our idealism, the senses demand their share. What was
this wretched old barrack to me! And now, since I can no longer see it
with my bodily eyes, I feel as if barbarians had ransacked a temple
which contained the most beautiful images and where I had often been
disposed to devotion."

He slowly turned toward Friedrichstrasse, intending to go to the house
in Dorotheenstrasse, look around the old "tun," and then deliver the
messages Reginchen and Franzelius had sent to their mother. They could
send no remembrances to the father; the worthy shoemaker was no longer
among the living. The last autumn had torn this modest leaf from the
tree of humanity, before it showed any signs of withering. The latter
part of his life, in which, following Heinrich Mohr's counsel, he had
eagerly striven for progress in his own sphere of action and studied
the questions relating to the culture of humanity in the closest
proximity, had been the most enjoyable and richest of his life. To be
sure, he was at first very angry that "mother" could not be induced to
accompany him on his journeys of discovery through Berlin. But by
degrees he seemed to become reconciled to this obstinacy, nay he
confessed to his friends in the society, that the full depths of
certain abysses of modern civilization can be measured only when men
venture into them "without ladies." As he talked continually about
these "abysses," certain wags endeavored to persuade him to deliver a
lecture upon them. For a long time he modestly refused, but at last
consented, and to the great astonishment of his faithful wife, who saw
her husband become an author in his old age, he spent many weeks in
filling a few sheets with extremely strange, extraordinarily worded
sentences, in which he forgot eating, drinking, sleeping, walking, and
even his workshop, but was as happy as a student composing his first
love song in honor of a lady, to whom he had never spoken a word. When
he delivered this wonderful composition, under the title of "studies of
social abysses," before one of the informal meetings, as a sort of
rehearsal, he was rewarded for his trouble by great and universal
merriment, a form of applause, which as he had scattered through it the
spice of a few puns and anecdotes, seemed very flattering. To be sure,
the president, for very plausible reasons, did not think the subject of
the lecture judicious for a large audience, but thanked the assiduous
shoe-maker in the warmest manner