"Now look upon me, I draw off my mask, I have convulsive movements on my face, like people who live after drinking sweet poison. I have made myself drunk with poison, I have swallowed the poison-pill, the great poison globule, the earth-globe. Out with it freely! I exult no more, I believe nothing more, I do not even lament right valiantly. My tree is hollowed out, burnt to a coal by fantastic fire. When, occasionally, in this state, the intestinal worms of the soul, exasperation, ecstasy, love, and the like, crawl round again, and gnaw and devour each other, then do I look down from myself to them; like polypuses, I cut them in twain and turn them wrong end foremost and stick them into each other. Then I look again at my own act of looking, and as this goes on _ad infinitum_, what then comes to one from it all? If others have an idealism of faith, so have I an idealism of the heart, and every one who has often gone through with all sensations on the stage, on paper, and on the earth, is in the same case. What boots it? If thou shouldst die at this moment, I often say to myself, then, as all radii of life run together into the minute point of a moment, all would verily be wiped out, invisible; to me, then, it is as if I had been nothing. Often I look upon the mountains and floods and the ground about me, and it seems to me as if they could at any and every moment flutter asunder and melt away in smoke, and I with them. The future life (as even the present is hardly to be called a life), and all that hangs thereupon, belongs to the ecstasies which one winks at; especially it belongs to the ecstasy of love. "As thou so readily assumest every difference from thyself to be enervation, so do I say to thee outright: Only ascend farther, only knead thyself more thoroughly, only lift thy head higher out of the hot waves of the feelings, then wilt thou no longer lose thyself in them, but let them billow on alone. There is a cold, daring spirit in man, which nothing touches at all,--not even virtue; for it alone chooses that, and is its creator, not its creature. I once experienced at sea a storm, in which the whole element furiously and jaggedly and foamingly lashed itself into commotion, and flung its waters pell-mell through each other, while overhead the sun looked on in silence;--so be thou! The heart is the storm; self is the heaven.