CUERVO - Biblioteca Nacional de Colombia

60 PARACELSUS
Set not remorselessly love's claims aside;
This heart was human once, or why recall
Einsiedeln, now, and Wtirzburg, which the Mayne
Forsakes her course to fold as with an arm ?
And Festus-my poor Festus, with his praise,
And counsel, and grave fears-where is he now?
Or the sweet maiden, long ago his bride?
I surely loved them-that last night, at least,
·When we . . . gone I gone! the better: I am saved
The sad review of an ambitious youth,
Choked by vile lusts, lomnoticed in their birth,
But let grow up and wind around a will
Till action was destroyed. No, I have gone
Purging my path successively of aught
Wearing the distant likeness of such lusts.
I have made life consist of one idea:
Ere that was master-up till that was born­
I bear a memory of a pleasant life
\Vhose small events I treasure; till one morn
I ran o'er the seven little grassy fields,
Startling the flocks of nameless birds, to tell
Poor Festus, leaping all the while for joy,
To leave all trouble for futurity,
Since I had just determined to become
The greatest and most glorious man on earth.
And since that morn all life has been forgot;
All is one day-one only step between
The outset and the end: one tyrant aim,
Absorbing all, fills up the interval-
One vast unbroken chain of thought, kept up
Through a career or friendly or opposed
To its existence: life, death, light and shade
The shows of the world, were bare receptacles
Or indices of truth to be wrung thence,
Not instruments of sorrow or delight:
For some one truth would dimly beacon me
F:om mountains rough with pines, and flit and winK
O'er dazzling wastes of frozen snow, and tremble
Into assured light in some branching mine,
'¥here ripens, swathed in fire, the liquid gold­
And all the beauty, all the wonder fell
On either side the truth, as its mere robe;
Men saw the robe-I saw the august form.
So far, then, I have voyaged with success,
So much is good, then, in this working sea
Which parts me from that happy strip of land­
But o'er that happy strip a sun shone, too I
And fainter gleams it as the waves grow rough,
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