which leap up out of the heart and so sportively keep up the human head and the human individuality at such an elevation, as a fountain bears the hollow ball balanced on its flickering stream,--this fountain will I draw off with the dagger, so that the _I_ may be precipitated.--I shuddered at this character at the time; but afterward, I reflected upon it, and it became my own!" * * * * * Frightful man! Thy blood-stream and the _I_ on the top of it have perhaps already collapsed, or will soon fall through.--And precisely this dark presentiment is also in the hearts of Victor and Clotilda----O that thou, thou other bowed man, whom I dare not name here before the public, mightest guess that I mean thee, that thou, just as well as the unhappy Lord, art eating away thy own self like blood-sucking corpses, and that, in the _starry night_ of life, thou still bearest a deadly _mist_ of thine own around thee! O the spectacle of a magnanimous heart, which merely through ideas makes itself helpless, and which lies inaccessible and benumbed in its arbor of philosophical poison-trees, often dyes our days black!--Believe, not that his Lordship is anywhere right! How can he find anything to be small, without holding it over against something great? Without reverence there could be no contempt; without the feeling of disinterestedness, no perception of selfishness; without greatness, no littleness. When thou canst explain the tears of the adagio by the vibration of the strings, or by the blood-globules and threefold skins of a beautiful face thy regard for the same; then and as well canst thou think to justify thy rapture for the _spiritual_ in Nature by means of its corporeal filaments, which are nothing but the _flute-pieces_ and flat and sharp valves of the unplayed harmony. The sublime resides only in thoughts, whether those of the Eternal One, who expresses them by letters made of worlds, or those of man, who reads them and spells them out!-- I postpone the refutation of his Lordship to another book, although this, too, is a refutation.-- 42. DOG-POST-DAY. Self-Sacrifice.--Farewell Addresses to the Earth.--Memento Mori.--Walk.--Heart of Wax. There is a sorrow which lays itself with a great sucker-sting to the heart and thirstily drains its tears,--the whole heart runs and gushes and spasmodically contracts its innermost fibres, in order to become a stream of tears, and does not feel the wrench of grief under the deadly-sweet effusion.... Such a deadly-sweet pang our Victor felt at Clotilda's letter.