“Harmony is at home only in the ideal world—­harmony which is unknown even among the gods harmony, whom I may know, and yet may never comprehend—­whom I love, and may never possess—­whom I long for, and who flies from me.

“I am as one that thirsteth, and harmony as the remote, unattainable well—­I am as one swimming in a wide sea, and she is the land which recedes as I deem myself near to it.

“Who will tell me the name of the country where she rules as queen, undisturbed and untroubled?  And which is most in earnest in his pursuit of the fair one:  He who lies sleeping in her arms, or he who is consumed by his passion for her?

“I am seeking what you deem that you possess.—­Possess—!

“Look round you on the world and on life—­look round, as I do, on this hall of which you are so proud!  It was built by a Greek; but, because the simple melody of beautiful forms in perfect concord no longer satisfies you, and your taste requires the eastern magnificence in which you were born, because this flatters your vanity and reminds you, each time you gaze upon it, that you are wealthy and powerful—­you commanded your architect to set aside simple grandeur, and to build this gaudy monstrosity, which is no more like the banqueting-hall of a Pericles than I or you, Cleopatra, in all our finery, are like the simply clad gods and goddesses of Phidias.  I mean not to offend you, Cleopatra, but I must say this; I am writing now on the subject of harmony, and perhaps I shall afterwards treat of justice, truth, virtue; although I know full well that they are pure abstractions which occur neither in nature nor in human life, and which in my dealings I wholly set aside; nevertheless they seem to me worthy of investigation, like any other delusion, if by resolving it we may arrive at conditional truth.  It is because one man is afraid of another that these restraints—­justice, truth, and what else you will—­have received these high-sounding names, have been stamped as characteristics of the gods, and placed under the protection of the immortals; nay, our anxious care has gone so far that it has been taught as a doctrine that it is beautiful and good to cloud our free enjoyment of existence for the sake of these illusions.  Think of Antisthenes and his disciples, the dog-like Cynics—­think of the fools shut up in the temple of Serapis!  Nothing is beautiful but what is free, and he only is not free who is forever striving to check his inclinations—­for the most part in vain—­in order to live, as feeble cowards deem virtuously, justly and truthfully.

“One animal eats another when he has succeeded in capturing it, either in open fight or by cunning and treachery; the climbing plant strangles the tree, the desert-sand chokes the meadows, stars fall from heaven, and earthquakes swallow up cities.  You believe in the gods—­and so do I after my own fashion—­and if they have so ordered the course of this life in every class of existence that the strong triumph over the weak, why should not I use my strength, why let it be fettered by those much-belauded soporifics which our prudent ancestors concocted to cool the hot blood of such men as I, and to paralyze our sinewy fists.