Hyperion to Bellarmin
It was in the beautiful days of autumn when, half-recovered from my wound, I went to the window again for the first time. I returned to life with calmer senses and my soul had become more attentive. With its gentlest magic heaven breathed upon me, and mild as a rain of blossom the bright sunbeams streamed down. There was a great, still, tender spirit in the season, and the peace of fulfilment, the bliss of ripeness in the murmuring boughs, enfolded me like the renewed youth the ancients hoped for in their Elysium.
I'd long not enjoyed it with pure soul, this childlike life of the world; now my eyes opened up with all the joy of seeing anew, and blissful nature had remained changeless in her beauty. My tears flowed before her as an offering of atonement, and a fresh heart rose shuddering from my former discontent. ‘O sacred plant world!’ I cried, ‘we strive and we scheme, and yet we have you! we struggle with our mortal powers to build the beautiful, and yet it grows up effortless beside us! it’s true, is it not, Alabanda? man is made to care for bare necessity, everything else looks after itself. And yet — I cannot forget how much more I wanted.’
‘Be happy, dear friend! that you are,’ cried Alabanda, ‘and no longer let your quiet working be hampered by grief.’
‘And I will rest too,’ I said. ‘Oh, all the designs, all the demands I will rip up like letters of debt. I will keep myself pure as an artist does; you will I love, innocent life, life of the groves and the springs! you will I honour, O sunlight! on you will I still myself, beautiful aether, you that inspirit the stars and here too breathe around these trees and here stir us deep within our breast! O wilfulness of men! like a beggar I bowed my neck and the silent gods of nature gazed at me with all their gifts! — You're smiling, Alabanda? Oh, how often in our early days
together did you smile that way when your boy prattled away before you in the drunken exuberance of youth, whilst you stood there like a silent temple pillar, amid the rubble of the world, and had to suffer the wild tendrils of my love to wind around you — look! it’s like a blindfold falling from my eyes and the golden days of old come to life again.”
‘Ah!’ he cried, ‘this earnestness in which we lived and this lust for life!’
‘When we hunted in the forest,’ I cried, ‘when we bathed in the surging sea, when we sang and we drank where the sun and the wine and eyes and lips sparkled through the shade of the laurel — it was a life beyond compare, and our spirit illumed like a shining heaven our youthful happiness.’ ‘And that is why neither can forsake the other,’ said Alabanda.
‘Oh, I have a grave confession to make to you,’ I said. ‘Will you believe me when I say I wanted away? from you! that I violently sought my death! was that not heartless? madness? ah, and my Diotima! she should leave me, I wrote to her, and then another letter, on the eve of the battle —’ ‘and there you wrote to her,’ he cried, ‘that in the battle you hoped to find your end? O Hyperion! But she may well not yet have received your last letter. You just have to make haste and write to her that you're alive.’
‘Dearest Alabanda!’ I cried, ‘that is solace! I’ll write at once and dispatch my servant with the letter. Oh, I will offer him all I have to rush and reach Calauria in time. —’
‘And the other letter, in which you spoke of renouncing her, the good soul will understand and readily forgive,’ he added.
‘She'll forgive?’ I cried; ‘O all you hopes! yes! if I could still be happy with the angel!’
‘You will still be happy,’ cried Alabanda; ‘you still have left the most beautiful of life’s seasons. The youth is a hero, the man a god if he can live to see it.’
There was a wondrous dawning in my soul as he spoke.
The tree tops softly shuddered; like flowers from the dark earth, stars sprang forth from the womb of the night and heaven’s spring sparkled on me in holy joy.