Hyperion to Bellarmin
Ihave nothing I might truly call my own.
Far away and dead are those I loved, and through no voice I hear from them, nothing ever more.
My business on earth is done. I set about my work with a will, bled over it, and made the world not a penny richer.
I return alone and unrenowned and wander through my fatherland, stretching about me like a vast graveyard, and it may be that what awaits me is the knife of the hunter who keeps us Greeks for sport like forest game.
But you still shine, sun of heaven! You still green, holy earth! Still the rivers rush into the sea, and shady trees whisper in the height of day. Spring’s blissful song sings my mortal thoughts to sleep. The plenitude of the all-living world nourishes and fills with drunkenness my starving spirit.
O blissful nature! I can’t tell what comes over me when I lift up my eyes before your beauty, but all the joy of heaven is in the tears I weep before you, the lover before the beloved.
My whole being stills and listens when the gentle ripple of the breeze plays about my breast. Often, lost in the immensity of blue, I look up into the aether and out into the hallowed sea, and it’s as if a kindred spirit opened its arms to me, as if the pain of isolation were dissolved in the life of the godhead.
To be one with everything, that is the life of the godhead, that is the heaven of man.
To be one with everything that lives, to return in blissful self-oblivion into the all of nature, that is the summit of thoughts and joys, that is the holy mountain pinnacle, the place of eternal peace where noon loses its sultriness and the thunder its voice and the boiling sea becomes like a waving corn-field.
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.