The Ideal and the Actual Life

Forever fair, forever calm and bright,Life flies on plumage, zephyr-light,For those who on the Olympian hill rejoice--Moons wane, and races wither to the tomb,And 'mid the universal ruin, bloomThe rosy days of Gods--With man, the choice,Timid and anxious, hesitates betweenThe sense's pleasure and the soul's content;While on celestial brows, aloft and sheen,The beams of both are blent.

Seekest thou on earth the life of gods to share,Safe in the realm of death?--bewareTo pluck the fruits that glitter to thine eye;Content thyself with gazing on their glow--Short are the joys possession can bestow,And in possession sweet desire will die.'Twas not the ninefold chain of waves that boundThy daughter, Ceres, to the Stygian river--She plucked the fruit of the unholy ground,And so--was hell's forever!The weavers of the web--the fates--but swayThe matter and the things of clay;Safe from change that time to matter gives,Nature's blest playmate, free at will to strayWith gods a god, amidst the fields of day,The form, the archetype , serenely lives.Would'st thou soar heavenward on its joyous wing?Cast from thee, earth, the bitter and the real,High from this cramped and dungeon being, springInto the realm of the ideal!

Here, bathed, perfection, in thy purest ray,Free from the clogs and taints of clay,Hovers divine the archetypal man!Dim as those phantom ghosts of life that gleamAnd wander voiceless by the Stygian stream,--Fair as it stands in fields Elysian,Ere down to flesh the immortal doth descend:--If doubtful ever in the actual lifeEach contest--here a victory crowns the endOf every nobler strife.

Not from the strife itself to set thee free,But more to nerve--doth victoryWave her rich garland from the ideal clime.Whate'er thy wish, the earth has no repose--Life still must drag thee onward as it flows,Whirling thee down the dancing surge of time.But when the courage sinks beneath the dullSense of its narrow limits--on the soul,Bright from the hill-tops of the beautiful,Bursts the attained goal!

If worth thy while the glory and the strifeWhich fire the lists of actual life--The ardent rush to fortune or to fame,In the hot field where strength and valor are,And rolls the whirling thunder of the car,And the world, breathless, eyes the glorious game--Then dare and strive--the prize can but belongTo him whose valor o'er his tribe prevails;In life the victory only crowns the strong--He who is feeble fails.

But life, whose source, by crags around it piled,Chafed while confined, foams fierce and wild,Glides soft and smooth when once its streams expand,When its waves, glassing in their silver play,Aurora blent with Hesper's milder ray,Gain the still beautiful--that shadow-land!Here, contest grows but interchange of love,All curb is but the bondage of the grace;Gone is each foe,--peace folds her wings aboveHer native dwelling-place.

When, through dead stone to breathe a soul of light,With the dull matter to uniteThe kindling genius, some great sculptor glows;Behold him straining, every nerve intent--Behold how, o'er the subject element,The stately thought its march laborious goes!For never, save to toil untiring, spokeThe unwilling truth from her mysterious well--The statue only to the chisel's strokeWakes from its marble cell.

But onward to the sphere of beauty--goOnward, O child of art! and, lo!Out of the matter which thy pains controlThe statue springs!--not as with labor wrungFrom the hard block, but as from nothing sprung--Airy and light--the offspring of the soul!The pangs, the cares, the weary toils it costLeave not a trace when once the work is done--The Artist's human frailty merged and lostIn art's great victory won!

If human sin confronts the rigid lawOf perfect truth and virtue , aweSeizes and saddens thee to see how farBeyond thy reach, perfection;--if we testBy the ideal of the good, the best,How mean our efforts and our actions are!This space between the ideal of man's soulAnd man's achievement, who hath ever past?An ocean spreads between us and that goal,Where anchor ne'er was cast!

But fly the boundary of the senses--liveThe ideal life free thought can give;And, lo, the gulf shall vanish, and the chillOf the soul's impotent despair be gone!And with divinity thou sharest the throne,Let but divinity become thy will!Scorn not the law--permit its iron bandThe sense (it cannot chain the soul) to thrall.Let man no more the will of Jove withstand ,And Jove the bolt lets fall!

If, in the woes of actual human life--If thou could'st see the serpent strifeWhich the Greek art has made divine in stone--Could'st see the writhing limbs, the livid cheek,Note every pang, and hearken every shriek,Of some despairing lost Laocoon,The human nature would thyself subdueTo share the human woe before thine eye--Thy cheek would pale, and all thy soul be trueTo man's great sympathy.

But in the ideal realm, aloof and far,Where the calm art's pure dwellers are,Lo, the Laocoon writhes, but does not groan.Here, no sharp grief the high emotion knows--Here, suffering's self is made divine, and showsThe brave resolve of the firm soul alone:Here, lovely as the rainbow on the dewOf the spent thunder-cloud, to art is given,Gleaming through grief's dark veil, the peaceful blueOf the sweet moral heaven.

So, in the glorious parable, beholdHow, bowed to mortal bonds, of oldLife's dreary path divine Alcides trod:The hydra and the lion were his prey,And to restore the friend he loved to-day,He went undaunted to the black-browed god;And all the torments and the labors soreWroth Juno sent--the meek majestic one,With patient spirit and unquailing, bore,Until the course was run--

Until the god cast down his garb of clay,And rent in hallowing flame awayThe mortal part from the divine--to soarTo the empyreal air! Behold him springBlithe in the pride of the unwonted wing,And the dull matter that confined beforeSinks downward, downward, downward as a dream!Olympian hymns receive the escaping soul,And smiling Hebe, from the ambrosial stream,Fills for a god the bowl!