ur joyous transport. For after that brief
pulsation is over, how bald is the earth, how black is life! It is
because I know not whither I am going, or whether I am going, or
whether there be a whither, that the act is so alluring. Only men
will not confess this, but give the name of cowardice and of
courage to what is neither the one nor the other. In dissipation,
in thoughtlessness, in indifference, the poor wretches lose both
life and death.

* * * * *

A strange dream, that is to say, a dream, has visited me. The
commonest thing is quite as strange as the uncommonest, only habit
blunts our sense.

I was dead. I knew it distinctly; and yet I lived on in my
consciousness. All my forlorn doubts, my stiff-neckedness that
would not bow to the yoke, my hard heart that closed itself so
early against love, had shut me out, so my conscience told me,
from the place to which the good hope to go. The state in which I
found myself, and numberless others along with me, was one the
common ordinariness, the dull triviality of which was quite
appalling. I was utterly unable to recollect my friends and those
whom I had loved, however intensely I strained my memory and put
it to the rack. A longing, like that of one pining with thirst
after a stream of fresh clear water, tormented me, to call up the
forms and the ideas of those beloved beings in my imagination; I
felt a yearning after them like a heavy weight that was crushing
me in the hidden places of my heart. Just as little could I bring
back those actions which during my life I might have called good.
Every thing in this region of my thoughts was like a bare parcht
waste. But everything evil rolled in whirling circles wearyingly
and dizzyingly before my inward eye. My vices and errours, all the
faults and misdeeds of my life, every wretched moment of my
temporal existence gathered round me as it were with the cries and
croaking of fierce hungry birds of prey. O these sins how hugely
and gigantically they swelled out! How horrible it was to see
their consequences unfolding themselves far, far away in the
realms of the future! how they took root and grew up riotously in
after-generations! nothing but looks of anguish, of reproach, of
pain, of bitter despair was turned upon me from thence. In like
ma