these visions that I was positively determined to give the whole thing up, and at last went to bed with the resolve at least to go straight through, without stopping anywhere; but what will one not commit for the sake of domestic peace?  The young cousins, male and female, must become acquainted, and who knows when Johanna will see you again?  She pounced upon me last night with the boy in her arms, and with all those wiles which formerly lost us Paradise; of course she succeeded in wringing my consent that everything should remain as before.  I feel, however, that I am as one to whom fearful injustice is done, and I am certain that I shall have to travel next year with three cradles, wet-nurses, long-clothes, and counterpanes.  I am now awake by six o’clock, and already in a gentle simmer of anger; I cannot get to sleep, owing to all the visions of traveling which my imagination paints in the darkest colors, even up to the “picnics” on the sandhills of Stolpmuende.  And then if one were only paid for it!  But to travel away the last remnants of a once handsome fortune with sucking babies!—­I am very unhappy!

Well—­Wednesday, then, in Gerswalde—­I should have done probably better by driving over Passow, and you would not have had so far to Prenzlau as to G——.  However, it is now a fait accompli, and the pain of selection is succeeded by the quiet of resignation.  Johanna is somewhat nervous about her dresses, supposing you Boitzenburgers have company.

TO HIS WIFE

Frankfort, August 7th, 1851.

I wanted to write to you yesterday and to-day, but, owing to all the clatter and bustle of business, could not do so until now, late in the evening on my return from a walk through the lovely summer-night breeze, the moonlight, and the murmuring of poplar leaves, which I took to brush away the dust of the day’s dispatches and papers.  Saturday afternoon I drove out with Rochow and Lynar to Ruedesheim; there I took a boat, rowed out upon the Rhine, and swam in the moonlight, with nothing but nose and eyes out of the water, as far as the Maeusethuerm near Bingen, where the bad bishop came to his end.  It gives one a peculiar dreamy sensation to float thus on a quiet warm night in the water, gently carried down by the current, looking above on the heavens studded with the moon and stars, and on each side the banks and wooded hill-tops and the battlements of the old castles bathed in the moonlight, whilst nothing falls on one’s ear but the gentle splashing of one’s own movements.  I should like to swim like this every evening.  I drank some very fair wine afterwards, and then sat a long time with Lynar smoking on the balcony—­the Rhine below us.  My little New Testament and the star-studded heavens brought us on the subject of religion, and I argued long against the Rousseau-like sophism of his ideas, without, however, achieving more than to reduce him to silence.  He was badly treated as a child by bonnes and tutors, without ever having known his parents.  Later on, in consequence of much the same sort of education as myself, he picked up the same ideas in his youth; but is more satisfied and more convinced by them than ever I was.