My wish, dear Chamisso, is merely to submit myself to thy judgment, not to endeavor to bias it.  I have long passed the severest sentence on myself, for I have nourished the tormenting worm in my heart.  It hovered during this solemn moment of my life incessantly before my soul, and I could only lift my eyes to it with a doubting glance, with humility and contrition.  Dear friend, he who in levity only sets his foot out of the right road, is unawares conducted into other paths, which draw him downward and ever downward; he then sees in vain the guiding stars glitter in heaven; there remains to him no choice; he must descend unpausingly the declivity and become a voluntary sacrifice to Nemesis.  After the hasty false step which had laid the curse upon me, I had, sinning through love, forced myself into the fortunes of another being, and what remained for me but that, where I had sowed destruction, where speedy salvation was demanded of me, I should blindly rush forward to the rescue?—­for the last hour struck!  Think not so meanly of me, my Adelbert, as to imagine that I should have regarded any price that was demanded as too high, that I should have begrudged anything that was mine even more than my gold.  No, Adelbert! but my soul was possessed with the most unconquerable hatred of this mysterious sneaker along crooked paths.  I might do him injustice, but every degree of association with him revolted me.  And here stepped forth, as so frequently in my life, and as in general so often in the history of the world, an event instead of an action.  Since then I have achieved reconciliation with myself.  I have learned, in the first place, to reverence necessity; and what is more than the action performed, the event accomplished—­her propriety.  Then I have learned to venerate this necessity as a wise Providence, which lives through that great collective machine in which we officiate simply as cooeperating, impelling, and impelled wheels.  What shall be, must be; what should be, happened, and not without that Providence, which I ultimately learned to reverence in my own fate and in the fate of those on whom mine thus impinged.

I know not whether I shall ascribe it to the excitement of my soul under the impulse of such mighty sensations; or to the exhaustion of my physical strength, which during the last days such unwonted privations had enfeebled; or whether, finally, to the desolating commotion which the presence of this gray fiend excited in my whole nature—­be that as it may, as I was on the point of signing I fell into a deep swoon and lay a long time as in the arms of death.