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have well-brought-up children, how hard I try to rear them in the right way. But this method, in God's name, does not suit me. Scolding ever and always, for nothing and again nothing blustering like a monster.

I have already pleaded with the woman, as earnestly as I could, for God's and the children's sakes she should take a steadier manner, a softer tone, all in vain! When I speak softly, things go from bad to worse. She knows hundreds of bad words where I know one. Now it is all over again for the time being, a storm set down on paper. She is my wife as before and I her husband as always..." [Voellmy, v 2 pp 193-195]

On the same day Salome accompanied her husband to the Lichtensteig market; he says of her: "For a little while she can join in, have a drink and be cheerful and merry - but then it is nothing but complaints, heaping up of reproaches, raising visions of heaven and hell". Next day he tries to convince her that "her eternal lamentations and doleful care are useless, a dismal bad habit which makes life sour and bitter - and cannot possibly be pleasing to God". [Chronik, p 185]

5th Aug. "Eh, the eternal chatter, the hateful, endless devil's prattling! [...] could I teach my youngsters to keep their tongues in check, if they will not accustom them to sound well. That hateful chattering all day long, without head nor tail to it. Has not the Creator given each bird a pleasant voice! Or Nature bids them keep their traps shut! And as for man? Shall he be the most noble of all the creatures, yet accustom his tongue to torment his neighbour by the most disgusting of sounds? Shall he accustom himself to babble forth nothing but senseless stuff in the harshest of tones?

God forgive me! I flee from it as if the devil were after me, whenever I come in peril of falling into the hands of such ugly-sounding croaking frogs. And yet the silliest of loudmouths are pleased with the sound of their own voices, and have flatterers who praise them. And that is just the fault that makes them remain to all eternity such champion chatterboxes. I strike myself upon the mouth whenever I escape from such a company. Let it be to you for a warning, you chattering hole, that you do not plague any other soul by your noise. I wish I could set an iron ring on my boy's mouth, until he accustomed himself to silence. I would tear out my hair by the roots, if I were to learn that he got his jay's tongue from me.

Every person must be what he is. Filthy and false, crooked or lame or whatever, but not in this case! I do not give myself out for a fine speaker, I do not understand cultivated speech, but this I know, that I can be silent, when nobody wants to hear me. Nor am I so fastidious that I like only contrived speeches from the world of scholarship or gallantry. No, there too one finds just as disgusting chatter. Wherever there is only something of decency, something only of common sense, only a little reason, a moderate tone, then I am content. But talk of nothing and again nothing in the whole wide world, matters that have nothing in the world to do with anything, senseless mockery, barefaced lies, lame merriment and jests that make you throw up, and then such a wretched, mirthless laughter at them, that would try the patience of an ox or an ass, things that never were on land nor sea, which go together like fire and ice, things that they understand less than the donkey, they throw them in all together like the apes with the hazel-nuts, and show their teeth and think it's a wonder, when they don't shut their gobs from one end of the day to the other, and annoy every respectable man with their endless stream of chatter. Better to howl with the wolves in the wilderness, than live in the society of these chatterboxes and senseless bags of wind." [Voellmy, v 2 pp 195-197]

7th Aug. "An hour of bliss"
     "In the early morning by the window to the east. All yet in soft stillness. Waited full of inward devotion for the sun - then she peeped gradually forth from behind the gloomy forest. What rapture! O the warmth around my heart! How the flaming goddess sent her splendid rays though the tops of the pine-trees, it seemed as if she burned them in golden flames yet did not consume

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