The Fatalist replied not, but advanced
To the Enthusiast: " Our thanks are yours;
Revealments of the heart are leaves that form
The Book of Man, and you have traced the thought,
And feeling through each phase, until returned
Again to childhood's paths.
" Receive respect
From one who flatters not; reproof shall come
From the Confessor's tongue.
" But let him hear
A darker tale of one who lived in doubt;
Who trod the valley of the shadow of death.
No stream-like life, diffusing peace, was mine,
The torrent I, exulting in the strength
Of passion disciplined by mastering will.
I could not make confession here; descend
The chase, through paths that open on my home."

He led the way. As in a theatre
When the scene shifts from dungeon-gloom to light,
So Nature changed to us the sudden view.
We looked into the heart of the green hills
Cleft open; a ravine between them wound.
Ascending from the depths, majestic woods
In leafiest magnificence arose;
Patrician ranks of poplar, pine and oak,
A solemn senate, bearded dignities
Tinged by red autumn with staid hues of age.
Azure mists floated o'er them, veiling haunts
Where the eye shapes ideal sanctuaries.
Sun-flashing tints gleamed through their dimpled shades
A greener radiance. From the filmy air
A valley slowly opened to the gaze,
Child-like beneath the vapour's mantling fold,
While a note told its life and quiet joy;
Orchestral voices of the stream afar
On pilgrimaging to his Ocean-shrine;
So still the air each tone was audible,
Making the silence felt in that deep sound!

I watched the haunt with a delighted eye,
For memory could revive no fairer scene
From all her past
The Pastor read my thought;
" We travel far, yet where find we a land
So beautiful as England? where the sun
Invigorates, but scathes not the green soil;
Where winter leaves not its enduring snows,
Where spring, though coy, yet lingers to the last;
And autumn revels in his golden store.
Where hamlets brown, in woodlands buried, raise
Their heavenward spires; where bears the lowliest cot
Upon its time-worn, venerated face,
The stamp of honourable poverty!"
I heard well pleased, and answer needed none.
Descending in that solitary glen,
The sun scarce entered through thick foliage;
Nought looked above save the all-seeing sky.
Yet was no sameness there; the pale grey crags
Shot forth their splintered pinnacles, or pine
Its lightning-shivered boughs, that warning gave
To the green youth in their exultant life.
As downward through the darkest paths we plunged,
The roar of waters deepened, till we stood
'Mid granite fragments hurled from heights unseen,
Crowding the strand, through which the arrowy stream
Shot hastily. Here paused the Fatalist,
Pointing where rose a cot among the rocks,
That, as the blue smoke oozed forth from its roof,
Showed like a thing of torpid life, its breath
Heavily rising on the pulseless air.

He turned to us, as one who set himself
Due obligation to fulfil; his face
Silently mirroring the inner man.
On either side the grey hair, parted, left
His ample and majestic forehead bare
His mind looked steadfastly from his deep eyes,
Stilled as dark waters sedged with fringing brows;
The calm look of a conscious soul oppressed
By solemn trifles of this daily life
No human sensibilities flashed forth
From their grey depths; a cold serenity
Manifest, and a passionless repose
His lips compressed proclaimed the inflexible will;
In whom the softer elements of life
Dwelt not; repelled as sun-showers from the rock:
The man, oppressed, had sought him 'mid the crowd,
Reading the law of duty on his face;
The fulness of regard in his staid look,
And earnestness of manner proved his truth.
With grave but courteous welcoming he spoke;
" Yonder my anchorage, and haven found,
Where prove your welcome; rest beside this stream,
And you shall hear the history of a life."

