The innocent! she'd yet to know the powerful abundance of her heart, and sweetly dismayed at the wealth within her, she buried it deep in her breast — and when she now confessed, holy simplicity, when she confessed with tears that she loved too much, and when she took leave from all she'd cradled till then to her heart, oh, when she cried: 'I've fallen away from May and summer and autumn, and don't heed the day and the night as once I did, don't belong any longer to heaven and earth, belong just to one, only to one, but the blossom of May and the flame of summer and the ripeness of autumn, the lightness of day and the gravity of night, and earth and heaven, all is fused for me into this one! so do I love!' — and when she now looked at me, in the fullness of her heart's content, when she, in bold and holy joy, took me into her beautiful arms and kissed me on brow and mouth, oh! when that divine head, dying in bliss, slipped down my open neck, and those lovely lips rested on my beating breast and the sweet breath touched my soul — O Bellarmin! my senses fail and my mind runs adrift.

I see, I see how this must end. The rudder has fallen into the surge and the ship will be seized like a child by the feet and hurled against the rocks.

## Hyperion to Bellarmin [XXX]

There are in life great hours. We look up to them like colossal figures of the future and antiquity, we fight a glorious fight with them, and should we hold our own against them, they then become like sisters and never leave us.

Once we sat together on our mountain, on a stone of the ancient city of this island, and spoke of how here the lion Demosthenes had found his end, how he'd here with holy self-elected death helped himself to freedom from the Macedonian chains and daggers — 'That glorious spirit went from this world with a jest,' one of us cried. 'And why not?' I said, 'there was nothing more for him here; Athens had become Alexander's whore and the world, like a hart, hounded to death by the great huntsman.'

'O Athens!' cried Diotima; 'there's many a time I've grieved when I gazed across and out of the blue twilight the phantom of the Olympieion rose before me!'

'How far is it to get there?' I asked

'A day's journey, perhaps,' Diotima replied.

'A day's journey,' I cried, 'and I haven't been there yet? We must go across together straightaway.'

'Right then!' cried Diotima; 'we shall have a fair sea tomorrow, and all's now still greenness and ripeness.

'One needs the eternal sun and the life of the immortal earth for such a pilgrimage.'

'Tomorrow then!' I said, and our friends agreed.

Early, to the rooster's song, we set out from the roadstead. We and the world were shining in fresh brilliance. Golden peaceful youth was in our hearts. The life in us was like a newborn isle of the ocean in which the first spring is beginning.

For some time now, under Diotima's influence, more stability had come into my soul; today I felt it with threefold purity, and the scattered swarming energies were all gathered in one single golden mean.

We spoke together about the excellence of the ancient Athenians, how it arose, in what it consisted.

One said it was the climate that made it; another: art and philosophy; a third: religion and polity.

'Athenian art and religion, and philosophy and polity,' I said, 'are flowers and fruits of the tree, not the soil and the roots. You take the effects for the cause.

'And anyone who tells me that this was all shaped by the climate should consider that we too still live in it.

'Less disturbed in every respect, freer from violent influence than any other people on earth, so grew the people of the Athenians. No conqueror weakens them, no military fortune inebriates them, no alien cult dulls them, no hasty wisdom drives them to untimely ripeness. Left to itself, like the growing diamond, such is their childhood. Almost nothing is heard of them up to the times of Pisistratus and Hipparchus. They took but little part in the Trojan War which, as in a hothouse, prematurely kindled and quickened most of the Greek peoples. — It's not extraordinary fate that brings forth man. Great and colossal are the sons of such a mother, but beautiful beings, or, what is the same thing, men they never become, or not until late when the contrasts war with each other too harshly for them not to make peace in the end.

'In exuberant vigour Lacedaemon rushes ahead of the Athenians and for this very reason would also have scattered and dissolved sooner, had not Lycurgus come and with his discipline contained its intemperate nature. And so from then on everything about the Spartan was acquired, all excellence achieved and bought through labour and selfconscious effort, and in as much as one can, in a certain sense, speak of the simplicity of the Spartans, yet it follows naturally that true childlike simplicity was wholly lacking amongst them. The Lacedaemonians breached too soon the order of instinct, they grew out of kind too soon, and so then, with them, discipline too had to begin too soon; for all discipline and art begins too soon where man's nature hasn't yet come to ripeness. Perfected nature must dwell in the human child before it enters school, so that the image of childhood may show it the way back from school to perfected nature.

'The Spartans remained eternally a fragment; for whoever was never a finished child can hardly become a finished man. —

'True, heaven and earth also did their part for the Athenians, as for all the Greeks, dispensing neither dearth nor abundance. The rays of heaven didn't fall upon them like a rain of fire. The earth didn't pamper and ravish them with caresses and lavish gifts as here and there the foolish mother otherwise may do.

'And then there was the prodigious gesture of Theseus, the voluntary curtailment of his own monarchic power.

'Oh! such a seed, thrown into the hearts of the people, must beget an ocean of golden grains, and visibly continues even late to burgeon and bear fruit amongst the Athenians.

'Once again then! that the Athenians grew up so free from violent influence of any kind, on such moderate fare, this is what made them so excellent, and this alone could!

'Leave man undisturbed from the cradle on! don't drive him from the enclosing oneness of his being's bud, out of his childhood's tabernacle! don't do too little lest he manage without you and so distinguish you from himself, don't do too much lest he feel your power or his own and so distinguish you from himself, in short, don't let man know until late that there are men, that there is something outside himself, for only in this way will he become man. But man is a god as soon as he's man. And once he's a god, then he's beautiful.'

'Strange!' cried one of the friends.

'You've never yet spoken so deeply from my soul,' cried Diotima.

'I owe it to you,' I answered.

'That's how the Athenian was man,' I continued, 'that's how he had to become man. Beautiful he came from the hands of nature, beautiful in body and soul, as the saying goes.

'The first child of human, of divine beauty is art. In art divine man renews and repeats himself. He wants to feel himself, and so he confronts himself with his own beauty. Thus man gave himself his gods. For in the beginning man and his gods were one, when, unknown to itself, eternal beauty was. — I'm speaking mysteries, but they are. —

'The first child of divine beauty is art. So it was with the Athenians.

'Beauty's second daughter is religion. Religion is love of beauty. The wise man loves beauty itself, infinite and all-embracing; the people love its children, the gods, who appear to them in multifarious forms. So it was too with the Athenians. And without such love of beauty, without such religion any state is a shrivelled skeleton without life and spirit, and all thought and deed a tree without a top, a column whose crown has been lopped off.

'But that it was really the case with the Greeks, and especially the Athenians, that their art and their religion are the true children of eternal beauty — of perfected human nature — and could issue only from perfected human nature, that is clearly evident if one is only willing to consider with an unbiased eye the objects of their holy art and the religion with which they loved and honoured those objects.

'There are blunders and blemishes everywhere, and so here too. But one thing is certain withal: what one finds in the objects of their art is mostly ripened man. Here there's not the pettiness, not the monstrousness of the Egyptians and Goths, here there's human sense and human form. They sheer off less than others into the extremes of the supersensual and the sensual. Their gods stay more than others within the beautiful mean of man.

'And as the object, so also the love. Not too servile and not all too familiar! —

'From the Athenians' beauty of spirit there followed too the necessary feeling for freedom.

'The Egyptian bears without pain the despotism of arbitrary power, the son of the North without resentment the despotism of the law, legally enshrined injustice; for the Egyptian possesses from the womb an instinct for servility and idolatry; in the North they have too little faith in the pure free life of nature not to be superstitiously thralled to legality.

'The Athenian can't abide arbitrary power because his divine nature brooks no disturbance, he can't abide legality everywhere because he has no need of it everywhere. Draco isn't for him. He expects to be treated gently, and has every right to do so too.'

'Fair enough!' someone interjected, 'that I understand, but how this poetic religious people should also come to be a philosophical one, that I don't see.'

'Without poetry,' I said, 'they would never even have been a philosophical people!'

'What has philosophy,' he responded, 'what has the cold sublimity of that science to do with poetry?'

'Poetry,' I said, sure of my case, 'is the beginning and end of that science. Like Minerva from Jupiter's head it springs from the poetry of infinite divine being. And so too what is irreconcilable in it will finally flow together again in the mysterious wellspring of poetry.'

'He's a paradoxical fellow,' cried Diotima, 'yet I sense his meaning. You're both digressing though. It's Athens we're talking about.'

'The man,' I began again, 'who has not at least once in his life felt in himself full unsullied beauty, when the powers of his being played into one another like the colours of the rainbow, who has never come to know that only in hours of inspiration all is inmost concord, this man will not even become a philosophical sceptic, his spirit is not even fitted for tearing down, let alone for building up. For believe you me, the sceptic finds flaws and contradiction in all that is thought only because he knows the harmony of flawless beauty that never is thought. He disdains the dry crust that human reason proffers him well-meaningly only because he's secretly feasting at the table of the gods.'

'Dreamer!' cried Diotima, 'that's why you too were a sceptic. But the Athenians!'

'I was just coming to them,' I said. 'The mighty phrase of Heraclitus, εν διαϕερον εαυτω (the One differentiated in itself), could have been arrived at only by a Greek, for it is the essence of beauty and before that was found, there was no philosophy.

'Now one could define, the whole was there. The flower had ripened, one could now dissect.

'The moment of beauty had now been made known among men, it was there in life and spirit, infinite oneness was.

'One could take it apart, divide it in the mind, think the divided together afresh, could so come more and more to know the essence of the highest and the best and turn that knowledge into laws for the manifold realms of the mind.

'Do you see now why the Athenians in particular had also to be a philosophical people?

'The Egyptian couldn't. He who doesn't live loving, and loved by, heaven and earth in equal measure, who doesn't in this sense live at one with the element in which he moves, is by nature also not so at one with himself and cannot know eternal beauty, at least not so readily as a Greek.

'Like a sumptuous despot the oriental clime prostrates its inhabitants with its power and its splendour, and before man has even learned to walk he must kneel, before he has learned to talk he must pray; before his heart has found its balance it must bow, and before the spirit is strong enough to bear flower and fruit, fate and nature sap from it all strength with searing heat.  Even the sublimest nothing begets nothing.

'The North, by contrast, drives its nurslings into themselves too soon, and if the spirit of the fiery Egyptian, too wanderlusting, rushes out into the world, in the North the spirit prepares to return into itself before it's even ready to fare forth.

'In the North man must already have sense before even there's any ripe feeling within him, he imputes to himself the guilt of all things before innocence even has come to its beautiful end; he must become rational, a self-conscious spirit, before he's a man, a worldly-wise man before he's a child; the harmony of whole human being, beauty, may not blossom and ripen in him before he's developed and cultured. Mere understanding, mere reason are ever the kings of the North.

'But from mere understanding there never came anything sensible, from mere reason never came anything rational.

'Understanding without beauty of spirit is like a ministering menial who fashions the fence from rough timber, according to plans he's been given, and nails together the posts that he's hewn for the garden his master wants to make. The understanding's whole business is work of necessity. By laying down rules it guards us from folly and wrongness; but being safe from folly and wrongness is not the pinnacle of human excellence.

'Reason without beauty of spirit, beauty of heart, is like a slavedriver whom the master of the house has set over the servants; he knows as little as the servants what good is served by all the endless toil, and only shouts: 'Get a move on,' and is almost loath to see it happen, for in the end he'd have no more driving to do and his part would be played out.

'From mere understanding comes no philosophy, for philosophy is more than only the limited perception of what is.

'From mere reason comes no philosophy, for philosophy is more than the blind demand for never-ending progress in the unification and differentiation of whatever it can be applied to.

'But when the divine εν διαϕερον εαυτω, the ideal of beauty illumines striving reason, it doesn't demand blindly, it knows why it demands and for what.

'When, like a May morning into the artist's workshop, the sun of the beautiful shines for the understanding in its activity, it's true that it doesn't rush forth and abandon its work of necessity, yet still it thinks fondly forward to the festal day when it will wander in the quickening light of spring.'

This was as far as I'd got when we landed on the coast of Attica. Ancient Athens now was too much in our minds for us to feel much like orderly talk, and I wondered now myself at the nature of my utterances. 'How ever did I come,' I cried, 'to fetch up on those barren mountain peaks on which you saw me?'

'It's always like that,' replied Diotima, 'when we're feeling elated. Exuberant energy looks to find work. Young lambs butt their heads together when they've had their fill of mother's milk.'

We now made our way up Lycabettus, for all our haste stopping at times in thought and wonderful anticipation.

It's good that man finds it so hard to convince himself of the death of what he loves, and likely no one has ever gone to his friend's grave without some quiet hope of actually meeting the friend there. The beautiful phantom of ancient Athens seized me like the shape of a mother returning from the realm of dead.

'O Parthenon!' I cried, 'pride of the world! at your feet lies Neptune's realm like a vanquished lion, and like children the other temples are gathered around you, and the eloquent Agora and the grove of Academe — '

'Can you transport yourself so into the ancient times,' said Diotima.

'Don't remind me of those times!' I replied; 'there was divine life and man was the central point of nature. Spring, when it blossomed all around Athens, it was like a demure flower at the virgin's bosom; the sun rose red with shame over the glories of the earth.

