“It is enough,” I said to myself, while my feet, treading unwillingly
the steep slope of the mountain, bore me downward toward the quiet
river; “it is enough,” I repeated, as I inhaled the resinous scent of
the pine grove, to which the chill of approaching evening had imparted a
peculiar potency and pungency; “it is enough,” I said once more, as I
seated myself on a mossy hillock directly on the brink of the river and
gazed at its dark, unhurried waves, above which a thick growth of reeds
lifted their pale-green stalks.... “It is enough!--Have done with
dreaming, with striving: ’tis high time to pull thyself together; ’tis
high time to clutch thy head with both hands and bid thy heart be still.
Give over pampering thyself with the sweet indulgence of indefinite but
captivating sensations; give over running after every new form of
beauty; give over seizing every tremor of its delicate and powerful
pinions.--Everything is known, everything has been felt over and over
again many times already.... I am weary.--What care I that at this very
moment the dawn is suffusing the sky ever more and more broadly, like
some inflamed, all-conquering passion! What care I that two paces from
me, amid the tranquillity and the tenderness and the gleam of evening,
in the dewy depths of a motionless bush, a nightingale has suddenly
burst forth in such magical notes as though there had never been any
nightingales in the world before it, and as though it were the first to
chant the first song of the first love! All that has been, has been, I
repeat; it has been recapitulated a thousand times--and when one
remembers that all this will so continue for a whole eternity--as though
to order, by law--one even grows vexed! Yes ... vexed!”