The Ideal And The Actual Life

Forever fair, forever calm and bright,
Life flies on plumage, zephyr-light,
 For those who on the Olympian hill rejoice--
Moons wane, and races wither to the tomb,
And 'mid the universal ruin, bloom
 The rosy days of Gods--With man, the choice,
Timid and anxious, hesitates between
 The sense's pleasure and the soul's content;
While on celestial brows, aloft and sheen,
 The beams of both are blent.

Seekest thou on earth the life of gods to share,
Safe in the realm of death?--beware
 To pluck the fruits that glitter to thine eye;
Content thyself with gazing on their glow--
Short are the joys possession can bestow,
 And in possession sweet desire will die.
'Twas not the ninefold chain of waves that bound
 Thy daughter, Ceres, to the Stygian river--
She plucked the fruit of the unholy ground,
 And so--was hell's forever!
The weavers of the web--the fates--but sway
The matter and the things of clay;
 Safe from change that time to matter gives,
Nature's blest playmate, free at will to stray
With gods a god, amidst the fields of day,
 The form, the archetype [39], serenely lives.
Would'st thou soar heavenward on its joyous wing?
 Cast from thee, earth, the bitter and the real,
High from this cramped and dungeon being, spring
 Into the realm of the ideal!

Here, bathed, perfection, in thy purest ray,
Free from the clogs and taints of clay,
 Hovers divine the archetypal man!
Dim as those phantom ghosts of life that gleam
And wander voiceless by the Stygian stream,--
 Fair as it stands in fields Elysian,
Ere down to flesh the immortal doth descend:--
 If doubtful ever in the actual life
Each contest--here a victory crowns the end
 Of every nobler strife.

Not from the strife itself to set thee free,
But more to nerve--doth victory
 Wave her rich garland from the ideal clime.
Whate'er thy wish, the earth has no repose--
Life still must drag thee onward as it flows,
 Whirling thee down the dancing surge of time.
But when the courage sinks beneath the dull
 Sense of its narrow limits--on the soul,
Bright from the hill-tops of the beautiful,
 Bursts the attained goal!

If worth thy while the glory and the strife
Which fire the lists of actual life--
 The ardent rush to fortune or to fame,
In the hot field where strength and valor are,
And rolls the whirling thunder of the car,
 And the world, breathless, eyes the glorious game--
Then dare and strive--the prize can but belong
 To him whose valor o'er his tribe prevails;
In life the victory only crowns the strong--
 He who is feeble fails.

But life, whose source, by crags around it piled,
Chafed while confined, foams fierce and wild,
 Glides soft and smooth when once its streams expand,
When its waves, glassing in their silver play,
Aurora blent with Hesper's milder ray,
 Gain the still beautiful--that shadow-land!
Here, contest grows but interchange of love,
 All curb is but the bondage of the grace;
Gone is each foe,--peace folds her wings above
 Her native dwelling-place.

When, through dead stone to breathe a soul of light,
With the dull matter to unite
 The kindling genius, some great sculptor glows;
Behold him straining, every nerve intent--
Behold how, o'er the subject element,
 The stately thought its march laborious goes!
For never, save to toil untiring, spoke
 The unwilling truth from her mysterious well--
The statue only to the chisel's stroke
 Wakes from its marble cell.

But onward to the sphere of beauty--go
Onward, O child of art! and, lo!
 Out of the matter which thy pains control
The statue springs!--not as with labor wrung
From the hard block, but as from nothing sprung--
 Airy and light--the offspring of the soul!
The pangs, the cares, the weary toils it cost
 Leave not a trace when once the work is done--
The Artist's human frailty merged and lost
 In art's great victory won! [40]

If human sin confronts the rigid law
Of perfect truth and virtue [41], awe
 Seizes and saddens thee to see how far
Beyond thy reach, perfection;--if we test
By the ideal of the good, the best,
 How mean our efforts and our actions are!
This space between the ideal of man's soul
 And man's achievement, who hath ever past?
An ocean spreads between us and that goal,
 Where anchor ne'er was cast!

But fly the boundary of the senses--live
The ideal life free thought can give;
 And, lo, the gulf shall vanish, and the chill
Of the soul's impotent despair be gone!
And with divinity thou sharest the throne,
 Let but divini