directly and indirectly, upon my soul; let none of it go past. Hindrances to my delight? They but make it piquant. Helps to it? Why should I repeat that, the higher my soul can rise, the deeper in degradation it can sink to find its joy. Enough that I can live! 361-414. << Wait for some transcendent future life! Never!though, all the same, for that life I trust my soul to He will not neglect earth Fate; for, like one who throws a handful of dust-so for any angelic easy was her act-she chequered the void with beauties heaven. that diversely affect my soul: what marvel, then, if, when these are consigned to nothingness by death, she should fashion for me, at another throw, a still superber spectacle? What light may there be hereafter instead of this sun? What may wander over me as moon? What will wind about me like the pleasures I shall have left behind? How will whatever takes the place of flesh cling around me? What will the new laughter be? Will the new sleep refresh like the sleep of earth? I cannot tell; but assuredly Fate is exhaustless in power to shape a grander world for me. But would she therefore have me leave alone this present life? Does she bid me quench my thirst at this first rivulet, or does she bid me count no draught worth drinking unless it come from some rocky fount above the clouds? And the stream here below is so sweet, with the voice in its pearly waters, over which hang shady trees, and its face of reate and sedge, and its silver beads and golden gravel beneath. It would be too absurd to slight the pleasure of the body for the hereafter! Let me quench my thirst here first, then go to a spring elsewhere-deck my hair with lilies of home ere I deck them with the lotus of a foreign land. Here, now, is the crowd. It forms the interest and chance of this present life, and I will use it one way or another. Heartily would I serve it with my life if that would really bring men good; but, if this be no service, why should they ask anything of me? If there are men who, seeing a better life beyond 414-428. Rather let heaven be earth intensified. death, cannot help setting aside this life, why should I refuse the gift? I take it, with its grand chance of self-indulgence. I will go through with it, and never will I howl that it were better to be stock or stone than a creature whose wants cannot be satisfied. I will praise this world, which you call the mere anteroom to the palace of a future life. Suppose it be nothing more! Shall my foot assume the courtly gait, my tongue its artificial speech, and my mouth. its smirk, a single moment before the palace-doors fly open? What! Shall I do nothing in the anteroom, with its gay swarms of guards and valets, pages and waiting-girls? Shall I have no pleasure in displacing pert claimants and securing a favourable position for down-hearted suitors-in laughing at the sleek parasite and breaking his own staff over the pompous usher's shoulders? Why, when admitted to the royal presence by and by, should I grieve, among the new joys there, over having left these other joys behind me? That the presence - chamber is floored with precious stones does not make me decline the pleasures of its less costly anteroom. "A future world in which the most precious things of this earth are but floor-work? I am no such fool as to desire any such change. Rather, if I must miss this earth for heaven, and mine were the choosing, I would ask to have, only in a higher degree, the pleasures that are here. Give me firmer arm and fleeter foot, but do not turn my limbs into wings-so soft is our greensward to the tread. I have no desire to rest aloft upon the thundercloud. We feel the bliss the more keenly that we have bodily organs, distinct from our spirits, to serve our purposes. Better to have a heaven through which I can move palpably than to fly through whole systems of worlds. Let my heaven be an intenser earth, with still a heaven above it! "Yet the cup of life, the extreme dull dregs of which I would now drink, was so often, just when full, dashed 429-457. from my lips. Surely I shall taste at last! To shun death and grasp the joy of selfishness is my one longing Right will not restrain him, —to shun death, which yet has so often revealed to men for right cona better life, which this life conceals, and which sage and sists in the strongest champion and martyr have fearlessly pursued by paths interest. of horrid torture. It was well for them; and I also would welcome death if I could see a better life behind. Only let what proves itself stronger than this present life disclose itself to me, and I will gladly die. But no empty moral conventions! My appeal is made to what I really feel; it is my feeling that makes me, and I know what I feel. What is truth, or right? One object, seen from different points, may appear beautiful or ugly according to the beholder's eye, but why must only one of its sides be right? Is there anything to bid a man choose one and reject its opposite? For me there is no abstract right. Right, for me, has always expressed itself in circumstances, and it must be pursued through every change in a life's history, since every period demands its own law and conduct. Any one of three courses might at this time constitute the right for me. might govern men regally with the Emperor, or I might obey him like his most timid-hearted serf, or I might start up suddenly, like a thought of God's, refuse this proffered power and wealth for the people's sake, and call upon whoever will to come and pick up the privileges I fling away." 291. 