sumes a diplomatic countenance, and thinks of what he can answer
without saying too much, and what he can write home concerning my
utterances. Those who are not so I find still less congenial; they
talk equivocally to the ladies, and the latter encourage them
shamefully. It makes a less morbid impression on me if a woman falls
thoroughly for once, but preserves a sense of shame at heart, than if
she takes pleasure in such chatter; and I value the Countess Thun,
because, despite the general fashion prevailing here, she knows how to
keep decidedly clear of all that sort of thing. * * * Your most
faithful v.B.

Frankfort, June 26, '51.

_My Darling_,--Today I have been suffering all day long from
homesickness. I received your letter of Sunday early, and then I sat
in the window and smelled the summer fragrance of roses and all sorts
of shrubs in the little garden, and while so doing I heard one of your
dear Beethoven pieces, played by an unknown hand on the piano, wafted
over from some window opposite, distantly and in snatches, and to me
it sounded prettier than any concert. I kept wondering why I must,
after all, be so far away, for a long time, from you and the children,
while so many people who do not love each other at all see one another
from morning till night. It is now seven months since I received at
Reinfeld the order to join the regiment; since then we have twice paid
each other a hasty visit, and it will be eight or nine months before
we shall be again united. It must, indeed, be the Lord's will, for I
have not sought it, and when I am sorrowful it is a consolation to me
that I did not speak a syllable in order to come here, and that
ambition for outward pomp was not what led me to this separation. We
are not in this world to be happy and to enjoy, but to do our duty;
and the less my condition is a self-made one, the more do I realize
that I am to perform the duties of the office in which I am placed.
And I certainly do not wish to be ungrateful, for I am, nevertheless,
happy in the knowledge of possessing so much that is dear, even if far
away from here, and in the hope of a happy reunion. On the arrival of
every letter from Reinfeld my first feeling is one of hearty gratitude
for the unmerited happiness that I still have you in this world, and
with every death of wife or child which I see in the newspaper the
consciousness of what I have to lose comes forcibly home to me, and of
what the merciful God has