I cannot say how much I have been moved by the truth, the beautiful vitality, and the simple fulness of your work.  My agitation, it is true, is greater than it will be when I have completely mastered your subject, and that will be an important crisis in my intellectual life; but yet this agitation is the effect of the Beautiful and only of the Beautiful, and is merely the result of my reason not having yet been able to master my feelings.  I now quite understand what you meant by saying that it was the Beautiful, the True, that could often move you to tears.  Calm and deep, clear and yet incomprehensible, like nature, your work makes its influence felt; it stands there, and even the smallest secondary incident shows the beautiful equanimity from which all has emanated.

[Illustration:  SCHILLER RECITING FROM HIS WORKS TO HIS WEIMAR FRIENDS]

But I cannot, as yet, find words to describe these impressions, and, moreover, I must today confine myself to the Eighth Book.  How well you have succeeded in bringing the large and widely extended circle, the different attitudes and scenes of the events, so closely together again!  Your work may be compared to a beautiful planetary system; everything belongs together, and it is only the Italian figures which, like comets and as weirdly as they, connect the system with one that is more remote and larger.  Further, these figures, as also Marianna and Aurelia, run wholly out of this system again, and, after having merely served to produce a poetical movement in it, separate themselves from it as foreign individuals.  How beautifully conceived it is to derive what is practically monstrous and terribly pathetic in the fate of Mignon and the Harpist from what is theoretically monstrous, from the abortions of the understanding, so that nothing is thereby laid to the charge of pure and healthy nature!  Senseless superstition alone gives birth to such monstrous fates as pursue Mignon and the Harpist.  Even Aurelia’s ruin is but the result of her own unnaturalness, her masculine nature.  Toward Marianna alone could I accuse you of poetic selfishness.  I could almost say she has been made a sacrifice to the novel, as the nature of the case would not permit of her being saved.  Her fate, therefore, will ever draw forth bitter tears, while in the case of the three others the reader will gladly turn from what is individual to the idea of the whole.

Wilhelm’s false relationship to Theresa is admirably conceived, motivated, and worked out, and still more admirably turned to account.  Many a reader will at first be actually alarmed at it, for I can promise Theresa but few wellwishers; all the more beautiful is the way in which the reader is rescued from this state of uneasiness.  I cannot imagine how this false relation could have been dissolved more tenderly, more delicately, or more nobly.  How pleased Richardson and all his set would have been had you made a scene out of it and been highly indelicate in the display