Knowing all too well.-- Many feelings have entered the world as the most terrible poisons, and in the end have become tasteful wines and pleasing intoxicants because men have blessed them with a little extract and mithridate of their own heart. It has been said, and not without genius, by that philosopher Bruno: “Heroic love is the property of those superior natures who are called mad not because they do not know, but because they know all too well.” When knowledge has succeeded in piercing our depths most remotely so that it stains us and is adopted into our nature; when we read in its image, frightening or sublime as it may be, the fears, the loves, the sorrows of our own heart- here we know all too well, here we delight in those “pleasures” of contemplation and the madness of heroic love. What folly do the men around us find in this, indeed, what madness! Yet we should recall the image of Achilles, who was said to have devoured his own heart in silence: if it may be greatness to dwell upon our heart in silence, then there may also lie much greatness in the silence of the philosopher. The great soul suffers silently, as Schiller says: the great soul may, perhaps, also love silently.