Masses of crag, o'er the green herbage strewn,
Gave rudest seats; the time, and scene, and man
Silence imposed. We looked from an abyss
Of verdure; wood-crowned hills enclosed the gorge;
A lightning-shivered oak bent o'er the stream;
The Fatalist reclined against the trunk.
His life spake in his face, the visible
Confession of one long soliloquy;
His deep voice came as if from nature's heart,
While self-possessed and slowly he began:

" Brethren! even such we are in heart allied;
Less effort of confession will be mine:
I shall not feel the blood rise to my cheek,
Evoked from memories unexorcised;
Effusions by slow time and habit chilled.
I stand a human tree whose seeds are lost;
Of moving impulse, passions that convulsed,
Impress of truth, and faculties of thought
That blossomed, seared, and died; no leaf remains.

" I here invoke the shadows of the past,
The spirit of memory, that doth unfold
Layers of ashes dead or burning still,
Rolled o'er that buried world, the living soul.
But who shall judge its failings, who retrace
Moral decadence? mark the line where good
With evil met, where purity first dimmed?
What teach us the great angels, Life and Time?
To sympathise with human frailties,
And know our own; to bear and to forbear;
To wait and hope, wisdom's far peaks attained
By the tired spirit and o'erwearied eye.
I played my part ordained upon the stage;
I sought a resting-place, and found it here,
Where shows my life reflected. In the cliff
I read my will, in yon calm stream my days
On-gliding; spring its lesson brings to me,
In autumn's hues I feel my own decline;
In winter's skeleton and fibred forms
I draw the moral that I have not taught.

He paused; the scene was wild and sad; the leaves
On the discoloured stream, the fading year,
And his deep voice, inspired a solemn tone,
Silence unbroken save by him.

" To bring
My youth before you, picture the strong course
Of eagles from their eyries. I was formed
Of massive energies and iron will,
And fiery impulse shot from Nature's forge
Life was to me a problem to be solved
I mused not on the outward shows of things;
The dreaming and imaginative mood,
The indwelling light reflected, was not mine
I loved to bare the inmost heart, and show
Passion's repellent nakedness. My haunt
Was in the lazar-house of man; I sought
To grasp rough human nature by the hand,
And feel my kindred; to confront the truths
That delicate and shrinking sense offends;
To read fate's mandate on the walls; to mark
Passion's lines cloven on each face, by use
Stamped into fiery law.

" In cities reared,
I knew not Nature's holier influence.
I ripened thought amid the factories' din,
And sordor of a life inferior;
Its joys, and agonies, and hopelessness
Whirled groaning round me like the huge machines
By which it toiled. I saw how poverty
In ties necessitous was bound to crime;
Mammon and Moloch, wealth and tyranny.
I marked, amid the whirl of deafening wheels,
Pale want, that strove, o'ermatched, with hungry gain,
The tyranny of strength o'er weakness crushed,
And vice, with stare of hardened apathy.
The dull brick walls closed round their stifling den;
Heavy oppression weighed upon each heart,
As sullenly they wrought their weary tasks
Amid the elements of sin and shame
I saw guilt drain the dregs of infamy;
Heart-wasting misery's hydra-headed forms,
Sickness and sorrow, madness and despair.

" I saw, and owned my human brotherhood;
I bound myself to life I felt was mine.
Then, with a pulse inflamed, I turned and heard
The sceptic to his eager audience
O'errule the law of duty, conscience prove
A shadow, virtue's strife unnatural.
I nursed a fiery independence, mine
The ascendant will, the leader guiding all.
In riotous liberty we mocked restraint;
Calm moments came to us with passion's ebb;
Duty's lost landmarks hidden rose and showed
The shallows where we stranded. Fallen I stood,
I gazed in the recesses of my soul,
And saw the moral ruins lying round,
The pillared strength of virtue overthrown.
Conscious I stood of my decline; I felt
I cowered before an eye within that gazed,
But spake not, what I heard; a voice that told
Of faculty wasted.
" Then I looked within
My brethren's life to justify my own.
I saw that vice and virtue, praise and blame,
Were sounds embodied into forms, forgot
When want or fiery impulse drove the man
Of nature into action; that faith stamped
In him no settled impress, hope, nor fear;
That, while we wrangle on our ant-hill, time
And life roll by us; earth cleaves on her course,
Obeying laws that make us what we are.

