Even this first meeting had carried the day with her. The next Sunday she could not help thinking of him during the sermon, and when she visited him with several of her relations, amongst whom there were some young ladies, to inspect the curiosities which he had brought with him from the Orient, her young heart was not only disturbed, but deeply troubled, because he seemed to have paid more attention to her sister than to her, and she already loved him. The following day put an end to her anxiety. It was a Palm Sunday, and that evening he wrote in his term-calendar “To-day the palm of life is won,” while, at a later hour, she confided to her diary the rejoicings of her heart. She prefaced the sentences with which she gave expression to her rapture by Chamisso-Schubert’s “I cannot understand it, I cannot believe it.” She continues: “God, my God, how shall I thank thee for this unutterable bliss! No, it is too great and too much, my Heavenly Father. ‘Beloved!’ Beloved by him! My heart is full, but I cannot write! My soul rejoices in the thought; Beloved by him! But how can I prove myself worthy of him?” The letters which he wrote to Elizabeth also lie before us, and it is not without deep emotion that we read these beautiful effusions of tender passion from the profoundly touched heart of a man to whom we had been accustomed to look up as an earnest teacher, and the dignified senior master of our science. Here we see him succumb with lovable weakness to a beautiful human emotion. The passion for his “Lilli” compensates him for the magic of the East, which he had felt so deeply a short time before, and he calls her his “Shulamite” and his “Rose of Sharon.” Yet even in the bonds of love he preserves the fundamental instincts of his soul, and he writes to her: “Often and earnestly do I ask myself, my dear Lilli, whether it is not after all ignoble selfishness, when I feel such intense bliss in your devoted love, and in the consciousness that I have won you, so ardently beloved a spirit, for my own. But then again I feel that through your love all that is good in me is helped and strengthened, and I become capable of a higher and purer love towards God and our fellow beings, and then it seems as if it could not be wrong to desire such a relation with all the strength of one’s soul; as if this happiness were our vocation, seldom however to be attained untroubled, and never entirely unalloyed, upon this earth. Oh, my Lilli, what a rare and rich life would lie before us if the thoughts which we have exchanged in our letters should one day become an actual living reality, not only in word but in deed.”