Hyperion to Bellarmin
Nothing can flourish and nothing so deeply dwindle as man. To the night of the abyss he often likens his suffering and to the aether his bliss, and how little does that tell us?
Yet there is nothing lovelier than when it begins to dawn in him once more, after a long death, and pain goes forth like a brother to meet distantly dawning joy.
Oh, it was with heavenly anticipation I now greeted the coming spring! As from afar on a silent breeze the sounds of the loved one’s lyre when all are sleeping, so spring’s soft melodies wafted round my breast, as if from Elysium I sensed its coming when the dead branches stirred and a gentle breath caressed my cheek.
Lovely heaven of Ionia! never had I so cleaved to you, but then never in its blithe and tender play had my heart been so akin to you as now. —
Who doesn’t yearn for the joys of love and great deeds when in the eye of heaven and the bosom of the earth the spring returns?
I rose as from my sickbed, softly and slowly, but my breast trembled so blissfully with secret hopes that I forgot to ask myself what this might signify.
Now in sleep more beautiful dreams enfolded me, and when I woke they were in my heart like the trace of a kiss on the cheek of the beloved. Oh, the morning light and I, we now approached each other like friends freshly reconciled, when they still affect aloofness and yet already hold within their soul the nearing endless moment of embrace.
And indeed my eye opened once again, though no longer as before, steeled and full of its own power; it had become more beseeching, it begged for life, but deep within I still felt things could again be with me as before, and better.
I beheld again my fellow men, as if I too looked to play my part and find my joy amongst them. I truly joined in everywhere with a whole heart.
Heavens! what gloating glee there was that the proud maverick had ended up as one of them! what a joke: the stag of the forest driven by hunger to come running into their barnyard! —
Oh! it’s my Adamas I was searching for, my Alabanda, but there appeared to me none.
Finally I wrote to Smyrna, and as I wrote, it was as if all the tenderness and might of man were compressed into a single moment; three times so I wrote, but no reply, I begged, threatened, minded him of all the hours of love and boldness, but no reply from him, the unforgettable, loved unto death — ‘Alabanda!’ I cried, ‘O my Alabanda! you’ve broken the staff over me. You kept me upright, you were the last hope of my youth! There’s now nothing left for me! that’s now holy and certain!’
We pity the dead as if they felt death, and yet the dead have peace. But this, this is the pain beyond all pain, this is relentless feeling of total annihilation when our life so loses all meaning, when the heart says to itself, ‘down you must go and nothing will remain of you; no flower have you planted, no hut have you built, only to be able to say: I leave behind a trace on earth.’ Oh! and yet the soul can still be so full of yearning, for all its despondency!
I was always searching for something, but I didn’t dare look up in human company. I had hours I could be frightened by the laughter of a child.
Yet mostly I was very still and patient, and often had a wondrous foolish faith in the healing powers of certain things; from a dove that I bought, from a trip in a boat, from a valley the mountains concealed from me, I could promise myself solace.
Enough! enough! had I grown up with Themistocles, had I lived amongst the Scipios, believe me, never would my soul have come to know itself from this side.