The collected works of Strindberg, which will shortly be published in a new edition, consist of some 115 plays, novels, collections of stories, essays and poems. Amongst these some seem absolutely antithetical. It is the constant changeability, the self-contradictions, which made Strindberg so incomprehensible to his contemporaries. The measure of his life-force was so liberal that he could afford to continue where others stop. He shed his skins like the snake and altered his colour like the chameleon, because he was the personification of perpetual movement and change. Thus he was endowed with ever-recurring youth; the decay of the old was immediately followed by birth of the new. The diary, in which, during the last fourteen years, he recorded his visions and supernatural experiences, will not be given to the world for many years to come. Though it depicts the last phase of his spiritual evolution, the postponement of publication is no doubt wise. Meanwhile, those who have poured curses on Strindberg's blatant atheism have been perplexed by his last words. When death was drawing near, he took the Bible--which always lay on the table by his bed--held it up and said in a clear voice: "Everything personal is now obliterated. I have settled with life. My account has been rendered. This alone is right." He expressed a last wish that the Bible and a little crucifix which he used to wear should be placed on his breast after death, and that he should be buried early in the morning, and not amongst the rich. He desired to be laid to rest alone on the top of a hill under the firs. This love of the early morning was part of his craving for more light. For many years he used to take a solitary morning walk. At seven o'clock he emerged from his "blue tower" in Stockholm and walked briskly through the streets and squares of his native town. At nine he was back at his writing-table--of late years a recluse for the rest of the day, absorbed in his work. "Ever since my youth," he writes in _Inferno_, "I devote my morning walk to meditations which are preparations for my daily work. Nobody may then accompany me, not even my wife. In the morning my mind enjoys a balance and an expansion which approach ecstasy; I do not walk, I fly; I do not feel that I have a body; all sadness evaporates and I am entirely soul. This is for me the hour of inner concentration, of prayer, my divine service." I have often seen Strindberg in the streets of Stockholm. He walked with his high forehead painfully contracted, the eyes searching and concentrated, and an expression of haughty bitterness upon his face. A solitary, suggesting to the passer-by Rodin's _Penseur_ in motion and the futile wanderings of Ahasuerus; he seemed wrapped in his own misery, held aloof by suffering and contempt.