echo of virtue, truth, and beauty,
created by the music of the spheres, calls us from this hollow
earth to the neighborhood of the music. Why and wherefore were
these desires given us? Merely that, like a swallowed diamond, they
should slowly cut through our earthly covering. Wherefore were we
placed upon this ball of earth, creatures with light wings, if
instead of soaring with our wings of ether, we are to fall back
into the earth-clods of our birth?... Is an angel to be imprisoned
in the body to be its dumb servant, its stove-warmer and butler,
its _cuisinier_ and porter at the door of the stomach? Shall the
ethereal flame merely serve to fill the circular stove with life's
warmth, obediently burn and warm, then become cold and
extinguished?'"

"Very good, indeed," I interrupted. "He knows how to put things in a
virile way.'

"'The discrepancy between our wishes and our relations, between the
_soul_ and the _earth_, remains a _riddle_ if we continue; and if
we cease to live, a _blasphemy_. Strangers, born upon mountains, we
consume in lowly places, with unhealthy _heimweh_ (home-sickness).
We belong to higher regions, and an eternal longing grows in our
hearts at music, which is the _Kuhreigen_ of our native Alps....'

"'From hence what follows?' asked the chaplain (a Kantian).

"'Not that we are unhappy, but that we are immortal; and this world
_within_ us demands and manifests a _second_ without us.... I
cannot tell how painful, how monstrous and horrible the thought of
an annihilating death, of an eternal grave, now appeared to me. Men
often bear their errors, as their truths, about in words, and not
in feeling; but let the believer in annihilation place before him,
instead of a life of sixty years, one of sixty minutes; then let
him look on the face of a beloved being, or upon a noble or wise
man, as upon an aimless hour-long appearance; as a thin shadow that
melts into light and leaves no trace; can he bear the thought? No!
the supposition of imperishableness is always with him; else there
would hang always before his soul, as before Mahomet's in the
fairest sky, a dark cloud; and, as Cain upon the earth, an eternal
fear would pursue him. Yes, if all the woods upon this earth were
groves of pleasure; if all the valleys were Kampaner valleys;