Poor, unfortunate man; doubly and trebly poor, because you have been doubly and trebly rich and happy before, in the fulness of your mental and physical strength, in the elasticity of your sanguine temper, nay even in the easy humor which bore you like a bird high over the greatest difficulties! Where is now your restless activity, which formerly made it impossible for you to sit still in one and the same place for any length of time, which induced you even at table frequently to change your place among your guests? Where is your sharp, penetrating mind, which used to solve the hardest problems as in play? Where your brilliant fancy, which threw even upon every-day occurrences a bewitching light? Where, above all, your Olympian cheerfulness, which made it so easy for you not to be angry or excited, but allowed you to fight at most with a humorous smile and satirical wit against the misery and wretchedness of life, against the stupidity and vulgarity of men? Where are the thousand arguments with which you often nearly overwhelmed the pessimist views of your friend Berger, when you tried to persuade him that this earth was by no means a vale of tears from the rising to the setting of the sun, but a wide, fair landscape, in which hill and dale, waste deserts and Elysian fields alternated very wisely, and that in most cases man was not only at liberty but even commanded to avoid the one and to enjoy the other? Have you all at once changed your views? Has a brutal blow of fate suddenly reduced you in the discussion to an _absurdum_? Has the pressure which weighs on your brain and paralyzes the elasticity of your mind transformed you all of a sudden from an optimist into a pessimist, so that you see the world and your own situation in dark colors, as you are counting the beats of your pulse mechanically, and sit there, rolled in a ball in your easy-chair, glaring in dull thoughts at the dying embers of the fire-place?