uth, the beautiful
vitality, and the simple fulness of your work. My agitation, it is
true, is greater than it will be when I have completely mastered your
subject, and that will be an important crisis in my intellectual life;
but yet this agitation is the effect of the Beautiful and only of the
Beautiful, and is merely the result of my reason not having yet been
able to master my feelings. I now quite understand what you meant by
saying that it was the Beautiful, the True, that could often move you
to tears. Calm and deep, clear and yet incomprehensible, like nature,
your work makes its influence felt; it stands there, and even the
smallest secondary incident shows the beautiful equanimity from which
all has emanated.

[Illustration: SCHILLER RECITING FROM HIS WORKS TO HIS WEIMAR FRIENDS]

But I cannot, as yet, find words to describe these impressions, and,
moreover, I must today confine myself to the Eighth Book. How well you
have succeeded in bringing the large and widely extended circle, the
different attitudes and scenes of the events, so closely together
again! Your work may be compared to a beautiful planetary system;
everything belongs together, and it is only the Italian figures which,
like comets and as weirdly as they, connect the system with one that
is more remote and larger. Further, these figures, as also Marianna
and Aurelia, run wholly out of this system again, and, after having
merely served to produce a poetical movement in it, separate
themselves from it as foreign individuals. How beautifully conceived
it is to derive what is practically monstrous and terribly pathetic in
the fate of Mignon and the Harpist from what is theoretically
monstrous, from the abortions of the understanding, so that nothing is
thereby laid to the charge of pure and healthy nature! Senseless
superstition alone gives birth to such monstrous fates as pursue
Mignon and the Harpist. Even Aurelia's ruin is but the result of her
own unnaturalness, her masculine nature. Toward Marianna alone could I
accuse you of poetic selfishness. I could almost say she has been made
a sacrifice to the novel, as the nature of the case would not permit
of her being saved. Her fate, therefore, will ever draw forth bitter
tears, while in the case of the three others the reader will gladly
turn from what is individual to the idea of the whole.

Wilhelm's false relationship to Theresa is admirably conceived,
motivated, and worked out, and still mor