Above this sea of crude distempered thought!
What we know not is what we need to know,
And what we know, we might as well let go;
But cease; cheat not the moment of its right
By curious care and envious repining;
Behold how fair, in evening’s mellow light,
The green-embosomed cottages are shining.
The sun slants down, the day hath lived his date,
But on he hies to tend another sphere.
O that no wing upon my wish may wait
To follow still and still in his career!
Upborne on evening’s quenchless beams to greet
The noiseless world illumined at my feet,
Each peaceful vale, each crimson-flaming peak,
Each silver rill whose tinkling waters seek
The golden flood that feeds the fruitful plain.
Then savage crags, and gorges dark, would rein
My proud careering course in vain;
Ev’n now the sea spreads out its shimmering bays,
And charms the sense with ectasy of gaze.
Yet seems the god at length to sink;
But, borne by this new impulse of my mind,
I hasten on, his quenchless ray to drink,
The day before me, and the night behind,
The heavens above me, under me the sea.
A lovely dream! meanwhile the god is gone.
Alas! the soul, in wingèd fancy free,
Seeks for a corporal wing, and findeth none.
Yet in each breast ’tis deeply graven,
Upward and onward still to pant,
When over us, lost in the blue of heaven,
Her quavering song the lark doth chaunt;
When over piny peaks sublime
The eagle soars with easy strain,
And over lands and seas the crane
Steers homeward to a sunnier clime.
Wagner.
I too have had my hours of whim,
But feeling here runs over reason’s brim.
Forest and field soon tire the eye to scan,
And eagle’s wings were never made for man.
How otherwise the mind and its delights!
From book to book, from page to page, we go.
Thus sweeten we the dreary winter nights,
Till every limb with new life is aglow;
And chance we but unroll some rare old parchment scroll,
All heaven stoops down, and finds a lodgment in the soul.
Faust.
Thou know’st but the one impulse—it is well!
Tempt not the yearning that divides the heart.
