I wish you could induce Cotta to pay for this manuscript at once; it could easily be calculated how many sheets it would print.  I have, it is true, no actual occasion to ask this, but it would look much better, would encourage energetic cooeperation, and also help in making the good name of the Horen better known.  A publisher has often enough to pay money in advance, so Cotta might surely once in a way pay upon the receipt of a manuscript.  Knebel wants the Elegies to be divided into three contributions; I, too, think this the right proportion, and we should thus have the first three numbers of next year’s Horen nicely adorned.  I will see to it that you get them in proper time.

Have you seen Stolberg’s abominable preface to his Platonic discourses?  The disclosures he there makes are so insipid and intolerable that I feel very much inclined to step out and chastise him.  It would be a very simple matter to hold up to view the senseless unreasonableness of this stupid set of people, if, in so doing, one had but a rational public on one’s side; this would at the same time be a declaration of war against that superficiality which it has now become necessary to combat in every department of learning.  The secret feuds of suppressing, misplacing, and misprinting, which it has carried on against us, have long deserved that this declaration should be held in honorable remembrance, and that continuously.

I find this doubly necessary and unavoidable in the case of my scientific works, which I am gradually getting into order.  I intend to speak out my mind pretty frankly against reviewers, journalists, collectors of magazines, and writers of abridgments, and, in a prelude or prolog, openly to declare myself against the public; in this instance, especially, I do not intend to allow any one’s opposition or reticence to pass.

What do you say, for instance, to Lichtenberg, with whom I have had some correspondence about the optical subjects we spoke of, and with whom, besides, I am on pretty good terms, not even mentioning my essays in his new edition of Erxleben’s Compendium, especially as a new edition of a compendium is surely issued in order to introduce the latest discoveries, and these gentlemen are usually quick enough in noting down everything in their interleaved books!  How many different ways there are of dispatching a work like this, even though it were but done in a passing manner I However, at the present moment, my cunning brains cannot think of any one of these ways.

I am, at present, very far from being in anything like an esthetic or sentimental mood, so what is to become of my poor novel?  Meanwhile, I am making use of my time as best I can, and my comfort is that, at so low an ebb, one may hope that the flood is about to return.

Your dear letter reached me safely, and I thank you for your sympathy, which I felt sure you would give me.  In such cases one hardly knows what is best to do—­to let grief take its natural course or to fortify oneself with the assistance which culture gives us.  If one determines to follow the latter course—­as I always do—­one feels better merely for the moment, and.  I have noticed that Nature always reasserts her rights in other ways.