in places the water was like blue vitriol, and in places it seemed as though the moonlight were liquefied and filling the bay instead of water.

“You said ‘eternal truth.’ … But is eternal truth of use to man and within his reach, if there is no eternal life?”

“The legend, the mirage, and I are all the products of your excited imagination. I am a phantom.”

She talked a long while and with great feeling. For some reason the idea came into his head that in the course of the summer he might grow fond of this little, weak, talkative creature, might be carried away and fall in love; in their position it was so possible and natural!

“Yes, you are one of those few who are justly called the chosen of God. You do the service of eternal truth. Your thoughts, your designs, the marvellous studies you are engaged in, and all your life, bear the Divine, the heavenly stamp, seeing that they are consecrated to the rational and the beautiful — that is, to what is eternal.”

Doctors and kind relations will succeed in stupefying mankind, in making mediocrity pass for genius and in bringing civilisation to ruin. If only you knew,”

“How fortunate Buddha, Mahomed, and Shakespeare were that their kind relations and doctors did not cure them of their ecstasy and their inspiration,”

“As of all life — enjoyment. True enjoyment lies in knowledge, and eternal life provides innumerable and inexhaustible sources of knowledge, and in that sense it has been said: ‘In My Father’s house there are many mansions.’”

you are the only man to whom I should not be afraid to marry my daughter. You are a clever man with a good heart, and would not let my beloved work go to ruin; and the chief reason is that I love you as a son, and I am proud of you. If Tanya and you could get up a romance somehow, then — well! I should be very glad and even happy. I tell you this p