“It seems to me, O my God!” he says in his journal, “that everything swims and turns around me.  My soul grows darker and darker; my moral strength grows less instead of greater; I work and cannot achieve; walk towards my aim and do not reach it; exhaust myself, and do nothing great.  The days of life flee one after another; cares and uneasiness increase; I see no haven anywhere for our sacred German cause.  The end will be that we shall fall, for I myself waver.  O Lord and Father! protect me, save me, and lead me to that land from which we are for ever driven back by the indifference of wavering spirits.”

About this time a terrible event struck Sand to the heart; his friend Dittmar was drowned.  This is what he wrote in his diary on the very morning of the occurrence: 

“Oh, almighty God!  What is going to become of me?  For the last fortnight I have been drawn into disorder, and have not been able to compel myself to look fixedly either backward or forward in my life, so that from the 4th of June up to the present hour my journal has remained empty.  Yet every day I might have had occasion to praise Thee, O my God, but my soul is in anguish.  Lord, do not turn from me; the more are the obstacles the more need is there of strength.”

In the evening he added these few words to the lines that he had written in the morning:—­

“Desolation, despair, and death over my friend, over my very deeply loved Dittmar.”

This letter which he wrote to his family contains the account of the tragic event:—­

“You know that when my best friends, A., C., and Z., were gone, I became particularly intimate with my well-beloved Dittmar of Anspach; Dittmar, that is to say a true and worthy German, an evangelical Christian, something more, in short, than a man!  An angelic soul, always turned toward the good, serene, pious, and ready for action; he had come to live in a room next to mine in Professor Grunler’s house; we loved each other, upheld each other in our efforts, and, well or ill, bare our good or evil fortune in common.  On this last spring evening, after having worked in his room and having strengthened ourselves anew to resist all the torments of life and to advance towards the aim that we desired to attain; we went, about seven in the evening, to the baths of Redwitz.  A very black storm was rising in the sky, but only as yet appeared on the horizon.  E., who was with us, proposed to go home, but Dittmar persisted, saying that the canal was but a few steps away.  God permitted that it should not be I who replied with these fatal words.  So he went on.  The sunset was splendid:  I see it still; its violet clouds all fringed with gold, for I remember the smallest details of that evening.