He must not stagger, faint and fall at last,
-Knowing a charm to baffle them; behold,
He bares his front-a mortal ventures thus
Serene amid the echoes, beams, and glooms!
If he be priest henceforth, or if he wake
The god of the place to ban and blast him there,-
Both well! What's failure or success to me?
I have subdued my life to the one end
Ordained life; there alone I cannot doubt,
That only way I may be satisfied.
Yes, well have I subdued my life! beyond
The obligation of my strictest vows,
The contemplation of my wildest bond,
Which gave, in truth, my nature freely up,
In what it should be, more than what it was-
Consenting that whatever passions slept,
Whatever impulses lay unmatured,
Should wither in the germ,-but scarce foreseeing
That the soil, doomed thus to perpetual waste,
Would seem one day, remembered in its youth
Beside the parched sand-tract which now it is,
Already strewn with faint blooms, viewless then.
I ne'er engaged to root up loves so frail
I felt them not; yet now, 'tis very plain
Some soft spots had their birth in me at first-
If not love, say, like love: there was a time.
When yet this wolfish hunger after knowledge
Set not remorselessly love's claims aside;
This heart was human once, or why recall
Einsiedeln, now, and Würzburg, which the Mayne Forsakes her course to fold as with an arm?
And Festus-my poor Festus, with his praise, And counsel, and grave fears-where is he now? Or the sweet maiden, long ago his bride?
I surely loved them—that last night, at least,
When we...
gone! gone! the better: I am saved
The sad review of an ambitious youth,
Choked by vile lusts, unnoticed in their birth,
But let grow up and wind around a will
Till action was destroyed. No, I have gone
Purging my path successively of aught
Wearing the distant likeness of such lusts.
I have made life consist of one idea:
Ere that was master-up till that was born-
I bear a memory of a pleasant life
Whose small events I treasure; till one morn
I ran o'er the seven little grassy fields,
Startling the flocks of nameless birds, to tell
Poor Festus, leaping all the while for joy,
To leave all trouble for futurity,
Since I had just determined to become
The greatest and most glorious man on earth.
And since that morn all life has been forgot;
All is one day-one only step between
The outset and the end: one tyrant aim,
Absorbing all, fills up the interval-
One vast unbroken chain of thought kept up
Through a career or friendly or opposed
To its existence: life, death, light and shade
The shows of the world, were bare receptacles
Or indices of truth to be wrung thence,
Not instruments of sorrow or delight:
For some one truth would dimly beacon me
From mountains rough with pines, and flit and wink
O'er dazzling wastes of frozen snow, and tremble
Into assured light in some branching mine,
Where ripens, swathed in fire, the liquid gold-
And all the beauty, all the wonder fell
On either side the truth, as its mere robe;
Men saw the robe-I saw the august form.
So far, then, I have voyaged with success,
So much is good, then, in this working sea
Which parts me from that happy strip of land-
But o'er that happy strip a sun shone, too!
And fainter gleams it as the waves grow rough,
And still more faint as the sea widens ; last
I sicken on a dead gulf, streaked with light
From its own putrefying depths alone!
Then-God was pledged to take me by the hand;
Now any miserable juggler bends
My pride to him. All seems alike at length:
Who knows which are the wise and which the fools?
God may take pleasure in confounding pride
By hiding secrets with the scorned and base—
He who stoops lowest may find most-in short,
I am here; and all seems natural; I start not :
And never having glanced behind to know
If I had kept my primal light from wane,
Am thus insensibly grown-what I am!
To fear a deeper curse, an inner ruin
Plague beneath plague-the last turning the first
To light beside its darkness. Better weep
My youth and its brave hopes, all dead and gone,
In tears which burn! Would I were sure to win
Some startling secret in their stead!—a tincture
Of force to flush old age with youth, or breed
Gold, or imprison moonbeams till they change
To opal shafts!-only that, hurling it
Indignant back, I might convince myself
My aims remained as ever supreme and pure!
Even now, why not desire, for mankind's sake,
That if I fail, some fault may be the cause,-
That, though I sink, another may succeed?
O God, the despicable heart of us!
Shut out this hideous mockery from my heart!
'Twas politic in you, Aureole, to reject
Single rewards, and ask them in the lump;
At all events, once launched, to hold straight on : For now 'tis all or nothing.
Your gains will bring if they stop short of such Full consummation! As a man, you had
A certain share of strength, and that is gone.
Already in the getting these you boast.
Do not they seem to laugh, as who should say----
"Great master, we are here indeed; dragged forth
"To light this hast thou done; be glad! now, seek
"The strength to use which thou has spent in getting !"
And yet 'tis surely much, 'tis very much,
Thus to have emptied youth of all its gifts,
To feed a fire meant to hold out till morn
Arrive with inexhaustible light; and lo,
I have heaped up my last, and day dawns not!
While I am left with gray hair, faded hands,
And furrowed brow. Ha, have I, after all,
Mistaken the wild nursling of my breast?
Knowledge it seemed, and Power, and Recompense !
Was she who glided through my room of nights,-
Who laid my head on her soft knees, and smoothed
The damp locks,-whose sly soothings just began
When my sick spirit craved repose awhile-
God! was I fighting Sleep off for Death's sake?
God! Thou art Mind!
Unto the Master-Mind
Spare my mind alone !
All else I will endure : if, as I stand
Here, with my gains, thy thunder smite me down,
I bow me; 'tis thy will, thy righteous will;
I o'erpass life's restrictions, and I die :
And if no trace of my career remain,
Save a thin corpse at pleasure of the wind
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