'tempts.' Attempts. 295. 'a pageant-city's.' Of the ideal Rome? I 301. 'The world's discardings!' It is difficult to say whether this means the miserable multitude or the things condemned, conventionally at least, by the world (1. 333 f.) 311. 'till.' Used, as in the phrase 'True till death,' without any terminative sense. 371. 'wander.' "To behold the wandering moon -Milton's Il Penscroso. 381. 'reate.' The water crowfoot. The name may be applied generally to the floating plants of a stream. "... let it" (the pond) "dry six or twelve months to kill the water-weeds, as water-lilies, candocks, reate, and bulrushes, that breed there."-Walton's Complete Angler. 382. 'grail.' A contraction of 'gravel.' 391. 'cannot choose.' See 1. 433 f. 399. 'trope.' Perhaps in its ordinary meaning of 'figure of speech.' 409. 'should thought of having lost.' An answer to the idea that we should not enjoy the present because it is fleeting. 411. 'citrine.' Of a greenish-yellow colour, like a citron. 'pyropus-stone.' A translucent deep-red gem, allied to the garnet. (ûp, ‘fire,' and y, 'eye,' 'face.') 445. 'a single of the sides.' There may be an unabashed realism in morals as in art. 448. 'still present, still to be pursued.' In youth he was endued with a certain right, and right is present in each stage, but it is not the same as the right in the stage before. There is no such thing as right apart from a man's circumstances and feelings, and these change. 455. Brutus.' There is no reference to any particular action of his. He shattered the regal power by banishing the Tarquin, but he did not seize on any of the broken power for himself. Scorning to reap any personal advantage, Sordello might fling down the badge, and thus, as well as by his gift of speech, destroy the Imperial power in Lombardy. Ll. 457-603. Sophistry over, Sordello again faces the truth, and now also understands its philosophy. He has made himself miserable through failing to accept the limitations imposed upon the soul by this earthly life. In this life -and the principle applies to all spheres of future existence a man's joy grows out of his proportioning to this life's conditions the amount of soul to be exercised, and it is love alone that can make a genius like Sordello accept such limitation. Sordello has been a god to himself; but what need a man has of a Divine Power, Who, being of different essence, is worthy of his whole being's worship, and, at the 457-484. Sordello sees that our good and evil and ties are con Then, as one who should pass through the outer parts of the earth and on till he comes upon the nucleus from which it grew, Sordello passed down through the secondary states of his soul's essence to the essence itself to other qualithe inmost, deep yearnings of which these are but a ditioned by covering; and, as one might most easily reach that nucleus time, when half the globe is dissolved, so the last truth Sordello saw was evolved by the break up of his fleshly part. Free from its binding power, he perceived that ill and good, sorrow and joy, beauty and ugliness, virtue and vice, the larger and the less-in short, all qualities recognised on earth-might be merely modes of time and this one world of matter, and incapable of binding. eternity (as they bind time) or mind (as they bind matter), if mind and eternity should choose to assert their attributes within a life conditioned otherwise than ours. These attributes, girt now with earthly circumstance, may in another sphere be girt quite differently— with a different good and a different evil, though with joys and sorrows still contrived, as they are here, to render easy or difficult a particular course of life under whatever takes the place of flesh, according as that course harms or benefits the arrangements of the new sphere in which it must be run, that these attributes may be prevented from flying beyond it. 485-549. has failed above tem the through trygreatest ing to rise He had poral limitdid not ations. No sooner was this truth apprehended than Sordello felt himself alone, away from time and earth, and And that he understood the failure of his career. What was secret of his past despair, which had been when he was greatest in his self-sufficiency? been made mad by craving, not some power he possess, but the expansion of the power he had. The secret of his despair lay in this: that he had been |