Calm is the bottom of my sea: who would guess that it hideth droll monsters!
Unmoved is my depth: but it sparkleth with swimming enigmas and laughters.
A sublime one saw I to-day, a solemn one, a penitent of the spirit: Oh, how my soul laughed at his ugliness!
With upraised breast, and like those who draw in their breath: thus did he stand, the sublime one, and in silence:
O’erhung with ugly truths, the spoil of his hunting, and rich in torn raiment; many thorns also hung on him—but I saw no rose.
Not yet had he learned laughing and beauty. Gloomy did this hunter return from the forest of knowledge.
From the fight with wild beasts returned he home: but even yet a wild beast gazeth out of his seriousness—an unconquered wild beast!
As a tiger doth he ever stand, on the point of springing; but I do not like those strained souls; ungracious is my taste towards all those self-engrossed ones.
What the critics said
Ludovici says the sublime ones are a type Nietzsche did not wholly dislike but who take life too seriously and never surmount the camel stage; real greatness is to speak of lofty things without being oppressed by them, and Nietzsche breaks old things not with the anarchist's irreverence but with the fingers of an artist at ease with beauty, guided by his own taste.