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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
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