forgotten to breathe in the midst of these pure thoughts. Then all at
once, the whole dream-world vanishes, like uprisen ghosts at the
crowing of the cock.

As I passed by the old castle and the lindens, and saw the sentinels
upon their horses, how many memories awakened in my soul, and how
everything had changed! Many years had flown since I was at the
castle. The Princess was dead. The Prince had given up his rule and
gone back to Italy, and the oldest prince, with whom I had grown up,
was regent. His companions were young noblemen and officers, whose
intercourse was congenial to him, and whose company in our early days
had often estranged us. Other circumstances combined to weaken our
young friendship. Like every young man who perceives for the first
time the lack of unity in the German folk-life, and the defects of
German rule, I had caught up some phrases of the Liberal party, which
sounded as strangely at court as unseemly expressions in an honest
minister's family. In short, it was many years since I had ascended
those stairs, and yet a being dwelt in that castle whose name I had
named almost daily, and who was almost constantly present in my memory.
I had long dwelt upon the thought that I should never see her again in
this life. She was transformed into an image which I felt neither did
nor could exist in reality. She had become my good angel--my other
self, to whom I talked instead of talking with myself. How she became
so I could not explain to myself, for I scarcely knew her. Just as the
eye sometimes pictures figures in the clouds, so I fancied my
imagination had conjured up this sweet image in the heaven of my
childhood, and a complete picture of phantasy developed itself out of
the scarcely perceptible outlines of reality. My entire thought had
involuntarily become a dialogue with her, and all that was good in me,
all for which I struggled, all in which I believed, my entire better