can
furnish the sole lever for setting a new and special tragic development
in motion; but to the real matter at issue! You are a poet, my friend,
and that alters everything. Your love, your trouble, ought to appear in
your eyes as something magnificent, in the full splendours of the
sacred art of poesy. You will hear the strains of the lyre struck by
the muse who is nearest akin to you, and in the divine gush of
inspiration you will receive the winged words in which to express your
love and your unhappiness. As a poet you might be called at this moment
the happiest man on the earth, since, your heart having been really
wounded as deep as it can be wounded, your heart's blood is now gushing
out. You require, therefore, no artificial incitement to allure you to
a poetic mood; and mark my words, this period of trouble will enable
you to produce something great and admirable.

"I must draw your attention to the fact that in these first moments of
your unhappiness there will be mingled with it a peculiar and very
unpleasant feeling which cannot be woven into any poetry; but it is a
feeling which soon vanishes away. Let me make you understand. For
example, after the unfortunate lover has had a good sound drubbing from
the enraged father, and has been kicked out of the house, and the
outraged mamma has locked the young lady in her chamber, and repelled
the attempted storming on the part of the desperate lover by the armed
domestics of the house, and when plebeian fists have even entertained
no shyness of the very finest cloth" (here the canon sighed somewhat),
"then this fermented prose of miserable vulgarity must evaporate in
order that the pure poetic unhappiness of love may settle as sediment
You have been fearfully scolded, my dear young friend, this was the
bitter prose that had to be surmounted; you have surmounted it, and so
now give yourself up entirely to poetry. Here--here are Petrarch's
_Sonnets_ and Ovid's _Elegies_; take them, read them, write yourself,
and come and read to me what you have written. Perhaps in the meantime
I also may experience a disappointment in love, of which I am not
altogether deprived of hopes, since I shall in all likelihood fall in
love with a stranger lady who has stopped at the 'White Lamb' in the
Steinweg,[12] and whom Count Nesselstaedt maintains to be a paragon of
beauty and grace, albeit he has only caught a fugitive glimpse of her
at the window. Then, my friend, like the Dioscuri,