Lucile | Page 9

the germ of his power Yet folded, his life had been earnest. Alas! In that life one occasion, one moment, there was When this earnestness might, with the life-sap of youth, Lusty fruitage have borne in his manhood's full growth; But it found him too soon, when his nature was still The delicate toy of too pliant a will, The boisterous wind of the world to resist, Or the frost of the world's wintry wisdom. He miss'd That occasion, too rathe in its advent. Since then, He had made it a law, in his commerce with men, That intensity in him, which only left sore The heart it disturb'd, to repel and ignore. And thus, as some Prince by his subjects deposed, Whose strength he, by seeking to crush it, disclosed, In resigning the power he lack'd power to support Turns his back upon courts, with a sneer at the court, In his converse this man for self-comfort appeal'd To a cynic denial of all he conceal'd In the instincts and feelings belied by his words. Words, however, are things: and the man who accords To his language the license to outrage his soul, Is controll'd by the words he disdains to control. And, therefore, he seem'd in the deeds of each day The light code proclaim'd on his lips to obey; And, the slave of each whim, follow'd wilfully aught That perchance fool'd the fancy, or flatter'd the thought. Yet, indeed, deep within him, the spirits of truth, Vast, vague aspirations, the powers of his youth, Lived and breathed, and made moan--stirr'd themselves--strove to start Into deeds--though deposed, in that Hades, his heart. Like those antique Theogonies ruin'd and hurl'd, Under clefts of the hills, which, convulsing the world, Heaved, in earthquake, their heads the rent caverns above, To trouble at times in the light court of Jove All its frivolous gods, with an undefined awe, Of wrong'd rebel powers that own'd not their law. For his sake, I am fain to believe that, if born To some lowlier rank (from the world's languid scorn Secured by the world's stern resistance) where strife, Strife and toil, and not pleasure, gave purpose to life, He possibly might have contrived to attain Not eminence only, but worth. So, again, Had he been of his own house the first-born, each gift Of a mind many-gifted had gone to uplift A great name by a name's greatest uses. But there He stood isolated, opposed, as it were, To life's great realities; part of no plan; And if ever a nobler and happier man He might hope to become, that alone could be when With all that is real in life and in men What was real in him should have been reconciled; When each influence now from experience exiled Should have seized on his being, combined with his nature, And form'd as by fusion, a new human creature: As when those airy elements viewless to sight (The amalgam of which, if our science be right, The germ of this populous planet doth fold) Unite in the glass of the chemist, behold! Where a void seem'd before, there a substance appears, From the fusion of forces whence issued the spheres!
VII.
But the permanent cause why his life fail'd and miss'd The full value of life was,--where man should resist The world, which man's genius is call'd to command, He gave way, less from lack of the power to withstand, Than from lack of the resolute will to retain Those strongholds of life which the world strives to gain. Let this character go in the old-fashion'd way, With the moral thereof tightly tack'd to it. Say-- "Let any man once show the world that he feels Afraid of its bark, and 'twill fly at his heels: Let him fearlessly face it, 'twill leave him alone: But 'twill fawn at his feet if he flings it a bone."
VIII.
The moon of September, now half at the full, Was unfolding from darkness and dreamland the lull Of the quiet blue air, where the many-faced hills Watch'd, well-pleased, their fair slaves, the light, foam-footed rills, Dance and sing down the steep marble stairs of their courts, And gracefully fashion a thousand sweet sports, Lord Alfred (by this on his journeying far) Was pensively puffing his Lopez cigar, And brokenly humming an old opera strain, And thinking, perchance, of those castles in Spain Which that long rocky barrier hid from his sight; When suddenly, out of the neighboring night, A horseman emerged from a fold of the hill, And so startled his steed that was winding at will Up the thin dizzy strip of a pathway which led O'er the mountain--the reins on its neck, and its head Hanging lazily forward--that, but for a hand Light and ready, yet firm, in