ared for it, affects one
powerfully and deeply--so deeply, in fact, that many will think you
quit the subject too abruptly. This, upon first reading it, was a very
decided feeling in my own case; but, on reading it a second time, when
surprise had subsided, I felt it less, and yet I fear that you may
have, in this, gone a hair's breadth too far. Mignon, before her end,
had begun to appear more womanly and softer, and thus to have become
more interesting in herself; the repulsive heterogeneity of her nature
had relaxed, and with this relaxation some of her impetuosity had
likewise disappeared. Her last song, especially, melts one's heart to
the most intense sympathy. Hence it strikes one as odd that, directly
upon the affecting scene of her death, the doctor should make an
experiment upon her corpse, and that this living being should so soon
be able to forget the person, merely in order to regard her as the
instrument of a scientific inquiry. It strikes one as being equally
strange that Wilhelm--who, after all, is the cause of her death, and
is aware of it--should at that moment notice the instrument-case and
be lost in the recollection of past scenes, when the present should
have so wholly absorbed him.

You may, in this case also, justify yourself as having been quite true
to nature, but I doubt whether you will be able to do this as regards
the "sentimental" demands of your readers; and therefore--in order
that nothing should interfere with the reader's acceptance of a scene
which is so splendidly motivated and so well worked out--I would
advise you to pay some attention to it.

Otherwise, I find everything you do with Mignon, when living as well
as when dead, most uncommonly beautiful. This pure and poetic creature
is specially and excellently qualified to have so poetical a funeral.
In her isolated condition, her mysterious existence, her purity and
innocence, she is so truly a representative of the period of life in
which she stands that she moves one to a feeling of unmixed sadness
and genuine human sorrow, for nothing but pure humanity was manifested
in her. That which, in every other individual, would be inconsistent,
nay, in a certain sense, revolting, is, in her, sublime and noble.

I should have liked to see the appearance of the Marquis in the family
motivated by something more than his mere dilettanteism in art. He is
too indispensable to the development, and the _need_ of his
interference might easily h