this call is common and imperative, and can never fail to be heard
without some more or less wilful closing of the ears. Though the
Hecker brothers were, and ever continued to be, men of the highest
business integrity, and though there existed between them a cordial
affection, which was intensified to an extraordinary degree in the
case of George and Isaac, yet the unfitness of the latter for
ordinary trade grew increasingly evident, and to himself painfully
so. The truth is, that his ideas of conducting business would have
led to the distribution of profits rather than to their accumulation.
If he could make the bake-house and the shop into a school for the
attainment of an ideal that had begun to hover, half-veiled, in the
air above him, he saw his way to staying where he was; but not
otherwise.

[* I Timothy 6:8.]

In the autumn of 1842 there came upon him certain singular
intensifications of this disquiet with himself and his surroundings.
In the journal begun the following spring, he so frequently and so
explicitly refers to these occurrences, now speaking of them as
"dreams which had a great effect upon my character"; and again,
specializing and fully describing one, as something not dreamed, but
seen when awake, "which left an indelible impression my mind,"
weaning it at once and for ever from all possibility of natural love
and marriage, that the integrity of any narrative of his life would
demand some recognition of them. His own comment, in the diary, will
not be without interest and value, both as bearing on much that
follows, and as containing all that need be said in explanation of
the present reference to such experiences: