Afterword

Abstract

To be one with everything that lives! At these words virtue lays aside its wrathful harness, the mind of man its sceptre, and all thoughts melt away before the vision of the world's eternal oneness like the toiling artist's rules before his heavenly Urania, and iron fate renounces its dominion, and from the covenant of beings death disappears, and indivisibility and eternal youth blesses, makes beautiful the world. On this height I often stand, my Bellarmin! But a moment of reflection casts me down. I begin to think, and find myself as I was before, alone, with all the pains of mortality, and my heart's sanctuary, the world's eternal oneness, is no more; nature's arms are closed, and I stand before her like a stranger and cannot comprehend her. Oh! had I never gone into your schools. It's learning that lured me down into the pit, in my youthful folly I thought to find in it the proof of my pure joy, and it has ruined everything for me. Amongst you I became so very rational, learnt to distinguish myself perfectly from what is around me, and now I'm set apart in the beautiful world, expelled from the garden of nature in which I grew and bloomed, and shrivel under the noonday sun. Oh, man is a god when he dreams, a beggar when he thinks, and when inspiration's gone he's left standing there like a delinquent son, cast out of the house by his father, staring at the pitiful pennies given as alms to help him on his way.