twenty-two-year-old youth sparkled uselessly away, leaving stale dregs
behind. Where and how may Isabella Loraine and Miss Russel be living
now? How many of those with whom I then flirted, tippled, and played
dice are now dead and buried! How many transformations has my view of
the world undergone in the fourteen years which have since elapsed,
while I always considered the existing one as alone correct! and how
much is now small to me which then appeared great, how much now
deserving of respect which I then ridiculed! How many a green bud
within us may still come to mature blossom and wither worthlessly away
before another period of fourteen years is over, in 1865, if we are
then still alive! I cannot realize how a person who is thoughtful and,
nevertheless, knows nothing or wishes to know nothing of God, can
endure giving a despised and tedious life, a life which is fleeting as
a stream, as a sleep, even as a blade of grass that soon withers; we
spend our years as in a babble of talk.

I do not know how I endured it in the past; if I should live now as I
did then, without God, without you, without children, I should, in
fact, be at a loss to know why I should not cast off this life like a
soiled shirt; and yet most of my acquaintances are thus, and they
live. If in the case of some one individual I ask myself what reason
he can have, in his own mind, for continuing to live, to toil, to
fret, to intrigue, and to spy--verily I do not know. Do not conclude
from this scribbling that I happen to be in a particularly black mood;
on the contrary, I feel as when, on a beautiful September day, one
contemplates the yellowing foliage; healthy and gay, but a little
sadness, a little homesickness, a longing for woods, lake, meadow, you
and the children, all mingled with the sunset and a Beethoven
symphony. Instead of that I must now call upon tiresome serene
Highnesses and read endless figures about German sloops of war and