Was the vine right?
The air which he had breathed for fifty years through all his dust-choked leaves and tendrils had been the air off millions of human lungs, corrupted in its passage through millions of human lips; and the thoughts which he thought were those of human wisdom:
The sad day died; the night fell; the lattice was closed; the flute lay untouched. A great misery seemed to enfold us. True, we were no worse off than we had been when the same day dawned. But that is the especial cruelty of every tempter always: he touches the innocent, closed eyes of his victims with a collyrium which makes the happy blindness of content no longer possible. If strong to resist him, he has still his vengeance, for they are never again at peace as they were before that fatal hour in which he showed them all that they were not, all that they might be.
Our stove was not more chill, our garret not more empty; our darkness not more dark amidst the gay, glad, dazzling city; our dusky roof and looming crown that shut the sky out from us not more gloomy and impenetrable than they had been on all those other earlier nights when yet we had been happy. Yet how intensified million-fold seemed cold and loneliness and poverty and darkness, all!—for we had for the first time known what it was to think of riches, of fame, of homage, of light, as possible, and then to lose them all forever!
I had been resigned for love’s sake to dwell amongst the roofs, seeing not the faces of the stars, nor feeling ever the full glory of the sun; but now—I had dreamed of the fair freedom of garden-ways and the endless light of summer suns on palace terraces, and I drooped and shivered and sickened, and was twice captive and twice exiled, and knew that I was a little nameless, worthless, hapless thing, whose fairest chaplet of blossom no hand would ever gather for a crown.
As with my life, so was it likewise with theirs.
They had been so poor, but they had been so happy: the poverty remained, the joy had flown.
The winter was again very hard, very cold: they suffered greatly.
They could scarcely keep together body and soul, as your strange phrase runs; they went without food sometimes for days and days, and fuel they had scarcely ever.
The bird in his cage was sold; they would not keep the little golden singing thing to starve to silence like themselves.