O meek attendant of Sol's setting blaze, I hail, sweet star, thy chaste effulgent glow; On thee full oft with fixed eye I gaze, Till I methinks, all spirit seem to grow. O first and fairest of the starry choir, O loveliest 'mid the daughters of the night, Must not the maid I love like thee inspire _Pure_ joy and _calm_ delight? Must she not be, as is thy placid sphere, Serenely brilliant? Whilst to gaze awhile Be all my wish 'mid Fancy's high career E'en till she quit this scene of earthly toil; Then Hope perchance might fondly sigh to join Her image in thy kindred orb, O star benign!
[First printed from MS. _Poetical and Dramatic Works_, 1877-80; _Poetical Works_, 1893, p. 11.]
[Sidenote: HEALTH, INDEPENDENCE, FRIENDSHIP]
Where health is--at least, though pain be no stranger, yet when the breath can rise, and turn round like a comet at its perihelion in its ellipse, and again descend, instead of being a Sisiphus's stone; and the chest can expand as by its own volition and the head sits firm yet mobile aloft, like the vane of a tower on a hill shining in the blue air, and appropriating sunshine and moonlight whatever weight of clouds brood below--O when health and hope, and if not competence yet a debtless _unwealth, libera et læta paupertas_, is his, a man may have and love many friends, but yet, if indeed they be friends, he lives with each a several and individual life.
[Sidenote: SELF-ABSORPTION AND SELFISHNESS]
One source of calumny (I say _source_, because _allophoby_ from _hëautopithygmy_ is the only proper _cause_) may be found in this--every man's life exhibits two sorts of selfishness, those which are and those which are not objects of his own consciousness. _A_ is thinking, perhaps, of some plan in which he may benefit another, and during this absorption consults his own little bodily comforts blindly--occupies the best place at the fire-side, or asks at once, "Where am I to sit?" instead of first inquiring after the health of another. Now the error lies here, that _B_, in complaining of _A_, first takes for granted either that these are acts of conscious selfishness in _A_, or, if he allows the truth, yet considers them just as bad (and so perhaps they may be in a certain sense), but _forgets_ that his own life presents the same, judges of his own life exclusively by his own consciousness, that of another by conscious and unconscious in a lump. A monkey's anthropomorph attitudes we take for anthropic.