g: but
he who would become a child must surmount even his youth."--

And I considered a long while, and trembled. At last, however, did I say
what I had said at first. "I will not."

Then did a laughing take place all around me. Alas, how that laughing
lacerated my bowels and cut into my heart!

And there was spoken unto me for the last time: "O Zarathustra, thy
fruits are ripe, but thou art not ripe for thy fruits!

So must thou go again into solitude: for thou shalt yet become
mellow."--

And again was there a laughing, and it fled: then did it become still
around me, as with a double stillness. I lay, however, on the ground,
and the sweat flowed from my limbs.

--Now have ye heard all, and why I have to return into my solitude.
Nothing have I kept hidden from you, my friends.

But even this have ye heard from me, WHO is still the most reserved of
men--and will be so!

Ah, my friends! I should have something more to say unto you! I should
have something more to give unto you! Why do I not give it? Am I then a
niggard?--

When, however, Zarathustra had spoken these words, the violence of his
pain, and a sense of the nearness of his departure from his friends came
over him, so that he wept aloud; and no one knew how to console him. In
the night, however, he went away alone and left his friends.

THIRD PART.

"Ye look aloft when ye long for exaltation, and I look downward because
I am exalted.

"Who among you can at the same time laugh and be exalted?

"He who climbeth on the highest mountains, laugheth at all tragic plays
and tragic realities."--ZARATHUSTRA, I., "Reading and Writing."

XLV. THE WANDERER.

Then, when it was about midnight, Zarathustra went his way over the
ridge of the isle, that he might arrive early in the morning at the
other coast; because there he meant to embark. For there was a good
roadstead there, in which foreign ships also liked to anchor: those
ships took many people with them, who wished to cross over from the
Happy Isles. So when Zarathustra thus ascended the mountain, he thought
on the way of his many solitary wanderings from youth onwards, and how
many mountains and ridges and summits he had already climbed.

I am a wanderer and mountain-climber, said he to his heart, I love not
the plains, and it seemeth I cannot long sit still.

And whatever may still overtake me as fate and experience--a wandering
will be therein, and a mountain-climbing: in the end