HOW DUTY ACQUIRES A GLAMOUR.—You can change a brazen duty into gold in the eyes of all by always performing something more than you have promised. 405. PRAYER TO MANKIND.—“Forgive us our virtues”—so should we pray to mankind. 406. THEY THAT CREATE AND THEY THAT ENJOY.—Every one who enjoys thinks that the principal thing to the tree is the fruit, but in point of fact the principal thing to it is the seed.—Herein lies the difference between them that create and them that enjoy. 407. THE GLORY OF ALL GREAT MEN.—What is the use of genius if it does not invest him who contemplates and reveres it with such freedom and loftiness of feeling that he no longer has need of genius?—To make themselves superfluous is the glory of all great men. 408. THE JOURNEY TO HADES.—I too have been in the underworld, even as Odysseus, and I shall often be there again. Not sheep alone have I sacrificed, that I might be able to converse with a few dead souls, but not even my own blood have I spared. There were four pairs who responded to me in my sacrifice: Epicurus and Montaigne, Goethe and Spinoza, Plato and Rousseau, Pascal and Schopenhauer. With them I have to come to terms. When I have long wandered alone, I will let them prove me right or wrong; to them will I listen, if they prove each other right or wrong. In all that I say, conclude, or think out for myself and others, I fasten my eyes on those eight and see their eyes fastened on mine.—May the living forgive me if I look upon them at times as shadows, so pale and fretful, so restless and, alas! so eager for life. Those eight, on the other hand, seem to me so living that I feel as if even now, after their death, they could never become weary of life. But eternal vigour of life is the important point: what matters “eternal life,” or indeed life at all? PART II. THE WANDERER AND HIS SHADOW. _The Shadow_: It is so long since I heard you speak that I should like to give you an opportunity of talking. _The Wanderer_: I hear a voice—where? whose? I almost fancied that I heard myself speaking, but with a voice yet weaker than my own. _The Shadow_ (after a pause): Are you not glad to have an opportunity of speaking? _The Wanderer_: By God and everything else in which I disbelieve, it is my shadow that speaks. I hear it, but I do not believe it. _The Shadow_: Let us assume that it exists, and think no more about it. In another hour all will be over. _The Wanderer_: That is just what I thought when in a forest near Pisa I saw first two and then five camels.