That the beautiful and bewitching
Is only a breath of awe,
That the precious, the enchanting,
The lovely is without permanence:
Cloud, flower, soap bubble,
Fireworks and the laughter of children,
The glance of a woman in the mirror
And many other wonderful things,
That they, barely discovered, fade away,
Last only a moment,
Are only a scent and a waft of wind,
Ah, we know that with mourning.
And the permanent, the rigid
Is not so intimately precious to us:
Jewels with cold fire,
Luster-laden bars of gold;
Even the stars, impossible to count,
Remain far away and foreign, they are not
Like us, the evanescent ones, do not reach
The innermost part of our souls.
No, it seems that the most fervently beautiful,
[The most] endearing is inclined
Toward destruction, always near to dying,
And the most precious: the sounds
Of music, which in the making
Already flee, already cease to be,
Are only a blowing, streaming, chasing,
And are wafted about by quiet mourning,
Because for not even a heartbeat
Do they permit themselves to be held, to be captured;
Sound upon sound, barely struck
Already fades and trickles away.
Thus is our heart given over
Faithfully and fraternally
To the flowing, the fleeting, to life,
Not to the firmly founded, to that which is capable of lasting.
We are soon tired of that which lasts,
Rock and star-world and jewels,
We who are driven in eternal change,
Wind- and soap-bubble-souls,
Wedded to time, ephemeral,
For whom the dew upon a rose petal,
For whom the wooing of a bird,
The dying of a play of clouds,
Glittering snow, a rainbow,
A butterfly, already flown away,
To whom the sound of laughter
That barely touches us in passing,
Can mean a celebration
Or can give pain. We love
That to which we are similar, and we understand
What the wind has written in the sand.