Page:Thus Spake Zarathustra - Thomas Common - 1917.djvu/238

 thoughts, and even around my words, lest swine and libertine should break into my gardens!-

Passion for power: the glowing scourge of the hardest of the heart-hard; the cruel torture reserved for the cruel themselves; the gloomy flame of living pyres.

Passion for power: the wicked gadfly which is mounted on the vainest peoples; the scorner of all uncertain virtue; which rides on every horse and on every pride.

Passion for power: the earthquake which breaks and upbreaks all that is rotten and hollow; the rolling, rumbling, punitive demolisher of whited sepulchres; the flashing interrogative-sign beside premature answers.

Passion for power: before whose glance man creeps and crouches and drudges, and becomes lower than the serpent and the swine:- until at last great contempt cries out of him-,

Passion for power: the terrible teacher of great contempt, which preaches to their face to cities and empires: "Away with you!"- until a voice cries out of themselves: "Away with me!"

Passion for power: which, however, mounts alluringly even to the pure and lonesome, and up to self-satisfied elevations, glowing like a love that paints purple felicities alluringly on earthly heavens.

Passion for power: but who would call it passion, when the height longs to stoop for power! nothing sick or diseased is there in such longing and descending!

That the lonesome height may not forever remain lonesome and self-sufficing; that the mountains may come to the valleys and the winds of the heights to the plains:-

Oh, who could find the right prenomen and honoring name