"Poor Sebastian!" said I, as I opened to-day's letter-bag, "before I get it open, I know already beforehand, that, after such a night, thou must have shut thyself up all day, to turn thy pale, exhausted face toward the garden of sorrow, that thou to-day lovest these poison-drops better than the vulnerary balsam, and that thou lookest into the glass to weep for this still, innocent form which it shows thee with its gashes, as if it were the form of a stranger.--Oh, when man has nothing more to love, he embraces the gravestone of his love, and sorrow becomes his loved one! Forgive one another the short delusion of mourning; for, among all the weaknesses of man, this is the most innocent, when, instead of soaring away like the bird of passage above winter, and flying to warmer zones, he sinks before it, and helplessly stiffens in his cold grief." Victor coffined himself, so to speak, that day in his chamber, which he opened to no one but a next-door neighbor of sorrows,--Marie,--whose form affected him as softly as an evening sun. Every other female face on the street gave him stings; and the brother of the lost Clotilda, whom he saw at the window, and to-day would gladly have embraced, lent to the remembrance which tears had dimmed, new colors.... Reader!--my female reader will be, of herself, more reasonable,--laugh not at my good hero, who _is_ none precisely where the strength of the soul becomes the strength of sorrow: at least, let me not hear it. Whoever has the sympathetic nerve of life--love--tied up or cut asunder, can well, if for no other reason, sigh and say, "Anything on earth can man lose more patiently than fellow-men." And yet at evening an accident--namely, a letter--made all his sorrows pass once more through his weary heart. A short letter from Emanuel--not, however, an answer to the one just sent to him--arrived. "My ever-loved one! "I have learned the day of thy entrance upon a new scene of tumultuous life, and I have said, 'May my beloved still continue happy! may the tranquillity of virtue wall in his heart as with a breast against the frosts and storms of his new life! may neither his sorrows nor his raptures be loud! may he mourn softly and silently as a princess in soft white! may he enjoy softly and silently, and in the temple of his heart may Pleasure play only as a noiseless fluttering butterfly in a church! and may Virtue float before him in the higher heaven above our sun, and warm and irradiate and gradually attract to herself his heart!'