It appeared that when Prince Otto met me after my interview with Prince Ernest, he did his best to provoke a rencontre, and failing to get anything but a nod from my stunned head, betook himself to my University.  A friendly young fellow there, Eckart vom Hof, offered to fight him on my behalf, should I think proper to refuse.  Eckart and two or three others made a spirited stand against the aristocratic party siding with Prince Otto, whose case was that I had played him a dishonourable trick to laugh at him.  I had, in truth, persuaded him to relieve me at once of horse and rival at the moment when he was suffering the tortures of a rejection, and I was rushing to take the hand he coveted; I was so far guilty.  But to how great a degree guiltless, how could I possibly explain to the satisfaction of an angry man?  I had the vision of him leaping on the horse, while I perused his challenge; saw him fix to the saddle and smile hard, and away to do me of all services the last he would have performed wittingly.  The situation was exactly of a sort for one of his German phantasy-writers to image the forest jeering at him as he flew, blind, deaf, and unreasonable, vehement for one fierce draught of speed.  We are all dogged by the humour of following events when we start on a wind of passion.  I could almost fancy myself an accomplice.  I realized the scene with such intensity in the light running at his heels:  it may be quite true that I laughed in the hearing of his messenger as I folded up the letter.  That was the man’s report.  I am not commonly one to be forgetful of due observances.

The prospect of the possible eternal separation from my beloved pricked my mechanical wits and set them tracing the consequent line by which I had been brought to this pass as to a natural result.  Had not my father succeeded in inspiring the idea that I was something more than something?  The tendency of young men is to conceive it for themselves without assistance; a prolonged puff from the breath of another is nearly sure to make them mad as kings, and not so pardonably.

I see that I might have acted wisely, and did not; but that is a speculation taken apart from my capabilities.  If a man’s fate were as a forbidden fruit, detached from him, and in front of him, he might hesitate fortunately before plucking it; but, as most of us are aware, the vital half of it lies in the seed-paths he has traversed.  We are sons of yesterday, not of the morning.  The past is our mortal mother, no dead thing.  Our future constantly reflects her to the soul.  Nor is it ever the new man of to-day which grasps his fortune, good or ill.  We are pushed to it by the hundreds of days we have buried, eager ghosts.  And if you have not the habit of taking counsel with them, you are but an instrument in their hands.

My English tongue admonishes me that I have fallen upon a tone resembling one who uplifts the finger of piety in a salon of conversation.  A man’s review of the course of his life grows for a moment stringently serious when he beholds the stream first broadening perchance under the light interpenetrating mine just now.