“As it was so,” he says again,
“as it was so in the beginning,
it shall be so in the end.”
There is the feeling here of a man who is striving to see things as they are. He will not blind himself to things: he will not answer “the painful riddle of the earth” by “stopping up his mouth with a clod.” He will have true faith, or no faith. Fate rules us, he sees:
“Man thinks, discarding the beaten track,
that the sins of his youth are slain,
when he seeks fresh sins, but he soon comes back
to his old pet sins again....
Some flashes like faint sparks from heaven,
come rarely with rushing of wings;