In "Eckhart" and the "Runenberg" we have seen some of the moral trials which meet men on first starting into life. In the "Friends" we have the lighter kind of speculative. A very little philosophy serves to teach us how very unreal every thing is that passes before our eyes; how it all takes a colouring from our spirits; how the very same thing appears almost contradictory to different people, or to the same person in different moods; that we do not so much see things themselves, as our own image thrown into them. Accordingly, men begin to crave for a truer insight; they try to clear their intellect of the gauzy film of feeling, and see things as they are. Ludwig, a young indolent dreamer, full of all this kind of sentimental longing to be rid of sentimentality, is on his way to visit a sick friend. He sits down in the heat of the day under a tree to indulge in the pleasure of a little disconsolate reflection on his friend's melancholy letter, and insensibly falls off into a sleep, and dreams. At once he finds all the difficulties of the world solved for him, all his highest aspirations satisfied. The chasm that divides the worlds of sense and spirit is bridged over; his mind meets its true objects. The earth he despised he is now relieved from; the deceptions of nature all vanish; he sees things as they are; he is in the real world of truth and beauty; nothing is subjective any longer; he breathes a real genuine objectivity; all mortal weaknesses, and with them love, may not enter here; the phantoms of his childhood flit before him again, but no longer as they were; they are transfigured into the cold sublimity of Grecian goddesses. Alas! he is far from satisfied; after the first few days of rapture, he would gladly be on earth again. He wished to be as the gods; his wish is granted, and among the gods he cannot live. This cold world may be a very grand place, but it is not for such as him. Like Lessing's Phoenix, at first sight the dwellers here seem beautiful beyond all conception; the second glance shews that if a man will be like them he must be content to be the only one of his race, with none to love him and none that he can love. "He is like the spirits he can comprehend, not like them." The truth he sought, he finds he has left behind; the old earth is his true home; and men, be they what they will, are his brothers. His friend comes to meet him; but he does not know him again, because here for the first time he sees him as he is, while before he had only seen in him the image of himself. If this be truth, he is sick of it; he sighs for the deception again, if deception it was that had been so delightful; he wakes to find his vision but a dream, in the sweet reality of his friend's embrace.