'The marble rocks of Hymettus and Pentelikon leapt from their slumbering cradle like children from the mother's womb, and took on form and life under the delicate hands of the Athenians.

'Nature proffered honey, and the fairest violets and myrtles and olives.

'Nature was priestess and man her god, and all the life in her and every shape and every sound of hers but a single rapturous echo of the glorious being to whom she belonged.

'Him alone she celebrated, to him alone she sacrificed.

'And he was worthy of it, whether he sat lovingly in the holy workshop, embracing the knees of the divine image he'd made, or on the headland, on Sunium's green peak, ensconced amidst the listening disciples, whiling away the hours with lofty thoughts, or he might be running in the Stadium, or from the speaker's tribune dispensing, like the storm god, rain and sun and lightning bolts and golden clouds —'

'Oh look!' Diotima now suddenly called out to me.

I looked, and could have died at the almighty spectacle.

Like a vast shipwreck when the storms are silenced and the sailors flown, and the body of the shattered fleet lies unrecognizable upon the sandbank, so lay before us Athens, and the orphaned pillars stood before us like the naked tree trunks of a forest which greened still in the evening and then went up in fire in the night.

'Here,' said Diotima, 'you learn to be still about your own fate, be it good or ill.'

'Here you learn to be still about everything,' I continued. 'Had the reapers who mowed this cornfield enriched their barns with its haulms, nothing would have been lost and I should be content to stand here as a gleaner; but who gained by it?'

'All of Europe,' replied one of the friends.

'Oh, yes!' I cried, 'they've hauled off the pillars and statues and sold them to each other, prizing the noble figures not a little on account of their rarity, the way one prizes parrots and monkeys.'

'Don't say that!' replied the same man; 'and should they really lack the spirit of all the beauty, it would be because that couldn't be carried away, couldn't be bought.'

'Quite!' I cried. 'For that spirit had perished even before the destroyers fell upon Attica. Only when the houses and temples are desolate do the wild beasts venture into the gates and streets.'

'For anyone who does have that spirit,' said Diotima consolingly, 'Athens still stands like a fruit tree in bloom. The artist can easily for himself restore the torso to wholeness.'

The next day we went out early, saw the ruins of the Parthenon, the site of the ancient theatre of Bacchus, the temple of Theseus, the sixteen columns that still remain standing of the divine Olympieion; but what most moved me was the ancient gate through which in former times one came out of the old town into the new, and where once a thousand beautiful people must have greeted each other in a single day. Now you come neither into the old nor into the new city through this gate, and mute and waste it stands there like a dried-up fountain from whose pipes the clear fresh water once sprang forth with a friendly plash.

'Alas!' I said, as we went walking round, 'it's a splendid game fate plays, is it not, toppling down the temples here and leaving the shattered stones for children to throw about, making the mutilated gods into benches before the peasant's hut and the tombs here a restingplace for the grazing bull, and such prodigality is more regal than the wantonness of Cleopatra when she drank the molten pearls; but even so, the pity of all that grandeur and beauty!'

'Dear Hyperion!' cried Diotima, 'it's time for you to leave; you're pale and your eyes are weary, and it's useless trying to help yourself with fancies. Come away! out into the green! in amongst the colours of life! that will do you good.'

We went out into the nearby gardens.

The others had fallen into conversation on the way with two British scholars reaping their harvest among the antiquities of Athens, and they were not to be budged. I was happy to leave them to it.

My whole being was uplifted when once again I saw myself alone with Diotima; in a glorious struggle with the sacred chaos of Athens she had prevailed. Like the lyre of the heavenly muse above the warring elements, so Diotima's still thoughts held sway above the wreckage. Like the moon from a tender cloud, so her spirit rose up from sweet sorrow; the heavenly maiden stood there in her sadness like the flower that breathes out its loveliest fragrance in the night.

On and on we walked, and in the end our walk was not in vain.

O you groves of Angele where the olive tree and the cypress, whispering round one another, cool themselves with friendly shade, where the golden fruit of the citron tree gleams through the dark green, where the swelling grape grows wantonly over the hedge, and the ripe orange, like a smiling foundling, lies on the way! you fragrant hidden paths! you tranquil seats where the image of the myrtle bush smiles from the spring! you I shall never forget.

Diotima and I walked about for a while beneath the glorious trees until a large cheerful glade opened up before us.

Here we sat down. There was a blissful stillness between us. My spirit floated about the divine form of the maiden like the butterfly about a flower, and all my being lightened and became one in the joy of inspiring contemplation.

'Are you so soon comforted again, you lighthead?' said Diotima.

'Yes! yes! I am,' I answered. 'What I thought was lost I have, what I languished for, as if it had vanished from the world, is now before me. No, Diotima! the wellspring of eternal beauty hasn't yet run dry.

'I've told you once before, I no longer need gods and men. I know that heaven is desolate and void, and the earth, which once overflowed with beautiful human life, has almost become like an anthill. But there is still a place where the old heaven and the old earth smile for me. For all gods of heaven and all godly humans of earth I forget in you.

'What's the shipwreck of the world to me, I know of nothing but my blissful isle.'

'There's a time for love,' said Diotima in gentle earnest, 'as there's a time to live in the happy cradle. But life itself drives us out.

'Hyperion!' — here she ardently seized my hand, and her voice was raised with grandeur — 'Hyperion! it seems to me that you are born for higher things. Do not misjudge yourself! it's the lack of material that's held you back. Things didn't move quickly enough. That cast you down. Like the young fencers you'd lunge too soon, before your aim was yet sure and your hand skilled, and since, as is only natural, you took more hits than you gave, you became chary and doubted yourself and all things; for you're as sensitive as you're hotheaded. But thereby nothing is lost. Had your mind and your actions matured so early, your spirit would not be what it is; you would not be the thinking man, had you not been the suffering one, the man in ferment. Believe me, you would never so clearly have come to know the equilibrium of beautiful humanity, had you not so utterly lost it. Your heart has found peace at last. I'll believe it. I understand it. But do you really think you've now reached your end? Will you lock yourself up in the heaven of your love and leave a world which has need of you to wither and grow cold beneath you? Down you must like the ray of light, like the all-refreshing rain you must descend into the land of mortality, you must illumine like Apollo, shake and quicken like Jupiter, or you are not worthy of your heaven. I beg you, go back into Athens once again, and this time look at the people there walking about amongst the ruins, the raw Albanians and the other good artless Greeks, who console themselves with a merry dance and a pious fable for the vile oppression that weighs down on them — can you say: "I'm ashamed of this material"? I think it could still prove malleable after all. Can you turn away your heart from those in need? They're not evil, they've done you no harm!'

'What can I do for them?' I cried.

'Give them what you have within you,' Diotima replied, 'give — '

'Not a word, not a word more, great soul!' I cried, 'else you will sway me, else it will be as if you'd forced me to it —

'They won't be happier, but nobler, no! they'll be happier too. They must come forth, they must rise like young mountains from the surging sea, driven by their subterranean fire.

'It's true I stand alone and come unrenowned among them. Yet just one who is a man, can he not do more than hundreds who are only fragments of men?

'Holy nature! you are the same within me and without. It cannot be so hard to unite what is without with the divine that is within me. If the bee can build its thriving little realm, then why shouldn't I be able to plant and raise what's needed?

'What? the Arab merchant sowed his Koran and there grew up for him like an endless forest a people of disciples, and that field should not also flourish where the ancient truth shall come again in newly quickened youth?

'Let there be fundamental change! From humanity's roots let the new world spring! Let a new godhead rule over them, a new future brighten before them.

'In the workshop, in the home, in the assemblies, in the temples, everywhere let there be change!

'But first I must go forth to learn. I'm an artist, but I lack the craft. I can mould in my mind, but I haven't yet learned to direct my hand — '

'You shall go to Italy,' said Diotima, 'to Germany, France — how many years do you need? three — four — I should think three are enough; you're not of the slow sort, and will be seeking out only the greatest and most beautiful —'

'And then?'

'You will become the educator of our people, you'll be a great man, I hope. And when I then embrace you like this, then I'll dream as if I were a part of the glorious man, then I'll rejoice as if you had gifted me, like Pollux to Castor, half of your immortality, oh! I shall become a proud maiden, Hyperion!'

I fell silent for a while. I was filled with ineffable joy.

'Is there then contentment between the decision and the deed,' I finally resumed, 'is there a calm before the victory?'

'It's the calm of the hero,' said Diotima, 'there are decisions which, like the dicta of the gods, are command and fulfilment in one, and such is yours. —'

We walked back, as after our first embrace. Everything had become strange and new for us.

Now I stood over the ruins of Athens like the farmer on the fallow field. 'Just lie peaceful,' I thought, as we took ship again, 'just lie peaceful, slumbering land! Soon young life will green from you and wax towards the blessings of heaven. Soon the clouds will no more rain in vain, soon the sun will find again its ancient progeny.

'Do you ask after men, nature? Do you lament like a lyre which the brother of chance, the wind alone plays, since the artist who kept it in tune is dead? They will come, your men, nature! A rejuvenated people will rejuvenate you too, and you will become as its bride, and the ancient covenant of spirits will renew itself with you.

'There will be but one beauty; and humanity and nature will unite into one all-embracing godhead.'

## Volume Two

μη φυναι, τον απαντα νιχα λογον. το δ'επει ϕανη, βηναι χειδεν, οδεν περ ηχει, πολν δεντερου ως ταχιστα.

Sophocles

[Not to be born is, past all prizing, best. But when a man has seen the light of day, this is the next best by far, that with the utmost speed he should go back whence he came.]

## Hyperion to Bellarmin [XXXI]

We were living the last lovely moments of the year, on our return from Attica.

A brother of spring was the autumn for us, full of mellow fire, a feast time for commemorating sorrows and past joys of love. The withering leaves wore the red hues of dusk, only the spruce and the laurel stood in eternal green. In the bright breezes wandering birds lingered, others swarmed in vineyard and garden, merrily reaping what people had left. And the heavenly light streamed pure from the open sky, through all the branches smiled the holy sun, the goodly, that never I name without joy and thanks, that often in deep grief has healed me with a glance and purged my soul of discontent and cares.

We revisited all our dearest paths, Diotima and I, vanished hours of bliss would meet us everywhere.

We remembered the past May, we'd never before seen the earth as then, we said, it had been transformed, a silver cloud of blossom, a joyful flame of life, freed of all coarser stuff.

'Oh! all was so full of joy and hope,' cried Diotima, 'so full of ceaseless growth and yet so effortless too, so blissfully at peace, like a child lost in play with not a thought in the world.'

'It's by this that I know it, the soul of nature,' I cried, 'by this still fire, by this lingering in its mighty haste.'

'And it's so dear to the happy, this lingering,' cried Diotima; 'you remember? we stood together on the bridge one evening, after a violent storm, and the red mountain torrent shot away like an arrow beneath

us, but beside it the woods were greening in peace and the bright beech leaves barely stirred. How it warmed our hearts that the soulful green did not fly away from us too like the stream, and the beautiful spring held still for us like a tame bird, but now just the same it's over the hills and long gone.'

We smiled at the phrase, although we felt more like grieving.

So too our own bliss would pass, and this we foresaw.

O Bellarmin! who then may say he stands fast when even the beautiful ripens so towards its fate, when even the divine must humble itself and share mortality with all that is mortal!

#### Hyperion to Bellarmin [XXXII]

I'd lingered with the lovely maiden before her house until the lamp of the night shone into the tranquil twilight; now I came back to Notara's dwelling, thoughtful, full of overflowing heroic life, as always when I went from her embraces. A letter had come from Alabanda.

'Things are on the move, Hyperion,' he wrote, 'Russia has declared war on the Porte; they're coming with a fleet into the Archipelago;3 the Greeks shall be free if they join the uprising to drive the Sultan to the Euphrates. The Greeks will do their part, the Greeks will be free and I'm heartily glad that there's finally something to do again. I couldn't face the light of day before we got as far as this.

'If you're still the old Hyperion, then come! You'll find me in the village before Coron when you come by way of Mistra. I'm staying on the hill, in the white villa by the woods.

'I've broken with the people whom you met with me in Smyrna. You were right, with your finer sense, not to step into their sphere.

'I long to see us both together again in the new life. Until now the world was too wretched for you to make yourself known to it. Since you wouldn't do bondsman's work you did nothing, and doing nothing made you dreamy and morose.

'You wouldn't swim in the swamp. Come now, come, and let us bathe in open sea!

'That shall do us good, my sole beloved!'

<sup>3 [</sup>Hölderlin's note] In the year 1770.

So he wrote. At first I was taken aback. My face burned with shame, my heart seethed like hot springs, and I couldn't keep still, so did it pain me to be outflown by Alabanda, bested once and for all. Yet all the more eagerly did I now embrace the work ahead. —

'I've grown too idle,' I cried, 'too fond of the quiet life, too fey, too sluggish! — Alabanda looks out into the world like a noble pilot, Alabanda is busy and searches the waves for booty; and your hands are asleep in your lap? and you would make do with words and conjure the world with magic formulas? But your words are feckless as snowflakes and merely make the air murkier, and your incantations are for the pious, but the unbelievers don't hear you. — Yes! to be gentle in season, that may be a beautiful thing, but to be gentle out of season, that's ugly, because it's cowardly! — But Harmodius! it's your myrtle I will be like, your myrtle in which the sword was concealed. I will not have walked in idleness for nothing, and my sleep shall become like oil when it's touched by the flame. I will not look on when it counts, will not go around asking for news when Alabanda takes the laurel.'

