all let us dispense with gratitude, for it belongs to the calculating, bourgeois virtues. _Do ut des_. Let us forget light, and gratitude, and the qualms of self-important idealism, let us go bravely to meet the coming night. She promises us great power over reality. Is it worth while to give up our old tastes and lofty convictions? Love and light have not availed against vitriol. What a horror would have seized us at the thought, once upon a time! That short phrase can annul all Schiller. We have shut our eyes and stopped our ears, we have built huge philosophic systems to shield us from this tiny thought. And now--now it seems we have no more feeling for Schiller and the great systems, we have no pity on our past beliefs. We now are seeking for words with which to sing the praises of our former enemy. Night, the dark, deaf, impenetrable night, peopled with horrors--does she not now loom before us, infinitely beautiful? Does she not draw us with her still, mysterious, fathomless beauty, far more powerfully than noisy, narrow day? It seems as if, in a short while, man will feel that the same incomprehensible, cherishing power which threw us out into the universe and set us, like plants, to reach to the light, is now gradually transferring us to a new direction, where a new life awaits us with all its stores. _Fata volentem ducunt, nolentem trahunt._ And perhaps the time is near when the impassioned poet, casting a last look to his past, will boldly and gladly cry: _Hide thyself, sun! O darkness, be welcome_! 2