In love, in misfortune, in joy, in despondency, in labour and rest, death has always been my uppermost, I might rather say my only thought. Suicide in me would have been of all human actions the most natural. I have never felt that any indescribable fear, any overpowering shudder draws us back, and flings the knife from our hands. If poor naked Joy, that is so meanly clad, she is ashamed to walk about the earth, were once to enter our doors, then the stab of the bright dagger would only be the last glittering pinnacle of our joyous transport. For after that brief pulsation is over, how bald is the earth, how black is life! It is because I know not whither I am going, or whether I am going, or whether there be a whither, that the act is so alluring. Only men will not confess this, but give the name of cowardice and of courage to what is neither the one nor the other. In dissipation, in thoughtlessness, in indifference, the poor wretches lose both life and death. * * * * * A strange dream, that is to say, a dream, has visited me. The commonest thing is quite as strange as the uncommonest, only habit blunts our sense. I was dead. I knew it distinctly; and yet I lived on in my consciousness. All my forlorn doubts, my stiff-neckedness that would not bow to the yoke, my hard heart that closed itself so early against love, had shut me out, so my conscience told me, from the place to which the good hope to go. The state in which I found myself, and numberless others along with me, was one the common ordinariness, the dull triviality of which was quite appalling. I was utterly unable to recollect my friends and those whom I had loved, however intensely I strained my memory and put it to the rack. A longing, like that of one pining with thirst after a stream of fresh clear water, tormented me, to call up the forms and the ideas of those beloved beings in my imagination; I felt a yearning after them like a heavy weight that was crushing me in the hidden places of my heart. Just as little could I bring back those actions which during my life I might have called good. Every thing in this region of my thoughts was like a bare parcht waste. But everything evil rolled in whirling circles wearyingly and dizzyingly before my inward eye. My vices and errours, all the faults and misdeeds of my life, every wretched moment of my temporal existence gathered round me as it were with the cries and croaking of fierce hungry birds of prey. O these sins how hugely and gigantically they swelled out! How horrible it was to see their consequences unfolding themselves far, far away in the realms of the future! how they took root and grew up riotously in after-generations! nothing but looks of anguish, of reproach, of