#### Hyperion to Bellarmin [XXXIII]

Diotima's sudden pallor, when she read Alabanda's letter, pierced my soul. She then began, calmly and earnestly, to advise me against this step, and we spoke much back and forth. 'O you men of violence!' she cried at last, 'you who are so quick to go to the extreme, remember Nemesis!'

'For those who suffer extremes,' I said, 'for them extreme is right.'

'Even if it's right,' she said, 'it's not what you were born for.'

'So it would seem;' I said, 'I've loitered long enough. Oh, I'd like to load an Atlas on my shoulders to discharge the debts of my youth. Do I have a sense of myself? do I have inner stability? Oh, let me go, Diotima! It's here, in just such work as this, that I must gain it.'

'That's sheer hubris!' Diotima cried; 'you were lately more modest, lately when you said: "first I must go forth to learn".'

'Dear sophist!' I cried, 'our talk then was of something completely different. Leading my people to the Olympus of divine beauty, where from springs for ever young there flows the true with all things good, is something I'm not yet fit to do. But I've learnt to use a sword, and for now that's all that's needed. The new covenant of spirits can't live in the air, the holy theocracy of the beautiful must have a free state to live in, and that demands space on earth and this space we shall surely conquer.'

'You will conquer,' cried Diotima, 'and forget what for? at best you'll force your free state into being and then say: "for what have I built?"  The savage struggle will tear you apart, beautiful soul, you will grow old, blissful spirit! and lifeweary ask at the end, "where are you now, you ideals of my youth?"'

'That's cruel, Diotima,' I cried, 'grasping the heart in this way, holding me fast by my own fear of death, by my highest joy of life, but no! no! no! bondage kills, but a just war brings every soul alive. It's what gives to gold the colour of the sun, that it gets thrown into the fire! This and only this gives to man his whole youth, that he bursts his bonds asunder! It's this alone can save him, that he goes forth and crushes the viper underfoot, the crawling century that poisons in the bud all beautiful nature! — You say I'll grow old, Diotima! if I liberate Greece? grow old and wretched, a mean little man? Oh, then he must have been right sapless and empty and godforsaken, that Athenian youth, the victory messenger from Marathon, when he came over the peak of Pentelikon and looked down into the vales of Attica!'

'Dearest! dearest!' cried Diotima, 'be still! I won't say another word.  Oh! when you're like this I have no power, no claim over you.'

 'Forgive me, divine maiden!' I cried, sunk down before her, 'oh, forgive me that I must! I'm not making a choice, I'm not deliberating. There's a power within me and I cannot tell if it's my self that drives me to this step.' 'It's your full soul that commands you,' she answered. 'Not to follow it often leads to ruin, but then following it likely does too. It's best you go, for that is greater. You act; I will bear it.'

#### Hyperion to Bellarmin [XXXIV]

Diotima was from now on marvellously changed.

With joy I'd seen how since our love began the muted life had opened out in glances and lovely words, and her genial tranquillity had often met me as sparkling inspiration.

But how alien to us grows the beautiful soul when after its first blossoming, after the morning of its course, it must rise toward high noon! One barely knew the blissful child any more, so sublime and so sorrowful had she become.

Oh, how many times I lay before that grieving image of divinity and thought to weep away my soul in pain for her, and stood up in wonderment and myself full of all-powerful energies! A flame had risen to her eyes from her oppressed breast. Her bosom had grown for her too crowded with wishes and sorrows; that's why the maiden's thoughts were so glorious and bold. A new greatness, a visible power over all that could feel, held sway within her. She was a higher being. She belonged no more to mortal man.

O my Diotima, could I have imagined then how it would end?

#### Hyperion to Bellarmin [XXXV]

Even canny Notara was captivated by the new project, promised me strong backing, hoped soon to occupy the Corinthian Isthmus and grasp Greece here as by the helve. But fate willed otherwise and rendered his work futile before it reached its goal.

He advised me not to go to Tinos, but to head straight down the Peloponnese, and as unobtrusively as possible. I should write to my father on the way, he said; the cautious old man would more easily condone a step that had been taken than allow one that hadn't. I wasn't wholly at ease with that, but we so readily sacrifice our own feelings when a great goal stands before our eyes.

'I doubt,' continued Notara, 'whether you'll be able to count on your father's help in a case like this. So I shall give you what you're surely going to need along the way so as to live and do your work for a time, come what may. If you can someday, then pay it back; if not, then what was mine was also yours. Don't be ashamed to take the money,' he added with a smile; 'even the steeds of Phoebus don't live on air alone, so the poets tell us.'

#### Hyperion to Bellarmin [XXXVI]

Now came the day of parting.

Throughout the morning I'd remained up in Notara's garden, in the fresh winter air, beneath the evergreen cypresses and cedars. I was composed. The great energies of youth sustained me, and the suffering I sensed bore me aloft like a cloud.

Diotima's mother had asked that Notara and the other friends and I should spend the last day together at her home. The good people all had taken their joy in me and Diotima, and what was godly in our love had not been lost on them. They were now to bless my leaving too.

I went down. I found the dear maiden at the hearth. It seemed for her a holy priestly office to tend to the house on this day. She had prepared everything, made everything in the house beautiful, and no one was allowed to help. She had gathered all the flowers that still remained in the garden, and managed to put together roses and fresh grapes even in this late season.

She knew my footfall when I approached, and came softly towards me; her pale cheeks glowed from the flame of the hearth and her earnest swollen eyes were glistening from tears. She saw how overcome I was. 'Go in, my dear,' she said, 'mother's inside and I shall follow shortly.'

I went in. There the noble woman sat and held out her lovely hand to me — 'are you come,' she cried, 'are you come, my son! I should be angry with you, you have taken my child from me, have talked all reason and sense out of me, and you do what you list and make off; but forgive him, you heavenly powers! if what he intends is wrong, and if it is right, oh, then do not hold back with your help for the dear youth!' I wanted to speak, but just then Notara came in with the other friends and behind them Diotima.

We were silent for a while. We honoured the grieving love that was in us all, we were fearful to make free with it in speeches and lofty thoughts. Finally, after a few fleeting words, Diotima asked me to tell of Agis and Cleomenes: I'd often mentioned those great souls with fiery reverence and claimed that they were demi-gods as surely as Prometheus, and their struggle with the fate of Sparta more heroic than any in the lustrous myths. The genius of these men, I'd said, was the golden sunset of the Greek day, just as Homer and Theseus had been its aurora.

I told their story and at the end we all felt stronger and uplifted.

'Happy the man,' cried one of the friends, 'whose life alternates between heartfelt joy and fresh battles.'

'Yes!' cried another, 'that is eternal youth when there are always ample energies at play and we can keep ourselves wholly in pleasure and toil.'

'Oh, that I could go with you!' Diotima cried to me.

'But it's good you stay behind, Diotima!' I said. 'The priestess may not leave the temple. You shall be the keeper of the holy flame, in quiet seclusion the keeper of the beautiful, that I may find it again in you.'

'Yes, you're right, my dear, that's best,' she said, and her voice trembled and her ethereal eyes were hidden behind her handkerchief, so their tears, their confusion shouldn't be seen.

 'Friends!' I cried, 'keep this angel safe for me. I can be sure of nothing more if I can't be sure of her. O heaven! I dread to think what I could do if I were to lose her.'

'Be calm, Hyperion!' Notara interjected.

'Calm?' I cried; 'O you good people! you're ready enough to worry how the garden's going to bloom or what the harvest will be like, you're capable of praying for your vines, and I'm supposed to part without wishes from the only thing my soul serves?'

'No, good Hyperion!' cried Notara, moved, 'no! you shall not part from her without wishes! no, by the godly innocence of your love! of my blessing you both may be sure.'

'You remind me,' I quickly cried.

So I fell upon one knee; with a wide gaze, blushing and solemnly smiling, she too sank down by my side.

'Long since, O nature!'

'We witness to it,' cried the others.

Now no words remained for us to speak. I felt my heart at its highest; I felt myself ripe for parting. 'Now I will forth, dear friends!' I said, and the life drained from all their faces.  I had killed everything around me, I was alone and reeled before the boundless silence in which my overflowing life no longer found a hold.

'Oh!' I cried, 'my heart burns hot within me, and you all stand there so cold, dear friends! and only the house-gods bend their ears? — Diotima! — you are silent, you don't see! — oh, it's well for you that you don't see!'

'Go then,' she sighed, 'it has to be; go then, you dear heart!'

'O sweet sound from these blissful lips!' I cried, and stood as in adoration before the lovely statue — 'sweet sound! one more time breathe upon me, dawn one more time, dear light of these eyes!'

'Don't speak that way, dearest!' she cried, 'speak in more earnest, speak with more greatness of heart to me!'

I wanted to hold myself back, but I was as in a dream.

'Woe!'  'See how gentle she is, and you so beside yourself.'

I looked at her and tears burst from my burning eyes.

'Farewell then, Diotima!' I cried, 'heaven of my love, farewell! — Let us be strong, dear friends! dear mother! I gave you joy and grief. Farewell! farewell!'

I staggered forth. Diotima followed me alone.

Evening had come and the stars rose in the heavens. Below the house we stood in stillness. Eternity was in us, above us. Soft as the aether Diotima enfolded me. 'Foolish man, what is separation?' she whispered to me mysteriously, with the smile of an immortal.

'I do feel different now,' I said, 'and I cannot tell which of the two is a dream, my sorrow or my joyfulness.'

'They both are,' she answered, 'and both are good.'

'Perfect one!'  By the starry heaven shall we know each other. Let it be the token between me and you for so long as our lips are mute.'

'Let it be!' she said with a lingering tone I'd never heard before — it was her last. Her image vanished away from me in the twilight, and I cannot tell if it was really she when I turned for the last time and the fading figure quivered one more moment before my eyes and then died into the night.

#### Hyperion to Bellarmin [XXXVII]

Why am I telling you, repeating my pain and stirring up again my restless youth in me? Isn't it enough to have gone through mortality once? why do I not remain still, in the peace of my spirit?

This is why, my Bellarmin! because every breath in life remains dear to the heart, because all changes in pure nature belong equally to her beauty.  Dear Bellarmin! I have rested a while; like a child I've been living among the quiet hills of Salamis, mindless of fate and the striving of men. Much has since changed in my eyes, and now I have peace enough within me to stay calm at every glance into human life. O friend! in the end the spirit reconciles us with all things. You won't believe it, at least not of me. But I think you should even see from my letters how daily my soul grows stiller and stiller. And I will go on speaking of it till you do believe it.

Here are letters from Diotima and me that we wrote to each other after my parting from Calauria. They are the most precious thing I confide to you. They are the warmest image from those days of my life. Of the clamour of war they tell you little. So much the more of my very own life, and that of course is what you want. And, oh, you must also see how loved I was. That I could never tell you, that Diotima alone can tell.

#### Hyperion to Diotima [XXXVIII]

I've awoken from the death of parting, my Diotima! fortified, as if from sleep, my spirit lifts itself up.

I'm writing to you from an Epidaurian mountain peak. There in the depths your island shimmers distant, Diotima! and out there my stadium where I must triumph or fall. O Peloponnese! O you springs of the Eurotas and Alpheus! That's where it will be decided! Out of the Spartan forests the ancient genius of the land shall swoop down like an eagle with our army, as on rushing wings.

A god must be in me, for I hardly even feel our separation. Like the blissful shades of Lethe my soul now lives with yours in heavenly freedom and fate sways over our love no more.

#### Hyperion to Diotima [XXXIX]

I'm now in the middle of the Peloponnese. I'm spending tonight in the same hut where once I stayed when, barely more than a boy, I roamed through these parts with Adamas. How happily I sat then on the bench before the house and listened to the tinkling bells of the caravan, coming from afar, and the plash of the nearby fountain, pouring its silvery waters into the basin beneath blossoming acacias.

Now I'm happy again. I wander through this land as through Dodona's grove, where the oaks resounded with oracles prophesying glory. I see nothing but deeds, past ones, future ones, even when I wander from morning till evening under the open sky. Believe me, anyone travelling through this land who still can thole a yoke upon his neck, who doesn't become another Pelopidas, that man is empty of heart or lacking in sense.

So long this land has slept — so long has time dragged by, like the river of hell, drumbly and dumb, in desolate idleness?

And yet everything lies ready.  Diotima! let me breathe the breath of God among them, let me speak to them a word from the heart, Diotima. Have no fear! They won't be so savage. I know raw nature. It scorns reason, but it's in league with inspiration. Whoever works with all his soul will never go astray. He has no need for overthought, for no force is against him.

#### Hyperion to Diotima [XL]

Tomorrow I shall be with Alabanda. It's a delight for me to ask the way to Coron, and I ask more often than is needed. I wish I could take the wings of the sun and fly to him, and yet I also like to linger so and ask myself: how will he be?

