zar more cheerful at times; but if you go away ... then ... oh
where shall I find any comfort! Then I shall soon die ... or only wish
that my father ... or my plague of a husband would make haste and die.
Alas! now that you don't love me any more, I am very very unhappy."

She began crying anew, and still more violently than before. Edward
eyed her for a long time with a searching glance, and lost himself in
a maze of thought. Whenever men, thus he mused to himself, give
themselves up to dark phantoms, and make caprices and extravagancies
the main stock of their life, mishap and horrour will spring up of
their own accord under their feet. Life is so tender and mysterious,
so pliant and volatile, and so easily takes every shape, that there is
no seed it will not readily receive. Evil sprouts up and runs wild in
it; and brings up the intoxicating grape from the nether world, and
the wine of horrour. Here in this childish innocence and simplicity
are already slumbering the germs of the most fearful events and
feelings, if time and opportunity should but forward and ripen them;
and close at my side stands the fiend tempting me to become the
gardener in this beauteous garden of the deadliest fruits.

He awoke from his study and said mournfully; "Dear child, thou dost
not yet understand thyself, thy destiny, or the world. I am not
frivolous enough to enter into thy plans, or to encourage thee in them
in the innocency of thy youth. What thou wishest cannot, must not be;
and in another year, or less perhaps, thou wilt see thyself how
impossible it is. We should both become wretched, and to deepen our
misery should despise each other. May heaven guide thy steps: but I
love and prize thee so much, that I cannot ruin thee. Pray to God: he
will support thee."

"He talks for all the world just like my father!" cried Rose, and
walkt away, half in sorrow, half in anger; while Edward went musing to
his room.

"Is Balthasar right then after all?" he said to himself; "is human
nature so utterly depraved? or is it not rather the business of
energy, resolution, and reason, to transform those very qualities in
us as in all other things into virtues and excellencies, which else if
they are neglected would become malignant and base?"

He then wrote a long letter to Herr Balthasar, and once more told him
positively that he must quit his house and the country, if the
marriage of Eleazar and Rose was irrevocably fixt; and that he would
rea