Gracious Baroness:
How gracious and kind of you—hearty thanks! Twice already I have been
eager to write to you; first after reading _Es Löwos_, which I find so
incomparable, and then after reading the _Inventarium einer Seele_. I
did not do so especially because I thought you would not care to pile
up still more correspondence. Now I have the privilege of offering you
my sincerest thanks for both,—and how touching, heart-quickening and
lovely is _Es Löwos_!
You, most gracious Baroness, and your husband are fighting together
with us, the little band that there is of us, against the absolute
bogging, the absolute collapse, of our literature. We who are living
shall have no laurels,—scorn and ridicule are too strong,—but we have
smoothed the way for our successors.
I have already heard so much about you from my friend Hermann
Friedrichs, whom I honor so highly—if only he were not so gloomy. In
political matters—I am very conservative, and am growing more so every
day if possible—Friedrichs and I are antipodes. But in other respects
we have many views in common.
You must be in the midst of springtime in your beautiful Lower
Austria; in my cloudy and ever-damp home and in the loneliness in
which I am compelled to live like a deaf-mute, scarcely a leaf is on
its way.
I beg you most humbly to remember me most cordially to your husband.
_Daredjan_[36]—wonderful.