FROM THE HEIGHTS
By F W Nietzsche
Translated by L. A. Magnus

                       1.

     MIDDAY of Life! Oh, season of delight!
                      My summer's park!
     Uneaseful joy to look, to lurk, to hark—
     I peer for friends, am ready day and night,—
     Where linger ye, my friends? The time is right!

                       2.

     Is not the glacier's grey today for you
                         Rose-garlanded?
     The brooklet seeks you, wind, cloud, with longing thread
     And thrust themselves yet higher to the blue,
     To spy for you from farthest eagle's view.

                       3.

     My table was spread out for you on high—
                      Who dwelleth so
     Star-near, so near the grisly pit below?—
     My realm—what realm hath wider boundary?
     My honey—who hath sipped its fragrancy?

                       4.

     Friends, ye are there! Woe me,—yet I am not
                        He whom ye seek?
     Ye stare and stop—better your wrath could speak!
     I am not I? Hand, gait, face, changed? And what
     I am, to you my friends, now am I not?

                       5.

     Am I an other? Strange am I to Me?
                      Yet from Me sprung?
     A wrestler, by himself too oft self-wrung?
     Hindering too oft my own self's potency,
     Wounded and hampered by self-victory?

                       6.

     I sought where-so the wind blows keenest. There
                     I learned to dwell
     Where no man dwells, on lonesome ice-lorn fell,
     And unlearned Man and God and curse and prayer?
     Became a ghost haunting the glaciers bare?

                       7.

     Ye, my old friends! Look! Ye turn pale, filled o'er
                      With love and fear!
     Go! Yet not in wrath. Ye could ne'er live here.
     Here in the farthest realm of ice and scaur,
     A huntsman must one be, like chamois soar.

                       8.

     An evil huntsman was I? See how taut
                  &nb............