to the earth in pieces! Oh, those
hundreds of laborious nights in which there was no sleep, nothing but
the excited raging of many voices! Those grey mornings on which the sun
shone on tattered leaves and a distorted face, a face full of suffering
that was always old and yet new! And those moonlight nights, when some
one moved along singing, not as one sings with joy, but as the heretics
who sat on the martyr benches of the Inquisition! Then there were the
rainy nights, the stormy nights, the nights when it snowed, and when he
chased after the phantom of a melody that was already half his own, and
half an incorporeal thing wandering around in boundless space under the
stars.

Each landscape became a pale vision: bush and grass and flower, like
spun yarn seen in a fever, the people who passed by, and the clouds
fibrillated above the forests were of one and the same constituency.
Nothing was tangible; the palate lost its sense of taste, the finger its
sense of touch. Bad weather was welcome; it subdued the noises, made men
quieter. Cursed be the mill that clappers, the carpenter who drives the
nails, the teamster who calls to his jaded pair, the laughter of
children, the croaking of frogs, the twittering of birds! An insensate
man looks down upon the scene, one who is deaf and dumb, one who would
snatch all clothing and decorations from the world, to the end that
neither colour nor splendour of any description may divert his eye, one
who mounts to heaven at night to steal the eternal fire, and who burrows
in the graves of the dead by day--an outcast.

In the beginning of spring, he started on the third movement, an andante
with variations. It expressed the gruesome peace that hovered over
Eleanore's slumbering face one night before her death. The springs
within him were all suddenly dried up; he could not tell why his hand
was paralysed, his fancy immobile.

One evening he returned from a long journey to Arnstein, a little place
in Lower Franconia, where he had then pitched his tent. He was living in
the house of a seamstress, a poor widow, and as he came into the room he
noticed her ten-year-old daughter standing by the open box in which he
had kept the mask of Zingarella. Out of a perfectly harmless curiosity
the child had removed the lid, and was standing bewitched at the
unexpected sight.

When Daniel's eyes fell on her, she was frightened; her body shook with
fear; she tried to run away. "No, no, stay!" cried Da