But when he who found out so much affinity between his Whitsuntide-journey and that journey to the watering-place in the book, came at last with his agitated soul to the destruction of that Jerusalem; then, with the first sad sigh of to-day, he said: "O thou good Destiny, never lay such a sacrificial knife on the heart of my Clotilda; ah, I should die, if she became so unhappy as Beata."--And he further reflected how the ruddy morning clouds of hope are only high, hovering rain, and how often sorrow is the bitter kernel of rapture, like the golden Imperial Apple of the German Emperor, which, to be sure, weighs three marks and three ounces, but inwardly is filled up with earth.... By Heaven! we are here needlessly embittering with night-thoughts the holy evening, and none of us knows why he sighs so.--I assure the reader I have the whole Whitsuntide-festival before me in copy, and there is not a single misfortune there, unless Victor joins on a fourth Whitsuntide-day as after-summer, and in that there should something be developed. I confess I like to be an æsthetic _frère terrible_, and to point the sword at the breast of the world, which is reading deep into my Invisible (mother) Lodge, and play other like tricks,--but that comes from the fact that in youth one reads and owns the Sorrows of Werther, of which, like a mass-priest, one prepares a bloodless victim before one enters the Academy. Nay, if I this very day were composing a romance, I should--as the blue-coated Werther has in every young Amoroso and author a quasi-Christ who on Good-Friday puts on a similar crown of thorns, and ascends a cross--myself also do the same over again....