Tell me, my friend, do you think that the grain would sprout in the furrow, Did it not truly accept as its summum and ultimum bonum That mere common and may-be indifferent soil it is set in? Would it have force to develop and open its young cotyledons, Could it compare, and reflect, and examine one thing with another? Would it endure to accomplish the round of its natural functions Were it endowed with a sense of the general scheme of existence? While from Marseilles in the steamer we voyage to Civita Vecchia, Vexed in the squally seas as we lay by Capraja and Elba, Standing, uplifted, alone on the heaving poop of the vessel, Looking around on the waste of the rushing incurious billows, 'This is Nature,' I said: 'we are born as it were from her waters; Over her billows that buffet and beat us, her offspring uncared-for, Casting one single regard of a painful victorious knowledge, Into her billows that buffet and beat us we sink and are swallowed.' This was the sense in my soul, as I swayed with the poop of the steamer; And as unthinking I sat in the hall of the famed Ariadne, Lo, it looked at me there from the face of a Triton in marble. It is the simpler thought, and I can believe it the truer. Let us not talk of growth; we are still in our Aqueous Ages. III. Claude to Eustace. Farewell, Politics, utterly! What can I do? I cannot Fight, you know; and to talk I am wholly ashamed. And although I Gnash my teeth when I look in your French or your English papers, What is the good of that? Will swearing, I wonder, mend matters? Cursing and scolding repel the assailants? No, it is idle; No, whatever befalls, I will hide, will ignore or forget it. Let the tail shift for itself; I will bury my head. And what's the Roman Republic to me, or I to the Roman Republic? Why not fight?--In the first place, I haven't so much as a musket; In the next, if I had, I shouldn't know how I should use it; In the third, just at present I'm studying ancient marbles; In the fourth, I consider I owe my life to my country; In the fifth--I forget, but four good reasons are ample. Meantime, pray let 'em fight, and be killed. I delight in devotion. So that I 'list not, hurrah for the glorious army of martyrs! Sanguis martyrum semen Ecclesiae; though it would seem this Church is indeed of the purely Invisible, Kingdom-come kind: Militant here on earth! Triumphant, of course, then, elsewhere! Ah, good Heaven, but I would I were out far away from the pother! IV. Claude to Eustace.