"No, sooner give me the frenzy which one draws from the temple of love as well as from that of the Eumenides! Better burn up in a real flame of misery, without hope, without utterance, even to paleness and madness, than be so loving and not loved! He who has once burned in this hell, Albano, continues to frequent it forevermore: that is the last misery. Can I not worry down life and death, and wounds and stings beforehand?--and certainly I am not weak. Nevertheless, I am not the man to put restraints upon a sentimental discourse, or harpsichord fantasy, or reading or singing, not though sorrow in person should hold before me a menace, undersigned by all the gods, that a female listener whom I cannot endure would immediately thereupon become my lover, and from that my mistress and my hell. "The Greeks gave Love and Death the same form, beauty, and torch; for me it is a murderous torch; but I love Death, and therefore Cupid. Long has life been to me a tragic muse; willingly to the dagger of a muse do I offer my breast; a wound is almost half a heart. "Hear further! Rabette has a fine nature, and follows it; but mine is for her a cloud of empty, transitory form and structure; she does not understand me. Could she, then would she be the first to forgive me. O, I have indeed treated her hardly, as if I were a destiny, and she I. Resent, but hear![31] On the night of the Illumination her longing and my emptiness brought us in the fiery rain of joy more warmly together; among the shiningly mailed and smoothly polished court-faces her ingenuous one bloomed lovely and living as a fresh child on the stage or at court; we happened into Tartarus,--we sat down in the place where thou didst swear to me thy resignation of Linda; in my senses wine glowed, in hers the heart. O, why is it that, when one speaks and streams, she has no other words than kisses, and makes one sensual from ennui, and forces one to speak her speech? My mad boldness, which fancy and intoxication breathe into me, and which I see coming on and yet await, seized me and drove me like a night-walker. But always is there in me something clear-seeing, which itself weaves the drag-net of delusion, throws it over me, and carries me away entangled in its meshes. So behold me on that night with the burning net-work about my head; the rivulet of death murmurs to me, the skeleton sweeps across the harp-strings,--but, enveloped, imprisoned, darkened, dazzled with the fiery hurdle-work of pleasure, I heed neither annihilation nor heaven, nor thyself and _that_ evening, but I drag all together and into the hurdle,--and so sank thy sister's innocence into the grave, and I stood upright on the royal coffin, and went down with it. "I lost nothing,--in me there is no innocence; I gained nothing,--I hate sensual pleasure. The black shadow, which some call remorse, swept broadly along after the vanished motley-colored pleasure-images of the magic-lantern; but is the black less optical than the motley?