Poor Victor! the unhappy needs activity, as the happy needs repose; and yet thou wast compelled to look, with bound limbs, into the future, as into an approaching, distending storm.--Thou couldst neither suppress nor guide nor hasten it, and hadst not even the comfort of forging weapons for sorrow, and, like Samson, to express and--extinguish the convulsion of agony by shakings down of the pillars!--He could not even do anything for the imprisoned darling, whom he had plunged into a still greater anguish; for Flamin's sufferings brought back again into his bosom _friendship_ for him, though disguised in the domino of _philanthropy_. He must wait to see; but he could not guess whether his Lordship was coming or was living,--neither of which suppositions, in consequence of his silence and of the non-appearance of the fifth princely son, had much in its favor.--At last he came to be afraid of sleep, especially the afternoon nap; for slumber lays, to be sure, its summer night over our present as over a future. It draws two eyelids like the first bandage over the wounds of man, and with a little dream covers over a battle-field; but when it departs again with its mantle, then do the _hungry_ pangs pounce so much the more fiercely upon the naked man, amidst stings he starts up out of the more tranquil dream, and reason must begin over again the suspended cure, the forgotten consolation.--And yet--thou good Destiny!--thou didst still show our Victor a streak of evening-redness in his broad night-heaven; it was the hope of perhaps receiving from Clotilda, whom his heart no longer dared call his own, a letter from London.... I was going to close this chapter, first with the intelligence that the chapters come in, in ever-widening comprehensiveness of periods and lessenings of size,--which betokens the end of the story,--and afterward with the request that readers will not take it ill, if the personages therein play and speculate more and more romantically; misfortune makes romantic, not the biographer. But I by no means conclude,--even on account of the last request,--but rather prefer to freshen a little in the mind of the reader the image of the old, joyous Victor, of whom he will hardly any longer be able to conceive. It is an uncommonly fortunate incident that the dog, on the third Dog-Post-Day, handed in one or two facts, which I at the time entirely omitted. For that reason I can now unexpectedly state them. It must certainly give me and the reader the greatest pleasure, when my picture--which was even at that time quite finished--is hung up here on this page. The hiatus of the third chapter, wherein I paint Victor's arrival at the parsonage from Göttingen, reads, when filled out, thus:--