Doctor Birkenhain greeted Oswald with due politeness, and then expressed his regret that he should have been deprived of the pleasure of making Doctor Braun's acquaintance, whom he had wished to congratulate upon having secured to himself a place among the first physicians of Germany by his admirable treatise on typhus. Then he added: "I have looked forward to your visit with the greatest interest, because I hope great things for Berger from the effect of your meeting with him. I know through Mr. Bemperlein, and also from Berger's own lips, that you are the most intimate friend, and, so to speak, the favorite, of the unfortunate man--that you were so at least before the breaking out of his disease. If anything can succeed in reviving once more the interest in life which has been almost entirely extinguished in Berger, it is love--not the universal love of mankind, which is only another kind of egotism, but the special love for a single individual, with whose joys and sorrows he can heartily sympathize. Love is the most vigorous of all feelings; it resists annihilation better than any other and outlives all others. The greatest psychologist who ever lived, and to whom we physicians are deeply indebted, Shakespeare, makes Lear say to the fool shortly before insanity overwhelms him: 'I have one part in my heart that's sorry yet for thee.' This one part of the heart is the sound part, where the cure must begin, and so it is with Berger. I beg, therefore, you will try to interest Berger by all means in your own fate. Tell him all about your plans and purposes, your hopes and your wishes--about your joys and your sorrows; speak to him especially of your griefs, if you have any--and you will pardon such an indiscretion in a physician--I think your confidences will be particularly ample in that direction. You smile! Well, perhaps I am mistaken, and what I thought I read in your face is the result of mere bodily uneasiness, and not of mental suffering; but, however that may be, do not conceal from Berger the shady side, and even the night side of your life. On the contrary, complain--and the more impressively, the more painfully, you can do that, the better--only mourn and grieve like a sick man, who longs after health like an imprisoned bird that yearns after freedom. The sufferings of those we love are a thousand times more touching to us than our own, and the burden which Berger hardly feels in his own case will appear to him unbearable when he sees it on the shoulders of one who is dear to him. For, I repeat it, that is the only way to approach such a man. He is too deep a thinker, too subtle a philosopher, not to be clad in impenetrable armor against all reasoning. If you prove to him the dignity and usefulness of life, he meets you with ten arguments which prove the contrary; and if you split a hair, he splits each half over again. On the other hand, you need not fear that he will involve you, as formerly, in long philosophic discussions.