To many ears that program does not sound provocative, promising, alluring. _Sehnsucht_ is not a feeling that makes one happy and blissful--not a feeling to which one would like to accord a constant and abiding possession of one's heart. "Only he who knows _Sehnsucht_ knows what I _suffer_"--so sighed Goethe's Mignon, one of the most impressive and marvelous characters the poet-genius ever created, an Incarnate Yearning, self-consumed in unquieted longing of soul, in _Heimweh_ for a dreamily visioned distance, to walk in whose sunny beauty her feet were never destined. To preach _Sehnsucht_ is to preach hunger. To hunger is to ache. The gnawing of a hungry stomach--but what is that compared with the gnawing of a hungry heart, when everything that seems good and great and worth striving after becomes elusive, unattainable, unintelligible, to passionate longing? _Sehnsucht_ is not anxiety, it is worse than anxiety. Anxiety is petty; _Sehnsucht_ is great and deep. In anxiety, life is dark, and darkness terrifies and distresses man. In _Sehnsucht_, life is luminous, but the light blinds the soul. _Sehnsucht_ sees all light in a magical radiance, yet cannot clasp it; feels its overpowering attraction, yet cannot satisfy the eye with it. Prometheus chained to a rock, after he had filched the celestial spark from the gods! Tantalus, the luscious fruit just over his head, but wafted away as soon as he longs to grasp it with greedy hands! Yes, all the human heart's deepest pain, this is _Sehnsucht_. Whoever names a pain that is not _Sehnsucht_ has not peered to the bottom of pain's chalice. "Woe to that man through whom _Sehnsucht_ comes!" we might almost cry. If you love me, do not stir up this yearning for the impossible that is in me, this hot, fervent craving, which can never find satisfaction, which can never enjoy the pleasures of life, or its own self. If you love men, save them from their very youth up in the presence of that tempestuous storm and stress into the Afar, where all solid shores vanish, all safe harbors are closed--save men, trembling, untranquil, from the everlasting question: Knowest thou the land? Knowest it well? Leave men their peace of mind, add no fuel to the flame of their discontent. Do not wrong them by letting them eat of the tree of knowledge. Do not show them the infinite expanse unrolling behind and beyond the narrow confines of their petty lives, thus spoiling the pleasure of their contentment, the joy they have in their limited and longingless life. Paradise is better than Wilderness. The familiar murmur of the brook in the meadow by the old home is more restful than the roar of the cataract or than the eternal haunting mystery and melody of the great sea. Such is the common cry of the lackadaisical, the longingless, the _laissez-faire_ people to all of us who "turn the world upside down."