seemed to want to break with all his old and to find a new set of friends. In the high temperature at which he lived, with so many impulses that were either frustrated or crucified, always hot with love or its ambivalent hate, he died--not like Segantini, because he was hypnotized by death at the very acme of his power and willed it actively, though unconsciously, as surely as if he had committed suicide, but he rather turned to it from sheer repletion of life, most of the experiences of which he had exhausted. It was as if a congeries of souls took possession of him by turns, so that in middle life he had himself already played most of the parts in the drama and thus knew it far more exhaustively than those who lead more unitary lives, however prolonged they may be. He was by no means theoretically a miserabilist or even a pessimist but was simply burned out (_blasé_, _abgelebt_). As if to anticipate the _Weltschmerz_ that his diathesis made it certain would later become acute, his passionate love for nature, deep and insightful as it was, did not prove an adequate compensation, and we cannot but wonder whether, if he had lived more normally and without infection to four-score, his life would not inevitably have ended with the same, though less acute, general symptoms. Yet even he never cursed the fate that brought him into life or inveighed against his parentage. His life was like a candle in the wind blown every way by turns, now and then flaring up and emitting great light and heat, now almost put out, smoking, sputtering, and malodorous in a socket like a blue flame just before its final extinction. The psychograph of the poet Heinrich von Kleist (d. 1811, _a.e._ 34) affords another example of a genius who died of premature old age near the period of its dawn or at the critical turn of the tide.[16] In the University his passion for omniscience impelled him to enroll for so many and diverse courses that his professors protested. Later he actually tried eight and attempted to sample other callings. “He would have liked to be everything.” In the space of fourteen years no less than nine women had engaged his fancy, although none had made a deep or lasting impression. He had also a veritable _Lust_ for traveling and after every important event in his life resorted to this kind of fugue from reality to lose himself in new scenes. “There is nothing consistent in me save inconsistency.” His demands on his friends, and also his ambitions, knew no bounds. He would “tear the crown from Goethe’s brow.” He felt he must storm all heights and do it now or never.