The kingly youth! why was I born later? why did I not spring with him from one cradle? I cannot suffer the difference that's between us. Oh, why did I live still like an idle shepherd-boy on Tinos and could only dream of the likes of him when already he was putting nature to the test in living labour, already battling sea and wind and all the elements? did I not also feel impelled towards the bliss of action?

But I will catch him up, I will be swift. By heaven! I'm overripe for work. My soul will only rage against itself if I don't soon free myself through living activity.

Noble maiden! how was I able to stand before you? How did you find it possible to love such a deedless being.

#### Hyperion to Diotima [XLI]

I have him, dearest Diotima!

Light is my breast and swift are my sinews, ha! and the future lures me, just as a clear watery deep lures us to leap in and cool our intemperate blood in the bracing bath. But that's just idle prattle. We're dearer to each other than ever, my Alabanda and I. We're freer together, and yet there's all fullness and deepness of life as before.

Oh, how right were those ancient tyrants to forbid friendships like ours! For then you're as strong as a demi-god and will thole no abuse in your sphere! —

It was evening when I entered his room. He had just put his work to one side, sat in a moonlit corner by the window, nursing his thoughts. I stood in the dark, he didn't recognize me, glanced perfunctorily in my direction. Heaven knows who he could have thought I was. 'So how's it going then?' he cried. 'Not too bad!' I said. But my dissembling was in vain.  'What's this?' he started up, 'is it you?' 'Of course it is, you blindling!' I cried, and flew into his arms. 'Oh now!' cried Alabanda at last, 'now there shall be change, Hyperion!'

'I think so too,' I said, and joyfully shook his hand.

'Do you still know me then,' Alabanda continued presently, 'do you still have your old pious faith in Alabanda? Generous soul! things meanwhile haven't gone as well for me as when I felt myself in the light of your love.'

'What?' I cried, 'Alabanda asks this? That was not proudly spoken, Alabanda. But it's the sign of the times that the old heroic nature goes begging for honour, and the living human heart, like an orphan, frets for a droplet of love.'

'Dear boy!' he cried; 'I've aged, that's all. This flabby life everywhere and the business with the old men whose disciple I tried to make you in Smyrna —'

'Oh, that's bitter,' I cried; 'even this man she's dared to assail, the goddess of death, the nameless one that they call fate.'

Light was brought and we gazed at each other anew with gentle loving scrutiny. My dearest's aspect was much changed since the days of hope. Like the mid-day sun from a blanched sky, his great ever-living eye gleamed at me from a faded face.

'My good young friend!' Alabanda cried, in friendly irritation at the gaze I gave him, 'enough of the doleful looks, there's a good fellow! I know full well I've gone downhill. O my Hyperion! I long so much for something great and true, and I hope to find it with you. You've grown beyond me, you're freer and stronger than you were and, believe it not! that makes me heartily glad.  I said, 'you rob me of my senses, and we shouldn't speak of ourselves at all until we're in the thick of life, amidst the deeds.'

'Quite right!' cried Alabanda joyously, 'it's only when the hunting horn sounds that the hunters feel fully what they are.'

'Will it soon begin then?' I said.

 Ha! may it reach right up to the tip of the tower and melt its vane, and rage and swirl about until the tower bursts and tumbles! — and don't let yourself be put off by our allies. I know full well the good Russians would like to use us as their guns. But don't you worry! once our stout Spartans have had the chance to find out who they are and what they can do, and when we've then conquered the Peloponnese, we'll laugh the North Pole in the face and build us a life of our own.'

'A life of our own,' I cried, 'a new, an honourable life. Were we then born of the swamp, like a will-o'-the-wisp, or do we stem from the victors of Salamis? How is it then now? how have you become a maidservant, free nature of the Greeks? how have you sunk so low, race of my fathers, of whom the divine effigies of Jupiter and Apollo were once merely the copy? — But hear me, heaven of Ionia! hear me, earth of the fatherland, you that half-naked, like a beggar-woman, wrap yourself in the rags of your ancient glory, I will thole it no longer!'

'O sun that reared us!' cried Alabanda, 'you shall be witness when under the toil our mettle grows, when under the blows of fate, like iron under the hammer, our project takes shape.'

We each of us kindled the other.

'And let not a blot stick,' I cried, 'none of the grotesques the age smears us with, like the rabble on walls.'

'Oh,' cried Alabanda, 'that's why war is so good —'

'Right, Alabanda,' I cried, 'like all great work where human energy and spirit alone helps and no crutch and no waxen wing. Then we shall cast off the slaves' livery on which fate has stamped its brand for us —'

'Then we'll have no more use for anything affected and forced,' cried Alabanda, 'then, just as in the Nemean races, we'll go unadorned, unfettered, naked to our goal.'

'To our goal,' I cried, 'where the young free state dawns and from Greek earth the pantheon of all that's beautiful rises.'

Alabanda was silent for a while.

'O youth! youth!' he cried, 'then will I drink from your fount, then will I live and love.

#### Hyperion to Diotima [XLII]

It's as well for me I'm wholly busy with my work. I'd surely tumble from one folly to another, so full is my soul, so fuddled am I by this man, wonderful and proud, who loves nothing but me and heaps on me alone all the humility that's in him. O Diotima! this Alabanda has wept before me, has begged me like a child to forgive him what he did to me in Smyrna.

O Diotima! O Alabanda! noble beings, grand, serene! how must I achieve if I'm not to flee before my happiness, before you?

Just as I was writing I received your letter, dearest.

Do not grieve, lovely being, do not grieve! Save yourself, unscathed by sorrow, for the future festivals of the fatherland! Diotima! for the glowing festal day of nature save yourself, and for all the blithe days in honour of the gods!

Can you not see Greece already?

Oh, can you not see how the eternal stars, glad of their new neighbours, smile above our towns and groves, how the ancient ocean, when it sees our people stroll along the shore, is minded again of the beautiful Athenians and again brings us fortune, just as then for its darlings, on joyful waves?

Soulful maiden! you're already so beautiful now! how shall you blossom then, in ravishing glory, when the right climate nourishes you!

#### Diotima to Hyperion [XLIII]

I'd mostly shut myself in since you went away, dear Hyperion! Today I was once again outdoors.

In the clement February air I've gathered life and bring you what I've gathered. It's still done me good too, the fresh warming of heaven, still I've been able to share in it, the new bliss of the plant world, pure and ever the same, where everything grieves and joys again in its season.

Hyperion! O my Hyperion! why don't we also tread the quiet paths of life? They are holy names, winter and spring and summer and autumn! but we do not know them. Is it not sin to grieve in spring? why then do we do it?

Forgive me! the children of the earth live through the sun alone; I live through you, I have other joys, is it then wonder if I have other grief? and must I grieve? must I then?

Brave one! dear one! should I wither when you shine? should my heart wilt when the lust of victory wakes in all your sinews? Had I once heard that a Greek youth were setting forth to drag our good people from its shame, to return it to maternal beauty whence it sprang, how I should have roused from childhood's dream and thirsted for the image of the worthy one! and now that he's here, now that he's mine, can I still weep?

For it seems to me barely yesterday, that magical evening when the holy stranger met me for the first time, when like a grieving genius he glanced into the sylvan shades where the carefree maiden sat in the dream of youth — in the breath of May he came, Ionia's magical breath of May, and this made him blossom the more for me, it waved his locks, it unfolded his lips like flowers, it dissolved into smiles his sorrow, and O you beams of heaven! how you did shine on me out of those eyes, those inspiriting springs where in the shade of sheltering arches eternal life shimmers and wells! —

Benevolent gods! how beautiful he became with his gaze upon me! how the whole youth, grown taller by a span, stood there in easy vigour, save that he let his loving arms hang humbly down as if they were nothing! and how he then looked up in rapture, as if I'd soared into heaven and were no longer there, oh! how he now smiled and blushed in all the grace of his heart when he became aware of me again and between the clouding tears his Phoebus eye shone through, to ask 'is it you? is it really you?'

 His genius was too blissful to remain alone, and too poor the world to comprehend it. Oh, that made for such a lovely image, woven of greatness and grief! But now it's different! the grief is gone!   Now I'm nought but joy. So does to speak of you make happy. And see! that's how it shall stay. Farewell!

#### Hyperion to Diotima [XLIV]

We've still found time to celebrate your feast day, lovely life! before the tumult begins. It was a heavenly day. Sweet springtime wafted and shone from the orient, it drew forth from us your name, just as it drew forth the blossoms from the trees, and all the blissful secrets of love poured out of me. A love like ours my friend had never known, and it was delightful how the proud man became all ear, how his eye and spirit glowed to grasp your image, your being.

'Oh,' he cried at last, 'then it's worth the effort fighting for our Greece if it still bears plants like these!'

'That's right, my Alabanda,' I said; 'then we'll go cheerful into battle, then heavenly fire will drive us on to deeds when our spirit is made young again by the image of such natures, and then we won't be chasing after petty goals, then we won't be bothering with this and that, tinkering with externals and ignoring the spirit, drinking the wine for the cup's sake; and we will not rest, Alabanda, till genial bliss is mystery no more, till all eyes are turned into triumphal arches from which the human spirit, so long absent, shines forth out of the erring and the suffering, and joyful in victory greets the paternal aether.  Love and hate and every sound from us must dumbfound the more vulgar world and never a single moment shall remind us of the humdrum past!'

#### Hyperion to Diotima [XLV]

The volcano's erupting. In Coron and Modon the Turks are under siege and we're pushing onwards with our mountain folk up the Peloponnese.

Now all melancholy's at an end, Diotima, and my spirit is firmer and quicker since I've been engaged in living labour, and see! I now even have a daily schedule.

I begin with the sun. Then I go out to where my warrior-folk lie in the forest shade, and greet the thousand bright eyes that now open up before me with wild affection. An awakening army! I know nothing like it, and all life in towns and villages is a swarm of bees by comparison.

Man cannot deny that once he was happy, like the deer of the forest, and after untold years there still glimmers in us a yearning for the days of the primal world when each roamed the earth like a god, before who knows what? made man tame, and instead of walls and dead wood the soul of the world, the all-pervasive holy air enveloped him still.

Diotima! I'm often filled with wonder when I walk amongst my carefree folk and, as if sprung from the earth, one after another rises and stretches towards the morning light, and among the troops of men the crackling flame leaps up where the mother sits with the shivering babe, where the quickening food cooks, whilst the horses, scenting the day, snort and whinny, and the forest resounds with all-shaking war music, and all around shimmers and rustles with weapons — but these are words, and the special delight of such a life is beyond telling.

Then my company gathers eagerly round me, and it's wonderful how even the oldest and thrawnest honour me in all my youth. We've come to confide in each other, and there's many a man will tell how he's been treated by life, and my heart often swells at this fate or that. Then I begin to talk of better days, and their eyes open wide and light up when they think of the covenant that shall join us and the proud image of the budding free state looms before them.

'All for each and each for all!' There's a joyful spirit in the words, and it always grips my men like a commandment from the gods. O Diotima! thus to see then how with hopes the hardened nature mellows and all its pulses beat higher and the grand designs smooth and clear the darkened brow, to stand thus in a sphere of human beings, surrounded by faith and joy, that's more than beholding earth and heaven and sea in all their glory.

Then I drill them in weapons and marching until noon. Their good cheer makes them willing pupils, and me it makes a master. Now they stand close-ranked in Macedonian phalanx and only move their arms, now they fly apart like rays of light to bolder strife in separate squads where supple force varies in every position and each man is his own commander, and then they assemble again at a point of safety — and always, wherever they move or stand in such a dance of weapons, there floats before their eyes and mine the image of the slaves of tyranny and the real battlefield.

Afterwards, when the sun shines hotter, council is held in the inner forest, and it's a joy to sway with quiet mind over our great future. We'll take away from chance its power, we shall master fate. We'll let resistance come on our terms, we'll goad the enemy into action for which we're well prepared. Or we'll look on, seemingly daunted, and let him come nearer till he offers his neck for the blow, we'll also confound him with our speed and that's my panacea. But more seasoned physicians think nothing of such cure-alls.

How good I then feel in the evenings with my Alabanda when for pleasure we roam the sun-red hills on sprightly steeds, and on the peaks where we linger the breeze plays in the manes of our mounts, and its friendly whispering mingles with our talk whilst we gaze out into the distances of Sparta that are to be our battle prize! and when we're returned and sit together in the lovely coolness of the night, and the wine cup wafts its fragrance, and the moonlight shines on our frugal meal, and in the midst of our smiling stillness the history of the ancients rises like a cloud from the sacred soil that bears us, how blissful is it then to grasp each other's hands in such a moment!

Then it may be that Alabanda speaks of many another tormented by the tedium of the age, of many a crooked path forged by life since its direct course has been blocked, and then my Adamas also comes to mind, with his journeyings, that longing of his which lured him into the depths of Asia — 'those are mere makeshifts, dear old man!' I'd like to call to him then, 'come! and build your world! with us! for our world is also yours.'

And your world too, Diotima, for it is a copy of you. O you, with your Elysian stillness, could we only create what you are!

