SOURCE: A foreword to The Redemption of Tycho Brahe by Max Brod, translated by Felix Warren Crosse, Alfred A. Knopf, 1928, pp. v-x.

In the following foreword to Brod's novel The Redemption of Tycho Brahe, Zweig praises Brod as a poetic writer.

It would be a tempting task to draw the portraits of all those poets whose power has gradually developed from frail beginnings; for the error still seems widely current that for every artist, youth is a period of violent activity, of high spirits that overflow into arrogance, of self-confidence in full flower insolently demanding attention, the Bakkalaureus in Faust. But in actual fact, among poets is not that other species of youth far more frequent, that species which begins with a wondrous awe of life, with a tender melancholy, with a sweet and much-embarrassed terror at the manifold tasks awaiting it, with a mistrust of its own...