I have only taken three coffee-cups of Burgundy, because I shall not perhaps need any more for the carnation and red crayon drawing of the afternoon--but O heavens! the night!--It is not my fault if it does not get to the ears of posterity, that most persons in the afternoon, on account of the heat, stayed out of the garden. But they see from the chambers the meadow, the timber-yard of a beautiful evening, where the children were already running round beforehand, carrying off the grass, and opening the feast of trumpets with horn-blowers on beer-siphons. It would be too trifling, if I should remark that several youngsters were stretched out dead by having red caps or crowns shot at them, because they represented hares, the cap-shooter the hunter, and the rest greyhounds; one can, however, take it metaphorically, and then it becomes satirical and edifying enough. The joy of tender natures is bashful; they would sooner show their wounds than their raptures, because they do not think to deserve either, or they stow both behind the veil of a tear. So was it with Victor, and in every joy he looked with a sigh to the west; I know not whether he thought of the setting of stars and of men, or of the blacks whose chains clank across even to our hemisphere, or on the nearer whites whose sundered chains they resolder with blood.----But this looking towards his _Keblah_[117] constrained him to _earn_ his rapture. That of yesterday and of to-day was so great, that he said with emotion to the genius of the earth: "Such greatness my feeble virtue cannot attain."--It availed him naught, that he sought to magnify himself to his conscience, and represented to it how many fair moments and happy pulsations he here in this _Valley of Seifersdorf_ imparts to his friends and to her, his friend, who through him regains her health, and to the children whom he sees already skipping about and who at evening will do so still more,--it had some effect on his conscience, but still not enough, when he asked it whether, then, he should stop his ears to the sphere-music of these days; whether he had not conquered his passions, and whether the enlargement of a man's sphere and the increase of his activity were not simply in proportion to the greater number of passions he had mastered; so that, accordingly, a maid of honor, nay, even a king, possessed no smaller circle of efficiency than the most useful citizen; and whether man, like very small children, had not been sent into the school of earth to learn to be _still_,--but the sacramental religious war between the old and the new Adam was ended merely by a delight, namely, by the determination, so soon as his father should release him from the manacles and ankle-fetters of the court, to do more cures than the city and country physicians and all _gratis_ and mostly among the poor.----