The great love he had borne her had survived all those trials of familiarity and of habit which are crueller enemies to love than absence or than death. It had been the romantic passion of Romeo united to that depth and unity of devotion which Friederich Othmar had been wont slightingly to call the knight's love for his lady. It had been so essentially interwoven with his life that it had always seemed to him it could only go away from him with life itself.
The idea that a love so great should yet have the same fate as have all the little passions of a frivolous hour was still intolerable to him. With him it had been of those passions which ennoble and enlarge human nature, because, though interwoven with the senses, they yet embrace the soul, and are drawn by their very idolatry to that longing for immortality which is the only possible approach to faith in it.
But he knew that he had never moved her thus; he knew that, if he had ever given utterance to all he felt, she would have listened with a derisive compassion as to the exaggeration of a mind distraught. The crystal clearness, the acute penetration, the ingrained scepticism of her intellect made impossible to her those illusions and those hopes which are so dear to minds more imaginative than critical, to temperaments more impassioned than logical, as was his.
He had given his whole life away to her, and she did not even care for the gift; scarcely deigned to accept it, except in conventional shape. He was unreasonable, no doubt, as she would have told him had he said so to her. He had asked of life and passion what neither can give—immortality. All which serve to console the great majority of mankind did not avail to console him for that loss.
Most men grow content with the crowd which is constantly about them, with the host of petty interests which claim them, with the repetition of pleasures and pursuits which is enforced on them; their days are dull, but they are full; they are consumed by monotony, but they are unconscious of its tedium, because they have no imagination and often no passion.
Othmar could not be thus reconciled to the disappointments and the sameness of existence. He required life to be a poem, and he was not consoled because it proved a mere diary.
The new year brought him without break that increase of occupation which makes it a season of such weariness to all who are of any importance in the world, and have a crowd of supplicants and petitioners always looking to them for support. Himself he would have liked to pass the winter season at Amyôt, but to her it was useless even to suggest it.
'You cannot ask the world to bury itself in a frozen wood by a river in flood,' she had said when once he had wished to do so.
'But is the world absolutely necessary?'
'If it were not there what should we do? You would read Plato perhaps for the thousandth time; I could not promise to read Goethe for the hundredth. The country in winter is like a man of eighty repeating a poem on spring.'