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my blood like a fever—I had never had such an experience before, yet I had done nothing but listen to an impassioned lecture. However, the exhilaration of that lecture must have lingered on within me, and when I read a line aloud I heard my voice unconsciously imitating his, the sentences raced on in the same headlong rhythm, my hands felt impelled to move, arching in the air like his own—as if by magic, in a single hour, I had broken through the wall which previously stood between me and the world of the intellect, and passionate as I was by nature, I had discovered a new passion, one which has remained with me to the present day: a desire to share my enjoyment of all earthly delights in the inspired poetic word. By chance I had come upon Coriolanus, and as if reeling in a frenzy I discovered in myself all the characteristics of that strangest of the Romans: pride, arrogance, wrath, contempt, mockery, all the salty, leaden, golden, metallic elements of the emotions. What a new delight it was to divine and understand all this at once, as if by magic! I read on and on until my eyes were burning, and when I looked at the time it was three-thirty in the morning. Almost alarmed by this new force which had both stirred and numbed my senses for six hours on end, I put out the light. But the images still glowed and quivered within me; I could hardly sleep with longing for the next day and looking forward to it, a day which was to expand the world so enchantingly opened up to me yet further and make it entirely my own.

Next day, however, brought disappointment. My impatience had made me one of the first to arrive at the lecture hall, where my teacher (as I will call him from now on) was to speak on English phonetics. Even as he came in I received a shock—was this the same man as yesterday, or was it only my excited mood and my memory that had made him a Coriolanus, wielding words in the Forum like lightning, heroically bold, crushing, compelling? The figure who entered the room, footsteps dragging slightly, was a tired old man. As if a shining but opaque film had been lifted from his countenance I now saw, from where I was sitting in the front row of desks, his almost unhealthily pallid features, furrowed by deep wrinkles and broad crevices, with blue shadows wearing channels away in the dull grey of his cheeks. Lids too heavy for his eyes shadowed them as he read his lecture, and the mouth, its lips too pale, too thin, delivered the words with no resonance: where was his merriment, where were the high spirits rejoicing in themselves? Even the voice sounded strange, moving stiffly through grey, crunching sand at a monotonous and tiring pace, as if sobered by the grammatical subject.
    I was overcome by restlessness. This was not the man I had been waiting for since the early hours of the morning—where was the astrally radiant countenance he had shown me yesterday? This was a worn-out professor droning his way objectively through his subject; I listened with growing anxiety, wondering whether yesterday’s tone might return after all, the warmly vibrant note that had struck my feelings like a hand playing music, moving them to passion. Increasingly restless, I raised my eyes to him, full of disappointment as I scanned that now alien face: yes, this was undeniably the same countenance, but as if emptied, drained of all its creative forces, tired and old, the parchment mask of an elderly man. Were such things possible? Could a man be so youthful one minute and have aged so much the next? Did such sudden surges of the spirit occur that they could change the countenance as well as the spoken word, making it decades younger?
    The question tormented me. I burned within, as if with thirst, to know more about the dual aspect of this man, and as soon as he had left the rostrum and walked past us without a glance, I hurried off to the library, following a sudden impulse, and asked for his works. Perhaps he had just been