University of Virginia Library

POEMS CLASSICAL, HISTORICAL, AND CHARACTERISTIC.

THE IDEAL WORLD.

AS INTERPRETED BY RABBI BEN ENOCH. (FROM THE SCROLL AND ITS INTERPRETERS.)

(Ben Enoch Expounds.)

. . . Mark, how of old
Men held what I, alone of moderns, hold:
(Ben Shishak's known philosophy in this
I recognize, and take the gloss for his)
—Namely, that this thrice complicated world,
Whereof Man stands i' the centre, hath enfurl'd,
And superposed as 'twere, three orbs distinct
Of Life. Each diverse, tho' together linkt
By Life's one law for whatsoever lives,
Whereby of each Earth gains, to each Earth gives,
What helps in turn, the End-all, and the Be-all:
One Animal: one Human: one Ideal:
Three circles of one sphere. Of these, the least
And lowest, is the kingdom of the beast,
Which man commands: who holds the middle place
Between Earth's lowest, and her highest, race.
But that which is the loftiest of the Three,
Sole region of Ideas, I take to be:
Which man, in truth, subserveth and obeyeth,
As him the brute beneath him. Whoso sayeth
A man's ideas to a man belong,
Knoweth not what he saith, or argueth wrong.
Far rather, I imagine, doth the Man
Belong to the Idea. For neither can
The Man command the Idea, nor deny
Submission to its mandate. Can he fly
From its pursuing? or its path dictate?
Or summons, or dismiss, or bid it wait,
Or hasten—here advance, and there stand still—
Now active be, now passive—at his will?
And, if it live not servile to his whim,
Say, can he slay it? Doth it not slay him,
Inexorably, with no mercy shown,
As he would slay a beast that is his own,
If his death, rather than his life, promote
That end whereto the Idea doth devote
The Man it uses? All as well my mule,
Whose footsteps I by staff and bridle rule,
Might think he rules me,—goeth by the road
His choice, not mine, selects, nor own the goad,
As that, for my part, I should boast to be
The lord of that ideal lord of me
Whose force I follow, and whose burthen bear,
Not as I will, but as I must, where'er
He goads me. And, if this brute mule of mine
Should lord it o'er his fellow mules, opine
Himself the sage whose way is Wisdom's track,
Because he bears my wisdom on his back,
Were not his folly all the worse? ‘What then,’
One asketh, ‘arguest thou, apart from men,
Ideas can exist? doth not man's mind
Create the Ideal?’ Nay, friend, for I find
Ideas make men, not men ideas. They
The dwellers of the ideal world, I say,
Are independent of mankind so much
As man is of the brutes. No more. For such
As is mankind's requirement of a race
Beneath it, born to serve it,—in like case
Is man. . . . Oh not by any means the lord,
But sturdy servitor, of that dim horde
Of dwellers on his brain; which, truly, need
And freely use,—to bear them, or to feed,—
For pasture, or for burthen, as may be—
Man, for their sakes created. Natheless he
Doth commonly consider and declare
That he is Something Great, because aware
Of Something Great within him. In like way
I dream'd the dial to the beam did say
‘Lo, I am Time!’ A little wind was waked,
Across the sun a little cloudlet shaked,
And the vain index of the heedless hour
Relapsed to nothingness. In many a flower
The moth and grub their dubious egglets hide.
Can the flower choose, or doth the flower decide
What to the summons of the sun shall rise
From her chance treasures to amaze men's eyes?
This launches, sapphrine-mantled, mail'd with gold,
Some warlike wyvern beautiful and bold,
Fit for the Persic say that rides to woo
His shy queen, gaily, in her globe of dew:
That sends forth, barely fit to browze on burrs,
A monster hateful as the imp that spurs
His sooty flank, and hums a hell-born hymn,
Forth venturing darkly when the air is dim.
I can but laugh, not seldom, in my sleeve,
When I look round the world, and there perceive
How men have builded monuments of brass
