39. CHAPTER XXXIX.
Who would lose,
Though full of pain, this intellectual being,
These thoughts that wander through eternity?
To be weak is miserable,
Doing or suffering.
— Paradise Lost.
Morton recovered slowly. The influences about him were
any thing but favorable to a quick convalescence, and it was
months before he was himself again. Even then, though his
health seemed confirmed, a deeper cloud remained upon his
spirits: his dungeon seemed more dark and gloomy, his
prospects more desperate.
One day he paced his cell in a mood of more than usual
depression.
“Fools and knaves are at large; robbery and murder have
full scope; vanity and profligacy run their free career; then
why is honest effort paralyzed, and buried here alive? There
are those in these vaults, — men innocent of crime as I, —
men who would have been an honor to their race, — who
have passed a score of years in this living death. And canting
fools would console them with saying that `all is for the
best.' I will sooner believe that the world is governed by
devils, and that the prince of them all is bodied in Metternich.
Why is there not in crushed hope, and stifled wrath,
and swelling anguish, and frenzy, and despair, a force to burst
these hellish sepulchres, and blow them to the moon!
“It is but a weak punishment to which Milton dooms his
ruined angel. Action, — enterprise, — achievement, — a hell
like that is heaven to the cells of Ehrenberg. He should have
chained him to a rock, and left him alone to the torture of
his own thoughts; the unutterable agonies of a mind preying
on itself for want of other sustenance. Action! — mured
in this dungeon, the starved soul gasps for it as the lungs for
air. `Action, action, action! — all in all! What is life
without it? A marsh, a quagmire, a rotten, stagnant pool.
It is its own reward. The chase is all; the prize nothing.
The huntsmen chase the fox all day, and, when they have
caught her, fling her to their hounds for a worthless vermin.
Alexander wept that he had no more worlds to conquer. What
did it profit him that a conquered world lay already at his feet?
The errant knights who roamed the world with their mistress's
glove on their helmet, achieving impossibilities in her
name, — which of them could have endured to live in peace
with her for a six-month? The crusader master of Jerusalem,
Cortes with Mexico subdued, any hero when his work
is done, falls back to the ranks of common men. His lamp
is out, his fire quenched; and what avails the stale, lacklustre
remnant of his days?
“Action! the panacea of human ills; the sure resource of
misery; the refuge of bad consciences; a maelstroom, in
whose giddy vortex saints and villains may whirl alike.
How like a madman some great criminal, some Macbeth, will
plunge on through his slough of blood and treachery, frantic
to dam out justice at every chink, and bulwark himself against
fate; clinching crime with crime; giving conscience no time
to stab; finding no rest; but still plunging on, desperate
and blind! How like a madman some pious anchorite, fervent
to win heaven, will pile torture on torture, fast, and vigil,
and scourge, made wretched daily with some fresh scruple,
delving to find some new depth of self-abasement, and still
struggling on unsatisfied, insatiable of penance, till the
grave devours him! Human activity! — to pursue a security
which is never reached, a contentment which eludes the
grasp, some golden consummation which proves but hollow
mockery; to seize the prize, to taste it, to fling it away, and
reach after another! This cell, where I thought myself buried
and sealed up from knowledge, is, after all, a school of philosophy.
It teaches a dreary wisdom of its own. Through
these stone walls I can see the follies of the world more
clearly than when I was in the midst of them. A dreary
wisdom; and yet not wholly dreary. There is a power and a
consolation in it. Misery is the mind-maker; the revealer of
truth; the spring of nobleness; the test, the purger, the
strengthener of the spirit. Our natures are like grapes in the
wine press: they must be pressed to the uttermost before
they will give forth all their virtue.
“Why do I delude myself? What good can be wrung out
of a misery like mine? It is folly to cheat myself with hope.
This hell-begotten Austria has me fast, and will not loosen
her gripe. Abroad in the free world, fortitude will count
for much. There, one can hold firm the clefts and cracks
of his tottering fortunes with the cement of an unyielding
mind; but here, it is but bare and blank endurance.
Yet it is something that I can still find heart to face my
doom; that there are still moments when I dare to meet this
death-in-life, this slow-consuming horror, face to face, and
look into all its hideousness without shrinking. To creep on
to my end through years of slow decay, mind and soul famishing
in solitude, sapped and worn, eaten and fretted away,
by the droppings of lonely thought, till I find my rest at last
under these cursed stones! God! could I but die the death
of a man! De Foix, — Dundee, — Wolfe. I grudge them
their bloody end. When the fierce blood boiled highest,
when the keen life was tingling through their veins, and the
shout of victory ringing in their ears, then to be launched at
a breath forth into the wilderness of space, to sail through
eternity, to explore the seas and continents of the vast unknown!
But I, — I must lie here and rot. You fool! you
are tied to the stake, and must bide the baiting as you can.
Will you play the coward? What can you gain by that?
You cannot run away. What wretch, when misery falls upon
him, will not cry out, `Take any shape but that?' In the
familiar crowd, in the daily resort, how many an unregarded
face masks a wretchedness worse than this! some shrunken,
cankered soul, palsied and world-weary, more hopelessly
dungeoned than you. Crush down your anguish, choke
down your groan, and say, `Heaven's will be done.'
“Muster what courage you may. Not those spasms of
valor that make the hero of an emergency, and when the
heart is on fire and the soul in arms, bear him on to great
achievement. Mine must be an inward flame, that warms
though it cannot shine; a fire, like the sacred Chaldean fire,
that must never go out; a perpetual spring, flowing up without
ceasing, to meet the unceasing need.
“And you, source of my deepest joy and my deepest sorrow,
— do not fail me now. Come to me in this darkness;
let your spirit haunt this tomb where I lie buried. In your
presence, the evil of my heart shrank back, rebuked; its good
sprang up and grew in life and freshness. You rose upon me
like the sun, warming every noble germ into leaf and flower.
You streamed into my soul, banishing its mists, and gladdening
it to its depths with summer light. These are no
girl's tears. Towards myself and my own woes, I have
hardened my heart like the barren flint. I should be less
than man if I did not weep when I think of you. You must
pass the appointed lot; you must fade with time and sorrow;
but to me you will be radiant still with youth and beauty.
So will I bide my hour, anchored on that pure and lofty
memory, waiting that last release when the winged spirit
shall laugh at bolts and dungeon bars.”
