In action, the English have the advantage enjoyed by free men always entitled to free discussion: of having a ready judgment on every question. We Germans, on the other hand, are always thinking. We think so much that we never form a judgment.

Round my cradle shimmered the last moonbeams of the eighteenth century and the first morning rays of the nineteenth.

Perhaps already I am dead, And these perhaps are phantoms vain; - These motley phantasies that pass At night through my disordered brain. Perhaps with ancient heathen shapes, Old faded gods, this brain is full; Who, for their most unholy rites, Have chosen a dead poet's skull.

He who fears to venture as far as his heart urges and his reason permits, is a coward; he who ventures further than he intended to go, is a slave.

Ask me not what I have, but what I am.

The stones here speak to me, and I know their mute language. Also, they seem deeply to feel what I think. So a broken column of the old Roman times, an old tower of Lombardy, a weather- beaten Gothic piece of a pillar understands me well. But I am a ruin myself, wandering among ruins.

Where words cease, there music begins.