#### Hyperion to Diotima [XLVI]

We've now had three successive victories in small skirmishes, but where the fighting men crisscrossed each other like lightning and everything was one consuming flame. Navarin is ours and now we stand before the fortress of Mistra, the remains of ancient Sparta. The flag I snatched from an Albanian horde I've planted on a ruin that lies before the city, I've flung for joy my Turkish turban into the Eurotas and have been wearing the Greek helmet ever since.

And now I'd like to see you, O maiden! I'd like to see you and take your hands and press them to my heart, for which the joy perhaps may soon be too great! soon! in a week perhaps it will be freed, the ancient, noble, holy Peloponnese.

O then, my dearest! teach me piety! then teach my overflowing heart a prayer!  But how can I help it if my thought is swifter than time? I'd much rather have it the other way round, with time and deed outflying thought, and winged victory overtaking hope itself.

My Alabanda blossoms like a bridegroom. From his every glance the coming world smiles out at me, and with that I can as yet just about still my impatience.

Diotima! I wouldn't swap this budding bliss for the finest heyday of ancient Greece, and the smallest of our victories means more to me than Marathon and Thermopylae and Plataea. Is it not true? Is not the convalescing life dearer to the heart than the untouched one that is yet to know sickness? Only when youth is gone do we love it, and only when lost youth comes again does it then gladden all the depths of the soul.

My tent stands by the Eurotas, and when I wake after midnight the ancient river-god murmurs reproachfully past me, and smiling I take the flowers of the bank and strew them on his glancing waves and say to him: 'Take this as a sign, you lonely one! Soon the life of old will blossom around you again.'

#### Diotima to Hyperion [XLVII]

I've received the letters, my Hyperion, that you wrote to me along the way. You seize me powerfully with all that you tell me, and amidst my love I often shudder to see the gentle youth who wept at my feet transformed into this warlike being.

Won't you then forget how to love?

But change as you will! I shall follow you. I think that if you could hate me I'd even then feel like you, I'd do my best to hate you too, and so our souls would remain akin and that's no idle vaunt, Hyperion.

I too am wholly changed from what I used to be. I'm missing my serene outlook on the world and my free delight in everything that lives. It's only the field of the stars that still attracts my eye. For that, I dwell the more fondly on the great spirits of ancient days and how they ended on earth, and those noble Spartan women have won my heart. Yet I don't forget the new warriors withal, the lusty ones whose hour is come; often I hear their triumphal clamour, nearer and nearer to me, roaring up through the Peloponnese, often I see them surging there like a cataract down through the Epidaurian woods, and their weapons glancing from afar in the sunlight that escorts them like a herald, O my Hyperion! and you hasten across to Calauria and greet the tranquil woods of our love, greet me and then fly back to your work; — and do you think I fear the outcome? Dearest! there are times I'm on the point of being overwhelmed, but my larger thoughts, like flames, hold the frost at bay. —

Farewell! carry it through as the spirit commands you! and don't let the war last too long, for the sake of the peace, Hyperion, for the sake of the beautiful, new, golden peace when, as you said, in our book of statutes will one day be inscribed the laws of nature, and when life itself, when divine nature, that can't be written into any book, will be in the heart of the community. Farewell.

## Hyperion to Diotima [XLVIII]

You should have soothed me, my Diotima! should have told me not to rush, told me to wrest from fate the victory bit by bit, as one does from tight debtors their dues. O maiden! standing still is worst of all. My blood dries up in my veins, so do I thirst to advance, and have to stand here idle, have to besiege and besiege day in and day out. Our people want to storm, but that would inflame their restive spirits beyond all temperance, and then woe to our hopes if the savage being seethes up and bursts the bonds of discipline and love.

I don't know, it can only be a matter of days before Mistra must surrender, but I wish we were further forward. Here in the camp it's like being in storm-laden air. I'm impatient, and I'm not happy with my men. There's a frightening wantonness amongst them.

But I'm silly to make so much of my mood. And it's surely worth enduring a worry or two for ancient Lacedaemon before it's won.

#### Hyperion to Diotima [XLIX]

It's over, Diotima! our people have plundered, murdered without distinction, even our brothers are slain, the Greeks in Mistra, the innocent, or they wander about helpless and the lifeless anguish on their faces cries out to heaven and earth for vengeance against the barbarians at whose head I stood.

Now I can go forth and preach my good cause. Oh, now all hearts will fly to me!

But I went about it cleverly, didn't I? I knew my people. Indeed! it was an extraordinary undertaking, to plant my Elysium with a band of brigands.

No! by holy Nemesis! I got what I deserved and I will bear it too, bear it till the pain tears my final consciousness asunder.

Do you think I'm raving? I have an honourable wound, dealt me by one of my faithful followers whilst I tried to avert the atrocity. If I were raving I'd rip the bandage from it, and then my blood would flow whither it belongs, into this grieving earth.

Oh, it would have been beautiful, my Diotima.

Do you call me disheartened? Dear maiden! there's too much calamity. Demented hordes burst in on all sides; rapine rages in Morea like a plague and anyone who doesn't himself seize the sword is put to flight, butchered, and yet the maniacs claim they're fighting for our freedom. Others from amongst the raw people are in the pay of the Sultan and they behave just the same.

I've just heard that our inglorious army is now scattered. At Tripolitsa the cowards met an Albanian troop that numbered half as many. But since there was nothing to plunder, the wretches all ran away. The Russians who'd ventured on the campaign with us, forty brave men, were the only ones to stand their ground, and all found their deaths.

And so now I'm alone again with my Alabanda, as before. Since he saw me fall and bleed in Mistra this faithful friend has forgotten all else, his hopes, his lust of victory, his despair. The man of wrath who plunged amongst the plunderers like an avenging god, he now so gently guided me out of the turmoil and my clothing was wet with his tears. He's stayed with me too in the hut where I've since lain, and I'm now the more pleased about that. For had he gone on with the others, he'd now be lying in the dust at Tripolitsa.

How things will go from now on, I don't know. Fate thrusts me out into confusion and that's what I deserve; I'm banished from you by my own shame, and who knows for how long?

Oh! I promised you a Greece and now you get a dirge instead. Be your own comfort!

#### Hyperion to Diotima [L]

I can barely bring myself to speak.

We delight in speech, to be sure, we chatter away like the birds so long as the world wafts over us like a May breeze; but between noon and evening things can change, and what is lost in the end?

Believe me, and mind that I say this to you from my deepest soul: language is a great superfluity. The best is ever for itself and rests in its depths like the pearl at the bottom of the sea. — But what I really wanted to write to you, since the painting must have its frame and man his daily task, I intend to take service for a while with the Russian fleet; for I want nothing more to do with the Greeks.

O dear girl! it's grown very dark around me!

#### Hyperion to Diotima [LI]

I've lingered, I've struggled. But finally it has to be.

I see what needs to happen, and because I see it, it shall come to pass. Do not mistake my meaning! do not condemn me! I must advise you to leave me, my Diotima.

I can be for you nothing more, you lovely being! This heart has run dry, and my eyes see living life no more. Oh, my lips are withered; the sweet breath of love wells up in my bosom no more.

A single day has robbed me of all youth; by the Eurotas my life has wept itself weary, oh! by the Eurotas that in irredeemable shame wails with all its waves past Lacedaemon's rubble. It's there, there I was mown down by fate. — Am I to possess your love like alms? — I'm so utterly nothing, as unrenowned as the meanest menial. I'm shunned, cursed like a common rebel, and many a Greek in Morea will henceforth recount our heroic deeds to his children's children as a tale of thieves.

Oh! and one thing I've long kept from you. My father solemnly disowned me, banished me beyond recall from the house of my youth, never wants to see me again, either in this life or the next, as he puts it. This was his response to the letter in which I told him of my undertaking.

But don't ever let yourself be led astray by pity. Believe me, there's a joy that still remains for us throughout. True pain inspires. Whoever mounts his misery stands higher. And what's glorious is that only in suffering do we fully feel the freedom of the soul. Freedom! understand the word who can — it's a profound word, Diotima. I'm so deeply beleaguered, so incredibly hurt, I'm without hope, without a goal, I'm utterly bereft of honour, and yet there's a power within me, an indomitable something that sends sweet shudders through my bones whenever it stirs in me.

And I still have my Alabanda. He has as little to gain as I do. Him I can keep for myself without harm! Oh! the kingly youth would have deserved a better lot. He's become so gentle and so still. That often nearly rends my heart. But each of us sustains the other. We say nothing to each other; what should we say? But for all that there's a blessing in many a little labour of love we perform for one another.

There he sleeps and smiles contentedly, in the midst of our misfortune. The good soul! he doesn't know what I'm doing. He wouldn't suffer it. 'You must write to Diotima,' he charged me, 'and must tell her to make ready soon to flee with you to a more liveable land.' But he doesn't know that a heart that's learned despair, such as his and mine, can be nothing more for the beloved. No! no! you could never ever find peace with Hyperion, you would have to become unfaithful, and that I will spare you.

   But oh heaven! if I could do that, then I'd also be another and so there'd be no need for me to part from you — part? Alas! I know not what I do. I weened myself so calm, so cool. Now my head reels and my heart flings itself about like a restless patient. Woe on me!  But it has to be and nature's 'Alas!' avails nothing here. I owe this to you, and besides I was born to be homeless and have no resting place. O earth! O you stars! shall I find nowhere to dwell in the end?

Just one more time I should like to return to your bosom, no matter where!  I beseech you, pay no heed to that! I'd say I was a seducer, if you were to listen to it. You know me, you understand me. You know how deeply you heed me by not pitying me, by not listening to me.

I can, I may no more — how can the priest go on living if his god is no more? O genius of my people! O soul of Greece! down I must go, in the realm of the dead I must seek you.

#### Hyperion to Diotima [LII]

I've waited long, I'll confess to you, I've been hoping longingly for a word of farewell from your heart, but you remain silent. That too is the language of your beautiful soul, Diotima.

Yet it's true, is it not, this doesn't mean the holier chords must cease? it's true, is it not, Diotima, though the gentle moonlight of love may sink, the higher stars in its heaven still continue to shine? Oh, this is my final joy, that we remain inseparable, though no sound more return from you to me, no shadow of our lovely days of youth!

I look out into the sunset sea, I stretch out my arms towards the airt where you live, far away, and my soul warms once more with all the joys of love and youth.

O earth! my cradle! all bliss and all pain is in the leave we take of you.

Pity, pity, that things don't go better now amongst men, else I'd gladly remain on this good star. But I can do without this earthly orb, and that's worth more than all that it can give.

'Let us, O child! suffer slavery in the sunlight,' said the mother to Polyxena, and her love of life could not have spoken more beautifully. But the sunlight it is that deters me from slavery, it won't let me stay on this degraded earth and, like paths leading home, the hallowed rays draw me on.

For long the majesty of the fateless soul has been more present to me than all else; I've often lived within myself in glorious solitude; I've grown used to shaking off all outward things like flakes of snow; how should I then be feared to seek out so-called death? have I not freed myself a thousand times in thought, how should I then hold back from really doing it for once? Are we then like serfs, fettered to the soil we plough? are we like tame fowl that durstn't run out of the farmyard because that's where they're fed?

We're like the young eagles the father drives from the nest, that they may search for their prey in the high aether.

Tomorrow our fleet goes into combat and this one will be hot enough. I look on the battle as a bath to wash the dust off me; and I expect to find what I wish for; wishes like mine are readily granted on the spot. And so I would end after all by achieving something through my campaign, and see that amongst men no effort goes to waste.

'Pious soul!' I'd like to say, 'think of me when you come to my grave.' But they'll probably cast me into the surging sea, and I'm happy to see my remains sink down where the sources all and the streams that I loved gather together, and where the storm-cloud rises up and waters the hills and the valleys that I loved. And we? O Diotima! Diotima! when shall we see one another again?

It's impossible, and my innermost life rebels at the thought that we could lose each other. I would wander the stars for millennia, clothe myself in all forms, in all of life's languages just to meet you once more. But I believe that like will soon find like.

Great soul! you'll be able to accept this parting, and so let me wander! Greet your mother! Greet Notara and the other friends!

Also greet the trees where I first met you, and the merry rivulets where we walked, and the lovely gardens of Angele, and let my image meet you when you do, my love! Farewell.

## Hyperion to Bellarmin [LIII]

I was in a lovely dream when I copied out for you the letters that I once exchanged. Now I write to you again, my Bellarmin! and take you further down, down to the deepest depths of my sorrows, and then, last of my loved ones! come forth with me to the place where a new day shines upon us.

The battle I'd written about to Diotima began. The ships of the Turks had taken refuge in the channel between the island of Chios and the Asian coast, and stood along the mainland off Chesma. My admiral left the line with his ship, the one I was on, and began the prelude with the first ship of the Turks. At the very first attack the raging pair were heated to a frenzy, it was a terrible revenge-sodden turmoil. The ships were soon bound fast together with their cordage; the furious fighting grew ever tighter and tighter.

A deep feeling of life coursed through me once more. I felt warm and well in every limb. Like one tenderly departing, my spirit felt itself for the last time in all its senses. And now, full of hot resentment that I knew no better way than to let myself be slaughtered among a throng of barbarians, and with tears of rage in my eyes, I stormed to where my death was certain.

