"I knew a little girl who when I took her on my shoulder would stretch
out her arms and exclaim, 'I am so tall!' She fancied that she was taller
than I then, and yet was only little Panthea."

"But in her own conception of herself, it was she who was tall, and that
decides the issue, for to each of us a thing is only that which it seems
to us. It is true they call me godlike, but I feel every day, and a
hundred times a day, the limitations of the power and nature of man, and
I cannot get beyond them. On the top of a mountain I cease to feel them;
there I feel as if I were great, for nothing is higher than my head, far
or near. And when, as I stand there, the night vanishes before my eyes,
when the splendor of the young sun brings the world into new life for me,
by restoring to my consciousness all that just before had been engulfed
in gloom, then a deeper breath swells my breast, and my lungs fill with
the purer and lighter air of the heights. Up there, alone and in
silence, no hint can reach me of the turmoil below, and I feel myself one
with the great aspect of nature spread before me. The surges of the sea
come and go, the tree-tops in the forest bow and rise, fog and mist roll
away and part asunder hither and thither, and up there I feel myself so
merged with the creation that surrounds me that often it even seems as
though it were my own breath that gives it life. Like the storks and the
swallows, I yearn for the distant land, and where should the human eye be
more likely to be permitted, at least in fancy, to discern the remote
goal than from the summit of a mountain?

"The limitless distance which the spirit craves for seems there to assume
a form tangible to the senses, and the eye detects its border line. My
whole being feels not merely elevated, but expanded, and that vague
longing which comes over me as soon as I mix once more in the turmoil of