be conquered, can still banish them for a long time from one's actions, willing rather to fall into an economical improvidence than into the heavy sin against the Holy Spirit in man. This firm confidence is easier to deserve than to have. In the noisy foundery and mill of the city he felt as if in a dreary forest. Accustomed as he was to tender souls, the city ones appeared to him all so thorny and unpolished; for love had, like tragedy, purified his passions in exciting them. All hung over so ruinous and moss-grown as if on the verge of a collapse, whereas the clean mirror-walls of Maienthal rose firm and radiant. For love is the only thing which fills the heart of man to the brim, although with a nectar-foam that soon sinks again; it alone composes a poem of some thousand minutes without the rattling repetitions of the letter R, as the Dominican Cardone[139] executed a poem upon it quite as long under the name _L' R_-- _sbadita_[140] without a single R,--hence, like crabs, it is finest in the months without an R in their name. The first thing he had to do in Flachsenfingen was to write to Clotilda. For as the Evangelist Matthieu would now in all probability go out into all the world and preach the gospel of the pistol-duel between the two friends to all people, there was nothing else to do for the sacred reputation of his beloved than to transform her into a betrothed by a publicly declared engagement. Flamin's newly kindled passion could not be considered at all in comparison with Clotilda's justification. The exclamation, "Thou art my brother," which the convulsions of anguish had wrung from Clotilda, had of course been incomprehensible to Flamin, and had fallen unheeded on his ear; but for the listening Mat it had become a grand text and _dictum probans_ of his doctrinal system respecting their being brother and sister.--In the letter, therefore, Victor besought his friend for a tacit assent to his suit; he left it to her, by his silence, to guess the most disinterested motives of his prayer.