I found the foe close enough to hand and, of the Russians who fought at my side, in a matter of moments not even one remained.  They looked on me as someone whom one fears to sin against, and fate seemed to reverence me in my despair.

In sheer self-defence one of them at last laid into me and struck me so that I fell. From then on I was aware of nothing more until I came to again on Paros, whither I'd been shipped.

From the servant who carried me out of the battle I afterwards heard that the two ships that began the combat had blown up only moments after he'd taken me off in a skiff with the surgeon. The Russians had hurled fire into the Turkish ship, and because their own was entangled with it, both went up together.

How this terrible battle ended you will know. 'So does one poison purge the other,' I cried, when I heard that the Russians had burned the entire Turkish fleet — 'so do tyrants wipe each other out.'

#### Hyperion to Bellarmin [LIV]

For six days after the battle I lay in a tortured death-like sleep. My life was like a night, punctuated by pain as by lancing lightning. The first thing I recognized was Alabanda. He had, as I heard, not left my side for an instant, he'd cared for me almost alone, with unbelievable solicitude, with a thousand tender homely attentions that would never in his life have occurred to him otherwise, and he'd been heard on his knees before my bed, crying: 'O live, dear friend! that I may live!'

It was a happy awakening, Bellarmin! when my eye now opened again to the light, and with tears of reunion this glorious man stood before me.

I reached out my hand to him and, proud as he was, he kissed it with all the rapture of love. 'He lives,' he cried, 'O nature! you kindly all-healing saviour! you at least don't forsake your wretched pair, these errants without a fatherland! Oh, I'll never forget, Hyperion! how your ship went up in fire before my eyes and thundering swept up the sailors with it into the raging flames, and amongst those few to be saved there was no Hyperion. I was out of my senses, and the furious clamour of battle did nothing to calm me. Yet I soon got word of you, and flew after you as soon as we were altogether finished with the foe.' —

And how he now watched over me! how with loving care he held me captive in the magic circle of his favours! how without a word he taught me through his great calmness to understand without rancour and like a man the free course of the world!

O you sons of the sun! you freer souls! much has been lost in this Alabanda. I've sought, and besought life in vain since he went away; such a truly Roman nature I never found again. Carefree, deeply wise, courageous, noble! Where is there a man if he was not one? And when he was mild and meek, it was as when the evening light plays in the gloom of the majestic oak and its leaves drip from the storm of the day.

#### Hyperion to Bellarmin [LV]

It was in the beautiful days of autumn when, half-recovered from my wound, I went to the window again for the first time. I returned to life with calmer senses and my soul had become more attentive. With its gentlest magic heaven breathed upon me, and mild as a rain of blossom the bright sunbeams streamed down. There was a great, still, tender spirit in the season, and the peace of fulfilment, the bliss of ripeness in the murmuring boughs, enfolded me like the renewed youth the ancients hoped for in their Elysium.

I'd long not enjoyed it with pure soul, this childlike life of the world; now my eyes opened up with all the joy of seeing anew, and blissful nature had remained changeless in her beauty. My tears flowed before her as an offering of atonement, and a fresh heart rose shuddering from my former discontent. 'O sacred plant world!' I cried, 'we strive and we scheme, and yet we have you! we struggle with our mortal powers to build the beautiful, and yet it grows up effortless beside us! it's true, is it not, Alabanda? man is made to care for bare necessity, everything else looks after itself. And yet — I cannot forget how much more I wanted.'

'Be happy, dear friend! that you are,' cried Alabanda, 'and no longer let your quiet working be hampered by grief.'

'And I will rest too,' I said. 'Oh, all the designs, all the demands I will rip up like letters of debt.   — You're smiling, Alabanda? Oh, how often in our early days together did you smile that way when your boy prattled away before you in the drunken exuberance of youth, whilst you stood there like a silent temple pillar, amid the rubble of the world, and had to suffer the wild tendrils of my love to wind around you — look! it's like a blindfold falling from my eyes and the golden days of old come to life again.'

'Ah!' he cried, 'this earnestness in which we lived and this lust for life!'

'When we hunted in the forest,' I cried, 'when we bathed in the surging sea, when we sang and we drank where the sun and the wine and eyes and lips sparkled through the shade of the laurel — it was a life beyond compare, and our spirit illumed like a shining heaven our youthful happiness.' 'And that is why neither can forsake the other,' said Alabanda.

'Oh, I have a grave confession to make to you,' I said. 'Will you believe me when I say I wanted away? from you! that I violently sought my death! was that not heartless? madness? ah, and my Diotima! she should leave me, I wrote to her, and then another letter, on the eve of the battle —' 'and there you wrote to her,' he cried, 'that in the battle you hoped to find your end? O Hyperion! But she may well not yet have received your last letter.  I cried, 'that is solace! I'll write at once and dispatch my servant with the letter. Oh, I will offer him all I have to rush and reach Calauria in time. —'

'And the other letter, in which you spoke of renouncing her, the good soul will understand and readily forgive,' he added.

'She'll forgive?' I cried; 'O all you hopes! yes! if I could still be happy with the angel!'

'You will still be happy,' cried Alabanda; 'you still have left the most beautiful of life's seasons. The youth is a hero, the man a god if he can live to see it.'

There was a wondrous dawning in my soul as he spoke.

The tree tops softly shuddered; like flowers from the dark earth, stars sprang forth from the womb of the night and heaven's spring sparkled on me in holy joy.

#### Hyperion to Bellarmin [LVI]

A few moments later, just as I was about to write to Diotima, Alabanda came back gleefully into the room. 'A letter, Hyperion,' he cried; I startled and flew across.

'How long,' wrote Diotima, 'had I to live without a sign from you! You wrote to me about the fateful day at Mistra and I responded swiftly; yet it seems you never received my letter. Soon afterwards you wrote to me again, briefly and gloomily, and told me you were minded to join the Russian fleet; again I replied; but you didn't receive that letter either; then it was my turn to wait in vain, from May till now, the end of summer, until a few days ago the letter came, telling me I should renounce you, my love!

'You counted on me, had faith enough in me to know this letter couldn't offend me. That gave me heartfelt joy in the midst of my grief.

'Unhappy sublime spirit! I've understood you only too well. Oh, it's so wholly natural that you no longer want to love, since your greater wishes languish. For must you not spurn food when you're dying of thirst?

'I soon came to know that I couldn't be everything to you. Could I loosen the bonds of mortality for you? could I still the flame in your breast for which no fountain flows and no vine grows? could I hand you the joys of a world in a chalice?

'That's what you want. That's what you need, and you can do no other.

'Happy all those who do not understand you! He who understands you must share your greatness and your despair.

'I found you as you are. Life's first curiosity drove me to that wondrous being. Ineffably the tender soul drew me on, and childishly fearless I played about your dangerous flame. — The beautiful joys of our love appeased you; but only, wicked man! to make you more savage. They soothed, they solaced me too, they made me forget you were fundamentally beyond solace, and that I wasn't far from becoming so myself, ever since I'd looked into your beloved heart.

'In Athens, among the ruins of the Olympieion, it seized me anew. I might well still have thought in a carefree hour that the grief of the youth could not really be so earnest and unrelenting. It's so rare that with his first step into life a man has felt so all at once, so minutely, so quickly, so deeply the whole fate of his age, and that it inheres indelibly within him, this feeling, because he isn't rough enough to drive it out and not weak enough to weep it away; that, my dearest! is so rare that we deem it almost unnatural.

'Now, amidst the rubble of bright Athens, now it came home to me all too painfully how the tables are turned, that now it's the dead who walk above the earth and the quick, the divine men, who are below, now I also saw it too plainly and palpably written on your face, now once and for all I conceded you were right. But at the same time you appeared greater to me too.  He to whom fate speaks so loud is entitled to speak still louder back to fate, I told myself; the more unfathomably he suffers, the more unfathomably powerful he is. From you, from you alone I hoped for all healing. I saw you travelling. I saw you working.  Founded by you, the grove of Academe greened again above the listening pupils, and the plane tree of Ilissus again heard holy discourse as of old.

'In your school the genius of our youth soon gained the earnestness of the ancients and its ephemeral games grew more immortal, for it became ashamed, holding butterfly flight to be imprisonment. —

'This one might have been content to steer a steed; now he's general. His whole pleasure another might have found in warbling an idle ditty; now he's an artist. For you'd laid bare before them in open combat the energies of the heroes, the energies of the world; you'd given them the riddles of your heart to solve; and so the youths learned to bring together what is great, learned to understand nature's play, full of soul, and put aside frivolity. — Hyperion! Hyperion! have you not made me, the mute maiden, into a muse? So it went with the others too.

'Oh! now these congenial men didn't leave one another so lightly; no longer did they drift aimlessly amongst one another like sand in the storm of the desert, nor did youth and age scorn each other, nor the stranger want a welcoming host, and fellow countrymen never more hived themselves off and lovers never more wearied of each other; from your springs, nature, they refreshed themselves, oh! with the holy joys that well up mysteriously from your depths and renew the spirit; and the gods quickened again the withering souls of men; every bond of friendship amongst them was guarded by the heart-sustaining gods. For you, Hyperion! had healed the eyes of your Greeks, that they could see living life; and the inspiration sleeping amongst them like fire in wood had been kindled by you, that they could feel the still and steady inspiration of nature and its pure children. Oh! now men no longer took the beautiful world like laymen the artist's poem when they praise the words and note the utility. A magical model you became for the Greeks, living nature! and kindled by the bliss of the ever-youthful gods, all man's doings were a festival as of old; and to their deeds the young heroes were escorted by Helios' light, more beautiful than any martial music.

'Hush! hush! It was my most beautiful dream, my first and my last. You're too proud to busy yourself further with this knavish race. And you're quite right in that. You led them to freedom and they thought of pillage.

'O my Hyperion! I'm the gentle maid no more since I've known all this. Outrage drives me upwards, that I can barely look to earth and my hurt heart won't stop trembling.

'We must part. You're right. Besides, I don't want any children; for I grudge them to the world of slaves, and in this drouth the poor plants would wither away before my eyes.

 The world must have one battlefield, one place of sacrifice where you can find release. It would be a pity if so the good energies all passed away like a dream. But however you find your end, you'll return to the gods, return to the holy, free, youthful life of nature whence you came, and that is all you long for and I too.'

So she wrote to me. I was shaken to the marrow, full of fear and joy, yet I sought to compose myself and find words for a reply.

'You consent, Diotima?' I wrote, 'you think my renunciation right? you could comprehend it? — Faithful soul! you could reconcile yourself to that? Even to my darkest erring you could reconcile yourself, heavenly patience! and surrendered yourself, gloomed yourself for love, happy child of nature! and became like me and sanctified by sharing it my grief? Beautiful heroine! what crown have you not earned?

'But let there now be an end to grieving, my love!

'It's true, isn't it, dearest! that it's not yet too late for my return, and you'll take me back and can love me again as before? it's true, isn't it, that the happiness of past days is not yet lost to us?

'I've taken it all to extremes. I've acted the ingrate towards my motherly earth, flinging away like a serf's pittance my blood and all the loving gifts she gave me, and oh! a thousand times more of an ingrate towards you, holy maiden! who once received me into her peace, me, a feral, fractured being, from whose deeply oppressed breast stole hardly a glimmer of youth, like the odd blade of grass on bare-trodden paths. Had you not called me into life? was I not yours? how could I then — oh, you don't yet know, I hope, haven't yet in your hands the unhappy letter I wrote to you before the last battle? I wanted to die then, Diotima, and imagined I was doing holy work. But how can that be holy which pulls lovers apart? how can that be holy which ruptures our life's pious happiness? — Diotima! life born of beauty! for that I've now become the more similar to you in what is uniquely yours, I've finally learned to reverence, I've learned to preserve what's good and essential on earth. Oh, even if I could land up there in the radiant islands of heaven, would I find more than I do with Diotima?

'Hear me now, beloved!

'In Greece I can remain no longer. That you know. When he cast me off my father sent me from his surplus funds enough for us to flee into some holy vale of the Alps or Pyrenees, and there to buy a couthie cottage and enough green earth to meet the needs of life's golden mean.

'Oh, come! in the depths of the mountain world the secret of our hearts shall rest like the precious stone in the mine, in the womb of the heaven-soaring forests we'll feel ourselves as amidst the pillars of the innermost temple where the godless dare not near, and we'll sit by the source, contemplating our world in its mirror, heaven and house and garden and us. Often on bright nights we'll stroll in the shade of our fruit trees and listen for the god in us, the loving one, while the plant from midday slumber raises its sunken head and the gentle life of your flowers quickens when they bathe their tender arms in the dew and the night breeze breathes coolingly around them, infusing them, and over us blossoms the meadow of heaven with all its sparkling flowers, and to the side behind westering clouds, as if out of love, shyly the moonlight mimics the sun-youth's setting — and then in the mornings when, like a river-bed, our valley fills with warm light and the golden flood runs tranquilly through our trees and flows around our house, enhancing the loveliness of the rooms, your creation, and you walk in the sunlit radiance and in your grace you sanctify the day for me, my love! when then, as we thus celebrate the bliss of morning, the bustling life of the earth kindles before our eyes like a sacrificial fire, and we go forth on our daily tasks to cast them too, as a part of us too, into the rising flame, will you not then say that we're happy, that we're become again like the ancient priests of nature, holy and joyful, those who were pious ere ever a temple stood.

