we will travel the
same bright path of poetry and disappointed love. Note, my good fellow,
what a great advantage my station in life gives me, for every affection
which I conceive, being a longing and hoping which can never be
gratified, rises to tragic intensity. But now, my friend, out, out,
away into the woods as you ought to."

It would doubtless be very wearisome to my kind reader, if not
unbearable, were I to describe here at length, in detail and with all
sorts of over-choice and exquisite words and phrases, all that Jonathan
and Nanni did in their trouble. Such things may be found in any
indifferent romance; and it is often amusing enough to see into what
postures the struggling author throws himself, merely in order to
appear original. On the other hand, it seems to be of great importance
to follow Master Wacht on his walks, or rather in his mental
journeyings.

It must appear very remarkable that a man of such strong self-reliant
spirit as Master Wacht, who had borne with unshaken courage and
unbending steadfastness the most terrible misfortunes that had befallen
him, and that would have crushed many less stouthearted spirits, could
be thus put beside himself with passion at an occurrence which any
other father of a family would have regarded as an ordinary event and
one easy to remedy, and would in fact have set about remedying it in
some way or other, good or bad. Of course the indulgent reader is well
aware that this behaviour of Wacht's must be traced to some good
psychological reason. The thought that poor Nanni's love for innocent
Jonathan was a misfortune which would exercise a pernicious influence
upon the whole course of his subsequent life was only due to the
perverse discord in Wacht's soul. But the very fact that this discord
was able to go on making itself heard in the otherwise harmonical
character of this thoroughly noble man, embraced the impossibility of
smothering it or reducing it completely to silence.

Wacht had made his acquaintance with the feminine character in one who
possessed it in a simple but also at the same time grand and noble
form. His own wife had enabled him to see into the depths of the real
woman's nature, as in a bright mirror-like lake. He saw in her the true
heroine who fought with weapons that were constantly unconquerable. His
orphan wife had forfeited the inheritance of an immensely rich aunt,
she had forfeited the love of all her relatives, and she had opposed
wi