To others on whose brains the whim it was
Of some Idea, on its sightless way
About the world, to settle, seize, and prey.
Why should the beasts, man scorns, not also raise,
After their fashion, some such baaing praise
About the sure-foot horse man drives, the ox
He ploughs with, or the fatlings of the flocks
Man kills for his best banquet? Now, I deem
That in the purpose of the One Supreme
Man is not, as he holds himself to be,
The highest necessity on Earth. But he,
Born for the service of Ideas alone,
Is for their sake, as they are for their own.
Notice, which most concerns, most occupies,
That Providence whereby man lives and dies:
Men or Ideas? An Idea hath need
Of growth,—full scope to satisfy its greed
Of power, and multiply, and propagate.
To meet which, man is there i' the mass. Now wait.
What happens? mark the issue. Men must perish
Wholesale, it may be, or piecemeal, to cherish,
Enrich, and ratify, the otherwise
Starved and pent life this one Idea tries
To nourish at men's cost; itself or these
Succumbing. Which doth the World's Ruler please
To rescue or confirm? Why, horde on horde
Nature, to serve her supernatural lord,
Of her selectest human children gives.
Little accounts she their mere deaths or lives!
'Tis but a race to ravage, but a realm
To wash away in blood, expunge, o'erwhelm.
Doth Nature shrink from,—Providence impeach,—
The sacrifice required? Men's bodies bleach
On bloody battle-fields uncounted. Men
Born to be used thus: ended there and then,
Their use being over. Dead and done with, they!
Yet not in vain, do after-comers say,
Lived they or died they, since their lives and deaths
(Else vainly born and buried in vain breaths)
Have served to manifest, make eminent,
The Idea for which they lived and died, content.
But to themselves, who doubts these men's lives seem'd
Of all-surpassing value? Each was deem'd
By the dead owner of it something worth
The special cherishing of Mother Earth.
And if to save and foster man's life were
Earth's, or Earth's Arch Disposer's, chiefest care
We must, for those men's sakes (whose life, pour'd forth
Like water, seems mere waste of what was worth
Such frustrate forethrift, care so baulk'd of gain,
In the fine fashioning of nerve and brain)
Attribute failure vast, or drear neglect,
To Earth's great Justicer and Architect.
But He,—that wrecks man's life i' the sharp ordeal
Which rescues life's pure essence from the unreal,
The false, the fleeting—heeds not how it fare
With the mere Human, born for death: Whose care
Is for the Ideal that doth never die.
The human swarm swims, in its season, by:
Races on races rise and roll away:
The generations flourish and decay.
What laughing Phantom leads, and mocks, the dance
Of these blind mummers thro' the Masque of Chance?
Lives on the life that from their lips it drains,
More glorious waxes as their glory wanes,
Brightens its deathless eyes in that fine air
Whose ardent essence man's prolong'd despair
Feeds with the fires that waste it, and doth dwell
On dead men's graves, deathless, impalpable,
Made of immortal element, the pure
Result of man—man's life that doth endure
Above the dust man drops in? What survives
Save this, the ceaseless dying of men's lives?
Egypt and all her castes—bold Babylon,
Beautiful Hellas—Rome's Republic—gone!
What rests, on earth, the lone result of these?
The airy, but immutable, images
Of their Ideals, in the life that lies,
To light our own, above us. Starrier eyes
Than ours are on us. Egypt's Thought, the Grace
Of Hellas,—now no more to render place
To Rome's strong Will,—the stout town-stealer. . . There
Behold man's bright pall-bearers—they that bear
On their calm brows, for costliest coronal,
The symbols of the summ'd-up ages all! [OMITTED]

KING SOLOMON AND THE MOUSE.

THE DEATH OF KING HACON.

SIDE BY SIDE.

I. (FRIEND AND FRIEND.)

II. (MAN AND WIFE.)