over with me, and if it were not for my
uncle's little musical evenings. I don't know what really would become
of me.... Let me stay here and eat my heart out.... Nothing can be made
of me, that you will see quite well.... I am ruined for everything; I
have been cheated in everything, and in a most exasperating way." ...
Again, "If I thought it possible that this frantic imp, my fancy, at
which I laugh right sardonically in my calmer moments, could ever
strain the fibres of my brain or could touch the feelers of my
emotional power, I should wish to cry with Shakespeare's Falstaff, 'I
would it were bedtime, and all well;'" ... and "I am accused by the
Santa Hermandad of my own conscience." And in another letter he unbares
the root of all his troubles in the exclamation, "Oh! that I had a
mother like you."

Tearing himself away from his lady-love with a violent wrench, Hoffmann
left Koenigsberg in a sort of "dazed or intoxicated state," his heart
bleeding with the anguish of parting. He arrived at Glogau on 15th
June, and met with a very friendly reception from his uncle and his
uncle's family, which consisted of his wife and a son and two
daughters. But though they appear to have exerted themselves to make
the unhappy youth comfortable, his heart and mind were too much
occupied with the dear one he had left behind for him to derive full
benefit from their kind and well-meant attentions. In the first letter
he wrote to his friend from his new home he says, "As Hamlet advised
his mother, I have thrown away the worser part of my heart to live the
purer with the other half.... Am I happy, you ask? I was never more
unhappy." In other letters, written some months later, he writes, "I am
tired of railing against Destiny and myself.... There are moments in
which I despair of all that is good, in which I feel it has been
enjoined upon me to work against everything that makes a vaunt of
specious happiness." But he took no manful and resolute steps to battle
against his unhappy state; he continued to correspond with the lady of
his affections, to gaze upon her portrait, to write to his friend about
her, and to dwell upon the past, the hours he had spent in her society.
His relatives, though treating him with all kindness, would seem to
have endeavoured to reason him out of his passion, since after he had
been some months in Glogau, he complains that those who had at first
been all love and sympathy were now cold and reserved tow