On the same morning on which the king and Bronnen were closeted together at the hunting-seat, the queen sent for Gunther. He found her clad in white and resting on her couch. She looked pale and feeble, and told him how provoked she felt at the vanity and conceit which had induced her, a young queen, to regard herself as wise and good, and had led her to imagine herself as gifted with unusual endowments.

"Did you know of what was going on here?" she asked the physician.

"No; I would not have believed it possible, and it is only now that I understand the terrible death of my dear friend Eberhard. A father in such grief--"

The queen did not enter into this view of the matter and went on, as if speaking to herself:

"When I recall the days, the hours, in which she sung, I must ask myself, can it be possible to sing such songs and such words,--breathing naught but love, kindness, exaltation, purity--and at the same time have nothing in one's soul? Aye, worse than nothing--falseness and hypocrisy? Every word seems false. Have we a right to be princes, to regard ourselves as superior to others and entitled to rule them, if we do not elevate ourselves above them by purity and greatness of soul? I have become a changed being since yesterday. My soul then lay at the bottom of the sea, and the waves of death and despair raged above me; but now I wish to live. Only tell me how to endure it all. You've been at court so long and despise everything. Don't shake your head; you despise it all--! Tell me, how is one to endure it? How can one manage to live on and yet remain here? You surely possess the mystery; impart it to me, for that alone can save me."

"Your Majesty," replied the physician, "you are still feverish and excited."

"Indeed, is that the sum of all your science? Princes are right when they abuse their fellow-creatures, for even the best of men are naught but polite shadows. I had placed all my dependence upon you; I had looked up to you as one exalted far above me; and where I had hoped to clasp a hand, you offer me an empty glove. You smile; I am not delirious, I've merely awakened to the truth; I have just passed through hours in which the beautiful world--ah! how full of beauty it was--seemed filled with naught but creeping worms and loathsome corruption. Oh, it is terrible! I fancied there was one free being to whom I could tell all, and from whom I could ask everything in return; but you are not the man. Ah! there are no real men in this world. The best are nothing more than title-bearing creatures!"

"You shall not have goaded me in vain!" muttered Gunther half aloud, and rising from his seat.

"I didn't mean to offend you!" cried the queen. "Ah, thus it is; in pain and sorrow, we wound those who are nearest to us!"

"Calm yourself, Your Majesty," replied Gunther, seating himself. "If there is anything for which I may claim credit, it is that I do not indulge my sensitiveness. I am severe toward others, because I am severe toward myself."

The queen closed her eyes, but presently she looked at him intently and said:

"I fear nothing more."

Thus encouraged, Gunther went on to say:

"Human fancy cannot realize how much of vice and misery, nor, on the other hand, how much of beauty, holiness, grandeur and sublimity there is in life.

"Your Majesty, I am here at the palace, which is a world in miniature, a world in itself. All that is terrible, and all that is noble, is attracted hither--and yet, with every returning spring, the flowers bloom and the trees deck themselves in robes of green, while the stars shine over all. There is a blooming flower, a shining star even in the most despicable of beings. A drop descends from the clouds and falls upon the dusty road. The drop and the dust uniting, become the mire of the highway; but to the eye that looks deeper, the drop is still pure, although divided and subdivided until it is almost impalpably minute, and inseparable from the dust that darkens it. But even this image does not suffice. No image directed to the senses, can convey an adequate conception of the Deity. God exists even in the grain of dust. To our eyes, it is dust; but to the eye of God, it is as pure as the water and is equally the abode of infinity. The very people whom you regard as so false would like to be good, if it did not entail so much trouble and involve so many sacrifices. Most men would like to win virtue, but do not care to earn it. They all desire to draw the great prize in the lottery of morality. 'Oh, if I were only good!' said a lost creature to me, one day. Your Majesty, truth tells us that hatred and contempt are not good for they injure the soul. The true art of living requires us to recognize that which is base in its true colors, but at the same time, to avoid debasing ourselves by violent or passionate feelings against that which is wicked or vulgar. You must remove hatred from your heart, and be at peace with yourself. Hatred destroys the soul. You must grow to feel that, viewed in the proper light, vice and crime are simply defects. They may lead to a thousand sad consequences, but, of themselves, have no existence; virtue alone is a reality. Come up higher, unto where I stand, and you will find that you have been tormenting yourself with mere shadows."

"I see the steps," said the queen; "help me up!"

"Naught can avail but self-help. Each must learn to be monarch of himself, even though he wear a kingly crown. The law teaches us that, in order to retain this command over ourselves, we must not permit anger and hatred to dwell in our souls, or to poison so much of the world as is given us to enjoy, be our share great or small."

"I had too much faith in virtue and kindness."

"Very likely. As long as one believes in mankind, there will be deception and despair. We persist in judging our fellow-creatures by what they are as regards us, instead of what they are as regards themselves. And thus, as long as we believe in human virtue, we may, at times, be perplexed at finding ourselves disappointed where we least expect it. As soon, however, as we recognize the Divine in everything, even though the possessor himself is unconscious of it, we have attained a lofty standpoint, from which we feel sure both of ourselves and of the world."

The queen hurriedly raised herself and, extending both hands to Gunther, exclaimed:

"You are a worker of miracles."

"No, I am not that. I am only a physician who has held many a hand hot with fever, or stiff in death, in his own. The healing art might serve as an illustration. We help all who need our help, and do not stop to ask who they are, whence they come, or whether, when restored to health, they persist in their evil courses. Our actions are incomplete, fragmentary; thought alone is complete and all-embracing. Our deeds and ourselves are but fragments--the whole is God."

"I think I grasp your meaning. But our life, as you say, is indeed a mere fraction of life as a whole, and how is each one to bear up under the portion of suffering that falls to his individual lot? Can one--I mean it in its best sense--always be outside of one's-self?"

