and there seems continually recurring to him a haunting presage of the unprofitableness of the life, after which men have not “any more a portion for ever in anything that is done under the sun.”  Where he speaks of resignation, after showing how the less impetuous and self-concentred natures can acquiesce in the order of this life, even were it to bring them back with an end unattained to the place whence they set forth; after showing how it is the poet’s office to live rather than to act in and thro’ the whole life round about him, he concludes thus: 

“The world in which we live and move
Outlasts aversion, outlasts love..... 
Nay, and since death, which wipes out man,
Finds him with many an unsolved plan,.... 
Still gazing on the ever full
Eternal mundane spectacle,
This world in which we draw our breath
In some sense, Fausta, outlasts death.....

  Enough, we live:—­and, if a life
  With large results so little rife,
  Tho’ bearable, seem scarcely worth
  This pomp of worlds, this pain of birth,
  Yet, Fausta, the mute turf we tread,
  The solemn hills around us spread,
  This stream that falls incessantly,
  The strange-scrawled rocks, the lonely sky,
  If I might lend their life a voice,
  Seem to bear rather than rejoice. 
  And, even could the intemperate prayer
  Man iterates, while these forbear,
  For movement, for an ampler sphere,
  Pierce fate’s impenetrable ear,
  Not milder is the general lot
  Because our spirits have forgot,
  In actions’s dizzying eddy whirled,
  The something that infects the world.”—­pp. 125-8.—­Resignation.

“Shall we,” he asks, “go hence and find that our vain dreams are not dead?  Shall we follow our vague joys, and the old dead faces, and the dead hopes?”

He exhorts man to be “in utrumque paratus.”  If the world be the materialized thought of one all-pure, let him, “by lonely pureness,” seek his way through the colored dream of life up again to that all-pure fount:—­

  “But, if the wild unfathered mass no birth
      In divine seats hath known;
  In the blank echoing solitude, if earth,
  Rocking her obscure body to and fro,
      Ceases not from all time to heave and groan,
  Unfruitful oft, and, at her happiest throe,
      Forms what she forms, alone:” 

then man, the only self-conscious being, “seeming sole to awake,” must, recognizing his brotherhood with this world which stirs at his feet unknown, confess that he too but seems.

Thus far for the scheme and the creed of the author.  Concerning these we leave the reader to draw his own conclusions.