health. And now let us detain you no longer from the marchanteas.
Euterpe.
But pray recollect that they grow where the rocks are both slippery and shelving.
[Exit Æsculapius. Euterpe sinks again upon the grass, with her face in her hands, and lies there motionless. Pallas walks up and down, in growing emotion, and at length breaks forth in soliloquy.]
Pallas.
Higher than this dull circle of the sense— Shrewd though its pulsing sharp reminders be, With ceaseless fairy blows that ring and wake The anvil of the brain—I rather choose To lift mine eyes and pierce
The long transparent bar that floats above, And hides, or feigns to hide, the choiring stars, And dulls, or faintly dulls, the fiery sun, And lacquers all the glassy sky with gold. For so the strain that makes this mortal life Irksome or squalid, chains that bind us down, Rust on those chains which soils the reddening skin, Passes; and in that concentrated calm, And in that pure concinnity of soul, And in that heart that almost fails to beat, I read a faint beatitude, and dream I walk once more upon the roof of Heaven, And feel all knowledge, all capacity For sovereign thought, all intellectual joy,
Blow on me, like fluttering and like dancing winds. We are fallen, fallen!... And yet a nameless mirth, flooding my veins, And yet a sense of limpid happiness And buoyancy and anxious fond desire Quicken my being. It is much to see The perfected geography of thought Spread out before the gorged intelligence, A map from further detail long absolved. But ah! when we have tasted the delight Of toilsome apprehension, how return To that satiety of mental ease Where all is known because it merely is? Nay, here the joy will be to learn and learn, To learn in error and correct in pain, To learn through effort and with ease forget, Building of rough and slippery stones a House,
Long schemed, and falling from us, and at the last Imperfect. Knowledge not the aim, so much As pleasure in the toil that leads to knowledge, We shall build, although the house before our eyes Crumble, and we shall gladden in the toil Although it never leads to habitation— Building our goal, though never a fabric rise.