I, God’s own image, from this toil of clay
Already freed, with eager joy who hail’d
The mirror of eternal truth unveil’d,
Mid light effulgent and celestial day
I, more than cherub, whose unfetter’d soul
With penetrative glance aspir’d to flow
Through nature’s veins, and, still creating, know
The life of gods,—­how am I punish’d now! 
One thunder-word hath hurl’d me from the goal!

Spirit!  I dare not lift me to thy sphere. 
What though my power compell’d thee to appear,
My art was powerless to detain thee here. 
In that great moment, rapture-fraught,
I felt myself so small, so great;
Fiercely didst thrust me from the realm of thought
Back on humanity’s uncertain fate! 
Who’ll teach me now?  What ought I to forego? 
Ought I that impulse to obey? 
Alas! our every deed, as well as every woe,
Impedes the tenor of life’s onward way!

E’en to the noblest by the soul conceiv’d,
Some feelings cling of baser quality;
And when the goods of this world are achiev’d,
Each nobler aim is term’d a cheat, a lie. 
Our aspirations, our soul’s genuine life,
Grow torpid in the din of earthly strife.

Though youthful phantasy, while hope inspires,
Stretch o’er the infinite her wing sublime,
A narrow compass limits her desires,
When wreck’d our fortunes in the gulf of time. 
In the deep heart of man care builds her nest,
O’er secret woes she broodeth there,
Sleepless she rocks herself and scareth joy and rest;
Still is she wont some new disguise to wear—­
She may as house and court, as wife and child appear,
As dagger, poison, fire and flood;
Imagined evils chill thy blood,
And what thou ne’er shalt lose, o’er that dost shed the tear.

I am not like the gods!  Feel it I must;
I’m like the earth-worm, writhing in the dust,
Which, as on dust it feeds, its native fare,
Crushed ’neath the passer’s tread, lies buried there.

Is it not dust, wherewith this lofty wall,
With hundred shelves, confines me round;
Rubbish, in thousand shapes, may I not call
What in this moth-world doth my being bound? 
Here, what doth fail me, shall I find? 
Read in a thousand tomes that, everywhere,
Self-torture is the lot of human-kind,
With but one mortal happy, here and there
Thou hollow skull, that grin, what should it say,
But that thy brain, like mine, of old perplexed,
Still yearning for the truth, hath sought the light of day,
And in the twilight wandered, sorely vexed? 
Ye instruments, forsooth, ye mock at me,—­
With wheel, and cog, and ring, and cylinder;
To nature’s portals ye should be the key;
Cunning your wards, and yet the bolts ye fail to stir. 
Inscrutable in broadest light,
To be unveil’d by force she doth refuse,
What she reveals not to thy mental sight
Thou wilt not wrest from her with levers and with