"Your honored father was still in London at the beginning of February, and had much _French_ correspondence; then he went off to Germany, and since that my mother knows nothing of his movements. May Destiny watch over his important life! Upon three oaths,[173] which his absence makes inviolable, hang many tears, many hearts, and, O God! a human life.--I enclose a leaf from your honored father, which he wrote at my mother's, and which contains a philosophy that makes my spirit and my prospects more and more sad. Ah, although you once said, neither the fear nor the hopes of man hit their mark, but always something else; still I have the mournful right to believe my apprehensions and all the dreams of anxiety, as I have hitherto been mistaken in nothing but in hope.--How insatiable is man!--But even though all should come true, and I should become too unhappy, still I should say, how could I now be too unhappy, had I not once been too happy?"---- You will readily forgive me, if I am silent about London, and about the impression which it might make on so _distrait_ a heart as mine. The active stir of freedom, and the glitter of luxury and of commerce, simply oppress a sorrowing soul, and do not make one more cheerful who was not cheerful before. Be happy, beloved native city, my heart said, be long and greatly happy, as I was in thee in my youth!--But then I love rather to hasten with my mother to her country-seat, where once three good children[174] so joyously bloomed, and there I am inexpressibly softened, and then I fancy myself happier here than among the happy. I only fancy it, I may well say: for when I contemplate there all the playthings of those good children, their task-books and their little clothes; when I seat myself under three cherry-trees planted close together, which they in play had set out in the child's garden, which was too narrow for them; and then when I think how on this stage they exercised and built up their hearts for a happier life than they have won, for a higher virtue than their relations allowed them, and for better society than they have found,--then am I sorely distressed, and then I feel as if I must weep and could say, I too was born in England, and was educated in Maienthal by Emanuel.