event her? He
who wrote verses and could not even answer the question what in all the
world he intended to become ...

And he forsook his zigzagging native city, around whose gables the damp
winds whistled, forsook the fountain and the old walnut-tree in the
garden, the familiars of his youth, forsook also the sea that he loved
so dearly, and felt no pain in so doing. For he had grown mature and
shrewd, had come to comprehend how things stood with himself, and was
full of mockery of the stupid and vulgar existence that had so long
held him in its midst.

He surrendered himself wholly to the power which seemed to him the most
lofty on earth, into whose service he felt himself called, and which
promised him rank and honors, the power of the spirit and of speech,
which sits smilingly enthroned over this unconscious and mute life.
With all his young passion he surrendered himself to her, and she
rewarded him with all she has to bestow, and took from him inexorably
all that she is wont to take as equivalent.

She sharpened his eyes and made him see through and through the big
words that swell men's bosoms, she unlocked for him the souls of men
and his own soul, made him a seer, and showed him the heart of the
world and every first cause hidden behind words and deeds. But what he
saw was this: comedy and misery--comedy and misery.

Then came loneliness with the anguish and the arrogance of this
knowledge, because he could not endure the circle of the innocent with
their happily beclouded minds, and the mark on his brow was
disconcerting to them. But sweeter and sweeter grew to him the joy in
words and in beautiful forms, for he was wont to say (and had already
written it down) that mere knowledge of the soul would infallibly make
us dejected if the pleasure of expression did not keep us awake and
lively....

So he lived in great cities and in the South, from whose sunshine he
promised himself a more luxuriant maturing of his art; and perhaps it
was the blood of his mother that drew him thither. But as his heart was
dead and without love, he fell into adventures of the flesh, sank
deeply into lust and the guilt of passion, and suffered unspeakably
from it all. Perhaps it was the heritage of his father in him, of that
tall, meditative, neatly dressed gentleman with the wild flower in his
button-hole, that made him suffer so down yonder, and that occasionally
set in motion within him a faint, yearning recollection of a ple