Thus do I show them only the ice and winter of my peaks—and NOT that my mountain windeth all the solar girdles around it!
They hear only the whistling of my winter-storms: and know NOT that I also travel over warm seas, like longing, heavy, hot south-winds.
They commiserate also my accidents and chances:—but MY word saith: “Suffer the chance to come unto me: innocent is it as a little child!”
How COULD they endure my happiness, if I did not put around it accidents, and winter-privations, and bear-skin caps, and enmantling snowflakes!
—If I did not myself commiserate their PITY, the pity of those enviers and injurers!
—If I did not myself sigh before them, and chatter with cold, and patiently LET myself be swathed in their pity!
This is the wise waggish-will and good-will of my soul, that it CONCEALETH NOT its winters and glacial storms; it concealeth not its chilblains either.
To one man, lonesomeness is the flight of the sick one; to another, it is the flight FROM the sick ones.
Let them HEAR me chattering and sighing with winter-cold, all those poor squinting knaves around me! With such sighing and chattering do I flee from their heated rooms.
Let them sympathise with me and sigh with me on account of my chilblains: “At the ice of knowledge will he yet FREEZE TO DEATH!”—so they mourn.