“I am a close student of your new political literature. Will you permit me to say that I discover therein a carping and regretful tone? It seems to me that its chief effort is devoted to blackening and decrying the regime you have chosen, to undermining confidence in it. Our efforts take the opposite direction. We are all for construction, adaptation, glorification, lyric enthusiasm. We accept our national mission. We accept our present life. We desire that our energies should continue to increase, to coalesce, to become intertwined. You will see; when the right moment comes they will secure for us a hegemony, and beyond question it will be the most humane and the most pacific of hegemonies.”
Our conversation was a lengthy one. All the conventional barriers had been cast down. Every one gave utterance to his own truth, as if speaking to himself alone, in that species of lucid exaltation which sometimes results from a prolonged vigil. And the strange thing was that in proportion as behind the verbal agreements we sensed ever more strongly the depths of unexpressed antagonisms, we felt each for the other an increasing esteem. The hours passed. All the lamps in the Frankfurter Hof had been extinguished, except our own, which continued to burn in the great reading-room, its yellow light piercing the smoke-wreaths from our cigars, and exhibiting the virile and yet refined features of the young banker. We passed out into the open. The porter was asleep. The streets were deserted. After this great duel between our respective national dreams, the cold of the night was agreeable. Through the ancient street where the young Goethe, locked up by his father in the corner room, had watched Gretchen going by, we gained the banks of the Main. The first streaks of dawn were already illuminating the broad surface of the river, peopled with motionless vessels.
This was a year ago. Now the war has come between our dreams.
At Leipzig, again, I see a small and cheap room, an eyrie in the Inselstrasse, among the great printing houses. It was attractive none the less, almost touching in its simplicity, the ugly little place, with an empty cup of coffee on the edge of a deal table laden with papers, and, fixed to the wall, two shelves for books. It was a cell, showing that its tenant was a man devoid of all vanities, a stranger to the amenities of our century. Here, one fine morning, after I had rung the bell five or six times, I was welcomed by M. Wilhelm Baum, editor of _Die Akademische Rundschau_ and president of the “Free Students.”