You are going through one of those tiresome soul-sicknesses that periodically overtake the too comfortable, and you must, apparently, tell somebody about it. Well, it is a form of _Weltschmerz,_ and only afflicts the well-fed. Pray do not suppose that I am insinuating that food is of undue interest to you; but it is true that if you did not have several meals a day and all of them too nice, if there were doubts about their regular recurrence, if, briefly, you were a washerwoman or a plough-boy, you would not have things the matter with your soul. Washerwomen and ploughboys do not have sick souls. Probably you will say they have no souls to be sick; but they have, you know. I imagine their souls thin and threadbare, stunted by cold and hunger, poor and pitiful, but certainly there. And I don't know that it is not a nicer sort of soul to have inside one's plodding body than an unwieldy, overgrown thing, chiefly water and air and lightly changeable stuff, so unsubstantial that it flops--forgive the word, but it does flop--on to other souls in search of sympathy and support and comfort and all the rest of the things washer-women waste no time looking for, because they know they wouldn't find them. You are a poet, and I do not take a youthful poet seriously; but if you were not I would laugh derisively at your comparing the entrance of my letters into your room at the Foreign Office to the bringing in of a bunch of cottage flowers still fresh with dew. I don't know that my pride does not rather demand a comparison to a bunch of hot-house flowers--a bouquet it would become then, wouldn't it?--or my romantic sense to a bunch of field flowers, wild, graceful, easily wearied things, that would not care at all for Foreign Offices. But I expect cottage is really the word. My letters conjure up homely visions, and I am sure the bunch you see is a tight posy of Sweet-Williams, with their homely cottage smell. It was charming of Matthew Arnold to let Sweet-Williams have such a nice line, but I don't think they quite deserve it. They have a dear little name and a dear little smell, but the things themselves might have been manufactured in a Berlin furniture shop where upholstery in plush prevails, instead of made in that sweetest corner of heaven from whence all good flowers come. Yours sincerely, ROSE-MARIE SCHMIDT. XXVIII Jena, April 26th.