Ardath | Page 8

It is HORRIBLE to think of all the pent-up sufferings of humanity--all the inconceivably hideous agonies that remain forever dumb and unrevealed! When I was young,--how long ago that seems! yes, though my actual years are taut thirty, I feel an alder-elde of accumulated centuries upon me--when I was young, the dream of my life was Poesy. Perhaps I inherited the fatal love of it from my mother--she was a Greek-and she had a subtle music in her that nothing could quell, not even my father's English coldness. She named me Theos, little guessing what a dreary sarcasm that name would prove! It was well, I think, that she died early."
"Well for her, but perhaps not so well for you," said Heliobas with a keen, kindly glance at him.
Alwyn sighed. "Nay, well, for us both,--for I should have chafed at her loving restraint, and she would unquestionably have been disappointed in me. My father was a conscientious, methodical business man, who spent all his days up to almost the last moment of his life in amassing money, though it never gave him any joy so far as I could see, and when at his death I became sole possessor of his hardly-earned fortune, I felt far more sorrow than satisfaction. I wished he had spent his gold on himself and left me poor, for it seemed to me I had need of nothing save the little I earned by my pen--I was content to live an anchorite and dine off a crust for the sake of the divine Muse I worshipped. Fate, however, willed it otherwise,--and though I scarcely cared for the wealth I inherited, it gave me at least one blessing--that of perfect independence. I was free to follow my own chosen vocation, and for a brief wondering while I deemed myself happy, ... happy as Keats must have been when the fragment of 'Hyperion' broke from his frail life as thunder breaks from a summer-cloud. I was as a monarch swaying a sceptre that commanded both earth and heaven; a kingdom was mine-a kingdom of golden ether, peopled with shining shapes Protean,--alas! its gates are shut upon me now, and I shall enter it no more!"
"'No more' is a long time, my friend!" interposed Heliobas gently. "You are too despondent,--perchance too diffident, concerning your own ability."
"Ability!" and he laughed wearily. "I have none,--I am as weak and inapt as an untaught child--the music of my heart is silenced! Yet there is nothing I would not do to regain the ravishment of the past--when the sight of the sunset across the hills, or the moon's silver transfiguration of the sea filled me with deep and indescribable ecstasy--when the thought of Love, like a full chord struck from a magic harp, set my pulses throbbing with delirious delight--fancies thick as leaves in summer crowded my brain--Earth was a round charm hung on the breast of a smiling Divinity--men were gods--women were angels'--the world seemed but a wide scroll for the signatures of poets, and mine, I swore, should be clearly written!"
He paused, as though ashamed of his own fervor. and glanced at Heliobas, who, leaning a little forward in his chair was regaling him with friendly, attentive interest; then he continued more calmly:
"Enough! I think I had something in me then,--something that was new and wild and, though it may seem self praise to say so, full of that witching glamour we name Inspiration; but whatever that something was, call it genius, a trick of song, what you will,--it was soon crushed out of me. The world is fond of slaying its singing buds and devouring them for daily fare--one rough pressure of finger and thumb on the little melodious throats, and they are mute forever. So I found, when at last in mingled pride, hope, and fear I published my poems, seeking for them no other recompense save fair hearing and justice. They obtained neither--they were tossed carelessly by a few critics from hand to hand, jeered at for a while, and finally flung back to me as lies--lies all! The finely spun web of any fancy,--the delicate interwoven intricacies of thought,--these were torn to shreds with as little compunction as idle children feel when destroying for their own cruel sport the velvety wonder of a moth's wing, or the radiant rose and emerald pinions of a dragon-fly. I was a fool--so I was told with many a languid sneer and stale jest--to talk of hidden mysteries in the whisper of the wind and the dash of the waves--such sounds were but common cause and effect. The stars were merely conglomerated masses of heated vapor condensed by the work of ages into meteorites and from meteorites into worlds--and these went on rolling in their appointed orbits, for what reason