She had sought once more, on Christmas eve, 1869, to win him over to the charms of that pious faith in miracles which filled her own soul, and to lead him to that fountain “whence alone flowed strength and happiness for her.” He answered her that she should not desire impossibilities, and should hold to that which was good in him, as he gladly contented himself with the many things that were excellent in her. Thereupon she wrote, “Truth and uprightness are family virtues of the Lepsius race. They have usually serene and well disposed natures, noble minds, which despise everything that is trivial, and a strong sense of honor. Richard adds to these a disposition to mediate and reconcile which makes him greatly beloved. Intelligence and clear sobriety of thought prevail among all the brothers and sisters. Richard has attained self-control and moderation amongst the manifold relations of life, and to this his prudence and his knowledge have added. Vain he is not; in short an _homme comme il faut_. At every moment he does what he thinks right, and therefore never has anything to repent of, (he once told me so himself.)” She then calls his character a well-regulated and symmetrical one, with a prevailing intellectual tendency, and, (we repeat), she exclaims after a married life of four and twenty years, and speaking with irritation, “If there were even any positive faults that I had to bear in Richard--but there are no faults, he has none, it is only community of faith which I miss.” In this analysis of his character there are certainly many words of warm appreciation, and indeed his uprightness was such that every judgment, every expression of opinion which we hear him utter either publicly or in writing to his acquaintances, corresponds exactly to what is contained in confidential letters to his family, and the memoranda intended for himself alone. But his own wife sees in him only the well-meaning, faultless and stainless man of intellect, and forgets that for him, too, there must have been a time when he had to strive against those impulses and emotions to which few men are strangers. Regarding this conflict he had written to her in former years a beautiful and perfectly unreserved letter.