"If I have still a wish to form it is that your blissful betrothal-mood may be continued in marriage, that is, may you be like me, who feel every day of my life that I cannot be sufficiently thankful to God for my happiness." In another letter he thus pictures his private paradise: "Eating and sleeping, without dress coat, without piano, without visiting-cards, without carriage and horses, but with donkeys, with wild flowers, with music-paper and sketch-book, with Cécile and the children." Again, in 1844, he writes of a return home: "I found all my family well, and we had a joyful meeting. Cécile looks so well again,--tanned by the sun, but without the least trace of her former indisposition; my first glance told this when I came into the room, but to this day I cannot cease rejoicing afresh every time I look at her. The children are as brown as Moors, and play all day long in the garden. And so I am myself again now, and I take one of the sheets of paper that Cécile painted for me, to write to you. "I am sitting here at the open window, looking into the garden at the children, who are playing with their 'dear Johann.' The omnibus to Koenigstein passes here twice every day. We have early strawberries for breakfast, at two we dine, have supper at half-past eight in the evening, and by ten we are all asleep. The country is covered with pear-trees and apple-trees, so heavy with fruit that they are all propped up; then the blue hills, and the windings of the Main and the Rhine; the confectioner, from whom you can buy thread and shirt-buttons; the list of visitors, which comes out every Saturday, as _Punch_ does with you; the walking-post, who, before going to Frankfort, calls as he passes to ask what we want, and next day brings me my linen back; the women who sell cherries, with whom my little four-year-old Paul makes a bargain, or sends them away, just as he pleases; above all, the pure Rhenish air,--this is familiar to all, and I call it Germany!" Grove makes this sketch of the blissful circle: "The pleasure in his simple home life, which crops out now and then in these Frankfort letters, is very genuine and delightful. Now, Marie is learning the scale of C; he has actually forgotten how to play it, and has taught her to pass her thumb under the wrong finger! Now, Paul tumbles the others about so as to crack their skulls as well as his own. Another time he is dragged off from his letter to see a great tower which the children have built, and on which they have ranged all their slices of bread and jam--'A good idea for an architect,' At ten Carl comes to him for reading and sums, and at five for spelling and geography--and so on. 'And,' to sum up, 'the best part of every pleasure is gone if Cécile is not there,' His wife is always somewhere in the picture."