k and ardent soul turns
with loathing from this false, hypocritical generation and shuts
himself up, as well as may be, in the hermitage of his own heart.

"My mind is unchristian, for it has no day of rest. Generally I
think that my disease has its seat in the abdomen or in the waist.
Mineral waters I can no more drink this summer. But is there not a
mineral water which is called Lethe?

"Whether my little personality returns thither whence it came, with
or without consciousness, a few months later or earlier, in order
to be drowned in its great fountain-head, or to float for some time
yet like a bubble, reflecting the clouds and an alien light--this
appears to me constantly a matter of less and less consequence."

There is to me a heartrending pathos in these confessions. It is easy to
stand aloof, of course, like a schoolmaster with his chastising rod, and
lash the frailties of poor human nature. It is easy to declare with
virtuous indignation that the man who covets his neighbor's wife is a
transgressor who has no claim upon our sympathy. And yet who can help
pitying this great, noble poet, who fought so bravely against his
"barbaric, Titanic self with its hairy arms"? His passionate intensity
of soul was, indeed, part of his poetic equipment; and he would not have
been the poet he was if he had been cool, callous, and self-restrained.
The slag in him was so intimately moulded with the precious metal that
their separation would have been the extinction of the individuality
itself. The fiery furnace of affliction through which he passed warped
and scorched and cracked this mighty compound, but without destroying
it. A glimpse of this experience which transformed the powerful, joyous,
bright-visaged singer into a bitter, darkly brooding pessimist, fleeing
from the sinister shadow which threatened to overtake him, is afforded
us in the poem "Hypochondria[40]":

"I stood upon the altitude of life,
Where mingled waters part and downward go
With rush and foam in opposite directions.
Lo, it was bright up there, and fair to stand.
I saw the sun, I saw his satellite,
Which, since he quenched his light, shone in the blue;
I saw that earth was fair and green and glorious,
I saw that God was good, that man was honest.

"Then rose a dread black imp, and suddenly
The black one bit himself into my heart;
And lo, at once the ea