"The Romantics constituted the ultimate wave, because the very core of terrestrial life died when they died. Surely man has never experienced, nor has he ever suffered more rapturously, the convulsions of being than did the Romantics. Their horizon flamed in the fiery gloaming of farewell, a last, irrevocable severing of the ties.

"Only a select few perceived this event. Fewer still understood its implications. Even Nietzsche confused that melancholy and overpowering radiance with the first flush of a new dawn.

"I have indulged in such descriptions merely so that the reader might be able to see the reason why we refer to these last, great bearers of the radiance of earth as the dithyrambic bards of destruction. They were surrounded by ghouls and vampires, and their creative work was never really consummated.

"The whole earth reeks as never before with the blood of the slaughtered, and the apelike masses now strut about with the precious spoils that they have plundered from the ravaged temple of life! "

-- Ludwig Klages