es, quite in our Professor's still vein,
significance enough? "From Suicide a certain after-shine (_Nachschein_)
of Christianity withheld me: perhaps also a certain indolence of
character; for, was not that a remedy I had at any time within reach?
Often, however, was there a question present to me: Should some one now,
at the turning of that corner, blow thee suddenly out of Space, into the
other World, or other No-world, by pistol-shot,--how were it? On which
ground, too, I have often, in sea-storms and sieged cities and other
death-scenes, exhibited an imperturbability, which passed, falsely
enough, for courage."

"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 tha