s. Intellect's page, Instinct, who had risen from the lily with
him, was a comical fellow. When he tried to follow his master's flight he
fell after the first few strokes of his wings, and usually among nettles.
Only when some base advantage was to be gained on earth did this servant
succeed better than his master. The mother, Matter, whom for the sake of
the verse I called by her Greek name Hyle, was also invested with a shade
of comedy as a dissatisfied wife and the mother-in-law of Intellect.

In regard to the whole Poem of the World I will observe that, up to the
time I finished the last line, I had never studied the kindred systems of
the Neo-Platonics or the Gnostics.

The verses which described the moment when Matter drew her fiery children
to her heart and thus warmed it, another passage in which men who were
destitute of intellect sought to destroy themselves and Love resolved to
sacrifice her own life, and, lastly, the song where Intellect rises from
the lily, besides many others, were worthy, in my opinion, of being
preserved.

What first diverted my attention from the work was, as has been
mentioned, the study of Feuerbach, to which I had been induced by a
letter from the geographer Karl Andree. I eagerly seized his books, first
choosing his "Axioms of the Philosophy of the Future," and afterwards
devoured everything he had written which the library contained. And at
that time I was grateful to my friend the geographer for his advice.
True, Feuerbach seemed to me to shatter many things which from a child I
had held sacred; yet I thought I discovered behind the falling masonry
the image of eternal truth.

The veil which I afterwards saw spread over so many things in Feuerbach's
writings at that time produced the same influence upon me as the mist
whence rise here the towers, yonder the battlements of a castle. It might
be large or small; the grey mist which forbids the eye from definitely
measuring its height and width by no means prevents the traveller, who
knows that a powerful lord possesses the citadel, from believing it to be
as large and well guarded as the power of its ruler would imply.

True, I was not sufficiently mature for the study of this great thinker,
whom I afterwards saw endanger other unripe minds. As a disciple of this
master there were many things to be destroyed which from childhood had
become interlaced by a thousand roots and fibres with my whole
intellectual organism, and such ope