“Is not more lightened which he feels, If his will be not satisfied: And that it be not from all time The law is planted, to abide.”—pp. 47-8.
The author applies this basis of fixity in nature generally to the rules of man's nature, and avow himself a Quietist. Yet he would not despond, but contents himself, and waits. In no poem of the volume is this character more clearly defined and developed than in the sonnets “To a Republican Friend,” the first of which expresses concurrence in certain broad progressive principles of humanity: to the second we would call the reader's attention, as to an example of the author's more firm and serious writing:—
“Yet when I muse on what life is, I seem Rather to patience prompted than that proud Prospect of hope which France proclaims so loud; France, famed in all great arts, in none supreme:— Seeing this vale, this earth whereon we dream, Is on all sides o'ershadowed by the high Uno'erleaped mountains of necessity, Sparing us narrower margin than we deem. Nor will that day dawn at a human nod, When, bursting thro' the net-work superposed By selfish occupation—plot and plan, Lust, avarice, envy,—liberated man, All difference with his fellow-man composed, Shall be left standing face to face with God.”—p. 57.
In the adjuration entitled “Stagyrus,” already mentioned, he prays to be set free
“From doubt, where all is double, Where Faiths are built on dust;”
and there seems continually recurring to him a haunting presage of the unprofitableness of the life, after which men have not “any more a portion for ever in anything that is done under the sun.” Where he speaks of resignation, after showing how the less impetuous and self-concentred natures can acquiesce in the order of this life, even were it to bring them back with an end unattained to the place whence they set forth; after showing how it is the poet's office to live rather than to act in and thro' the whole life round about him, he concludes thus:
“The world in which we live and move Outlasts aversion, outlasts love..... Nay, and since death, which wipes out man, Finds him with many an unsolved plan,.... Still gazing on the ever full Eternal mundane spectacle, This world in which we draw our breath In some sense, Fausta, outlasts death.....
Enough, we live:—and, if a life With large results so little rife, Tho' bearable, seem scarcely worth This pomp of worlds, this pain of birth, Yet, Fausta, the mute turf we tread, The solemn hills around us spread, This stream that falls incessantly, The strange-scrawled rocks, the lonely sky, If I might lend their life a voice, Seem to bear rather than rejoice. And, even could the intemperate prayer Man iterates, while these forbear, For movement, for an ampler sphere, Pierce fate's impenetrable ear, Not milder is the general lot Because our spirits have forgot, In actions's dizzying eddy whirled, The something that infects the world.”—pp. 125-8.—Resignation.
“Shall we,” he asks, “go hence and find that our vain dreams are not dead? Shall we follow our vague joys, and the old dead faces, and the dead hopes?”
He exhorts man to be “in utrumque paratus.” If the world be the materialized thought of one all-pure, let him, “by lonely pureness,” seek his way through the colored dream of life up again to that all-pure fount:—