The Life of Raphael

Dear Friend, - I regard it as my special good fortune that your pen enables me once more to enter into communication with your countrymen. It is as if I were an American speaking to Americans. Your translations are so spirited that I sometimes feel as if an author were at work in your Fatherland whose views are precisely the same as mine, and with whom I am strangely in unison. From my youth I have felt an interest and sympathy in America, although I have never been there. I can recall from the days of my far-off boyhood, the undefined, romantic feeling with which men strained their gaze across the ocean's wide expanse from the fettered, pre-Bismarck Germany, to the opposite shores "where Freedom dwelt."

These sentiments, however, are by no means the ground of my present attachment to your country.