Innately sensual he sought to drive away his gloom (as he had often done) by conjuring scenes of Florentine Nights and living over again those blissful moments; Signora Francesca, with those dark brown eyes, long, black lashes, rich black hair, and captivating body; Signora Letitia—that temptress, with a throbbing bosom, who carried on flirtations with half a dozen men at the same time; Matilda—that virtuous flirt, who tried to conceal her sensuousness by constantly talking about, and condemning, the sensuality of others; that pink-cheeked English girl, whose face looked as if it were bedewed with spray from the sea—No, these recollections brought no joy to his heart, not even a momentary consolation, as they had done on other occasions. He was seized with a morbid longing to wander, to wander everlastingly, to run away from himself.
While at Venice he received a letter from his brother that his father was very ill. He could read between the lines that it was a call to his father’s death-bed. Somehow, this very sad news brought him relief. It at once removed his restlessness. He was calm. He had suddenly become philosophical, stoical. It was as if one of his veins had been opened to relieve an intense pain. He left Italy and rushed back to his native land where his father was dying.
The following three months he frittered away between Hamburg and Berlin. His widowed mother had moved to Hamburg, and she begged him to stay there but he detested the city. It held for him too many bitter memories.
He finally decided to isolate himself. His action was that of the storm-tossed woman of passion who finds refuge in a nunnery.
He went to Potsdam, where he could see only “Himmel und Soldaten”. Potsdam in those days was not the suburb of Berlin that it is today. There was neither Subway nor Elevated nor speedy surface trains to carry one from Unter den Linden to Sans Souci in half an hour. Then it was a considerable distance from the Prussian capital.
In Potsdam he found himself truly isolated, far from friends and diversions. And he had so many plans for work; the completion of another book; a humorous book, poems, essays, a political treatise. Then, again, here he was safe from his ever threatening peril—of falling in love. He had barely escaped a strong attachment for the wife of a friend, but her intellect had saved him.
He remained at Potsdam nearly six months, working feverishly on new poems.
After a time he found his self-imposed imprisonment irksome. The atmosphere in Potsdam was not to his liking either. The presence of soldiers—die Menschenfresser—everywhere, the artificiality of the gardens of San Souci, where the firs were “masked as orange trees” and “so unnatural that they were almost human”—everything was unbearable here.
VIII.
He longed for rest. He wished to escape from the tumults of life, from the tumults of his passions. He was a poet and wished to withdraw to bucolic quietude, indulge in pleasant reveries, and pipe sweet melodies.