And any heart, turned Godwards, feels more joy
In one short hour of prayer, than e’er was raised
By all the feasts on earth since their foundation.
But no one will believe us; as if we
Had never known the vain things of the world,
Nor lain and slept in sin’s seducing shade,
Listless, until God woke us; made us feel
We should be up and stirring in the sun;
For every thing had to be done ere night.
What is all this joy and jollity about?
Grant there may be no sin. What good is it?
I can’t defend these feasts, Sir, and can’t blame.
Good evening, friends! Why, Festus! I rejoice
We meet again. I have a young friend here,
A student—who hath staid with us of late.
You would be glad, I know, to know each other.
Therefore be known so.
You are a student, Sir.
I profess little; but it is a title
A man may claim perhaps with modesty.
True. All mankind are students. How to live
And how to die forms the great lesson still.
I know what study is: it is to toil
Hard, through the hours of the sad midnight watch,
At tasks which seem a systematic curse,
And course of bootless penance. Night by night,
To trace one’s thought as if on iron leaves;
And sorrowful as though it were the mode
And date of death we wrote on our own tombs:
Wring a slight sleep out of the couch, and see
The self-same moon, which lit us to our rest,
Her place scarce changed perceptibly in Heaven.
Now light us to renewal of our toils.—
This, to the young mind, wild and all in leaf,
Which knowledge, grafting, paineth. Fruit soon comes,
And more than all our troubles pays us powers;
So that we joy to have endured so much:
That not for nothing have we slaved and slain
Ourselves almost. And more; it is to strive
To bring the mind up to one’s own esteem:
Who but the generous fail? It is to think,
While thought is standing thick upon the brain
As dew upon the brow—for thought is brain-sweat;
And gathering quick and dark, like storms in summer,
Until convulsed, condensed, in lightning sport,
It plays upon the heavens of the mind—
Opens the hemisphered abysses here,
And we become revealers to ourselves.
When night hath set her silver lamp on high,
Then is the time for study; when Heaven’s light
Pours itself on the page, like prophecy
On time, unglooming all its mighty meanings;
It is then we feel the sweet strength of the stars,
And magic of the moon.
It’s a bad habit.
And wisdom dwells in secret and on high,
As do the stars. The sun’s diurnal glare
Is for the daily herd; but for the wise,
The cold pure radiance of the night-born light,
Wherewith is inspiration of the truth.
There was a time when I would never go
To rest before the sun rose; and for that,
Through a like length of time as that now gone,
The world shall speak of me six thousand years hence.
How know you that the world wont end to-morrow?
I now, an early riser, love to hail
The dreamy struggles of the stars with light,
And the recovering breath of earth, sleep-drowned,
Awakening to the wisdom of the sun,
And life of light within the tent of Heaven;—
To kiss the feet of Morning as she walks
In dewy light along the hills, while they,
All odorous as an angel’s fresh-culled crown,
Unveil to her their bounteous loveliness.
I am devote to study. Worthy books
Are not companions—they are solitudes:
We lose ourselves in them and all our cares.
The further back we search the human mind—
Mean in the mass, but in the instance great—
Which starting first with Deities and stars
And broods of beings earth-born, Heaven-begot,
And all the bright side of the broad world, now
Boats upon dreams and dim atomic truths,
Is all for comfort and no more for glory—
The nobler and more marvellous it shows.
Trifles like these make up the present time;
The Iliad and the Pyramids the past.
The future will have glory not the less.
I can conceive a time when the world shall be
Much better visibly, and when, as far
As social life and its relations tend,
Men, morals, manners shall be lifted up
To a pure height we know not of nor dream;—
When all men’s rights and duties shall be clear,
And charitably exercised and borne;
When education, conscience, and good deeds
Shall have just equal sway, and civil claims;—
Great crimes shall be cast out, as were of old
Devils possessing madmen:—Truth shall reign,
Nature shall be rethroned, and man sublimed.
Oh! then may Heaven come down again to earth;
And dwell with her, as once, like to a friend.
As like each other as a sword and scythe.
Oh! then shall lions mew and lambkins roar!
And having studied—what next?
Much I long
To view the capital city of the world.
The mountains, the great cities, and the sea,
Are each an era in the life of youth.
There to get worldly ways, and thoughts, and schemes;
To learn to detect, distrust, despise mankind—
To ken a false factitious glare amid much
That shines with seeming saintlike purity—
To gloss misdeeds—to trifle with great truths—
To pit the brain against the heart, and plead
Wit before wisdom—these are the world’s ways:
It learns us to lose that in crowds which we
Must after seek alone—our innocence;
And when the crowd is gone.
Not only that:
There all great things are round one. Interests.
Mighty and mountainous of estimate,
Are daily heaped or scattered ’neath the eye.
Great deeds, great thoughts, great schemes, and crimes, and all
Which is in purpose, or in practice, great
Of human nature—there are common things.
Men make themselves be deathless as in spite;
As if they waged some lineal feud with time;
As though their fathers were immortal, too,
And immortality an every-day
Accomplishment.
Fie! fie! ’tis more for this:
Amid gayer people and more wanton ways,
To give a loose to all the lists of youth—
To tr your passion flowers high ahead,
And bind them on your brow as others do.
The mornlit revel and the shameless mate—
The tabled hues of darkness and of blood—
The published bosom and the crowning smile—
The cup excessive; and if aught there be
More vain than these or wanton—that to
