not ours exceed it in worth, who for two years, though double in form, have been one in impulse, soul, and life-we, who for each other have cast aside the bonds of a hypocritical society and the cant of custom? But enough, Ethel; if we have renounced seeing each other, we permit ourselves to write, and through this means follow the courses of each other's being through the dark wastes of life.

Do not expect to hear of any system or method on my part; time seems too short and the world too vast for that! I rush from science to philosophy, and from philosophy to our old friends the poets; and then, overwearied by too much idealism, I fancy I become practical in returning to science. Have you ever attempted to conceive all there is in the world worth knowing-that not one subject in the universe is unworthy of study? The giants of literature, the mysteries of many-dimensioned space, the attempts of Boltzmann and Crookes to penetrate Nature's very laboratory, the Kantian theory of the universe, and the latest discoveries in embryology, with their wonderful tales of the development of life—what an immensity beyond our grasp! As I walk over the hills here, what a feeling of shame comes over me that I know

nothing of botany or geology; that though I may gaze with loving eye on flower and rock, I am ignorant of the life-history contained in the one and the world-history in the other! But my head swims; I feel our nature is too small, our powers are nought. Happy is the man who not only can say, "I know nothing," but can content himself with that nothing.

N-, April 2nd.

Your letter, my beloved one, reached me last night during one of the grandest scenes I have ever witnessed. I was standing at my window, facing the old Schloss, whose outline I attempted in vain to see through the blackness of the night. I listened to the sighing of the wind and the moaning of the trees; it was like the weeping of the women when the warriors prepare for the fight. My head had felt heavy the whole day, and, without being able to account for it, I was in a state of great nervous excitement. Some one opened the door and put a letter into my hand, but I made no attempt to turn and read it, and continued to gaze into the darkness. Suddenly there was a vivid flash, and every cowslip on the hillside, every stone and leaf of ivy on the castle opposite, were distinctly delineated; it was followed by the

crash of the thunder and the fall of a giant elm some hundred yards up the castle hill. An impulse took possession of me. I rushed from the house, and as flash followed flash almost instantaneously, and the roaring of the thunder engulfed in a sea of sound the crashing of the trees as they waged battle with the wind, I reached the castle terrace, and saw the plain of the Rhine beneath me

"He views

The dismal situation, waste and wild.

A dungeon horrible on all sides round

As one great furnace flamed; yet from those flames
No light, but rather darkness visible."

I thrust your letter in my bosom to preserve it from the torrents of rain which beat upon me, the drops leaping again from the earth, as if rejoicing in the elemental war. All my heaviness had passed away. My heart panted; I flung my arms back; my soul seemed possessed of a god's power, and I felt I was the Spirit of the Storm. O Ethel, had you been with me, you would have known that Nature's God requires no churches, her religion no framework of creed. Man is a divine atom, mankind a portion of the Whole; the Whole is God.

"We strive the heavenly powers to know—

Find creeds deceitful, faith but woe!"

Not in a dogmatic theology, not in a form of faith,

shall we ever find a religion or a living God. These are but the weak attempts of weak mankind to give a symbol and a reason for the divine feeling, the religiosity within it. Religions are as the starspheres with which the ancients would express the planetary motions. Each answers to the state of astronomical or religious knowledge at its date. But as Newton found the planets wanted no external mechanism to guide them, and moved by an innate force, so do we require no outer dogma, no mechanic form to be religious. Man, as guided by the force of innate feeling, is necessarily religious, because he recognizes that he is a portion of the Divinity. Man looked at from the commonplace of every day may seem to have but an infinitesimally small sphere of freedom; yet, as the mathematician considers a small closed surface on one side to bound a finite space, whilst on the other he regards it as containing infinity: so does man, when looking at his actions and life, seem to be finite, and the individual "I" to be utterly circumscribed; yet if, on the other hand, he looks outside this limit, he sees that it is he himself who bounds the infinite, who grasps the Whole, and that to his "I" is due the very existence of that Whole.

It is to this problem, Ethel-the union of the