Daniel wandered up to the castle, along the walls, over the bridges and
planks.
It was his youth that caused him so to love the night that he forgot all
men and seemed to himself to be alone on earth. It was his youth that
delivered him up to things with such passion that he was able to weave
the ghostly flowers of melodies about all that is visible--melodies that
were so delicate, so eloquent, and so winged that no pen could ever
record them. They vanished and died whenever he sought to capture them.
But it was also his youth that fired his eyes with hatred when he saw
the comfort of lit windows, and filled his heart with bitterness against
the satisfied, the indifferent, the strangers, the eternal strangers who
had no consciousness of him.
He was so small and so great: small in the eyes of the world, great in
his own estimation. When the tones burst from him like sparks from an
anvil, he was a god. When he stood in the dark court behind the City
Theatre waiting for the final chorus of "Fidelio" to penetrate the wall
and reach his grateful ears, he was an outcast. Fountains of music
rustled all about him. He looked into the eyes of the children and there
was melody; he gazed up at the stars and there was harmony. He finally
came to the point where there was no limit. His day was a waste place,
his brain a parched field in the rain, his thoughts were birds of
passage, his dreams a super-life.
He lived on bread and fruit, treating himself only every third day to a
warm meal in the inn at the sign of the White Tower. There he would sit
and listen at times, unobserved, to the quite remarkable conversation of
some young fellows. This awakened in him a longing for intercourse with
congenial companions. But when the brethren of the Vale of Tears finally
took him into their circle, he was like a Robinson Crusoe or a Selkirk
who had been abducted from his island.