You old clock-bell, you sweet lyre! Every pain has torn your heart, father-pain, fathers'-pain, forefathers'-pain; your speech has become ripe,-
-Ripe like the golden autumn and the afternoon, like my hermit heart- now say you: The world itself has become ripe, the grape turns brown,
-Now does it wish to die, to die of happiness. You higher men, do you not feel it? There wells up mysteriously an odour,
-A perfume and odour of eternity, a rosy-blessed, brown, gold-wine-odour of old happiness.
-Of drunken midnight-death happiness, which sings: the world is deep, and deeper than the day could read!
7.
Leave me alone! Leave me alone! I am too pure for you. Touch me not! has not my world just now become perfect?
My skin is too pure for your hands. Leave me alone, you dull, doltish, stupid day! Is not the midnight brighter?
The purest are to be masters of the world, the least known, the strongest, the midnight-souls, who are brighter and deeper than any day.
O day, you grope for me? you feel for my happiness? For you am I rich, lonesome, a treasure-pit, a gold chamber?
O world, you want me? Am I worldly for you? Am I spiritual for you? Am I divine for you? But day and world, you are too coarse,-
-Have cleverer hands, grasp after deeper happiness, after deeper unhappiness, grasp after some God; grasp not after me:
-My unhappiness, my happiness is deep, you strange day, but yet am I no God, no God's-hell: deep is its woe.
