Beside it, with the note “Original manuscript of Theodor Körner. Unpublished poem!” a much-yellowed sheet of coarse deckle-edged paper on which stand several stanzas with deletions and corrections: _Begeist’rung fasset mich mit heil’gem Glühn_ A holy ardor seizes me and fills me As the soft harmony of thy accent thrills me; A ravishment that all my soul entrances Is in thy glances. Upon thy breast would I, the world forgetting, My happy fortunes with the gods’ be setting. The goal of all my eagerness, love-drunken, In thee is sunken. Love brings Leander to a sweet undoing; It plunges [_illegible_[12]] into ruin. The fairest lot that heart has ever treasured To me is measured. With the hot turmoil of love’s rapturous madness Life’s sun ascends for me in cloudless gladness; The Horae’s endless light, the radiant morn, To me was born. For boldly in thy glances I might sun me; Thy image pours all ecstasies upon me; Grandest and most divine of women, thee, Thee I might see. Enamored youth! The poem did not receive its final polish nor its last stanzas, and was left unprinted; apparently it did not seem to him good enough to print. It was just dashed off in an hour of intoxicating happiness. He saw life ascending as a cloudless sun, in the radiance of youth, in the light of the Horae—and how soon an enemy’s bullet was to destroy this life! Can it be calculated how much of the beautiful and valuable that stupid bullet shot away from posterity? I turn more pages. There follows, from A. Anderssen, the great chess-player, a twenty-two-move game of chess; from G. Meyerbeer, the beginning of the overture to the tragedy _Struensee_. Then once more a verse with an illustrious signature: _Reines Herz gibt reinen Sinn_ Clean heart gives the man clean sight; In the pure eye clear and bright Mirrored lies the world. Clouded heart gives clouded eye, World and life and destiny All in darkness curled. Friedrich Rückert And another great poet writes for the album, _Und musst du denn, trotz Kraft und Mut_ If, spite of strength and courage good, The thorns your skin will tear, See to it only that your blood Does not the rose besmear. Friedrich Hebbel A historian too has his say: Priests place themselves between men and the Deity only as shadows: as when the eye takes to its help a smoked glass, to see the sun through this dull medium. Ferdinand Gregorovius Rome, February, 1865 Two French letters: