To all asceticism the healthy nature of this man, with his keen enjoyment of life, was a stranger, but for him the words “impulse” and “impulsiveness” had come to embody everything which transgresses the limits of an orderly and law-abiding life, everything which compels the rider, who should seek to govern his steed and guide it according to his will, to follow the animal instead wherever it may bear him. He at least knew how to compel the steed to submission. In England he seems to have shed warm heart’s blood in his effort to obtain the mastery over himself. There, where he found friendship, love, and the fullest inspiration, we often see him dissatisfied with himself, and hear him complain of “faint-heartedness and every sort of bondage.” (See page 100). He chiefly means here by “bondage” his faulty control over the powerful impulses of his nature, which he endeavors to subdue. Here he confesses to Bunsen (See page 127), that he daily feels he has not yet passed beyond the period of education. His vivacious wife was astonished, when he was a mature man, to behold him rule over himself with entire and sovereign power, and guide the ship of his and her life. She was often forced to give expression to what she felt at this sight. “Richard,” she says, “always the same, I always depressed or excited.” On one occasion she compares herself with her husband in a different way, and says: “It is very true that it is better and makes one’s path easier through life, to be so passionless. One does not hope for too much, one is not so timid, one is not so much troubled, one does not have to struggle so much. But that is the way I am made, and at the bottom, I would not even care to be so self-poised; if one has a harder struggle, one has also more ardor and heartfelt delight.” But the nature of this man cannot be called so perfectly self-poised, for he was as much beloved as a companion as he was esteemed as a scholar. He never showed in his manner the least trace of pedantry, and, as she herself had previously acknowledged, (See page 247) he gave himself up entirely and thoroughly to everything in which he engaged, whether it was social pleasures or the most serious affairs.