" I turned from records of my fellow-men;
I raised my mind toward the eternal One
Bodied by man in his clay-moulded form.
When the keen stars the storm-clouds stained with light,
Alone beneath the troubled elements
I walked, the black sea opening at my feet
A fluctuating tomb; nought visible
Save ghastly foam paling the face of night
Then did I, soothed by that great Organ-peal,
Stand on earth's brink, and look beyond her shore
Into infinity, and for moments felt
Life's marvels might be solved. I knelt before
The One with hope, by doubt o'ershadowed still;
I knelt to my own thought, I was the moth
Aspiring to the unapproachable.
The dull dead weights of life and time had told
Upon my heart, my day of faith was past.

" No more my restless being sought for rest.
When the sun set in storms, in fiery rents
Disclosing shapes in thunders, when the winds
Raised their wild chorus o'er the wintry waves
My soul awoke, I saw Necessity
In action; power that made me what I was
In the grey desolation of the waves
Drearily heaving, in the flying scud
Bearding the clouds that swept by me like ghosts,
I read the face of one reflected truth
I felt that Life was war of all on all,
Akin with death; one and the changeful same.
I looked on Nature with the eyes that saw
Beneath her veils, and read into her life,
The image of the man reflected there;
The calm, and storm, and energy repressed.
I marked the evils of mankind; I saw
How the material impresses controlled
The yielding will, its self made destiny;
How selfishness debased the heart it seared;
The cold withstood the impulses that swerved,
The weak lacked power and failed, the failure vice;
Habits, and faiths, and tongues, alike were taught,
And men the players acting parts assigned.

I watched them stripped of robes conventional.
Some sate apart, and reasoned, even as gods,
Of good and ill, enacting less than men.
Some thought, whose faculty was disbelief,
Of all things, most themselves; the weary owned
Necessity's law, and gloried in repose
Some from life's table spread, in loathing turned,
Feeling the mockery of the tinsel show;
They saw the flower-wreathed skull and grinning jaws
Pointing vain truths to joyous life around.
One motive ruled each breast; a faith or hope,
Where none were hypocrites — to live again;
And to this golden trust the vilest clung,
Until, their wick burnt out, they passed forgot;
The insect tribes that float in the sunlight,
What know they of the fallen? among woods,
Who marks the sinking leaf?
" Here I repose;
Yet in my solitude I feel a want
Of rest I have not found: I seem to snatch
But moments of repose drawn from the heart
Of agitation, as if yet I heard
Too near me life's pulsations, and the shore
Whose waters hide us in oblivion.
I have lived here like the great seers of old;
Myself I still revered; I strove to exalt
My being, swayed not by false stoic pride,
But self-respect inviolate. I owned
My obligations to my brother man,
Duties and law of conscience. I resign
My life to the disposing agency
With calm submission; I must know, or rest
Unconscious; the grave buries or reveals.
No impulse of life agitates me more;
I stand beyond desire, fear, hope, or love;
The man of thought rests on tranquillity.
Nor have I lacked faith, natural or revealed;
I bound myself to nature and my kind;
I drew from each rewards I sought not, peace,
And resignation, and prophetic faith
In slow perfectibility of man.

" I sought not wreaths of fame, accorded still
Beyond the grave, when jealousy and hate
Are felt no more; auguster hope was mine.
I saw beyond the illusive shows of life
The austere and awful face of Truth unveiled.
I proved the rest that grows from restlessness;
From the years lost amid conventional life.
I would have been a ruler of men's minds,
No wrangler vain whose voice dies with the hour;
My epitaph, sole record I shall leave,
Should ever wandering footstep find my grave: —

" " The dust here gathered formed a human life,
Resolved again to primal elements
From which it was; he lived and he was loved;
He thought and felt, and suffered and enjoyed. " "