| “I too have sought to know as thou to LOVE, Excluding love as thou refused’st knowledge; Still thou hast beauty and I power. We wake! ***** “Are we not halves of one dissever’d world, Whom this strange chance unites once more? Part?—Never! Till thou, the lover, know, and I, the knower, Love—until both are saved!” |
After all, perhaps, only the same old world-renowned myth in another form—the marriage of Cupid and Psyche; Love and Intelligence long parted, long suffering, again embracing, and lighted on by Beauty to an immortal union. But to return to our poet. Aprile, exhausted by his own aimless, dazzling visions, expires on the bosom of him who knows; and Paracelsus, who began with a self sufficing scorn of his kind, dies a baffled and degraded man in the arms of him who loves;—yet wiser in his fall than through his aspirations, he dies trusting in the progress of humanity so long as humanity is content to be human; to love as well as to know;—to fear, to hope, to worship, as well as to aspire.
94.
Lord Bacon says: “I like a plantation (in the sense of colony) in a pure soil; that is, where people are not displanted to the end to plant in others: for else it is rather an extirpation than a plantation.” (Bacon, who wrote this, counselled to James I. the plantation of Ulster exactly on the principle he has here deprecated.)
He adds, “It is a shameful and unblessed thing to take the scum of people, and wicked condemned men, to be the people with whom you plant” (i. e. colonise). And it is only now that our politicians are beginning to discover and act upon this great moral truth and obvious fitness of things!—like Bacon, adopting practically, and from mere motives of expediency, a principle they would theoretically abjure!
95.
Because in real life we cannot, or do not, reconcile the high theory with the low practice, we use our wit to render the theory ridiculous, and our reason to reconcile us to the practice. We ought to do just the reverse.
