Diotima to Hyperion
I’ve received the letters, my Hyperion, that you wrote to me along the way. You seize me powerfully with all that you tell me, and amidst my love I often shudder to see the gentle youth who wept at my feet transformed into this warlike being.
Won’t you then forget how to love?
But change as you will! I shall follow you. I think that if you could hate me I'd even then feel like you, I’d do my best to hate you too, and so our souls would remain akin and that’s no idle vaunt, Hyperion.
I too am wholly changed from what I used to be. I’m missing my serene outlook on the world and my free delight in everything that lives. It’s only the field of the stars that still attracts my eye. For that, I dwell the more fondly on the great spirits of ancient days and how they ended on earth, and those noble Spartan women have won my heart. Yet I don’t forget the new warriors withal, the lusty ones whose hour is come; often I hear their triumphal clamour, nearer and nearer to me, roaring up through the Peloponnese, often I see them surging there like a cataract down through the Epidaurian woods, and their weapons glancing from afar in the sunlight that escorts them like a herald, O my Hyperion! and you hasten across to Calauria and greet the tranquil woods of our love, greet me and then fly back to your work; — and do you think I fear the outcome? Dearest! there are times I’m on the point of being overwhelmed, but my larger thoughts, like flames, hold the frost at bay. —
Farewell! carry it through as the spirit commands you! and don’t let the war last too long, for the sake of the peace, Hyperion, for the sake of the beautiful, new, golden peace when, as you said, in our book of statutes will one day be inscribed the laws of nature, and when life itself, when divine nature, that can’t be written into any book, will be in the heart of the community. Farewell.