---

Sweet dreams have fled,

The past has fled,

The present is gloomy,

The far-off future bleak.

Having never experienced

The joy and happiness of life,

I look back sadly

Upon long-vanished times.

I do not know what I love,

I have neither peace nor rest.

I do not know what I believe,

Why I still live — for what?

I would like to die, die

Dozing upon a green meadow

Clouds drifting by above me,

Forest-solitude around me.

The universe's eternal wheels

Roll in a circular path —

The rusty spring of the globe

Constantly winds itself up.

How nice to fly about

Like air around the revolving ball

Creeping into every corner,

Subsiding in soaring space!

How nice to engulf the world

In universal intensity.

And then write an epitaph

About the world's circumference.

In the pit of my stomach

I would constrain infinity,

Proving, then, with a thousand reasons,

That world and time are finite.