While buried in these shadows, I allowed my favorite poets and text-books to accumulate dust. I even ground them under my feet in excess of wrath. "You wretched dreamers!" I said to them; "you who teach me only suffering, miserable shufflers of words, charlatans, if you know the truth, fools, if you speak in good faith, liars in either case, who make fairy-tales of the woes of the human heart. I will burn the last one of you!"

Then tears came to my aid and I perceived that there was nothing real but my grief. "Very well," I cried, in my delirium, "tell me, good and bad genii, counselors for good or evil, tell me what to do! Choose an arbiter and let him speak."

I seized an old Bible which lay on my table, and read the first passage that caught my eye.

"Reply to me, thou book of God!" I said, "what word hast thou for me?" My eye fell on this passage in Ecclesiastes, Chapter IX:

   For all this I considered in my heart even to declare all this,
   that the righteous and the wise, and their works, are in the hand
   of God; no man knoweth either love or hatred by all that is before
   them.

   All things come alike to all: there is one event to the righteous,
   and to the wicked; to the good and to the clean, and to the unclean;
   to him that sacrificeth, and to him that sacrificeth not: as is the
   good, so is the sinner; and he that sweareth, as he that feareth an
   oath.

   This is an evil among all things that are done under the sun, that
   there is one event unto all: yea, also the heart of the sons of men
   is full of evil, and madness is in their heart while they live, and
   after that they go to the dead.

When I read these words I was astounded; I did not know that there was such a sentiment in the Bible. "And thou, too, as all