"We were torn from each other sleeping, Schoppe. That time has veiled itself, and remains so. Very wide awake will we be when we look on each other again. Of thee I know nothing; if Rabette does not write to me, I shall have to bear about with me and endure this burning impatience till our meeting in summer. Of myself what is there to write? I am changed even to my innermost being, and by an ingrasping giant-hand. When the sun passes over the zenith of countries, they all wrap themselves in a deep cloud; so am I now beneath the sun at its highest point, and I am also shrouded. How a man in Rome, in actual Rome, can merely enjoy and weakly melt away before the fire of art, instead of starting up red with shame, and striving and struggling for power and exploits, is what I cannot comprehend. In painted Rome, in the Rome of poetry, there laziness may luxuriate; but in the real Rome, where obelisks, Colosseum, Capitol, triumphal arches, incessantly behold and reproach thee,--where the history of ancient deeds, all day long, like an invisible storm-wind, sweeps and sounds through the city, and impels and lifts thee,--O, who can stretch himself out in inglorious ease and contemplation before the magnificent stirring of the world? The spirits of saints, of heroes, of artists, follow after the living man, and ask, indignantly, 'What art thou?' With far other feelings dost thou go down out of the Vatican of Raphael, and over the steps of the Capitol, than thou comest out of any German picture-gallery or antique cabinet. There thou seest, on all hills, old, eternal majesty. Even a Roman woman is, in shape and pride of stature, still related to her city. The dweller beyond the Tiber is a Spartan, and thou wilt no more find a Roman than a Jew stupid; whereas in Pestitz thou must become impatient with the very contrast of the mere form. Even the calm Dian maintains that the odious masks of the ancients look like the faces in the German streets, and their Fauns and other bestial gods like nobler court-faces, and that their copy-pictures of Alexander, of the philosophers, of the Roman tyrants, however pointedly and prosaically they stand out in contrast to their poetical statues of the gods, resemble the present ideals of the painters.