"Lift up your hearts, my brethren, high, higher! And do not forget your legs! Lift up also your legs, ye good dancers--and better still if ye stand also on your heads! "This crown of the laughter, this rose-garland crown--I myself have put on this crown; I myself have consecrated my laughter. No one else have I found to-day strong enough for this. "Zarathustra the dancer, Zarathustra the light one, who beckoneth with his pinions, one ready for flight, beckoning unto all birds, ready and prepared, a blissfully light-spirited one:-- "Zarathustra the soothsayer, Zarathustra the sooth-laugher, no impatient one, no absolute one, one who loveth leaps and side-leaps: I myself have put on this crown! "This crown of the laughter, this rose-garland crown--to you my brethren do I cast this crown! Laughing have I consecrated: ye higher men, _learn,_ I pray you--to laugh!" _Thus spake Zarathustra_, lxxiii. 17, 18, and 20. SILS-MARIA, OBERENGADIN, _August_ 1886. [1] And shall not I, by mightiest desire, In living shape that sole fair form acquire? SWANWICK, trans. of _Faust._ THE BIRTH OF TRAGEDY FROM THE SPIRIT OF MUSIC FOREWORD TO RICHARD WAGNER. In order to keep at a distance all the possible scruples, excitements, and misunderstandings to which the thoughts gathered in this essay will give occasion, considering the peculiar character of our æsthetic publicity, and to be able also to write the introductory remarks with the same contemplative delight, the impress of which, as the petrifaction of good and elevating hours, it bears on every page, I form a conception of the moment when you, my highly honoured friend, will receive this essay; how you, say after an evening walk in the winter snow, will behold the unbound Prometheus on the title-page, read my name, and be forthwith convinced that, whatever this essay may contain, the author has something earnest and impressive to say, and, moreover, that in all his meditations he communed with you as with one present and could thus write only what befitted your presence. You will thus remember that it was at the same time as your magnificent dissertation on Beethoven originated, viz., amidst the horrors and sublimities of the war which had just then broken out, that I collected myself for these thoughts. But those persons would err, to whom this collection suggests no more perhaps than the antithesis of patriotic excitement and æsthetic revelry, of gallant earnestness and sportive delight. Upon a real perusal of this essay, such readers will, rather to their surprise, discover how earnest is the German problem we have to deal with, which we properly place, as a vortex and turning-point, in the very midst of German hopes. Perhaps, however, this same class of readers will be shocked at seeing an æsthetic problem taken so seriously, especially if they can recognise in art no more than a merry