Wealth, house and hall, with acres rich and rare,
As wife or child appear she, water, flame,
Dagger, or poison, she is still the same;
And still we fear the ill which happens never,
And what we lose not are bewailing ever.
Alas! alas! too deep ’tis felt! too deep!
With gods may vie no son of mortal clay;
More am I like to worms that crawl and creep,
And dig, and dig through earth their lightless way,
Which, while they feed on dust in narrow room,
Find from the wanderer’s foot their death-blow and their tomb.
Is it not dust that this old wall
From all its musty benches shows me?
And dust the trifling trumperies all
That in this world of moths enclose me?
Here is it that I hope to find
Wherewith to sate my craving mind?
Need I spell out page after page,
To know that men in every age
And every clime, have spurred in vain
The jaded muscle and the tortured brain,
And here and there, with centuries between,
One happy man belike hath been?
Thou grinning skull, what wouldst thou say,
Save that thy brain, in chase of truth, like mine,
With patient toil pursued its floundering way
By glimmering lights that through dim twilight-shine?
Ye instruments, in sooth, now laugh at me,
With wheel, and cog-wheel, ring, and cylinder;
At Nature’s door I stood; ye should have been the key,
But though your ward be good, the bolt ye cannot stir.
Mysterious Nature may not choose
To unveil her secrets to the stare of day,
And what from the mind’s eye she stores away,
Thou canst not force from her with levers and with screws.
Thou antique gear, why dost thou cumber
My chamber with thy useless lumber?
My father housed thee on this spot,
And I must keep thee, though I need thee not!
Thou parchment roll that hast been smoked upon
Long as around this desk the sorry lamp-light shone;
Much better had I spent my little gear,
Than with this little to sit mouldering here;
Why should a man possess ancestral treasures,
But by possession to enlarge his pleasures?
The thing we use not a dead burden lies,
But what the moment brings the wise man knows to prize.
But what is this? there in the corner; why
Does that flask play the magnet to mine eye?
And why within me does this strange light shine,
