Hyperion to Bellarmin
I’ve never known anything so free from wants, so divinely self-sufficient.
As the wave of the ocean round the shores of blissful islands, so my restless heart swirled round the peace of the heavenly maiden.
I had nothing to give her but a spirit full of wild contradictions, full of bleeding memories, nothing to give but my unbounded love with its thousand cares, its thousand tumultuous hopes; but there she stood before me in changeless beauty, effortlessly, in smiling perfection, and
all the yearning, all the dreaming of mortality, oh! everything that in golden hours of morning the genius foretells of higher spheres, was all fulfilled in this single tranquil soul.
They say the struggle abates above the stars, and it’s only in the future, so they promise us, once our yeast has sunk, that fermenting life will turn into the noble wine of joy; otherwise the blessed’s peace of heart is now nowhere to be sought upon this earth. I know different. I’ve come the shorter way. I stood before her and heard and saw the peace of heaven, and in the midst of groaning chaos there appeared to me Urania.
How often have I stilled my sorrowing before this image! how often have overweening life and striving spirit been assuaged when, sunk in blissful contemplation, I looked into her heart, as one looks into the source when it softly trembles from the touches of heaven, trickling down on it in silver droplets!
She was my Lethe, this soul, my holy Lethe, from which I drank oblivion of existence, so that I stood before her like an immortal, and joyfully scolded myself, and as after heavy dreams could not but smile at all the chains that had borne me down.
Oh, with her I should have become a happy man, a great man!
With her! but that has gone awry, and now I err around in what’s before and in me and beyond, and don’t know what to make of myself and other things.
My soul is like a fish cast out of its element upon the sand of the shore, and writhing and thrashing about till it shrivels up in the heat of the day.
Oh! if only there were still something in the world for me to do! if there were some work, a war for me, that should quicken me!
Babes torn from their mother’s breasts and cast into the desert were once, so they say, suckled by a wolf.
My heart is not so lucky.