Yes, something might certainly be done with it.  I soon mastered it completely, but gradually the relation changed and it mastered me, gave me no rest, and forced me to try upon it the poetic power so long condemned to rest.

When I set to work I was not permitted to leave the house in the evening.  Was it disloyal to science if I dedicated to poesy the hours which others called leisure time?  The question was put to the inner judge in such a way that he could not fail to say “No.”  I also tried successfully to convince myself that I merely essayed to write this tale to make the material I had gathered “live,” and bring the persons and conditions of the period whose history I wished to write as near to me as if I were conversing with them and dwelling in their midst.  How often I repeated to myself this well-founded apology, but in truth every instinct of my nature impelled me to write, and at this very time Moritz Hartmann was also urging me in his letters, while Mieczyslaw and others, even my mother, encouraged me.

I began because I could not help it, and probably scarcely any work ever stood more clearly arranged, down to the smallest detail, in its creator’s imagination, than the Egyptian Princess in mine when I took up my pen.  Only the first volume originally contained much more Egyptian material, and the third I lengthened beyond my primary intention.  Many notes of that time I was unwilling to leave unused and, though the details are not uninteresting, their abundance certainly impairs the effect of the whole.

As for the characters, most of them were familiar.

How many of my mother’s traits the beautiful, dignified Rhodopis possessed!  King Amasis was Frederick William IV, the Greek Phanes resembled President Seiffart.  Nitetis, too, I knew.  I had often jested with Atossa, and Sappho was a combination of my charming Frankfort cousin Betsy, with whom I spent such delightful days in Rippoldsau, and lovely Lina von Adelsson.  Like the characters in the works of the greatest of writers—­I mean Goethe—­not one of mine was wholly invented, but neither was any an accurate portrait of the model.

I by no means concealed from myself the difficulties with which I had to contend or the doubts the critics would express, but this troubled me very little.  I was writing the book only for myself and my mother, who liked to hear every chapter read as it was finished.  I often thought that this novel might perhaps share the fate of my Poem of the World, and find its way into the fire.

No matter.  The greatest success could afford me no higher pleasure than the creative labour.  Those were happy evenings when, wholly lifted out of myself, I lived in a totally different world, and, like a god, directed the destinies of the persons who were my creatures.  The love scenes between Bartja and Sappho I did not invent; they came to me.  When, with brow damp with perspiration, I committed the first one to paper in a single evening, I found the next morning, to my surprise, that only a few touches were needed to convert it into a poem in iambics.