which every mortal has to seek to become a person of noble spirit. Every thinking human being who seeks for advancement has to go through such internal struggles. Normally, these are thoughts and emotions, which are competing against one another. But with me, those thoughts and feelings had taken on shapes of visible and audible characters. I saw them with my eyes closed, and I heard them by day and night; they interrupted my work; they woke me from my sleep. The dark ones were more powerful than the bright ones; when they forced themselves upon me, resistance was useless. At ordinary times, my inner world was quiet; then, there was no conflict. But was soon as I started to work, one character after another woke up. Every one of them wanted to change my work according to its wishes. This also very much depended on the topic I was dealing with. Nobody objected against a funny short story. I could finish something like this without an argument, without interruption. But when working on a serious village-tale, numerous voices spoke out for and against me. In those village-tales, I have proven time and time again that God will not permit any mockery of his power, but punishes precisely according to the sin committed. Against this, certain characters within me rose up. But I met with the greatest resistance, as soon as I rose to even higher paths in my work or in my reading. Whenever I took on a religiously, or ethically, or aesthetically higher topic, the dark character within me rebelled with all of its might against it and tormented me in a manner which is entirely inexpressible. In order to demonstrate in what manner this occurred and what kind of a torment this was, I want to give an explanatory example: I had been commissioned to write a parody of "Des Sängers Fluch" <The Singer's Curse> by Uhland [a]. I did so. This parody got the title "The Tailor's Curse". A tailor cursed a shoemaker, his ramshackle hovel, and tiny garden, where only two gooseberry-bushes grew. The curse on the house took on the form of the following lines: [a] Ludwig Uhland (1787-1862) "The mortgage does await this, that you, today, shall fall. Damn walls, hear what your fate is: I will destroy you all!" I wrote this parody, without being disturbed by my inner voices while doing so. Nothing within me rebelled to the slightest extent against such a base thing. Just the luminous character disappeared; it mourned, because I had enough abilities to do better and nobler things. Some time later, I had to write a didactic poem, of which I now remember nothing more than the following verses: