Page:Masterpieces of German literature volume 10.djvu/118

 shoot at V. I did it without anger, and missed. Now, farewell, my dearly beloved mother. Give love to father and every one from

Vienna, June 14, '52.

My Beloved Heart,—At this hour I ought to sit down and write a long report to his Majesty concerning a lengthy and fruitless negotiation which I had today with Count Buol, and concerning an audience with the Archduchess Empress-Dowager. But I have just taken a promenade on the high ramparts all round the inner city, and from them seen a charming sunset behind the Leopoldsberg, and now I am much more inclined to think of you than of business. I stood for a long time on the red Thor Tower, which commands a view of the Jägerzeil and of our old-time domicile, the Lamb, with the café before it; at the Archduchess' I was in a room which opens on the home-like little garden into which we once secretly and thoughtlessly found our way; yesterday I heard Lucia—Italian, very good; all this so stirs my longing for you that I am quite sad and incapable. For it is terrible to be thus alone in the world, when one is no longer accustomed to it; I am in quite a Lynaric mood. Nothing but calls, and coming to know strangers, with whom I am always having the same talk. Every one knows that I have not yet been here very long, but whether I was ever here before, that is the great question which I have answered two hundred times in these days, and happy that that topic still remains. For folk bent on pleasure this may be a very pretty place, for it offers whatever is capable of affording outward diversion to people. But I am longing for Frankfort as if it were Kniephof, and do not wish to come here by any means. F. must lie just where the sun went down, over the Mannhartsberg yonder; and, while it was sinking here, it still continued shining with you for over half an hour. It is terribly far. How different it was with