Artemis to Actaeon and Other Verses | Page 6

darkened into death,?And held my scalpel. Well, suppose I knew??Sum up the facts--her life against her death.?Her life? The scum upon the pools of pleasure?Breeds such by thousands. And her death? Perchance?The obolus to appease the ferrying Shade,?And waft her into immortality.?Think what she purchased with that one heart-flutter?That whispered its deep secret to my blade!?For, just because her bosom fluttered still,?It told me more than many rifled graves;?Because I spoke too soon, she answered me,?Her vain life ripened to this bud of death?As the whole plant is forced into one flower,?All her blank past a scroll on which God wrote?His word of healing--so that the poor flesh,?Which spread death living, died to purchase life!
Ah, no! The sin I sinned was mine, not theirs.?Not that they sent me forth to wash away--?None of their tariffed frailties, but a deed?So far beyond their grasp of good or ill?That, set to weigh it in the Church's balance,?Scarce would they know which scale to cast it in.?But I, I know. I sinned against my will,?Myself, my soul--the God within the breast:?Can any penance wash such sacrilege?
When I was young in Venice, years ago,?I walked the hospice with a Spanish monk,?A solitary cloistered in high thoughts,?The great Loyola, whom I reckoned then?A mere refurbisher of faded creeds,?Expert to edge anew the arms of faith,?As who should say, a Galenist, resolved?To hold the walls of dogma against fact,?Experience, insight, his own self, if need be!?Ah, how I pitied him, mine own eyes set?Straight in the level beams of Truth, who groped?In error's old deserted catacombs?And lit his tapers upon empty graves!?Ay, but he held his own, the monk--more man?Than any laurelled cripple of the wars,?Charles's spent shafts; for what he willed he willed,?As those do that forerun the wheels of fate,?Not take their dust--that force the virgin hours,?Hew life into the likeness of themselves?And wrest the stars from their concurrences.?So firm his mould; but mine the ductile soul?That wears the livery of circumstance?And hangs obsequious on its suzerain's eye.?For who rules now? The twilight-flitting monk,?Or I, that took the morning like an Alp??He held his own, I let mine slip from me,?The birthright that no sovereign can restore;?And so ironic Time beholds us now?Master and slave--he lord of half the earth,?I ousted from my narrow heritage.
For there's the sting! My kingdom knows me not.?Reach me that folio--my usurper's title!?Fallopius reigning, vice--nay, not so:?Successor, not usurper. I am dead.?My throne stood empty; he was heir to it.?Ay, but who hewed his kingdom from the waste,?Cleared, inch by inch, the acres for his sowing,?Won back for man that ancient fief o' the Church,?His body? Who flung Galen from his seat,?And founded the great dynasty of truth?In error's central kingdom?
Ask men that,?And see their answer: just a wondering stare?To learn things were not always as they are--?The very fight forgotten with the fighter;?Already grows the moss upon my grave!?Ay, and so meet--hold fast to that, Vesalius.?They only, who re-conquer day by day?The inch of ground they camped on over-night,?Have right of foothold on this crowded earth.?I left mine own; he seized it; with it went?My name, my fame, my very self, it seems,?Till I am but the symbol of a man,?The sign-board creaking o'er an empty inn.?He names me--true! Oh, give the door its due?I entered by. Only, I pray you, note,?Had door been none, a shoulder-thrust of mine?Had breached the crazy wall"--he seems to say.?So meet--and yet a word of thanks, of praise,?Of recognition that the clue was found,?Seized, followed, clung to, by some hand now dust--?Had this obscured his quartering of my shield?
How the one weakness stirs again! I thought?I had done with that old thirst for gratitude?That lured me to the desert years ago.?I did my work--and was not that enough??No; but because the idlers sneered and shrugged,?The envious whispered, the traducers lied,?And friendship doubted where it should have cheered?I flung aside the unfinished task, sought praise?Outside my soul's esteem, and learned too late?That victory, like God's kingdom, is within.?(Nay, let the folio rest upon my knee.?I do not feel its weight.) Ingratitude??The hurrying traveller does not ask the name?Of him who points him on his way; and this?Fallopius sits in the mid-heart of me,?Because he keeps his eye upon the goal,?Cuts a straight furrow to the end in view,?Cares not who oped the fountain by the way,?But drinks to draw fresh courage for his journey.?That was the lesson that Ignatius taught--?The one I might have learned from him, but would not--?That we are but stray atoms on the wind,?A dancing transiency of summer eves,?Till we become one with our purpose, merged?In that vast effort of the race which makes?Mortality immortal.
"He that loseth?His life shall find it": so the Scripture runs.?But I so hugged the fleeting self in me,?So loved the lovely perishable hours,?So kissed