ill for the first time in his life, “the dark powers of his unconscious nature came in to help the disease and make the disintegrative process easier and to invite death,” as if love of it were the consummation of his love of all things that lived, and the latter would not have been complete without the former. Another case of a genius who hurried through the table d’hôte Nature provides and left the table sated to repletion when her regular guests were but half through the course was the German poet, Lenau.[15] Born in 1802, he studied philosophy, law, and medicine successively, sought contact with primeval nature in America at thirty, returned to find himself famous, and, after a period of prolonged chastity, became promptly infected with syphilis, falling a victim to insanity at forty-two and dying of progressive paralysis at forty-eight. Syphilis is perhaps the most psychalgic of all diseases that afflict man, for it not only poisons the arrows of love and makes its ecstasy exquisite pain but weakens all the phyletic instincts, like the climacteric, and like it brings hyperindividuation in its train. He knew both the joys and the pains of life, the depths of misery and the heights of euphoria. Eros and Thanatos were inseparable in his soul, and both had their raptures and inspired him by turns. Amorousness brought acute religiosity, and between his erotic adventures he lapsed far toward the negation of all faiths and creeds. When not in love his violin was treated as a paramour, and he forgot it when the tender passion glowed again in his soul. I doubt if any poet ever had a truer and deeper feeling for nature or was a more eloquent interpreter of all her moods and aspects. He exhausted both homo- and heterosexual experiences, remaining through a series of love affairs, however, true to his Sophie, who was like his mother and with whom his relations were pure and whose influence was beneficent. Even before his infection megalomania alternated with misanthropy, and he had all the fluctuations of mood that are such characteristic stigmata of hysteria. Spells of lassitude alternated with Berserker energy; masochism with sadism; excesses, including those of drink, with spells of depression. In his aggressive moods he stormed up mountains, which to him were symbols of mental elevation, until he was completely exhausted. Sometimes he fancied himself a nobleman or even a monarch and always strove to reduce all about him to servile satellites. The Job-Faust-Manfred motive often took possession of him, and sometimes he played his violin half the night, dancing in rapt ecstasy and unable to keep time. In his periods of self-reproach after orgasms of ecstasy he became ascetic. His poetry and converse were, especially for such a man, singularly pure. He said he carried a corpse around within him. Most insanities are only an exaggeration or breaking out of previous traits, and this was exceptionally so in his case. At one time he