"Ah!" cried Ilse, "that is a view of earthly life which is only possible to those who do great things, and in whom later times will take an interest; my blood runs cold at the thought. Are men, then, only like flowers and weeds, and a nation like a great meadow, and what remains, when they are mowed down by time, only useful hay, for later generations? Surely all that once existed and all existing at present have lived also for themselves, and for those whom they have loved, for wife and children and friends, and they were something more than ciphers among millions; something more than leaves on an enormous tree. Though their existence is so insignificant and useless that you can perceive no trace of their work, yet the life and the soul of the beggar and the life and the soul of my poor invalid in the village are guarded by a power which is greater than your great net that is woven of the souls of men." She arose and gazed anxiously into her husband's face. "Bow your human pride before a power that you do not understand." The scholar looked at his wife with deep solicitude. "I do bow humbly before the thought that the great unity of human beings on this earth is not the highest power of life. The only difference between you and me is, that my mind is accustomed to hold intercourse With the higher powers of earth. They are to me revelations so holy and worthy of reverence, that I best love to seek the Eternal and Incomprehensible by this path. You are accustomed to find the inscrutable in the conceptions which have been impressed on your mind through pious traditions; and I again repeat what I before said, your faith and yearnings arise from the same source as mine, and we seek the same light, though in different ways. What the Gods, and also the Angels and Archangels were to the faith of earlier generations--higher powers which, as messengers of the Highest, hovered about and influenced the lives of men--the great intellectual unity of nations and mankind are in another sense to us, personalities which endure and yet pass away, though according to different laws from what individual men do. My endeavour to understand these laws is one form of my piety. You yourself will gradually learn to appreciate the modest and elevating conceptions of the holy sphere in which I live. You also will gradually discover that your faith and mine are about the same." "No," cried Ilse, "I see only one thing, a great gulf which divides my thoughts from yours. Oh, deliver me from the anguish which tortures me in my concern for your soul." "I cannot do it, nor can it be done in a day. It can only be done by our own lives, by thousands of impressions and by thousands of days, in which you will become accustomed to look upon the world as I do."