Your own

B.

Schoenhausen, February 7, ’47.

My Heart,—­Just returned through a wild, drifting snow-storm from an appointment (which unfortunately was occasioned by the burning out of a poor family).  I have warmed myself at your dear letter; in the twilight, even, I recognized your “Right honorable.”  All my limbs are twitching with eagerness to be off to Berlin again today, and to characterize the dikes and floods in terms of the unutterable Poberow[10] dialect.  The inexorable thermometer stands at 2 below freezing-point, accompanied with howling wind and large flakes, as though it would soon rain.  What is duty!  Compare Falstaff’s expressions touching honor.  At any rate, I shall write you straightway, even if I ruin myself in postage, and no sensible thoughts find their way through the debris of the fire that still has possession of my imagination.  After reading your last remark I have just lit my cigar and stirred the ink.  First, like a business-man, to answer your letter.  I begin with a request smacking of the official desk—­namely, that when you write you will, if you please, expressly state what letters you have received from me, giving their dates; otherwise one is uncertain as to the regular forwarding of them, as I am in doubt whether you have received my first letter, which I wrote the day of my arrival here, while on a business trip, in Jerichow, if I mistake not, on very bad paper, Friday, the 29th of January.  I am very thankful that you do not write in the evening, my love, even if I am myself to suffer thereby.  Every future glance into your gray-blue-black eye with its large pupil will compensate me for possibly delayed or shortened letters.

If I could only dream of you when you do of me!  But recently I do not dream at all—­shockingly healthy and prosaic; or does my soul fly to Reinfeld in the night and associate with yours?  In that case it can certainly not dream here; but it ought to tell about its journey in the morning, whereas the wayward thing is as silent about its nocturnal employments as though it, too, slept like a badger.

Your reminder of the bore, Fritz, with the letter-pouch transports me to Reinfeld and makes me long still more eagerly for the time when I can once again hug my black Jeannette for my good-morning at the desk.  About the letter with the strange address, evidently in a woman’s hand, I should like to tell you a romantic story, but I must destroy every illusion with the explanation that it comes from a man who used to be a friend of mine, who, if I do not mistake, once in Kniephof took a copy of an Italian address that I received.  Again a curtain behind which one fancies there is all the poetry in the world, and finds the flattest prose. (I once saw in Aix-la-Chapelle, while strolling about the stage, the Princess of Eboli, after I had just spent my sympathy upon her as she lay overwhelmed and fainting at the queen’s feet in one of the scenes, eating bread and butter and cracking bad jokes behind the scenes.) That cousin Woedtke is fond of me, and that the Versin sausage and letter affair is all right, I am glad to learn.