Alone? The smiling fountain seems to chide me,—
The constant fountain, rooted still beside me,
And speaking wistful words I toil to hear:
Ah, how alone! The mystic words confound me;
And still the awakened fountain yearns beyond me,
Streaming to some unknown I may not near.
"Oh, list," he cries, "the wondrous voices calling!
I hear a hundred streams in silver falling;
I feel the far-off pulses of the sea.
Oh, come!" Then all my length beside him faring,
I strive and strain for growth, and soon, despairing,
I pause and wonder where the wrong can be.
Were we not equal? Nay, I stooped, from climbing,
To his obscure, to list the golden chiming,
So low to all the world, so plain to me.
Now,'twere some broad fair streamlet, onward tending
Should mate with him, and both, serenely blending,
Move in a grand accordance to the sea.
I tend not so; I hear no voices calling;
I have no care for rivers silver-falling;
I hate the far-off sea that wrought my pain.
Oh for some spell of change, my life new-aiming!
Or best, by spells his too much life reclaiming,
Hold all within the fountain-curb again!
ABOUT THIEVES.
It is recorded in the pages of Diodorus Siculus, that Actisanes, the Ethiopian, who was king of Egypt, caused a general search to be made for all Egyptian thieves, and that all being brought together, and the king having "given them a just hearing," he commanded their noses to be cut off,—and, of course, what a king of Egypt commanded was done; so that all the Egyptian "knucks," "cracksmen," "shoplifters," and pilferers generally, of whatever description known to the slang terras of the time, became marked men.
Inspired, perhaps, with the very idea on which the Ethiopian acted, the police authorities have lately provided, that, in an out-of-the-way room, on a back street, the honest men of New York city may scan the faces of its thieves, and hold silent communion with that interesting part of the population which has agreed to defy the laws and to stand at issue with society. Without disturbing the deep pool of penalogy, or entering at all into the question, as to whether Actisanes was right, or whether the police of New York do not overstep their authority in putting on the walls this terrible bill of attainder against certain citizens of the United States, whom their country's constitution has endeavored to protect from "infamous punishments,"—the student of moral science will certainly be thankful for the faces.
We do not remember ever having "opened" a place or picked a pocket. We have made puns, however; and so, upon the Johnsonian dictum, the thing is latent in us, and we feel the affinity. We do not hate thieves. We feel satisfied that even in the character of a man who does not respect ownership there may be much to admire. Sparkles of genius scintillate along the line of many a rogue's career. Many there are, it is true, who are obtuse and vicious below the mean,—but a far greater number display skill and courage infinitely above it. Points of noble character, of every good as well as most base characteristics of the human race, will be found in the annals of thievery, when they are written aright.
Thieves, like the State of Massachusetts in the great man's oration, "have their history," and it may be safely asserted that they did not steal it. It is dimly hinted in the verse of a certain ancient, that there was a time in a remoter antiquity "ere thieves were feared"; yet even this is cautiously quiet as to their non-existence. Homer, recounting traditions old in his time, chuckles with narrative delight over the boldness, wit, and invention of a great cattle-stealer, and for his genius renders him the ultimatum of Greek tribute, intellectually speaking, by calling him a son of Zeus. Herodotus speaks plainly and tells a story; and the best of all his stories, to our thinking, is a thief's story, which we abridge thus.
"The king Rhampsinitus, the priests informed me, possessed a great quantity of money, such as no succeeding king was able to surpass or nearly come up to, and, wishing to treasure it, he built a chamber of stone, one wall of which was against the palace. But the builder, forming a plan against it, even in building, fitted one of the stones so that it might be easily taken out by two men or even one.