Hyperion to Bellarmin
Smyrna was soured for me now. My heart had grown altogether weary over time. Now and then the wish might rear in me to wander round the world, or find some war to fight in, or else seek out my Adamas and burn away my rancour in his fire; but wish was all it stayed, and my futile sapless life refused to be refreshed.
Summer was now coming to an end; already I could sense the dreich dank days and the whistling of the winds and the brawling of the rain-swollen streams; and nature, which like a foaming fountain had swelled up in every flower and tree, stood already now before my darkened mind, dwindling and closed down and turned in upon itself, like me.
I wanted to take with me what I could of all this fleeting life; all I’d grown to love without I wanted to make safe within, for well I knew that the returning year would find me no longer amidst these trees and mountains; and so now, more than before, I walked and rode about throughout the region.
But what mainly drove me abroad was the secret longing to catch sight of one I’d encountered daily for some time, passing beneath the trees before the city gates.
Like a young titan the glorious stranger strode amongst this race of pygmies who with timid joy drank in his beauty, sizing up his strength and stature, feasting with furtive glance upon the glowing bronzed Roman face, as if upon forbidden fruit; and it was a glorious moment each time this man’s eye, for whose gaze the vastness of the aether seemed too small a bound, so laid aside all pride and searched and strove until it felt itself in mine, and blushingly we passed each other by, looking all the while.
One day Id ridden deep into the forests of Mount Mimas, and didn’t turn home till late evening. I’d dismounted and was leading my horse
down a steep, broken path, over tree-roots and stones, and as I wound my way down through the scrub into the hollow that now opened before me, I was suddenly set upon by Karaburun robbers, and at first I struggled to fend off their two drawn sabres, but they were already weary from other work, and in the end I coped. I calmly got back on my horse and rode on down.
At the foot of the mountain, amidst the woods and the piled-up crags, a small glade opened up before me. It grew light. The moon had just risen over the gloomy trees. From a distance I saw horses stretched out on the ground and men beside them in the grass.
‘Who are you?’ I called out.
‘That’s Hyperion!’ cried a hero’s voice, joyfully surprised. ‘You know me,’ the voice went on; ‘I see you every day under the trees by the city gates.’
My horse flew to him like an arrow. The moonlight shone bright in his face. I knew him; I jumped down.
‘Good evening!’ cried the gentle strapping fellow, giving me a look both wild and tender, and his brawny fist squeezed mine and made me feel his meaning through and through.
Oh, now my bootless life was at an end!
Alabanda — this was the stranger's name — now told me that he and his servant had been set upon by robbers and the two that I’d encountered had been sent packing by him, that he’d lost his way out of the forest and hence had been forced to stay put till I came by. “This has cost me a friend,’ he added, pointing to his dead horse.
I gave mine to his servant and we proceeded on foot.
‘It serves us right,’ I began, as we made our way out of the forest arm in arm; ‘why did we have to hold back for so long and pass each other by, so that it took this misadventure to bring us both together.’
‘But I must tell you,’ replied Alabanda, ‘that you were more to blame, you were the colder one. I rode after you today.’
‘My glorious friend!’ I cried, ‘just you wait and see! you shall never surpass me in love.’
Each moment brought us closer, more joyfully together.
As we approached the city we passed a well-built caravansary, resting amid murmuring fountains and fruit trees and sweet-scented meadows.
We decided to spend the night there. We sat up late together, with the windows open. A sublime spirit of stillness enfolded us. Earth and sea were sunk in blissful silence, like the stars that hung above us. Barely a breeze floated into the room from the sea and gently played with our light, and perhaps the more plangent tones of distant music drifted to us, while the thundercloud lay cradled in the aether’s bed and sounded fitfully through the stillness from afar, like a slumbering giant when he sighs more deeply in his dreadful dreams.
Our souls were bound to be all the more powerfully drawn together, because they’d been unwillingly closed off from one another. We met like two streams that come rolling down the mountain and hurl aside the ballast of earth and stones and rotten wood and all the sluggish mess that holds them back, clearing their way to each other and bursting through to where, embracing and embraced with equal force, they mingle into one majestic river and begin their wandering course into the vastness of the sea.
