ade them upset their old academic chairs, and wherever that old
infatuation had sat; I bade them laugh at their great moralists, their
saints, their poets, and their Saviours.

At their gloomy sages did I bid them laugh, and whoever had sat
admonishing as a black scarecrow on the tree of life.

On their great grave-highway did I seat myself, and even beside the
carrion and vultures--and I laughed at all their bygone and its mellow
decaying glory.

Verily, like penitential preachers and fools did I cry wrath and shame
on all their greatness and smallness. Oh, that their best is so very
small! Oh, that their worst is so very small! Thus did I laugh.

Thus did my wise longing, born in the mountains, cry and laugh in me; a
wild wisdom, verily!--my great pinion-rustling longing.

And oft did it carry me off and up and away and in the midst of
laughter; then flew I quivering like an arrow with sun-intoxicated
rapture:

--Out into distant futures, which no dream hath yet seen, into warmer
souths than ever sculptor conceived,--where gods in their dancing are
ashamed of all clothes:

(That I may speak in parables and halt and stammer like the poets: and
verily I am ashamed that I have still to be a poet!)

Where all becoming seemed to me dancing of Gods, and wantoning of Gods,
and the world unloosed and unbridled and fleeing back to itself:--

--As an eternal self-fleeing and re-seeking of one another of many Gods,
as the blessed self-contradicting, recommuning, and refraternising with
one another of many Gods:--

Where all time seemed to me a blessed mockery of moments, where
necessity was freedom itself, which played happily with the goad of
freedom:--

Where I also found again mine old devil and arch-enemy, the spirit
of gravity, and all that it created: constraint, law, necessity and
consequence and purpose and will and good and evil:--

For must there not be that which is danced OVER, danced beyond? Must
there not, for the sake of the nimble, the nimblest,--be moles and
clumsy dwarfs?--

3.

There was it also where I picked up from the path the word "Superman,"
and that man is something that must be surpassed.

--That man is a bridge and not a goal--rejoicing over his noontides and
evenings, as advances to new rosy dawns:

--The Zarathustra word of the great noontide, and whatever else I have
hung up over men like purple evening-afterglows.

Verily, also new stars did I make them see, along with new ni