Lucile [56]
the first? Or walks without stumbling? Or quenches his thirst At one draught? Bah! I tell you! I, bachelor John, Have had griefs of my own. But what then? I push on All the faster perchance that I yet feel the pain Of my last fall, albeit I may stumble again. God means every man to be happy, be sure. He sends us no sorrows that have not some cure. Our duty down here is to do, not to know. Live as though life were earnest, and life will be so. Let each moment, like Time's last ambassador, come: It will wait to deliver its message; and some Sort of answer it merits. It is not the deed A man does, but the way that he does it, should plead For the man's compensation in doing it. "Here, My next neighbor's a man with twelve thousand a year, Who deems that life has not a pastime more pleasant Than to follow a fox, or to slaughter a pheasant. Yet this fellow goes through a contested election, Lives in London, and sits, like the soul of dejection, All the day through upon a committee, and late To the last, every night, through the dreary debate, As though he were getting each speaker by heart, Though amongst them he never presumes to take part. One asks himself why, without murmur or question, He foregoes all his tastes, and destroys his digestion, For a labor of which the result seems so small. 'The man is ambitious,' you say. Not at all. He has just sense enough to be fully aware That he never can hope to be Premier, or share The renown of a Tully;--or even to hold A subordinate office. He is not so bold As to fancy the House for ten minutes would bear With patience his modest opinions to hear. 'But he wants something!' "What! with twelve thousand a year? What could Government give him would be half so dear To his heart as a walk with a dog and a gun Through his own pheasant woods, or a capital run? 'No; but vanity fills out the emptiest brain; The man would be more than his neighbor, 'tis plain; And the drudgery drearily gone through in town Is more than repaid by provincial renown. Enough if some Marchioness, lively and loose, Shall have eyed him with passing complaisance; the goose, If the Fashion to him open one of its doors, As proud as a sultan returns to his boors.' Wrong again! if you think so, "For, primo; my friend Is the head of a family known from one end Of his shire to the other as the oldest; and therefore He despises fine lords and fine ladies. HE care for A peerage? no truly! Secondo; he rarely Or never goes out: dines at Bellamy's sparely, And abhors what you call the gay world. "Then, I ask, What inspires, and consoles, such a self-imposed task As the life of this man,--but the sense of its duty? And I swear that the eyes of the haughtiest beauty Have never inspired in my soul that intense, Reverential, and loving, and absolute sense Of heart-felt admiration I feel for this man, As I see him beside me;--there, wearing the wan London daylight away, on his humdrum committee; So unconscious of all that awakens my pity, And wonder--and worship, I might say? "To me There seems something nobler than genius to be In that dull patient labor no genius relieves, That absence of all joy which yet never grieves; The humility of it! the grandeur withal! The sublimity of it! And yet, should you call The man's own very slow apprehension to this, He would ask, with a stare, what sublimity is! His work is the duty to which he was born; He accepts it, without ostentation or scorn: And this man is no uncommon type (I thank Heaven!) Of this land's common men. In all other lands, even The type's self is wanting. Perchance, 'tis the reason That Government oscillates ever 'twixt treason And tyranny elsewhere. "I wander away Too far, though, from what I was wishing to say. You, for instance, read Plato. You know that the soul Is immortal; and put this in rhyme, on the whole, Very well, with sublime illustration. Man's heart