Claude to Eustace

Farewell, Politics, utterly! What can I do? I cannotFight, you know; and to talk I am wholly ashamed. And although IGnash my teeth when I look in your French or your English papers,What is the good of that? Will swearing, I wonder, mend matters?Cursing and scolding repel the assailants? No, it is idle;No, whatever befalls, I will hide, will ignore or forget it.Let the tail shift for itself; I will bury my head. And what's theRoman Republic to me, or I to the Roman Republic?Why not fight?--In the first place, I haven't so much as a musket;In the next, if I had, I shouldn't know how I should use it;In the third, just at present I'm studying ancient marbles;In the fourth, I consider I owe my life to my country;In the fifth--I forget, but four good reasons are ample.Meantime, pray let 'em fight, and be killed. I delight in devotion.So that I 'list not, hurrah for the glorious army of martyrs!Sanguis martyrum semen Ecclesiae; though it would seem thisChurch is indeed of the purely Invisible, Kingdom-come kind:Militant here on earth! Triumphant, of course, then, elsewhere!Ah, good Heaven, but I would I were out far away from the pother!

Not, as we read in the words of the olden-time inspiration,Are there two several trees in the place we are set to abide in;But on the apex most high of the Tree of Life in the Garden,Budding, unfolding, and falling, decaying and flowering ever,Flowering is set and decaying the transient blossom of Knowledge,--Flowering alone, and decaying, the needless unfruitful blossom.Or as the cypress-spires by the fair-flowing stream Hellespontine,Which from the mythical tomb of the godlike ProtesilausRose sympathetic in grief to his love-lorn Laodamia,Evermore growing, and when in their growth to the prospect attaining,Over the low sea-banks, of the fatal Ilian city,Withering still at the sight which still they upgrow to encounter.Ah, but ye that extrude from the ocean your helpless faces,Ye over stormy seas leading long and dreary processions,Ye, too, brood of the wind, whose coming is whence we discern not,Making your nest on the wave, and your bed on the crested billow,Skimming rough waters, and crowding wet sands that the tide shall return to,Cormorants, ducks, and gulls, fill ye my imagination!Let us not talk of growth; we are still in our Aqueous Ages.