"Then the man plucked up his manhood and said, 'I will have what I feared'; and Schoppe stepped up nearer to the broad, high cloud, and lo! it was only (one would gladly have put one's self to bed on the spot) the longest dream of the last, long sleep, no more,--what they call madness. Now if one should go for some time into a mad-house, for example, by way of joke, then might one have the dream, if all other things were as well suited to keep the matter in countenance, as in the case of many a one already. And now, thereinto will I gradually sink,--into the dream, where the point of the dagger is broken off against the future, and the rust rubbed off against the past,--where man, undisturbed and alone, is the reigning House in the shadow-realm and Barataria-island of his ideas, and the John Lackland, and, like a philosopher, _makes_ everything that he _thinks_,--where he also draws his body out of the waves and surges of the external world, and cold and heat and hunger and weak nerves and consumption and dropsy and poverty assail him no more, and no fear, no sin, no error can come near the mind in the mad-house where the three hundred and sixty-five dreams of the nights in the year weave themselves together into a single one, the flying clouds into one great evening red. "But here lurks something bad! Man must be in a condition to pick out for himself and appropriate with understanding his dream, his good fixed idea,--for a high ant-hill of the most grim and bewitching swims and swarms before him,--otherwise he may fare as ill as if he were still in his senses. I must now, in particular, make my arrangements to find and recognize a good-natured, favorable fixed conceit, which shall deal well with me. If I can bring it about, to be, perhaps, the first man in the crazy house, or the second Momus, or the third Schlegel, or the fourth grace, or the fifth king at cards, or the sixth wise virgin, or the seventh worldly Electorate, or the eighth Wise Man of Greece, or the ninth soul in the ark, or the tenth muse, or the forty-first Academician, or the seventy-first Translator,[117] or, in fact, the universe, or, in fact, the universal spirit himself,--then, certainly, my fortune is made, and life's scorpion robbed of his whole sting. But what golden jewel of a fortune does not in addition thereto still stand open? Can I not be a very highly-favored lover, who sees the sun of a beloved sail all day long through heaven, and looks up and cries, 'I see only thy sunny eye, but it contents me!' Can I not be a deceased person, who, full of disbelief in the next world, has made the journey into it, and now does not know at all which way to turn there for joy? O can I not--for the shorter dream and old age do indeed, of themselves, make one childish--be an innocent child again, that plays and knows nothing, that takes all men for its parents, and that has now a tear-drop hanging before him, formed out of the collapsing gay bubble