“Dear Sir,—I write from Presburg. I have sent my manuscripts, &c., to the care of my sister, and have told her to deliver them unopened to you. . . .
“Upon recollection, I am much pleased with your last letter in which you say you feel yourself identified in some measure with me. Our acquaintance was but short, yet I feel as if our souls were nearly allied. But our situations are very different. You live in retirement. Although in the neighbourhood of a great city, you may be said to be widely removed from the influence of those violent passions which agitate in so extraordinary a degree the present generation. But I am tossed to and fro in a tempestuous world. I have hourly to encounter the passions and prejudices of men, and to suppress my own passions, naturally strong, on occasions eminently calculated to rouse them to the utmost. Wherever I have turned my steps I have met with obstacles; in almost every man I have found an opposer; disease, poverty, and persecution have united to afflict me. If, in such circumstances as these, you have supposed that I was at all times to preserve the same collected coolness which I might be able to do in maturer age, and in the quiet of retirement, you have expected from me what is probably more than will ever be performed by man. It is perhaps enough that I can recover myself, and collect my powers for new efforts; and that I never lose sight of the main object, but continue to pursue it with steadiness while it is possible to be pursued. . . .
| A WALKING TOUR. | 31 |
“I am going to Pesth, Fünfkirchen, Semlin, Temeswar, Hermanstadt. I shall thence turn towards the north. I will visit Deehczin, Cashan, and Eperin, and cross the Carpathians into Poland. I have gotten an invitation from a Polish prince to visit him at his country seat, from whence, by the way of Cracow, we are to return together to Vienna.
“I shall write again from Pesth.
