“He has written.  He has confessed to my mother, as to a true and dear friend, his love for E——­, and his conviction of its utter hopelessness.  He feels himself unable to combat it.  He thinks he must try, by absence, to bring more peace to his mind.  Yet he cannot bear to give up our friendship,—­an intercourse become so dear to him, and so necessary to his daily happiness.  Poor Irving!”

It is well for our peace of mind that we do not know what is going down concerning us in “journals.”  On his way to the Herrnhuthers, Mr. Irving wrote to Mrs. Foster:—­

“When I consider how I have trifled with my time, suffered painful vicissitudes of feeling, which for a time damaged both mind and body,—­when I consider all this, I reproach myself that I did not listen to the first impulse of my mind, and abandon Dresden long since.  And yet I think of returning!  Why should I come back to Dresden?  The very inclination that dooms me thither should furnish reasons for my staying away.”

In this mood, the Herrnhuthers, in their right-angled, whitewashed world, were little attractive.

“If the Herrnhuthers were right in their notions, the world would have been laid out in squares and angles and right lines, and everything would have been white and black and snuff-color, as they have been clipped by these merciless retrenchers of beauty and enjoyment.  And then their dormitories!  Think of between one and two hundred of these simple gentlemen cooped up at night in one great chamber!  What a concert of barrel-organs in this great resounding saloon!  And then their plan of marriage!  The very birds of the air choose their mates from preference and inclination; but this detestable system of lot!  The sentiment of love may be, and is, in a great measure, a fostered growth of poetry and romance, and balderdashed with false sentiment; but with all its vitiations, it is the beauty and the charm, the flavor and the fragrance, of all intercourse between man and woman; it is the rosy cloud in the morning of life; and if it does too often resolve itself into the shower, yet, to my mind, it only makes our nature more fruitful in what is excellent and amiable.”

Better suited him Prague, which is certainly a part of the “naughty world” that Irving preferred:—­

“Old Prague still keeps up its warrior look, and swaggers about with its rusty corselet and helm, though both sadly battered.  There seems to me to be an air of style and fashion about the first people of Prague, and a good deal of beauty in the fashionable circle.  This, perhaps, is owing to my contemplating it from a distance, and my imagination lending it tints occasionally.  Both actors and audience, contemplated from the pit of a theatre, look better than when seen in the boxes and behind the scenes.  I like to contemplate society in this way occasionally, and to dress it up by the help of fancy, to my