ough he never answered her letters, he looked forward to receiving
them, and became impatient if one were overdue. He often thought of the
swallow when he would step to the window on a dark night. He thought of
her as an all-seeing spirit that hovered in the air. The swallow--that
was fraught with meaning--the restless, delicate, swift-flying swallow.
And in his mind's eye he saw the swallow that hovered over AEgydius Place
when Eberhard came to take him up to the room with the withered flowers.

He wrote to Philippina: "Decorate my graves. Buy two wreaths, and lay
them on the graves."

"You must mount to the clouds, Daniel, otherwise you are lost," was one
passage in one of the letters from the Swallow. Another, much longer,
ran: "As soon as you feel one loneliness creeping over you, you must
hasten into another, an unknown one. If your path seems blocked, you
must storm the hedges before you. If an arm surrounds you, you must tear
yourself loose, even though it cost blood and tears. You must leave men
behind and move above them; you dare not become a citizen; you dare not
allow yourself to be taken up with things that are dear to you; you must
have no companion, neither man nor maid. Time must hover over you cold
and quiet. Let your heart be encased in bronze, for music is a flame
that breaks through and consumes all there is in the man who created it,
except the stuff the gods have forged about their chosen son."

Why should the picture of this red-haired Jewess, from whom Daniel had
fled in terror, not have vanished? There was a Muse such as poets dream
of! "Jewess, wonderful Jewess," thought Daniel, and this
word--Jewess--took on for him a meaning, a power, and a prophetic flight
all its own.

"The work, Daniel Nothafft, the work," wrote this second Rahel in
another letter, "the rape of Prometheus, when are you going to lay it at
the feet of impoverished humanity? The age is like wine that tastes of
the earth; your work must be the filter. The age is like an epileptic
body convulsed with agonies; your work must be the healing hand that
one lays on the diseased brow. When will you finally give, O
parsimonious mortal? when ripen, tree? when flood the valley, stream?"

But the tree was in no hurry to cast off the ripened fruit; the stream
found that the way to the sea was long and tortuous; it had to break
through mountains and wash away the rocks. Oh, those nights of torment
when an existing form crashed and fell