"Certainly," replied Edwin, "so long as they confine themselves to secret pity, and do not allow their acts to be affected by it, so long as they do not force upon us the consciousness that we have other wants and satisfy them in a different way. For after all the ultimate and most common standard of a man's value is, whether he is capable of devotion or not, whether he can raise his thoughts above the dust of workday life and produce and worthily enjoy a holiday stillness. In this alone men differ and foolishly wrangle about how it happens. Those who only in dense crowds can succeed in remembering their common humanity, their universal weakness, their need, and all that binds them under the universal law, consider those persons arrogant and presumptuous, who can only feel the presence of the eternal powers, when communing with their own hearts in the deepest solitude, or with their most intimate friends. Nothing alien and fortuitous must touch me, if I am to approach what people have agreed to call God. The voice of a good man, who wants to obtrude upon me his little well meant passages from Scripture, the faces of his innocent hearers, to whom each word is a revelation, baffle and destroy my best efforts to rise above earthly appearances into the one and all. That which now speaks to us from the open house of God, is a feeling so strangely made up of memories of our childhood, universal philanthropy, the summer air, and the notes of the organ, that we gladly allow it to produce its effect upon us. But when we seriously reflect, it leads us away from, rather than into ourselves. It draws us toward natures which have little in common with us. We have often said, dearest, that mankind might be divided into two great classes, those who strive toward what is steadfast, calm, and limited, and those who never forget that every thing is fleeting, and are only satisfied when they themselves are in the current of the eternal stream. How could the piety of these two classes be the same? When the former pass from the restless, ever moving world, through a church door into their Sunday, where every thing has remained the same from time immemorial, the inexpressible appears before them confined within set forms, and for all new wants and sorrows the same consolations are ready, which have soothed their ancestors for a thousand years. How can it surprise us, that people who find their salvation in remaining ever the same and prefer to stifle certain instincts of the soul and mind, rather than be allured into the illimitable, cannot understand us, whose piety is rooted in the strength and boldness which in moments of enthusiasm, enable us to burst the barriers that confine us, in order through presentments and intuition, to grasp all space?"
"They do not know," said Leah gently, after a short pause, "how much more courage and humility it requires, to confess that we cannot recognize God, then to believe ourselves his pet children, in whose ears He whispers the secret of the world, and thereby relieves from all future care."
When they returned home in the evening and entered their cosy room, they espied a letter lying on the desk. "I don't know why it is," said Edwin, "but I fear this stranger which has crept in, will destroy the pleasure of the last hours of vacation."
"Don't read it until to-morrow," pleaded Leah.
But Edwin had already opened the letter, and a smaller note fell out. As Leah picked it up, he glanced at the signature of the large one. "Doctor Basler," he read, and his light tone instantly grew sad. "A letter from there--six closely written pages--strange, how far distant it seems, all that transpired there, as if years had intervened; so greatly does happiness harden us to the sorrows of others! And now once more it appears like yesterday. Poor creature, to be so quickly forgotten, even by your only friend! Perhaps though it may not contain a word about her. Come we will sit down on the sofa and read the letter together."
Leah had become perfectly silent. Without exactly concealing the note she had picked up, she held it in her hand, so that for the instant Edwin forgot it. They seated themselves near the lamp and read:
"Dear Sir and Friend!
"I should consider it my duty, even without the count's express command, to relate to my dear friend's son, the particulars of an event extremely sad in its nature, and which if it should reach him in its bare outlines through the medium of the press, would be doubly agitating.
"So--sine ambagibus--for so-called preparation in such cases only increases anxiety and dread, and men, dear Herr Doctor, know that fate strides rapidly--we have lost our beautiful young mistress, the countess, in a manner as sudden as it is distressing.
"You are already aware, that the writer of this letter did not enjoy any special favor or regard from the lady who has died so young. Yet I do not need to assure you, that the brevity of this account, which is garnished by no expression of feeling, is due solely to the haste imposed upon me by the pressure of circumstances, and not by any lack of sympathy in my master's misfortune. Such a thing would not only be inhuman in general, but ungrateful in particular, in so far as the noble lady at last did justice to the good will of her faithful servant and honored him with a priceless token of her confidence.