Nor is it rare to find passages in him
“with the song like the song of a maiden,
with the scent like the scent of a flower.”
For “dark and true and tender is the north” with all its storm and stress.
Poor “sick stock-rider” and poet, with his wild eyes and wild words, and that “shyness and reserve which kept him locked up, as it were, in himself!” Our proud, passionate heart “out-wore its breast” as “the sword outwears its sheath,” and so we “took our rest,” but not before we had won our resignation and known, or almost known, the truth, even as Empedocles did, and yet died because “he was come too late”—or too soon—
“and the world hath the day, and must break thee,
not thou the world.”
Gordon won his resignation, and knew, or almost knew, the truth. The “criticism of life” that we find in the first two scenes of “The Road to Avernus” is almost ripe: pessimistic, it is true, but almost ripe. Laurence has lost his love, (and Laurence, let us remember, is the lover that “kisses too hard!”) Does he despair in the strain of “Rolla,” or “bluster,” and take refuge in the breast of “the wondrous mother age,” and the “vision of the world” in the strain of the man of “Locksley Hall?” No, he has lost his love, and the loss is bitter, but
“such has been, and such shall still be, here as there, in sun or star.
These things are to be and will be; those things were to be and are.”