"Ought I to hide it from thee, when griefs or follies unman me? Ought I to show thee the faults I have repented of, and never my present ones? No, come hither, dear one, to my wounded breast! I will lay open to thee the heart therein, let it bleed and beat under the exposure as it will. Thou wilt, perhaps, still cover it up again with thy fatherly love, and say, 'I love thee still.' "Thou, my Emanuel, reposest in thy lofty solitude, on the Ararat of the saved soul, on the Tabor of the shining One: there thou gazest, softly dazzled, into the sun of Deity, and seest calmly the cloud of death swim in over the sun; it veils the orb: thou growest blind under the cloud; it melts away, and again thou standest before God. Thou lovest men as children who cannot offend,--thou lovest earthly enjoyments as fruits, which one plucks for refreshment, but without hungering for them; the storms and earthquakes of life pass by thee unheard, because thou liest in a life-dream full of tones, full of songs, full of meadows,--and when death awakes thee, thou art still smiling over the bright dream. "But, ah! more than one tempest thunders into the life's-dream of the rest of us, and makes it distressful. If a higher being could enter into the hurly-burly of ideas which encompasses our spirit, and from which it must draw its breath, as we breathe in an air composed of all kinds of gases poured together,--if he were to see what kinds of nutriment pass through our inner man, from which it has to extract its chyle: that medley of comic operas,--Bayle's Dictionaries,--concerts of Mozart,--Messiahs,--military operations,--Goethe's poems,--Kant's writings,--table-talks,--lunar observations,--vices and virtues,--men and sicknesses and sciences of all sorts:--if the Being should examine this _olla-podrida_ of life, would he not be curious to know what heterogeneous and mutually repulsive juices thereby run together in the poor soul, and would he not wonder that anything settled and uniform is left as a residuum in man? Ah, Emanuel! if thy friend is now in a fine banquet-hall, now in a garden, now in an opera-box, now under the great night-heavens, now in the presence of a coquette, and now before thee,--surely, this ambiguous alternation of scenes must bring him sorrows, and perhaps leave stains.... "No, I will not deceive my Emanuel----O, are, then, the trifles and the pebbles of this life worth our choosing crooked paths to avoid them, as the sapping-caterpillar submits to winding courses through the twig-work of its leaf? No, all that I have said is true; but I should not have said it, had not other sorrows led me to speak of these also; and yet, thou innocently, simple-heartedly, sublimely trusting teacher, thou wouldst have believed me! Ah, thou hast too good an opinion of me!... O, it is a long and weary step from admiration to imitation! But now look into my open heart!