Your mind works intuitively to an extraordinary degree, and all your thinking powers appear, as it were, to have come to an agreement with your imagination to be their common representative.  In reality, this is the most that a man can make of himself if only he succeeds in generalizing his perceptions and making his feelings his supreme law.  This is what you have endeavored to do, and what in a great measure you have already attained.  My understanding works more in a symbolizing method, and thus I hover, as a hybrid, between ideas and intentions, between law and feeling, between a technical mind and genius.  This it is that, particularly in my earlier years, gave me a rather awkward appearance both in the field of speculation and in that of poetry; for the poetic mind generally got the better of me when I ought to have philosophized, and my philosophical mind when I wished to poetize.  Even now it frequently enough happens that imagination intrudes upon my abstractions, and cold reason upon my poetical productions.  If I could obtain such mastery over these two powers as to assign to each its limits, I might yet look forward to a happy fate; but, alas! just when I have begun to know and to use my moral powers rightly, illness seizes me and threatens to undermine my physical powers.  I can scarcely hope to have time to complete any great and general mental revolution in myself; but I will do what I can, and when, at last, the building falls, I shall, perhaps, after all, have snatched from the ruins what was most worthy of being preserved.

You expressed a wish that I should speak of myself, and I have made use of the permission.  I make these confessions to you in confidence, and venture to hope that you will receive them in a kindly spirit.

I shall today refrain from entering into details about your essay, which will at once lead our conversations on this subject upon the most fertile track.  My own researches—­entered upon by a different path—­have led me to a result rather similar to that at which you have arrived, and in the accompanying papers you will perhaps find ideas which coincide with your own.  I wrote them about a year and a half ago, for which reason, as well as on account of the occasion for which they were penned (they were intended for an indulgent friend), there is some excuse for their crudeness of form.  These ideas have, indeed, since then, received in me a better foundation and greater precision, and this may possibly bring them much nearer to yours.

I cannot sufficiently regret that Wilhelm Meister is lost to our periodical.  However, I hope that your fertile mind and friendly interest in our undertaking will give us some compensation for this loss, whereby the admirers of your genius will be double gainers.  In the number of the Thalia which I herewith send you, you will find some ideas of Koerner’s on Declamation, which, I think, will please you.

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