'Have I said enough? decide now my fate, dear maiden, and soon! — It's as well that I'm still half an invalid from the last battle, and that I've yet to be released from service; else I couldn't stay here, I'd need to be off to ask you in person, and that wouldn't be good, that would be to besiege you. —

'O Diotima! foolish qualms strike me at the heart, and yet — I can't thole the thought that this hope too shall founder.

'Are you not grown too great to return to the happiness of earth? The fierce flame of the spirit, kindled by your sorrow, will it not consume everything mortal in you?

'I know full well that he who lightly falls out with the world more lightly makes peace with it too. But you, with your childlike stillness, you so happy once in your high humility, Diotima! who will appease you when fate arouses you?

'Dear life! is there no more healing power for you in me? of all the sounds from the heart is there none to call you back again to human life where you once so lovingly lingered in low flight? oh come, oh remain in this twilight! This shadowland is the element of love, and only here does the still dew of sadness run from the heaven of your eyes.

'And do you mind our golden days no more? those lovely, divinely melodious days? do they not whisper to you from all the groves of Calauria?

'And look! there's so much has perished in me, and I no longer have many hopes. Your image with its heavenly disposition I managed still to rescue like a house-god from the flames. Our life, ours, is still intact in me. Should I now go and bury this too? Shall I go forth, restless and without a goal, from one alien land to another? Is it for this I learned to love?

 Mine you were and mine you will stay.'

### Hyperion to Bellarmin [LVII]

I was sitting with Alabanda on a nearby hill, in pleasantly warming sun, and around us played the wind with the fallen leaves. The land lay still; only here and there from the forest there came the sound of a toppling tree, felled by the landman, and beside us the ephemeral rainstream murmuring down to the tranquil sea.

I was as good as free of worry; I hoped now soon to see my Diotima, soon to live with her in quiet happiness. Alabanda had talked me out of all my doubts; so sure was he himself about it. He too was blithe; but in another sense. The future had no power over him any more. Oh, I didn't know it; he was at the end of his joys; with all his claims on the world, with all his conquering nature, he saw himself useless, ineffectual and isolated, and took it just as if he'd played some trivial game and lost.

A messenger now approached us. He brought us the discharge from war service that we'd both requested from the Russian fleet, since for us there was nothing more to do that seemed worth the effort. I could now leave Paros when I pleased. And I was now fit enough to travel. I didn't want to wait for Diotima's answer, I wanted away, to her; it was as if a god propelled me to Calauria. When Alabanda heard this his colour changed, and he looked at me in sadness. 'Is it so easy for my Hyperion,' he cried, 'to leave his Alabanda?'

'Leave,' I said, 'how so?'

'Oh, you dreamers!' he cried, 'can't you see that we must part?'

'How should I see it?' I replied; 'you never speak of it; and if now and then I noticed anything about you that might have hinted at a parting, I took it readily for whimsy, abundance of the heart —'

'Oh, I know it well,' he cried, 'this divine game of affluent love that creates want for itself so as to unburden itself of its own fullness, and I would it were so with me, good Hyperion! but this is meant in earnest!'

'In earnest?' I cried, 'and why then?'

'Because, my Hyperion,' he said gently, 'I wouldn't wish to disturb your future happiness, that's why; because I must fear Diotima's nearness. Believe me, it's a parlous thing to live around lovers, and a deedless heart, such as mine now is, will hardly be able to bear it.'

'O good Alabanda!' I said with a smile, 'how you mistake yourself! You're not made of wax, and your steadfast soul won't so lightly leap beyond its bounds. For the first time in your life you're being capricious. You played the sick-nurse here for me, and one sees how little you're made for the part. Sitting still has made you skittish —'

'You see,' he said, 'that's just the point. Shall I be any more active living with the two of you? and if it were any other woman! but this Diotima! can I do otherwise? can I feel her with half my soul? she who's through and through so wholly one, one single divinely undivided life? Believe me, it's childish folly to seek to see this being without love. You're staring at me as if you didn't know me? Well, I've become alien to myself these past few days, ever since her being came so alive in me.'

'Oh, why can't I give her to you?' I cried.

'Stop it!' he said. 'Don't try to comfort me, for here there can be no comfort. I'm alone, alone, and my life's running out like an hourglass.'

'Great soul!' I cried, 'must it come to this with you?'

'Put your mind at rest!' he said. 'I was already beginning to wither when we found each other in Smyrna. Yes! when I was still a ship's boy, and my spirit and all my limbs became quick and strong on rude fare and brave toil! when in the clear air after a stormy night I'd cling to the top of the mast, beneath the fluttering flag, and gaze out after the seabirds across the shining deep, when in battle our wrathful ships often churned up the sea like the boar's tusk the earth, and I'd stand bright-eyed by my captain's side — then I was alive, oh, then I was alive! And long afterwards, when the young Tiniot crossed my path on the Smyrna shore, with his earnestness, his love, and my hardened soul thawed again under the glances of the youth and learned to love and hold holy all that's too good to be governed, when with him I began a new life, and there burgeoned within me new and more soulful energies for enjoying and battling the world, then I hoped again — oh! and all that I hoped and had was chained to you; I pulled you to me, tried to drag you forcibly into my fate, lost you, found you again, our friendship alone was my world, my worth, my fame; now that too is over, for ever, and my whole existence is in vain.'

'Is that really true?' I replied with a sigh.

 I said.

'Let me tell you,' he said. 'There's something I've never fully spoken to you about. And then — it will calm you and me a little too, if we speak about the past.

'I was once walking helpless by the harbour of Trieste. The privateer I used to serve on had foundered some years before, and together with a few others I'd barely been able to save myself, washing ashore at Seville. My captain had drowned, and my life and my sopping clothes were all I had left. I undressed and rested in the sun, drying my clothes on the bushes. Then I walked on along the road towards the town. Before I'd reached the gates I saw a merry company in the gardens, went in and sang a cheerful Greek ditty. I didn't know a sad one. It made me burn with shame and pain, displaying my misfortune in this way.  "Forgive me," I said, when I was done with my song; "I've just been shipwrecked and for the moment can't think of anything better to do for the world than sing." I'd said this in Spanish as best I could. A man with a distinguished face came up to me, gave me money, and said in our tongue with a smile: "Here! use that to buy yourself a whetstone and learn to sharpen knives, and make your wandering way on solid earth." The advice pleased me. "Sir! that's indeed what I'll do," I replied. Having also been generously rewarded by the others, I went and did as the man had advised, and for some time roved about Spain and France.

'What I experienced during this time, how on the thousandfold forms of bondage my love of liberty honed itself, and how from the many hardships my mettle and my shrewdness grew, I've often relished telling you.

'I pursued my innocent wandering work with pleasure, but in the end it became soured for me.

'People took it for a mask, because I can't have looked suitably vulgar; they imagined I was covertly engaged in some dangerous activity, and I was in fact arrested twice. That induced me then to give it up, and with what little money I'd earned I set out on the journey back to the home from which I'd once run away. I'd got as far as Trieste, and was about to move on, down through Dalmatia.  And so, half recovered, I came to be walking sadly by the harbour of Trieste. Suddenly there stood before me the man who'd once helped me out when I was cast ashore at Seville. He was peculiarly glad to see me again, told me he often thought of me and asked me how I'd fared the while. I told him everything. "I see," he cried, "that it wasn't in vain to send you for a little to the school of fate. You've learned to endure, now if you wish you shall act."

'The words, his tone, the clasp of his hand, his mien, his glance—with the force of a god all this struck my being, made now more flammable than ever by much suffering, and I gave myself up to it.

'The man I'm speaking about, Hyperion, was one of those you saw with me in Smyrna. The very next night he inducted me into a solemn society. A shudder ran through me when I stepped into the hall and, as I entered, my companion pointed to the grave men and said: "this is the League of Nemesis." Drunk with the grand sphere of action that opened up before me, I solemnly made over my blood and my soul to these men. Soon afterwards the gathering was adjourned, to be resumed years later elsewhere, and each of us set out on the allotted path he was to take through the world. I was assigned to those you found with me in Smyrna some years after.

'The constraint under which I lived often tormented me, I saw precious little of the grand actions of the League, and my lust for deeds found scant nourishment. Yet none of this sufficed to make me fall away. It was my passion for you that finally seduced me. I've often told you, I was as if without air and sun when you were gone; and I had no other choice; I had to give up either you or my League. What I chose you see.

'But all of the works of men have in the end their punishment, and it's only gods and children whom Nemesis doesn't strike.

'I preferred the divine right of the heart. For the sake of my darling I broke my oath. Was that not right? must not the noblest longing be the freest? — My heart has taken me at my word; I gave it freedom and, as you see, it's putting it to use.

'Pay homage to the genius but once, and he'll heed no mortal hindrance any more and tear in two all life's bonds for you.

'Obligation I broke for the sake of the friend, friendship I would break for the sake of love. For Diotima's sake I would betray you, and in the end murder myself and Diotima because we should still not be one. But that's not the way it's going to be; if I'm to atone for what I did, then I will do it with freedom; I shall choose my own judges; those whom I've failed shall have me.'

'You mean your brothers of the League?' I cried; 'O my Alabanda! don't!'

'What can they take from me but my blood?' he replied. Then he gently grasped my hand. 'Hyperion!' he cried, 'my time is up, and all that's left for me is a noble end. Leave me be! Don't belittle me, put faith in my word! I know as well as you do that I could still fabricate an existence for myself, could, since the banquet of life is all consumed, still play with the crumbs, but that's not my way; nor is it yours. Need I say more? Do I not speak from your soul? I thirst for air, for a cooling breeze, Hyperion! My soul wells over of itself and will no longer be held in the old circle. Soon the beautiful winter days will come when the dark earth is nothing more than the foil to shining heaven; then would be a good time, then the islands of light more liberally sparkle besides! — you wonder at my words? Dearest! those taking leave of life all speak like drunken men and like to put on a festive manner. When the tree begins to wither, don't its leaves all wear the red hues of dawn?'

'Great soul,' I cried, 'must I bear pity for you?'

By his exaltation I could feel the depth of his suffering. Never in my life had I known such woe. And yet, O Bellarmin! yet I also felt the greatness of all joys, having such an image of divinity in my eyes and arms.  Go, you consummate one! I would go with you, were there no Diotima.'

'Do I have you now?' replied Alabanda, 'do you speak this way? How deep, how soulful all becomes, once my Hyperion grasps it!'

'He's flattering me,' I cried, 'trying to coax from me a second time my ill-considered word! good gods! and gain my permission for the trip to the blood-tribunal!'

'I'm not flattering you,' he replied in earnest, 'I've a right to do what you would hinder, and it's no mean one! honour that!'

'They won't,' I kept telling myself, 'they can't. It's too senseless putting such a glorious life to the slaughter like some sacrificial beast,' and this conviction served to calm me.

It was a special bonus to hear him still the following night, after each of us had prepared for his own journey and we'd gone out again before daybreak to be alone together once more.

'Do you know,' he said, amongst other things, 'why I've never been awed by death? I feel in me a life that no god has created and no mortal man begotten. I believe we owe our being to ourselves and it's only of our own free desire that we're so closely bound into the all.'

'I've never heard you talk like this before,' I answered.

'And what,' he continued, 'what would this world be, were it not a unison of free beings? did not of their own joyous impulse the living join together from the very beginning in one full-voiced life, how wooden would it be, how cold? what a heartless piece of work would it be?'

'So here in the highest sense it were true,' I replied, 'without freedom everything is dead.'

'Yes indeed,' he cried, 'there's not a blade of grass grows up unless it has its own germ of life within! how much the more in me! and therefore, my dear friend! because I feel myself free in the highest sense, because I feel myself beginningless, therefore I believe that I'm endless, that I'm indestructible. If a potter's hand has made me, then let him smash his vessel as he pleases. But that which lives within must be unbegotten, must be divine of nature in its germ, sublime beyond all might and all art, and therefore invulnerable, eternal.

'We each have our mysteries, dear Hyperion! our more secret thoughts; these have been mine; ever since I could think.

'What lives is indestructible, stays free in its most deeply servile form, stays intact and though you split it to the ground, stays unscathed and though you shatter it to the marrow, and its essence flies away in triumph through your fingers. — But the morning wind stirs; our ships are awake. O my Hyperion! I have overcome; I've been able to bring myself to speak my heart's death sentence and separate you and me, darling of my life! be gentle with me now! spare me the parting pains! let's be quick! come!' —

A chill shot through all my bones as he uttered these words.

'Oh, by your troth, Alabanda!' I cried, prostrate before him, 'must it be, must it really be?  Brother! you took from me even the presence of mind to ask, "where are you going?"'

'I may not name the place, dear heart!' he replied; 'yet perhaps we shall meet again one day.'

'Meet again?' I replied; 'so that's one faith I'm the richer by! and so I'll become ever richer in faith and in the end there'll be nothing but faith for me.'

'Dearest!' he cried, 'where words are no help, let us be still! let us make a manful end! You ruin the last moments for yourself.'

Meanwhile we'd come closer to the harbour.