He, by fate and men’s barbarism driven from hearth and home and hunted hither and thither amongst strangers, from early youth made savage and embittered, and yet also with an inner heart full of love, full of longing to break out of the coarse husk and into a congenial element; I, so inwardly detached from everything already, so wholly alien and lonely amongst men, in the dearest melodies of my heart accompanied so grotesquely by the world’s clanging cymbals; I, for whom the blind and lame were hated of my soul, yet myself too blind and lame, so utterly encumbered by all I had in common, be it ever so remotely, with the sophisticates and pedants, the barbarians and the wiseacres — and so full of hope, so full of single-hearted expectation of a more beautiful life —
How could these two youths not rush to embrace each other in temptestuous joy?
O you, my friend and brother-in-arms, my Alabanda, where are you? I could believe you’ve gone across into the unknown land, to peace, and have become again what once we were as children.
Sometimes, when a thunderstorm passes overhead, dispensing its divine energies on forests and seeded fields, or when the waves of the surging sea disport themselves, or a chorus of eagles soars around the mountain peaks where I wander, my heart can stir as if my Alabanda
were not far away; but more visibly, more vividly, more palpably he lives within me, just as once he stood before me, a fierily stern and terrible accuser when he rehearsed the sins of the age. How then my spirit awakened in its depths, how the thundering words of remorseless justice rolled over my tongue! Like harbingers of Nemesis, our thoughts scoured the earth and cleansed it till not a trace of any curse remained.
We also summoned the past before our tribunal; proud Rome didn’t daunt us with its glory, nor Athens seduce us with its youthful bloom.
Like storms when they, exulting and relentless, blast their way through woods and over mountains, so our souls forged ever onwards in their colossal projects; not that we, like milksops, brought forth our world as if by incantation, callowly expecting to encounter no resistance — Alabanda was too astute and too manful for that. But often even effortless enthusiasm can be soldierly and shrewd.
One day I recall with particular vividness.
We'd gone together out into the countryside, sat in intimate embrace in the dusky shade of the evergreen laurel, looking together in our Plato where he speaks so wonderfully sublimely of ageing and renewal, and now and then resting our eyes upon the muted leafless landscape where heaven, more beautifully than ever, with cloud and sunlight played about the trees in their autumnal sleep.
Then we spoke much of present-day Greece, both with bleeding hearts, for this same dishonoured soil was fatherland to Alabanda too.
And he was indeed uncommonly moved.
‘When I see a child,’ he cried, ‘and consider how demeaning and corrupting is the yoke that it will bear, and that it will languish, as we do, that it will search for human beings, as we do, and ask, as we do, after the beautiful and the true, that it will fruitlessly waste away because it will be alone, as we are, that it — O Greeks, just take your sons from their cradles and cast them into the river, so that at least they'll be spared your shame!’
‘Surely, Alabanda, things will surely change!’ I said.
‘How’ he retorted; ‘our heroes have lost their fame, our sages their disciples. Great deeds, without a noble people to heed them, are no more than a hefty blow to a numb skull, and lofty words that find no lofty hearts in which to echo are like a dying leaf rustling down into the dung. What will you do about it?’
‘I will’ I said, ‘take my shovel and fling the dung into a pit. A people in whom greatness of thought and deed no longer inspires greatness of thought and deed has nothing more in common with others that still are human beings, it has forfeited all rights, and it’s an empty farce, a superstition, to go on reverencing such will-less corpses as if there beat a Roman heart within them. Away with them! It shall not stand where it stands, the rotten withered tree, for it steals light and air from the young life ripening for a new world.’
Alabanda flew to me and hugged me, and his kisses pierced my soul. ‘Comrade’ he cried, ‘dear comrade! Oh, now I’ve got one hundred arms with which to fight!
‘T hear my melody at last,’ he went on, in a voice that stirred my heart like a battle cry, ‘and that’s enough for me! They’re glorious words you've spoken, Hyperion! What? the god shall depend on the worm? The god in us, for whom the path to infinity beckons, shall stand and wait till the worm gets out of his way? No! no! We don’t ask whether you're willing! You never are, you slaves and barbarians! Nor will we try to change you for the better, for that’s a waste of effort! we just want to see to it you make way for the triumphant march of man. Oh! let someone light the torch for me that I may sear the weed from the heath! let the mine be made for me that I may blast the sluggish clods from the earth!’
‘Where possible we'll push them gently aside,’ I interjected.
Alabanda was silent for a while.
