eeling of horror came over me, as when a person suddenly finds
himself alone in the midst of immeasurable mountains of ice.
Everything about me and in me was cold and strange, and even my tears
froze.

Wonderful worlds appeared and vanished before me in my uneasy dream. I
was sick and suffered great pain, but I loved my sickness and welcomed
the suffering. I hated everything earthly and was glad to see it all
punished and destroyed. I felt so alone and so strangely. And as a
delicate spirit often grows melancholy in the very lap of happiness
over its own joy, and at the very acme of its existence becomes
conscious of the futility of it all, so did I regard my suffering with
mysterious pleasure. I regarded it as the symbol of life in general; I
believed that I was seeing and feeling the everlasting discord by
means of which all things come into being and exist, and the lovely
forms of refined culture seemed dead and trivial to me in comparison
with this monstrous world of infinite strength and of unending
struggle and warfare, even into the most hidden depths of existence.

On account of this remarkable feeling sickness acquired the character
of a peculiar world complete in itself. I felt that its mysterious
life was richer and deeper than the vulgar health of the dreaming
sleep-walkers all around me. And with the sickliness, which was not at
all unpleasant, this feeling also clung to me and completely separated
me from other men, just as I was sundered from the earth by the
thought that your nature and my love had been too sacred not to take
speedy flight from earth and its coarse ties. It seemed to me that all
was right so, and that your unavoidable death was nothing more than a
gentle awakening after a light sleep.

I too thought that I was awake when I saw your picture, which evermore
transfigured itself into a cheerful diffused purity. Serious and yet
charming, quite you and yet no longer you, the divine form irradiated
by a wonderful light! Now it was like the terrible gleam of visible
omnipotence, now like a soft ray of golden childhood. With long, still
drafts my spirit drank from the cool spring of pure passion and became
secretly intoxicated with it. And in this blissful drunkenness I felt
a spiritual worthiness of a peculiar kind, because every earthly
sentiment was entirely strange to me, and the feeling never left me
that I was consecrated to death.

The years passed slowly by, and deeds and works advanc