Friedrich Nietzsche again found the happiness which he had enjoyed in the preceding year; a like happiness, but sustained by a graver kind of emotion: the full midday of his thought rose after the dawn. Towards the end of December he passed a crisis and surmounted it. A sort of poem in prose commemorated this crisis. We will translate it here. It is the consequence of his meditations, of those examinations of conscience which he used to write down, as a young man, each Saint Sylvester's Day: "_For the New Year._--I still live, I still think: I must still live, for I must still think. _Sum, ergo cogito: cogito, ergo sum._ This is the day upon which every one is permitted to express his desire and his dearest thought: I, too, shall then express the inner wish which I form to-day, and say what thought I take to heart, this year, before all other--what thought I have chosen as the reason, guarantee, and sweetness of my life to come! I wish to try each day to see in all things necessity as a beauty--thus shall I be one of those who make things beautiful. _Amor fati,_ let that be henceforward my love! I do not wish to go to battle against the hideous. I do not wish to accuse, I do not even wish to accuse the accusers. _To avert my gaze,_ let that be my sole negation. In a word, I wish to be, in every circumstance, a Yea-Sayer!" The thirty days of January passed without a cloud appearing in the sky. He was to dedicate to this fine month, as a sign of gratitude, the fourth book of the _Gay Science,_ which he entitled _Sanctus Januarius;_ an admirable book rich in critical thought, in intimate refinements, and from the first to the last line dominated by a sacred emotion--_Amor fati._