The days creep along sluggishly in the little Carpathian health-
resort. You see no one, and no one sees you. It is boring enough to
write idyls. I would have leisure here to supply a whole gallery of
paintings, furnish a theater with new pieces for an entire season,
a dozen virtuosos with concertos, trios, and duos, but--what am I
saying--the upshot of it all is that I don't do much more than to
stretch the canvas, smooth the bow, line the scores. For I am--no
false modesty, Friend Severin; you can lie to others, but you don't
quite succeed any longer in lying to yourself--I am nothing but a
dilettante, a dilettante in painting, in poetry, in music, and
several other of the so-called unprofitable arts, which, however, at
present secure for their masters the income of a cabinet minister,
or even that of a minor potentate. Above all else I am a dilettante
in life.

Up to the present I have lived as I have painted and written poetry.
I never got far beyond the preparation, the plan, the first act, the
first stanza. There are people like that who begin everything, and
never finish anything. I am such a one.

But what am I saying?

To the business in hand.

I lie in my window, and the miserable little town, which fills me
with despondency, really seems infinitely full of poetry. How
wonderful the outlook upon the blue wall of high mountains interwoven
with golden sunlight; mountain-torrents weave through them like
ribbons of silver! How clear and blue the heavens into which
snowcapped crags project; how green and fresh the forested slopes;