All my feelings I do not truly know.  I had then grown up to boyhood, and the mild beauty of the suffering angel could not linger in my young heart without alluring it.  I loved her as only a boy can love, and boys love with an intensity and truth and purity which few preserve in their youth and manhood; but I believed she belonged to the “strange people” to whom you are not allowed to speak of love.  I scarcely understood the earnest words she spoke to me.  I only felt that her soul was as near to mine as one human soul can be to another.  All bitterness was gone from my heart.  I felt myself no longer alone, no longer a stranger, no longer shut out.  I was by her, with her and in her.  I thought it might be a sacrifice for her to give me the ring, and that she might have preferred to take it to the grave with her, and a feeling arose in my soul which overshadowed all other feelings, and I said with quivering voice:  “Thou must keep the ring if thou dost not wish to give it to me; for what is thine is mine.”  She looked at me a moment surprised and thoughtfully.  Then she took the ring, placed it on her finger, kissed me once more on the forehead, and said gently to me:  “Thou knowest not what thou sayest.  Learn to understand thyself.  Then shall thou be happy and make many others happy.”

FOURTH MEMORY.

Every life has its years in which one progresses as on a tedious and dusty street of poplars, without caring to know where he is.  Of these years nought remains in memory but the sad feeling that we have advanced and only grown older.  While the river of life glides along smoothly, it remains the same river; only the landscape on either bank seems to change.  But then come the cataracts of life.  They are firmly fixed in memory, and even when we are past them and far away, and draw nearer and nearer to the silent sea of eternity, even then it seems as if we heard from afar their rush and roar.  We feel that the life-force which yet remains and impels us onward still has its source and supply from those cataracts.

School time was ended, the first fleeting years of university life were over, and many beautiful life-dreams were over also.  But one of them still remained:  Faith in God and man.  Otherwise life would have been circumscribed within one’s narrow brain.  Instead of that, a nobler consecration had preserved all, and even the painful and incomprehensible events of life became a proof to me of the omnipresence of the divine in the earthly.  “The least important thing does not happen except as God wills it.”  This was the brief life-wisdom I had accumulated.