Nevertheless, because of these things a certain sadness masters the soul, and but few noteworthy men are to be found who have not temporarily suffered melancholy in their youth. Even at best, they live in the mood which Goethe depicts in the words: _So still and thoughtful? Something is lacking; freely confess. “Contented am I, but ’tis not well with me, nevertheless.”_ But, as every brave young soul sees, life is not given us with the purpose that we may always be only “still and thoughtful,” nor that we may consume ourselves in disconsolate complaints or in the pessimism that wastes the soul’s powers. Those are the conditions that attend transition, and must appear. A new life must spring therefrom, but one feels, indeed, that a kind of death first lies between. This is the surrender of the personal will, intent upon the selfish life; this will a man renounces with so much difficulty that Calvin was able to found upon this fact his doctrine of a formal predestination of some to this development of his true existence, and of others to a loss of it. But every such death, for those who bear within them the seed of an eternal life, is not the final goal, but the means to a new and higher development of life. Whoever is unable to hold fast to this hope with the tenacity with which Job clung to it, and yet is no longer able to find any satisfaction in the world of the senses, falls now into a gloomy asceticism which is forever shovelling at his grave; or into an idle dialogue (in diaries and letters) with his painful dissatisfaction with the universe; or into the confused Buddhistic longing for some Nirvana; or, finally, into one of the various other aberrations of the human spirit, which all agree only in considering the true way as an impossible or fantastic one. At this point of life, for a time, the word of salvation is, Forward! II