“After I had listened to the strangest things about this work for almost a year, I at last took it myself in hand, and it excited in me astonishment and admiration; an effect which will produce in the mind which is simply susceptible, everything good, beautiful, and great. . . . The poet who, surpassing the limit of all our conceptions, has penetrated with burning spiritual vision the past and present, and consequently the future, has now subdued new regions under his limitless talent, but what he will accomplish therein can be predicted by no human being. His procedure, however, we can nevertheless in a measure more closely determine. He adheres to the letter of the Biblical tradition, for he allows the first pair of human beings to exchange their original purity and innocence for a guilt mysterious in its origin; the punishment which is its consequence descending upon all posterity. The monstrous burden of such an event he lays upon the shoulders of Cain as the representative of a wretched humanity, plunged for no fault of its own into the depths of misery. “To this primitive son of man, bowed down and heavily burdened, death, which as yet he has not seen, is an especial trouble; and although he may desire the end of his present distress, it seems still more hateful to exchange it for a condition altogether unknown. Hence we already see that the full weight of a dogmatic system, explaining, mediating, yet always in conflict with itself, just as it still for ever occupies us, was imposed on the first miserable son of man. These contradictions, which are not strange to human nature, possessed his mind, and could not be brought to rest, either through the divinely-given gentleness of his father and brother, or the loving and alleviating co-operation of his sister-wife. In order to sharpen them to the point of impossibility of endurance, Satan comes upon the scene, a mighty and misleading spirit, who begins by unsettling him morally, and then conducts him miraculously through all worlds, causing him to see the past as overwhelmingly vast, the present as small and of no account, and the future as full of foreboding and void of consolation. “So he turns back to his own family, more excited, but not worse than before; and finding in the family circle everything as he has left it, the urgency of Abel, who wishes to make him offer a sacrifice, becomes altogether insupportable. More say we not, excepting that the motivation of the scene in which Abel perishes is of the rarest excellence, and what follows is equally great and priceless. There now lies Abel! That now is Death—there was so much talk about it, and man knows about it as little as he did before.