consider this advice as a
hardship, or otherwise than if I asked you to buy yourself a green or
a blue dress; it is not a matter of life and death; you are _my_ wife,
and not the diplomats', and they can just as well learn German as you
can learn French. Only if you have leisure, or wish to read anyway,
take a French novel; but if you have no desire to do so, consider this
as not written, for I married you in order to love you in God and
according to the need of my heart, and in order to have in the midst
of the strange world a place for my heart, which all the world's bleak
winds cannot chill, and where I may find the warmth of the home-fire,
to which I eagerly betake myself when it is stormy and cold without;
but not to have a society woman for others, and I shall cherish and
nurse your little fireplace, put wood on it and blow, and protect it
against all that is evil and strange, for, next to God's mercy, there
is nothing which is dearer and more necessary to me than your love,
and the homelike hearth which stands between us everywhere, even in a
strange land, when we are together. Do not be too much depressed and
sad over the change of our life; my heart is not attached, or, at
least, not strongly attached, to earthly honor; I shall easily
dispense with it if it should ever endanger our peace with God or our
contentment. * * * Farewell, my dearly beloved heart. Kiss the
children for me, and give your parents my love.

Your most faithful v.B.

Frankfort, May 16, '51.

_Dear Mother_,--* * * So far as I am at present acquainted with the
_highest_ circles of society, there is only one house which seems to
me to promise company for Johanna--that of the English Ambassador. As
this letter will probably be opened by the Austrian (Frankfort)
post-office authorities, I shall refrain from explaining on this
occasion the reasons therefor. Even those letters which, like my last
ones, I took occasion to send by a courier, are not secure from
indiscretions at _Berlin_; those to me as well as those from me; but
those which go by the regular mail are always opened, except when
there is no time for it, as the gentleman who will read this could
probably testify. But all that, for better, for worse, forms part of
the petty ills of my new position.

In my thoughts I must always ask you and our dad to forgive me for
depriving you of the pleasure and the happiness of your old days,
inasmuch as I transplant to such a distance the br