Opas. Ne’er will the peace or apathy of age
Be thine, or twilight steal upon thy day.
The violent choose, but cannot change, their end—
Violence, by man or nature, must be theirs;
Thine it must be, and who to pity thee?
Rod. Behold my solace! none. I want no pity.
Opas. Proclaim we those the happiest of mankind
Who never knew a want? O what a curse
To thee this utter ignorance of thine!
Julian, whom all the good commiserate,
Sees thee below him far in happiness:
A state indeed: of no quick restlesness,
No glancing agitation—one vast swell
Of melancholy, deep, impassable,
Interminable, where his spirit alone
Broods and o’ershadows all, bears him from earth
And purifies his chasten’d soul for heaven.
Both heaven and earth shall from thy grasp recede.
Whether on death or life thou arguest,
Untutor’d savage or corrupted heathen
Avows no sentiment so vile as thine.
Rod. Nor feels?
Opas. O human nature! I have heard
The secrets of the soul, and pitied thee.
Bad and accursed things have men confest
Before me, but have left them unarrayed,
Naked, and shivering with deformity.
The troubled dreams and deafening gush of youth
Fling o’er the fancy, struggling to be free,
Discordant and impracticable things:
If the good shudder at their past escapes,
Shall not the wicked shudder at their crimes?
They shall—and I denounce upon thy head
God’s vengeance—thou shalt rule this land no more.
Rod. What! my own kindred leave me, and renounce me!
Opas. Kindred? and is there any in our world
So near us, as those sources of all joy,
Those on whose bosom every gale of life
Blows softly, who reflect our images
In loveliness through sorrows and through age,
And bear them onward far beyond the grave.
Rod. Methinks, most reverend Opas, not inapt
Are these fair views; arise they from Seville?
Opas. He, who can scoff at them, may scoff at me.
Such are we, that the giver of all good
Shall, in the heart he purifies, posess
The latest love—the earliest, no, not there!
I’ve known the firm and faithful; even from these
Life’s eddying spring shed the first bloom on earth.
I pity them, but ask their pity too.
I love the happiness of men, and praise
And sanctify the blessings I renounce.
Rod. Yet would thy baleful influence undermine
The heaven-appointed throne.