"Because, if I am not totally mistaken, you are affected with the poet's deadly disease--the longing after the Blue Flower--and will die one of these days of your unsatisfied longing. You recollect the beautiful story in Novalis' works? The Blue Flower, after which the great Minnesinger was longing? The Blue Flower! Do you know what that is? That is the flower which mortal eye has never yet seen, and the fragrance of which fills the whole world. Not every creature is delicately enough made to be able to perceive the perfume; but the nightingale is intoxicated with it when it sings and sobs and sighs in the moonlight or at early daybreak; and all foolish men have been and are drunk with it when they cry in prose and in poetry to heaven, pouring out their sorrow and their grief; and all the countless millions to whom the gift was denied to utter what they suffer, and who in their speechless sorrow look up to merciless Heaven. Ah! and there is no cure for that malady! No cure but death! He who has once breathed the perfume of the Blue Flower, has no more peace and quiet in this life. As if he were an accursed murderer, as if the angel with the flaming sword were after him, he is driven on and on, although his sore feet pain him and he yearns to lay down his weary head to rest. He asks, in his torments of thirst, for a drink at this or that cottage door, but he returns the emptied cup without thanks, for there was a fly in the water, or the cup was not quite clean, or--well, well, he was not refreshed by the drink. Refreshed! Where is the eye which satisfies us so that we would never like to look into another again, more brilliant, more fiery than the first? Where is the bosom on which we have once rested, which keeps us from desiring to listen to the beating of another heart, more ardent, more burning with love? Where? I ask you where?" The baron paused: Oswald was strangely moved. What the eccentric man by his side had been saying, more to himself than to be heard, in an almost elegiac tone, which contrasted strikingly with his ordinarily sharp, strident voice--it was his own thoughts, which he had had often and often, from early boyhood up, so that he was almost frightened by the close resemblance of his Double. He had no answer for the baron's question, which he seemed to have propounded to himself. "I have always been thinking about the necessity," continued the baron, "which forces men first to forget their own existence more or less, before they reach the condition which we call happiness, for want of a better word, and that they are the happier, the more fully they can forget it. 'The best of life is but intoxication,' says Byron. Yes indeed! The love of Romeo and Juliet, for which we face death as readily, as we go to a feast, is also but intoxication. 'To sleep is better than to be awake,' says the wisdom of the East; but the best of all is death." "And yet comparatively few men kill themselves," said Oswald.