He waited but she did not return. He called at the same place the next day and the next but she did not appear. Each new love was a first love to him, only it lashed his soul with greater fury. Ah! the shades of the past, they were nothing more than a memory to him now. The wilted flower of yesterday is always forgotten when the perfume of the living one is wafted into our nostrils. No one was like Miriam. There never was any other woman as sweet as Miriam. His whole being yearned for her. Hedwiga, Hilda, Eugenie—they were all fancies—but Miriam—everything swam before his feverish eyes as he thought of her. Nothing in life mattered any more—nothing! He tried to see her at her home—to tell her parents of his love for their daughter, but the rabbi, like Eugenie’s father, shut the door in his face. He suddenly awoke from his poet’s dream. He saw nothing but abject misery around him. He could no longer share in his host’s gayety. IV. He curtailed his visit and returned to Berlin heavy of heart, saddened beyond endurance. His short-lived romance intensified his bitterness against the rulers of Poland. He hurried to Rahel. He knew no one would understand his present woe as well as that all-wise woman. She was not only his literary critic but also his priestess, to whom he confessed everything. And with that sage smile on her refined intellectual features she knew how to console, how to tender sympathy, and listened with genuine concern. He buried himself in work again but he could not forget his love for Miriam and with it came the depressing memory of Poland. All his innate slumbering passions for justice, for liberty, were aroused to a white heat. Unlike Balaam of old, he had gone to Poland to bless and returned cursing. Why should he care for personal friendships? Why think of selfish advantage? Why consider what a hypocritical society might call poor manners? Like the seers of old he was bidden to speak, and he seized his pen and told the truth as he saw it regardless of all consequences. This essay was the first gun that he fired in the liberation of the _Junker_-ridden people. For his caustic utterances not only revealed the tyranny of the Polish nobles but also silhouetted the hideous forms of the _Junkers_; the censor who had pruned away every trace of humor from the article, unwittingly failed to strike out a sentence fraught with danger.