‘I take my joy in the future,’ he spoke again at last, ardently clasping both my hands. ‘Thank God! I’ll meet no common end. To be happy is to be torpid in the mouths of the slaves. To be happy! when I hear you slaves speak to me of being happy, it’s like having pap and lukewarm water on the tongue. So fatuous and futile is everything for which you sacrifice your laurel crowns, your immortality.
‘O holy light that wanders restlessly above us, working throughout its vast realm, and transmits its soul to me too in the rays that I drink, may your happiness be mine!
‘The sons of the sun feed on their deeds; it’s by victory they live; with their own spirit they rouse themselves, and their strength is their joy.’ —
The spirit of this man would often seize you so, you might almost have been ashamed, feeling yourself so carried away light as a feather.
‘O heaven and earth!’ I cried, ‘that’s what I call joy! — Those are other times, that’s not a voice from my childish age, that’s not the soil where men’s hearts heave under the slave driver's whip. — Yes! yes! by your glorious soul, man! You will save the fatherland with me.’
‘That I will, he cried, ‘or perish.’
From this day on we grew ever holier and dearer to one another. There was now a deep and ineffable earnestness between us. But we were only the more blissfully together. Each of us lived only in the eternal ground tones of his being, and onward we strode without frills from one great harmony to another. Our common life was full of glorious rigour and boldness.
‘How is it you’ve become so still?’ Alabanda once asked me smilingly. ‘In the torrid zones,’ said I, ‘nearer the sun, even the birds don’t sing.’
But in this world all things rise and fall, and man with all his giant strength holds nothing fast. Once I saw a child stretch out its hand to catch the moonlight; but the light went calmly on its way. So too are we left standing there, wrestling to hold back wandering fate.
Oh, could we only ponder it as calmly as we watch the stars in their course!
The happier you are, the less it takes to bring you down, and such blissful days as Alabanda and I were living are like the peak of a sheer crag where it needs the merest touch from your companion to send you abruptly tumbling over the lacerating edges, down into the endless glooming depths.
We'd taken a glorious trip to Chios, and found a thousand joys in one another. Like breezes over the surface of the sea, the friendly enchantments of nature swayed over us. In joyful surprise we looked at one another without speaking a word, but our eyes were saying, ‘I’ve never seen you like this before!’ So glorified were we by the powers of earth and heaven.
During the trip we’d argued with bright ardour about a good few things; this time, as before, my heart had taken its joy in watching this spirit on his bold erratic course, as he so heedless of all rules, with such cheerful abandon and yet mostly so sure-footedly pursued his path.
As soon as we were back on land we made haste to be alone.
‘You can’t really convince anyone,’ I now said most lovingly, ‘you win people over, you beguile them before you begin; when you speak it’s impossible to doubt, and he who doesn’t doubt isn’t convinced.’
‘Proud flatterer,’ he responded, ‘you lie! but it’s as well that you remind me! only too often you’ve robbed me of my reason! I wouldn’t wish to be free from you, not for all the crowns in the world, but yet I often find it troubling that you should be so indispensable to me, that I’m so fettered to you; and look,’ he went on, ‘so that you may have me all, you shall know all about me too! up till now, for all the joy and glory, we’ve never thought to delve into the past.’
Then he told me of his fate; it was like watching a young Hercules struggle with Megaera.
‘Will you now forgive me,’ he concluded the tale of his adversities, ‘will you now have more patience if often I’m coarse and rancid and hard to stomach!’
‘Oh stop, stop!’ I cried, deeply moved; ‘but to think that you're still here, that you preserved yourself for me!’
‘That’s right! for you!’ he cried, ‘and I’m delighted you yet find me palatable fare. And though sometimes I might taste to you like a crab, just keep on pressing me until I’m fit to drink.’
‘Leave me be! leave me be!’ I cried; I resisted in vain; the man made a child of me; nor did I conceal it from him; he saw my tears, and woe to him if he shouldn’t have seen them!
‘We're carousing,’ Alabanda now resumed, ‘we're killing time in drunkenness.”
‘We're having our bridegroom days together,’ I blithely cried, ‘so why shouldn't it still sound as if we were in Arcadia. — But to return to what we were discussing earlier!
‘Say what you will, you grant too much power to the state. It may not demand what it cannot enforce. Yet what love gives, and the spirit, cannot be enforced. Let it leave that untouched, or we should take its precious law and nail it to the pillory! By heaven! he little knows how much he sins who would turn the state into a school of morals. It’s this that’s always made the state into a hell, that man has tried to make of it his heaven.
