This tension of my mind inspired in me a great ardour for work. I achieved brilliant successes with perfect indifference, successes which contributed to deceive my family, who found in them a proof that I had accepted my new discipline. A good pupil, as my bulletins had it, could not but be a fine child and the joy of his family. Aunt Deen sent me extravagant compliments in bad handwriting, setting all down to the account of my filial affection. From grandfather I never heard. But what were these positive results in comparison with the inward experiences that were going on in me? Little by little I relinquished all religious practices, building up for myself a sort of mysticism in which I formed a habit of taking refuge. Imagination substituted for my walks in the forest and other wild retreats, and even for my meetings with Nazzarena, a sort of abstract notion of nature and of love in which I found intense joy. I invented elusive landscapes and ideal passions. I was at the age in which one most easily lives in metaphysical chimeras, when ideas are mistaken for affections, and the sensibilities have no need of the spring-board of reality to leap into action. In my dreams I was my own master, until such time as life should make me independent. I had discovered the independence of the brain, and that it can supply all that is lacking. And to crown all, I threw myself into music as into an element which takes one’s own shape; plastic and so to say liquid, it lent itself to all my longings with a docility which filled me with wonder. I had come upon the _Freischütz_ and _Euryanthe_, that forest where the alleys reach beyond sight. It was more beautiful and especially more vast than the one which long ago had awakened me to the latent life of things. By it I scaled mountains higher and more inaccessible than that to which the shepherd had been leading his flock. And sometimes the sharp pain of the notes that I drew from my instrument brought back to me the unforgettable lamentation of the nightingale in love with the rose: _All night long I wear out my throat for her, but she sleeps and hears me not_. For her? I did not know her name, I could not perceive her face, but that she existed I had not the slightest doubt. But--strange phenomenon--she was no longer Nazzarena: fidelity itself was but one more chain to break. With the help of music and of my thoughts I built for myself a palace into which no visitor was admitted: they thought me present, and simply absent-minded, when in fact I had retreated to my solitude, the only place where I was actually myself. This faculty of concentration set me apart from friendship. No schoolfellow was admitted to my friendship; so that my family, against which I was in rebellion, by itself alone represented to me all humanity.