I understand now your preference for country life, I like you for it and feel as you do about it.  I can no longer endure to see these ungainly masses of everything that is corrupt and diseased in mankind; and when I think about them in a general way they seem to me like wild animals bound by a chain, so that they cannot even vent their rage freely.  In the country, people can live side by side without offensively crowding one another.  If everything were as it ought to be, beautiful mansions and cosy cottages would there adorn the green earth, as do the fresh shrubs and flowers, and create a garden worthy of the gods.

To be sure we shall find in the country the vulgarity that prevails everywhere.  There ought really to be only two social classes, the culturing and the cultured, the masculine and the feminine; instead of all artificial society, there should be a grand marriage of these two classes and universal brotherhood of all individuals.  In place of that we see a vast amount of coarseness and, as an insignificant exception, a few who are perverted by a wrong education.  But in the open air the one thing which is beautiful and good cannot be suppressed by the bad masses and their show of omnipotence.

Do you know what period of our love seems to me particularly beautiful?  To be sure, it is all beautiful and pure in my memory, and I even think of the first days with a sort of melancholy delight.  But to me the most cherished period of all is the last few days, when we were living together on the estate.  Another reason for living again in the country.

One thing more.  Do not have the grapevines trimmed too close.  I say this only because you thought they were growing too fast and luxuriantly, and because it might occur to you to want a perfectly clear view of the house on all sides.  Also the green grass-plot must stay as it is; that is where the baby is to crawl and play and roll about.

Is it not true that the pain my sad letter caused you is now entirely compensated?  In the midst of all these giddy joys and hopes I can no longer torment myself with care.  You yourself suffered no greater pain from it than I. But what does that matter, if you love me, really love me in your very heart, without any reservation of alien thought?  What pain were worth mentioning when we gain by it a deeper and more fervid consciousness of our love?  And so, I am sure, you feel about it too.  Everything I am telling you, you knew long ago.  There is absolutely no delight, no love in me, the cause of which does not lie concealed somewhere in the depths of your being, you everlastingly blessed creature!

Misunderstandings are sometimes good, in that they lead us to talk of what is holiest.  The differences that now and then seem to arise are not in us, not in either of us; they are merely between us and on the surface, and I hope you will take this occasion to drive them off and away from you.