‘The state is the coarse husk round life’s kernel and nothing more. It’s the wall around the garden of human fruits and flowers.
‘But what help is the wall around the garden when the soil lies parched? Then all that helps is rainfall from heaven.
‘O rainfall from heaven! O inspiration! You will bring again to us the springtime of the peoples. The state cannot command you hither. But let it not hinder you, then you will come, come you will, with your almighty joys, wreathe us in golden clouds and lift us high above mortality, and we shall marvel and wonder whether we’re still who we were, we, the needy who’d ask the stars if a blossoming spring awaited us there — do you ask me when this shall come to pass? Then when the darling of time, the youngest, most beautiful daughter of time, the new church arises from these soiled and worn-out forms, when the wakened feeling for the divine brings back to man his divinity and beautiful youth to his breast, when — I can’t proclaim it, for I barely sense it, but it shall surely, surely come. Death is a herald of life, and that we’re now slumbering in our sickhouses, that’s a sure sign there'll soon be a healthy awakening. Then, only then shall we truly be, then is the spirits’ element found!’
Alabanda was silent, and looked at me astonished for a while. I was rapt with endless hopes; divine energies carried me away like a wisp of cloud —
‘Come!’ I cried, grasping Alabanda by his garment, ‘come, who can stand it any longer in the benighted dungeon that surrounds us?’
‘Whither, my drunken dreamer?’ answered Alabanda dryly, and a shade of derision seemed to pass across his face.
I felt that I’d been flung down from the clouds. ‘Go!’ I said, ‘you’re a little man!’
At that moment several strangers entered the room, striking figures, mostly gaunt and pale, as far as I could tell in the moonlight, and calm, but there was something in their mien that pierced the soul like a sword, and it was like standing in the presence of omniscience; one might have doubted whether these were the aspects of needy natures, had not murdered feeling left behind its traces here and there.
One I found particularly striking. The stillness of his features was the stillness of a battlefield. Within this man wrath and love had raged, and intelligence beamed out above the wreckage of his heart like the eye of a hawk, perched on palace ruins. Deep contempt lay on his lips. One sensed it was no trivial purpose that engaged this man.
Another more likely owed his calm to natural hardness of heart. He displayed barely any trace of violence, either freely willed or inflicted by fate.
A third could rather have wrung from life his coldness by force of conviction, and often be at war still with himself, for there was a lurking contradiction in his being; to me he seemed to feel the need to keep himself in check. He had the least to say.
As soon as they came in Alabanda leapt up like sprung steel.
‘We’ve been looking for you,’ one of them cried.
‘You'd find me,’ he said laughingly, ‘if I hid myself in the centre of the earth. They’re my friends,’ he added, turning towards me.
They seemed to eye me rather sharply.
‘Here’s another keen to see the world a better place,’ cried Alabanda in a while, pointing to me.
‘Are you serious about that?’ asked one of the three.
‘Bettering the world is no joking matter,’ I said.
‘You've said a great deal in few words!’ cried one of them in his turn. ‘You're our man!’ another.
‘You think that way too?’ I asked.
‘Ask us what we do!’ was the response.
‘And if I asked?’
‘Then we’d tell you we’re here to clean up the earth, that we clear the stones from the field, and break the hard clods with the mattock, and dig furrows with the plough, and seize the tares by the roots, cut them through at the roots, rip them out with the roots, that they may wither away in the searing sun.’
‘Not that we expect to reap,’ another interjected, ‘for us the reward will come too late; we shall not live to see the harvest ripen.
‘We're in the evening of our days. We erred often, hoped much and achieved little. We liked to take more risks than time to think. We were eager to be quickly done and trusted to good fortune. We spoke much of joy and pain, and loved and hated both. We played with fate and it did the same with us. From beggar’s staff to crown it tossed us up and down. It swung us as one swings a glowing censer, and we glowed till the coals turned to ash. We’ve ceased to speak of fortune good or ill. We've grown beyond life’s middle where all is green and warm. But that which outlives youth is not the worst. It’s from hot metal the cold sword is forged. And they say that burnt-out dead volcanoes yield no mean young wine.’
