With the peace of Heaven?
How long it is, how long!
The youth is aged; the very earth itself, which once smiled on me,
Has grown different.
“Oh, farewell! The soul of every day departs, and, departing, turns to thee—
And over thee there weeps
The eye that, becoming brighter,
Looks down,
There where thou tarriest.”
This distinctly suggests a renunciation, an envy of one’s own youth, that time of freedom which one would like to retain through a deep-rooted dislike to all duty and endeavor which is denied an immediate pleasure reward. Painstaking work for a long time and for a remote object is not in the nature of child or primitive man. It is difficult to say if this can really be called laziness, but it seems to have not a little in common with it, in so far as the psychic life on a primitive stage, be it of an infantile or archaic type, possesses an extreme inertia and irresponsibility in production and non-production.