shall have to travel next year with three cradles, wet-nurses,
long-clothes, and counterpanes. I am now awake by six o'clock, and
already in a gentle simmer of anger; I cannot get to sleep, owing to all
the visions of traveling which my imagination paints in the darkest
colors, even up to the "picnics" on the sandhills of Stolpmünde. And
then if one were only paid for it! But to travel away the last remnants
of a once handsome fortune with sucking babies!--I am very unhappy!

Well--Wednesday, then, in Gerswalde--I should have done probably better
by driving over Passow, and you would not have had so far to Prenzlau as
to G----. However, it is now a _fait accompli_, and the pain of
selection is succeeded by the quiet of resignation. Johanna is somewhat
nervous about her dresses, supposing you Boitzenburgers have company.


TO HIS WIFE

FRANKFORT, August 7th, 1851.

I wanted to write to you yesterday and to-day, but, owing to all the
clatter and bustle of business, could not do so until now, late in the
evening on my return from a walk through the lovely summer-night breeze,
the moonlight, and the murmuring of poplar leaves, which I took to brush
away the dust of the day's dispatches and papers. Saturday afternoon I
drove out with Rochow and Lynar to Rüdesheim; there I took a boat, rowed
out upon the Rhine, and swam in the moonlight, with nothing but nose and
eyes out of the water, as far as the Mäusethürm near Bingen, where the
bad bishop came to his end. It gives one a peculiar dreamy sensation to
float thus on a quiet warm night in the water, gently carried down by
the current, looking above on the heavens studded with the moon and