‘It’s not for our sakes we say this,’ cried another now more urgently, ‘it’s for your sakes we say it! We don’t go begging for men’s hearts. We don’t need their hearts, their wills. For there’s no way they can be against us, for everything is for us, and the foolish and the prudent and the simple and the wise and all vices and all virtues of crudity and culture are in our service without hire, and help us blindly on towards our goal — only we would wish that there be some to savour what we do, and so, from amongst the thousand blind helpers, we select the best that we may turn them into seeing helpers — but if no one wants to dwell where we have built, it’s not our fault and not our loss. We did our part. If no one wants to gather where we ploughed, who will blame us for that? Who will curse the tree when its apple falls into the mire? I’ve often told myself, “you're offering to corruption,” and still went on to finish my day’s work.’
‘These are impostors!’ all the walls cried out to my quickened sense. I felt like one about to suffocate in smoke, who smashes doors and windows to get out, so did I thirst for air and freedom.
And soon they saw how ill at ease I was and broke off. Day was already dawning when I stepped out of the caravansary where we’d been together. I felt the breath of the morning breeze like balsam on a burning wound.
I was already too riled by Alabanda’s derision for his mysterious connections not to make me lose all faith in him now.
‘He’s bad,’ I cried, ‘yes, he’s bad. He feigns unbounded openness and consorts with men like these — and conceals it from you.’
I felt like a bride when she learns her beloved is secretly living with a whore.
Oh, this was not the kind of pain one likes to nurse, holding it to one’s heart like a child, singing it to slumber with the tones of the nightingale!
Like a wrathful serpent when it climbs remorselessly up knees and loins, enwinding every limb, and sinks its venomed fangs now into breast, now into nape, so was my pain, so did it grip me in its terrible embrace. I summoned my highest heart for help and strove for noble thoughts so as to still hold back, and for a few moments too it worked, but now I’d also found the strength for rage, and now, like a malicious blaze, I killed each spark of love within me.
‘He must,’ I thought, * — these are his people after all — he must be conspiring with them against you! What did he want with you anyway? What could he have looked for in you, the dreamer? Oh, had he but gone his way! But then they get their peculiar pleasure in taking on their opposite! having such a strange beast in their stable suits them just fine!’ —
And yet I’d been ineffably happy with him, had so often sunk in his embrace and emerged with heart invincible, so often like steel been tempered and purged in his fire!
When once on a serene midnight I pointed out to him the Dioscuri, and Alabanda laid his hand on my heart and said: ‘Those are mere stars, Hyperion, mere letters with which the names of the heroic brothers are written in the heavens; it’s in us they are! living and true, with their courage and their divine love, and you, you are the son of the god and share your immortality with your mortal Castor!’ —
When I roamed with him through the forests of Ida, and we descended down into the valley to ask the silent burial mounds about their dead, and I said to Alabanda that amongst the mounds one perhaps belonged to the spirit of Achilles and his beloved friend, and Alabanda confessed to me that he was often a child and imagined our one day falling in a single vale of battle and resting together beneath a single tree — who would have thought then that it would come to this?
I turned it over and over with all the strength of mind that I had left, I accused him, I defended him, and accused him the more bitterly again; I struggled against my mood and tried to cheer myself, only for all my efforts to end in utter gloom.
Alas! my eye had been left red and raw from many a hefty blow and was hardly even beginning to heal, how should it now see more soundly?
Alabanda visited me next day. My heart seethed when he came in, but I restrained myself, however much I was nettled and angered by his pride and his composure.
‘The air is glorious,’ he finally said, ‘and it will be a very beautiful evening, let’s walk up to the acropolis together.’
I agreed. For a long time no word was spoken. ‘What is it you want?’ I asked at last.
‘You can ask me that?’ replied this savage spirit with a sorrow that pierced my soul. I was taken aback, confounded.
‘What am I to think of you?’ I began again at last.
‘Think me what I am!’ he answered calmly.
‘You need to make apology,’ I said in a changed voice, looking at him proudly, ‘absolve yourself! cleanse yourself!’
That was too much for him.
‘How can it be,’ he cried indignantly, ‘that this fellow should bend me to his every whim? — It’s true, they’d let me out of school too early, Id dragged all the chains and torn them all asunder, there was just one I'd missed, only one still left to smash, I hadn’t yet been chastised by a fantast — go on, murmur all you like! I’ve kept silent long enough!’
‘O Alabanda! Alabanda!’ I cried.
‘Be still, he replied, ‘and don’t use my name against me like a dagger!’
