Whether they would be quite as enthusiastic had she come to settle here, is another question; but Clara has the gift to win friends wherever she goes.  She has already seen something of the town, and was much charmed with the Sazienki Park and Palace.  I am glad she likes it,—­the more so as the country, soon after crossing the frontier, seemed to her rather depressing.  Truly, only those born on the soil can find any charm in the vast solitary plains, where the eye finds very little to rest upon.  Clara, looking through the carriage window, said more than once:  “Ah!  I can understand Chopin now!” She is utterly mistaken,—­she does not understand Chopin and his feelings, any more than she is in touch with his native land.  I, though a cosmopolitan by education, by atavism understand our nature, and am surprised myself at the spell a Polish spring casts upon me, and it seems as if I could never feel tired of it.  Properly speaking, what does the view consist of?  Sometimes, on purpose, I put myself into a stranger’s place,—­a painter’s, having no preconceived ideas about it, and look at it with his eyes.  The landscape then makes upon me the impression as if a child had drawn it, or a savage, who had no notion about drawing.  Flat fallow-land, wet meadows, huts with their rectangular outline, the straight poplars around country-seats on the distant horizon, a broad, flat plain, finished off with a belt of woods,—­that “ten miles of nothing,” as the Germans call it; all this reminds me of a first attempt at drawing landscape.  There is scarcely enough for a background.  From the moment I cease looking upon it with a stranger’s eyes, I begin to feel the simplicity of the view, incorporate myself with that immense breadth, where every outlined object melts into the far distance, as a soul in Nirvana; it has not only the artistic charm of primitiveness, but it acts soothingly upon me.  I admire the Apennines; but my spirit is not in touch with them, and sooner or later they become wearisome.  The human being finds a resting-place only where he is in harmony with his surroundings; and is reminded that his soul and the soul of nature are of the same organization.  Homesickness springs from the isolation of the soul from its surroundings.  It appears to me that the principle of psychical relationship could be applied in a still wider sense.  It may seem strange that I, brought up in foreign lands, permeated by their culture, should harbor such views; but I go farther still, and say a foreign woman, even the most beautiful, appears to me more as a species of the female kind than a soul.

I remember what I wrote at one time concerning Polish women, but one statement does not contradict the other; I may perceive their faults, and yet feel myself nearer to them than to strangers.  Besides, my old opinions—­at least, the greater part of them—­are now in tatters, like a worn-out garment.