A good roguish thing is also the long silence, and to look, like the winter-sky, out of a clear, round-eyed countenance:— —Like it to stifle one’s sun, and one’s inflexible solar will: verily, this art and this winter-roguishness have I learnt WELL! My best-loved wickedness and art is it, that my silence hath learned not to betray itself by silence. Clattering with diction and dice, I outwit the solemn assistants: all those stern watchers, shall my will and purpose elude. That no one might see down into my depth and into mine ultimate will—for that purpose did I devise the long clear silence. Many a shrewd one did I find: he veiled his countenance and made his water muddy, that no one might see therethrough and thereunder. But precisely unto him came the shrewder distrusters and nut-crackers: precisely from him did they fish his best-concealed fish! But the clear, the honest, the transparent—these are for me the wisest silent ones: in them, so PROFOUND is the depth that even the clearest water doth not—betray it.— Thou snow-bearded, silent, winter-sky, thou round-eyed whitehead above me! Oh, thou heavenly simile of my soul and its wantonness! And MUST I not conceal myself like one who hath swallowed gold—lest my soul should be ripped up? MUST I not wear stilts, that they may OVERLOOK my long legs—all those enviers and injurers around me? Those dingy, fire-warmed, used-up, green-tinted, ill-natured souls—how COULD their envy endure my happiness! Thus do I show them only the ice and winter of my peaks—and NOT that my mountain windeth all the solar girdles around it! They hear only the whistling of my winter-storms: and know NOT that I also travel over warm seas, like longing, heavy, hot south-winds. They commiserate also my accidents and chances:—but MY word saith: “Suffer the chance to come unto me: innocent is it as a little child!” How COULD they endure my happiness, if I did not put around it accidents, and winter-privations, and bear-skin caps, and enmantling snowflakes! —If I did not myself commiserate their PITY, the pity of those enviers and injurers! —If I did not myself sigh before them, and chatter with cold, and patiently LET myself be swathed in their pity! This is the wise waggish-will and good-will of my soul, that it CONCEALETH NOT its winters and glacial storms; it concealeth not its chilblains either. To one man, lonesomeness is the flight of the sick one; to another, it is the flight FROM the sick ones. Let them HEAR me chattering and sighing with winter-cold, all those poor squinting knaves around me! With such sighing and chattering do I flee from their heated rooms. Let them sympathise with me and sigh with me on account of my chilblains: “At the ice of knowledge will he yet FREEZE TO DEATH!”—so they mourn. Meanwhile do I run with warm feet hither and thither on mine olive-mount: in the sunny corner of mine olive-mount do I sing, and mock at all pity.— Thus sang Zarathustra. LI. ON PASSING-BY.