Is it not to you also remarkable how everything on this earth moves toward the centre, how orderly everything is, how insignificant and trivial?  So it has always seemed to me.  And for that reason I suspect—­if I am not mistaken, I have already imparted my suspicion to you—­that the next life will be larger, and in the good as well as in the bad, stronger, wilder, bolder and more tremendous.

The duty of living had conquered, and I found myself again amid the tumult of human life, and of my and its weak efforts and faulty deeds.  A feeling of horror came over me, as when a person suddenly finds himself alone in the midst of immeasurable mountains of ice.  Everything about me and in me was cold and strange, and even my tears froze.

Wonderful worlds appeared and vanished before me in my uneasy dream.  I was sick and suffered great pain, but I loved my sickness and welcomed the suffering.  I hated everything earthly and was glad to see it all punished and destroyed.  I felt so alone and so strangely.  And as a delicate spirit often grows melancholy in the very lap of happiness over its own joy, and at the very acme of its existence becomes conscious of the futility of it all, so did I regard my suffering with mysterious pleasure.  I regarded it as the symbol of life in general; I believed that I was seeing and feeling the everlasting discord by means of which all things come into being and exist, and the lovely forms of refined culture seemed dead and trivial to me in comparison with this monstrous world of infinite strength and of unending struggle and warfare, even into the most hidden depths of existence.

On account of this remarkable feeling sickness acquired the character of a peculiar world complete in itself.  I felt that its mysterious life was richer and deeper than the vulgar health of the dreaming sleep-walkers all around me.  And with the sickliness, which was not at all unpleasant, this feeling also clung to me and completely separated me from other men, just as I was sundered from the earth by the thought that your nature and my love had been too sacred not to take speedy flight from earth and its coarse ties.  It seemed to me that all was right so, and that your unavoidable death was nothing more than a gentle awakening after a light sleep.

I too thought that I was awake when I saw your picture, which evermore transfigured itself into a cheerful diffused purity.  Serious and yet charming, quite you and yet no longer you, the divine form irradiated by a wonderful light!  Now it was like the terrible gleam of visible omnipotence, now like a soft ray of golden childhood.  With long, still drafts my spirit drank from the cool spring of pure passion and became secretly intoxicated with it.  And in this blissful drunkenness I felt a spiritual worthiness of a peculiar kind, because every earthly sentiment was entirely strange to me, and the feeling never left me that I was consecrated to death.