Laughing Truths/Carl Spitteler

He is the greatest of you all. Never has your land—the honourable soil of sacred individuality and freedom—produced such a hero of art and thought… Permit a stranger (though so long your guest as to feel for his part that he is no longer a stranger, however you may feel on yours) to honour, now that he has joined the dead, Our Homer, the greatest German poet since Goethe, the only master of the epic since Milton died three centuries ago. But a more solitary figure amid the art of his day than either the one or the other of these.—Romain Rolland. Quoted by permission from Carl Spitteler, In Memoriam.