'One more thing!' he said, when we were at his ship. 'Greet your Diotima! Love each other! be happy, you beautiful souls!'

'O my Alabanda!' I cried, 'why can't I go in your stead?'

'Your calling is more beautiful,' he replied; 'stay with it! you belong to her, that lovely being is from now on your world — Oh! since there is no happiness without sacrifice, take me as sacrifice, O fate, and leave the loving their joy!' —

His heart began to overwhelm him, and he tore himself from me and leapt into the ship to shorten the parting for himself and me. I felt this moment like a thunderbolt that's followed by night and deathly stillness, but in the midst of the desolation my soul reared up to hold him, the dear departing, and my arms darted towards him of their own accord. 'Woe! Alabanda! Alabanda!' I cried, and heard from the ship a muffled 'Farewell'.

#### Hyperion to Bellarmin [LVIII]

It chanced that the vessel due to take me to Calauria delayed until the evening, Alabanda having already gone his way that morning.

I stayed on the shore, weary with the pains of parting, stilly gazing into the sea from one hour to another. My spirit told over the sorrowful days of slowly dwindling youth, and adrift like the beautiful dove, it hovered over the future. I wished to give myself strength, I took out my long-forgotten lute to sing myself a song of fate that I'd once, in blithely innocent youth, repeated after my Adamas.

> You wander high in the light On gentle ground, you blissful genii! Heavenly radiant airs Touching you soft, As the hand of the harpist her Hallowing strings.

Fatelessly, like the slumbering Suckling, breathe the celestials; Chaste preserved In the modest bud, Blossoms ever For them the spirit, And the blissful eyes Gaze in eternal Tranquil glory.

But to us it is given In no place to rest, They dwindle, they fall, The suffering mortals Blindling from one Hour to another, Like water from rock To rock hurled down, Year long into confusion below.

So I sang to the strings. I'd hardly finished when a boat came in and I immediately recognized my servant who brought me a letter from Diotima.

'So you're still on earth?' she wrote, 'and see the daylight still? I'd thought to find you elsewhere, my love! The letter you wrote before the battle of Chesma I received earlier than you afterwards wished, and so for a week I lived in the belief you'd thrown yourself into the arms of death, until your servant arrived with the joyful news that you're still alive. Besides, I'd heard a few days after the battle that the ship on which I knew you to be had blown up with all hands lost.

'But O sweet voice! once again I heard you, the language of the beloved touched me once more like a May breeze, and for a moment your beautiful hopeful joy, the lovely phantom of our future happiness deluded me too.

'Dear dreamer, why must I wake you? why can't I say, "come and make true the beautiful days you promised me!" But it's too late, Hyperion, it's too late.  Don't be dismayed! All that is natural purges itself, and everywhere life's blossom winds itself freer and freer of coarser stuff.

'Dearest Hyperion! little did you think to hear this year my swansong.

#### Continued

'It began soon after you'd left, and even in the days before our parting. A force of spirit before which I took fright, an inner life before which the life of the earth paled and dwindled like lamps of the night in the glow of morning — shall I say it? I could have gone to Delphi and built the god of inspiration a temple beneath the cliffs of ancient Parnassus, and, a modern Pythia, kindled the flagging peoples with divine utterance, and my soul knows that my maidenly mouth would have opened the eyes of all the godforsaken and smoothed their dulled brows, so powerful was the spirit of life in me! Yet ever more weary grew my mortal limbs and dread weight pulled me relentlessly down. Oh! often in the stillness of my bower I have wept for the roses of youth! they withered and withered, and only from tears did your maiden's cheek redden. They were still the trees of old, it was the bower of old — there once stood your Diotima, your child, Hyperion, before your joyful eyes, a flower among flowers, and the powers of earth and heaven came peacefully together in her; now she walked a stranger among the buds of May, and her familiars, the lovely plants, nodded to her amiably, but she could only grieve; yet I passed none by, yet one after another I bade farewell to all the playmates of my youth, the groves and springs and whispering hills.

'Oh! as long as I still was able I would often make my sweet and weary way up to the heights where you'd stayed with Notara, and speak about you with our friend, as lightsomely as possible, so that he shouldn't write to you about me; but soon, when her heart grew too loud, the hypocrite stole out into the garden, and then there I was at the rail above the cliff where I once gazed down with you and out into open nature, oh! where I stood, held by your hands, caressed by your watchful eyes, in the first shuddering warming of love and wished to pour out my overflowing soul like sacrificial wine into life's abyss; there I now lurched around and cried my sorrow to the wind, and like a timid bird my glance flitted about and barely dared look at the beautiful earth from which I was to part.

#### Continued

'That's the way it's gone with your maiden, Hyperion. Don't ask how? don't explain this death to yourself! Whoever thinks to fathom such a fate will end by cursing himself and the world, and yet there's not a soul to blame.

'Shall I say it's grief for you that's killed me? oh no! oh no! it was welcome to me, this grief, it gave the death I bore within me form and grace; it's in honour of your darling that you're dying, I could now tell myself. —

'Or did my soul become too ripe for me in all the raptures of our love, and is that why, like a headstrong youth, it will be held no more in its humble home? tell me! was it my heart's luxuriance that estranged me from mortal life? is nature in me become through you, you glorious man! too proud to put up with it any longer on this mediocre star? But if you taught my soul to fly, why won't you also teach it to return to you? If you kindled the aether-loving fire, why wouldn't you tend it for me? — Hear me, my love! for the sake of your beautiful soul! don't you blame yourself for my death!

'Could you hold me back when your fate pointed you on the selfsame path? and if you had, in your heart's heroic struggle, preached to me — "be content, my child! and come to terms with the times" — would you not have been the vainest of all the vain?

#### Continued

'I will tell you plainly what I think. Your fire was alive in me, your spirit had passed into me; but that would scarce have harmed, and only your fate has made my new life deadly to me. Too mighty for me had my soul become through you, it would through you have also stilled again. You drew my life away from earth, you would have also had the power to fetter me to earth, you would have bound my soul as in a magic circle into your embracing arms; oh! just one of your heartfelt glances would have held me fast, just one love speech of yours would have turned me back into a happy wholesome child; yet when your own fate drove you into spiritual solitude, like floodwater onto a mountain peak, oh, only when I fully believed the storm of battle had burst open the dungeon and my Hyperion had flown up into ancient freedom, that was the turning point for me and soon it will be over.

'I've made many words, and yet the great Roman perished silently when her Brutus and the fatherland were writhing in their death throes. But what better could I do in the best of my last days of life? — And there are many things I still feel driven to say. Mute was my life; my death is eloquent. Enough!

#### Continued

'There's just one thing more I must say to you.

'You would have to go under, you'd have to despair, yet the spirit will save you. No laurel will comfort you, and no wreath of myrtle; Olympus will, the living and present, that eternally youthful blossoms around all your senses. The beautiful world is my Olympus; in this you will live, and with the holy beings of the world, the gods of nature, with them you will be joyful.

'Oh, be welcome, you good, you faithful! you deeply missed and misjudged! children and elders! sun and earth and aether with all the living souls that play about you, as you play about them, in eternal love! Oh, take all-venturing men, take back the fugitives into the family of gods, take them up into the home of nature from which they absconded! —

'You know this word, Hyperion! You began it in me. You will fulfil it in yourself, and only then rest.

'That's enough for me to die in joy as a Greek maiden.

'Those poor souls who know nothing but their own sorry handiwork, who are merely slaves of need and scorn genius, and who do not honour you, childlike life of nature! let them fear death. Their yoke is become their world; they know nothing better than their bondage; dread the freedom of the gods that death gives us?

'But I don't! I have gone beyond the patchwork made by hand of man, I have felt the life of nature that passes all thought — even if I became a plant, would the harm be so great? — I shall be. How should I be lost from the sphere of life where the love eternal, that is common to all, holds all natures together? How should I depart from the covenant that binds all beings? This is not so easily broken as the loose bonds of our age. It's not like a market day when folk flock together and make a great bustle and then disperse. No! by the spirit that unites us, by the god's spirit that is proper to each and common to all! no! no! in nature's covenant troth is no dream. We part to be only more inwardly one, more divinely at peace with all, with ourselves.

'I shall be; I do not ask what I shall become. To be, to live, that is enough, that is the glory of the gods; and that is why all that is life is equal in the divine world, and there are there no masters and menials. Natures live together like lovers; they have all in common, spirit, joy and eternal youth.

'Permanence is the choice of the stars, in silent fullness of life they constantly wheel, knowing no age. We embody perfection in change, splitting the great chords of joy into wandering melodies. Like harpers around the thrones of the elders, we live, ourselves divine, around the silent gods of the world, with life's fleeting song we soften the blissful earnest of the sun-god and the others.

'Look up into the world! is it not like a wandering triumphal pageant where nature celebrates its eternal victory over all corruption? and does not life for its greater glory take with it death in golden chains, as once the general would take with him captive kings? and we, we're like the virgins and youths who with dance and song, in shifting shapes and sounds, accompany the majestic procession.

'Now let me be still. To say more would be too much. We shall likely meet again. —

'Grieving youth! soon, soon you will be happier. Your laurel failed to ripen and your myrtles faded, for priest you shall be of divine nature, and your poetic days burgeon already. Oh, could I only see you in your future beauty! Farewell.'

At the same time I received a letter from Notara in which he wrote:

'The day after she'd written to you for the last time she grew quite still, spoke only a few more words, and then said that she would rather part in fire from the earth than be buried, and we should gather her ashes in an urn and set it in the woods at the spot where you, my dear friend! had first met her. Soon after, when it began to grow dark, she said goodnight to us as if she wished to sleep, and wrapped her arms around her lovely head; until toward morning we heard her breathing. As it then became wholly still and I heard nothing more, I went over to her and listened.

'O Hyperion! what more shall I say? It was finished and our plaints awakened her no more.

'It is a terrible mystery that such a life should die, and I have to confess to you that I myself have neither sense nor faith since I witnessed this.

'Yet better always a beautiful death, Hyperion! than such a torpid life as ours now is.

'Warding off flies, that's our work in the future, and gnawing on the things of the world like children on dried orris root, that's our joy in the end. Growing old amongst youthful peoples seems to me a delight, but growing old where all is old seems to me worse than anything. —

'I'm tempted to advise you, my Hyperion! not to come here. I know you. It would rob you of your senses. Besides, you're not safe here. My dear friend! think of Diotima's mother, think of me and spare yourself!

'I have to confess, I shudder when I ponder your fate. But then I also believe, it's not the deeper springs that searing summer dries up, only the shallow rain-stream. I've seen you at moments, Hyperion! when you seemed to me a higher being. Now you're put to the test, and that's going to show who you are. Farewell.'

So Notara wrote; and you ask, my Bellarmin! how I feel now, telling you this?

My dearest friend! I'm at peace, for I want no better than the gods. Must not everything suffer? And the nobler it is, the more deeply. Does not holy nature suffer? O my godhead! that you could grieve as you are blissful is something I long failed to grasp. But the bliss that does not suffer is sleep, and without death there is no life. Should you be, like a child, eternal and slumber as nothingness? forego the victory? not pass through all the perfections?  For it alone leads from one bliss to the next, and there can be no other companion. —

Once I'd begun to revive again, I wrote to Notara from Sicily where I'd first been brought by ship from Paros:

'I've obeyed you, dear friend! I'm already far away from you all, and want to give you my news now; but words come hard to me; you won't mind my confessing that. The blessed, among whom Diotima is now, do not speak much; in my night, in the depths of the grieving, speech too is at an end.

'My Diotima died a beautiful death; you're right; and it's this that rouses me and gives me back my soul.

'But it's no longer the same world I return to. I'm a stranger, like the unburied when they come up from Acheron, and were I even on my home island, in the gardens of my youth that are barred to me by my father, oh! still, still I should be a stranger in the earth and no god can any longer link me to the past.

'Yes! it's all over. I just must tell myself that time and again, have the thought bind my soul so that it stay calm and not become inflamed through senseless childish efforts.

'It's all over; and even could I weep, beautiful divinity, as once you wept for Adonis, my Diotima will still not return to me and my heart's word has lost its power, for the winds alone hear me.

'Oh, God! and that I myself am nothing, and the meanest workman can say he's achieved more than I! that they may comfort themselves, the poor in spirit, and smile and chide me as a dreamer because my deeds failed to ripen, because my arms are not free, because my times are like the raging Procrustes who cast the men he captured into a child's cradle and, so that they'd fit into the little bed, would hack off their limbs.

'If only it weren't too utterly dreary to fling oneself into the foolish mob and be torn to pieces by it! or if only noble blood could feel no shame at mingling with the blood of slaves! oh, if there were a banner, gods! that my Alabanda might serve under, a Thermopylae where I could bleed it out with honour, all the lonely love I'll never more need! To be sure it would be better if I could live, live, and in the new temples, in the newly assembled agora of our people, still the great grief with great joy; but on that I shall be silent, for I'll merely weep my strength wholly away if I think upon it all.

'Oh, Notara! with me too it's over; my own soul has grown hateful to me because I must blame it for Diotima's being dead, and the ideas of my youth I deemed so grand mean nothing to me any more. They poisoned my Diotima, didn't they!