“The work, Daniel Nothafft, the work,” wrote this second Rahel in another letter, “the rape of Prometheus, when are you going to lay it at the feet of impoverished humanity? The age is like wine that tastes of the earth; your work must be the filter. The age is like an epileptic body convulsed with agonies; your work must be the healing hand that one lays on the diseased brow. When will you finally give, O parsimonious mortal? when ripen, tree? when flood the valley, stream?” But the tree was in no hurry to cast off the ripened fruit; the stream found that the way to the sea was long and tortuous; it had to break through mountains and wash away the rocks. Oh, those nights of torment when an existing form crashed and fell to the earth in pieces! Oh, those hundreds of laborious nights in which there was no sleep, nothing but the excited raging of many voices! Those grey mornings on which the sun shone on tattered leaves and a distorted face, a face full of suffering that was always old and yet new! And those moonlight nights, when some one moved along singing, not as one sings with joy, but as the heretics who sat on the martyr benches of the Inquisition! Then there were the rainy nights, the stormy nights, the nights when it snowed, and when he chased after the phantom of a melody that was already half his own, and half an incorporeal thing wandering around in boundless space under the stars. Each landscape became a pale vision: bush and grass and flower, like spun yarn seen in a fever, the people who passed by, and the clouds fibrillated above the forests were of one and the same constituency. Nothing was tangible; the palate lost its sense of taste, the finger its sense of touch. Bad weather was welcome; it subdued the noises, made men quieter. Cursed be the mill that clappers, the carpenter who drives the nails, the teamster who calls to his jaded pair, the laughter of children, the croaking of frogs, the twittering of birds! An insensate man looks down upon the scene, one who is deaf and dumb, one who would snatch all clothing and decorations from the world, to the end that neither colour nor splendour of any description may divert his eye, one who mounts to heaven at night to steal the eternal fire, and who burrows in the graves of the dead by day—an outcast. In the beginning of spring, he started on the third movement, an andante with variations. It expressed the gruesome peace that hovered over Eleanore’s slumbering face one night before her death. The springs within him were all suddenly dried up; he could not tell why his hand was paralysed, his fancy immobile.