Idle as I knew the praise of man, and sovereign as was my scorn for the meanness which stoops to the vulgar purchase of popularity, I felt and honored the true fame—that renown whose statue is devoted, not by suspicious and clamorous flattery of the time, but by the solemn and voluntary homage of the future, whose splendor, like that of a new-born star, if it take ages to reach mankind, is sure to reach them at last, and shines for ages after its fount is extinguished; whose essential power, if it be coerced and obscured, like that of a man while his earthly tenement still shuts him in, is thenceforth to develop itself from strength to strength—the mortal putting on immortality.
The Fetters of a Soul
In the whirl of such thoughts I was often carried away, to the utter oblivion of my peculiar fate, for the man and his associations were strong within me, in defiance of the command. The gloom often passed away from my soul, as the darkness does from the midnight ocean in the dash and foam of its own waters. Nature is perpetual and drives the affections, sleeping or waking, as it drives the blood through the old channels. It was only at periods, produced by strong circumstance, that I felt the fetter, but then the iron entered into my soul! To this partial pressure belongs the singular combination of such a fate as mine with an interest in the world, with my loves and hates, my thirst of human fame, my reluctance at the prospect of the common ills and injuries of life. I was a man, and this is the whole solution of the problem. For one remote evidence that I was distinct from mankind, I had ten thousand, direct and constant, that I was the same. But for the partiality of the pressure there was a lofty reason.
The man who feels himself above the common fate is instantly placed above the common defenses of mankind. He may calumniate and ruin; he may burn and plunder; he may be the rebel and the murderer. Fear is, after all, the great defense. But what earthly power could intimidate him? What were chains or the scaffold to him who felt instinctively that time was not made for his being; that the scaffold was impotent; that he should yet trample on the grave of his judge, on the moldered throne of his king, on the dead sovereignty of his nation? With his impassiveness, his experience, his knowledge, and his passions, concocted and blackened by ages, what breast could be safe against the dagger of this tremendous exile? What power be secure against the rebel machination or the open hostility of a being invested with the strength of immortal evil? What was to hinder a man made familiar with every mode of influencing human passions—the sage, the sorcerer, the fount of tradition, the friend of their worshiped ancestors—from maddening the multitude at whose head he willed to march, clothed in the attributes of almost a divinity?
But I was precluded or saved from this fearful career by the providential feeling of the common repugnances, hopes, and fears of human nature. Pain and disease were instinctively as much shunned by me as if I held my life on the frailest tenure; death was as formidable as my natural soldiership would suffer it to be; and even when the thought occurred that I might defy extinction, it threw but a darker shade over the common terrors, to conceive that I must undergo the suffering of death without the peace of the grave. Man bears his agony for once, and it is done. Mine might be borne to the bitterest extremity, but must be borne with the keener bitterness of the knowledge that it was in vain.
A Message from Septimius
I was recalled from those reveries to the world by a paper dropped through a crevice in the rafters above my head. On seeing its signature, “Septimius,” my first impulse was to tear it in pieces, but Esther’s name struck me, and I read it through.
“You must not think me a villain, tho I confess appearances are much in favor of the supposition. But I had no choice between denying that I knew you and being instantly beheaded. This comes of discipline. Titus is a disciplinarian of the first order, and the consequence is that no man dares acknowledge any little irregularity before him: so far, his morality propagates knaves. But I must clear myself of the charge of having acted disingenuously by your daughter. I take every power that binds the soul to witness that I know not what is become of her; nay, I am in the deepest anxiety to know the fate of one so lovely, so innocent, and so high-minded.
A Lover’s Confession
“And now, prince, that I am out of the reach of your frown, let me have courage to disburden my heart. I have long known Esther, and as long loved her. From the time when I was first received within your palace in Naphtali—and I have not forgotten that to your hospitality I then owed my life—I was struck with her talents and her beauty. When the war separated us and I returned to Rome, neither in Rome nor in the empire could I see her equal. To solicit our union I gave up the honors and pleasures of the court for the campaign in your hazardous country. I searched Judea in vain, and it was chiefly in the vague hope of obtaining some intelligence of Esther that I solicited the command of our unfortunate mission. There I felt all hazard more than repaid by her sight, to me lovelier than ever. I will acknowledge that I prolonged my confinement to have the opportunity of obtaining her hand. But her religious scruples were unconquerable. I implored her leave to explain myself to you. Even this, too, she refused, ‘from her knowledge of your decision.’ What then was I to do? Loving to excess, bewildered by passion, oppressed with disappointment, and seeing but one object on earth, my evil genius prompted me to act the dissembler.