"And you felt no liking for him?" "Just a very little liking, I do not deny it; he paid me attentions, people remarked it, and often threw us together in society; it flattered me, as he was accounted the ornament and pride of those circles, and he gazed at me with fervid eyes as though he felt a deep passion for me, but he looked at all the world with the same eyes, and when I recognised that, he became indifferent to me." "He has the eye and heart of a poet! Such a heart yearns to possess everything beautiful that it looks upon as its own heaven-bestowed property; it is dangerous and fatal to win a poet's evanescent passion--he only gives it durability in his works, not in his life. How many blossoms of beautiful emotions has Goethe plucked, as it were, in passing by; to how many women's hearts did his wanderings bring death, like the approach of the inapproachable. That does not suit us inferior mortals! And even if in the extravagance of youth, we do yield ourselves up to such poetical paroxysms, we must soon learn to control ourselves, for we not only leave desolate the lives of others, like that poet, but also our own, as we are unable to cast imperishable creations into the other scale." Eva looked questioningly at him with her large eyes. "Let us sit down upon the grassy mound, among the blue-bells, they ring in spring, perhaps also for me; it was here I found my campanula." Eva stood hesitatingly; he drew her down beside himself upon the sward. "The girl that asks for feelings fresh as morn, must reject the man--reject him decidedly--who, after abundant experiences in far-off lands, returns to his home. My life is an Odyssey. I have suffered many shipwrecks; many a Calypso has bound me in her fetters, yet no Penelope awaits the home-comer, he has first to seek her." Eva did not venture to look up, and plucked the blue flowers while he continued-- "Yet what are whirlpools and ocean wonders, the magicians and nymphs of other days--what all the harsh and sweet dangers of those seas which Homer's sun has illuminated for evermore, compared with the shoals and abysses which menace the bold traveller of the present time? To-day there is no Odyssey in which a vein of Faust would not be concealed, a struggle to fathom the world and life. And how wonderfully at this great turning-point of the period in which we are born, all truths and all delusions play into one another! And while still at home I succumbed to these perils! I saw how the old faith clung convulsively to the standard of the world's renunciation, in that religious enthusiasm which then held its sway over me, I joined it; yet beauty, which we learn to despise, passion, which we should renounce by oath, gained the victory within me over that belief. They all played a daring game, I succumbed to it, and I was not the only one; it was the first great step astray in my life."