He seemed to revel in the stimulus of the hurry-up motive that so often supervenes, but far more slowly, in those who realize that they have reached the zenith of their powers. Love of his mother made him an artist and he early married a wife who was the mother-image, which was never marred by any childish jealousy of his father, of whom he had known little, but was sublimated into love of mankind and even of animals. But his later greater love of death obscured the mother image and even overcame his passion for home, which he had idealized, and dominated his exquisite feeling for and worship of nature, which he always regarded as charged with symbolic meanings. At a crisis in the early thirties a prevalent depressive mood gave way to the joy of creation, and his character and the method of his art seemed to undergo a transformation. His resentment at his own fate seemed to vent itself in the desire to banish if not, as Abraham thinks, to punish his mother by representing her in scenes of exquisite suffering; and when at the age of thirty-six his Alpinism made him at home only with the mountains the break with his past life became more and more marked. The ordinary vicissitudes of life were not sufficient and he wished to gamble not with the mere abatement or reinforcement of life but with life and death themselves. Even his dreams were haunted by a thanatic mood, and his superstitions were such that they almost made life itself a hateful dream. He tells us of fancying himself sitting in a retired nook that was at the same time like a church, when a strange figure stood before him, a creature of dreadful and repulsive form, with white gleaming eyes and yellow flesh tone, half cretin and half death. “I rose, and with impressive mien ordered it away after it had ogled me sideways. I followed it with my eye into the darkest corner until it had vanished.” And this vision he thought ominous. When he turned around he shuddered, for the phantom was again before him. Then he arose like a fury, cursed and threatened it, and it vanished and did not return, for it was more obedient than Poe’s Raven. His ambivalent reaction against this was not only to work harder but to affirm that there was no death and thus to revive much of the earlier religiosity of his childhood. One of his pictures was of a dying consumptive which he transformed into one of blooming life. More and more the death thought mastered his consciousness--almost as much as it did the soul of the insane painter, Wertz--and provoked him to greater enthusiasm and ever longer and more arduous programs for his future life. But from the subconscious he was always hearing more and more clearly the call of death, for which his deeper nature seems to have passionately longed, while the opposite will-to-live became more and more impotent. All his prodigious activity in later life seems to have been thus really due to a subdominant will to die. When he fell