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hy Godlike crime was to be kind,[70]To render with thy precepts lessThe sum of human wretchedness,And strengthen Man with his own mind;But baffled as thou wert from high,Still in thy patient energy, 40In the endurance, and repulseOf thine impenetrable Spirit,Which Earth and Heaven could not convulse,A mighty lesson we inherit:Thou art a symbol and a signTo Mortals of their fate and force;Like thee, Man is in part divine,[71]A troubled stream from a pure source;And Man in portions can foreseeHis own funereal destiny; 50His wretchedness, and his resistance,And his sad unallied existence:To which his Spirit may opposeItself--an equal to all woes--[m][72]And a firm will, and a deep sense,Which even in torture can descryIts own concentered recompense,Triumphant where it dares defy,And making Death a Victory. Diodati, _July_, 1816. [First published, _Prisoner of Chillon_, etc., 1816.] A FRAGMENT.[73] Could I remount the river of my yearsTo the first fountain of our smiles and tears,I would not trace again the stream of hoursBetween their outworn banks of withered flowers,But bid it flow as now--until it glidesInto the number of the nameless tides. * * * * * What is this Death?--a quiet of the heart?The whole of that of which we are a part?For Life is but a vision--what I seeOf all which lives alone is Life to me, 10And being so--the absent are the dead,Who haunt us from tranquillity, and spreadA dreary shroud around us, and investWith sad remembrancers our hours of rest.The absent are the dead--for they are cold,And ne'er can be what once we did behold;And they are changed, and cheerless,--or if yetThe unforgotten do not all forget,Since thus divided--equal must it beIf the deep barrier be of earth, or sea; 20It may be both--but one day end it mustIn the dark union of insensate dust.The under-earth inhabitants--are theyBut mingled millions decomposed to clay?The ashes of a thousand ages spreadWherever Man has trodden or shall tread?Or do they in their silent cities dwellEach in his incommunicative cell?Or have they their own language? and a senseOf breathless being?--darkened and intense 30As Midnight in her solitude?--Oh Earth!Where are the past?--and wherefore had they birth?The dead are thy inheritors--and weBut bubbles on thy surface; and the keyOf thy profundity is in the Grave,The ebon portal of thy peopled cave,Where I would walk in spirit, and behold[74]Our elements resolved to things untold,And fathom hidden wonders, and exploreThe essence of great bosoms now no more. 40 * * * * * Diodati, _July_, 1816. [First published, _Letters and Journals_, 1830, ii. 36.]
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