Читать книгу Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 15, No. 85, January, 1875 - Various - Страница 2

I have arrived at Marly, and, with the ssistance of much sarcasm from Hohenfels, am getting on with considerable spirit at my Progressive Geography. When man's Hope ceases temporarily to take a merely Human aspect, may it not suffer a fresh avatar and begin in a new and Geographical form its beneficent career? The Dark Ladye has sunk beneath my horizon, but speculations over the Atlantean and Lunar Mountains are still succulent and vivifying.

I fled, lashed by a hundred despairs and by many symptoms of headache and dyspepsia, from the wedding-feast at Brussels. Charles and the baron of Hohenfels accompanied me. It was a night-train. The spectacle of so much wedded happiness was too much for me, too much for Hohenfels. The effect was, contrarily, rather stimulating to Charles, who has made a match with Josephine, and with her assistance is now listening, the tear of sensibility in his eye, to Mendelssohn's "Wedding March" as executed by the village organ!

We passed Valenciennes, Somain, Donai, Arras, Amiens, Clermont, Criel, Pontoise—the last points of merely bodily travel that I shall ever make: here-after my itineracy shall be entirely theoretical. We took a carriage at Pontoise, and traversed the woods of Saint-Germain. As I neared home I bowed right and left to amicable and smiling neighbors, who waved me good-day from their doors. So did my Newfoundland, who broke his chain and leaped upon my shoulders, flourishing his tail—overjoyed to salute the returning Ulysses.

In the British Museum, among the Elgin Marbles, Phidias has carved a pile of heaped-up marble waves, and out of them rise the arms of Hyperion—the most beautiful arms in the world. Homesick for heaven, those weary arms try to free themselves of the clinging foam. Another minute and surely the triumphant god will leap from his watery couch and guide with unerring hands the coursers of the Dawn! But that reluctant minute is eternal, and the divinity still remains incapable, clogged and wrapped in the embrace of marble waves. Yet the real sun every morning succeeds in equipping himself for his journey, and arrives, glad, at his welcome bath in the western sea.

The inference I draw is: If you want a career to be eternal instead of transitory, hand it over to Art.

The true moral of it all is, that we are all savage myths of the Course of the Sun. We disappear any number of times, but we rise and trail new clouds of glory, and our readers or our audiences perceive that it is the same old Hyperion back again. The youth who by the faithful hound, half buried in the snow, is found far up on the most inaccessible peaks of imagination, is perceived to grasp still in his hand of ice that Germanesque and strange device—Auf Wiedersehen.