I was singularly disposed to reflect on everything that came to my notice, to give everything a mental and moral significance; I treated events as pearls in a necklace which I tried to string together. It struck me that there was something significant about the arrival of these books at this time. I devoured them with a bitterness and a sadness born of despair. "Yes, you are right," I said to myself, "you alone possess the secret of life, you alone dare to say that nothing is true and real but debauchery, hypocrisy and corruption. Be my friends, throw on the wound in my soul your corrosive poisons, teach me to believe in you." While buried in these shadows I allowed my favorite poets and text-books to accumulate dust. I even ground them under my feet in excess of wrath. "You wretched dreamers," I said to them; "you who teach me only suffering, miserable shufflers of words, charlatans if you knew the truth, fools if you speak in good faith, liars in either case, who make fairy tales of the human heart, I will burn every one of you!" Then tears came to my aid and I perceived that there was nothing real but my grief. "Very well," I cried, in my delirium, "tell me, good and bad genii, counsellors for good or evil, tell me what to do! Choose an arbiter and let him speak." I seized an old Bible which lay on my table and read the first passage that caught my eye. "Reply to me, thou book of God," I said, "what word have you for me?" My eye fell on this passage in Ecclesiastes, chapter ix: I pondered all these things in my heart, and I sought diligently for wisdom. There are just and wise men and their works are in the hands of God; nevertheless man does not know whether he is worthy of love or hatred. And the future is unknown, for there is one event to the righteous and to the wicked; to the good, and to the clean, and to the unclean; to him that sacrificeth and him that sacrificeth not. The righteous is treated as the sinner and the perjurer as him who speaks the truth. There is an evil among all things that are done under the sun, and there is one event to all. Therefore the hearts of the children of men are full of evil and madness while they live, and after that they go to the dead. When I read these words I was astounded; I did not know that there was such a sentiment in the Bible. "And thou, too, as all others, thou book of hope!"