"Cherished by me, as my own immortal Sophia, will be the friendship, the assiduity with which you strove to render her last days serene. Sophia still treasures your kindnesses with the warmest gratitude, and I have felt a silent impulse to express to you this gratitude, united with my own. You will pardon it to my love, when I tell you, that your attention to Sophia's wishes, and that half year's residence with her, now first has made you really dear to me.... I must cling to the past, as I have nothing more to expect from the future. Farewell, and be happier than Your friend, HARDENBERG." But how soon does his grief become holy, and therefore a joy! The letter is chiefly valuable as an introduction to the third Hymn to the Night:-- "Once as I shed bitter tears, when my hope dissolved into pain flowed away, and I stood alone by the barren hillock, which hid in a dark, narrow space the form of my life; alone, as none had been before, driven by unspeakable anguish, powerless, nothing left but a thought of misery;--as I then looked about after aid, could neither move forward nor backward, but clung to a fleeting, extinguished life, with infinite longing,--then came from the blue distance, from the heights of my old blessedness, a breath as of twilight, and at once the tie of birth, the chain of Light, was rent asunder. Away flew the glory of earth, and with it my sorrow; the sadness rushed together into a new, unfathomable world; thou, Night's-inspiration, slumber of heaven, camest over me. Gently the scene rose aloft; above it floated my unfettered, new-born Spirit The hillock became a dust-cloud, and through it I saw the transfigured features of my Beloved. Eternity lay in her eyes; I grasped her hands, and the tears became a glittering, indissoluble tie. Thousands of years flew away in the distance, like tempest-clouds. Upon her neck I wept enrapturing tears at the thought of this new life.--It was the first and only dream, and since then do I feel an eternal, unchangeable faith in the heaven of Night, and its Sun my Beloved." Such is the melting tenderness, which is a chief element of his poetry, such the cunning drug that embalms his genius! FOOTNOTES: [Footnote 1: Mährchen.] [Footnote 2: _Mutter_ or _Metallmutter_ is the gang or matrix that contains the ore.] [Footnote 3: _Mährchen._] [Footnote 4: _Bacchischen Wehmuth_; the sadness that drives to dissipation, not the Elysium of the morning after.]