"I am well aware, Your Majesty, that passions and emotions cannot be regulated by ideas; for they grow in a different soil, or, to express myself correctly, move in entirely different spheres. It is but a few days since I closed the eyes of my old friend Eberhard. Even he never fully succeeded in subordinating his temperament to his philosophy; but, in his dying hour, he rose beyond the terrible grief that broke his heart--grief for his child. He summoned the thoughts of better hours to his aid--hours when his perception of the truth had been undimmed by sorrow or passion--and he died a noble, peaceful death. Your Majesty must still live and labor, elevating yourself and others, at one and the same time. Permit me to remind you of the moment when, seated under the weeping ash, your heart was filled with pity for the poor child that, from the time it enters into the world, is doubly helpless. Do you still remember how you refused to rob it of its mother? I appeal to the pure and genuine impulse of that moment. You were noble and forgiving then, because you had not yet suffered. You cast no stone at the fallen; you loved and, therefore, you forgave."

"Oh God!" cried the queen, "and what has happened to me? The woman on whose bosom my child rested is the most abandoned of creatures. I loved her, just as if she belonged to another world--a world of innocence. And now I am satisfied that she was the go-between, and that her naÏvetÉ was a mere mask concealing an unparalleled hypocrite. I imagined that truth and purity still dwelt in the simple rustic world--but everything is perverted and corrupt. The world of simplicity is base; aye, far worse than that of corruption!"

"I am not arguing about individuals. I think you mistaken in regard to Walpurga; but, admitting that you are right, of this, at least, we can be sure: morality does not depend upon so-called education or ignorance, belief or unbelief. The heart and mind which have regained purity and steadfastness alone possess true knowledge. Extend your view beyond details and take in the whole--that alone can comfort and reconcile you."

"I see where you are, but I cannot get up there. I can't always be looking through your telescope that shows naught but blue sky. I am too weak. I know what you mean; you say, in effect: 'Rise above these few people, above this span of space known as a kingdom--compared with the universe, they are but as so many blades of grass, or a mere clod of earth.'"

Gunther nodded a pleased assent, but the queen, in a sad voice, added:

"Yes, but this space and these people constitute my world. Is purity merely imaginary? If it be not about us, where can it be found?"

"Within ourselves," replied Gunther. "If it dwell within us, it is everywhere; if not, it is nowhere. He who asks for more, has not yet passed the threshold. His heart is not yet what it should be. True love for the things of this earth, and for God, the final cause of all, does not ask for love in return. We love the divine spark that dwells in creatures themselves unconscious of it: creatures who are wretched, debased and, as the church has it, unredeemed. My master taught me that the purest joys arise from this love of God or of eternally pure nature. I made this truth my own, and you can and ought to do likewise. This park is yours; but the birds that dwell in it, the air, the light, its beauty, are not yours alone, but are shared with you by all. So long as the world is ours, in the vulgar sense of the word, we may love it; but when we have made it our own, in a purer and better sense, no one can take it from us. The great thing is to be strong and to know that hatred is death, that love alone is life, and that the amount of love that we possess is the measure of the life and the divinity that dwells within us."

Gunther rose and was about to withdraw. He feared lest excessive thought might over-agitate the queen, who, however, motioned him to remain. He sat down again.

"You cannot imagine--" said the queen, after a long pause, "but that is one of the cant phrases that we have learned by heart. I mean just the reverse of what I have said. You can imagine the change that your words have effected in me."

"I can conceive it."

"Let me ask a few more questions. I believe--nay, I am sure--that on the height you occupy, and toward which you would fain lead me, there dwells eternal peace. But it seems so cold and lonely up there. I am oppressed with a sense of fear, just as if I were in a balloon ascending into a rarer atmosphere, while more and more ballast was ever being thrown out. I don't know how to make my meaning clear to you. I don't understand how to keep up affectionate relations with those about me, and yet regard them from a distance, as it were--looking upon their deeds as the mere action and reaction of natural forces. It seems to me as if, at that height, every sound and every image must vanish into thin air."

"Certainly, Your Majesty. There is a realm of thought in which hearing and sight do not exist, where there is pure thought and nothing more."

"But are not the thoughts that there abound projected from the realm of death into that of life, and is that any better than monastic self-mortification?"

"It is just the contrary. They praise death, or, at all events, extol it, because, after it, life is to begin. I am not one of those who deny a future life. I only say, in the words of my master: 'Our knowledge is of life and not of death,' and where my knowledge ceases, my thoughts must cease. Our labors, our love, are all of this life. And because God is in this world and in all that exist in it, and only in those things, have we to liberate the divine essence, wherever it exists. The law of love should rule. What the law of nature is in regard to matter, the moral law is to man."

"I cannot reconcile myself to your dividing the divine power into millions of parts. When a stone is crushed, every fragment still remains a stone; but when a flower is torn to pieces, the parts are no longer flowers."

"Let us take your simile as an illustration, although in truth no example is adequate. The world, the firmament, the creatures that live on the face of the earth, are not divided--they are one; thought regards them as a whole. Take, for instance, the flower. The idea of divinity which it suggests to us, and the fragrance which ascends from it, are yet part and parcel of the flower: attributes without which it is impossible for us to conceive of its existence. The works of all poets, all thinkers, all heroes, may be likened to streams of fragrance, wafted through time and space. It is in the flower that they live forever. Although the eternal spirit dwells in the cell of every tree or flower, and in every human heart, it is undivided and, in its unity, fills the world. He whose thoughts dwell in the infinite, regards the world as the mighty corolla from which the thought of God exhales."

For some time, the queen kept her face buried in her hands. Gunther quietly withdrew.