In the house (which stands on a corner) my great resource when time hangs heavy on my hands is to sit in the window and examine my neighbors. The houses are all four stories high and composed of separate flats, as in Paris. I live in the 3me. Diagonally opposite is a young ladies' boarding-school where the _young_ ladies, very young they are, are wont to relax from their studies by kissing their hands, etc., etc., etc., to a young English lout, who has been here in the house, and myself. Said lout left for England yesterday, for which I heartily thank him, and I shall now monopolize the attention of the school. We rather _had_ them, for we had a telescope to observe them by. Not one was good-looking. There has, however, lately arisen in the Christian Strasse, just under my window, a most ravishing apparition, and I begin to think my heart will not wither wholly away. About eighteen, hair like night, and _such_ eyes! Their mute-appealing, love-lorn look goes through and through me. Every day for the last week, after dinner, have I sat in my window and she in hers. I with the telescope! she with those eyes! and we communing with each other!! I will try to make a likeness of her and send with this letter, but I may not succeed.[36] She has only one defect, which is the length of her nose. If that were only an inch and a half shorter, I should propose at once to her Mother for it; but religious difference might intervene, so it is better as it is. I am expecting T. S. Perry any day now, you may imagine how impatiently.... Tell Harry I have been reading some essays by Fr. Theod. Vischer, the _bedeutende Esthetiker_, on Strauss, on Goethe's "Faust" and its critics, etc., etc., which have much interested me. He is a splendid writer for style and matter--as brilliant as any of the non-absolutely-harlequin Frenchmen. The foundation of the thought is, or at least appears to be to my untutored mind, Hegelian; but they were published in 1844 and he may have changed. His "Aesthetik" henceforward appears in the list of "books which I must some day read." Some of the commentaries there quoted on "Faust" are incredibly monstrous for ponderous imbecility and seeing everything in the universe and out of it, except the point. I read this morning an Essay of Kuno Fischer's on Lessing's "Nathan"--one of the parasitic and analytic sort on the whole, but still very readable. The way these cusses slip so fluently off into the "Ideal," the "Jenseitige," the "Inner," etc., etc., and undertake to give a _logical_ explanation of everything which is so palpably trumped up _after_ the facts, and the reasoning of which is so grotesquely incapable of going an inch into the future, is both disgusting and disheartening. You never saw such a mania for going deep into the bowels of truth, with such an absolute lack of intuition and perception of the skin thereof. To hear the grass grow from morn till night is their happy occupation.