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Our Slow Periods.—It is thus that artists feel, and all men of "works," the maternal species of men: they always believe at every chapter of their life—a work always makes a chapter—that they have now reached the goal itself; they would always patiently accept death with the feeling: "we are ripe for it." This is not the expression of exhaustion,—but rather that of a certain autumnal sunniness and mildness, which the work itself, the maturing of the work, always leaves behind in its originator. Then the tempo of life slows down—turns thick and flows with honey—into long pauses, into the belief in the long pause....

Our Slow Periods.—It is thus that artists feel, and all men of "works," the maternal species of men: they always believe at every chapter of their life—a work always makes a chapter—that they have now reached the goal itself; they would always patiently accept death with the feeling: "we are ripe for it." This is not the expression of exhaustion,—but rather that of a certain autumnal sunniness and mildness, which the work itself, the maturing of the work, always leaves behind in its originator. Then the tempo of life slows down—turns thick and flows with honey—into long pauses, into the belief in the long pause....

Approximate author period: c. 1872 AD · industrial