“So had it lasted,” concludes the Wanderer, “so had it lasted, as in bitter protracted Death-agony, through long years.  The heart within me, unvisited by any heavenly dew-drop, was smouldering in sulphurous, slow-consuming fire.  Almost since earliest memory I had shed no tear; or once only when I, murmuring half-audibly, recited Faust’s Death-song, that wild Selig der den er im Siegesglanze findet (Happy whom he finds in Battle’s splendor), and thought that of this last Friend even I was not forsaken, that Destiny itself could not doom me not to die.  Having no hope, neither had I any definite fear, were it of Man or of Devil:  nay, I often felt as if it might be solacing, could the Arch-Devil himself, though in Tartarean terrors, but rise to me, that I might tell him a little of my mind.  And yet, strangely enough, I lived in a continual, indefinite, pining fear; tremulous, pusillanimous, apprehensive of I knew not what:  it seemed as if all things in the Heavens above and the Earth beneath would hurt me; as if the Heavens and the Earth were but boundless jaws of a devouring monster, wherein I, palpitating, waited to be devoured.

“Full of such humor, and perhaps the miserablest man in the whole French Capital or Suburbs, was I, one sultry Dog-day, after much perambulation, toiling along the dirty little Rue Saint-Thomas de l’Enfer, among civic rubbish enough, in a close atmosphere, and over pavements hot as Nebuchadnezzar’s Furnace; whereby doubtless my spirits were little cheered; when, all at once, there rose a Thought in me, and I asked myself:  ’What art thou afraid of?  Wherefore, like a coward, dost thou forever pip and whimper, and go cowering and trembling?  Despicable biped! what is the sum-total of the worst that lies before thee?  Death?  Well, Death; and say the pangs of Tophet too, and all that the Devil and Man may, will or can do against thee!  Hast thou not a heart; canst thou not suffer whatsoever it be; and, as a Child of Freedom, though outcast, trample Tophet itself under thy feet, while it consumes thee?  Let it come, then; I will meet it and defy it!’ And as I so thought, there rushed like a stream of fire over my whole soul; and I shook base Fear away from me forever.  I was strong, of unknown strength; a spirit, almost a god.  Ever from that time, the temper of my misery was changed:  not Fear or whining Sorrow was it, but Indignation and grim fire-eyed Defiance.

“Thus had the EVERLASTING NO (das ewige Nein) pealed authoritatively through all the recesses of my Being, of my ME; and then was it that my whole ME stood up, in native God-created majesty, and with emphasis recorded its Protest.  Such a Protest, the most important transaction in Life, may that same Indignation and Defiance, in a psychological point of view, be fitly called.  The Everlasting No had said:  ’Behold, thou art fatherless, outcast, and the Universe is mine (the Devil’s);’ to which my whole Me now made answer:  ’I am not thine, but Free, and forever hate thee!’