1.

Daybreak is an affirmative book, profound but bright and benevolent. The same applies once more and in the highest degree to La Gaya Scienza: in almost every sentence of this book profundity and playfulness go gently hand in hand. A verse which expresses my gratitude for the most wonderful month of January which I have ever lived—the whole book is a gift—entirely reveals the abysmal depths from which "wisdom” has here become joyful. "Thou who with cleaving fiery lances, The stream of my soul from its ice dost free, Till with a rush and a roar it advances, To enter with glorious hoping the sea: Brighter to see and purer ever, Free in the bonds of thy sweet constraint— So it praises thy wondrous endeavour, January thou beauteous saint”! Who can be in any doubt as to what "glorious hoping” means here when he has realized the diamond beauty of the first of Zarathustra’s words as they appear in a radiant glitter of light at the close of the fourth book? Or when he reads the granite sentences at the end of the third book wherein a fate for all times is first given a formula? The songs of Prince Free as a Bird which for the most part were written in Sicily remind me quite forcibly of that Provencal notion of "Gaya Scienza”, of that union of Minstrel, Knight and free spirit which distinguishes that wonderfully early culture of the Provençals from all ambiguous cultures.