Frankfurt, 18th May, ’51.
Frankfurt is wretchedly wearisome; I am so spoilt with having so much affection about me, and a great deal to do; and I now first perceive how unthankful I have been towards many people in Berlin—for I will not take you and yours into the question. Even the coolness of fellow-countrymen and party associates I had in Berlin is an intimate connection compared with the relations one makes here; being, in fact, nothing more than mutual suspicious espionage. If one had any thing indeed to detect or to conceal! The people here worry themselves about the merest trifles; and these diplomatists, with their important nothings, already appear more ridiculous to me than a Deputy of the Second Chamber in his full-blown dignity. Unless outward events take place—and those we clever members of the Diet can neither guide nor predetermine—I now know accurately what we shall have done in one, two, or five years, and could bring it about in twenty-four hours, if the others would for a single day be reasonable and truthful. I never doubted that they all made soup with water; but such a simple, thin water-gruel, in which you can’t see a globule of fat, astonishes me! Send me Justice X. or Herr von Sarsky hither from the toll-gate, when they are washed and combed, and I will lord it in diplomacy with them. I am making enormous progress in the art of saying nothing in a great many words. I write reports of many sheets, which read as tersely and roundly as leading articles; and if Manteuffel can say what there is in them, after he has read them, he can do more than I can.
Each of us pretends to believe of his neighbor that he is full of thoughts and plans, if he would only tell; and at the same time we none of us know an atom more of what is going to happen to Germany than of next year’s snow. Nobody, not even the most malicious skeptic of a democrat, believes what quackery and self-importance there is in this diplomatizing. Well, I have railed long enough, and now I will tell you that I am very well. Yesterday I was in Mainz: the neighborhood is lovely. The rye is in full ear, although it is infamously cold all night and in the mornings. Excursions by railroad are the best here. One can reach Heidelberg, Baden-Baden, Odenwald, Homburg, Soden, Wiesbaden, Bingen, Rüdesheim, and Niederwald comfortably in one day, stop five or six hours, and return here in the evening. Until now I have not gone much about, but shall do so, that I may take you about when you come. Rochow started yesterday for Warsaw—he went off at nine o’clock in the evening; the day after to-morrow he will be there, and probably back in a week. As to politics and people, I can not write much, as most of the letters are opened here. When they know your address on mine, and your handwriting on your letters, they will very likely find out they have no time to read family letters.
Frankfurt, 3d July, 1851.
The day before yesterday I thankfully received your letter and the news that you were all well. But do not forget, when you write to me, that the letters are not only read by myself, but by all sorts of postal spies; and do not inveigh against certain persons in them, for that is all set down to the husband—to my account; besides, you do the people injustice. As to my appointment or non-appointment, I know no more than was told me at my departure: all other things are possibilities and conjectures. What is irregular in the matter is the silence of the Government towards me, as it would be as well to let me know for certain, and indeed officially, whether I am to live here or in Pomerania with wife and child next month. Be prudent in all you say to people, then, without exception—not only against ——, particularly in opinions of persons, for you can not conceive what one has to endure if one once becomes an object of observation; be assured that whatever you say in the —— or the bathing-machine is served up with sauce either here or at Sans-Souci. Forgive me for scolding you so, but after your last letter I must take up the diplomatic hedge-knife. If —— and others could sow distrust in our diplomatic camp, they would thereby attain one of the chief ends of their letter robberies. I went the day before yesterday to Wiesbaden to ——, and, with a mixture of sadness and wisdom, we went to see the scene of former folly. Would it might please God to fill this vessel with his clear and strong wine, in which formerly the champagne of twenty-one years of youth foamed uselessly, and left nothing but loathing behind. Where now are —— and Miss ——? How many are buried with whom I then flirted, drank, and diced? How many transformations have taken place in my views of the world in these fourteen years, among which I have ever looked upon the actually Present as the True? How little are some things to me that then appeared great? How much is venerable to me now, that I then ridiculed? How much foliage may bud, grow green, give shadow, rustle, and worthlessly fade within the next fourteen years, till 1865, if we live to see it? I can not understand how a man who considers his own nature, and yet knows nothing of God, and will know nothing, can endure his existence from contempt and wearisomeness. I know not how I could formerly support it; were I to live as then, without God, without you, without my children! I should not, indeed, know whether I had not better abandon life like a dirty shirt; and yet most of my acquaintances are in that state, and live on! If I ask of an individual, what object he has in living on, in laboring and growing angry, in intriguing and spying, I obtain no answer. Do not conclude from this tirade that my mood is dark; on the contrary, I feel like a person who looks, on a fine September morning, on the yellowing foliage; I am healthy and cheerful, but I feel some melancholy, some longing for home, a desire for forests, ocean, wilderness, for you and my children, mingled with the impressions of sunset and of Beethoven. Instead of which I have to pay dreary visits to —— and read endless ciphers about German steam corvettes and cannon-balls, rusting and eating up money in Bremerhaven. I should like to have a horse, but I could not ride alone—it is too wearisome; and the society with whom one rides is also wearisome. And now I must go to Rochow, and to all sorts of-ins and-offs, who are here with the Archduchess Olga.
Frankfurt, 8th July, 1851.
Yesterday and to-day I have been anxious to write to you, but in the whirl of business could not get so far until the evening late, on my return from a walk during which I blew away the dust of business with the summer night’s breeze, moonlight, and the rustle of poplar foliage. On Saturday afternoon I went with Rochow and Lynar to Rüdesheim. I there took a boat, went out on the Rhine, and swam in the moonlight, eyes and nose only above the tepid water, to the Rat Tower, near Bingen, where the bad bishop met his end. There is something strangely dreamy to lie in the water on a still night, slowly driven by the stream, seeing the heavens, with moon and stars, above, and on either hand the wood-capped mountains and city spires in the moonlight, without hearing any thing but one’s own gentle splashing. I should like to swim like that every night. I then drank some very decent wine, and sat for a long time smoking with Lynar on the balcony, the Rhine below us. My small Testament and the starry night led to some conversation on Christianity; and I shook earnestly at the Rousseau-like virtue of his soul, only reducing him to silence. As a child he has been ill-treated by nurses and tutors, without really knowing his parents, and has emerged from his youth with similar ideas, founded on a similar education, to my own, but bears them with more content than ever has been my case. Next day we went in the steamer to Coblenz, breakfasted there for an hour, and returned in the same way to Frankfurt, where we arrived in the evening. I undertook the journey with the object of visiting old Metternich, at Johannisberg, at his invitation; but the Rhine delighted me so much, that I preferred a trip to Coblenz, and postponed the visit. We saw the river, on our immediate journey to the Alps, in the finest weather; on this fresh summer morning, and after the dusty weariness in Frankfurt, it rises much in my esteem. I look forward with real delight to spending a couple of days with you, at Rüdesheim; the place is so calm and rural, the people pleasant, and nothing dear. We would then take a small rowing-boat, and go quietly down, climb the Niederwald, and this and the other castle, and return by the steamer. One can leave here in the morning early, stay eight hours at Rüdesheim, Bingen, Rheinstein, and so forth, and return hither by the evening. My appointment here seems now to be certain.