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Tetschen,1 Sunday, 8 o'clock
July 16, 1882
My sweet little bride
If you only knew how lovely it is here and how incomparably more lovely it would be with you! The Elbe flows by, still a modest little river, showing me the way to you, to you. High mountains, some overgrown, some bare in strange formation, nice little houses which do not look as though they were meant to be lived in but to be put up and knocked down as in a game of bricks,
all in a row along the river, a few proud buildings gazing down from the mountain slopes as though they had nothing to do with the rest. One of them all by itself on a hill, a castle or a monastery or something like that-it's really all the same to me. On the left lies Bodenbach, on the right Tetschen and between them two bridges, one for the railway and the other for “vagrant scholars” on their way to their sweethearts. On the second bridge I had to pay a toll of two kreutzer, but this I did willingly; I was glad I had not broken a leg.2 I have been telling such an awful lot of lies lately. I crossed the bridge to Tetschen because in Bodenbach there was no coffeehouse from which I could write to you. It turns out that I have to stay here till 2 A.M. and won't reach Hamburg until 2:30 P.M. on Tuesday and don't know if I can see you even on Tuesday, and I am completely roasted or grilled-no, not completely done, only half, like an English roast beef. But to return to Bodenbach. There is a kind of holy Sunday stillness over everything and the bells are ringing, I don't quite know why, and the streets are so clean, the people so polite, the old ones looking as I have always expected Christian Fürchtegott* Gellert to look and the young ones so modest, as if nowadays they themselves lived in fear of God. In the middle of the market place there is a square stone, could be the tomb of an old Saxon king, but it probably isn't and I really don't care what it is. It is enough that I can walk around here without being asked, “Who gave you that r