Had I or any one else been lying in wait behind a bush or in a narrow pass, and had we darted out in the nick of time, we might have taken away the two letters, sealed up one into the other, which Victor was sending to Maienthal, from the hands of the messenger, who understood no German, namely, his Italian servant. The letter to Emanuel was the wrapper of the letter to Clotilda,--friendship is always the envelope of love. Of the wrapper I will give only an extract before I communicate in full the letter to Clotilda. He begged his Emanuel to take this only as a letter-cover, and to hand the enclosed to Clotilda alone;--he told him without further explanation he was held not by his own wishes, but by flowery chains which drew him back from the other chains of flowers in Maienthal, and that a manifold fettering with garlands was something one _could_ not break through, because one _would_ not,--he was intentionally obscure in regard to his new connection with Clotilda, because he could not presume upon her permission of the contrary;--he playfully begged his friend to beg his lady-friend to command him to make the journey to Flachsenfingen, that they might get a sight of each other,--(I lose my way in this period if I show the design of this way of putting the thing);--he erased again in his head the question, whether Clotilda still needed the physician, merely because he was one for her in a double sense, and only asked whether she had recovered.--Finally he concluded thus:-- "And thus then I flutter with tolerably dusted butterfly's[59] wings in the immense temple which to our butterfly[60] eyes breaks up into smaller ones, and the leafy ornaments of whose columns we take for the columns themselves, and whose rows of pillars become invisible from their greatness; there flutters the human butterfly[61] up and down,--strikes against windows,--rows through dusty cobwebs,--flaps his wings at last around a hollow flower,--and the great organ-tone of the eternal harmony tosses him about with merely a _dumb_, rising and falling tempest, which is too great for a mortal ear.