ditions whose every movement signifies a danger to our possessions, honour, life, and death, and to those most dear to us, appear to us in quite a different light. Tiberius, for instance, must have pondered more deeply on the character of the Emperor Augustus and his government, and known more about it than even the wisest historian possibly could. Now we all live, comparatively speaking, in a security by far too great to make us true discerners of men; some discern for the sake of amusement, others by way of pastime, others, again, from sheer habit; but never as acutely as if they were told, Discern or perish! As long as the truths do not cut us to the quick, we maintain a certain attitude of contempt towards them; they still appear to us too much like the “winged dreams,” as though we could or could not have them—as though something in them: was at our discretion, as though we could also be roused from these truths of ours.
461
Hic Rhodus, hic salta—Our music, which can and must change into everything, because, like the demon of the seas, it has no character of its own—this music, in times past, devoted its attention to the Christian sage, and translated its ideal into sounds; why should it not also hit on those brighter, more cheerful, and universal sounds which correspond to the ideal thinker? —a music which could soar up and down at case only
