a desperate struggle for existence; that sickness and sin, repentance and sorrow, undermine our life most thoroughly and eat their way to the core like worms in ripe fruit; that at best our pleasures are a dance upon graves--that, if life really ever was precious, death, inexorable death, is forever scorning and scoffing at this precious life. And I looked around on nature, in which poets see an idyll, and I found that it was either dead and insensible, or, when it does feel and sympathize, only repeating the bloody drama of human existence in a ruder and more shocking form. I saw that the different races of animals are engaged in fierce, implacable warfare against each other, uninterrupted by a moment's peace, and that their wars are carried on with a cruelty by the side of which even the most refined tortures of the Inquisition appear at times very harmless proceedings. "And whilst I thus tore the gay rags to pieces, under which cowardice and stupidity try to conceal the wounds and sores of society, there arose in my heart a feeling which I had not known before--hatred. It was only my love in another form, although I tried to persuade myself that I had forgotten the faithless one; it was only another expression of my fondness of life, although I had fancied that I had forever closed my account with life. When we really give up life, we know nothing more of love or hatred. "At that time, however, I did hate. Passionately as I had loved, my whole being was concentrated in the one, burning desire to be revenged. Revenge! revenge! on him! on her!--this was the cry of a voice within me, which I could never silence again. They all knew my misfortune in Fichtenau, and felt for me with that cheap sympathy which is composed of delight in scandal and the pleasure we take in the failures of others. They told me, unasked, all that was known about Leonora's flight.