Scornful Apollo's ensign, lie thou there!

Though thou hast been my shade in the world's heat,

Though I have loved thee, lived in honoring thee,Yet lie thou there,

My laurel bough!

I am weary of thee!

I am weary of the solitude

Where he who bears thee must abide !

Of the rocks of Parnassus,

Of the gorge of Delphi,

Of the moonlit peaks, and the caves.

Thou guardest them, Apollo !

Over the grave of the slain Pytho.
Though young, intolerably severe;
Thou keepest aloof the profane,

But the solitude oppresses thy votary!

The jars of men reach him not in thy valley,

But can life reach him?

Thou fencest him from the multitude,

Who will fence him from himself?

He hears nothing but the cry of the torrents

And the beating of his own heart.

The air is thin, the veins swell,—

The temples tighten and throb there,-
Air! air!

Take thy bough; set me free from my solitude!
I have been enough alone!

Where shall thy votary fly then? back to men?
But they will gladly welcome him once more,
And help him to unbend his too tense thought,
And rid him of the presence of himself,

And keep their friendly chatter at his ear,

And haunt him, till the absence from himself,

That other torment, grow unbearable;

And he will fly to solitude again,

And he will find its air too keen for him,

And so change back; and many thousand times
Be miserably bandied to and fro

Like a sea wave, betwixt the world and thee,
Thou young, implacable God! and only death
Shall cut his oscillations short, and so

Bring him to poise. There is no other way.

And yet what days were those, Parmenides!
When we were young, when we could number friends

In all the Italian cities like ourselves,
When with elated hearts we joined your train,
Ye Sun-born Virgins! on the road of truth.2
Then we could still enjoy, then neither thought
Nor outward things were closed and dead to us,
But we received the shock of mighty thoughts
On simple minds-with a pure natural joy ;
And if the sacred load oppressed our brain,
We had the power to feel the pressure eased,
The brow unbound, the thoughts flow free again,
In the delightful commerce of the world.
We had not lost our balance then, nor grown
Thought's slaves, and dead to every natural joy!
The smallest thing could give us pleasure then!
The sports of the country people,

A flute note from the woods,

Sunset over the sea;

Seed-time and harvest,

The reapers in the corn,

The vinedresser in his vineyard,
The village-girl at her wheel!

Fulness of life and power of feeling, ye
Are for the happy, for the souls at ease,

Who dwell on a firm basis of content!

But he who has outlived his prosperous days,
But he whose youth fell on a different world
From that on which his exiled age is thrown,
Whose mind was fed on other food, was trained
By other rules than are in vogue to-day,

Whose habit of thought is fixed, who will not change,

But in a world he loves not must subsist

In ceaseless opposition, be the guard

Of his own breast, fettered to what he guards,
That the world win no mastery over him;
Who has no friend, no fellow left, not one;
Who has no minute's breathing space allowed
To nurse his dwindling faculty of joy, –

Joy and the outward world must die to him,
As they are dead to me!

A long pause, during which EMPEDOCLES remains motionless, plunged in thought. The night deepens. He moves forward and gazes round him, and proceeds:

And you, ye stars,

Who slowly begin to marshal,

As of old, in the fields of heaven,

Your distant, melancholy lines!

Have you, too, survived yourselves?

Are you, too, what I fear to become?
You, too, once lived!

You too moved joyfully

Among august companions

In an older world, peopled by Gods,

In a mightier order,

The radiant, rejoicing, intelligent Sons of Heaven!

But now you kindle

Your lonely, cold-shining lights,

Unwilling lingerers

In the heavenly wilderness,

For a younger, ignoble world;
And renew, by necessity,
Night after night, your courses,
In echoing unneared silence,
Above a race you know not.
Uncaring and undelighted,

Without friend and without home;

Weary like us, though not

Weary with our weariness.

No, no, ye stars! there is no death with you,
No languor, no decay! Languor and death,