"If our Horion was not happy, then, of course, it may well be a comfort to him, if he is permitted even in the noonday of life to take his siesta, if he is permitted to die, and released from the hotly-beating heart, hushed by the death-angel, to lay himself down so early under the long shroud, which the genius of humanity draws over whole peoples, as the gardener draws the cover over the flower-bed to shield it from sun and rain,--against the glow of our joys, against the gush of our sorrow.... _Rest thou too, Horion!_" ... His grief at these words from the old dream so overmastered and so unmanned him that he passed over from it--by way either of excuse or of relief--into an almost frenzied humor. "The whole joke, however, is half against my taste, which at court I wanted to cultivate. Life absolutely does not pay for one's scolding on its account at our good friend Death, or fumigating him with the incense of praise. The fear of dying excepted, there is nothing more pitiable than the fear of living. People of true talents should get drunk in order to see life in the right light, and afterward report it to us. The wretchedest of all (but so that _human_ life in the comparison turns out still passable) is _civil_ life, at which I could let fly for years, because it has nothing but long troughs for the stomach, from which hang down chains for the fancy,--because it perverts man into a cit,--because it turns our fleeting existence from a corn-field into a drill-plough,--because it exhales a pestilential vapor which lies thick before the grave and over the heavens, and in which the poor expeditionary committee-man, sweating, chewing, fat, and besmeared, without a warm sunbeam for his heart, without a streak of light for his eye, drives round, till the ramming-block of the pavior[42] pounds him down on the marshy ropewalk. The only advantage such a poor piece of marble has, out of which a _pavement_ is made, instead of a _statue_, is that it looks upon the whole of human life as something really edifying, which it cannot sufficiently praise. And yet to us good fools the outer world could not appear so small, were there not something eternal and great within us, whereto we contrast it,--were there not a sunlight in us, which falls into this opera-house, just as the daylight, sometimes, when a door opens, falls in upon the nightly stage,--were it not that, like men in old pictures of the resurrection, we are half bedded in the earth and half out of it,--and if this ice-life were not an _Aiguille percée_,[43] and had not an opening out into an eternal blue.... Amen! "I have, however, still to announce to the sorrowing assembly, that I have been making an April-fool of it; for the dead man, whose funeral sermon I have been delivering, is really myself." ...