confined in a very strange and improper manner,
so that no one could approach her. After all, there may be something
the matter with her; she is silly perhaps, or something of the kind.
But why should I write you all this? I could have conveyed it better
and more circumstantially by word of mouth. Know that I shall see you
in a fortnight. I must again behold my dear; sweet, angelic Clara.
The ill-humour will then be dispersed, which, I must confess, has
endeavoured to get the mastery over me, since that fatal, sensible
letter. Therefore I do not write to her to-day. A thousand greetings,
&c.

* * * * *

Nothing more strange and chimerical can be imagined than that which
occurred to my poor friend, the young student Nathaniel, and which I,
gracious reader, have undertaken to tell you. Have you, kind reader,
ever known a something that has completely filled your heart, thoughts,
and senses, so as to exclude every thing else? There was in you a
fermentation and a boiling, and your blood inflamed to the hottest glow
bounded through your veins, and gave a higher colour to your cheeks.
Your glance was so strange, as if you wished to perceive, in empty
space, forms which to no other eyes are visible, and your speech flowed
away into dark sighs. Then your friends asked you: "What is it,
revered one?" "What is the matter, dear one." And now you wished to
express the internal picture with all its glowing tints, with all its
light and shade, and laboured hard to find words only to begin. You
thought that in the very first word you ought to crowd together all the
wonderful, noble, horrible, comical, frightful, that had happened, so
that it might strike all the hearers at once like an electric shock.
But every word, every thing that is in the form of speech, appeared to
you colourless, cold and dead. You hunt and hunt, and stutter and
stammer, and the sober questions of your friends dart like icy breezes
upon your internal fire until it is ready to go out; whereas if, like a
bold painter, you had first with a few daring strokes drawn an outline
of the internal picture, you might with small trouble have laid on the
colours brighter and brighter, and the living throng of various forms
would have carried your friends along with it, and they, like you,
would have seen themselves in the picture that had proceeded from your
mind. Now I must confess to you, kind reader, that no one has really
asked