stubborn heart, its alchemy begun,
Seems ever near the prize--wealthiest when most undone.

'We wither from our youth, we gasp away--
Sick--sick; unfound the boon--unslaked the thirst,
Though to the last, in verge of our decay
Some phantom lures, such as we sought at first--
But all too late, so are we doubly cursed.
Love, fame, ambition, avarice--'tis the same,
Each idle--and all ill--and none the worst--
For all are meteors with a different name,
And Death the sable smoke where vanishes the flame.

'Few--none--find what they love or could have loved,
Though accident, blind contact, and the strong
Necessity of loving, have removed
Antipathies--but to recur, ere long,
Envenomed with irrevocable wrong;
And circumstance, that unspiritual god
And miscreator, makes and helps along
Our coming evils with a crutch-like rod,
Whose touch turns hope to dust--the dust we all have trod.

'Our life is a false nature--'tis not in
The harmony of things,--this hard decree,
This uneradicable taint of sin,
This boundless Upas, this all blasting tree.
Whose root is earth, whose leaves and branches be
The skies which rain their plagues on men like dew--
Disease--death--bondage--all the woes we see--
And worse--the woes we see not--which throb through
The immedicable soul, with heartaches ever new.'

Again:

'What is the worst? Nay, do not ask--
In pity from the search forbear:
Smile on--nor venture to unmask
Man's heart, and view the hell that's there!'

Merciful God! how men suffer when they fly from Thee. When they refuse
to listen to the sublime voice implanted within, which calls them to
Thee, forever reminding them that they were made for things infinite,
eternal! O ye men of pleasure, it is the very greatness of your nature
which torments you: there is nothing save God capable of filling the
immeasurable depths of your longing! How different the language of
Klopstock, as already quoted: 'What recompense could I ask? I have
tasted the cup of angels in singing of my Redeemer!'

One of the most dangerous, yet most brilliant among the novelists of the
present day, says:

'Properly speaking, love is not a violent aspiration of every
faculty toward a created being; it is rather a holy thirst of the
most ethereal part of our being for the unknown. Tormented with
intuitions of an eternal love, filled with torturin