“He maketh the wrath o’ man to praise him,” he said. “This will be for our good.”
The whole day after, there was not between them another allusion to the matter. Cosmo read to his father a ballad he had just written. The old man was pleased with it; for what most would have counted a great defect in Cosmo’s imagination was none to him—this namely, that he never could get room for it in this world; to his way of feeling, the end of things never came here; what end, or seeming end came, was not worth setting before his art as a goal for which to make; in its very nature it was no finis at all, only the merest close of a chapter.
This was the ballad, in great part the result of a certain talk with Mr. Simon.
The miser he lay on his lonely bed,
Life’s candle was burning dim,
His heart in his iron chest was hid,
Under heaps of gold and a well locked lid,
And whether it were alive or dead,
It never troubled him.
Slowly out of his body he crept,
Said he, “I am all the same!
Only I want my heart in my breast;
I will go and fetch it out of the chest.”
Swift to the place of his gold he stept—
He was dead but had no shame!
He opened the lid—oh, hell and night!
For a ghost can see no gold;
Empty and swept—not a coin was there!
His heart lay alone in the chest so bare!
He felt with his hands, but they had no might
To finger or clasp or hold!
At his heart in the bottom he made a clutch—
A heart or a puff-ball of sin?
Eaten with moths, and fretted with rust,
He grasped but a handful of dry-rotted dust:
It was a horrible thing to touch,
But he hid it his breast within.
And now there are some that see him sit
In the charnel house alone,
Counting what seems to him shining gold,
Heap upon heap, a sum ne’er told:
Alas, the dead, how they lack of wit!
They are not even bits of bone!
Another miser has got his chest,
And his painfully hoarded store;
Like ferrets his hands go in and out,
Burrowing, tossing the gold about;
And his heart too is out of his breast,
Hid in the yellow ore.
Which is the better—the ghost that sits
Counting shadowy coin all day,
Or the man that puts his hope and trust
In a thing whose value is only his lust?
Nothing he has when out he flits
But a heart all eaten away.