Others may, if they choose, enjoy the good fortune of having their lady-love adorn their graves with garlands and water them with the tears of fidelity. Oh, women! hate me, laugh at me, jilt me--but let me live! Life is all too laughably sweet, and the world too delightfully bewildered; it is the dream of an intoxicated god, who has taken French leave of the carousing multitude of immortals, and has laid himself down to sleep in a solitary star, and knows not himself that he creates all that he dreams--and the dream images form themselves in such a mad variegated fashion, and often so harmoniously reasonable--the Iliad, Plato, the battle of Marathon, Moses, Medician Venus, Strasburg Cathedral, the French Revolution, Hegel, the steamboat, etc., etc., are single good thoughts in this divine dream--but it will not last long, and the god awakes and rubs his sleepy eyes, and smiles--and our world has run to nothing--yes, has never been. No matter! I live. If I am but a shadowy image in a dream, still this is better than the cold, black, void annihilation of Death. Life is the greatest good and death the worst evil. Berlin lieutenants of the guard may sneer and call it cowardice, because the Prince of Homburg shudders when he beholds his open grave. Henry Kleist[4] had, however, as much courage as his high-breasted, tightly-laced colleagues, and has, alas! proved it. But all strong men love life. Goethe's Egmont does not part willingly from "the cheerful wont of being and working." Immermann's Edwin clings to life "like a little child to its mother's breast," and though he finds it hard to live by stranger mercy, he still begs for mercy: "For life and breath is still the highest." When Odysseus in the under-world sees Achilles as the leader of dead heroes, and extols his renown among the living, and his glory even among the dead, Achilles answers:-- "No more discourse of death, consolingly, noble Odysseus! Rather would I in the field as daily labourer be toiling, Slave to the meanest of men, a pauper and lacking possessions, Than mid the infinite host of long-vanished mortals be ruler."