No, no, go not to Lethe, neither twist Wolf's-bane, tight-rooted, for its poisonous wine; Nor suffer thy pale forehead to be kiss'd By night-shade, ruby grape of Proserpine; Make not your rosary of yew-berries, Nor let the beetle, nor the death-moth be Your mournful Psyche, nor the downy owl A partner in your sorrow's mysteries; For shade to shade will come too drowsily, And drown the wakeful anguish of the soul.
But when the melancholy fit shall fall Sudden from heaven like a weeping cloud, That fosters the droop-headed flowers all, And hides the green hill in an April shroud; Then glut thy sorrow on a morning rose, Or on the rainbow of the salt-sand wave, Or in the wealth of globed peonies; Or if thy mistress some rich anger shows, Imprison her soft hand, and let her rave, And feed deep, deep upon her peerless eyes.
She dwells with Beauty--Beauty that must die; And Joy, whose hand is ever at his lips Bidding adieu; and aching Pleasure nigh, Turning to poison while the bee-moth sips: Ay, in the very temple of Delight Veiled Melancholy has her sovran shrine, Though seen of none save him whose strenuous tongue Can burst Joy's grape against his palate fine; His soul shall taste the sadness of her might, And be among her cloudy trophies hung.
The main direction of our studies has been indicated in the preceding lectures to such an extent that from this point forward our customary review may be omitted. In examining the _Prometheus_ of Æschylus we have found three particulars, in which not only Æschylus, but his entire contemporary time shows complete unconsciousness of the most precious and essential belongings of personality. These particulars were, (1), the absolute impossibility of growth, implicitly affirmed of the gods and explicitly affirmed of men in the passages which were read; (2) the awkwardness of Jove's apparatus of power which included a minister for every kind of act--as contrasted with the elasticity and much-in-little which each man must perceive in regarding the action of his own mind; and (3) the gross and purely physical character of the punishments used by Jove to break the spirit of Prometheus. It was contended, you remember, that if the audience of Æschylus had acquired that direct way of looking phenomena in the face, which is one of the incidents of our modern personality, they would have perceived such an inadequacy between the thunders and earthquakes of Jove, on the one hand, and the immortal spirit of a Titan and a god like Prometheus, on the other, that the play, instead of being a religious and impressive spectacle to them, as it doubtless was, would have been simply a matter of ridicule, or at best one of those mere _dilettante_ entertainments where of our own free will we forgive the grossest violations of common sense and propriety for the sake of the music or the scenery with which they are associated, as for example at the Italian opera, or the Christmas pantomime.