The sun was already looking into my window over the mountains when I awoke.  Was it the same sun which looked upon us the evening before with lingering gaze, like a departing friend, as if it would bless the union of our souls, and which set like a lost hope?  It shone upon me now, like a child which bursts into our room with beaming glance to wish us good morning on a joyful holiday.  And was I the same man who, only a few hours before, had thrown himself upon his bed, broken in body and spirit?  Immediately I felt once more the old life-courage and trust in God and myself, which quickened and animated my soul like the fresh morning, breeze.  What would become of man without sleep?  We know not where this nightly messenger leads us; and when he closes our eyes at night who can assure us that he will open them again in the morning—­that he will bring us to ourselves?  It required courage and faith for the first man to throw himself into the arms of this unknown friend; and were there not in our nature a certain helplessness which forces us to submission, and compels us to have faith in all things we are to believe, I doubt whether any man, notwithstanding all his weariness, could close his eyes of his own free will and enter into this unknown dream-land.  The very consciousness of our weakness and our weariness gives us faith in a higher power, and courage to resign ourselves to the beautiful system of the All, and we feel invigorated and refreshed when, in waking or in sleeping, we have loosened, even for a short time only, the chains which bind our Eternal Self to our temporal Ego.

What had appeared to me, only yesterday, dark as an evening cloud flying overhead, became instantly clear.  We belonged to one another, that I felt; be it as brother and sister, father and child, bridegroom and bride, we must remain together now and forever.  It only concerned us to find the right name for that which we in our stammering speech call Love.

  “Thy elder brother I would be,
  Thy father—­anything to thee.”

It was this “anything” for which a name must be found, for the world now recognizes nothing as nameless.  She had told me herself that she loved me with that pure all-human love, out of which springs all other love.  Her shuddering, her uneasiness, when I confessed my full love to her, were still incomprehensible to me, but it could no longer shatter my faith in our love.  Why should we desire to understand all that takes place in other human natures, when there is so much that is incomprehensible in our own?  After all, it is the inconceivable which generally captivates us, whether in nature, in man, or in our own breasts.  Men whom we understand, whose motives we see before us like an anatomical preparation, leave us cold, like the characters in most of our novels.  Nothing spoils our delight in life and men more than this ethic rationalism which insists upon clearing up everything, and illuminating every mystery of our