oor Delilah-world will not always shear of their
strength and eyesight, and set to grind in darkness at _its_ poor
gin-wheel! Such souls are, in these days, getting somewhat out of
humour with the world. Your very Byron, in these days, is at least
driven mad; flatly refuses fealty to the world. The world with its
injustices, its golden brutalities, and dull yellow guineas, is a
disgust to such souls: the ray of Heaven that is in them does at least
predoom them to be very miserable here. Yes:--and yet all misery is
faculty misdirected, strength that has not yet found its way. The
black whirlwind is mother of the lightning. No _smoke_, in any sense,
but can become flame and radiance! Such soul, once graduated in
Heaven's stern University, steps out superior to your guinea.

Dost thou know, O sumptuous Corn-Lord, Cotton-Lord, O mutinous
Trades-Unionist, gin-vanquished, undeliverable; O much-enslaved
World,--this man is not a slave with thee! None of thy promotions is
necessary for him. His place is with the stars of Heaven: to thee it
may be momentous, to thee it may be life or death, to him it is
indifferent, whether thou place him in the lowest hut, or forty feet
higher at the top of thy stupendous high tower, while here on Earth.
The joys of Earth that are precious, they depend not on thee and thy
promotions. Food and raiment, and, round a social hearth, souls who
love him, whom he loves: these are already his. He wants none of thy
rewards; behold also, he fears none of thy penalties. Thou canst not
answer even by killing him: the case of Anaxarchus thou canst kill;
but the self of Anaxarchus, the word or act of Anaxarchus, in no wise
whatever. To this man death is not a bugbear; to this man life is
already as earnest and awful, and beautiful and terrible, as death.

Not a May-game is this man's life; but a battle and a march, a warfare
with principalities and powers. No idle promenade through fragrant
orange-groves and green flowery spaces, waited on by the choral Muses
and the rosy Hours: it is a stern pilgrimage through burning sandy
solitudes, through regions of thick-ribbed ice. He walks among men;
loves men, with inexpressible soft pity,--as they _cannot_ love him:
but his soul dwells in solitude, in the uttermost parts of Creation.
In green oases by the palm-tree wells, he rests a space; but anon he
has to journey forward, escorted by the Terrors and the Splendours,
the Archdemons and Archangels. All Heaven, all