felt warmed and cheered at heart at the very sight of him. I remember
his voice too, soft and even, with a peculiar sort of sweet huskiness
in it. He spoke, as a rule, little, and with noticeable difficulty. But
when he warmed up, his words flowed freely, and--strange to say!--his
voice grew still softer, his glance seemed turned inward and lost its
fire, while his whole face faintly glowed. On his lips the words
'goodness,' 'truth,' 'life,' 'science,' 'love,' however
enthusiastically they were uttered, never rang with a false note.
Without strain, without effort, he stepped into the realm of the ideal;
his pure soul was at any moment ready to stand before the 'holy shrine
of beauty'; it awaited only the welcoming call, the contact of another
soul.... Pasinkov was an idealist, one of the last idealists whom it
has been my lot to come across. Idealists, as we all know, are all but
extinct in these days; there are none of them, at any rate, among the
young people of to day. So much the worse for the young people of
to-day!

About three years I spent with Pasinkov, 'soul in soul,' as the saying
is.

I was the confidant of his first love. With what grateful sympathy and
intentness I listened to his avowal! The object of his passion was a
niece of Winterkeller's, a fair-haired, pretty little German, with a
chubby, almost childish little face, and confidingly soft blue eyes.
She was very kind and sentimental: she loved Mattison, Uhland, and
Schiller, and repeated their verses very sweetly in her timid, musical
voice. Pasinkov's love was of the most platonic. He only saw his
beloved on Sundays, when she used to come and play at forfeits with the
Winterkeller children, and he had very little conversation with her.
But once, when she said to him, 'mein lieber, lieber Herr Jacob!' he