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,
As the soft nightly moon through groves of sombre pine?
I greet thee, matchless phial; and with devotion
I take thee down, and in thy mellow potion
I reverence human wit and human skill.
Fine essence of the opiate dew of sleep,
Dear extract of all subtle powers that kill,
Be mine the first-fruits of thy strength to reap!
I look on thee, and soothed is my heart’s pain;
I grasp thee, straight is lulled my racking brain,
And wave by wave my soul’s flood ebbs away.
