"'Master of life!' he cried, desponding,
'Must our lives depend on these things?'"
The question whether our lives must depend upon "these things" is very strange. It sounds as if life were derived from these things; that is to say, from nature in general. Nature seems suddenly to have assumed a very strange significance. This phenomenon can be explained only through the fact that a great amount of libido was stored up and now is given to nature. As is well known, men of even dull and prosy minds, in the springtime of love, suddenly become aware of nature, and even make poems about it. But we know that libido, prevented from an actual way of transference, always reverts to an earlier way of transference. Minnehaha, the laughing water, is so clearly an allusion to the mother that the secret yearning of the hero for the mother is powerfully touched. Therefore, without having undertaken anything, he goes home to Nokomis; but there again he is driven away, because Minnehaha already stands in his path.
He turns, therefore, even further away, into that early youthful period, the tones of which recall Minnehaha most forcibly to his thoughts, where he learnt to hear the mother-sounds in the sounds of nature. In this very strange revival of the impressions of nature we recognize a regression to those earliest and strongest nature impressions which stand next to the subsequently extinguished, even stronger, impressions which the child received from the mother. The glamour of this feeling for her is transferred to other objects of the childish environ-
