"Is it enough, here, to creep around the giants with eyes full of astonishment and folded hands, and then languidly and pusillanimously to lie pining at their feet? Friend, how often in the days of discontent did I pronounce the artists and poets happy, who at least may appease their longing by light and joyous creations, and who with beautiful plays celebrate the mighty dead,--Archimimes of the heroic age. And yet, after all, these voluptuous plays are only the jingling of the bells on the lightning-conductor: there is something higher; action is life; therein the whole man bestirs himself, and blooms with all his twigs. Not of the narrow, timid achievements of littleness on the oar-bank and the lolling-bank of the times are we speaking here. There still stands a gate open to the coronation-city of the spirit,--the gate of sacrifice, the door of Janus. Where else on earth than on the battle-field is the place to be found in which all energies, all offerings, and virtues of a whole life, crowded into an hour, play together in divine freedom with thousand sister powers and offerings? Where else do all faculties--from the most rapid sharp-sightedness even to all bodily capacities of despatch and of endurance, from the highest magnanimity down to the tenderest pity, from all contempt of the body even up to the mortal wound--find the lists so freely open for a covenant-rivalry? although, for the very same reason, the play-room of all the gods stands open also to the mask-dance of all the furies. Only take war in a higher sense, where spirits, without relation of gain and loss, only by force of honor and of object, bind themselves over to destiny, that it shall select from among their bodies the corpses, and draw the lot of victory out of the graves. Two nations go out on the battle-plain, the tragic stage of a higher spirit, in order to play against one another, without any personal enmity, their death-parts; still and black hangs the thunder-cloud over the battle-field; the nations march on into the cloud and all its thunders; they strike, and gloomily and alone burns the death-torch above them; at last it is light, and two triumphal gates stand built up,--the gate of death and the gate of victory,--and the host has divided and passed through both, but through both with garlands of honor. And when it is over, the dead and the living stand exalted in the world, because they had not cared for life. But when the great day is to be still greater, when the most costly thing is to come to the spirit which can hallow life, then does God place an Epaminondas, a Cato, a Gustavus Adolphus, at the head of the consecrated host, and freedom is at once the banner and the palm. O, blessed he who then lives or dies at once for the god of war and for the goddess of peace!