"Gladly would I show you the work I am at present engaged upon. Yet for a nature so quiet as yours, you appear to me far too forcible and positive. Overbeck must love you a thousand fold more than I: with me you suffer indulgence to take the place of impartial justice. How I once fretted about such things!
"What a treasure is a deep, positively incurable pain! Better than the most unalloyed bliss which this poor world has to offer, it brings us near to the Holy One. It is more faithful, far less variable. It draws us into solitude, into ourselves.
"You surmise, doubtless, what I mean. Daily do I thank Heaven that through you such knowledge was to come to me. This is bitter medicine; administered, to a child, upon sweet fruit. But why do I entertain you with such trivialities? In all books of all nations we read the same thing; and yet when the poor human heart is pressed with its heavy burthen, it feels just as profoundly and acutely as in the very days of Troy itself; and the utterances of joy and of love, like those of pain, are ever new and their method inexhaustible; ever does one cast himself upon the breast of a loving, sympathetic soul.
"Accept for the moment this confused scribble and remain friendly and well-disposed toward me. Continue to peep through my fingers, and leave me just five of them. I claim to myself, however, the privilege of an unlimited love and veneration for you. My entire household and all your friends send heartfelt greeting; foremost of all, however, your
P. V. CORNELIUS."
The correspondence was interrupted when Cornelius removed to Berlin; but not the friendship, which endured to the end. Nor did the exchange of letters cease entirely; so that the ink-shy master once asserted in Berlin, that he had written to no lady so often as to her.
Among the earliest acquaintances of Emily Linder, was Father Franz von Baader; as the nine letters indicate, which were addressed to her, and published in the complete works of Baader. The first of these was dated as early as the 25th of May, 1825, therefore at the commencement of her residence in Munich; and the contents indicate the immediate cause of their mutual attraction. This letter has somewhat the nature of a memorial, in which the philosopher draws a parallel between the art of painting and the God-like art of benevolence; closing with the following words:
"Herewith commends himself to Miss Emily Linder—she who rendered her memory so dear, so imperishable to him by an act kindness performed at his request to a poor family—
Franz Baader."