y their enemies of the
Landmannschaft; the house that they had built was demolished and its
fragments dispersed. Sand took this event for an omen, and was greatly
depressed by it.

"It seems to me, O my God!" he says in his journal, "that everything
swims and turns around me. My soul grows darker and darker; my moral
strength grows less instead of greater; I work and cannot achieve;
walk towards my aim and do not reach it; exhaust myself, and do nothing
great. The days of life flee one after another; cares and uneasiness
increase; I see no haven anywhere for our sacred German cause. The
end will be that we shall fall, for I myself waver. O Lord and Father!
protect me, save me, and lead me to that land from which we are for ever
driven back by the indifference of wavering spirits."

About this time a terrible event struck Sand to the heart; his friend
Dittmar was drowned. This is what he wrote in his diary on the very
morning of the occurrence:

"Oh, almighty God! What is going to become of me? For the last fortnight
I have been drawn into disorder, and have not been able to compel myself
to look fixedly either backward or forward in my life, so that from the
4th of June up to the present hour my journal has remained empty. Yet
every day I might have had occasion to praise Thee, O my God, but
my soul is in anguish. Lord, do not turn from me; the more are the
obstacles the more need is there of strength."

In the evening he added these few words to the lines that he had written
in the morning:--

"Desolation, despair, and death over my friend, over my very deeply
loved Dittmar."

This letter which he wrote to his family contains the account of the
tragic event:--

"You know that when my best friends, A., C., and Z., were gone, I became
particularly intimate with my well-beloved Dittmar of Anspach; Dittmar,
that is to say a true and worthy German, an evangelical Christian,
something more, in short, than a man! An angelic soul, always turned
toward the good, serene, pious, and ready for action; he had come to
live in a room next to mine in Professor Grunler's house; we loved each
other, upheld each other in our efforts, and, well or ill, bare our good
or evil fortune in common. On this last spring evening, after having
worked in his room and having strengthened ourselves anew to resist all
the torments of life and to advance towards the aim that we desired to
attain; we went, about seven in the evening, to the bath