opposed, and to the tone almost of hatred with which one man whenever his name is mentioned calls out _Schmutzfink_. About our poets I have been from the beginning quite sane. But yours were somehow