Of course, not every one of these peculiar and silent characters is victorious in the strife with the hard, stubborn, conventional world, nor does their struggle for their highest good always lead to a tragic ending. Storm's eye rests too serenely and securely on the object; he is an artist filled with too deep a sympathy with life to deceive himself sentimentally about the fatal chain of human destiny, about guilt and error, about the secret relation between weakness and its results in life, about the places in the way which we cannot pass. He is a better, even a keener, realist than many who call themselves by that name, and has looked deeper into the eye of Nature than those who imagine that their microscope has laid bare to them every eyelid of the eternal mother.--From "Studien zur Litteratur der Gegenwart" (1895). THE RIDER ON THE WHITE HORSE What I am about to tell I learned nearly half a century ago in the house of my great-grandmother, old Madame Fedderson, widow of the senator, while I was sitting beside her armchair, busy reading a magazine bound in blue pasteboard--I don't remember whether it was a copy of the "Leipzig" or of "Pappes Hamburger Lesefruechte." I still remember with a shudder how meanwhile the light hand of the past eighty-year-old woman glided tenderly over the hair of her great-grandson. She herself and her time are buried long ago. In vain have I searched for that magazine, and therefore I am even less able to vouch for the truth of the statements in it than I am to defend them if anyone should question them; but of so much I can assure anyone, that since that time they have never been forgotten, even though no outer incident has revived them in my memory.