"To this primitive son of man, bowed down and heavily burdened, death,
which as yet he has not seen, is an especial trouble; and although he
may desire the end of his present distress, it seems still more hateful
to exchange it for a condition altogether unknown. Hence we already see
that the full weight of a dogmatic system, explaining, mediating, yet
always in conflict with itself, just as it still for ever occupies us,
was imposed on the first miserable son of man. These contradictions,
which are not strange to human nature, possessed his mind, and could not
be brought to rest, either through the divinely-given gentleness of his
father and brother, or the loving and alleviating co-operation of his
sister-wife. In order to sharpen them to the point of impossibility of
endurance, Satan comes upon the scene, a mighty and misleading spirit,
who begins by unsettling him morally, and then conducts him miraculously
through all worlds, causing him to see the past as overwhelmingly vast,
the present as small and of no account, and the future as full of
foreboding and void of consolation.

"So he turns back to his own family, more excited, but not worse than
before; and finding in the family circle everything as he has left it,
the urgency of Abel, who wishes to make him offer a sacrifice, becomes
altogether insupportable. More say we not, excepting that the
motivation of the scene in which Abel perishes is of the rarest
excellence, and what follows is equally great and priceless. There now
lies Abel! That now is Death--there was so much talk about it, and man
knows about it as little as he did before.

"We must not forget, that through the whole piece there runs a kind of
presentiment of a Saviour, so that the poet at this point, as well as in
all others, has known how to bring himself near to the ideas by which we