Now my own resentment exploded in its turn. We didn’t let it rest till there was hardly any going back. We violently destroyed the garden of our love. We often stopped and stood there saying nothing, and would so gladly have fallen on each other’s necks with thousand joys, but wretched pride stifled every sound of love that rose up from the heart.
‘Farewell!’ I cried at last and rushed away. Despite myself I had to look back, despite himself Alabanda had come after me.
‘That’s a strange beggar, isn’t it, Alabanda?’ I called out to him, ‘his last farthing and he flings it in the mire!’
‘And if that’s the case may starve for all I care,’ he cried and went his way.
Stunned Istaggered on and presently was standing by the sea, gazing onto the waves — oh! down strove my heart, down into the deep, and my arms flew out towards the free flowing surge; but soon, as if from heaven, a gentler spirit came over me and withits peaceful wand brought order to the turmoil of my sorrowing soul; more tranquilly Ipondered my fate, my faith in the world, my dismal experiences, I reflected on my fellow men, as from early youth I’d come to know and apprehend them, brought up in their multifarious ways, and everywhere found dull or strident discord; only in simple childlike limitation did I still find pure melodies — ‘it’s better,’ I told myself, ‘to become a bee and build one’s house in innocence than to rule with the rulers of the world and howl
with them as with wolves, than to lord it over whole peoples and sully one’s hands on such polluted material.’ I wanted to return to Tinos and live for my gardens and fields.
Smile all you like! I was very much in earnest. For the life of the world consists in alternate unfolding and closing, issuing forth and returning to self, why not too the heart of man?
It’s true this new lesson was hard for me to accept, it’s true I was loath to leave behind the proud errancy of my youth — for who gladly tears off his wings? — but it had to be!
I went through with it. I was now really embarked. A fresh mountain breeze carried me out of Smyrna’s harbour. In wonderful tranquillity, just like a child knowing nothing of the next moment, I lay there on my ship and gazed on the trees and mosques of the city, my green walks along the shore, my footpath up to the acropolis, all this I gazed upon, and let it draw away, further and further away; but now, as I came out onto the high sea and everything was slowly sinking lower, like a coffin into the grave, suddenly then it was as if my heart were broken — ‘O heaven!’ I cried, and all the life in me awoke and struggled to hold back the fleeing present, but it was gone, gone!
Like a mist it lay before me, that heavenly land where, like a hind let loose on open pasture, far and wide I’d roamed over vales and heights and brought the echo of my heart to springs and streams, to breadths and depths of the earth.
Yonder onto Tmolus I’d walked in lonely innocence; down there to where Ephesus once stood in happy youth and Teos and Miletus, up there into the holy grieving Troad I’d wandered with Alabanda — with Alabanda — and like a god I’d ruled over him, and like a child, tender and trusting, I’d done his eye’s bidding with joy in my soul, full of jubilant delight in his being, always happy, whether holding his horse’s bridle for him, or when, exalted above myself, in glorious resolve, in daring thoughts, in fiery eloquence, I matched his soul!
And now it had come to this, now I was nothing, I’d been so hopelessly despoiled of everything, become the poorest among men and didn’t even know how.
‘O endless erring!’ I thought to myself, ‘when will man tear himself free from your chains?
‘We speak of our hearts, our plans, as if they were ours, and yet it’s a power outside ourselves that tosses us about and lays us in the grave just as it pleases, and we know neither whence it comes nor whither it goes.
‘We'd like to grow high up here and spread our boughs and branches out there, and yet it’s soil and weather that decide the way it goes with us, and if the lightning falls upon your crown and splits you down to the roots, poor tree! what has it to do with you?’
That’s what I thought. Does it anger you, my Bellarmin? Just wait to hear what’s still to come.
You see, the sad thing, my dear friend! is that the mind so readily takes on the errant heart’s complexion, so readily holds fast to fleeting sorrow, that thought, which ought to heal the pains, becomes itself sick, that the gardener whose task it is to plant the rosebushes so often lacerates his hand on them, oh! it’s this that’s made many a man a fool before those whom, like another Orpheus, he’d otherwise have ruled, it’s this that’s so often made the noblest nature an object of derision before such men as can be found in any street, this is the rock on which heaven's favourites founder, that their love is powerful and tender as their mind, that often their heart’s waves move more strongly and more swiftly than the trident with which the sea-god rules them, and therefore, my dear friend, let no man get above himself!